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Event Date: 21 – 22 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

 

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University
and the Centre for International Relations, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

Download workshop package here

“There is no liberalism without a culture of danger.” (Foucault)

Threats and risks have become the preferred categories for imagining contemporary security. Practices such as defence, border control and the surveillance of populations, insurance, risk profiling to identify suspicious subjects, and risk assessments to protect objects and systems such as critical infrastructure, rely heavily on well-established paradigms of security. Discourses and practices of threats and risks, with their allied technologies of measurement and calculation, however, relate to the wider problem of danger and its allied concept of ‘uncertainty’. Thinking ‘danger’ relates to understandings of uncertainties, otherness of being, and spaces and environments of protection in excess of those accounted for in the language and metrics of discourses of threats and risks.

What happens, then, if the analysis of security resorts to understandings of ‘danger’, ‘dangerousness’, and processes of ‘endangerment’? Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and gender? Is it possible to think security in relation to danger away from utilitarian economic categories such as cost-benefit analysis, risk calculus, and rational choice?

The workshop aims to explore these questions and to challenge participants to wonder if current policy security priorities such as terrorism, climate change, weapons proliferation, resilience and migration can be thought in relation to ‘danger’ outside discourses of threats and risks.

In the first three workshops of this seminar series we began to explore an agenda for contemporary biopolitical security research around problems such as mobilities and circulations, resilience, values and processes of valuations in relation to the technologies through which lifestyles and livelihoods are treated as referents of security. In this fourth workshop we intend to spark a conversation around the implications of thinking dangerousness in relation to security and life.

The workshop is based on participants’ work and invites a reflection on the following questions:

- How are ideas of danger constituted? What forms of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ are involved in constituting a dangerous subject or a dangerous environment?

- What are the preconditions for understanding endangerment in and how do they question the ‘new security challenges’ of for example, terrorism (and cyber-terrorism), proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and health pandemics?

- Can discourses and practices of security be different if reflections on the consequences of endangerment are advanced?

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Programme:

MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY

Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Vivienne Jabri – Introduction

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Panel 1 – Ontologisations of Danger

• Btihaj Ajana – Re-ontologising Danger (AUDIO HERE)
• Joscha Wullweber – Strategies of Danger and Dangerous Strategies (AUDIO HERE)
• David Chandler – The Ontology of Danger:Recasting the Human Subject in Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience (AUDIO HERE)
• Andrew Neal – The Entropy of Dangerousness (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Martin Coward (Newcastle University)

discussion:

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Panel 2 – Risk managing the dangerousness of terror

• Cerelia Athanassiou – Changing the Global War on Terror: Who is the ‘Ready’ Citizen Arming Against? (AUDIO HERE)
• Lisa Stampnitzky- Constituting terrorism: three attempts at rational governance (AUDIO HERE)
• Christopher Zebrowski – Falling-out: Examining the problematising capacities of danger (AUDIO HERE)
• Jonas Hagmann – Risk registers and the measurement of everything: Security scientism and the reassertion of modernism (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Claudia Aradau (The Open University)

discussion:

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Panel 3 – Danger’s Otherness

• Debbie Lisle – Danger’s Other: Pleasure, Leisure & Travel (AUDIO HERE)
• Sam Okoth Opondo – Fearscapes / Securescapes : Urban Anxieties, Securities and the Domestic Scene (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Vivienne Jabri

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Keynote Address:

Professor Marieke de Goede
Networked Danger and Speculative Security (AUDIO HERE)

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TUESDAY 22 February

Panel 4 – Sites, spaces and strategies of endangerment

• Charlotte Heath-Kelly – Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT strategy (AUDIO HERE)
• Casey McNeill – Danger and un-governed spaces in the US (AUDIO HERE)
• Alex Hamilton – ‘Dangerous tools’ in ‘dangerous hands’: How synthetic biology is imagined as a ‘bioterrorist threat’ (AUDIO HERE)

Chair: Peter Adey

discussion:

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Final Roundtable and Conclusions With:

• Mustapha Pasha (University of Aberdeen)
• Marieke de Goede (University of Amsterdam)
• Luis Lobo-Guerrero (Keele University)
• Vivienne Jabri (King’s College London)
• Martin Coward (Newcastle University)

discussion:

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2 Comments

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Event Date: 21 February 2011
The River Room
King’s College London, Strand Campus
London WC2R 2LS

Problematising Danger

ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security

 

Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
and the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University

Debbie Lisle
D.Lisle@qub.ac.uk

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talk:

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Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and gender?

When security is framed through constituent objects, the first critical move is to work out how danger constitutes itself, and is constituted, over and against its opposite. For me, some of the key forces that danger constructs itself against are not ‘safety’ or even ‘security’, but rather the ‘life, livelihoods and lifestyles’ that emerge around pleasure, leisure and travel. One way to work out this oppositional logic is to trace how, since the events of 9/11 (and more specifically the bombings of hotels, bars, and nightclubs in Bali and Mombasa in October / November 2002), the tourism and leisure industry as a whole has become a strategic ‘object’ of security that needs to be protected from the dangers of terrorism. Governments, policy-makers, media commentators and scholars in Tourism and Hospitality Studies have used the emerging rhetoric of ‘soft targets’ to make sense of how seemingly benign places like hotels and tourist attractions are now on the front line of the War on Terror. Tourism and leisure’s vast labour force, its wealth generation, its cultural capital, its advertising and marketing campaigns, its increasingly comprehensive insurance arrangements, its ever-regenerating fantasy landscapes, and most importantly, its material infrastructure, have all become objects of utility that can be calculated. These objects are accorded monetary value in terms of how much it will cost to protect the tourism and leisure industries from terrorist attacks (e.g. the hastily arranged flights home for tourists in Egypt January 2011), and how much potential revenue will be lost if the industry is attacked (e.g. American airline reservations and hotel occupancy dropped 50% after 9/11). Such calculations opened up the tourism industry to all kinds of invasive techniques and practices of security, surveillance and monitoring all in the name of protecting holiday makers and valuable tourism infrastructure from terrorism. The notion here is that if the securitizing process is successful, it will restore more robust and protected circuits of travel, cultural exchange and commerce all over the world, allow tourists to start travelling again, and allow the tourism industry – the world’s biggest – to start generating revenue again. What this suggests is that the rhetoric of soft targets helped, in part, to resolve the security / freedom contradiction that emerged after 9/11: it allowed people to keep travelling for business and pleasure, but it ensured that those travellers and their hosts were safe within the security envelope of the Coalition of the Willing.

There are, of course, further implications of an approach that traces the oppositional framing of danger / pleasure and reveals the manner in which travel, tourism, and leisure come to be taken as objects of security. For example, there is a powerful geopolitical imaginary at work here which positions those who value travel and cultural exchange squarely within the liberal moment – they are members of a diverse, global, cosmopolitan community that is committed to fighting radical Islamic terrorists who, apparently, do not value travel and cultural exchange in the same way. After the events of Bali and Mombasa especially, governments, media commentators and scholars in Tourism and Media Studies reproduced this geopolitical imaginary uncritically, which led to claims that (a) terrorists have a ‘Medieval’ mindset whereas we are ‘Modern’ (ignoring the clear Orientalist and racist implications of such a logic) and (b) Western tourists are entirely innocent victims of terrorism (ignoring that tourism is complicit in many forms of cultural imperialism and exploitation)

This kind of genealogical tracing of the opposition between danger / pleasure is a necessary move, but it is not sufficient. Too often it remains a static framing (both in space and in time) that lifts practices of tourism and leisure out of the realm of the political. I want to argue that danger’s relationship with pleasure, leisure and travel is, and has always been, a much more complex and entangled affair. Indeed, to think about danger outside of dominant discourses of security and risk requires us to move on from tracing static oppositional logics as if the assemblage of hierarchies and asymmetries never moves. What we need to think about is how oppositional logics such as danger / pleasure operate relationally; that is, how danger has always been juxtaposed with pleasure, leisure and travel in ways that do not necessarily or always privilege the urgency and drama of danger.

Thinking relationally requires an additional and rather difficult re-imagination: it requires us to think of oppositional logics such as danger / pleasure in terms of their constant mobility, circulation, adaptability and transformation. This suggests that the juxtaposition of danger with pleasure, leisure and travel is constantly mutating and reforming. Certainly there are times when it coalesces into a recognizable asymmetry that must be revealed and resisted (e.g. the War on Terror’s securitization of the leisure and tourism industry). But there are many other moments in which these two forces circulate, mutate, reverse and infect one another such that their constituent subjectivities and power relations are reassembled. To start thinking about how these mutations occur, we need to start not with oppositions, but rather with the juxtapositions of danger / pleasure, leisure, travel:

Experiences of pleasure, leisure and travel in martial contexts (e.g. a soldier’s thrill at killing enemies; the voyeurism of watching war and playing war games; the leisure infrastructures accompanying force deployment; the travel opportunities afforded by active service and R&R)

War’s mobilization of existing leisure and travel infrastructure (e.g. troop requisitioning of hotels; soccer stadia used for mass killings; hotels used for detention and deportation)

Leisure and tourism experiences that seek out danger (e.g. journeys to war zones immediately post-conflict by journalists, artists, amateur war reporters) or take conflict and war as their object (e.g. battlefield tourism; War tours; museum commemorations of war; war re-enactments).

 

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