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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

discussion:

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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

Andrew Neal
University of Edinburgh

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talk:

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My current work:

• analysing counter-terrorism lawmaking in Parliament
• from publication of Lord Lloyd’s ‘Inquiry into terrorism legislation’ in 1996 to present day.
• by taking a longer view, trying to look beyond the core themes of security debates in the last decade:
  1. Temporal moment/rupture
  2. Sovereign exceptionalism/executive decisionism
  3. Binaries (e.g. norm/exception, before/after)
• Questions: 
  • What happens to exceptionalism and emergencies over time?
  • What is their lifespan?
  • What does security look like from a lawmaking perspective, rather than an ‘exception to law’ perspective?
  • What does security look like from a parliamentary perspective, rather than a sovereign/executive perspective only?
  • What does security look like from a parliamentary perspective, rather than a governmentality perspective?
  • What does normalisation look like and how does it work?

Parliament occupies a very interesting position

• in some ways an arcane power
• very limited/weak in policy terms
• very limited/weak in relation to ever expanding executive
• very limited/weak in relation to ever expanding technologies of governmentality beyond the traditional institutions of government
• following Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick’s recent rereading of Foucault in relation to law
  • ‘expulsion thesis’ of established interpretations: 
    • governmentality supplants sovereign and juridical powers of law
    • the power of the law is repressive, limited, negative, monotonous, the pure statement of power (History of Sexuality)
    • corresponds to experience of parliamentary counter-terrorism lawmaking
    • repetitive, symbolic, monotonous, repressive, written
  • but, law presents an excess, it opens up unexpected possibilities, it is constitutive of powers of governmentality, it exceeds the intentions of the those who use it, it is ‘dangerous’ 
    • corresponds to problem of CT law for parliamentarians
    • immense political and social pressure to make new laws in response to security events
    • but the big problem for parliamentarians is that they don’t know the consequences of their actions
    • how will the laws be used?
    • Will new police powers be misused?
    • Will new definitions of terrorism bring protestors or liberation movements into their remit?
    • Will the mistakes of the past be repeated?
    • The history of CT legislation shows that despite executive assurances, all the fears of parliamentarians have come to pass.

Danger’

• Not a commonly found term in the parliamentary debates
• Actually not a great discussion of the nature of the threat, dangerous individuals, dangerous forms of life 
  • Much of this is assumed as obvious in the wake of events like 9/11 and 7/7
  • Much of this discussion depends on expert knowledge from the security establishment, since parliamentarians have little of way of contesting this 
    • (lack of symbolic capital on security due to lack of access to intelligence and constitutional convention of deference to executive on security)
  • What are the ‘dangers’ for parliamentarians?
    • The dangers of the laws they are being asked to give assent to: 
      • What will their effect be?
      • Danger of negative/counter-productive consequences of certain powers: 
        1. recruiting sergeant argument
        2. alienates community that is most important source of intelligence
        • E.g. extending pre-charge detention presents the danger of making Britain less safe in two ways (David Davis as shadow home secretary in 2008):
    • Dangers of repeating the mistakes of the past: 
      • Some Northern Ireland MPs and MPs with constituents who were ‘suspect’ communities 
        • Counter-terrorism laws used to terrorise communities
        • Some argue that they were needed, others argue that they were not effective
        • Peace came from political solution and de-escalation of these powers
    • Future dangers of threats
      • But once away from the immediate focus in the wake of terrorist attacks, these future dangers become hypothetical
      • Entropy of dangerousness – when time passes from spectacular event, political effect of emergency becomes much weaker
      • Hypothetical discourse of danger very divisive and highly contested in parliament, not persuasive
        • Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008
        • E.g. discussion of powers needed for three 9/11s in future – not credible
        • Impossible to quantify what powers might be needed, impossible to quantify any lack in current powers
        • Some security professionals asking for more powers (some police), others happy with current powers (Crown Prosecution Service)
    • Danger to constitution of Britain itself 
      • Threat to magna carter, British liberties, relationship of individual to the state, of ‘giving the terrorists a victory’

Interesting findings:

• in the wake of terrorist attacks, parliament has a long history of legislating in a knee-jerk way (rushed, reactive, repetitious)
• laws often proved to be problematic/unworkable
  • e.g. 1998 post-Omagh legislation (Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Security) Act 1998)
  • widely recognised in reflexive discourses of parliamentarians and commentators
    • ‘this is what we do, let’s not do it this time’
  • exceptional events promp exceptional response (almost unfailingly)
    • consensus to act, consensus on threat
  • but also, strong parliamentary principle
    • ‘exceptional laws require exceptional scrutiny’ 
      • as soon as exceptionality enters the legislative discourse, parliament demands special scrutiny, limits, restrictions 
        • e.g. sunset clauses
        • annual review
        • special independent reviewer (Lord Carlile until recently, but a long tradition)
        • annual debate/parliamentary renewal
      • can be very critical of these 
        • 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act meant to be temporary for six months, but was debated and renewed every year for 25 years.
        • One MP – ‘a sham’
      • special scrutiny/oversight measures didn’t stop legislative excess, but did win significant concessions.
      • Clive Walker – given weakness of parliament in British constitution, least we can hope for.
  • But, when the exception/emergency has faded, there are also periods/acts of normalisation 
    • Terrorism Act 2000 
      • In context of peace in N. Ireland
      • Consolidating/modernising previous laws
    • Interesting parallels with current review of CT laws/powers by new government
    • When the new laws are not introduced as exceptional/emergency laws, the parliamentary response is much weaker. 
      • When the aim is normalisation, not exceptionalism, parliament does not dig its heels in for exceptional scrutiny.
      • Allows what was previously exceptional to become normalized
        • Some reductions in powers, but also making permanent of others.
        • Removal of scrutiny mechanisms.
        • True in 2000 and 2011.
        • Terrorism Act 2000 broad and sweeping, still causing problems today (e.g. stop and search)
    • Arguably, normalisation is more ‘dangerous’ than exceptionalism, in terms of civil liberties, change to constitution of UK, in terms of normalizing assumptions of dangerousness of ‘suspect’ groups (including protestors, e.g.)

 

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