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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

Joscha Wullweber
University of Kassel, Germany
j.wullweber@jpberlin.de

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The radical outside

My approach to danger rests on Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony as well as Jessop’s strategic-relational approach. It is based on the assumption that society is constitutively divided. The “radical outside”, represented by antagonistic counterparts, marks the very possibility for stabilizing identities. A reconciled society – a fullness – is always only partially achievable by way of hegemonic struggles trying to represent that fullness. Furthermore, class antagonism (in the singular) marks only one possibility of all sorts of antagonisms (in the plural). These antagonistic divisions potentially cross every social sphere, while no antagonism is a priori more important or dominant than others.

One possibility of such a radical outside – of “the Other” – is danger. Generally, the specific content of danger is not important. A particular danger becomes a radical outside, because it is (strategically) constructed – by language and action – as something radically opposed to society or as something radically threatening society. From this it follows that the social structure of society is the result of historically antecedent social struggles, which involve the drawing of lines of inclusion and exclusion. Different articulations as parts of competing hegemonic projects try to fill – that is, give meaning to – the (empty) concept of danger as well as the (empty) common good.

In this sense, hegemonic struggles constitute the basic principle of social organization. It is therefore necessary not to look for one single antagonistic border, but to be aware of the different positions from which different dangers are constructed. From this perspective, the presence of antagonistic frontiers in the form of certain generally accepted dangers can be a sign of a stable hegemonic discourse or relatively stable social community. This is because, as indicated above, identities do not have a positive identity. They ‘need’ the construction of a radical outside in order to ensure their own long-term existence.

Hegemony

The concept of hegemony as it used here derives from Antonio Gramsci. It deviates from the conventional understanding – the still common tendency to equate hegemony with dominance – in that it rests on the ability to universalize a particular interests of a group as a socio-economic, cultural, and political (etc.) structure. According to Gramsci, the ruling group pursues its interests in ways that lead other groups to regard these interests as common or general interests. Hence, hegemony involves active consent on the part of the ruled.

Gramsci was already aware of the constructiveness of identities. His term catharsis – which is astonishingly close to the term governmentality coined later on by Foucault – indicates that subjects are constructed within the hegemonic process. The struggle for hegemony does not take place among stable subjects, but implies the production of new (collective) identities. What is more, it is a struggle for the hegemonic construction of identities. Accordingly, the hegemonic “collective will” does not confront the subjects in terms of an alienation of their real interests. Instead – at least at this specific spatio-temporal moment – it is the expression of the interests of the majority of people of a certain society. Hegemony is therefore not so much an external and constraining social structure as it is a productive power relation.

Emptiness

According to post-structural hegemony theory, hegemony denotes a specific relation between particularity and universality. In the first place, every hegemony comprises only a definite social and spatio-temporal realm. Correspondingly, it is not possible to speak in general terms of a hegemony of a certain state on a global scale, as is the tendency, for example, in Realist theory. Rather, it is necessary to specify the form, scope, and temporal framework of a hegemony.

Second, it is an imaginary universality which becomes hegemonic, the imaginary status being represented by an empty signifier. Through (strategic) articulations, this signifier tends to lose its particularity – it becomes detached from its previous specific content in order to become the embodiment of fullness, i.e. a universality. Thus, an empty signifier is a hybrid of a particularity and a universality. The empty signifier will always be a universality which is contaminated by a particularity – that is, a tendentially empty signifier – an empty signifier to come. Political actors can try to promote a hegemonic project and attempt to make sure that their respective interests are inscribed within that project at a privileged stage. But in contrast to Gramsci and neo-Gramscian approaches, from a post-structuralist point of view it is not possible – or at least it lacks sufficient complexity – to say that a certain person, class, or political group has become hegemonic. Rather, it is a certain element of common sense, a ‘world-view’, a societal relation, or a specific danger that is or becomes hegemonic. That does not mean that certain actors and political groups do not benefit more than others from a given form of discourse organization. On the contrary, and almost by definition, a particular hegemony expresses and covers the interests of some actors more than others. Third, the concept of hegemony implies making alternatives unthinkable, at least to a certain degree.

Danger

In short, the starting point of my approach to danger is grafted on the post-positivist assumption that there is no such thing as objective danger. There is nothing intrinsic to the concept of danger that infers a specific threat, risk, or danger. Accordingly, it is not an intrinsic form of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ that constitutes a dangerous subject. Danger is first and foremost an empty category. While this does not suggest that the content of danger is arbitrary or indifferent, it does mean that danger should be understood in terms of its relation to strategy.

From this perspective, the content of danger is the contingent outcome of struggles among competing discourses and articulations. It is a reflection of hegemonic struggles which define what must be seen as endangerment or dis-endangerment. Different articulations as parts of competing hegemonic projects try to fill the (empty) category of danger. Thus, it is a question of strategy. These strategies, in turn, are embedded into a relatively stable spatio-temporal, socio-political, and strategic-selective structure – the contingent and discursive fundament of every society where meaning no longer floats freely but has become largely fixed. It follows that the horizon of strategic possibilities is limited. At the same time, actors have an adaptive capacity. They are able to change their strategies if necessary. (A particular) Danger is thus transformed into a socially and politically relevant concept. According to this line of reasoning, an understanding of endangerment must be based on the comprehension of strategies, power relations, and struggles within a discursive field.

The strategic use of the concept of danger is a dangerous undertaking: if successful, the ‘menacing’ sliding signifier can fill the constitutive lack of society’s identity as the presence of the Other. At the same time, as constitutive outside endangerment threatens (democratic) societies and gives way to potential states of exception.

 

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