Backdoor Broadcasting Company

__________________________________

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?

———————————————

Programme:

MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY

Luis Lobo-Guerrero and Vivienne Jabri – Introduction

PLAY

 

download

———————————————

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:

PLAY

 

download

———————————————

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:

PLAY

 

download

———————————————

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:

PLAY

 

download

==============================================

Keynote Address:

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

==============================================

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:

PLAY

 

download

———————————————

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:

PLAY

 

download

———————————————

2 Comments

__________________________________

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

Chris Zebrowski
Keele University

—————————–

talk:

PLAY

 

download

—————————–

The contamination of the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel the Lucky Dragon brought worldwide media attention to what were intended to be secret American H-bomb tests conducted in the Bikini Atoll in March 1954. It also announced, in spectacular fashion, the emergence of the threat of fallout: radioactive dust kicked up by the blast of thermonuclear weaponry and spread by the vicissitudes of the wind. Historians have located the advent of thermonuclear weaponry as a turning point in British logics of Civil Defence (Cf. Grant, 2010, Hennessy, 2010), which had until then maintained a common trajectory from the Second World War. While historians have centred attention on the massive amplification in blast power offered by the H-bomb (no doubt because the blast itself would be directly and indirectly responsible for the majority of casualties), my research into this area has focused on the ‘discovery’ of fallout in problematising British civil defence thinking. In my intervention I would like to move beyond the distinction between risks and threats and focus specifically on the event of fallout’s ‘discovery’ and, specifically, its capacity to problematise sufficiently stabilized and technologized logics of civil defence.

From the Second World War British Civil Defence was guided by the allied priorities of protecting the British population and maintaining UK war-fighting capabilities. Over the course of the war, a Civil Defence apparatus originally designed for strike-breaking purposes was ameliorated through application of the emerging science of Operational Research (OR) within the Civil Defence and Research Committee. Research focused on the effects of high explosives on both the body and the material infrastructures of the city. Research was particularly influenced by the controlled experiments of Solly Zuckerman, a primatologist, on direct and indirect effects of ‘blast’ on lab animals (Cf. Zuckerman, 1978, Zuckerman, 1941, Zuckerman, 1940) which would be used to inform both Civil Defence and, in later years, Allied strategic bombing campaigns. Adey (2010: 155-61) suggests these studies “had important consequences for understanding the process of aerial bombing, scientifically perpetuating the analogic and affective amplifications of morale and panic through the trope of the explosion and the body’s susceptibility to indirect environmental effects” (Adey, 2010: 159). A strong understanding of the material and affective effects of blast were reflected in the bunker logic of Civil Defence: the prophylactic securitization of material bodies which underpinned the broader objective of protecting the collective national psyche from fear.

This bunker logic would continue to inform Civil Defence thinking from the Second World War until 1955 despite the advance of weaponry including the advent of the atomic bomb. This can be explained, I believe, by the extent to which each of these advances could be conceptualized by operational researchers as simply representing an amplification in blast-power: something which was already well-understood, and could be responded to by simply by ‘scaling-up’ existing metrics (Cf. Smith, 2009). Fallout however could not be sufficiently absorbed into these metrics. This was made clear within the 1955 ‘Strath Report’, officially titled The Defence Implications of Fall-out from a Hydrogen Bomb. In contrast to the direct blow to the materiality of the body perpetrated by blast, fallout threatened to poison the environmental milieu in which biological life subsists. It was a threat which integrated with the multiple flows comprising the atmosphere to spread its deadly effects over a wide geographic area—an instance of what Peter Sloterdijk (2009) would term ‘atmoterrorism’. Contaminated agriculture and livestock would be unusable for a minimum of two months whilst contamination would ‘immobilize considerable areas of the country and force inhabitants to cover for some days and in certain areas for a week or more.’  Rather than attempting to target the circulatory infrastructures directly as in doctrines of strategic bombing, fallout would arrest these circulations through the poisoning of the environmental milieu itself. Strategic studies suggested that the condensed geography of the UK meant that as few as 10 ten-megaton bombs, strategically placed on the Western seaboard and ground-detonated to maximize fallout, would ensure “no part of the country would be free from the risk of radio-active contamination.”[ Ibid.]

While blast and fire were expected to claim many more lives—estimated at 3 deaths to every 1 caused by radiation—it is the advent of fallout which appears to have initiated a fundamental reorganization of British Civil Defence. Focusing specifically on the ‘problematic potential’ of fallout, I’ve been tempted to place a greater emphasis on the epistemological insecurity—or uncertainty—related to fallout, than its capacity to highlight vulnerabilities within a civil defence apparatus designed to protect against blast. Specifically, I’m interested in the way in which the danger of fallout was amplified to the extent that it exceeded a stabilized framework of intelligibility for understanding, and thus controlling, threat based on calculative metrics of assessing blast. In thinking about this issue, I’ve been influenced by Foucault’s thinking on problematisation as an event which inspires (reflective) thought on a practice which has been technologized (reduced to instrumental knowledge, know-how, or savoir-faire). I’d also be interested in exploring with the audience similarities between Foucault’s notion of panic, and contemporary thinking on trauma within discourses of PTSD, which similarly stress the significance of an event which exceeds the subjects framework of intelligibility.

 

<== back to main conference page

 

No Comments