Limor Samimian-Darash

Hebrew University of Jerusalem | HUJI · Federmann School of Public Policy and Government

When the future is connected to the term ‘imagination’, it is generally presented through the concept of the ‘imaginary’—that is, an image of the future that is related to a grand social image. In this article, we discuss the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and argue that although this concept provides a needed perspective that allows scholar...

As a social technology, the scenario differs from other techniques usually associated with managing future uncertainties. These draw mainly on the construct of risk and the related notion of risk management – that is, calculation and evaluation based on knowledge of past events, leading to possible control, prevention or prediction of unknowable fu...

This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occur...

The coronavirus pandemic has revived scholarly engagement with the concept of biopolitics, with interpretations diagnosing either the widespread adoption of a classic biopolitical regime or the full‐blown emergence of totalitarian repression (or both of these simultaneously). Relying on a close analysis of different interventions taken by Israeli a...

The rise of emergency governance in global public health has driven a number of changes in this field. In this article, we investigate one of the practices of emergency governance – border screening – and identify a new form of screening that emerged in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Analysing the UK’s deployment of Ebola ent...

The chapter provides an overview of the field of biosecurity mostly as it developed in the US. It begins by providing essential insights about historical and political developments in the biosecurity arena. It shows that biosecurity has origins as early as World War II, when the fighting parties were developing both biological weapons and counterme...

In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel’s annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by the...

In this article, we analyze UK global health policy in the light of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Specifically, we focus on the UK government’s intervention in the epidemic, reflections on the UK’s response in parliamentary committees and government-sponsored forums, and subsequent UK global health policy changes. Post-Ebola, we argue, UK global health...

Following the Second Lebanon War (2006), Israeli preparedness exercises were designed in reference to that crisis event. Hold annually for more than a decade, ‘Turning Point’ exercises are now accompanied by a ‘National Emergency Week’. After three years of fieldwork in the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) and the Turning Point admini...

In this article we propose a mode of analysis that allows us to consider security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. We first develop a genealogy for the anthropology of security, demarcating four main approaches: violence and state terror; military, militarizat...

In this article, I analyze how the Turning Point scenario-based exercise works as a technology-based uncertainty, both in its conceptualization of the future and in its enactment. The Israeli preparedness exercise involves the activation of and reaction to a chosen event, one that does not replicate the past or attempt to predict the future. Though...

Biosecurity is a concern in many parts of the world but is differently conceived and addressed depending on context. This article draws on two cases concerned with life sciences research involving dangerous pathogens, one in the United States and one in Israel, to examine this variability. In both cases, concern revolves around issues of biosafety...

Drawing on the Israeli ‘Immanuel Affair’ (also called the ‘Israeli Brown Affair’), we examine the complex relationship between governmentality and population compositions. In the town of Immanuel, the State attempted to establish a homogeneous population of ultra-orthodox Jews by opening it to unrestricted settlement. Rather than homogeneity howeve...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2014.00110.].

Through analysis of preparedness for pandemic influenza in Israel, I explore how future uncertainty is conceptualized and the various practices put into action to deal with it. In particular, I discuss the emergence of a new type of uncertainty—potential uncertainty—and three technologies employed to cope with it: risk technology, preparedness tech...

In this article, I examine the bodily changes that soldiers undergo in an intensive counter-terrorism military training course. I argue that military draftees develop control and violent capabilities through Violent Reflexive Bodily Practices (VRBPs), a concept I introduce here. VRBPs, which form the core of training in this elite military unit, ar...

The article analyzes the heterogeneous forms of action within the state’s preparedness assemblage for biological threats in Israel. By examining preparedness practices in two biological preparedness events — the smallpox vaccination project (a possible event) and the ongoing preparations for pandemic influenza (a virtual event) — the analysis maint...

During preparations for the Second Gulf War, Israel considered universal smallpox vaccination. In doing so, it faced a problem: how to legitimise carrying out a security action against an uncertain future danger (smallpox pandemic), when this action carried specific, known risks (vaccine complications). To solve this problem, the Israeli preparedne...

Drawing on an inquiry into Israel's preparedness for biological threats, in this article I suggest a new analysis of biosecurity events. A complex and dynamic assemblage emerges to prepare for biological threats, one that I call a “pre-event configuration.” The assemblage is composed of three core elements—the scientific element, the security eleme...