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Practicing Uncertainty: Scenario-Based Preparedness Exercises in Israel
Abstract
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 designed to challenge responders, the scenario does not represent a worst-case event but a plausible one. With this technology, the Israeli preparedness system is directed neither toward producing specific responses nor toward discovering the best solutions for an unknown future. Rather, the technology generates uncertainty through its execution, from which new problems are extracted. I examine both the discursive and the dispositional aspects of the Turning Point scenario, approaching it as a narrative put into action. I thus go beyond the conceptualization of the future underlying this technology and address how it practices uncertainty.
... Performed as a global 'crisis' of uncertain yet unprecedented threat (Lakoff, 2017;Anderson, 2021), a pandemic is made big. It is the combination of the unknowability and scale of the threat in pandemics that generates the atmosphere for precautionary action (Saminmian-Daresh, 2016). In the face of threat, mathematical models can perform a bridge to knowing by generating forecasts as well as 'worst-case' scenarios to enable policy decisions (Brooks-Pollock et al., 2021). ...
... In emergency scenarios, the scaling-up of simulated problem potential often cannot rely on known risks for calculation but works with incalculable probabilities whose consequences might be catastrophic (Lakoff, 2017). Uncertainty, rather than knowable risk, creates the energy for precaution, pre-emption and prudence (Saminmian-Daresh, 2016;Cooper, 2006;Diprose et al., 2008;Anderson and Adey, 2011). What counts in the making of a pandemic is not so much the precision of projections, but the problematization of the event (Foucault, 2009). ...
In this paper, we trace how mathematical models are made ‘evidence enough’ and ‘useful for policy’. A key thread in our analysis is how pandemics are made ‘big’. Working with the interview accounts of mathematical modellers and other scientists engaged in the UK Covid-19 response, we focus on two weeks in March 2020 prior to the announcement of an unprecedented national lockdown. We follow the work of one particular device, that of modelled ‘doubling-time’. By following how modelled doubling-time entangles in its assemblage of evidence-making, we draw attention to multiple actors, including beyond models and metrics, which affect how evidence is performed in relation to the scale of epidemic and its policy response. We draw attention to: policy; Government scientific advice infrastructure; time; uncertainty; and leaps of faith. The ‘bigness’ of the pandemic, and its evidencing, is situated in social and affective practices, in which uncertainty and dis-ease are inseparable from calculus. This materialises modelling in policy as an ‘uncomfortable science’. We argue that situational fit in-the-moment is at least as important as empirical fit when attending to what models perform in policy. [183].
... In such studies, scenarios are oft en connected to the 'future present' (that will happen in the real future) rather than to that which is actualised (i.e. an already happening event). Th e scenario addresses potential future events not by accurately describing them, but by encouraging imagination and considering various plausibilities and dynamics that cannot be anticipated (Samimian-Darash 2016, 2022b. While illuminating, this body of work has rarely examined in depth what happens to scenarios when the future potential event for which we sought to prepare -a pandemic in the present case -actualises. ...
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 occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario technology is adapted to the new temporality in terms of its form and content. In correspondence with the scholarship of ‘the anthropology of the future’, the article focuses on changes in temporal orientations – specifically, with a shift from a temporality of (future) preparedness to a temporal orientation of (immediate) urgency and how such a shift in temporality affects the technology of the scenario. Moving from preparing for potential future uncertainties to responding to an urgent event set in a present that is unfolding into an uncertain, immediate future provokes a new temporal orientation, for which the initial temporality of the scenario technology becomes its limitation.
Cet article explore le lien entre technologie et temporalité, et discute spécifiquement de la technologie des scénarios et de la temporalité de l'urgence, dans le contexte de la pandémie de coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). Il illustre comment, malgré l'orientation inhérente de cette technologie vers la potentialité future, une fois qu'un événement réel se produit et que la temporalité de la préparation est remplacée par une temporalité d'urgence, la technologie du scénario est adaptée à la nouvelle temporalité en termes de forme et de contenu. En correspondance avec la recherche de “l'anthropologie du futur ” , l'article s'intéresse aux changements d'orientations temporelles — plus précisément, au passage d'une temporalité de préparation (future) à une orientation temporelle d'urgence (immédiate) et à la manière dont un tel changement de temporalité affecte la technologie du scénario. Passer de la préparation à des incertitudes futures potentielles à la réponse à un événement urgent dans un présent qui se déroule dans un futur incertain et immédiat provoque une nouvelle orientation temporelle, pour laquelle la temporalité initiale de la technologie du scénario devient sa limite.
... first responders, decision-makers, members of the public) and emergency phases in real time [20]. Samimian-Darash [21] as well as Anderson and Adey [20] emphasised how scenario based exercise events help practice and at the same time enact uncertainty, leading to identification of new problems related to emergency planning. Andersson et al. [22] focused on inter-organisational collaboration and highlighted related uncertainties, for instance concerning the roles and responsibilities of the different organizations and the lack of clear control mechanisms on how to enact collaboration in practice. ...
Emergency management implies making decisions under uncertainty. Though this is a truism, uncertainties faced by different actors during radiological emergencies have not been investigated as intensively as other emergencies and lack a systematic analysis during realistic conditions. Hence, the goal of this study is to identify and analyse the uncertainties that may appear during radiological emergencies. Furthermore, this research explores among which actors and at which stages of decision-making process these uncertainties appear.
For this purpose, non-participatory observation has been used during 11 nuclear or radiological emergency exercises in the period of 2017–2018 at 29 observation points in 6 countries and 1 international exercise. The observers recorded actual behavior of different actors (participants of the observed exercises) under live conditions.
Results provide valuable insights into the complex decision-making process related to actions taken for the protection of individuals and society at large during realistic exercises of a radiological emergency. Most uncertainties synthesized from our observations are related to the practical implementation of emergency actions, e.g. the potential for unexpected failure of communication tools or channels, or the inadequacy of emergency plans to cope with the real situation. A high number of uncertainties were also associated to knowledge gaps, e.g. related to the consistency of radiological assessments or the insufficient familiarity of emergency actors with the rules and procedures. The findings of this study can inspire emergency planners and other stakeholders to strengthen radiological emergency management, advance emergency response practices, and improve communication and collaboration between different actors in emergency situations.
... I will refer to societal security as an umbrella term, which comprise aspects of institutionalized emergency preparedness (MSB, 2013:13), public preparedness (Coppola, 2011:269) and articulations of the responsible, vigilant subject (Aradau andvan Munster, 2013:95, Emerson, 2019;Rose and Lentzos, 2017). Moreover, I use the term to emphasize the trend over the last two decades pertaining to preparedness as a principal form of governing in the prospect of uncertain negative futures (Lakoff, 2006;O'Malley, 2013;Samimian-Darash, 2016;Samimian-Darash and Rabinow, 2015). Finally, the notion of societal security is employed to encompass social actors at various analytical levels, from public and civil organizations to individual subjects, as well as to empirical settings in various national-political-cultural contexts. ...
... 5 Scenario-based exercises are another example of policy training by situated learning. Although their expressed goal is to predict the future, in reality these exercises in futurism generate knowledge that affects how policy-makers identify problems in the present and shape what is thinkable in terms of policy options (Mallard & Lakoff 2011;Samimian-Darash 2016). 6 Birth rates have been declining in Russia since at least the 1960s (Zakharov 2008). ...
The article explores a series of professional development seminars for state bureaucrats in the context of the moral panic over Russia's ‘demographic crisis’. It follows the vernacularization of social knowledge for state bureaucrats – a central practice that marks these pedagogical engagements. The article explores this practice's potentialities and limitations for effectively communicating social knowledge to administrative audiences. It grounds itself in the theoretical discussions of expertise and demonstrates how vernacularizing social knowledge for post‐Soviet statecraft shapes the social and political meanings of Russia's demographic crisis, investing state policies and discourses with authority. Traductions épineuses : créer un lexique vernaculaire de la démographie pour les pouvoirs publics postsoviétiques Résumé L'article explore une série de séminaires de développement personnel destinés aux bureaucrates de l’État dans le contexte de la panique morale entourant la « crise démographique » en Russie, et montre la vernacularisation du savoir social à l'intention des fonctionnaires. Celle‐ci est une pratique marquante et centrale de ces enseignements. L'autrice en explore les possibilités et les limites en termes de transmission efficace des connaissances sur le social aux publics administratifs. Elle fonde son approche sur les discussions théoriques de l'expertise et démontre comment cette vernacularisation du savoir pour les fonctionnaires postsoviétiques donne forme aux significations sociales et politiques de la crise démocratique russe, conférant de l'autorité aux politiques et discours de l’État.
... ;Elbe, Roemer-Mahler, and Long 2014;Keck 2018;Schoch-Spana 2004). These practices include, for instance, stockpiling (of supplies, pharmaceuticals, etc.)(Elbe, Roemer-Mahler, and Long 2014), vaccinating first responders (Samimian-Darash 2011), simulations, and scenario-based exercises(Anderson 2010; Adey 2011, 2012;Aradau and van Munster 2012;Armstrong 2012;Caduff 2015;Collier 2008;Keck 2018;Lakoff 2007Lakoff , 2008Samimian- Darash 2016;Schoch-Spana 2004). ...
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 policy turned into a pursuit of global health emergency-preparedness through development. This, we further suggest, resulted from what we identify as the specific structure of the UK’s emergency-preparedness configuration that creates a ‘spill-over’ between the immediate event (of emergency) and future preparedness. This configuration transmits problems between different temporalities – allowing immediate, urgent problems to become problems of future uncertainty (and future uncertainties to be enacted as urgent problems). In activating emergency-preparedness, furthermore, self-scrutiny is triggered – prompting the UK to assume responsibility for problems identified as threats regardless of their point of origin, thus internalizing external problems.
... If anticipatory planning marks the zeitgeist of contemporary governmentality, it is far from monolithic. It has multiple genres, situated contexts, and cultural vocabularies in need of ethnographic attention (Lowe 2010;Samimian-Darash 2016). I suggest that we understand what I here call heterodystopias as a specific genre of anticipatory governance: one that frames particular spaces at once as sites of experimental management for future crisis and as representational zones that enact spectacles of containment and securitization. ...
This essay interrogates an emergent genre of development projects that seek to instill resilience in populations likely to be severely impacted by climate change. These new projects venture a dark vision of life in a warming world—one where portable technologies become necessary for managing a future of climate chaos. I propose, following Michel Foucault, understanding these projects as heterodystopias: spaces managed as and in anticipation of a world of dystopian climate crisis that are at once stages for future interventions and present-day spectacles of climate security. My exploration of these projects is situated in the borderlands of Bangladesh, a space increasingly imagined as a ground zero of climate change. The projects discussed frame the borderlands as a site that reflects forward onto a multiplicity of (other) dystopian spaces to come. Their often puzzling architecture reveals a grim imagining of the future: one in which atomized resilient families remain rooted in place, facing climate chaos alone, assisted by development technology. In this way, these projects seek to mitigate against global anxiety about climate displacement by emplacing people—preventing them from migrating across borders increasingly imagined as the front lines of climate security. Yet at the same time, these projects speak a visual language that suggests they are as much about representing success at managing climate crisis to an audience elsewhere as they are to successfully stemming climate migration in a particular place. Heterodystopia provides an analytic for diagnosing the specific visions of time and space embedded in securitized framings of the future. In doing so, however, it also points toward counterimaginations and possibilities for life in the midst of ecological change. I thus conclude by contrasting climate heterodystopias with other projects that Bangladeshi peasants living in the borderlands are carrying out: projects that offer different ways of imagining the environment and life in the borderlands of Bangladesh.
The article introduces readers to work on a new research project “Overcoming Uncertainty in Interaction with the Physical and Social Environment in the Russian Arctic” by describing its conceptual and theoretical approach and premises as well as the steps of designing it. It opens with an analysis of the concept of risk, which is currently popular in the Arctic Social Studies and which is sometimes claimed to be the central concept in the field. It proceeds by describing the new approach, which is based on the concept of uncertainty, both natural and social, which constantly accompanies human life in the Far North. The inhabitants of the North know from experience that uncertainty cannot be ruled out, but one can be constantly prepared for it by planning one’s behavior with this factor in mind. Furthermore, one can suggest that the effects of ecological, economic and social changes are experienced by these inhabitants first and foremost as shifts in the level and kind of uncertainty. Therefore, the concept of uncertainty can replace the concept of risk in the studies of the effects of change on northern communities; in fact, “uncertainty” is preferable because its conceived nature is obvious, while in many risk studies, risk is still perceived as something objective. The main questions that a study of uncertainty can answer are: what is the role of natural and social uncertainty in the everyday life of the permanent population of the Arctic? What are the action strategies of the people in the face of uncertainty, including discursive strategies to explain the growing uncertainty? What is the role of state authorities, industrial companies, local organizations, urban and rural communities in overcoming the negative consequences of natural and social uncertainties? How are social connections and networks involved in dealing with situations of uncertainty? The paper demonstrates how these questions can be answered on the basis of anthropological fieldwork. It also uses examples from the Komi Republic (Vorkuta), Yakutia (Chersky settlement), and Magadan area to demonstrate the sort of problems the uncertainty-based approach can contribute to solving. A review of the existing literature in Russian and English is presented in order to give the reader useful insights into the field of uncertainty studies and outline the main directions of research that a study of uncertainty can take
We explore messy translations of evidence in policy as a site of ‘uncomfortable science’. Drawing on the work of John Law, we follow evidence as a ‘fluid object’ of its situation, also enacted in relation to a hinterland of practices. Working with the qualitative interview accounts of mathematical modellers and other scientists engaged in the UK COVID‐19 response, we trace how models perform as evidence. Our point of departure is a moment of controversy in the public announcement of second national lockdown in the UK, and specifically, the projected daily deaths from COVID‐19 presented in support of this policy decision. We reflect on this event to trace the messy translations of “scientific consensus” in the face of uncertainty. Efforts among scientists to realise evidence‐based expectation and to manage the troubled translations of models in policy, including via “scientific consensus”, can extend the dis‐ease of uncomfortable science rather than clean it up or close it down. We argue that the project of evidence‐based policy is not so much in need of technical management or repair, but that we need to be thinking altogether differently.
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 authorities in response to the pandemic, this article argues that, rather than classic biopolitical strategies, such governmental interventions are better understood in relation to a problem of actual uncertainty. The case of Israel demonstrates how state apparatuses responded to actual uncertainty with technologies that are linked to different rationalities and how these technologies enabled the creation and management of a new milieu. The article further argues that, in making and intervening upon this milieu, state apparatuses employed a particular normalisation strategy that is tied to a form of power that we term encapsulation.
Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Israel established a number of
‘corona hotels’ – hybrid spaces that were neither fully treatment-oriented nor fully
incarcerational, in which people known or suspected to be infected with the coronavirus
were confined, sometimes for prolonged and indefinite periods. This paper describes
the experience of 25 people who were confined in corona recovery and isolation
hotels between March and July 2020. The corona hotels exemplify how remote medical
technology and digital medicine together enable a new ‘technogeography of care’, where
care and abandonment are inextricably linked. The paper adds to the growing number
of critical studies on digital health by showing how the employed technologies impact
the concepts of human embodiment, subjectivity and social relations, as well as how
the occupants negotiated the meaning of these technologies and resisted their effects.
In this paper, I analyze the use of architecture and affect as means for ensuring a prepared and resilient population. I do this by exploring an empirical case of public simulation centers, which are an emerging type of educational facility with the purpose of training the public for future emergencies using advanced simulations. Accordingly, existing anticipatory techniques are being redeployed and applied to a new target group, the public, which calls for renewed engagement with the use of space, physical design, and affect as means for involving and fostering the public in societal preparedness. Drawing on literature on anticipatory governance, I focus on two questions, elaborating first how public simulation centers produce and enable security affects and, second, exploring the means, material and immaterial, by which these centers attract and involve citizens in security practices.
There is a growing trend to prepare children for future disasters. A Japanese nonprofit organization has developed an event called Iza! Kaeru Caravan, which includes games that teach children and their families how to survive disasters, from earthquakes to floods. Many disaster experts and government officials from other countries have now implemented the Caravan in their own contexts. Based on ethnographic research in Japan and Chile, this article shows how playful methods in disaster preparedness orient children, and by proxy their families, to accept an apocalyptic future, helping the neoliberal state buy time. Advocates of disaster preparedness in Japan and Chile accept that state actors will not come immediately to the rescue. Playful methods mobilize children and their families to take responsibility for their own survival through the subjunctive work of the “as if.” Ambiguously positioned between fun and education, playful methods of preparedness command attention from children and adults—what I call “attentive play”—as they frame and reframe the games to figure out, “Is this play?” Ultimately, the article shows that attentive play buys time for the state to temporarily defer its responsibilities to citizens, but the ambiguity of play can also exceed its ideological effects.
Tracing the emergence of the scenario technology and key shifts in how it is used, we argue that scenarios represent a new way of governing future uncertainty. We analyse two of the most influential approaches to the technology—those of Herman Kahn and Pierre Wack. In the first, scenarios emerge as a solution to an ontological problem of future uncertainty—a solution that seeks to use imagination as a form of reasoning about the future (Mode I scenarios). In the second, however, scenarios appear as a solution to an epistemological problem—a way of challenging and changing perceptions, of remediating one’s perception of the world and accepting its uncertainty. That is, scenarios become a way of entering into an uncertain sensibility and a particular mode of experience and practice related to and centred on uncertainty—a new mode of subjectivation. We refer to this as Mode II scenarios.
In 1999, two devastating earthquakes occurred in Northwestern Turkey, which claimed around 18,000 lives. Since the disaster, many scientific studies and projects, both international and national, have been conducted, concluding that another earthquake at the magnitude of at least six will hit Istanbul. Even though there is a consensus among scientists that an earthquake will happen in Istanbul, there is a plethora of different theories and arguments about the anticipated earthquake. This paper is an historical account of how different technoscientific practices have enacted different North Anatolian Faults stretching across Anatolia and Marmara Sea. The multiplicity of the fault does not emerge as an epistemic problem of having different perspectives, but it is an ontological question of how plural realities are being made in different scientific practices. We argue that scientific uncertainties emerge when these different faults do not fit together in technoscientific circles and across public venues.
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 them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities can be distinguished from each other in terms of their approaches to future uncertainty, their temporalities and the role of imagination within their enactment. To further conceptually develop the logics of imagination, I draw on Deleuze’s and Bergson’s discussions of the concept of fabulation, and I suggest that scenarios and simulations represent two different logics of future-governing that are based on practices of imagination.
This study explores the growing presence of emotional terminology within Israeli popular discourses on national security, as reflected in the daily talk of Israelis living on the border with the Gaza Strip. It is based on ethnography conducted in 2016–18 as part of a multi-site, multidisciplinary study on articulations of security in frontier communities. Findings reveal that the grassroots discourse of national security is saturated with emotional language, and that this, in turn, is interlaced with relationships terminology. Residents report high levels of insecurity (fear, trauma, and constant disquiet), alongside pride in their families’ and communities’ strong care and solidarity, which they perceive as a great source of resilience. Parenthetically, the state and the military, too, are made concrete through relational emotions. We argue that the language of emotional-relationality frames national security and resilience as mental dispositions, and that this subsequently renders the robust power apparatuses that maintain their semi-transparency.
The analysis dwells on the political implications of the phenomenon. We note an association between residents’ preoccupations with the conflict’s emotional effects on their lives and their consistent avoidance from criticising the state’s policies regarding its management or potential transformation. This transposition of the political with the emotional, we argue, offers a distinct insight into Israelis’ familiar tendency to avoid criticising Israel’s aggressions against the Palestinians: the embeddedness of national security in emotional relationships implicitly constructs political criticism as betrayal of intimate relations.
The emergence of “situational awareness” as a response to the perception of a new terrorism in European cities marks a significant shift in the conceptualization of security. Focusing on a recently introduced German Federal Police program that trains ordinary officers in their capability to handle “complex life threatening situations of police operation” the article explores how situational awareness introduces a warrior logic into policing and urban subjectivity and modifies our understanding of security at large. It points us to the limitations of preparedness and concretizes the hitherto elusive call to resilience. Three analytical dimensions – space-time, sensing and connectivity – will be developed to render the situation thinkable for empirical research as well as to grasp security as a “live” mode of government.
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 administration, we came to realise that the conceptualisation of preparedness for such events has morphed. Through an analytical discussion on the concepts of crisis and emergency, we argue that a shift in orientation has occurred and crisis response gave birth to emergency management. That is, preparedness is no longer driven by historical precedent but has become a form of future-oriented emergency practice. Moreover, we argue, an emergency apparatus–a distinct technology of governance–has emerged that, although varying in form and composition, has become the means and ends of civilian-front preparedness. © 2018
Recent Palestinian Authority (PA) initiatives to help Palestine adapt to climate change help shine light on the role that climate uncertainties play in how political futures can be represented. UN-led adaptation has occasioned opportunities for new networks of actors to make claims about Palestinian futures and to perform PA readiness for statehood. These actors weigh scientific uncertainties about climate against uncertainties over if and when settler colonialism in Palestine will end. How they do so matters because it is the foundation of requests for capital that could be translated into some of the most important institutions and infrastructures of Palestinian governance over the next several years, including those that provide Palestinians with access to water. It also matters because it constitutes the image with which PA officials represent what needs to be “fixed” in Palestine in important international forums such as the UN. Climate change adaptation is a new approach to the management of uncertain environmental futures. This analysis offers insight into how this approach shapes and is shaped by practices of statecraft in places marked by the volatilities of war, economic crisis, and occupation.
Our current ecumene is governmentalistically plural. The biopolitical technology of the regulation of one or another bounded population remains active among many other such technologies. The mode of veridiction proper to biopolitics is actuarial; it has a proper epistemology. In these two respects, it stands beside and apart from the mode of veridiction proper to a parabiopolitics, which is scenaristic and grounded in a sophiology. I extract the lineaments of parabiopolitical reason from two sources. One is an exercise undertaken in Greece between 2002 and 2004 under the mandate of the European program of FORESIGHT. The other is the work of Pierre Wack, whose methodology of scenario planning brings the difference that makes a difference between biopolitical epistemology and parabiopolitical sophiology most brightly to light.
The 2007 launch of the Caribbean Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) introduced a new mechanism of state security against the uncertainties of climate change. Proponents argue that increasing the ability of member-states to finance disaster recovery through catastrophe insurance mitigates the effects of increasingly frequent and intense hurricanes and thus contributes to climate change adaptation. In contrast, I offer a critical analysis of the CCRIF that draws out how it facilitates what I call the ‘financialization of disaster management’. The introduction of financial logics and techniques enables the state and capital to visualize a population’s self-organizing adaptive capacity as both a threat to state-based forms of order and a value that can be leveraged on capital markets as catastrophe risk. Leveraging enhances a state’s ability to repair its critical infrastructure and preemptively negate undesirable adaptations. The CCRIF blends risk pooling with parametric insurance techniques to turn the uncertainty surrounding a population’s immanent adaptability into catastrophe risks that can be leveraged to enhance state security and capital accumulation in an emergent environment.
This article analyses the conjunctures of risk and security that have recently emerged in the securitization of HIV/AIDS. Although these partially corroborate Ulrich Beck's notion of risk society, important elements of the securitization of HIV/AIDS resist his understanding of risk as a `danger of modernization'. The article therefore turns to François Ewald's alternative theorization of risk as a `neologism of insurance', and shows that insurance is a risk-based security practice widely used to manage the welfare of populations. Such a biopolitical approach to risk is also valuable for analysing the securitization of HIV/AIDS, which, even though it is unfolding outside the domain of insurance, similarly draws upon multiple risk categories (`security risks', `risk groups' and `risk factors') in efforts to improve the collective health of populations. Analysed through a wider concept of risk as a `biopolitical rationality', the conjuncture of risk and security in the securitization of HIV/AIDS thus emerges as a principal site where the institutions of sovereign power in international relations are being absorbed and integrated within a wider biopolitical economy of power.
This article examines 'enactment' as a significant new form of knowledge about collective life that differs fundamentally from familiar forms of 'social' knowledge. The emergence of enactment is traced through a series of domains where the problem of estimating the likelihood and consequence of potentially catastrophic future events has been made an explicit object of expert reflection: response to a possible nuclear attack in US civil defence planning in the late 1940s; the emergence of natural hazard modelling in the 1960s and 1970s; and the emergence today of terrorism risk assessment and its proposed application to federal budgetary distributions. The article engages with central questions in debates around 'risk society' and insurance, holding that new approaches to understanding and assessing risk are not merely idiosyncratic or subjective. Rather, they should be treated as coherent new forms of knowledge and practice whose genealogy and present assemblies must be traced.
This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call 'distributed preparedness'. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US.
Criticism 46.1 (2004) 17-39
In our 1999 book Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay Bolter and I defined "remediation" as the double logic according to which media (particularly but not exclusively digital media) refashion prior media forms. In response to the question of what was new about digital media at the end of the twentieth century, we proposed that these media were new precisely because of the ways in which they refashioned older media. Specifically, we examined the ways in which such media as computer graphics, video games, virtual reality, and the World Wide Web define themselves by borrowing from, paying homage to, critiquing, and refashioning their predecessors, principally television, film, photography, and painting, but also print. Video and computer games, we argued, remediate film by styling themselves as "interactive movies," incorporating standard Hollywood cinematic techniques. Virtual reality remediates film as well as perspective painting. Digital photography remediates the analog photograph. The Web absorbs and refashions almost every previous visual and textual medium, including television, film, radio, and print. Furthermore, we argued that older media remediate newer ones within the same media economy. The traditional Hollywood cinema, for example, has responded to the challenge of digital media in a variety of different ways: by employing computer graphics in otherwise conventional films, by creating films entirely with computer animation, or by replacing the logic of linear narrative with more iterative, gamelike logics. Television, too, has made such extensive use of new media that TV screens often look like Web pages. Remediation, we suggested, seemed to be a characteristic not only of contemporary media but of visual media at least since the Renaissance, with its invention of linear-perspective painting—as evidenced by the recent interest among art historians in the role that optical devices (including the camera lucida, camera obscura, and photographic projection) played in the history of realistic painting. Each medium seems to follow this pattern of borrowing and refashioning other media, and rivalry as well as homage seem always to be at work.
In Remediation we took Kathryne Bigelow's 1995 film Strange Days as exemplifying the often contradictory logic of mediation at work at the end of the twentieth century, tracing out what we described as the double logic of remediation by which contemporary culture seeks simultaneously to proliferate and to erase mediation, to eliminate all signs of mediation in the very act of multiplying them. In 1999 we argued that Bigelow presented a vision of the near future that was really an account of the double logic of remediation at the historical moment of the film's production and release. Strange Days imagines an idealized form of remediation as a perceptual immediacy that would bypass or erase all mediation by connecting one consciousness to another, even while the film itself simultaneously presents a world in which media and mediation are everywhere (including the recording and playback devices that produce and transmit the "clip" that is a piece of another's perceptual experience).
Although we were, I would insist, correct to single out Strange Days as an instance of remediation as a cultural dominant at the end of the twentieth century, we did not at that point recognize how this double logic—if not precisely nearing its end—was at least on the verge of being re-mediated according to another logic, a logic of premediation in which the future has always already been pre-mediated. In other words, we failed to understand fully the way in which Strange Days was already participating in a logic of premediation insofar as it was pre-mediating the United States (particularly Los Angeles) nearly five years into the future. Furthermore, we failed to recognize that Strange Days was also participating in a logic of premediation insofar as it remediated future media practices and technologies. In depicting the "wire" as a device that records one person's sensory perception of the past, according to the logic of appropriate media forms, and makes it available in the future for playback by another person, through means of appropriate media technologies, Strange Days not only participated in the double logic of remediation at the end of...
In risk research, culture has been used mainly as a 'black box' of unknowns into which 'irregularities' of risk perceptions that could not be otherwise accounted for can be referred. In social anthropology it has been taken for granted that what is to be considered a 'risk' depends entirely on cultural settings and assumptions; risks are culturally defined and selected. This article takes a critical stance towards any such simplistic ideas about risk and culture. Culture is approached from a perspective of cognitive theory and is hence understood as shared schemata that define categories, relationships and contexts, making it possible to process meanings and order information. It is argued that if we are to succeed in investigating risk contextually, without ending up in a relativistic muddle which merely acknowledges myriads of diverse risk perceptions, it is necessary to problematize the assumed simplistic cultural nature of risk.
This essay concerns the current intersection of national security and public health in the United States. It argues that over the course of the past three decades, a new way of thinking about and acting on the threat of infectious disease has coalesced: for public health and national security officials, the problem of infectious disease is no longer only one of prevention, but also—and perhaps even more—one of preparedness. The essay describes the process through which a norm of preparedness came to structure thought about threats to public health, and how a certain set of responses to these threats became possible. The story is a complex one, involving the migration of techniques initially developed in the military and civil defense to other areas of governmental intervention. The analysis is centered not on widespread public discussion of biological threats but, rather, on particular sites of expertise where a novel way of understanding and intervening in threats was developed and deployed. It focuses in particular on one technique, the scenario-based exercise, arguing that this technique served two important functions: first, to generate an affect of urgency in the absence of the event itself; and second, to generate knowledge about vulnerabilities in response capability that could then guide intervention. More broadly, the scenario-based exercise is exemplary of the rationality underlying the contemporary articulation of national security and public health.
How should we understand the politics of security today? This article addresses this question from one particular perspective, that of 'biosecurity'. It examines contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Europe, and that one can identify three different configurations: contingency planning, protection and resilience. Each of these embodies a significantly different way of reconciling fundamental imperatives for those who would govern a liberal society today - the imperative of freedom and the imperative of security.
The events of 9/11 appeared to make good on Ulrich Beck's claim that we are now living in a (global) risk society. Examining what it means to ‘govern through risk’, this article departs from Beck's thesis of risk society and its appropriation in security studies. Arguing that the risk society thesis problematically views risk within a macro-sociological narrative of modernity, this article shows, based on a Foucauldian account of governmentality, that governing terrorism through risk involves a permanent adjustment of traditional forms of risk management in light of the double infinity of catastrophic consequences and the incalculability of the risk of terrorism. Deploying the Foucauldian notion of ‘dispositif’, this article explores precautionary risk and risk analysis as conceptual tools that can shed light on the heterogeneous practices that are defined as the ‘war on terror’.
This 1999 book presents a variety of exciting perspectives on the perception of risk and the strategies that people adopt to cope with it. Using the framework of recent social and cultural theory, it reflects the fact that risk has become integral to contemporary understandings of selfhood, the body and social relations, and is central to the work of writers such as Douglas, Beck, Giddens and the Foucauldian theorists. The contributors are all leading scholars in the fields of sociology, cultural and media studies and cultural anthropology. Combining empirical analyses with metatheoretical critiques, they tackle an unusually diverse range of topics including drug use, risk in the workplace, fear of crime and the media, risk and pregnant embodiment, the social construction of danger in childhood, anxieties about national identity, the governmental uses of risk and the relationship between risk phenomena and social order.
In recent years, new disease threats—such as SARS, avian flu, mad cow disease, and drug-resistant strains of malaria and tuberculosis—have garnered media attention and galvanized political response. Proposals for new approaches to "securing health" against these threats have come not only from public health and medicine but also from such fields as emergency management, national security, and global humanitarianism.
This volume provides a map of this complex and rapidly transforming terrain. The editors focus on how experts, public officials, and health practitioners work to define what it means to "secure health" through concrete practices such as global humanitarian logistics, pandemic preparedness measures, vaccination campaigns, and attempts to regulate potentially dangerous new biotechnologies.
As the contributions show, despite impressive activity in these areas, the field of "biosecurity interventions" remains unstable. Many basic questions are only beginning to be addressed: Who decides what counts as a biosecurity problem? Who is responsible for taking action, and how is the efficacy of a given intervention to be evaluated? It is crucial to address such questions today, when responses to new problems of health and security are still taking shape. In this context, this volume offers a form of critical and reflexive knowledge that examines how technical efforts to increase biosecurity relate to the political and ethical challenges of living with risk.
In this paper we explore the relation between affect and security through a case study of one technique for making futures present and actionable: the use of exercises in UK emergency planning after the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act. Based on observation of exercises and interviews with emergency planners, we show how exercises function by making present an interval' of emergency in between the occurrence of a threatening event and its becoming a disaster. This interval' is made present through a set of partially connected affective atmospheres and sensibilities. By making futures present at the level of affect, exercises function as techniques of equivalence that enable future disruptive events to be governed. Through this case study we argue against epochal accounts that frame the relation between affect and security in terms of an age of anxiety' or a culture of fear'. Instead, we understand security affects to be both a means through which futures are made present in apparatuses of security and a part of the relational dynamics through which apparatuses emerge, endure, change, and function strategically.
In this article, we examine contemporary ‘resilience’ through UK preparedness – an apparatus of security enacted under the legal and organizational principles of UK Civil Contingencies and civil protection legislation and practices. By examining the design, practices and technologies that constitute the exercises performed within Civil Contingencies, the article first suggests that the manner in which exercises have been mobilized as examples of preparedness and apocalyptical imaginations of the ‘unthinkable’ should be understood within the highly specific societal and political contexts that shape them. More substantially, the article then provides a nuanced understanding of the life of the security assemblage through an in-depth analysis of the exercise and its design, materials, play and contingent relations. Seeking to deepen and widen concerns for what matters in security studies, animated by concern for objects, bodily affects, contingencies and excess, the article contends for a more serious concern with how security and its practices can surprise, shock, enthral and disrupt in a manner that need not only be associated with failure.
Ever since its establishment in 1948, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has exhibited characteristics conventionally associated with a "people's army." The composition of its force structure (mainly based on compulsory conscription and reserve duty) has both reflected and reinforced that image. During the past decade, however, the relative weights of the IDF's manpower complement have begun to change. While reserve duty is being reduced and conscription is becoming more selective, the career and professional component is being augmented. This article examines the societal, economic, and operational reasons for those changes. It then goes on to discuss their possible effects on the fabric of relations between Israeli society and the IDF. Specifically noted are the implications for (a) military service as a rite of passage towards full citizenship; (b) the IDF's posture of "military role expansion"; and (c) civil-military relations in Israel.
In the context of the `war on terror', techniques of imagining the future have taken on new political significance. Richard Grusin has coined the term `premediation' to describe the way in which news media and cultural industries map and visualize a plurality of possible futures. This article examines the relation between the politics of risk and premediation as a security practice. Premediation simultaneously deploys and exceeds the language of risk. Its self-conscious deployment of imagination in security practice feeds economies of both anxiety and desire.
This article looks at the increasing prominence of bioterrorist threat scenarios in recent US foreign policy. Germ warfare, it argues, is being depicted as the paradigmatic threat of the post-Cold War era, not only because of its affinity for cross-border movement but also because it blurs the lines between deliberate attack and spontaneous natural catastrophe. The article looks at the possible implications of this move for understandings of war, strategy and public health. It also seeks to contextualize the US’s growing military interest in biodefence research within the commercial strategies of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. In its methodology, the article weaves together elements from defence literature, scientific perspectives on infectious disease, catastrophe theory and political economy. The conceptual underpinnings of the strategy of pre-emptive warfare, it argues, lie as much in the theory of biological emergence as in official US defence strategy.
Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle' (Ewald), `preparedness' (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption' (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feature within the Australian political imaginary. We explore how the approach to the future entailed in the paradigm enframes `life' and stifles democratic participation and innovation in ways of living. Three case studies (in biosecurity, bioecology and biomedicine) demonstrate not only how the paradigm pervades the government of everyday life, but also how it is challenged by human `agents', material `life' and the dynamic relations between these two. By formulating what this involves, we point to a concept of the political more conducive to democratic pluralism, diversity of life and innovative culture.
Most of the subjects concerned with Israel, such as the location of the military and militaristic culture, are heavily distorted in comparison to other themes prevalant in the discourse and the debates in the social sciences, very much like the other issues linked with the Jewish-Arab conflict and Jewish-Arab relations (Kimmerling, 1992). Ideological and value loaded considerations blur the issue, making even the usage of the term ‘militarism’ in the canonical textbooks a taboo in Israel. The main purpose of this paper is three-fold: 1) to present a brief survey of the present state of the literature on so-called ‘civil-military relations’ in Israel, from which 2) a revision can be made of the overall impact of the Jewish-Arab conflict and the militarization of Israeli society. This will be followed by 3) a reformulation of the effect of militarization on the institutional and value spheres of the Israeli collectivity.
Like many other states, Israel was forged through the struggle of a national liberation movement that likely drew inspiration from an ethnic past and that certainly worked to establish a political framework. Once the state existed, however, its leaders did not regard the ethnie as an objective category that would in large measure determine whether a nation would emerge. Instead, they viewed the ethnie as a subject susceptible, in varying degrees, to manipulation, invention, domination, and mobilization. As the prime minister of Piedmont said, “We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians”; or as Israel's first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, put it in April 1951 during the election campaign: “I see in these elections the shaping of a nation for the state because there is a state but not a nation.”
In this article, I interrogate the national cultural work performed by the mass circulation of images of a nuclear-bombed United States since 1945. It argues that the production of negative affect has become a central arena of nation-building in the nuclear age, and tracks the visual deployment of nuclear fear on film from the early Cold War project of civil defense through the “war on terror.” It argues that the production and management of negative affect remains a central tool of the national security state, and demonstrates the primary role the atomic bomb plays in the United States as a means of militarizing everyday life and justifying war.
This article explores one way in which medical practice confronts old age, disease, and conceptions of risk through an examination of geriatric assessment, a recently created health care modality in the United States. The process of geriatric assessment is shown to extend medicine's gaze to all aspects of bodily, mental, and social existence, thereby contributing to widespread cultural confusion about the equation of old age with disease. Geriatric medicine's representation of old age and disease is embedded in a risk discourse permeating contemporary society. An analysis of geriatric assessment conferences suggests that the old become the field on which the imperative to reduce risk by behavior modification and supervision competes with the deeply held value of autonomy. Medicine is assumed to be the appropriate institution for managing both the risks associated with aging and disease and the conflict between surveillance and care on the one hand, and freedom and neglect on the other.
This article considers the specific mode of visualization that is at work in contemporary border security practices. Taking inspiration from art historian Jonathan Crary's genealogies of attention, it situates homeland security visuality in a particular economy of attention or attentiveness to the world. How is it that we come to focus on some elements of our way of life, establish them as normal and designate deviations from the norm? How does this algorithmic attentiveness break up the visual field, 'pixelating' sensory data so that it can be reintegrated to project a picture of a person? The pre-emptive lines of sight emerging in contemporary security practice become precisely a means of visualizing unknown futures. The article concludes with reflections on the creative artistic forms of attention that flourish even where the lines of sight of the consumer, the citizen, the border guard, the traveller, the migrant appear ever more directed and delimited. It is in these more creative modes of attention that we find one of the most important resources to contemporary political life - the capacity to question the 'better picture', to disrupt what we see as ordinary or out of the ordinary and confront the routines of our lives anew.
This paper analyses contemporary Australian newspaper coverage of the threat of pandemic influenza in humans, specifically in the light of recent transformations in biomedical and public health understandings of infectious disease as continuously emerging. Our analysis suggests that the spectre of pandemic influenza is characterised, in newspaper accounts, as invoking a specific form of nation building. The Australian nation is depicted as successfully securing itself in the face of a threat from Asia (and in the absence of an effective international health body). What is described in newspaper accounts reflects a shift in the public health response to infectious disease. This response does not entail a direct focus on protecting either the population or national territory. Instead, it involves the continuous rehearsal of readiness to react to disasters through the networking of government and private agencies responsible for maintaining critical infrastructure. In this way, coverage of pandemic influenza positions health as central to national security, with little reporting of the reasons for or the potential implications of this alliance. Thus, the imperative to 'be prepared' is presented as self-evident.
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