`It Sounds Like a Riddle': Security Studies, the War on Terror and Risk

Abstract

A research programme on `reflexive security' is emerging, as a number of students of international security are applying sociological insights of `risk society' to understand new discourses and practices of security. This research note maps the current achievements and future challenges of this emerging research programme on risk arguing that it offers a way to overcome the debate about whether to apply a `broad' or `narrow' concept of security; a debate which is stifling the discipline's ability to appreciate the `war on terrorism' as an example of a new security practice. Discussing the nature of strategy in a risk environment, the paper outlines the consequences for applying the concept of reflexive rationality to strategy. Doing so, I address some of the concerns on how to study `reflexive security' previously raised by Shlomo Griner in Millennium.

Governing Terrorism Through Risk: Taking Precautions, (un)Knowing the Future

“…Most interestingly, Beck argues that these uninsurable risks undermine the social arrangements through which risks have been made controllable in the past. Control is no longer possible in risk society, which instead 'balances its way along beyond the limits of insurability' (Beck, 1999: 32 Rasmussen (2004) similarly claims that in the war on terror the ideal of complete security is being replaced by a focus on the management of risks in conditions of uncertainty.…”

“…Beck saw in terrorism another manifestation of 'world risk society' (Beck, 2002; see also Coker, 2002b;Rasmussen, 2004;Spence, 2005). Comparing the terrorist attacks of September 11 with the Chernobyl of the 1980s (Beck, 2002;, Beck has claimed that September 11 drove home the lesson that we now live in a 'risk society', a society in which there are uncontrollable and unpredictable dangers against which insurance is impossible.…”

“…8 Concomitantly, IR-theorists who have used the risk society framework have examined how transnational loyalties are constituted around a common interest in the management of global risks (Coker, 2002a;Griner, 2002;Rasmussen, 2004;Spence, 2005).…”

Editors’ introduction: neoliberalism and/as terror

“…Since the onset of the War on Terror, various critical literatures in International Relations have identified neoliberal economic trends as integral to counterterrorism frameworks and techniques.security, for example, identify the application of actuarial tools drawn from the market (especially insurance) to issues of political violence, tracing their subsequent development into speculative tools of contingency management (Amoore and De Goede 2008;Heng and McDonagh 2009;Lobo-Guerrero 2012;Vedby Rasmussen 2004). Here, insecurity is tamed through its rendering as manageable, predictable risk precisely by the application of economic technologies to various fields of security.…”

Insuring Terrorism, Assuring Subjects, Ensuring Normality: The Politics of Risk after 9/11

“…They also play a marginal role in security analyses inspired by Ulrich Beck's thesis of risk society (Rasmussen, 2004). According to this thesis, insurance appears difficult to uphold in the context of terrorism, which appears to surpass the traditional technologies of insurance that rely upon measuring frequency and severity and quantifying ensuring premiums.…”