Rehearsing for the Plague: Citizens, Security, and Simulation

Abstract

Daily practices of bioterrorism preparedness are producing a security community in which citizens are bound together by common biological risk, access to care during times of crisis, and the ability and authority to provide care in an emergency. Through the study of national-level exercise programmes and city-wide preparedness plans in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this ethnographic research asks how communities are materially and ideologically organized around the idea of mitigating biological risk. The dual acts of planning for bioterrorism and simulating a response prescribe a distinct role for government in caring for a population, and not just during times of crisis. This paper explores the outcomes of publicly rehearsing the care practices of government through bioterror simulation by considering how restructuring health systems around the idea of biopreparedness confounds the specter of war with life-giving acts of health care, offering citizens a way of living within the state of emergency.

On parabiopolitical reason

“…Influenza or other hygienic perils may cry out for ‘preparedness,’ but our current technological resources can only rarely realistically aim at ‘preemption’ (though sometimes they do—see Cooper, 2006). Scenaristically-informed military defense or offense may sometimes be directed toward preparedness, sometimes toward preemption (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Cooper, 2006), sometimes toward precaution, but once again the specificity of its directions and simulations (see Armstrong, 2012) is always inflected by the extant resources available in achieving its ends—among other things.…”

Iterations of Olympic security: Montreal and Vancouver

“…It is also significant that the most spectacular of these exercises are deliberately staged for public consumption, involving various degrees of stylization, finesse and production value (Boyle and Haggerty, 2012). As operationalized enactments of imagined catastrophes, these performances shape how we respond to risk, not only by teaching participants what roles they should play in managing crises, but also in contouring the broader selection of risks we prepare for in the present and conditioning the nature of such eventualities (Armstrong, 2012). And, while it is impossible to actually plan for all worst-case scenarios, highly visible security exercises sustain the appearance of having contemplated all possible risks, and in doing so buttress confidence in the state’s ability to provide security under conditions of radical uncertainty.…”

Avian preparedness: simulations of bird diseases and reverse scenarios of extinction in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore

“…In the last twenty years, techniques of simulation have multiplied in the world of disaster management (Revet ). The stated objective of these exercises is to ‘rehearse’ a disaster situation in order to better prepare for it (Armstrong ). Actors in a simulation treat the expected disaster as if it had happened in order to immerse themselves in the reality it should produce (Seligman, Weller, Puett & Simon ).…”