The Risk Society at War

Rasmussen, Mikkel Vedby

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511491634

Cited by 124 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…38 At the same time, precautionary actions to address specific risks can in themselves have unintended consequences, among which may be the creation of new risks. 39 Thus the problem of international terrorism was not solved when Al-Qaeda was defeated in Afghanistan, though its character may have altered and its centre of gravity shifted elsewhere. At the same time, the intervention itself created new problems, including a ferocious Taleban insurgency and a resurgence of Islamist activity in Pakistan.…”

Section: Operations and Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

British civil-military relations and the problem of risk

Edmunds

2012

International Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Drawing primarily on the experience of the UK since 2001, this article examines the increasing prevalence of risk as an organizing concept for western defence and security planning and its implications for civil–military relations and strategy‐making. It argues that there may be tensions between such approaches and the principles of good strategy‐making, which aim to link means and resources to ends in a coherent manner. Not only does risk potentially blur the relationship between means and ends in the strategy‐making process, it also exposes it to contestation, with multiple interpretations of what the risks actually are and the strategic priority (and commitment) which should be attached to them. The article examines these tensions at three levels of risk contestation for British defence: institutions, operations and military–society relations. In the case of the UK, it contends that the logic of risk has not been able to provide the same national motivation and sense of strategic purpose as the logic of threat. In this context, calls for a reinvigoration of traditional strategy‐making or a renewed conception of national interest may be missing a more fundamental dissonance between defence policy, civil–military relations and the wider security context. More widely, the strategic ennui that some western states have been accused of may not simply be a product of somehow falling out of the habit of strategy‐making or an absence of ‘political will’. Instead, it may reflect deeper social and geostrategic trends which constrain and complicate the use of military force and obscure its utility in the public imagination.

show abstract

Section: Operations and Riskmentioning

confidence: 99%

British civil-military relations and the problem of risk

Edmunds

2012

International Affairs

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The nemesis, the evil empire or the archenemy that had always been present on the horizon has dissolved into a blurry concept -a concept that at the least is not as visible or tangible anymore as it once was. In this environment where threats are less tangible and objectively hard to define, subjective securitization has been on the rise (Rasmussen, 2006).…”

Section: Securitized Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Surrogate warfare: the art of war in the 21st century?

Krieg

Rickli

2018

Defence Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The upshot of this is that the precautionary principle is not only the basis of legislation and policies, but also a powerful theoretical idea (Van Asselt and Ortwin, ; Rasmussen, ). The treatment of a given risk under the precautionary framework, and thus its policy salience, derives essentially from the way different stakeholders understand the precautionary principle and the scope they grant it (Murphy and Levidow, , pp.…”

Section: Temporality Precaution and The Ethics Of Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise of Precaution and the Global Governance of Risks

Balzacq

2015

Political Studies Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research shows that interpretations and uses of the precautionary principle can exacerbate the relations between states. Indeed, the precautionary principle increasingly plays a pivotal role in explaining how actors position themselves on various issues related to health, safety and environmental (HSE) risks. However, the books under review tend to subscribe to the approach that separates out precaution from risk assessment. In contrast, it is suggested in this article that the precautionary reasoning is a distinctive view of risk regulation, which reworks rather than repudiates risk assessment. This turn might help scholars to embark on the difficult task of understanding the extent to which the precautionary principle affects how HSE norms on risks are crafted, the channels through which they spread and the mechanisms that enable them to operate effectively.In the last decade, a series of controversies on health, safety and environmental risks (HSE) has pitted two of the giant economic actors in the international system, the European Union (EU) and the United States (US), against one another. The disagreement is over the criteria that should underlie risk regulation at the international level. Although both sides agree that a broad family of risks is characterised by radical uncertainty and ignorance about the depth and magnitude of future consequences, they spar over the norm that policy makers should trust in order to fashion policies that forestall disastrous outcomes.In general, it is argued that the EU places its faith on the precautionary principle while the US insists on cost-benefit analysis. Put in simple terms, risk assessment aims to turn uncertainty into knowledge. Precaution, by contrast, considers that not all nonknowledge can go through this transformative process. Yet, precaution has been conceptualised in many different ways. One of the best known, if not most influential formulations of the precautionary principle is contained in Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration: ' [W]here there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.'The stakes are high. Indeed, from trade to war, through the discussion on the appropriate steps to take in order to minimise the effects of global warning, the tensions between cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle are changing the ways in

show abstract

The Risk Society at War

Cited by 124 publications

References 0 publications

British civil-military relations and the problem of risk

British civil-military relations and the problem of risk

Surrogate warfare: the art of war in the 21st century?

The Rise of Precaution and the Global Governance of Risks

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About