ESRC Seminar Series- Contemporary Biopolitical Security
Fourth (and final) workshop
Problematising Danger
Co-sponsored by the Biopolitics of Security Network,
the Emerging Securities Research Unit @ Keele University
and the Centre for International Relations, War Studies Department, King’s College London
21-22 February 2011
The River Room, King’s College London, Strand Campus
Keynote address: Professor Marieke de Goede (University of Amsterdam)
‘Networked Danger and Speculative Security’
Organisers
Luis Lobo-Guerrero (Keele University)
Vivienne Jabri (King’s College London)
Workshop coordinator:
Philip Slann (Keele University)
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Contemporary Biopolitical Security Seminar Series
Seminar Series Aims and Objectives
The seminar series has fostered debate, research and networking opportunities on the problem-space that
results from posing questions on what does it mean to secure ‘life’ and ‘forms of life’ in the 21st century.
It has provided the material funds to enable meetings and collective-thinking opportunities for
intellectuals working on the area of the biopolitics of security. Biopolitics, broadly speaking, is the politics
of life itself. It is a concept related to the power relations and forms of knowledge that brought together
constitute what life and forms of life are to be. The immediate political relevance of this intellectual
problem is that only when ‘life’ and ‘forms of life’ are specifically defined decisions and strategies on how
to govern, promote, and protect them can be made. Biopolitical research is all about investigating the
ways in which conceptions of life are made to be and the strategies devised to ‘make live’.
Biopolitics is a concept coined and initially developed by Michel Foucault in France in the 1970s.
Foucault’s original formulations, however, have been advanced consequently in the English-speaking
academic world, particularly in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and parts of the United States. A
whole new body of theory inspired in the work of Foucault began to fertilise social sciences from the
1980s onwards under the rubric of ‘governmentality’. This work has had significant impact in policymaking and widened the scope for inter-disciplinary social research. In this century, the publication of the
translations of Foucault’s lecture series of the mid 1970s Society Must be Defended, and Security,
Territory, Population have re-ignited intellectual debate and empowered younger intellectual generations
to develop new theoretical tools and policy-relevant instruments.
Biopolitics of security is already a theoretical elaboration on the Foucauldian idea of biopolitics. It refers
specifically to the analysis of the security strategies that derive from biopolitical conceptions of life.
Foucault understood life as a function of classification processes, ‘speciation’ as he called it. Biopolitics of
security is concerned with analysing how life is classified as species and as such protected and promoted.
In simple terms, then, biopolitics of security studies the ways in which ‘life’ and forms of life are the result
of classification processes aimed at protecting and promoting life as species.
Specific objectives of the seminar series have been:

To promote inter-disciplinary research on the biopolitics of security amongst research students,
early-career academics, and senior researchers in dialogue with policy-makers.

Advance collective knowledge on the biopolitics of security by analysing emerging regimes of
classification of life, developments in biometrics and surveillance, and the latest trends in the
implementation of rationalities of risk within contemporary (global) governance.

Facilitate the dissemination and development of novel and creative ideas on the biopolitics of
security, particularly of early-career academics working in the United Kingdom.
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Problematising Danger Workshop
"There is no liberalism without a culture of danger." (Foucault, 2008: 67)
FOUCAULT, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979,
Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.
Threats and risks have become the preferred categories for imagining contemporary security. Practices
such as defence, border control and the surveillance of populations, insurance, risk profiling to identify
suspicious subjects, and risk assessments to protect objects and systems such as critical infrastructure, rely
heavily on well-established paradigms of security. Discourses and practices of threats and risks, with their
allied technologies of measurement and calculation, however, relate to the wider problem of danger and
its allied concept of ‘uncertainty’. Thinking ‘danger’ relates to understandings of uncertainties, otherness
of being, and spaces and environments of protection in excess of those accounted for in the language and
metrics of discourses of threats and risks.
What happens, then, if the analysis of security resorts to understandings of ‘danger’, ‘dangerousness’, and
processes of ‘endangerment’? Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to
understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of ready-made ‘objects’ of security such as
sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as class and
gender? Is it possible to think security in relation to danger away from utilitarian economic categories
such as cost-benefit analysis, risk calculus, and rational choice?
The workshop aims to explore these questions and to challenge participants to wonder if current policy
security priorities such as terrorism, climate change, weapons proliferation, resilience and migration can
be thought in relation to ‘danger’ outside discourses of threats and risks.
In the first three workshops of this seminar series we began to explore an agenda for contemporary
biopolitical security research around problems such as mobilities and circulations, resilience, values and
processes of valuations in relation to the technologies through which lifestyles and livelihoods are treated
as referents of security. In this fourth workshop we intend to spark a conversation around the
implications of thinking dangerousness in relation to security and life.


The workshop is based on participants’ work and invites a reflection on the following questions:
How are ideas of danger constituted? What forms of ‘data’, ‘information’, and ‘knowledge’ are
involved in constituting a dangerous subject or a dangerous environment?

What are the preconditions for understanding endangerment in and how do they question the
‘new security challenges’ of for example, terrorism (and cyber-terrorism), proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction, climate change, and health pandemics?

Can discourses and practices of security be different if reflections on the consequences of
endangerment are advanced?
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Programme
MONDAY 21 FEBRUARY
12:00 - 12:45 and Lunch
12:45 – 1:00 Introduction
- Luis Lobo-Guerrero (Keele University) and Vivienne Jabri (King’s college London)
1:00 – 2:30 Panel 1
Ontologisations of Danger
-
Btihaj Ajana (King’s College London), Re-ontologising Danger
Joscha Wullweber (University of Kassel), Strategies of Danger and Dangerous Strategies
David Chandler (University of Westminster), The Ontology of Danger: Recasting the Human
Subject in Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience
Andrew Neal (University of Edinburgh), ‘The Entropy of Dangerousness’
Chair: Martin Coward (Newcastle University)
2:30 – 4:00 – Panel 2
Risk managing the dangerousness of terror
-
Cerelia Athanassiou (University of Bristol), Changing the Global War on Terror: Who is the
‘Ready’ Citizen Arming Against?
Lisa Stampnitzky (University of Oxford) , Constituting terrorism: three attempts at rational
governance
Christopher Zebrowski (Keele University), Falling-out: Examining the problematising capacities
of danger
Jonas Hagmann and Myriam Dunn-Cavelty (ETH Zurich), Risk registers and the measurement
of everything: Security scientism and the reassertion of modernism
Chair: Claudia Aradau (The Open University)
4:00-4:30 – Coffee Break
4:30 – 5:30 – Panel 3
Danger’s Otherness
- Debbie Lisle (Queen’s University Belfast), Danger’s Other: Pleasure, Leisure & Travel
- Sam Okoth Opondo (University of Hawaii at Manoa), Fearscapes / Securescapes : Urban
Anxieties, Securities and the Domestic Scene
Chair: Vivienne Jabri
6:00 – 7:30 – Keynote Address
‘Networked Danger and Speculative Security’
Professor Marieke de Goede, University of Amsterdam
The lecture will take place at the Weston Room, Maughan Library, Chancery Lane, London
WC2A 1LR. Chancery Lane is a short walk from the Strand Campus and is on the right hand side
as you walk away from Fleet Street.
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8:00 – Workshop dinner (by invitation)
TUESDAY 22 February
9:00-10:30 – Panel 4
Sites, spaces and strategies of endangerment
- Charlotte Heath-Kelly (University of Aberystwyth), Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual:
Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT strategy.
- Casey McNeill (John Hopkins University), Danger and un-governed spaces in the US
- Alex Hamilton (London School of Economics), ‘Dangerous tools’ in ‘dangerous hands’: How
synthetic biology is imagined as a ‘bioterrorist threat’
Chair: Peter Adey tbc
10:30 – 11:00 – Coffee
11:00 – 1:00 – Final Roundtable and Conclusions
- Mustapha Pasha (University of Aberdeen)
- Marieke de Goede (University of Amsterdam)
- Luis Lobo-Guerrero (Keele University)
- Vivienne Jabri (King’s College London)
- Didier Bigo (King’s College London)
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Abstracts of interventions
Panel 1: Ontologisations of Danger
Re-ontologising Danger
Dr Btihaj Ajana
Centre for Culture, Media and Creative Industries (CMCI)
King’s College London
btihaj.ajana@kcl.ac.uk
This intervention starts with an assumption: that ontology has retreated from the notion of danger insofar
as the latter and its governmental conceptualisations are less thought of in terms of being and embodied
experience, and more in terms of future-oriented managerial and strategic processes that seek to pre-empt
danger or even capitalise on it. In this sense, ‘re-ontologising danger’ is a call to bring back the question of
being to bear on the notion of danger and on the consequences of thinking danger and dangerous
thinking as a way of challenging the mind-sets that govern governance itself.
So, why ontology?
Studies concerning security, securitisation, risk management and other related developments have been
largely conducted through the lens of governmentality thesis and that of the risk society. Such analytics
have doubtless been instrumental in providing a diagnosis of the hybrid arguments, strategies and
modalities of thought and action that underpin security mechanisms and their attitude towards danger,
and in revealing how specific forms of subjectivity come into being through the different governmental
practices. Yet the focus of such analytics has been mainly based on an ‘empiricism of the surface’ (Rose)
and directed towards abstract rationalities and technologies of rule.
In this sense, an engagement with ontology may complement these approaches by providing a different
level of analysis. It can allow the issue of danger to be viewed from the very humble layer of the everyday
(Jean-Luc Nancy) and to be reconnected to the embodied question of being and to the ways in which it
unfolds within the material fabric of life itself. This is particularly important in the current climate where
security strategies towards danger and risk are largely based on abstracted calculative technologies of
simulation and pre-emption that often lead to the ‘fictionalisation of the world’ (Bigo) and the
construction of spaces of simulacra and projections whose ramification has been the paradoxical increase
in instances of endangerment and insecurity rather than their total pre-emption. As such, this intervention
argues that an ontological approach can help reclaim the question of danger from the fear-driven
strategies of security and their regimes of control, and at the same time, placing it (back) within a more
embodied material sphere that is present in and to its own actualisations.
In addition, ontology also opens up unique sets of political and ethical questions, questions that challenge
the normative assumptions that underpin liberal individualism, reconfiguring the very basis of what
counts and qualifies as an ethico-political question in the first place. So in place of the familiar concepts
of risk/benefit analysis, agency, rationality, subjectivity, choice and so on, an ontological approach incites
the retrieval of and engagement with notions such as relationality, singularity, alterity, affects and
embodiment. This can also allow the redefinition of the problem spaces and the reframing of what is cast
as a question and solution beyond the technocratic formulations of contemporary modes of governance.
Rethinking danger from an ontological standpoint demands a reconsideration of the foundational
categories of governance and with it the rethinking of the political itself. Jean-Luc Nancy’s work provides
a touchstone for this task. In his refusal of the dominant articulations of the political as ‘the technoeconomical organization or “making operational” of our world’ (Nancy), Nancy provides an alternative
vision of the political that is based on a co-existential analytic of ‘being with’, that is, on relationality and
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acts of sharing between singular beings that are irreducible to projects, programmes and governmental
operations.
Nancy’s anti-managerial stance towards the political carries over to his approach towards the future.
Whereas governmental approaches vis-à-vis the future are often based on images of otherness and
dangerousness, and the belief that one can create ‘a grammar of futurantérieur’ by which the future can be
read as a form of the past in order to manage risk and prevent unwanted events (Bigo), Nancy, on the
other hand places a demand on politics to reconceive ‘uncertainty’ as a condition that is carved in the
heart of human existence itself (Hutchens), and re-imagine the future as a space that is ‘wholly beyond the
reach of free agency [and] resulting from incessant surprisings of experience’ (ibid.). This, however, does
not amount to a sense of passivity in the face of uncertainty, but to a sense of ‘openness’ towards the
future and a responsible engagement with the world-in-the-present.
I argue that both Nancy’s take on the notion of the political and his foregrounding of open futurity have
the potential to act as an antidote to the prevailing politics of fear and its stifling systems of control,
challenge the “us and them” divide, encourage more generous, accountable, indeterministic and nonassimilationist modes of relating, and incite a careful and mindful examination of how our (in)actions and
interactions affect the material fabric of our being-with-others (elements that are crucial to rethinking
how danger unfolds within and through politics of immigration, borders and citizenship, for instance).
Strategies of Danger and Dangerous Strategies
Joscha Wullweber
University of Kassel, Germany
(j.wullweber@jpberlin.de)
The radical outside
My approach to danger rests on Laclau and Mouffe's theory of hegemony as well as Jessop’s strategicrelational approach. It is based on the assumption that society is constitutively divided. The “radical
outside”, represented by antagonistic counterparts, marks the very possibility for stabilizing identities. A
reconciled society – a fullness – is always only partially achievable by way of hegemonic struggles trying to
represent that fullness. Furthermore, class antagonism (in the singular) marks only one possibility of all
sorts of antagonisms (in the plural). These antagonistic divisions potentially cross every social sphere,
while no antagonism is a priori more important or dominant than others.
One possibility of such a radical outside – of “the Other” - is danger. Generally, the specific content of
danger is not important. A particular danger becomes a radical outside, because it is (strategically)
constructed – by language and action – as something radically opposed to society or as something radically
threatening society. From this it follows that the social structure of society is the result of historically
antecedent social struggles, which involve the drawing of lines of inclusion and exclusion. Different
articulations as parts of competing hegemonic projects try to fill – that is, give meaning to – the (empty)
concept of danger as well as the (empty) common good.
In this sense, hegemonic struggles constitute the basic principle of social organization. It is therefore
necessary not to look for one single antagonistic border, but to be aware of the different positions from
which different dangers are constructed. From this perspective, the presence of antagonistic frontiers in
the form of certain generally accepted dangers can be a sign of a stable hegemonic discourse or relatively
stable social community. This is because, as indicated above, identities do not have a positive identity.
They 'need' the construction of a radical outside in order to ensure their own long-term existence.
Hegemony
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The concept of hegemony as it used here derives from Antonio Gramsci. It deviates from the
conventional understanding – the still common tendency to equate hegemony with dominance – in that it
rests on the ability to universalize a particular interests of a group as a socio-economic, cultural, and
political (etc.) structure. According to Gramsci, the ruling group pursues its interests in ways that lead
other groups to regard these interests as common or general interests. Hence, hegemony involves active
consent on the part of the ruled.
Gramsci was already aware of the constructiveness of identities. His term catharsis – which is astonishingly
close to the term governmentality coined later on by Foucault – indicates that subjects are constructed
within the hegemonic process. The struggle for hegemony does not take place among stable subjects, but
implies the production of new (collective) identities. What is more, it is a struggle for the hegemonic
construction of identities. Accordingly, the hegemonic “collective will” does not confront the subjects in
terms of an alienation of their real interests. Instead – at least at this specific spatio-temporal moment – it
is the expression of the interests of the majority of people of a certain society. Hegemony is therefore not
so much an external and constraining social structure as it is a productive power relation.
Emptiness
According to post-structural hegemony theory, hegemony denotes a specific relation between particularity
and universality. In the first place, every hegemony comprises only a definite social and spatio-temporal
realm. Correspondingly, it is not possible to speak in general terms of a hegemony of a certain state on a
global scale, as is the tendency, for example, in Realist theory. Rather, it is necessary to specify the form,
scope, and temporal framework of a hegemony.
Second, it is an imaginary universality which becomes hegemonic, the imaginary status being represented
by an empty signifier. Through (strategic) articulations, this signifier tends to lose its particularity – it
becomes detached from its previous specific content in order to become the embodiment of fullness, i.e.
a universality. Thus, an empty signifier is a hybrid of a particularity and a universality. The empty signifier
will always be a universality which is contaminated by a particularity – that is, a tendentially empty signifier –
an empty signifier to come. Political actors can try to promote a hegemonic project and attempt to make
sure that their respective interests are inscribed within that project at a privileged stage. But in contrast to
Gramsci and neo-Gramscian approaches, from a post-structuralist point of view it is not possible – or at
least it lacks sufficient complexity – to say that a certain person, class, or political group has become
hegemonic. Rather, it is a certain element of common sense, a 'world-view', a societal relation, or a specific
danger that is or becomes hegemonic. That does not mean that certain actors and political groups do not
benefit more than others from a given form of discourse organization. On the contrary, and almost by
definition, a particular hegemony expresses and covers the interests of some actors more than others.
Third, the concept of hegemony implies making alternatives unthinkable, at least to a certain degree.
Danger
In short, the starting point of my approach to danger is grafted on the post-positivist assumption that
there is no such thing as objective danger. There is nothing intrinsic to the concept of danger that infers a
specific threat, risk, or danger. Accordingly, it is not an intrinsic form of ‘data’, ‘information’, and
‘knowledge’ that constitutes a dangerous subject. Danger is first and foremost an empty category. While
this does not suggest that the content of danger is arbitrary or indifferent, it does mean that danger
should be understood in terms of its relation to strategy.
From this perspective, the content of danger is the contingent outcome of struggles among competing
discourses and articulations. It is a reflection of hegemonic struggles which define what must be seen as
endangerment or dis-endangerment. Different articulations as parts of competing hegemonic projects try
to fill the (empty) category of danger. Thus, it is a question of strategy. These strategies, in turn, are
embedded into a relatively stable spatio-temporal, socio-political, and strategic-selective structure – the
contingent and discursive fundament of every society where meaning no longer floats freely but has
become largely fixed. It follows that the horizon of strategic possibilities is limited. At the same time,
actors have an adaptive capacity. They are able to change their strategies if necessary. (A particular)
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Danger is thus transformed into a socially and politically relevant concept. According to this line of
reasoning, an understanding of endangerment must be based on the comprehension of strategies, power
relations, and struggles within a discursive field.
The strategic use of the concept of danger is a dangerous undertaking: if successful, the ‘menacing’ sliding
signifier can fill the constitutive lack of society’s identity as the presence of the Other. At the same time, as
constitutive outside endangerment threatens (democratic) societies and gives way to potential states of exception.
The Ontology of Danger: Recasting the Human Subject in Discourses of Vulnerability and Resilience
David Chandler
University of Westminster
This paper explores how danger has acquired an ontological status taken as a starting assumption in
discourses of global insecurity, particularly at the interventionist nexus of policy-making in relation to
state failure, conflict and underdevelopment. The key point it makes is that framings of human rationality
are held to make us dangerous subjects - permanently subjected to danger - with the solution to
vulnerability being the universalising of preventive intervention with the goal of the empowerment and
capacity- or capability-building of the subject to enable resilience to, in and through danger. Modern
liberal rationality is constructed as making us vulnerable through the hubris of universalizing, linear,
teleological views of progress - and the policy interventions reflective of this. Equally, pre-modern
frameworks of rationality, reproduced through the path-dependencies of social orders, are held to make
us vulnerable through their role in the reproduction of power relations in states making the transition to
liberal modernity. In both cases the rationalities of power and knowledge are held to perpetuate danger
reproducing both the frailties and vulnerabilities of peoples and ecosystems. The dominant policysolution of the empowerment, voice and capability-building of those marginalised from power is held to
enable social resilience and the management of vulnerabilities. This perspective which accords danger
with grounding ontological status is critically engaged with here, through the work of AmartyaSen, newinstitutionalist economics and Foucault's birth of biopolitics, suggesting that the discourse of
vulnerability, empowerment and resilience can easily rationalise the status quo and reinterpret social,
economic and political problems in therapeutic frameworks, problematically suggesting that work on the
self can resolve problems in the absence of any transformation of social relations.
The entropy of dangerousness – legislative security politics
Andrew Neal
University of Edinburgh
My current work:
- analysing counter-terrorism lawmaking in Parliament
- from publication of Lord Lloyd’s ‘Inquiry into terrorism legislation’ in 1996 to present day.
- by taking a longer view, trying to look beyond the core themes of security debates in the last
decade:
1. Temporal moment/rupture
2. Sovereign exceptionalism/executive decisionism
3. Binaries (e.g. norm/exception, before/after)
- Questions:
o What happens to exceptionalism and emergencies over time?
o What is their lifespan?
o What does security look like from a lawmaking perspective, rather than an
‘exception to law’ perspective?
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o
o
o
What does security look like from a parliamentary perspective, rather than a
sovereign/executive perspective only?
What does security look like from a parliamentary perspective, rather than a
governmentality perspective?
What does normalisation look like and how does it work?
Parliament occupies a very interesting position
- in some ways an arcane power
- very limited/weak in policy terms
- very limited/weak in relation to ever expanding executive
- very limited/weak in relation to ever expanding technologies of governmentality beyond the
traditional institutions of government
- following Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick’s recent rereading of Foucault in relation to law
o ‘expulsion thesis’ of established interpretations:
 governmentality supplants sovereign and juridical powers of law
 the power of the law is repressive, limited, negative, monotonous, the pure
statement of power (History of Sexuality)
 corresponds to experience of parliamentary counter-terrorism lawmaking
 repetitive, symbolic, monotonous, repressive, written
o but, law presents an excess, it opens up unexpected possibilities, it is constitutive of
powers of governmentality, it exceeds the intentions of the those who use it, it is
‘dangerous’
 corresponds to problem of CT law for parliamentarians
 immense political and social pressure to make new laws in response
to security events
 but the big problem for parliamentarians is that they don’t know
the consequences of their actions
 how will the laws be used?
 Will new police powers be misused?
 Will new definitions of terrorism bring protestors or liberation
movements into their remit?
 Will the mistakes of the past be repeated?
 The history of CT legislation shows that despite executive
assurances, all the fears of parliamentarians have come to pass.
‘Danger’
-
Not a commonly found term in the parliamentary debates
Actually not a great discussion of the nature of the threat, dangerous individuals, dangerous
forms of life
o Much of this is assumed as obvious in the wake of events like 9/11 and 7/7
o Much of this discussion depends on expert knowledge from the security establishment,
since parliamentarians have little of way of contesting this
 (lack of symbolic capital on security due to lack of access to intelligence and
constitutional convention of deference to executive on security)
o What are the ‘dangers’ for parliamentarians?
 The dangers of the laws they are being asked to give assent to:
 What will their effect be?
 Danger of negative/counter-productive consequences of certain
powers:
o E.g. extending pre-charge detention presents the danger of
making Britain less safe in two ways (David Davis as shadow
home secretary in 2008):
1. recruiting sergeant argument
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


2. alienates community that is most important source of
intelligence
Dangers of repeating the mistakes of the past:
 Some Northern Ireland MPs and MPs with constituents who were
‘suspect’ communities
o Counter-terrorism laws used to terrorise communities
o Some argue that they were needed, others argue that they were
not effective
o Peace came from political solution and de-escalation of these
powers
Future dangers of threats
 But once away from the immediate focus in the wake of terrorist
attacks, these future dangers become hypothetical
 Entropy of dangerousness – when time passes from spectacular event,
political effect of emergency becomes much weaker
 Hypothetical discourse of danger very divisive and highly contested in
parliament, not persuasive
o Counter-Terrorism Bill 2008
o E.g. discussion of powers needed for three 9/11s in future –
not credible
o Impossible to quantify what powers might be needed,
impossible to quantify any lack in current powers
o Some security professionals asking for more powers (some
police), others happy with current powers (Crown Prosecution
Service)
Danger to constitution of Britain itself
 Threat to magna carter, British liberties, relationship of individual to the
state, of ‘giving the terrorists a victory’
Interesting findings:
- in the wake of terrorist attacks, parliament has a long history of legislating in a knee-jerk way
(rushed, reactive, repetitious)
- laws often proved to be problematic/unworkable
o e.g. 1998 post-Omagh legislation (Criminal Justice (Terrorism and Security) Act 1998)
o widely recognised in reflexive discourses of parliamentarians and commentators
 ‘this is what we do, let’s not do it this time’
o exceptional events prompt exceptional response (almost unfailingly)
 consensus to act, consensus on threat
o but also, strong parliamentary principle
 ‘exceptional laws require exceptional scrutiny’
 as soon as exceptionality enters the legislative discourse, parliament
demands special scrutiny, limits, restrictions
o e.g. sunset clauses
o annual review
o special independent reviewer (Lord Carlile until recently, but a
long tradition)
o annual debate/parliamentary renewal
 can be very critical of these
o 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act meant to be temporary for
six months, but was debated and renewed every year for 25
years.
o One MP - ‘a sham’
 special scrutiny/oversight measures didn’t stop legislative excess, but
did win significant concessions.
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
o
Clive Walker – given weakness of parliament in British constitution,
least we can hope for.
But, when the exception/emergency has faded, there are also periods/acts of
normalisation
 Terrorism Act 2000
 In context of peace in N. Ireland
 Consolidating/modernising previous laws
 Interesting parallels with current review of CT laws/powers by new government
 When the new laws are not introduced as exceptional/emergency laws, the
parliamentary response is much weaker.
 When the aim is normalisation, not exceptionalism, parliament does not
dig its heels in for exceptional scrutiny.
 Allows what was previously exceptional to become normalized
o Some reductions in powers, but also making permanent of
others.
o Removal of scrutiny mechanisms.
o True in 2000 and 2011.
o Terrorism Act 2000 broad and sweeping, still causing problems
today (e.g. stop and search)
 Arguably, normalisation is more ‘dangerous’ than exceptionalism, in terms of
civil liberties, change to constitution of UK, in terms of normalizing
assumptions of dangerousness of ‘suspect’ groups (including protestors, e.g.)
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Panel 2: Risk managing the dangerousness of terror
Changing the Global War on Terror: Who is the ‘Ready’ Citizen
Arming Against?
Cerelia Athanassiou
University of Bristol
cerelia.athanassiou@bristol.ac.uk
Obama’s US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has declared a determined move against the
Global War on Terror’s (GWOT) ‘culture of fear’ towards a more reasoned, and ‘ready’, ‘culture of
preparedness’ (Napolitano 2009). Yet, despite this commitment by the Obama administration to ‘desecuritise’ (Waever 1995) US responses to terrorism, understandings of threat and security remain similar
to those articulated by Bush’s GWOT. Obama’s efforts to privilege calm over constant heightened
security, and to equate the category of ‘terrorist’ with that of ‘criminal’ (rather than ‘war criminal’), are
happening while a fearful population is being trained within a framework of war. Among the instruments
of the DHS’s ‘Ready’ campaign is a newly mobilised citizenry, trained to detect, report and, if necessary,
tackle individuals suspected of ‘terrorism’. These model citizens are supported in their efforts by
resources such as the DHS website, which is becoming increasingly userfriendly and contains multiple
sections dedicated to informing, and training, concerned citizens about the terrorist threat.1 These are all
resources very much embedded in the tabloid framework of US politics (Debrix 2008), and are part of the
Obama strategy of ‘change’. In this paper, I look at the DHS’s ‘Preparedness’ website section and the
online resources it makes available for concerned citizens, like the YouTube video ad ‘The 8 Signs of
Terrorism’2 and webinars on ‘preparedness’. The aim is to understand how the subject position of the
American ‘us’ versus the terrorist ‘other’ is changing, if at all, from its previous articulations, by
looking at the intertextualities with previous definitions and understandings of security, threat and danger.
Constituting terrorism: three attempts at rational governance
Lisa Stampnitzky
Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society, University of Oxford
Lisa.stampnitzky@sbs.ox.ac.uk
This intervention identifies three rationalities through which early terrorism experts attempted to
constitute terrorism as a particular sort of governable problem, each of these not only implied a
different understanding of terrorism as a problem, but also enabled to a different mode of
governmentality, or set of practices through which the problem might be managed. The earliest
U.S. response to terrorism envisioned international law as one of the primary methods for
governing terrorism, reflecting the State Department’s primary role, which saw this as an issue to
be handled through diplomatic channels, and indeed, to a certain extent a problem aimed
primarily at diplomats. A second approach focused upon developing practical strategies for
managing and responding to terrorist events (particularly hijackings, kidnappings, and hostage
situations) through routinized event management responses developed through fantasy scenarios.
By developing planned, routine, responses for various potentialities, experts and policymakers
sought to tame the frightening and seemingly unpredictable terrorist event. Where the legal
approach sought to manage terrorism at the level of the international world-system through legal
regulations and treaties, the operational approach focused upon managing terrorism at the level
of the incident. A third approach sought to rationalize terrorism and make it subject to
techniques of risk management, largely through the creation of terrorism event databases. The
production of such chronologies, in which counts of terrorist events and deaths/casualties are
plotted over time, and databases, in which events are correlated with characteristics of
14
perpetrators, victims, and methods of attack, aimed to make terrorism subject to calculable
technologies of risk management such as insurance. However, as the problem of “terrorism” took
shape over the course of the 1970s, however, it resisted such rationalizing logics, and no one of
these approaches was able to successfully “capture” the management of the terrorism problem.
Terrorism thus remained a difficult problem, unable to be subsumed under prevailing logics of
risk management.
Falling–out: The Problematizing Potential of Fallout
Chris Zebrowski
Keele University
The contamination of the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel the Lucky Dragon brought worldwide media
attention to what were intended to be secret American H-bomb tests conducted in the Bikini Atoll in
March 1954. It also announced, in spectacular fashion, the emergence of the threat of fallout: radioactive
dust kicked up by the blast of thermonuclear weaponry and spread by the vicissitudes of the wind.
Historians have located the advent of thermonuclear weaponry as a turning point in British logics of Civil
Defence (Cf. Grant, 2010, Hennessy, 2010), which had until then maintained a common trajectory from
the Second World War. While historians have centred attention on the massive amplification in blast
power offered by the H-bomb (no doubt because the blast itself would be directly and indirectly
responsible for the majority of casualties), my research into this area has focused on the ‘discovery’ of
fallout in problematising British civil defence thinking. In my intervention I would like to move beyond
the distinction between risks and threats and focus specifically on the event of fallout’s ‘discovery’ and,
specifically, its capacity to problematise sufficiently stabilized and technologized logics of civil defence.
From the Second World War British Civil Defence was guided by the allied priorities of protecting the
British population and maintaining UK war-fighting capabilities. Over the course of the war, a Civil
Defence apparatus originally designed for strike-breaking purposes was ameliorated through application
of the emerging science of Operational Research (OR) within the Civil Defence and Research Committee.
Research focused on the effects of high explosives on both the body and the material infrastructures of
the city. Research was particularly influenced by the controlled experiments of Solly Zuckerman, a
primatologist, on direct and indirect effects of ‘blast’ on lab animals (Cf. Zuckerman, 1978, Zuckerman,
1941, Zuckerman, 1940) which would be used to inform both Civil Defence and, in later years, Allied
strategic bombing campaigns. Adey (2010: 155-61) suggests these studies “had important consequences
for understanding the process of aerial bombing, scientifically perpetuating the analogic and affective
amplifications of morale and panic through the trope of the explosion and the body’s susceptibility to
indirect environmental effects” (Adey, 2010: 159). A strong understanding of the material and affective
effects of blast were reflected in the bunker logic of Civil Defence: the prophylactic securitization of
material bodies which underpinned the broader objective of protecting the collective national psyche
from fear.
This bunker logic would continue to inform Civil Defence thinking from the Second World War until
1955 despite the advance of weaponry including the advent of the atomic bomb. This can be explained,
I believe, by the extent to which each of these advances could be conceptualized by operational
researchers as simply representing an amplification in blast-power: something which was already wellunderstood, and could be responded to by simply by ‘scaling-up’ existing metrics (Cf. Smith, 2009).
Fallout however could not be sufficiently absorbed into these metrics. This was made clear within the
1955 ‘Strath Report’, officially titled The Defence Implications of Fall-out from a Hydrogen Bomb. In contrast to
the direct blow to the materiality of the body perpetrated by blast, fallout threatened to poison the
environmental milieu in which biological life subsists. It was a threat which integrated with the multiple
flows comprising the atmosphere to spread its deadly effects over a wide geographic area—an instance of
what Peter Sloterdijk (2009) would term ‘atmoterrorism’. Contaminated agriculture and livestock would
be unusable for a minimum of two months whilst contamination would ‘immobilize considerable areas of
15
the country and force inhabitants to cover for some days and in certain areas for a week or more.’ 1
Rather than attempting to target the circulatory infrastructures directly as in doctrines of strategic
bombing, fallout would arrest these circulations through the poisoning of the environmental milieu itself.
Strategic studies suggested that the condensed geography of the UK meant that as few as 10 ten-megaton
bombs, strategically placed on the Western seaboard and ground-detonated to maximize fallout, would
ensure “no part of the country would be free from the risk of radio-active contamination.”2
While blast and fire were expected to claim many more lives—estimated at 3 deaths to every 1 caused by
radiation—it is the advent of fallout which appears to have initiated a fundamental reorganization of
British Civil Defence. Focusing specifically on the ‘problematic potential’ of fallout, I’ve been tempted to
place a greater emphasis on the epistemological insecurity—or uncertainty—related to fallout, than its
capacity to highlight vulnerabilities within a civil defence apparatus designed to protect against blast.
Specifically, I’m interested in the way in which the danger of fallout was amplified to the extent that it
exceeded a stabilized framework of intelligibility for understanding, and thus controlling, threat based on
calculative metrics of assessing blast. In thinking about this issue, I’ve been influenced by Foucault’s
thinking on problematisation as an event which inspires (reflective) thought on a practice which has been
technologized (reduced to instrumental knowledge, know-how, or savoir-faire). I’d also be interested in
exploring with the audience similarities between Foucault’s notion of panic, and contemporary thinking
on trauma within discourses of PTSD, which similarly stress the significance of an event which exceeds
the subjects framework of intelligibility.
Jonas Hagmann
ETH Zurich
Risk registers and the bureaucratic production of danger knowledge
1. In the early 2000s, the production of national risk registers emerged as a novel element of Western
security practice. National risk registers aim to assess, locate, compare, and rank all kinds of possible
public dangers, ranging from natural hazards to industrial risks and political contingencies. With their
thematic breadth and systematic approach, risk registers are unparalleled attempts at comprehensive and
secure construction of danger knowledge.
2. Risk registers are directly linked to national security strategies, for which they formally set out central
knowledge bases. The assembly of risk registers is also popular: Risk registers have already been produced
in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Norway, in Switzerland (twice), and in the United Kingdom, while
other countries, but also the European Commission and the US Department of Homeland Defense plan
on constructing danger inventories.
3. Risk registers are coming to occupy central places in the production of danger knowledge in Western
countries. By laying out comprehensive maps of public dangers, risk registers define national danger
realities, and in doing so instruct Western security practice both directly and indirectly. Nevertheless, the
actual rationales and methodologies guiding risk register production remain largely intransparent: How do
risk registers determine dangers? How do they define dangerousness, and which endangered objects are
identified?
4. The assembly of national risk registers follows a peculiar syllogism. First, it is asserted that the national
security dispositif must be made more efficient and effective as a whole. Second, it is argued that for such
reform to be successful, full danger/situation awareness is necessary. Third, it is suggested that danger
awareness can be achieved through comprehensive risk assessments, i.e., calculations of the likelihood
and impact of danger.
1
2
CAB 134/940. HDC(55)3, ‘The Defence Implications of Fall-out from a Hydrogen Bomb’
Ibid.
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5. This syllogism is politically efficacious. At a higher level, it moves security politics away from grand
political determinations of danger towards technical assessments of object vulnerabilities. Effectively, the
focus no longer rests on the actual sources of danger, but on the ‘endangered’ status of objects as it is
conditioned by that object itself. Rather than focusing on the causes of danger, the primary focus of
security policy comes to rest on the inherent strength and resilience of objects, whether they be technical
infrastructures, elements crucial for the functioning of the economy, or political structures. This larger
shift affects how security policy is organised more practically:
a. First, the shift entails a bureaucratization of security policy. The determination as to what is a danger is
made not so much by presidents or prime ministers in grand statements, but by civil servants or
specialists working for public administrations. In risk registers, engineers determine the vulnerability of
infrastructures to flooding and rockslides, physicists determine the technical redundancy of power grids,
and doctors assess and determine how dangerous a pathogen is.
b. Second, the formulation of dangerousness becomes object-centric. It is not the subject of danger, but
the potentially endangered object that lies at the heart of political action. The focus is not on the terrorist,
but on mitigating the blast effects of a potential bomb. The focus is not on the polluting company, but on
the mitigation of environmentally adverse effects on the human body. Such a focus on objects dispenses
with an analysis of the actors responsible in creating dangers.
c. Third, risk registers empower a managerial security agenda, and they project a state of permanent public
insecurity: Risks are not evaluated in terms of whether they exist or not – they are assumed to exist and
merely differentiated according to likelihood and impact. With this, security politics becomes a matter of
simply managing an existing situation. Everything is aimed at prevention and object-hardening in what is
considered to be a perpetually insecure risk context that constantly remains in a state of potentiality.
d. Fourth, the focus on vulnerabilities, and the absence of grand identifications of enemies, empowers
administrative decisions about the referent object. What is held to be vulnerable – and thus also judged to
have legitimate claims to protection – follows from the risk maps drawn by engineers and civil protection
experts. There is no conscious political agenda that posits, for instance, that the general population or
individual human beings should be the primary referent objects of security – a decision that has obvious
disempowering consequences for such actors.
e. Fifth, the mapping of dangers as established by risk registers relies on, and also projects, scientist
sources of danger knowledge. By employing scientific and scientist assessment methodologies - from
engineering in particular, but also by drawing on expert validation systems more generally -, risk registers
draw their authority from ‘science’, i.e., the notion of science as objective arbiter of truth. In doing so, risk
registers effectively advance science as an authoritative and supreme source of knowledge about danger,
rivalling both grand political and democratic, participatory sources of danger determination.
6. The emergence of risk registers is a remarkable novel element of Western security practice. Risk
registers not only provide comprehensive systematizations of public danger. They also advance a
managerial, vulnerability- and object-centred security agenda that draws its legitimacy from efficiency
concerns and scientist inquiry.
7. This shift not only challenges more subject-centred and reflexive security agendas. It also challenges
established research foci and critical security scholarship: Risk registers suggest that the production of
danger knowledge largely resides within public administrations rather than with the declarations of
presidents and prime ministers. Also, risk registers direct attention towards the mobilization of science as
source of truth in security affairs, as opposed to other forms of influence and/or capital and processes of
convincing. Last, but not least - whether we like it or not -, the popularity of managerial risk registers also
challenges the political impact of reflexive security studies on government practice.
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Panel 3: Danger’s Otherness
Danger’s Other: Pleasure, Leisure & Travel
Debbie Lisle
D.Lisle@qub.ac.uk
Is it possible to think security by referring ideas of danger to understandings of life, livelihoods and lifestyles, instead of readymade ‘objects’ of security such as sovereignty, territory, the nation-state, citizens, borders, and sociological categories such as
class and gender?
When security is framed through constituent objects, the first critical move is to work out
how danger constitutes itself, and is constituted, over and against its opposite. For me, some of the key
forces that danger constructs itself against are not ‘safety’ or even ‘security’, but rather the ‘life, livelihoods
and lifestyles’ that emerge around pleasure, leisure and travel. One way to work out this oppositional logic
is to trace how, since the events of 9/11 (and more specifically the bombings of hotels, bars, and
nightclubs in Bali and Mombasa in October / November 2002), the tourism and leisure industry as a
whole has become a strategic ‘object’ of security that needs to be protected from the dangers of terrorism.
Governments, policy-makers, media commentators and scholars in Tourism and Hospitality Studies have
used the emerging rhetoric of ‘soft targets’ to make sense of how seemingly benign places like hotels and
tourist attractions are now on the front line of the War on Terror. Tourism and leisure’s vast labour force,
its wealth generation, its cultural capital, its advertising and marketing campaigns, its increasingly
comprehensive insurance arrangements, its ever-regenerating fantasy landscapes, and most importantly,
its material infrastructure, have all become objects of utility that can be calculated. These objects are
accorded monetary value in terms of how much it will cost to protect the tourism and leisure industries
from terrorist attacks (e.g. the hastily arranged flights home for tourists in Egypt January 2011), and how
much potential revenue will be lost if the industry is attacked (e.g. American airline reservations and hotel
occupancy dropped 50% after 9/11). Such calculations opened up the tourism industry to all kinds of
invasive techniques and practices of security, surveillance and monitoring all in the name of protecting
holiday makers and valuable tourism infrastructure from terrorism. The notion here is that if the
securitizing process is successful, it will restore more robust and protected circuits of travel, cultural
exchange and commerce all over the world, allow tourists to start travelling again, and allow the tourism
industry – the world’s biggest – to start generating revenue again. What this suggests is that the rhetoric of
soft targets helped, in part, to resolve the security / freedom contradiction that emerged after 9/11: it
allowed people to keep travelling for business and pleasure, but it ensured that those travellers and their
hosts were safe within the security envelope of the Coalition of the Willing.
There are, of course, further implications of an approach that traces the oppositional framing of danger /
pleasure and reveals the manner in which travel, tourism, and leisure come to be taken as objects of
security. For example, there is a powerful geopolitical imaginary at work here which positions those who
value travel and cultural exchange squarely within the liberal moment – they are members of a diverse,
global, cosmopolitan community that is committed to fighting radical Islamic terrorists who, apparently,
do not value travel and cultural exchange in the same way. After the events of Bali and Mombasa
especially, governments, media commentators and scholars in Tourism and Media Studies reproduced
this geopolitical imaginary uncritically, which led to claims that (a) terrorists have a ‘Medieval’ mindset
whereas we are ‘Modern’ (ignoring the clear Orientalist and racist implications of such a logic) and (b)
Western tourists are entirely innocent victims of terrorism (ignoring that tourism is complicit in many
forms of cultural imperialism and exploitation)
This kind of genealogical tracing of the opposition between danger / pleasure is a necessary move, but it
is not sufficient. Too often it remains a static framing (both in space and in time) that lifts practices of
tourism and leisure out of the realm of the political. I want to argue that danger’s relationship with
pleasure, leisure and travel is, and has always been, a much more complex and entangled affair. Indeed, to
think about danger outside of dominant discourses of security and risk requires us to move on from
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tracing static oppositional logics as if the assemblage of hierarchies and asymmetries never moves. What
we need to think about is how oppositional logics such as danger / pleasure operate relationally; that is,
how danger has always been juxtaposed with pleasure, leisure and travel in ways that do not necessarily or
always privilege the urgency and drama of danger.
Thinking relationally requires an additional and rather difficult re-imagination: it requires us to think of
oppositional logics such as danger / pleasure in terms of their constant mobility, circulation, adaptability
and transformation. This suggests that the juxtaposition of danger with pleasure, leisure and travel is
constantly mutating and reforming. Certainly there are times when it coalesces into a recognizable
asymmetry that must be revealed and resisted (e.g. the War on Terror’s securitization of the leisure and
tourism industry). But there are many other moments in which these two forces circulate, mutate, reverse
and infect one another such that their constituent subjectivities and power relations are reassembled. To
start thinking about how these mutations occur, we need to start not with oppositions, but rather with the
juxtapositions of danger / pleasure, leisure, travel:
Experiences of pleasure, leisure and travel in martial contexts (e.g. a soldier’s thrill at killing enemies; the
voyeurism of watching war and playing war games; the leisure infrastructures accompanying force
deployment; the travel opportunities afforded by active service and R&R)
War’s mobilization of existing leisure and travel infrastructure (e.g. troop requisitioning of hotels; soccer
stadia used for mass killings; hotels used for detention and deportation)
Leisure and tourism experiences that seek out danger (e.g. journeys to war zones immediately postconflict by journalists, artists, amateur war reporters) or take conflict and war as their object (e.g.
battlefield tourism; War tours; museum commemorations of war; war re-enactments).
Fearscapes / Securescapes : Urban Anxieties, Securities and the Domestic Scene
Sam Okoth Opondo
University of Hawai’i at Manoa
Email:opondo@hawaii.edu
In this essay, I examine how modern politics is related to everyday cultural practices concerned with
‘dangers’ and a desire to account for what can and cannot happen within the space of the postcolonial
African city. Among other things, I engage the conceptions of risk emanating from a desire to manage the
contingencies that modern science and the state have failed to address. Such a treatment of urban cultures
raises fundamental questions that enable us to problematize the relationship between the management of
contingency and a politics of security that is attentive to domestic anxieties and their manifestation in
various spheres of public life. It also foregrounds a vernacular micropolitics and the minute texture of
everyday life and suggests a treatment of security that is concerned with more the official macropolitics of
the postcolonial city. For example, rumours and banal profiling practices that implicitly figure the
immigrant or the diseased body as a threat acquire new meaning as they are presented as part of a
postcolonial fearscape/securescape. Similarly, the turn to ‘occult economies’ and healing processes
aimed at enhancing lives, acquiring and securing property and relations present some useful sites for
thinking about the production and management of threats to urban sociality.
In order to supply a critical perspective on the aforementioned postcolonial securescape, I summon a
number of fictional, ethnographic and historical accounts of urban life that illustrate how relational
techniques of the self and new subjectivities are produced as a response to these threats. As such, much
of my engagement with Nairobi’s domestic spaces seeks to illustrate how discourses on danger are
deployed to actively organize perceptual experience, consolidate habits and compose ethical dispositions
that are central to the idea of proper urban and civic life. What is at stake here is the recognition that in an
19
attempt to secure certain forms of urban domesticity, a variety of bodies, spaces, identities and functions
are marked as a threat to ‘peaceful and developed’ city lifestyles and livelihoods and therefore subjected to
policing practices and modes of surveillance that limit their circulation or the forms of ambiguity that they
articulate.
Attentiveness to these vernacular aspects of urban security reveals the multiple ways in which conceptions
of danger and risk in the postcolonial city exceed official security discourses. It also illustrates how statist,
secular and techno-scientific modes of abstraction and standardization of threats translate or transform
the constantly changing social reality into something that more closely resembles the administrative and
epistemological grid familiar to official observation, calculation and policing.3 Generally, a more open
conception of urban anxieties and threats reveals the complex network of actors concerned with the
administration of ‘life’ and the multiple ways in which a ‘general problematic of improvement’ and a
concern with bodies, health, subsistence and habitation operates in the city.4
Consider the following snapshots:
Snapshot One: The ‘war on HIV/AIDS’ has led to various interpretations of the meaning of ‘evil’, the
healing or infecting potential of ‘blood’ and the resource draining capacities of the disease. In response to
the threats posed by HIV/AIDS, local idioms have emerged and inserted themselves into larger global
circuits and concerns suggesting forms of conversion geared towards providing moral agency and erasing
the ambiguity and contingency that HIV/AIDS brings into the city life. Key among these is the salvation
and healing promised through Pentecostal churches and the access to Anti-retroviral medication and
material support which accrues from ‘coming out’ with ones status. Outside official sanction, we also
witness a turn to occult beliefs - phenomena often associated with tradition and bucolic life – as part of
the ‘organization of circulation’ of bodies [and body parts] geared towards securing health, wealth,
procreation ,lovers and general well being in a world that HIV/AIDS makes uncertain.
On the whole, the spread of HIV/AIDS in cities like Nairobi has been productive of significant forms of
sociality, signification, enterprise and activism, both negative and positive.5 Doubtless, HIV/AIDS has
redrawn the parameters of circulation, calculation and existence in the city. It has contributed to the need
for a self awareness and sometimes demanded openness about ones HIV status with the announcement
of CD4 T-cell counts and viral loads, the histories and networks of sexual liaisons and more recently
ones sexual orientation. HIV/AIDS has been presented as a threat to intimacy as it turns ‘intimate
pleasures’, forms of labour and cultural expression into ‘mortal risks’ and contributes to the profiling of
high risk groups ; prostitutes, refugees, the sexualized domestic worker, long-distance truck drivers,
polygamists or those trapped in ‘anachronistic’ traditional practices like wife inheritance or the lack of
male circumcision. It is for these reasons that trust, fidelity, faith, conversion and knowledge of the body’s
makeup, risky relations and behaviour change are presented as part of the solution to the pandemic. For,
with HIV/AIDS, there is a need for care and vigilance based on the knowledge that things/people are
not always what they seem to be.
Snapshot Two: Nairobi, Kenya 2008-10, the clamour for a new constitution, the desire to re-imagine the
nation anew following the ethnocidal character of the 2008 post election violence. A return to ‘normalcy’
is marked by the shift of empathic concerns from a focus of encampment of refugees fleeing
neighbouring states due to ‘well founded fears’ to sympathetic identification with fellow Kenyans –the
Internally Displaced Persons - now living in IDP camps.
A nationwide population census shows that the Somali population in the country has increased thus
illustrating the failure of the state to effectively make distinctions between citizen and refugee
populations.A distinction that is predicated more on the policing of circulation of the Somali body
James C. Scott, ‘Cities, People, and Language’ in Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta Eds, The Anthropology
of The State: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006) P.260-261
4
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (1998), p. 139.
5 Jean Comaroff , Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order, Public Culture 19:1 p.
197-219
3
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[through encampment in designated areas and provision of movement passes] rather than through the
calculation of births, mortality and the level of health or life expectancy.
The Indian Ocean piracy and the capital flows it enables emerge as a form of Somali ‘bio-piracy’. A cover
that enables ‘Somali money’ and bodies to surreptitiously make their way into Eastleigh Nairobi where
they are laundered and authenticated through the purchase of real estate and national identification cards
thus changing the demographic, proprietary and racial-spatial character of the city.
These anxieties about Kenyaness, about an Islamic threat to city and family space is inter-articulated with
other anxieties about the politics of life itself. On one hand, aspirational Nairobians express an anxiety
about the prospect of home ownership in a city with ever increasing property prices.On the other hand,
Pentecostal Christians provide a reading of city and national space that discerns a Muslim [read
Somali,Gulf states and Libyans] plot to buy up the city and create an Islamic space that will pave the
way for a legal order that is more sympathetic to their concerns. A further desire to determine the politics
of life itself, is articulated through the clamour for unambiguous sexualities and a ‘pro-life’ abortion
debate that focuses on when life begins and under what conditions it can be terminated and by who.
From the above, it is evident that security is always directed towards the securing of a referent object that
is problematised through different discourses on danger-through the formation of fearscapes and
securecapes. Whether it is a health concern ,an existential anxiety or the question of foreign bodies, we
cannot merely focus our analysis of these dangers as problematic in the given society , but must examine
how the formation and articulation of the ‘body politic’ is also implicated in how we understand danger.
That is, any treatment of the explosion of discursive interest in the politics of life itself must engage the
ontological predicates and epistemologies associated with the securing of life that do not fall within the
register of rational surveillance, calculative practices, secular profiling of individuals and collectivities.
Thus, a concern with the problematization of danger in the postcolonal city indexes a more complex
concern with how one cares for the self as a means of averting risks and threats emerging from lifestyles
and forms of ‘circulation’ that exceed neo-liberal normative trends and contemporary biopolitical
practices. It invites us to take seriously the numerous modes of meaning making and disambiguation that
seek to render the future knowable through the management of circulation, calculation and optimization
of life both within and outside of western rationality.
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Panel 4: Sites, spaces and strategies of endangerment
Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the ‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK
PREVENT strategy
Charlotte Heath-Kelly
Aberystwyth University
cch08@aber.ac.uk
This paper considers how ‘knowledge’ about ‘radicalisation’ produces a dangerous Muslim subject, but
also how opacity concerning transitions to terrorism generates that will to knowledge. Looking at the
underpinnings of the UK PREVENT strategy, this paper utilises conceptions of risk and governmentality
to understand how the radicalisation discourse produces criteria of dangerousness and opportunities for
intervention in British Muslim communities.
The major assumption which underwrites UK PREVENT strategy is that a ‘radicalisation process’
actually exists; this conception evolved from academic and policymaking discomfort with post-Cold War
‘religious’ terrorism and from the discourse of ‘New Terrorism’ - which produced knowledge about
increasing connections between religiosity and violence. As well as focusing policymaking attention on
religious ideas as the ‘contagion’ behind contemporary violence, and producing understandings of
‘vulnerability’ and ‘intervention’ within PREVENT, the idea that a ‘radicalisation process’ exists presents
a counterfactual to terrorism - which enables governmental intervention in its supposed production. This
presents an interesting overlap between disciplinary and security governance, as those presenting
vulnerability indicators for radicalisation are also (viewed as) threats to the wider collective – they are both
‘at-risk’ and ‘risky’, vulnerable and dangerous.
Converse to the role of knowledge, Lacher’s (2008) conception of opacity is also used to explain
governmental mapping exercises of Muslim communities. Perceived illegibility drives a ‘will to
knowledge’, which reproduces understandings of disorder in Muslim communities (post-Bradford,
Oldham and the Satanic Verses controversy) and upon which calculations of dangerousness and risk (qua
terrorism) are made. This paper argues, then, that a combination of knowledge and opacity (the perfect
conditions for risk) concerning Muslim ‘borderlands’ produced governmental mapping strategies and
‘knowledges’ which underwrite PREVENT.
Ungoverned Spaces” and AFRICOM in the Sahara-Sahel
Casey McNeill
Johns Hopkins University
In Foucault’s account of biopower, as power that takes the life of the population as its object, he
describes the ‘military-diplomatic apparatus’ of the modern state as being particularly resistant to
biopolitical technologies, demonstrating instead the persistence of sovereign and disciplinary power.
Questioning the continued relevance of this claim, I explore the prominence of biopolitical strategies in
U.S. military interventions in Africa via the new Africa Command (AFRICOM). I aim to complicate
critiques that AFRICOMis a neo-imperialist effort to gain access to Africa’s strategic resources. While, as
a space embedded in historically produced relationships of power, the legacy of colonialism and
imperialism in Africa remains, the practices and strategies of power that actualize these relationships
develop and change over time. Describing practices in Africa with reference to a past iteration of global
power—that of imperial conquest—precludes inquiries into temporal adaptations and evolutions in the
distributive and circulatory effects of power across spatialdifference.
22
In 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense defined “ungoverned spaces” as a new “threat paradigm” for
Africa; this paradigm has since been consistently invoked to justify AFRICOM’s interventions in Africa.
Following Foucault’s claim that “Liberalism turns into a mechanism continually having to arbitrate
between the freedom and security of individuals by reference to this notion of danger,” I understand
ungoverned spaces to be such a notion of danger. It arbitrates U.S. security practicesvia ontological
determinations about what forms of life and freedom are dangerous and what forms must be secured,
locating threats not in a regime or an ideology, but in a particular way of life – a life that is undergoverned
or ungovernable.
The Sahara-Sahel region was one of the first areas identified as a dangerous ungoverned space. Currently,
AFRICOM oversees a State-Department led program in the region, the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism
Partnership (TSCTP) and a military-led program, Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara (OEF-TS).
The goal of these programs, according to AFRICOM’s 2010 Posture Statement, is to “deny safe havens
to terrorists” by “increasing border security, promoting democratic governance, and reinforcing regional
as well as bilateral military ties.” The tools needed to achieve these goals reach beyond the traditional
military apparatus. AFRICOM emphasizes the need for a “holistic view of security that includes defense,
law enforcement, and customs and border security” and attention to issues like public health, economic
development, and democratization.
AFRICOM interventions in the Sahara-Sahel demonstrate biopolitical rationalities and instrumentalities
of governance. As a rationality, biopolitics arbitrateswhat freedoms and interests are
valuableorthreatening according to its valuation ofways of life that must be protected. As an
instrumentality, biopoliticsconnectsparticular people, practices and interests to these definitions of danger,
as it securitizes discriminately. Thus, the rationality of ‘ungoverned spaces’ as a way to arbitrate between
desirable and dangerous forms of life is instrumentally applied to the Sahara-Sahel region, enabling
particular interventions.
According to AFRICOM’s biopolitical rationalities and instrumentalities, life in the Sahara-Sahel region is
conceptualized in opposition to the resilient, productive, and adaptable population that neoliberal
governance seeks to foster. In contrast, it is imagined as (a) not properly participating in processes of
global circulation, particularly due to its large volume of unregulated trade and smuggling activities and (b)
not adapting properly to a globalizing (post)modernity on any number of fronts, including
(i)poverty/development, (ii)responses to illegal activities, and (iii)enforcement of national borders and
related forms of government surveillance(especially among nomadic Tuareg populations).
How, according to this framework, might life in the Sahara-Sahel be made governable, and thus rendered
less dangerous? The objectives of AFRICOMare to produce institutions and practices that signify a
resilient, adaptable population according to neoliberalism’s (evolving) valuation of life. Adaptability to
issues of poverty, terrorism and crime, climate change, disease and human rights are managed and
regulated via particular institutions and knowledge practices, which produce authoritative assessmentsand
cost-benefit calculations. This governance work, carried out under AFRICOM by the U.S. military, State
Department, USAID, and non-governmental “partners”, participates in its own economy of resources,
standing, and influence, in which a project’s correlation with hegemonic “best practices” determines its
viability. These governance practices produce assessments of regions like the Sahara-Sahel that identify
vulnerabilities and then apply these “best practices.”
As in the case of AFRICOM, these interventions oftendisrupt existing strategies of adaptability.
According to regional analysts, the TSCTP and OEF-TSare exacerbating local vulnerabilities associated
with environmental change, political marginalization of minority and nomadic groups, and poverty.US
counter-terrorism military aidis strengthening contested national governments’ ability to repress, rather
than negotiate with, dissident groups. This is the case for rebel groups, largely made up of nomadic
Tuaregs, in Algeria, Mali, and Niger, whose demands include greater political autonomy and increased
investments in economic development. Additionally, regional militarization is disrupting vital sources of
income, including tourism and trading routes. These routes represent more than income, but the
protection of a nomadic way of life that has been under threat, not only from the rigidity of international
borders and systems of land tenure, but also by increasing environmental and economic pressures.
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Observers who are attentive to ways in which these interventions disrupt or destroy local practices and
livelihoods, and especially where theycirculate resources into the global economy to benefit corporations
and financial institutions who are not accountable to local communities, call these practices a form of
neo-imperialism. This is analogous to imperialism because it is a form of domination – domination over
the ways in which life adapts and participates in global processes of circulation. This expression of power
is made possible by hegemonic regimes of knowledge/power, expressed in discourses of security,
development, humanitarianism, and human rights via states, the UN, civil society groups, NGOs, and
humanitarian groups. This is an important claim because it shows how liberal projects to mitigate real
human vulnerabilities can and do produce forms of domination that do not challenge states’ political
violence, but rather enable it.
Dangerous tools’ in ‘dangerous hands’: How synthetic biology is imagined as a ‘bioterrorist threat’
R. Alexander Hamilton
London School of Economics
Introduction to synthetic biology and synthetic biology ‘security concerns’
Synthetic biology is an emerging science that seeks to make biology engineerable, permitting the rational
design and construction of novel living systems. Where this aim suggests many opportunities, possibly
ushering in themuch-anticipated ‘century of biology’, offering new avenues for theproduction of health
and wealth, it also suggeststhe possibility ofnew, uncontrollable dangers. The reason being, some argue,is
because if more people, working in less formal research settings, begin to design and construct novel
living systems, they might also use this technology to create novel pathogens, expanding the scope of the
‘bioterrorist threat’.Assessing how this threat might manifest itself, where its dangers lie, and how they
might be managed, however, is problematic. Many uncertainties surround synthetic biology, including
uncertainties about the current state of the art, its future potential, and the skills and motives of
prospective ‘bioterrorists’, as well as the promising yet problematiccommunities of emergingamateur
biologists – referred to, sometimes interchangeably,as‘do-it-yourself biologists’; ‘citizen scientists’; ‘garage
biologists’; ‘biohobbyists’ or ‘biohackers’. In brief, the synthetic biology ‘threat’ is described as complex,
and seemingly open-ended, which challenges a risk calculus that depends on stable factsabout the world.
Research aims and methods
This research broadly aims to map and critically examine the social and political processes that permit
synthetic biology to be viewed as a security problem for which diverse security solutions are posed. My
research is concerned with several distinct features of the synthetic biology security debate, as articulated
by experts engaged in assessing and managing emerging risks in the life sciences, including: (1) how
synthetic biology is understood as a security problem; (2) the forms of measurement used to qualify and
quantify the synthetic biology threat; and (3) the modes of anticipatory governance deployed in the face
of uncertainty. In the course of myresearch, I have read widely on the science of synthetic biology and its
perceived security implications. I have also complimented this scientific and technical literature review
with a series of interviews with a ‘constellation of experts’ (Rabinow 2008), including risk analysts, military
planners, law enforcement agents, public health officials, prominent synthetic biologists, and others with a
stated interest, and perceived expertise, in negotiating the security challenges posed by synthetic
biology.This research principally focuses on the synthetic biology security threat as it is framed in the
United States, where biosecurity considerations play an integral role in the synthetic biology debate, and
are viewed as the key risks posed by the science.
Conceptual framework
Underlying this research is a conceptual interest in how threats are constructed –that is, how objects,
knowledge, and people are identified as security problems; how these problems are elaborated as threats,
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and how these threats are, at least ostensibly, governed. Although drawing on aspects ofsecuritization
theory (Wæver 1995), this research is concerned not only with the naming of security problems, but also
with the mechanisms that permit security problems to be rendered knowable and actionable. Of particular
interest, then, are the specific rationalities and technologies of risk that are deployed in the name taming
chance, including their scope and limitations. To an extent, this research agrees with Beck’s (1992) notion
of ‘risk society’, acknowledging that modern, self-generated catastrophespose uncertainties that challenge
the logic of probabilistic risk assessment.Yet it also acknowledges, as a number of risk theorists have
pointed out (Ewald 2002; Erickson and Doyle 2004; O’Malley 2004),that despite the perceived openendedness of catastrophic threats, including climate change, terrorism, natural disasters and economic
crisis, concerted efforts are being made (by risk analysts, military planners and others) to render these
events knowable; with the presumption that they can be managed. Therefore, this research strives to
suspend judgment on what types of threats synthetic biology mightactuallyenable – that is, whether they
are actually calculable risks or incalculable dangers–in favor of focusing on the words and actions of those
presently engaged in assessing and managing the unruly aspects of synthetic biology, and synthetic
biologists, in pursuit of a sustainable science. Their words and actions, of course, are no less instrumental
in shaping perceptions of the synthetic biology threat, including the knowledge and people bound up with
it,as well as mediating possible responses to this threat.
Preliminary findings
As a site of emergence, characterized by uncertainty and rapid change, synthetic biology provides a unique
vantage point from which to explore how modern technological threats are assembled; how they are
constituted; and what strategies of preemptive governance are proposed to manage them. What stands
out at this stage of my research is the manner in which synthetic biology and its practitioners are variously
framed as dangerous and risky. Dangerous, to the extent that security experts suggest that DNA synthesis
technology might be used to synthesize all manner of dangerous, unknown and potentially unknowable,
pathogens; as well as to the extent that this technology is accessible to an expanding universe of amateur
scientists, who might deliberately, or accidently, cause grave harm. And,risky, to the extent that practical
responses are nonetheless proposed to mitigate the likelihoodof potential harm, including a variety of
strategies aimed at screening orders for synthetic DNA (increasingly purchased from commercial ‘gene
foundries’), filtering out dangerous sequences and suspicious buyers, while at the same time questioning
the dangerousness of synthetic DNA outside of a ‘natural' cellular context, and acknowledging the
difficulties of pinpointing dangerous people. In this context, assessing and managing risk, while drawing
on certain empirical indices, such as statistical matches between ‘safe’ DNA and DNA ‘of concern’ or
profiles of ‘credible’ buyers and buyers ‘of concern’, depends equally, and perhaps primarily, on making
subjective distinctions between who or what should count as ‘dangerous’. Such an approach to managing
threats is largely about drawing boundaries, establishing limits, and erecting barriers, in an effort to
support the productive aspects of synthetic biology while preempting the destructive ones. As there seem
to be few indications of government shutting down, or even greatly curtailing, synthetic biology (at least
in the United States), precautionary risk management, in its most restrictive form, does not appear to be
on the political agenda (Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues 2010). Instead, efforts
are being made to monitor developments in synthetic biology, and the activities of synthetic biologists,
and to take measures to lessen the impact, or at least the liability, that might result from the misuse of
synthetic biology.
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List of Participants
Name
Charlotte Heath-Kelly
Stamatis Cheimarios
Catherine Charrett
Rupert Alcock
Cerelia Athanassiou
Dr Jonas Hagmann
Dr Andrew Neal
Heather Lowrie
Dr Heather Brunskell-Evans
Casey McNeill
Dr Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Corey Walker-Mortimer
Christopher Zebrowski
Dr Peter Adey
Emily Jackson
Dr Barry Ryan
Juliette Hallaire
Dr Btihaj Ajana
Professor Vivienne Jabri
Professor Didier Bigo
Doerthe Rosenau
Nicholas Michelsen
Isabel Siqueira
Mirzokhid Karshiev
Alex Hamilton
Dr Martin Coward
Dr Claudia Aradau
Professor Jef Huysmans
Helen Arfvidsson
Dr Vicki Squire
Bruno Magalhães
Professor David Chandler
Dr Leonie Ansems de Vries
Dr Debbie Lisle
Dr Andreas Behnke
Mark Pope
Dr Lisa Stampnitzky
Nadine Voelkner
Joscha Wullweber
Professor Mustapha Kamal Pasha
Professor Marieke de Goede
Stella Arar
Samson K. O. Opondo
Pol Bargues
Affiliation
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth University
Aberystwyth University
Bristol University
Bristol University
Centre for Security Studies, ETH Zurich
Edinburgh University
Edinburgh University
Greenwich University
John Hopkins University
Keele University
Keele University
Keele University
Keele University
Keele University
Keele University
Keele University
King's College London
King's College London
King's College London
King's College London
King's College London
King's College London
King's College London
London School of Economics
Newcastle University
Open University
Open University
Open University
Open University
Open University
Professor of IR, University of Westminster
Queen Mary University of London
Queen's University, Belfast
Reading University
Royal Holloway, University of London
Said Business School, University of Oxford
Sussex University
Univeristy of Kassel
University of Aberdeen
University of Amsterdam
University of Durham
University of Hawaii
University of Westminster
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