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Security, Technologies of
Risk, and the Political:
Guest Editors Introduction
CLAUDIA ARADAU, LUIS LOBO-GUERRERO & RENS VAN MUNSTER*
148
between past and present mainly in semantic terms. Indeed, the notion that
today risk is everywhere differs little from Kleins (1997) formulation more
than a decade ago that security threats are socially constructed and now
every month is security awareness month.
This special issue of Security Dialogue, however, argues that more is at stake
in dealing with risk. It claims that identifying the referent of protection in
terms of risk has important implications for thinking security and politics. As
the following articles show, risk entails a qualitative difference of the present
in relation to the problem of security. Risk-based perspectives to security differ considerably from their threat-based counterparts in how they approach
the question of security and in the policy prescriptions and governmental
technologies they instantiate. Whereas the latter tend to emphasize agency
and intent between conflicting parties, risk-based interpretations tend to
emphasize systemic characteristics, such as populations at risk of disease or
environmental hazard. Moreover, threat-based interpretations rely on intelligence in an attempt to eliminate danger, while risk relies on actuarial-like
data, modelling and speculations that do not simply call for the elimination
of risk but develop strategies to embrace it. In short, whereas the concept of
threat brings us in to the domain of the production, management and
destruction of dangers, the concept of risk mobilizes and focuses on different
practices that arise from the construction, interpretation and management of
contingency.1 As a consequence, more difficult ontological and epistemological problems are at stake in dealing with the concept of risk than has been
recognized within the discipline of international relations. This special issue,
then, seeks to bring the debates about risk in the social sciences within the
horizon of the Foucauldian question of the present.
Of course, there are also important continuities. Risk analysis often also draws upon intelligence reports to
calculate, assess and manage risks, while threat management is also about the management of a contingent future. For example, security technologies such as deterrence and mutually assured destruction
(MAD) could well be seen as practices that insure against the full exposure to a contingent and apocalyptic future of nuclear warfare (Cooper, 2004). In this sense, the concept of risk may also be a useful concept
from which to rewrite the history of the Cold War and the game-theoretical models deployed to calculate
and manage the probability of nuclear conflict.
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150
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152
are increasingly constituted as patients at risk, expected to take responsibility for the management of their own health-risk portfolios.
Nonetheless, the moral economy of risk management depends on the
specification of groups at risk and risky, with prevention becoming the
necessary supplement to insurantial calculations. Groups at risk for HIV/
AIDS are then statistically described as dangerous (Elbe, in this issue), while
constructions of risk end up reinforcing gendered and racialized imaginaries
of the subject (Chan & Rigatos, 2002). Governing through risk also separates
the subject who is to be known and penetrated by the knowledgeable gaze
from its actions. As Paul Passavant (2005) has noted, what counts now is no
longer evidence about the actions of Iraq or North Korea, because we know
their true nature. Political subjectivity, orders of governance and liberal
regimes depend upon and evolve as a function of the transformation of risk
technologies.
By transforming the distinction between normality and exception, risk
modifies our understanding of the relationship between politics and security
in at least two ways. On the one hand, the architecture of the normal takes
shape through heterogeneous and mundane actuarial practices, through the
arbitrary declarations of risky-ness and bureaucratic reallocation of power.
The imperceptible and unknowable captured by technologies of risk are
reinscribed upon concrete everydayness, thereby colonizing normality.
Rather than the limit of normality, risk infuses exceptionalism within the
governmentality of everydayness. On the other hand, the relation to the
exception is modified by the unknowable catastrophic event. At the horizon
of catastrophe, precaution, prudence or premediation imbue liberal regimes
with a different exceptionalism. The sovereign order is no longer simply
that of decision, but also that of imagination. Rather than cutting off the
sovereigns head in political theory, as Foucault suggested, new discussions
of risk are increasingly sensitive to the heterogeneous and strategic imbrication of sovereignty and governmentality. Their implications for the political
questions we are faced with today cannot be underestimated: Who decides?
is increasingly supplemented by Who gets to imagine the future?. The
imagination of the future has become one of the main political stakes (Salter,
in this issue; de Goede, in this issue). For Dillon (in this issue), the sovereign
will has been replaced by the contingency of the event, with its implications for the commodification of subjects and the transformation of individual and collective subjects of law.
The political subject that emerges out of risk governance is a subject split
between the injunction to embrace risk and the prudential warning to take
precautions against the unknowable but announced future catastrophe.
However, the subject is split not only through the contradictory imperatives
to which it is submitted, but also through the effects of risk for the rational
autonomous subject. Slavoj Z izek (1999: 342) has reproached Beck for leaving
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154
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