Special Issue on Security, Technologies of Risk, and the Political

Imagining Numbers: Risk, Quantification,

and Aviation Security

MARK B. SALTER*
School of Politics, University of Ottawa, Canada

Aviation security is a vital but under-studied component of contem-

porary security. This article uses the Foucauldian notion of a ‘dispositif
of security’ to understand how policies, practices, and institutions of
aviation security are arranged to surveil, police, and control mobile
populations. Moving beyond sovereign accounts of law or disciplin-
ary descriptions of incarceration, the analysis of the dispositif demon-
strates the ever-expanding areas of life that are colonized by ‘security’
and ‘risk’. I argue that the general strategy of quantification and the
specific tactic of the expert panel both illustrate how the invocation of
risk allows for new and expanding security practices, and also masks
the depoliticization of the airport and civil aviation.

Keywords security • risk • risk management • statistics • aviation

security

Introduction

C
UTTING ACROSS NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL bound-
aries, as well as economic, political, and social divisions, civil aviation
is a vital sector of contemporary global life. Since first becoming a
high-profile target for terrorists and hijackers in the late 1960s, aviation
security has waxed and waned in the public imagination. Tolerance for secu-
rity procedures and delays at airports decreases as the memory of attacks
fades, while demands for a secure and efficient sector are made continuously
by industry members and the businesses that depend on global mobility.
Since the attacks of 11 September 2001, more scholarly attention has been
paid to aviation and airport security. However, this kind of public and schol-
arly attention focuses on the role of government or the private sector in secu-
rity screening, or on evaluations of various detection technologies. Informed
by the international political sociology of the Paris School, the present article
takes a different methodological tack to analyze the aviation security sector.
I follow the work of Didier Bigo, Louise Amoore, Marieke de Goede, and

© 2008 PRIO, www.prio.no

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244 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

Anna Leander, who argue that an important activity of the ‘managers of

unease’ in particular security sectors is the construction of the ‘risk’ field
itself and the concomitant construction of expert knowledge in that field. For
example, Leander (2005) discusses the way in which private military com-
panies provide the data and analysis that lead governments to particular
foreign and military policies, often then implemented by the selfsame com-
panies. Amoore (2006) examines the way that private risk managers within
large consulting firms shape, if not determine, government policy – particu-
larly in the areas of biometrics, screening technologies, and border and air-
port security. De Goede (2008: 000) demonstrates the importance of the
‘premediation’ of terrorist events in the public imaginary that ‘foster new
conjunctions of governing and expertise that are in urgent need of analysis’.
Similarly, Bigo (2002) examines how the networks of police and intelligence
agencies evolve through the development of technical knowledge and
expertise, which then constitute the threats that those selfsame agencies must
control. Building on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘the field’, Bigo (2006: 8) describes
the commonsense meanings of security that are constructed by the inhabi-
tants of a particular network. Each of these analyses combines close
empirical work on the generation of expertise with analysis of the social con-
struction of security. In the field of aviation security, the steady accretion of
security screening procedures and the widening list of banned items have
occluded the irreducible vulnerability of open societies. The public imagi-
nary has become fixated on the inconveniences of travel and not the
increased securitization of everyday life. Simultaneously, the technique of
quantification of abstract risk categories renders the imaginary as real, invok-
ing the authority of statistics and probability. Following on from critique of
the usage of statistical methods in social control by Foucault, Hacking, and
Rose, among others, I argue that imaginary risks are made real dangers
through the use of quantification as a particular professional strategy of the
managers of unease. Bigo (2006: 8) argues that ‘through the “authority of
statistics” [the managers of unease claim] the capacity to class and prioritize
the threats, to determine what exactly constitutes security’. This represents a
useful addition to our theorization of risk. Under a disciplinary or sovereign
paradigm of risk, we would expect that actors would manage their risk
through the traditional options of acceptance, avoidance, transfer, or mitiga-
tion. However, under a security dispositif, we would expect that the causes of
the risk itself would be obscured by the focus on risk management. Analysis
of the dispositif essentially requires that scholars ask what is being obscured
and made possible by this risk management practice. In this article, I provide
a brief critique of contemporary writings on aviation security, and I examine
the general paradigm of risk, the strategy of quantification, and the tactic of
the expert panel.

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 245

Aviation Security

Aviation security is a dramatically important vector of global security that is

under-represented in security studies.1 Terror attacks against civil aviation
are generally increasing both in number and in their efficacy in terms of
fatalities or economic cost (see Merari, 1999). Unfortunately, contemporary
security analysis of aviation takes place within a realist, empiricist frame that
simply reinforces the state-centric assumptions of power politics. It ignores
the networked nature of threats and the complex web of state and non-state
security actors that actually provide security. Within this realist perspective,
airplanes and airports are perceived as being highly symbolic targets that are
particularly vulnerable physically. But, by the same token, apart from high-
level international treaties on the criminalization of attacks against civil avia-
tion, aviation security is predominantly seen within a national security or
policing frame (Szyliowicz, 2004). Civil aviation is assumed to be a technical
and commercial activity with no inherent political value – other than the sym-
bolic value attached to flag carriers or to hijackings.2 A realist myopia persists,
which includes assumptions that terrorists are rational actors but cannot be
negotiated with, that states are unitary actors chiefly responsible for aviation
security, and that terror against aviation is chiefly a ‘criminal’ and not a ‘polit-
ical’ act. ‘Unlawful acts against civil aviation’, as expressed in Annex 17 of the
Chicago Treaty, are not defined in regard to any political or social motive.
Policymaking is driven by catastrophe and disaster (Birkland, 2004; Russell &
Preston, 2004). The number of case studies is limited to a few spectacular
events (Wilkinson & Jenkins, 1999): the Lod massacre, the attacks at Rome air-
port, hijackings in the 1970s by terrorist groups or lone individuals, the Air
India bombing, the Pan Am 103 bombing, the attacks of 9/11, and the
attempted attack by ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid. Thus, aviation security is
directly linked to national policing failures. But, the powerful logic of the
symbolism of terror attacks on civil aviation escapes most traditional analy-
ses. St. John (1999: 30) epitomizes this realist approach, arguing that ‘the
politicization of an essentially criminal phenomenon was fostered by . . .
domestic press coverage . . . the indulgence of the public . . . and the capitula-
tion of governments to the orders of assailants’. For such analysts, civil
aviation occurs within a system dominated by states and characterized by

1
Aviation security is engaged within the ‘air transportation management’ field and the ‘terrorism studies’
field, both of which are entirely state-centric. Air transport management experts, often from airlines, air-
port firms, consultancies, or specialist aviation universities, focus on aviation security from a problem-
solving perspective: public vs. private security screeners, effective technologies, the role of human factor
analysis, appropriate screening procedures, etc. Within terrorism studies, aviation security is seen as sub-
set of national security. Neither perspective is particularly ‘critical’, in the Cox sense of the term, in ques-
tioning the status quo (see Salter, 2007b).
2
See the two exceptions for thoughtful considerations of the imperial politics of the international airport:
Fuller & Harley (2005) and Aaltola (2005).

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246 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

raison d’état and rational choice (Heal & Kunreuther, 2005). The obvious
symbolic connection of civil aviation targets and other conflicts or interests is
dismissed as a form of asymmetric warfare. In short, aviation security is an
accidental byproduct of national security: ‘aircraft security is at the mercy of
erratic foreign policy’ (St. John, 1999: 46). St. John’s conclusion is that Middle
Eastern geopolitical problems must be solved to prevent the problem of avia-
tion security and terrorism. Szyliowicz (2004: 58) makes a similar point that a
‘systemic’ response is needed to the problem of global terrorism: ‘widespread
changes in all aspects of aviation – in planning, design, implementation, and
operation – are required if such a [resilient, flexible] system is to emerge. The
goal should be to incorporate security into every element of the system to the
extent possible’. Thus, the solution to aviation insecurity is portrayed as
either the resolution of high political dramas, which has the effect of reinforc-
ing the position of states – and particularly the USA as a superpower – as the
primary problem-solvers of global politics, or the securitization of the entire
aviation system. Hainmüller & Lemnitzer (2003: 22) conduct a careful
analysis of US and European airport security regimes, but conclude that the
sovereign state should solidify its monopoly on the provision of security and
resist the temptation to outsource security screening. Though civil aviation is
a network on which global economic, social, and political spheres depend, the
effects of those global networks is erased in the national examination of
attacks. Consequently, the report of the 9/11 Commission (2004) detailed the
ways that the airport security screening system failed – rather than the net-
works of international travel that made the easy transport of 19 terrorists
across the globe possible.3 Morgan’s (2004: 5) analysis starkly separates
society from the garrison-state: ‘The garrison and society are starkly juxta-
posed in the atmosphere of the airport, and even in this restrictive manifesta-
tion of the state’s police power, terrorists were able to exploit vulnerabilities
to carry out the most massive single terrorist operation in world history’. In
short, traditional analyses of the aviation security network remained stuck in
a realist, state-centric universe of rational public actors.
We can point to three provocative articulations of contemporary aviation
security. Aaltola contextualizes the structure of international airport hub-
and-spoke architecture in terms of US imperialism. He argues that ‘the
meaning of the hierarchical world order is passed on to an aggregation of
people caught in the airport’s frame and flow . . . airports teach people the
central rituals of acknowledgements that are needed to navigate the
Byzantine structures of the modern hierarchical world order’ (Aaltola, 2005:
261). I argue that international mobility is a form of deviance or abnormality
that is contained through specific technologies of the international self,
3
This is not to say that the 9/11 Commission did not place the attacks within a global or historically sensi-
tive context, merely that the responses to this have been to expand the systems of surveillance at airports
and through the international civil aviation sector – rather than to reconsider the ease of global mobility.

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 247

including the passport, the visa, and the confession within the multiplicitous
site of the airport (Salter, 2006, 2007a). Aaltola and I concur that the circula-
tion of anxiety is central to the governance of the globally mobile through
modern airports. Though examining automobility, Packer (2006: 392) pushes
this argument further:
mobility could be replacing the individual as the means by which dangerous identities
are formulated. This production of a predictive mode of mobility assessment creates a
risk identity for that mobility which in no way depends on the individual driver. . . .
Identities become risk assessment algorithms of mobilities. It is not who is a threat, but
what vehicular movement can be used to predict a threat.

International mobility is not something to be eliminated within this system,

but rather the risk is managed to allow for the disposition of certain enter-
prises, forces, and knowledges.
The approach of the Paris School (Bigo, 2002, 2006; c.a.s.e. collective, 2006;
Salter, 2007a) decentres the state and focuses instead on the actors, institu-
tions, and networks of security professionals that constitute the ‘field’ of
aviation security. In particular, Bigo (2001: 108) argues that the actual net-
works of security officials do not respect the clean analytical borders of
inside/outside or national/international, police/army. This focus on the
professionals of security – regardless of agency, nationality, or commercial
entity – avoids the methodological reductionism of realist analyses. Further-
more, by elaborating the strategies and tactics of aviation security, this kind
of ‘field’ analysis can take into account diverse actors, institutions, and net-
works, as well as the dynamics between them. In the aviation security sector,
the strategies of risk management and quantification are complemented by
the tactic of the expert panel approach. In the next section, I examine the
predominant paradigm of ‘risk’ and ‘security’ through which the field of
aviation security is constructed.

Risk and the Security ‘Dispositif’

Aradau & van Munster (2007) argue convincingly that the trope of risk has
come to dominate many aspects of contemporary security politics within
public, private, national, and transnational spheres. From their admirable
analysis, I differ little. In this section, I will briefly summarize the argument
and then expand on the notion of the dispositif of security. Aradau & van
Munster coin the term ‘dispositif of risk’, to which I want to add the ‘dispositif
of security’. While the dispositif of risk makes the management of popula-
tions, practices, and institutions amenable to governance in the name of
risk, there is something critically different about how the aviation security

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248 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

sector is governed in terms of ‘security’. The justifications of risk factors and

security threats are different and produce different effects in terms of what
can be governed in their name. Campbell (1998: 2) makes this point: ‘not all
risks are equal, and not all risks are interpreted as dangers. . . . Those events
or factors that we identify as dangerous come to be ascribed as such only
through an interpretation of their various dimensions of dangerousness’
(emphasis mine).
We might point to two paradigms of ‘risk’ in critical social science: risk
society and governmentality through risk. Beck understands risk to stem
from industrialization and the attempt by modern governments to individu-
alize the resultant dangers. In sum, ‘risk is seen merely as an ideology con-
cealing the current ungovernability of modernization risks’ (Rose, O’Malley
& Valverde, 2006: 96). The Foucauldian path, illustrated by Ewald (1991: 197),
describes risk not as an objective result of a complex environment but rather
as a way of defining and governing populations through the application of
insurance as an ‘abstract technology’ of control. Ewald’s description of how
we might understand the particular example of insurance is extremely useful
in drawing our attention to the different aspects of how the circulation of risk
is managed. Probabilistic uncertainty comes to be understood as a govern-
mental resource that can be deployed to create, obscure, or manage certain
issues, institutions, or behaviors. Ewald (1991: 198) argues that insurance is
involved as a ‘technology, form, institution, and imaginary’ in the constitu-
tion of a particular form of society in which social resources are arrayed in a
particular way. The imagination is primary to the definition of risk: ‘nothing
is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But, on the other hand, anything
can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyzes the danger, considers the
event’ (Ewald, 1991: 199). It is imagination that is the primary act of risk, and
the founding rationality of insurance. The first conceit of risk, insurance,
and risk management is that this imagination can be tamed, made numerate,
and structured in a way that makes it rational and reasonable.

Dispositif
Aradau & van Munster use the Foucauldian term ‘dispositif’ for their analysis
of risk. They aver that ‘despite the peril of exoticism . . . “dispositif” has been
preserved as such in English . . . due to the perceived inadequacy of transla-
tions such as mechanism and apparatus’ (Aradau & van Munster, 2007: 109).
Foucault’s sense of dispositif is not mechanistic as a structure, an apparatus, or
a network per se, but rather a constellation of institutions, practices, and
beliefs that create the conditions of possibility within a particular field. It is a
capability for governance, or the disposition of a field towards a mode of
governance. As Agamben (2007: 27) writes, ‘dispositifs must always imply a
process of subjectification. They must produce their own subject’. This is why

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 249

I find it important to distinguish between the dispositif of risk and the

dispositif of security. While the dispositif of risk creates the objects of risk, the
dispositif of security defines the objects of security. It defines what might be
governed in the name of security, or what might be defined as security. This
is useful for a consideration of this sector, since it orients our attention to how
experts define and govern aviation security. Deleuze (1992: 160) summarizes
the dispositif as ‘regimes which must be defined from the point of view of the
visible and from the point of view of that which can be enunciated’, in addi-
tion to being comprised of ‘lines of force’ and ‘lines of subjectification’. The
dispositif as a critical frame for orienting analysis towards the routinization of
politics retains a large sense of actors, agency, and practices that are shaped
by similar fields of vision, applications of force, and conditions of subject-
ivity. In this section, I want to highlight another part of the formulation of dis-
positif that may also be useful to scholars in the field of international relations.
During his lecture course at the Collège de France in 1977–78, published as
Security, Territory, Population, Foucault (2007) argued that the dispositif of
security is characterized by the spaces of security, the art of government, and,
crucially, the normalization inherent in security. To distinguish the dispositif
of security from legal or disciplinary forms of power, he defined three
elements of the dispositif of security: first, it ‘inserts the phenomenon in ques-
tion within a series of probable events’; second, ‘the reactions of power to this
phenomenon are inserted in a calculation of cost’; and, finally, ‘instead of a
binary division between the permitted and the prohibited, one establishes an
average considered as optimal on the one hand, and on the other, a band-
width of the acceptable that must not be exceeded’ (Foucault, 2007: 6). Rather
than a simply legal prohibition or disciplinary mechanism for the incarcera-
tion of the abnormal, the dispositif of security renders particular spheres of
society amendable to a particular kind of governance, based on notions of the
norm, the case, and probability. Foucault discusses the way in which towns
emerge historically as an opportunity for governance. He argues that towns,
rather than borders or territorial frontiers, become the focus of military,
social, and economic security concern. The management of food shortages,
he argues, is a direct result of a particular system of production and con-
sumption and a clear example of this dispositif of security. Governmental
efforts in the 16th and 17th centuries did not aim to solve food shortages.
Rather, governments aimed to manage the insecurity caused by the
proto-market system of agricultural production through various indirect
mechanisms. Rather than distribute the risk of food shortages through state-
directed food storage or price controls, the state described food shortages as
a natural occurrence, and then described the resultant social tension as a nat-
ural place for a governmental, security solution. It was not the role of the
state to ensure that every citizen has enough to eat; rather, the ability of the
government to govern must be protected from the dislocations and shortages

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250 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

caused by the free market. State security, then, is a matter of keeping civil
peace in times of tension, rather than the distribution of scarce food.
Building from this notion of management, the dispositif of security is conse-
quently not exclusively a fixed attempt to protect or enclose something, but
‘the specific space of security refers then to a series of possible events; it refers
to the temporal and the uncertain, which have to be inserted within a given
space’ (Foucault, 2007: 20). Foucault (2007: 44–46) draws a distinction
between disciplinary power and the dispositif of security:
Discipline is essentially centripetal. I mean that discipline functions to the extent that it
isolates a space . . . discipline concentrates, focuses, and encloses. . . . The [dispositifs] of
security have the constant tendency to expand; they are centrifugal. New elements are
constantly being integrated. . . . Security therefore involves organizing, or anyway
allowing the development of ever-wider circuits.

The dispositif of security, consequently, suits far more easily the continual
expansion of security fields in the ‘war on terror’.
It is normalization that has the effect of rendering the object of security
invisible. The opposite of the disciplinary power, which seeks to separate
normal and abnormal, the trick of the dispositif of security is to render the sum
of all possible objects of governance as part of a continuum to be governed.
Vaccination, Foucault (2007: 62) says, is indicative of this dispositif:
It is not the division of those who are sick and those who are not. It takes all who are sick
and all who are not as a whole, that is to say, in short, a population, and it identifies
the coefficient of probable morbidity in this population. . . . Thus we get the idea of a
‘normal’ morbidity or mortality. . . . What technique is to be used in relation to this? It
will be to try and reduce the most unfavourable, deviant normalities in relation to the
normal, the general curve.

The attempt to manage disease renders infection invisible, as the infected

become simply one group within a general population. The precise object of
abnormality is subsumed under a scale of degree of abnormality. Airport
security screening functions precisely the same way as vaccination, in terms
of the dispositif of security. The number of prohibited items seized operates
within a bandwidth defined by the national aviation security authority not as
a function of the degree of security or threat, but as a measure of sensitivity
of the screening process (Salter, 2007a). The passengers who carry prohibited
items are (usually) not criminally prosecuted and not incarcerated, though
the prohibited item is ‘surrendered’. Instead, the detection of prohibited
items enables the securitization of wider spheres of public behavior, spaces,
and surveillance. Instead of a focus on the incalculable success/failure rate of
security screening (the number of terrorists who board a plane or the number
of prohibited items not detected), the number of cases for secondary screen-
ing stands in for the efficacy of the security system (Olapiriyakul & Das, 2007:
67–68). Since there is no way to reliably explain a rise or decline in the

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 251

number of prohibited items successfully screened, these statistics are used to

authorize new expansions of security, new grounds for searches, new areas
of personal space or private life to be screened.
What is crucial about my reading of the Foucauldian dispositif of security is
that the object of the dispositif is obscured. Security itself, as an objective or
subjective condition, disappears in the management of security. Insecurity is
lost on a scale of the degree of security. The focus of biopolitics is not the
individual case, but rather the norm (Foucault, 1997: 73). Within aviation secu-
rity, the policing of the norm happens not so much to incarcerate abnormal
travelers or to manage the distribution of risk among a population, but rather
to obscure the actual security that is at stake. For example, airport screening
focuses on objects that may be dangerous, but not on passengers who may be
dangerous (Salter, 2006). Castel (1991: 281) argues that this change in social
relations means ‘intervention no longer takes the form of the direct face-to-face
relationship. . . . It comes instead to reside in the establishing of flows of popula-
tion based on the collation of a range of abstract factors deemed liable to
produce risk in general’. Rather, the security dispositif continually incorporates
more and more aspects of the mobile individual to be screened and
securitized. Even if individual travelers are trained and disciplined to lower
their own risk profiles, the expansion of ‘risk’ categories is done in the name of
security. There is a fundamental reorientation away from the territory (or, in
our case, the ‘sterile’ airport space) that is delimited and protected, and
towards the conditions of the management of populations and the problem of
governing ‘too much’ (Foucault, 1997: 75). Attention – policy, analytical, and
public – becomes oriented towards the problem of governing security or, more
precisely, the circulation of insecurity (Adey, 2007; Amoore, 2007).

Risk Management Within the Security Dispositif

A primary mode of the security dispositif is risk management, which I argue,
at least within aviation security, produces security objects (not risk objects).
A preliminary example of the security dispositif can be formulated through
an examination of the paradigm of risk management as a security practice.4
This article applies the theoretical work of Aradau & van Munster to the
quotidian world of aviation security practices. I want to argue that the
security dispositif explains the practice of risk management within aviation
because of the securitization of the essential field of the sector. Risk manage-
ment has become dominant within business and government as a way of
managing the unpredictable (Hood, Rothstein & Baldwin, 2001; Leiss, 2001).
Two professional templates of risk management are dominant: CAN/
4
In 2004, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA) held a workshop with Richard Ericson,
David Lyon, Jean-Paul Brodeur, and Pat O’Malley, among others, to determine whether risk manage-
ment was the best strategy for CATSA’s screening activities. The results can be read in Brodeur (2006).

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252 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

CSA-Q850-97 from the Canadian Standards Association (CSA, 1997) and

ISO/IEC Guide 73:2002 (ISO, 2002). Risk management is defined as ‘the
systematic application of management policies, procedures and practices to
the tasks of analyzing, evaluating, controlling, and communicating about
risk issues’ (CSA, 1997: 3). With some variation, both standards follow the
same assumptions. Risk analysis involves assessment, management, and
evaluation.5 Risks to a given enterprise are assessed according to frequency,
the vulnerability of the assets involved, and the probable impact.6 The gen-
eral risk environment and particularities of the enterprise are considered –
including stakeholders’ appetite for risk. Enterprises then manage the risk
through avoidance, acceptance, mitigation, or transfer. Managers may avoid
the risk by ceasing the line of business or activity; they may accept the risk,
understanding the frequency, vulnerability, and impact; they may mitigate
the risk to bring the consequences in line with the appetite for risk; or they
may transfer the risk through insurance, subcontracting, or other methods.
As argued by many business analysts, managing risk has become one of the
primary duties of an enterprise, however problematic that task might be (see
Ericson, 2006). This has proven to be exceptionally popular for governments
in Western countries under the paradigm of New Public Management
theory (Advani & Borins, 2001; Hood & Peters, 2004).
The dispositif of security is particularly useful for understanding how the
practice of risk management is not intended to resolve the risks to an enter-
prise; rather, risk is used by the ‘managers of unease’ as a justification for
expanding their security business. Foucault (2007: 33) looks at food shortages
to explore how the dispositif of security reorients police attention away from
a physical lack of food towards the social effects of the consequent revolu-
tion. A parallel can be found in the way that the risk management
paradigm reorients police attention away from the actual lack of public secu-
rity in the civil aviation network in a complex, open, interdependent society
towards the social consequences of security management. For example, an
airline carrier might cease operations in an unstable part of the world because
it wishes to avoid the risk of hijacking or terrorist attacks. It may accept the
risk of metal cutlery and glass within the first-class cabin. It may mitigate the
risk of hijackings similar to those of 9/11 through reinforcing cockpit doors
and pressuring the government to provide funding for such refurbishments.
It may transfer the risk of a catastrophic attack through war insurance, issued
by a national government or commercial insurer. More importantly, risk is
used by airport and air carriers to pressure governments to spend more on
aviation security. The presentation of risk is used by governments to justify

5
There is slight disagreement between sectors as to whether risk analysis or risk management is the general
category.
6
Different standards take risk to include only negative risks, while the British, Australian, and New Zealand
models take risk to be neither necessarily positive nor necessarily negative.

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 253

the expansion of airport screening, no-fly, air marshal, surveillance, and

other policing programs. Risk is also used to manage passenger and stake-
holder expectations. Several air carriers now announce that it is their policy
that passengers remain seated, that the washrooms in the first-class cabin are
reserved for first-class passengers for security reasons, and that crowding
near the cockpit is prohibited. As the security dispositif would predict, the
number of activities, practices, and institutions that come to be framed in
security language is centripetal and continually increases. While these con-
trols are framed in the language of risk, they are justified through the appeal
to the maintenance of security (not the reduction of risk).
Risk management is a strategy of using administrative practices and
knowledge structures to mobilize the perception of danger in order to
arrange the resources of the public, stakeholders, and a given enterprise
itself. Widely shared assumptions about risk and the international standards
of risk management are best understood using a security dispositif: the risk
management approach does not aim to eliminate danger, but rather to
manage the circulation of risk within an enterprise to shape the conditions of
possibility for responsibility, action, and accountability. To explore this
further, I will drill down into the strategy of quantification of security and the
particular tactic of the expert panel on aviation security in subsequent
sections of this article.

The Empire of Numbers

In mathematics, i represents an imaginary number, such as the square root of

a negative real number, whereas R represents real numbers, which can be
expressed by an infinite decimal (and include the set of r – that is, rational
numbers that can be expressed as the fraction of two integers). The square root
of negative one (–1) is an imaginary number; pi (π) is a real number, though not
a rational number. Descartes was the first to use the term ‘imaginary number’
in Geometry ([1637] 1954). In many ways, the trick of traditional international
relations in both discourse and practice is precisely to translate i as R – to close
off political possibilities, to limit the imagination, and to reassert a fundamen-
tal kind of Cartesian empirical realism (Ashley & Walker, 1990). Traditional
security studies performed a similar maneuver, orienting attention towards
the ‘real’ risks of Soviet or rogue-state aggression, rather than the imaginary
dangers of colonialism, unemployment, and failing social infrastructure. The
Paris School has precisely reoriented analytical attention towards the motors
of discourse and practice: How do competing imaginary threats become real?
What are the practices of this security imagination? How has quantification
become a strategy of the security dispositif?

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254 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

A key part of Foucault’s (1997) discussion of the transition in the 16th and
17th centuries from a pastoral model of sovereignty that focused on terri-
torial integrity towards a population-based model of biopolitics is the devel-
opment of statistics as a form of authoritative knowledge practice. To control
the population, it is necessary to know the population, and the late 17th and
early 18th centuries see the development of a wide range of statistical and
demographic tools through which administrators figured the population.7 As
Hacking (1990: 1) argues, ‘society became statistical’. Statistics came to be
treated as social facts, rather than mathematical expressions of probability.
The strategy of quantification is particularly amenable to the centripetal
forces of the security dispositif. Once the paradigm of probability becomes
dominant, ‘the incalculable is only the not yet calculable, and organisation is
given priority’ (Elden, 2006: 140). Security chases risk – that is to say
that security may colonize areas of social, public, and political life when the
quantitative, probabilistic, statistical case is made. Just as the dispositif of
vaccination erases the categories of infected and not-infected, the categories
of sick, vagrant, criminal, and insane were placed within the context of a
normal distribution of abnormality within a population (Foucault, 2007: 60).
Ericson & Haggerty (1997: 112) argue that ‘in the nineteenth century the risk-
profiling of populations became an instrumental part of liberal utilitarian
political reform in matters of public health and security, and it has been so
ever since’.
Contemporary analyses of the numeration of contemporary governance
can be seen in a number of disciplines. To focus on the security field, Bigo
(2002) demonstrates clearly the ways in which the ‘authority of statistics’ is
used to bolster the specific regimes of truth and expertise behind the devel-
opment of the transnational field of ‘managers of unease’. According to
Ericson & Haggerty (1997: 114), ‘like expertise, risk technologies are self-
legitimating. Their very availability justifies the need for them. . . . As they set
out in search of problems, risk technologies masquerade as solutions’.
Profiles of groups ‘at risk’, which are always already overdetermined by
racial, ethnic, historical, linguistic, and national narratives, are repositioned
as having arisen from the data themselves. Following a dispositif of security,
the development of profiles does not seek to eliminate the risk presented by
these groups or profiles, but to manage the circulation of the risk. The circu-
lation of risk enables the dispositif to better dispose the resources of society,
the government, the policing agencies, and the managers of unease them-
selves. Quantification becomes a dominant strategy, because it provides the
cloak of objectivity:

7
For more historical analysis of the role of chance, probability, and statistics in the development of Western
societies, see Hacking (1990), Gigerenzer et al. (2000), Elden (2006).

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 255

If experts often claim too much, however, it is the political and social system that
permits, even encourages their pretensions. The objectivity and techniques of the
modern expert parallel the impartiality and rules of the modern bureaucrat. Both
exclude personal discretion and emphasize the consistent and even mechanical applica-
tion of established procedures across the board to avoid bias, the one aiming at truth to
fact, the other at fairness. Both seek the high ground, above the political fray (Gigerenzer
et al., 2000: 236).

Within the aviation security field, several competing consultancies have

established models of risk analysis for terror attacks, which are promoted at
regional and international industry conferences. Both the International Civil
Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Air Transport Associa-
tion (IATA) are moving towards ‘enterprise risk management’ and ‘security
management systems’ that are based on quantifiable security and ROI
(return on investment) results. I have elsewhere discussed the new Security
Management Systems requirement (see Salter, 2007a), and in particular the
fetish of experts for quantification.
The expression of surveillance in quantitative terms, then, becomes the key
for the development of data from which to draw conclusions about empirical
security threats. In short, with the paradigm of risk, ‘one does not start from a
conflictual situation observable in experience, rather one deduces it from a
general definition of dangers one wishes to prevent. These preventive poli-
cies thus promote a new mode of surveillance: that of systematic predetection’
(Castel, 1991: 288). As developed by Aradau & van Munster (2007: 102–107),
this is the precautionary principle, by which action must be taken before clear
data or intelligence justify that action. The provision of public security is thus
association with the expansion of a surveillant assemblage, from which data
are gathered and analyzed to predetermine the groups at risk (Haggerty &
Ericson, 2001). Within the field of aviation security, average wait times and
throughput of passengers through a screening point and numbers of items
seized become the focus of policing, rather than the actual security impact of
dangerous individuals or prohibited items (Salter, 2007b). The dispositif of
security thus erases the actual object of security and places governmental
emphasis on the management of insecurity. In the face of the ‘yet to be calcu-
lated’, managers of unease focus on visible and measurable phenomena. The
remainder of this article will examine the way that the abstract technology of
risk management is applied in the aviation security sector.

Risk and Aviation Security

Aviation security predominantly focuses upon the screening of prohibited

objects, rather than screening individuals for behavior or intent (Salter,

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256 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

2007a: 61–62). Experts from the ICAO and responsible government agencies
draft a list of prohibited items that are screened for using metal detectors,
explosives-detection systems, backscatter or millimeter-wave x-rays, and
human screeners. While the separation of airports into ‘sterile’ and ‘public’
zones, based on identification cards and authorized entry, might seem to con-
tradict this, it is common practice for even authorized individuals to be
screened for prohibited items as they enter sterile areas. The airport is thus
more typical of the ‘banopticon’ that protects by exclusion, by which Bigo
(2006) inverts the Foucauldian panopticon, which protects by incarceration.
This is not to say that aviation security professionals are not concerned with
identity credentials, perimeter control, and emergency preparedness. But,
the dominant activity of aviation policing is screening (goods, individuals,
identity documents, authorizations and passes, even data). The airport is an
urban, national, and international border. Since the airport is both a continu-
ation of urban space and a radically insecure connection to the globe, the
screening function is central to security. The institutions that compete for the
provision of aviation security represent both the centripetal tendencies of
dispositif and the centrifugal tendencies of discipline.8 Under Annex 17 of the
governing 1947 Chicago Treaty, each signatory state must designate a
national aviation security authority, which then provides regulation that
meets international requirements – systems that are now audited under the
post-9/11 ICAO University Security Audit System Programme. At the
national level, different police forces and security agencies compete for the
provision of aviation security. Air carriers and airport authorities are also
involved in security. Each of these groups often relies on a flock of transna-
tional security consultants and international experts. Because air carriers
carry significant economic risk, while governments and regulators hold
significant political risk, there are conflicting valences within the negotiation
of security procedures (Birkland, 2004: 356).

Table 1: Security Screening

Positive: presence of prohibited item, False positive: presence of prohibited

detection, ‘stop’ decision item, no detection, ‘go’ decision

Negative: no presence of prohibited item, False negative: no presence of prohibited

no detection, ‘go’ decision item, no detection, ‘stop’ decision

8
The complexity of this situation is illustrated in the Canadian case (see Salter, 2007a). Recent reports from
the CATSA Act Review Secretariat (2006), the Auditor-General of Canada (2006), and the Standing Senate
Committee on National Security and Defence (2003, 2007) demonstrate some of the adverse results of this
complex environment.

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 257

One of the few critical efforts to examine aviation security according to its
own rationality is that of Frederickson & LaPorte (2002). Their analysis of
aviation security as a ‘high reliability’ organization demonstrates the core
problems with organizational rationality. They describe clearly the possible
outcome of security screening in terms of positive, negative, false positive,
and false negative (see Table 1). The question of quantification lies at the
heart of their analysis, precisely because security screening cannot yet be
calculated. Frederickson & LaPorte (2002: 41) argue that ‘it is nearly impossi-
ble to know how many [false negative] threats there were or how many [false
negative] errors there might have been, were it not for effective passenger
and baggage screening’. From the point of view of passengers, false negatives
are pervasive and cause frustrating and pointless delays. From the point of
view of the national aviation security authority, false positives are cata-
strophic. But, there is a crucial problem with the coding of this grid. The
security of the system is not impacted by irrelevant false positives.
Furthermore, there is no way to quantify, code, or contextualize failures.
There is no recording how many prohibited items are surrendered per
passenger (is it multiple items on every tenth passenger, or simply one item
per passenger?). There are absolutely no data worldwide on the number of
prohibited items not detected, and there are no processes for secondary
detection once in a sterile area.9 No civil aviation authority currently con-
ducts an impact assessment of the failed detection of prohibited items. There
is simply no ‘root cause analysis’ of routine failures. At best, this kind of
systemic or operational research is performed after spectacular failures.
Consequently, aviation security managers have no idea of the total number
of items not detected, and hence cannot determine detection rate. They
cannot calculate the impact of failures of the system, since the vast majority
of false positives cause neither absolute nor relative decreases in security,
and those false positives that do cause disaster do so on a scale that is impos-
sible to calculate for any individual manager or carrier.
Risk management is an absolute empirical failure in providing real know-
ledge or increasing aviation security. But, it is a success for the dispositif of
security: it continually generates new areas to which security might be
applied. The statistics regarding detection rate, average passenger wait
times, number of prohibited items seized – these imaginary numbers contin-
ually generate new possible objects, profiles, or groups for security screening.
With no consideration of the actual proportion of passengers that represent a
threat, the detection rate, the number of benign prohibited items seized, or
9
Some security agencies engage in infiltration tests, the results of which are not publicly available. As a
result of the Air India bombing in Canada, passengers boarding Air India flights are often rescreened
immediately before they board their planes. Two recent incidents in which prohibited items were detect-
ed at secondary screening at the gate, after not being caught at primary screening, have led to questions
about the implementation of primary screening. But, these incidents are entirely random and cannot be
extrapolated to the general population of passengers, flights, or security procedures.

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258 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

the cost of delays, several scholars have offered abstract models of aviation
security screening. Babu, Batta & Lin (2004: 633) offer a model for the number
of risk categories and corresponding security stations that minimizes false
positives, although ‘the basic assumption made in [their] model is that all
passengers pose an equal threat’. They suggest that the division of passen-
gers into subgroups with differential screening can be efficient: ‘while it is
widely recognized that security screening efficiency can be improved if
passengers with different threat probabilities are treated differently, what is
perhaps not as obvious is that grouping even initially indistinguishable
passengers can improve screening efficiency when some screening steps are
optional’ (Babu, Batta & Lin, 2004: 643). Even when the population is indis-
tinguishable in terms of threat, ‘efficiency’ is increased by applying enhanced
security procedures to some portion of that population. Here is a perfect
example of calculation, in the absence of data, leading to the increased secu-
ritization of aviation screening. The fetish of quantification obscures this core
dissimilarity between security and safety, the fundamental lack of statistical
data, and the absence of security. Industry experts admit that the quantifica-
tion of impact of successful attacks, the frequency of attacks, and the detec-
tion of prohibited items is beyond current technical means. Internal pressure
from stakeholders, the public, and governments, however, requires some
kind of performance measurement (Auditor-General of Canada, 2006: 35–38;
Hainmüller & Lemnitzer, 2003). As a consequence, what analysts, enter-
prises, and governments alike measure are indirect, measurable variables:
throughput of a screening point, percentage of total sent to secondary screen-
ing, number of prohibited items detected, technical sensitivity of detection
equipment, proportion of time in training/repair, etc. Since there are no data
– no quantification of security is possible – security agencies measure what is
measurable.
For example, there is an international debate on the proper procedure for
screening hold baggage. The European Union has standardized hold-
baggage screening, using a risk-based system. Passenger luggage is screened
with x-ray technology; if no alarms are tripped, it is then loaded. Alarms
cause the luggage to be subject to more refined scans, explosives-detection
systems, CT tomography, and finally hand search, etc. Consequently,
Europeans boast of having the lowest proportion of bags subject to the most
exacting level of search. For their part, US officials subject every bag to CT
tomography, which provides greater reliability and fewer false alarms. Each
side mounts statistical evidence of false-alarm rates, speed of processing,
efficiency of equipment, but there is simply no empirical evidence of the
actual ‘security’ garnered.
How do the multiple and heterogeneous practices of security screening add
up to a dispositif? There are simply no valid or reliable data on aviation secu-
rity (Button, 1999: 74). There are no data on the efficacy of airport or baggage

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 259

security screening (Hainmüller & Lemnitzer, 2003: 4). As a consequence,

how do risk managers develop codified risk assessments in the absence of
meaningful data? Within this field, the use of expert panels demonstrates the
role of quantification.

Expert Panels

The expert panel provides a veil of objectivity for the security dispositif: in
short, it distances the construction of knowledge from systems of control. An
analysis of the global civil aviation security sector bears out Bigo’s (1996)
analysis of European police networks: a transnational cadre of consultants,
technocrats, and experts who determine the grammar and vocabulary of the
field of aviation security, replete with former police and military personnel,
as well as former regulators or administrators. But, as one expects of the
dispositif of security, there is an inherent dynamic within the expert panel to
present essentially imagined threats as real. This i–R translation produces
risk experts who are then enabled to manage the risk they define. The expert
panel has had the clearest effect on aviation screening in the case of new
technologies and screening practices. The banning of liquids/gels – or, more
precisely, the strict limiting of liquids/gels – is another example of the
security dispositif. The international norm of 100ml of liquids/gels is based on
an assumed failure of screening – 100ml of explosives would likely not cause
a catastrophic crash. This limit emerged from within the Israeli aviation secu-
rity community and has been adopted around the globe. An exception to this
general adoption demonstrates the importance of expertise: Australia’s avia-
tion security authorities have refused to impose a liquid ban on the grounds
that their risk analysis demonstrates that other security screening procedures
will detect this threshold of explosives. Again, from what we would predict
from a Foucauldian perspective, the dispositif of security does not tell us any-
thing about the prohibition of explosives – rather, it defines the bandwidth of
acceptable and unacceptable explosions.
Each panel starts by chasing nightmares of low-probability, high-impact
scenarios. The DELPHI method (or similar) used by these groups relies on
numerical coding to poll experts as to threat.10 The earliest research on this
method results in a drive towards ‘common sense’ or consensus through the
quantitative rankings of ‘most likely’ actions and results (Dalkey & Helmer,
1963: 466). The results of groupthink, path dependency, and bureaucratic
inertia are a granting of credibility to threats to which the security agency
10
For example, Transport Canada has conducted a single risk assessment of the aviation security environ-
ment since 2001, using quantitative methodology and ranking (CATSA Act Review Secretariat, 2006: 33).
This exercise has yet to be repeated.

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260 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

always already has the answer. Consequently, these expert panels both
provide nightmares that promote new expansions of security and reify the
‘common sense’ of current security procedures. Birkland (2004: 362) demon-
strates how post-9/11 aviation security policy, legislation, and regulations
derived directly from the ‘all of the experience with aviation that had been
amassed before these attacks’.
Ericson & Doyle chart the rise of ‘terrorism loss estimate models’ offered by
several companies after the 9/11 attacks. They trace how ‘AIR and Risk
Management Solutions hired former FBI and CIA counterterrorism opera-
tives to make educated guesses about landmark buildings that might be
targets of terrorism. AIR also used its experts to estimate frequency’ (Ericson
& Doyle, 2004: 228). As Ericson (2006: 348) argues, there is a fundamental
problem with this system:
a risk-management system is based on prior conventions for recognition, selection,
assessment, and evaluation, which, in turn, are grounded in institutions, values, inter-
ests, and ways of life. Aggregate data of population risks can never be used precisely to
indicate whether the case under scrutiny is an actual source of harm.

These aggregate threat assessments, such as the Department of Homeland

Security’s ‘threat level’ or the CAPPSII ‘red–yellow–green’ threat assessment
(Barnett, 2004), do nothing to give information or intelligence on a particular
case. Rather, such aggregate assessments function to define the ‘bandwidth’.
McLay, Jacobson & Kobza (2006) use a ‘multilevel allocation problem’
(MAP) model to determine optimal levels of aviation security. In the absence
of security data, they rely on data from the Official Airline Guide’s annual
Official Airline Flight Guide11 and come to a predictable conclusion: efficacy is
determined through an analysis of fixed and marginal costs, and not in terms
of the potential impact of a failure in the system. They support the actions of
the Transportation Security Administration to bring back a CAPPS (Com-
puter Assisted Passenger Prescreening System) to evaluate passenger risk.
The MAP model argues that, within the complex environment of aviation
security, mathematically, the fewer classes of security risks, the better the
system should respond. This conclusion reinforces a solution already dis-
counted owing to privacy concerns, and places the state back in the centre of
aviation security through expanded surveillance (see Barnett, 2004). What
is crucial about the MAP model is that it performs precisely the dispositif
function discussed above: the two ‘greedy’ classes that are proposed for
classifying the mobile population for screening are ‘low’ and ‘high’ risk. No
longer are there dangerous or safe travelers, but a continuum in which all
travelers present some degree of risk – a risk that is to be managed and dis-
tributed throughout the system. Airport screening becomes the vaccine for
security breaches.
11
See http://www.oag.com.

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 261

This is not to say that the use of the expert panel is entirely homogeneous or
uncontested. Expert panels failed to change the aviation security sector
before the spectacular failures of Pan Am 103, Air India, or 9/11. The vulner-
abilities of aviation security were well known within the industry, but this
knowledge did not create the possibility for new areas of security. The US
General (now Government) Accounting Office issued a number of damning
reports on airport screeners, with little actual effect (GAO, 2002; Bazerman &
Watkins, 2005: 368; Standing Senate Committee on National Security and
Defence, 2007). Bazerman & Watkins (2005: 370–372) trace the demise of the
1996 White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, whose
recommendations were diluted and eventually defeated by a lack of political
will and corporate pressure. In this case, the recommendations of the expert
panel were used by mundane commercial and conservative political interests
– but, even in the refusal of its recommendations, the integrity of the know-
ledge claim by the expert panel was upheld. The argument here is not that
experts may be outmaneuvered, but that the use of expert panels is impli-
cated in a dispositif of security. An ICAO Aviation Security Panel of Experts
was created in 1986 after the Air India bombing as a group of independent
experts that would develop technical knowledge above the fray of politics. In
the 20 years of its operation, the issue of aviation security has become increas-
ingly salient in the popular imagination. But, the panel itself has become
increasingly politicized and the role of independent experts has diminished.
While it was initially established as a board of nationally nominated inde-
pendent experts, over time more national representatives of governments
have been appointed. The ICAO Aviation Security Panel of Experts has
become politicized.
The expert panel is a technique that generates authority for the production
of knowledge that subsequently permits the arrangement of economic,
political, and social technologies of security. Since terrorists are always faster
entrepreneurs than governments, prone to gambling on new vectors of
attack, government regulators and operating agencies are necessarily conser-
vative. The expert panel starts brainstorming with low-probability events,
but then allocates scarce resources to those threats that are most frequent or
have the highest potential impact. In the absence of data, the incalculable are
quantified through a consensus-making process that excludes outliers or
low-probability events. Faced with this political economy of risk and secu-
rity, experts generate analyses that lead to solutions that they themselves are
able to provide. The security of the population becomes comprehended in
terms of an ever-expanding assemblage of screening procedures.

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262 Security Dialogue vol. 39, no. 2–3, April 2008

Conclusion

The utility of the dispositif as a frame of analysis becomes clear: rather than
seek a clear fungible commodity of security or risk, we have analyzed the
way that the appeal to security and risk makes certain dispositions of forces,
resources, and norms possible. Following on from Aradau & van Munster’s
(2007: 107) formulation of ‘precautionary risk’ as a ‘dispositif at the limit’, I
would argue that the quantification of the security imaginary serves as a
tactic of this rolling expansion of surveillance and control. Furthermore, the
specific practices of risk management in aviation security allow a more
diffuse analytic of ‘decisionist’ politics, in which decisions are justified in the
name of emergencies, crises, and exceptions (Doty, 2007). The dispositif of
security allows for a wide assemblage of actors to engage in this type of
politics and continually to increase the spaces in which security operates.
Within this field of contestation, within the discussion of security, there is no
discussion of the ‘security’ of the object, no voice for the people who are
flown – only the governments, the companies, the experts who can express
their concerns in numbers. The incalculable is impossible to discuss publicly:
one may only discuss the rarification and clarification of quantitative tools
for better getting to grips with aviation security. The description of threats to
aviation security in quantitative terms, especially when spoken by the expert
panel, hides the expansion of the ambit of security in the policing, surveil-
lance, and control of mobile populations. Mobility has become understood,
not as a right, but as a deviation to be explained to agents of the state.
Coupled with the galloping expansion of the definition of enemies within the
‘war on terror’, the dispositif of security is able to justify much more control by
corporate, government, and private actors.
Most often, analysis of aviation security recurs back to sovereignty, the
state, and the question of security management. This is a fundamental
depoliticization of mobility, citizenship, and society. Airports are not simply
places of mobility or incarceration, and to a large extent the model of the dis-
ciplinary society does not explain institutions, policies, or practices there. The
critical work on the airport demonstrates a clear need to move beyond the
sovereignty/discipline dichotomy. We need more critical discussion of the
complicity of air carriers in the international policing of refugees (Walters,
2002) and the role of aviation in creating networks that open or restrict the
potential for global mobility (Aatola, 2005). The actual evaluation of the sys-
tem in terms of ‘security’ is not simply underdetermined, but undetermined.
Within this kind of international biopolitics, the technologies of risk are inter-
preted through security screening practices to make all individuals a source
of danger and to justify all efforts to gather and interpret more information
about travelers with the badge of security.

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Mark B. Salter Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security 263

* Mark B. Salter is Associate Professor of International Relations at the School of Politics of

the University of Ottawa. He is the editor of Politics at the Airport (University of Minnesota
Press, 2008), co-editor with Elia Zureik of Global Surveillance and Policing (Willan, 2005),
and the author of Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Lynne Rienner,
2004), along with several articles on airports, passports, and global mobility. Salter is a
member of the editorial board of International Political Sociology and Associate Editor of The
Journal of Transportation Security. He has written reports and conducted research for
Transport Canada, the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority, and the Canadian
Human Rights Commission. The author would like to acknowledge the financial support
of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the comments of two
anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team for their input.

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