Louise Amoore, The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013. (original) (raw)

Disputing Security and Risk: The Convoluted Politics of Uncertainty

The Politics of Uncertainty: Challenges of Transformation, 2020

This chapter explores some of the dilemmas that arise in using uncertainty as a lens to interpret societal problems and issues. Using several cases to open up discussion we argue that it is vitally important to understand the historical, political and cultural context in which debates about risk, uncertainty and (in)security materialise. Arguing for a re-specified, context-specific account, we seek to unravel dominant understandings of uncertainty in three domains: cyber security, counter-radicalisation strategy and mechanisms for coping in the aftermath of structural violence. While acknowledging the value of uncertainty as an heuristic device, we argue that established units of sociological analysis – such as power and ideology – remain important explanatory concepts in understanding institutional actions and policy drivers.

The International Political Sociology of Risk

The international political sociology (IPS) of risk is generally concerned with understanding the governance of uncertainty. As economists Bodie and Merton (1999) have classically described it, risk is uncertainty that matters. Risk is a rationality of governing the uncertain that affects the ways in which individuals and collectivities live, organize themselves, and exercise power. However, there is no single rationality of risk, and, as illustrated in this essay, rationalities of risk change as a function of the knowledge that informs them. A major concern of the IPS of risk is the ways in which uncertainty has become a central problem for governance. The ways in which risks are assessed and managed are taken as problematic spaces from which to question the roles of states, societies, economic actors, and individuals in coping with uncertainty. International Relations (IR) as a discipline has slowly begun to incorporate theoretical developments in risk theory arising from sociology, economics, and anthropology. This is a recent development that begins mainly with the end of the Cold War, although there are traces of risk theory having been applied to security analysis prior to this period. This essay contextualizes the introduction of risk as a problem for analysis within IR and explores three main approaches: the risk society thesis, the governmentality ...

Insuring Terrorism, Assuring Subjects, Ensuring Normality: The Politics of Risk after 9/11

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2008

Security has been located either in the political spectacle of public discourses or within the specialised field of security professionals, experts in the management of unease. This article takes issue with these analyses and argues that security practices are also formulated in more heterogeneous locations. Through a governmental analysis of risk, this article locates security practices in the 'shadows' of the insurance industry. Since the early days of the 'war on terror', the insurance industry has had an instrumental role and 'underwriting terrorism' has become part of the global governmentality of terrorism. We explore the political implications of the classificatory practices that insurance presupposes and argue that the technologies of insurance foster subjects who are consistent with the logic of capitalism and entrench a vision of the social where antagonisms have been displaced or are suspended by an overwhelming concern with the continuity of social and economic processes. These effects of insurance will be discussed as the 'temporality', 'subjectivity' and 'alterity' effects.

Chance, Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature. An Introduction

Special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies 60.4, 2015

This is the introduction to a special issue on "Chance, Risk, Security: Approaches to Uncertainty in American Literature" I edited for the journal Amerikastudien / American Studies in 2015. The contributors to the special issue conceptualize 'uncertainty' as embedded in the transformations that make up modernity. From the vantage point explored here, ‘uncertainty’ is principally Janus-faced: it deprives individuals and collectives of stable frames of meaning and existence, but it also restructures the future as a matter of human concern. While the uncertainties of modernity inscribe the future in the domain of contingency, they also make it accessible to human efforts of regulating it. To be more precise, in this special issue uncertainty is considered a social and philosophical condition of modernity that has brought forth the categories of chance, risk, and security, each of which aims to get a handle on uncertainty.

Governing Terrorism Through Risk: Taking Precautions, (un)Knowing the Future

European Journal of International Relations, 2007

9/11 appeared to make good on Ulrich Beck's claim that we are now living in a (global) risk society. Examining what it means to 'govern through risk', this article departs from Beck's thesis of risk society and its appropriation in security studies. Arguing that the risk society thesis problematically views risk within a macro-sociological narrative of modernity, this paper shows, based on a Foucauldian account of governmentality, that governing terrorism through risk involves a permanent adjustment of traditional forms of risk management in light of the double infinity of catastrophic consequences and the incalculability of the risk of terrorism. Deploying the Foucauldian notion of 'dispositif', this article explores precautionary risk and risk analysis as conceptual tools that can shed light on the heterogeneous practices that are defined as the 'war on terror'.

Political risk and security studies: Towards a conceptual framework of political riskiness

Interdisciplinary Research Methods in EU Law , 2024

Although the popularity of political risk is growing in several academic fields such as business studies, political science, and more, as it stands, there lacks a developed conceptual framework that theorises distinct intensity levels of political risk and which takes account of context. The closest attempt at theorising political risk is perhaps the division into macro and micro political risk. While important, this differentiation is increasingly rejected as ham-fisted by scholars of political risk. This chapter is an attempt to advance a conceptual framework enabling greater clarity and understanding of political risk, including its sources. 1 All the while capturing the relative 'riskiness' of distinct political risks through the lens of security. The categories of the framework are imported from the discipline of security studies. This is justified for two reasons: First, security and risk tend to share the same political and operational space. Indeed, one cannot hope to forecast political risk without knowledge of the security situation in each context. Second, unlike political risk, security has benefitted from years of work on the meaning of security, sources of threats and much else besides. In this chapter, I bring to bear the sectors of security and distinct types of threateners into a matrix that give way to a rudimentary conceptual framework on political risk, differentiating into manageable political risk, partially manageable political risk, and unmanageable political risk.