Risk and the War on Terror

Louise Amoore, Marieke de Goede, Louise Amoore, Marieke de Goede

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134068357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers the first comprehensive and critical investigation of the specific modes of risk calculation that are emerging in the so-called War on Terror.

Risk and the War on Terror offers an interdisciplinary set of contributions which debate and analyze both the empirical manifestations of risk in the War on Terror and their theoretical implications. From border controls and biometrics to financial targeting and policing practice, the imperative to deploy public and private data in order to 'connect the dots' of terrorism risk raises important questions for social scientists and practitioners alike.

• How are risk technologies redeployed from commercial, environmental and policing domains to the domain of the War on Terror?
• How can the invocation of risk in the War on Terror be understood conceptually?
• Do these moves embody transformations from sovereignty to governmentality; from discipline to risk; from geopolitics to biopolitics?
• What are the implications of such moves for the populations that come to be designated as 'risky' or 'at risk'?
• Where are the gaps, ambiguities and potential resistances to these practices?

In contrast with previous historical moments of risk measurement, governing by risk in the War on Terror has taken on a distinctive orientation to an uncertain future. This book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of international studies, political science, geography, legal studies, criminology and sociology.

Part I
Risk, precaution, governance

1 Taming the future

The dispositif of risk in the war on terror

Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster

The message is that there are no knowns. There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—things we don’t know we don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld (2002)

Responsible science and responsible policymaking operate on the precautionary principle.

Tony Blair (2002)

Introduction

After 9/11, catastrophe has become once more the dominant political imaginary of the future. Even if the catastrophic extent of 9/11 has been subject to debate, the projected future is one of expected and undeniable catastrophe. As the deputy Secretary of Defense pointed out at the fifth anniversary of 9/11: “[T]he reason (terrorists) killed 3,000 people that day is because they didn’t know how to kill 30,000 or 300,000 or 3 million. But if they had known how to…they would have” (Miles 2006). Comparing the terrorist attacks of 9/11 with the Chernobyl disaster of the 1980s, Ulrich Beck (2002) has claimed that September 11 drove home the lesson that we now live in a risk society, a society in which there are uncontrollable and unpredictable dangers against which insurance is impossible and where questions of compensation, liability and harm minimization have lost all their social and political significance.

In the post-September 11 conditions of extreme uncertainty, decision-makers are simply no longer able to guarantee predictability, security and control (Rasmussen 2004). Rather, “the hidden central issue in world risk society is how to feign control over the uncontrollable—in politics, law, science, technology, economy and everyday life” (Beck 2002: 41, emphasis added; see also the Introduction to this volume). According to theorists of risk society, control is ideological, doomed to fall short of the measure of reality. As insurance companies sustained unprecedented losses as a result of the 9/ 11 attacks, Beck’s observations on the uninsurability and uncontrollability of risk appeared to carry considerable empirical value. Yet, a closer look at the developments in the governance of risk illuminates that his sweeping statements about uncontrollable risks in an age of extreme uncertainty are inattentive to the institutional measures and actions that have accompanied the tragic events of 9/11. Against the backdrop of radical contingency and incalculability, organizations—public as well as private—have attempted to devise means to minimize or avoid the catastrophic promise of the future, seeking for alternative ways to predict and master the risk of terrorism (for an overview, see Ericson and Doyle 2004a).

Our analysis of the risk practices deployed in the “war on terror” breaks with Beck’s risk society thesis and explores the deployment of a governmental dispositif of risk (Aradau and van Munster 2007). Formulated in the context of environmental struggles in Germany in the 1970s, Beck’s narrative of risks as produced by modernity does not travel well to the current practices and technologies of risk deployed in the war on terror.¹ Drawing upon Foucault’s work on governmentality and recent social analyses of risk, this chapter will therefore explore how a dispositif of risk is deployed in the “war on terror” at the horizon of catastrophic future and radical uncertainty. This approach takes as its starting point the conceptualization of risk as a dispositif, i.e. a heterogeneous assemblage of discursive and material elements for governing social problems.²

Unlike Beck’s uninsurable risks, a Foucauldian approach focuses on how presumably incalculable catastrophic risks such as terrorism are governed. Rather than ideological attempts to “feign control”, as intimated by Beck, it will be argued that different policies such as war, surveillance, injunctions to integration and drastic policies against antisocial behaviour in fact function within a dispositif of precautionary risk. What is new is not so much the advent of an uncontrollable risk society as the emergence of a “precautionary” element that has given birth to new rationalities of government that require that the catastrophic prospects of the future be tamed and managed. In conjunction with a neoliberal rationality of risk, the dispositif of precautionary risk creates convergent effects of depoliticization and dedemocratization.³

Beyond the empirical connections between Beck’s earlier analysis and 9/ 11, his uninsurable risk society also carries profound political consequences. Indeed, for Beck, the advent of risk society harbours the possibility for reinventing the international along more democratic and cosmopolitan lines as expert rule gives way to deliberation in global public forums (Beck 1992, 1999). Against this optimistic view, however, others have pointed out that the representation of catastrophic risks, especially in the wake of 9/11, has brought about exceptional practices beyond and outside the law, imperial reinventions of liberty and democracy and securitization of boundaries of difference.⁴ But framing the alternatives to the international as either “imperial” or “exceptional” (Walker 2006) on a general level does not shed light on their relationship to the heterogeneous practices deployed in the war on terror. We argue, therefore, that exceptionality and imperialism in the wake of 9/11 need to be understood against the background of how governing terrorism is problematized at the horizon of a catastrophic future to be avoided at all costs.

At the same time, Beck (2003) maintained that the advent of risk society signalled the end of neoliberalism, as no companies or other private actors would be willing to embrace the risk of terrorism and other catastrophic events. However, this chapter will argue that the new meanings of the exceptional and imperial that define the securitizing practices post-9/11 reify the status quo through a specific rendering of politics as the social and economic continuity of neoliberalism. The dispositif of risk in the war on terror is profoundly depoliticizing, inasmuch as it suspends the contestation of political decisions on the exception and displaces social antagonisms. In conjunction with a neoliberal rationality of governance, it is de-democratizing inasmuch as it undermines political agency that challenges the inegalitarian neoliberal global world order. The argument will proceed in three stages: first, we outline a genealogy of the dispositif of risk. Second, we explore the specific configuration of risk practices deployed in the “war on terror”. Third, we analyse the political implications of the precautionary dispositif for the philosophy of the exception, imperial and securitizing practices, and its intersections with the rationality of neoliberalism.

Taming the future: insurance, neoliberalism and precaution

Contrary to Beck’s emphasis on the univocal logic of modernity that leads to incalculable risks, scholars using an analytic of government inspired by the work of Michel Foucault have been attentive to the diversity of risk practices. In this approach, risk can be understood as a dispositif to govern social problems. A dispositif consists of “discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” (Foucault 1980a: 194). The heterogeneous elements that make up a dispositif of risk can be understood more systematically as a combination of rationalities and technologies, a “family of ways of thinking and acting, involving calculations about probable futures in the present followed by interventions into the present in order to control that potential future” (Rose 2001: 7). A dispositif of risk is the product of contingency and invention, not the result of the logic of modernity (O’Malley 2004: 7). Hence, a dispositif of risk creates a specific relation to the future, which requires the monitoring of the future, the attempt to calculate what the future can offer and the necessity to control and minimize its potentially harmful effects.

Importantly, the identification of risk is not the same as recognizing the uncertainty of future events. On the contrary, the identification and management of risk is a way of organizing reality, taming the future, disciplining chance and rationalizing individual conduct (Hacking 1990). Identifying the future as bearing catastrophic risks is therefore linked with visions of order and ways to constitute and reproduce it.⁵

A dispositif of risk is subject to transformation and modification, depending on the knowledgeable representations of the problems and objects to be governed and on the available technologies to produce particular effects in the governed. Risk inscribes reality as harbouring “potential dangerous irruptions” (Castel 1991: 288) and deploys technologies to avert these events in the future. The heterogeneity of risk practices can be unravelled both synchronically and diachronically. Thus, although risk was thought for a long time to be co-extensive with the insurable, a genealogy of risk reveals different dispositifs developed in particular historical contexts and in response to specific social problems (Donzelot 1984; Ewald 1986).

The first dispositif of risk is that of nineteenth-century liberalism, which imposed not only legal duties and restrictions upon individual freedom, but equally moral ones. The dispositif of responsibility functions under the moral motto “do no harm to others”. Responsibility was the responsibility of prudent individuals who negotiated the vicissitudes of fortune on their own and avoided becoming a burden on the others. The second dispositif of risk, insurance, emerged at a time when politics and economics proved incapable of managing social problems. Insurance provided an answer to the “scandal of the poor” in the post-revolutionary French République, when neither political equality nor capitalism could (Donzelot 1984). Despite equality before the law and equal sovereignty, the poor had no property and were therefore forced to sell their labour. Yet, free access to work did not mean the end of their indigence. The resolution of the social question—impossible through either political claims or economic measures—was given in the form of mandatory insurance. Risk could convert conflicting demands within the République and mitigate the “shameful opposition between the owners of capital and those who, living only by their labour, remain enslaved to them at the same time as they are proclaimed politically sovereign” (Donzelot 1988: 396). The wage system was the first form of collective risk insurance, guaranteeing rights, giving access to benefits outside work and protecting workers from the peril of indigence.

In this context, a growing number of social problems of industrial modernity became governed by technologies of insurance. The dispositif of insurance emerged out of a contestation over means to deal with a social problem and, given its non-revolutionary claims in dealing with society, became a dominant way of framing social events such as, for example, the work accident.⁶ Solidarity through insurance could thus make up for the shortcomings of society, compensate for the effects of poverty and reduce the negative effects of oppression. With insurance, state actions targeted only the forms of social relations and not the structures of society. The injured, sick or unemployed worker did not need to demand justice before a court or to take to the streets as the proletarians had done in 1848. Instead, the worker could be indemnified by the state, the greatest social insurer. Through insurance, workers could be protected against unemployment or accidents, in a word against indigence, the great political concern of the century.

The dispositif of risk insurance modified the traditional understanding of risk as individual responsibility. With risk insurance, individuals are no longer directly and solely responsible for their fate. The state creates a general principle of responsibility in which individuals cannot be disentangled from one another.⁷ Currently, however, insurance itself is undergoing further transformations linked with the historical context in which its technologies are deployed. On the one hand, insurance is under attack from neoliberalism; on the other, it is challenged by scientific discoveries.

First, with the rise of neoliberalism, the practice of collective risk management tends to be supplanted by “prudentialism”, in which subjects are required to prudently calculate, and thereby minimize, the risk that could befall them. This does not however reactivate the nineteenth-century understanding of risk, but redirects the dispositif of insurance towards the individual—hence the reference to the notion of “new prudentialism” (O’Malley 1992: 261). Society is once more disintegrated; solidarity trickles down to categories of the population defined by the redeployment of private insurance. Insurance becomes a matter of individual responsibility rather than societal solidarity; it functions as a market which individuals enter for the provision of their own security. Neoliberalism thus entails a shift towards private security arrangements and a rediscovery of individual responsibility. Baker and Simon have aptly described this shift as a move from “spreading risk”, concerned with the socialization of risks by spreading them out over the whole population, to “embracing risk” leading to a depooling of collective risks towards individual responsibility (Baker and Simon 2002).

Second, insurance has undergone another modification which, until recently, has been given relatively little attention in the literature on governmentality. This second modification concerns not the rationality of neoliberalism but, rather, the rationality of scientific knowledge that has underpinned the insurance dispositif. If insurance has been modified as a result of neoliberalism, traditional strategies of risk insurance have also come under attack from the scientific discoveries that undermine the very logic of calculability and the possibility of providing calculations for the future. As Ewald has succinctly formulated this latter challenge, risk “tends to exceed the limits of the insurable in two directions: toward the infinitely small-scale (biological, natural, or food-related risk), and toward the infinitely large-scale (‘major technological risks’ or technological catastrophes)” (Ewald 1993: 222).⁸

Therefore, the dispositif of insurance undergoes a double modification. On the one hand, the rationality of neoliberalism steers it towards market-based organization of the social, the subject and the state. According to Wendy Brown, neoliberalism casts the political and social sphere as dominated by market concerns and organized by market rationality (Brown 2006: 694). On the other hand, the rationality of scientific knowledge steers it towards radical uncertainty. As Tom Baker has astutely noted, both rationalities are reactions to the limits of insurance: precautionary risk is a reaction to the limits of insurance to prevent dangerous occurrences, while embracing risk is a reaction to the inability of the insurance state to effectively spread loss (Baker 2002: 351).

The precautionary rationality challenges insurance to tame the infinities of risk and integrate it within a dispositif of governance.⁹ While these two “infinities” of risk appear reminiscent of Beck’s incalculable risks of modernity, infinity is not synonymous with incalculability. After all, the limit of knowledge has always confronted insurance technologies. Insurance is the art of making the seemingly incalculable subject to calculation (Ericson, Doyle and Barry 2003: 284). The first element of infinity that undermines a politics of insurance is the catastrophic element, the grave and irreversible damage that an event can cause. The second element of infinity is that of uncertainty. Ewald’s infinitely small or infinitely large-scale risks are both related to scientific knowledge. When knowledge is unable to define the prospect of the future, to compute its own effects upon the future, the logic of insurance is surpassed (Ewald 2002). Traditionally, insurance requires the identification of risk and the statistical estimation of an event happening.

At its core, the precautionary element is derived from environmental politics. The environment was the first area in which catastrophic events were possible, yet not scientifically provable. Formulated initially within the legal realm, the precautionary principle has its roots in the German Vorsorgeprinzip, or foresight principle, which emerged in the early 1970s and developed into a principle of German environmental law.¹⁰ Since then, it has informed international policy statements and agreements—initially recognized in the World Charter for Nature, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1982; and subsequently adopted in the First International Conference on Protection of the North Sea in 1984. The European Commission, which recognized it for the first time in relation to the environment in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, later extended it to other situations (European Commission 2000). The definition of the precautionary principle is however most often traced back to the 1992 Rio Declaration (United Nations 1992), which states that action should not be dependent upon “full scientific certainty”. Similarly, the European Environment Agency has urged us to take actions on the basis of what we do not know: “Forestalling disasters usually requires acting before there is strong proof of harm” (European Environment Agency, quoted in Stern and Wiener 2006: 394).

Notwithstanding its familiar ring, precaution can be reduced neither to traditional responsibility in the face of dangers nor to neoliberal prudentialism. It is not a reminder of precautions that must be taken individually by entering the insurance market. Precautionary risk introduces within the computation of the future its very limit, the infinity of uncertainty and potential damage. It is therefore exactly the opposite of prudence: if the latter recommended what “precautions” to take under conditions of knowledge, the former demands that we act under scientific and causal uncertainty. The weight of the future is not simply that of contingency, but that of catastrophic contingency. This double infinity of risk makes infinite risks difficult to govern by the technologies of insurance. Yet, this does not mean, as Beck wrongly hypothesized, that these technologies dwindle out of existence or that governmentality is suspended. Social problems are always subjected to the imperative of governmentality. The representation of the double infinity of terrorism has rather led to the deployment of a precautionary dispositif, which has been grafted upon the “old” insurantial technologies of risk management.

Precautionary risk has not, however, spelled the death of insurantial risk or of prudentialism. It has reconfigured insurance in a new dispositif that deploys already available rationalities and technologies of risk. The precautionary element is grafted upon the existing technologies of insurance, other forms of calculation and relationality to the future. The rationality of neoliberalism and the rationality of precaution are not mutually exclusive, but converge in the emphasis on market agents as risk embracing and the simultaneous (if contradictory) need to control the conditions of markets as well as the conditions of the future.¹¹ Precautionary risk relies on the neoliberal idea that the future is radically uncertain. Radical uncertainty is, after all, the motor of market and competitive behaviour. If, in the neoliberal rationality, uncertainty is seen to foster more innovation and economic profit, the precautionary rationality emphasizes the other side of neoliberalism, namely that of the need to govern markets and create the conditions of their functioning. As will be shown in the following sections, precautionary risk and its focus upon risk avoidance do not involve the end of insurance, but also open up novel and profitable ways of embracing risk in and by the insurance business.

Precautionary risk in the war on terror

While it originated in the environmental sphere, we argue that precautionary risk has also emerged in the dispositif of risk to govern terrorism, where other, traditional technologies are considered fallible or insufficient.¹² Here, Rumsfeld’s tautological quote that opened this chapter can be read as an overview of risk management. The “known knowns” activate technologies of responsibilit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword: Rusing risk
• Introduction: Governing by risk in the war on terror
• PART I Risk, Precaution, Governance
• PART II Crime, Deviance, Exception
• PART III Biopolitics, Biometrics, Borders
• PART IV Risks, Tactics, Resistances
• Bibliography