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On March 11, 2020, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen addressed the Danish nation in a press conference broadcast live from the “Hall of Mirrors” in the Ministry of the State. The setting was grandiose, the tone was serious, the future gloomy. The corona pandemic was here, and it was threatening the Danish citizens, the healthcare system, the welfare state. Frederiksen announced an immediate and two weeklong lockdown of Denmark. Now was the time to show “community spirit.” Each and every citizen was called upon to work collectively to protect vulnerable individuals, societal cohesion and the survival of the Danish state. Gone were the threats from climate change, which dominated the general election less than a year earlier. If border control was relevant, the reason was no longer the migrants and refugees whose “influx” and “failure to integrate” had fundamentally re-configured the Danish party system over the last decades. A classic act of securitization requiring the concentration of all attention and resources on emergency measures to fight off an existential threat, some would argue. However, with this book we argue that what happens in instances like this is more complicated. It constitutes a complex web of translations of this security message into the daily practices of government agencies, private companies, and of citizens. The aim of this book is to provide a framework, which should make us better equipped for analysing and understanding such translations.
Zooming out in the press conference room, a number of other people appeared at lecterns beside the prime minister's, representing different forms of authority and expertise in different sectors, at different levels ranging from the individual to the international. The Minister of Health, The Head of the Danish Health Authority, A medical doctor, A senior representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Head of the Danish National Police. Together with the Prime Minister, these voices translated what kind of unwanted future, the corona pandemic foreshadowed and how it could be handled. This book argues that to understand what was unravelling before our eyes on that March day, security analysis should be heading in a new direction. This book tries to systematise and think through thoroughly how such an analytic would look like.
Because before and beyond the pandemic, the security field has escaped its classical confines. National security is more and more concerned about issues such as terrorism, cyber security and organised crimes, which does not respect the traditional boundaries between a state’s external and internal security. Migration is increasingly cast as a security issue, equally conflating the internal and the external: treated as policing, border control, the fight against international organised crime, and in some cases inter-civilisational conflict, the issue takes amorphous shapes that are not easily grasped within classical terminology. Issues pertaining to environmental degradation, food safety, and pandemics bring in areas of expertise far beyond the traditional security studies field. Risk-assessment in relation to energy, industry, transportation, and health enter national security under the heading of “critical infrastructure protection” and challenge sedimented divisions. Economists analyse risk at different levels of analysis, but face challenges, when e.g. the threat from terror upsets the relationship among the categories of uncertainty, economic risk, and political risk. Each of these areas assesses, selects, and governs unwanted futures – risks, dangers, or threats – but they do so in different ways.
Also, dangers and risks that were previously seen as substantially separate are more often connected, compared and weighed against each other. For example, climate change and violent conflict are linked in at least two ways: first they are “compared” when policy makers prioritise different “threats” and make statements (typically backed by experts) about one being bigger than the other, and second, because they sometimes get causally connected, as if one might trigger the other. In Box 1.1 of this book, Bruno Latour demonstrates how the issues of terrorist attacks and climate change are being linked. In his reflection on the atrocious 2015 terror attack against the French concert venue Bataclan, he shows how the action against the perpetrators were weighed against action to prevent climate change.
Likewise, we are witnessing a collapse of established boundaries as different scholarly agendas and social practices are gradually merging and finding distinct ways of governing. Indeed, policy makers are expecting researchers and other experts to handle potential challenges on a joint basis. Specialised terminologies embedded simultaneously in different theoretical traditions and in different societal practice fields that previously evolved for distinct professions, disciplines or organisations increasingly intersect and interact. But even though the experts, called upon, speak to the same objects, they are speaking different disciplinary languages without much mutual contact or understanding. A key challenge for both security studies and for other disciplines theorising and contributing to the practical management of security today is to understand how these separate bodies of knowledge meet and produce unforeseen political consequences.
Translations of security thus happen all the time, with consequences for how we understand the political possibilities for action. While we all might recognise this pattern, we lack a conceptual and analytical apparatus to fully understand what is at stake in these translations: how they define, restrain or enable action. This book suggests a conceptual framework for how to analyse these translations of security (Brief 1.1).
Brief 1.1 Translations of security
What is a translation zone?
A translation zone is a point of observation that describes (1) how different conceptual expressions of how to handle unwanted futures meet, and (2) how new meanings are negotiated.
Why should we study translations of security?
By studying translations of security, we (1) come to understand changes in the current security landscape, and (2) enable a qualified and reasoned critique of current political practices of security.
In this introductory chapter, we first recount the evolution of the most basic concepts organising how our societies manage threats and unwanted futures and explain how our approach should be of interest across academic disciplines (beyond standard calls for interdisciplinarity). We then discuss our core analytical choice – focusing on the forms of translation occurring in “meetings of meanings” – and explain how that choice makes sense in relation to our own disciplinary background in security studies. Finally, we introduce the foundational elements of our analytical framework: our focus on conceptual meetings in “translation zones” across central modes of societal differentiation – and how this focus organises the volume.
1.1 The diversity of unwanted futures
Our basic claim is that in order to understand how society handles some of the most important problems it faces today, we need to pay attention to how different ideas about threats, risk, and dangers meet and what new meanings and future political possibilities are prescribed in the translations that take place in these meetings. A precondition for talking about “meetings” is of course that some pre-existing entities exist which may enter into a meeting. Apart from security, this family includes members like various versions of risk thinking attempting to calculate the value of unwanted futures (Adams 1995; McDaniels & Small 2004; Renn 1992); versions of uncertainty thinking inviting resilience, precaution, pre-emption or threat assessments (Vogel Vogel 2012 Callon et al. 2009; Chandler 2014; Vogel, 2012); and sustainability thinking asking for technical-rationally informed adjustments of socio-economic development (Duffield 2001; Gad & Strandsbjerg 2019).
While the concepts of security and risk share many features, the two concepts embody distinct histories; being occupied with the possibility to form: decision-making within distinct fields. Where studies on security have focused on the political management of the exception, risk studies have historically been preoccupied with the private (economic) management of everyday perils and opportunities. Until the 1980s, the concept of security was mainly tied to the realist conceptions of the nation state and military matters, concerned with order, territory and war. This understanding of security came under pressure during the 1980s, when security scholars problematised the narrow focus on states and military matters and showed how the concept of security constituted the political possibilities within a wider field of non-military matters, e.g. environmental politics, immigration, and religion (Buzan 1983; Buzan et al. 1998; Laustsen & Wæver 2002).
Almost parallel to this development in security studies, sociologists and anthropologists started to point to the political nature of risk. Most prominently, Ulrich Beck (1992) linked the power of risk management to the evolution of the industrial society and Mary Douglas emphasised the political choices involved in the societal selection of risks and dangers (Douglas & Wildavsky 1982). Likewise, poststructuralist scholars pointed to the disciplining effects and neoliberal character of the dominant economic and social practices of risk analysis (Ewald 2001; O’Malley 2004; Simon 2002).
Recently, a number of neologisms have entered the debates on risk and security, in many ways spanning the two debates by questioning the risk management idea of forecasting and control, and security studies’ focus on the survival of collective and delineated referent objects (Petersen 2016). Precaution, resilience and sustainability are examples of some of the most powerful neologisms of today. While these concepts differ in many respects (see, e.g. Gad & Strandsbjerg 2019; Stirling 2007), they all share a common focus on the problem of managing uncertain (possibly catastrophic) futures and problematise the possibility of a spatial limitation of today’s risks and dangers.
This brief sketch is a history of conceptual boxes. But it is also a history of how these boxes are connected; how their conceptual content is mixed; and how their delineation is negotiated. Increasingly, any given issue is shaped by the fact that it does not fit neatly into one space, but traverses several categories. Every single way of governing a specific challenge connects actors who are anchored in different “universes” (Wigen 2018: 49). Their engagement with this issue and with each other might re-shape the actors themselves and the social worlds they originally acted with reference to. Over time, the boundaries of the social placement of a given issue are likely to change. Our contention is that we are now approaching a situation, where these changes are often as important as the fixed categories and the predictable processes they encompass. Simultaneously, these changes can only be understood if taking into account those universes of meaning that actors speak from and how these are embedded in large societal patterns. Therefore, it is urgent to study how the meaning of security is shaped by processes of translation – by actors approaching it with different symbolic repertoires and yet interacting over a given issue despite these differences.
1.2 The value of science – disciplinary and interdisciplinary
We do not venture into this terrain to suggest (better) translation among mutually estranged modes of communicating. We do however believe that understanding better the full spectrum of how translations happen, will make for more reflexive attempts, and certainly (as we will show in chapter three in relation to academic disciplines), an improved understanding of translations might improve democratic accountability. But these are both secondary effects to our core project. Our approach is basically empirical and explorative: We intend to study the actually happening phenomenon of translations; what is happening out there, right now.
Therefore, our “translations” approach to security is not meant to be the universally brilliant, timeless contribution that security studies has regrettably ignored in the past and should uniformly ascribe to in the future. The relevance of this approach emerged at a particular time and place. It is a response to a specific situation in which, on the one hand, “security” has assumed new centrality in public and private policy-making – while, on the other hand, we are witnessing not just the specific security mode expanding, but several competing styles and codifications simultaneously gaining wider circulation and therefore increasingly intersecting.
Some would argue that a standard interdisciplinary framework would be able to tackle this challenge. We believe that this is simply not e...
