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Lentzos, F., & Rose, N. (2009). Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience. Economy and Society, 38(2), 230-254

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How should we understand the politics of security today? This article addresses this question from one particular perspective, that of ‘biosecurity’. It examines contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Europe, and that one can identify three different configurations: contingency planning, protection and resilience. Each of these embodies a significantly different way of reconciling fundamental imperatives for those who would govern a liberal society today – the imperative of freedom and the imperative of security.

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Mathews, A. S., & Barnes, J. (2016). Prognosis: visions of environmental futures. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22(S1), 9-26.

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While prognoses about the future are as old as human society, this special issue argues that the proliferation of new ways of modelling, planning, and interpolating the future of resources and environments is an increasing feature of contemporary environmental politics. In our introduction, we draw out two dimensions to this prognostic politics: first, the processes of making predictions about the future; and second, the movement of these predictions through the unstable and messy institutions that act upon the future in the present. We argue that new regimes of environmental forecasting and contests over these prognoses are giving rise to new forms of nature, framings of time and space, and modes of politics.

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O'Brien, S. (2016). ‘We Thought the World Was Makeable’: Scenario Planning and Postcolonial Fiction. Globalizations, 13(3), 329-344.

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This essay uses Indra Sinha's 2007 novel, Animal's People, as a critical lens to analyze the discourse of scenario planning. I argue that scenario planning, a strategy of speculation about possible futures, elides history—specifically the intertwined processes of colonialism and capitalism—in favor of the idea of globalization as an inexorable unfolding of the world as a complex system. Following a brief genealogy of the discourse of scenario planning that highlights its Cold War origins, and ongoing function in imagining, and helping to secure, the future of global capitalism, I offer as counterpoint a postcolonial reading of Animal's People. A fictional exploration of the aftermath of the 1984 Union Carbide factory gas leak in Bhopal, India, the novel contests (thematically and formally) the hegemonic temporality of globalization that informs scenario planning and the model of risk management it inspires.

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Opitz, S., & Tellmann, U. (2015). Future emergencies: temporal politics in law and economy. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(2), 107-129.

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This article develops a notion of the ‘politics of time’ in order to analyze the effects that imaginations of future emergencies have in the fields of law and economy. Building on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social time, it focuses on the multiplex temporalities in contemporary society, which are shown to interact differently with the ‘emergency imaginary’. We demonstrate that the apprehension of the future in terms of sudden, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events reinforces current modes of producing financial futurity, while it undermines the procedural rhythm and retroactive sentencing of liberal law. As a whole, the article supplements the analysis of the ‘politics of truth’ prevalent in the current debate about precaution and pre-emption with a theoretical perspective on social temporality.

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Ringland, G., & Schwartz, P. P. (1998). Scenario planning: managing for the future. John Wiley & Sons.

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The history of scenario planning is rich and varied. Throughout the ages people have tried to make decisions today by studying the possibilities of tomorrow. When that tomorrow was more predictable and less fraught with uncertainty, those possibilities had a good chance of being the right ones. Now, however, the only given constant in a world of complexity is change itself. In an environment where information technology is driving an information revolution, and where the rules can be rewritten with breathtaking speed, planning can seem more based on luck than foresight. But, as this book shows, there are methods for coping with unpredictability. The scenario planning techniques described in this book will help to think about uncertainty in a structured way. Case studies including ICL, British Airways and United Distillers highlight the fact that those who feel scenario planning too 'futurist' to take seriously should take another look at its usefulness in wrestling with the pace of change.

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Samimian‐Darash, L. (2009). A pre‐event configuration for biological threats: Preparedness and the constitution of biosecurity events. American Ethnologist, 36(3), 478-491.

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Drawing on an inquiry into Israel's preparedness for biological threats, in this article I suggest a new analysis of biosecurity events. A complex and dynamic assemblage emerges to prepare for biological threats, one that I call a “pre‐event configuration.” The assemblage is composed of three core elements—the scientific element, the security element, and the public health element—each of which diagnoses threats and suggests appropriate solutions. This configuration also determines what will be perceived as an event for which preparation is needed and what will remain a nonevent. I maintain that the constitution of an event takes place beyond the actual time of its occurrence and is determined by the pre‐event configuration in the “time of event.” Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of events should combine an examination of actual events and their aftermath with an inquiry into their potentialities as determined by the pre‐event configuration.

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Samimian-Darash, L. (2016). Practicing uncertainty: Scenario-based preparedness exercises in Israel. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 359-386.

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In this article, I analyze how the Turning Point scenario-based exercise works as a technology-based uncertainty, both in its conceptualization of the future and in its enactment. The Israeli preparedness exercise involves the activation of and reaction to a chosen event, one that does not replicate the past or attempt to predict the future. Though designed to challenge responders, the scenario does not represent a worst-case event but a plausible one. With this technology, the Israeli preparedness system is directed neither toward producing specific responses nor toward discovering the best solutions for an unknown future. Rather, the technology generates uncertainty through its execution, from which new problems are extracted. I examine both the discursive and the dispositional aspects of the Turning Point scenario, approaching it as a narrative put into action. I thus go beyond the conceptualization of the future underlying this technology and address how it practices uncertainty.

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Samimian-Darash, L. 2013. Governing future potential biothreats: toward an anthropology of uncertainty. Current Anthropology 54 (1).‏

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Through analysis of preparedness for pandemic influenza in Israel, I explore how future uncertainty is conceptualized and the various practices put into action to deal with it. In particular, I discuss the emergence of a new type of uncertainty—potential uncertainty—and three technologies employed to cope with it: risk technology, preparedness technology, and event technology. Event technology emerges in the preparations for a potential uncertainty event—such as pandemic influenza. In contrast with the other two technologies, it acknowledges the problem of potential uncertainty and retains uncertainty through its action. Thus, uncertainty is not solely linked to the appearance of new risks in the world, which is the basis of the risk society approach (e.g., Beck 1992; Giddens 2000), nor is it related to the impossibility of calculating these risks, as the preparedness paradigm (e.g., Lakoff 2008) and science and technology studies argue. Rather, uncertainty underpins a technology through which the future, although not reducible to calculable forms, can still be governed. Employing the concept of potential uncertainty and considering the various technologies applied to management of the future allow for a more thorough discussion of problems of future uncertainty with which current societies are preoccupied.

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Schoch‐Spana, M. (2004). Bioterrorism: US public health and a secular apocalypse. Anthropology Today, 20(5), 8-13.

Abstract:

This analysis was prepared for the ‘Bioterrorism: Historical contexts, long‐term consequences’ conference held at the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, on 8 May 2002. A revised version was presented at the panel ‘A plagued future? Emerging diseases, bioweapons, and other anticipated microbial horrors’ at the 2002 American Anthropological Association Meetings, 23 November. I thank meeting participants for their comments, as well as Nick King, Joe Masco and the anonymous referees for AT. I am indebted to colleagues D.A. Henderson, Tara O'Toole, Tom Inglesby and Michael Mair for their reflections on the humanitarian and public policy dilemmas posed by bioweapons, and to Onora Lien and Ari Schuler for research assistance.

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Simon, S., & de Goede, M. (2015). Cybersecurity, bureaucratic vitalism and European emergency. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(2), 79-106.

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Securing the internet has arguably become paradigmatic for modern security practice, not only because modern life is considered to be impossible or valueless if disconnected, but also because emergent cyber-relations and their complex interconnections are refashioning traditional security logics. This paper analyses European modes of governing geared toward securing vital, emergent cyber-systems in the face of the interconnected emergency. It develops the concept of ‘bureaucratic vitalism’ to get at the tension between the hierarchical organization and reductive knowledge frames of security apparatuses on the one hand, and the increasing desire for building ‘resilient’, dispersed, and flexible security assemblages on the other. The bureaucratic/vital juxtaposition seeks to capture the way in which cybersecurity governance takes emergent, complex systems as object and model without fully replicating this ideal in practice. Thus, we are concerned with the question of what happens when security apparatuses appropriate and translate vital concepts into practice. Our case renders visible the banal bureaucratic maneuvers that seek to operate upon security emergencies by fostering connectivity, producing agencies, and staging exercises.

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