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Tellmann, U. (2009). Imagining catastrophe: Scenario planning and the striving for epistemic security. economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, 10(2), 17-21.

Abstract:

The  Basel  Committee  on  Banking  Supervision  recently stated  that  one  important  cause  for  the  catastrophic  nature  of  the  financial  crisis  has  been  a  false  sense  of  security.  The report thereby rehearses the widely shared diagnoses that a lack of an appropriate estimation of risk exposures belongs to the core causes of the crisis. Interestingly, this  epistemological  failure  is  taken  to  be  a  “failure  of  imagination”  about  what  the  future  may  hold  in  store  (Basel  Committee  on  Banking  Supervision  2009:  17).  Accordingly,  the  efforts  of  regulation  called  for  are  directed  at  furthering  more  imaginative  and  flexible  views  of  the  future. They seek to imply modes of stress testing that are not  any  longer  linked  to  the  notion  of  risk  as  a  “constant statistical   process”   (ibid.:9f).   Imaginations   of   “shocks which have not previously occurred” (ibid:  14) promise – so it seems – more adequate knowledge about one’s own risks. The archive of previous occurrences and the statistical calculations  of  normal  distributions  are  replaced  by  “non-statistical  modes  of  anticipating  the  future”  (O’Malley 2003: 277).

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Walker, J., & Cooper, M. (2011). Genealogies of resilience: From systems ecology to the political economy of crisis adaptation. Security dialogue, 42(2), 143-160.‏

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The concept of ‘resilience’ was first adopted within systems ecology in the 1970s, where it marked a move away from the homeostasis of Cold War resource management toward the far-from-equilibrium models of second-order cybernetics or complex systems theory. Resilience as an operational strategy of risk management has more recently been taken up in financial, urban and environmental security discourses, where it reflects a general consensus about the necessity of adaptation through endogenous crisis. The generalization of complex systems theory as a methodology of power has ambivalent sources. While the redefinition of the concept can be directly traced to the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling, the deployment of complex systems theory is perfectly in accord with the later philosophy of the Austrian neoliberal Friedrich Hayek. This ambivalence is reflected in the trajectory of complex systems theory itself, from critique to methodology of power.

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Wilkinson, A., & Kupers, R. (2013). Living in the Futures. Harvard business review, 91(5), 118-127.

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In 1965, a time when quantitative, computer-driven planning was very much in vogue, Royal Dutch Shell started experimenting with a different way of looking into the future: scenario planning. Shell's practice has now survived for almost half a century and has had a huge influence on how businesses, governments, and other organizations think about and plan for the future. The authors interviewed almost every living veteran of the Shell scenario planning operation, along with top Shell executives through the years. They identify several principles that both define the process at Shell and help explain how it has survived and thrived for so long. For instance, Shell scenarios are stories, not predictions, and are designed to help break the habit, ingrained in most corporate planning, of assuming that the future will look much like the present. They must above all be plausible, with a logical story line, in order to encourage intuition and judgment. They create a safe space for dialogue and for acknowledging uncertainty. They must also be relevant, not simply disruptive and challenging. And they need some quantification to be credible-but the numbers must flow from the stories, rather than the other way around. Otherwise, there's always the danger that quantitative models will hide assumptions and constrain thinking rather than refine it. Because scenarios follow a rhythm distinct from the annual strategy cycle, they allow an organization to see realities that would otherwise be overlooked. INSET: Idea in Brief.

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Alaszewski, A., & Burgess, A. (2007). Risk, Time & Reason. Health, Risk & Society, 9(4), 349-358.

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Over time, a number of alternative approaches to risk have developed and, while these co-exist, they structure time in different ways and are grounded in different combinations of cognitive rationality and affect. The initial conceptualization of risk, which remains prominent, was based on the use of knowledge from past events to provide the context for choices which minimize harm in the future. It underpins structured approaches to decision making based on use of statistics as a means of calculating the probability of future outcomes. This approach has been challenged by the development of a more forensic approach in which the emphasis is on identifying the specific causes of disasters using hindsight and from the analysis of specific cases making recommendations to prevent future disasters. While this approach has a rational basis, it also addresses the collective emotional responses to disaster and provides a cathartic function. In the late twentieth century a more precautionary approach has emerged, in which the fear of future is given precedence over evidence or lack of evidence of past harm. The precautionary approach is future oriented and casts the future principally in negative, potentially catastrophic terms.

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Amoore, L. (2013). The politics of possibility: Risk and security beyond probability. Duke University Press.‏

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Since September 11, 2001, the imagination of "low probability, high consequence" events has become a distinctive feature of contemporary politics. Uncertain futures—devastation by terrorist attack, cyber-crime, flood, financial market collapse—must be discerned and responded to as possibilities, however improbable they may be. In The Politics of Possibility, Louise Amoore examines this development, tracing its genealogy through the diverse worlds of risk management consulting, computer science, commercial logistics, and data visualization. She focuses on the increasingly symbiotic relationship between commercial opportunities and state security threats, a relation that turns the trusted, iris-scanned traveler into "a person of national security interest," and the designer of risk algorithms for casino and insurance fraud into a homeland security resource. Juxtaposing new readings of Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, Massumi, and Connolly with interpretations of post–9/11 novels and artworks, Amoore analyzes the "politics of possibility" and its far-reaching implications for society, associative life, and political accountability.

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Aradau, C., & Van Munster, R. (2007). Governing terrorism through risk: Taking precautions,(un) knowing the future. European journal of international relations, 13(1), 89-115.‏

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The events of 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 article 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’.

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Hannerz, U. (2015). Writing Futures An Anthropologist's View of Global Scenarios. Current Anthropology, 56(6), 797-818.‏

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Toward the end of the twentieth century, the Cold War ended, and globalization became a key word in public discourse. In the new situation people could ask, with relief or anxiety, what might happen next? So a small but lively intellectual industry rose to the challenge, creating scenarios for a born-again world. As the world turned, there would be more of them. With 9/11 there was another wave of global commentary. There were hot wars in Central Asia and the Middle East, and then, with economic upheavals spreading rather unevenly over the world, there were shifts in the global centers of gravity. This again generated more scenarios for the world. Often, the future visions could be encapsulated in striking catchphrases: the end of history, the clash of civilizations, jihad versus McWorld, soft power, and others. The Eric Wolf Lecture of 2014 scrutinizes world scenarios as a genre of creative writing but also considers their role as a set of representations of the world that are now circulated, received, and debated in a worldwide web of social relationships. As a contemporary sociocultural phenomenon, the scenarios come out of a zone of knowledge production where academia, media, and politics meet. The authors are global public intellectuals. While anthropology has contributed little to them directly, these writings deserve attention for the way they offer the Big Picture of the world and, at times, for their use of cultural understandings.

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

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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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Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (Vol. 17). SAGE.‏

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This panoramic analysis of the condition of Western societies has been hailed as a classic. This first English edition has taken its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern.

Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the `risk society′. The changing nature of society′s relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.

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