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De Goede, M. (2008). The politics of preemption and the war on terror in Europe. European journal of international relations, 14(1), 161-185

Abstract:

In the midst of the war on terror and unilateral US security politics, many observers look to Europe for alternatives. It is argued that Europe is particularly opposed to preemptive security practice, and prefers instead to rely on the rule of law. This article examines the meaning of preemption in the war on terror, and analyses three aspects of European counter-terror policy. It becomes clear that, with respect to a number of policies that play a key role in preemptive security practice, including criminalizing terrorist support, data retention, and asset freezing, the European Union is world leader rather than reluctant follower. Instead of relying on images that position Europe as inherently critical of preemptive security, debate concerning the legitimacy and desirability of such practices must be actively fostered within European public space.

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De Goede, M., Simon, S., & Hoijtink, M. (2014). Performing preemption. Security Dialogue, 45(5), 411-422

Abstract:

Nearly fifteen years after 9/11, it is time to grapple with the way in which imperatives of preemption have made their way into routine security practice and bureaucratic operations. As a growing literature in security studies and political geography has argued, preparing for catastrophe, expecting the worst, and scripting disasters are central elements of contemporary, speculative security culture. One of the most-discussed findings of the 9/11 Commission Report was that US security services had insufficiently deployed their imagination to foresee and preempt the attacks. This paper introduces a special issue that offers a range of in-depth empirical studies that analyze how the imperative of routinizing the imagination plays out in practice across different policy domains. It deploys the lens of performativity in order to conceptualize and explain the materialization of preemption and its situated entanglements with pre-existing security bureaucracies. The lofty rhetoric of preparing for the worst encounters numerous obstacles, challenges and reversals in practice. As becomes clear through the notion of performativity, such obstacles and challenges do not just ‘stand in the way’ of implementation, but actively shape the materialization of preemption in different sectors.

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Diprose, R., Stephenson, N., Mills, C., Race, K., & Hawkins, G. (2008). Governing the future: The paradigm of prudence in political technologies of risk management. Security Dialogue, 39(2-3), 267-288

Abstract:

Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle' (Ewald), `preparedness' (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption' (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feature within the Australian political imaginary. We explore how the approach to the future entailed in the paradigm enframes `life' and stifles democratic participation and innovation in ways of living. Three case studies (in biosecurity, bioecology and biomedicine) demonstrate not only how the paradigm pervades the government of everyday life, but also how it is challenged by human `agents', material `life' and the dynamic relations between these two. By formulating what this involves, we point to a concept of the political more conducive to democratic pluralism, diversity of life and innovative culture.

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Grove, K. (2012). Preempting the next disaster: Catastrophe insurance and the financialization of disaster management. Security Dialogue, 43(2), 139-155

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The 2007 launch of the Caribbean Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) introduced a new mechanism of state security against the uncertainties of climate change. Proponents argue that increasing the ability of member-states to finance disaster recovery through catastrophe insurance mitigates the effects of increasingly frequent and intense hurricanes and thus contributes to climate change adaptation. In contrast, I offer a critical analysis of the CCRIF that draws out how it facilitates what I call the ‘financialization of disaster management’. The introduction of financial logics and techniques enables the state and capital to visualize a population’s self-organizing adaptive capacity as both a threat to state-based forms of order and a value that can be leveraged on capital markets as catastrophe risk. Leveraging enhances a state’s ability to repair its critical infrastructure and preemptively negate undesirable adaptations. The CCRIF blends risk pooling with parametric insurance techniques to turn the uncertainty surrounding a population’s immanent adaptability into catastrophe risks that can be leveraged to enhance state security and capital accumulation in an emergent environment.

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Kaufmann, M. (2016). Exercising emergencies: Resilience, affect and acting out security. Security Dialogue, 47(2), 99-116.‏

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The idea of the complex emergency has given rise to the notion of resilience as a form of acting out security. While security policies largely embrace the concept of resilience, critical scholarship points to the ‘responsibilization’ of the threatened subject, who is ‘programmed’ to act out security in a fashion that internalizes neoliberal values. This behavior is trained through disciplinary practices, such as exercises, that seek to conduct the conduct of disaster populations. However, is the resilient subject only ever an instance of programs and disciplinary power? This article takes a look at how self-organization comes about and how this process can be conceptualized through affect. It uses the setting of a cyber-security exercise to describe the dynamic interplay between affect and re/action. Building on Spinoza’s understanding of affect as the onset for action, the article discusses what affect theory contributes to resilience theory. It concludes that, as a form of acting out security, resilience incorporates both ‘programmed’ and ‘self-determined’ actions. Both forms of acting, however, imply that the resilient subject has no choice but to act out security. Given this fundamental restraint, powerlessness as the incapacity to act appears as one of the few instances that escape the governmental logic of resilience.

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Bishop, P., Hines, A., & Collins, T. (2007). The current state of scenario development: an overview of techniques. foresight, 9(1), 5-25.

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Purpose – The paper aims to review all the techniques for developing scenarios that have appeared in the literature, along with comments on their utility, strengths and weaknesses.

Design/methodology/approach – The study was carried out through an electronic search using internet search engines and online databases and indexes.

Findings – The paper finds eight categories of techniques that include a total of 23 variations used to develop scenarios. There are descriptions and evaluations for each.

Practical implications – Futurists can use this list to broaden their repertoire of scenario techniques.

Originality/value – Scenario development is the stock‐in‐trade of futures studies, but no catalog of the techniques used has yet been published. This list is the start at developing a consensus list of techniques that can be refined as the field matures.

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Brassett, J., & Vaughan-Williams, N. (2015). Security and the performative politics of resilience: Critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian emergency preparedness. Security Dialogue, 46(1), 32-50

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This article critically examines the performative politics of resilience in the context of the current UK Civil Contingencies (UKCC) agenda. It places resilience within a wider politics of (in) security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan for, pre-empt, and imagine extreme events. Moving beyond existing diagnoses of resilience based either on ecological adaptation or neoliberal governmentality, we develop a performative approach that highlights the instability, contingency, and ambiguity within attempts to govern uncertainties. This performative politics of resilience is investigated via two case studies that explore 1) critical national infrastructure protection and 2) humanitarian emergency preparedness. By drawing attention to the particularities of how resilient knowledge is performed and what it does in diverse contexts, we repoliticize resilience as an ongoing, incomplete, and potentially self-undermining discourse.

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Bradfield, R., Wright, G., Burt, G., Cairns, G., & Van Der Heijden, K. (2005). The origins and evolution of scenario techniques in long range business planning. Futures, 37(8), 795-812.

Abstract:

Scenario Planning has been around for more than 30 years and during this period a multitude of techniques and methodologies have developed, resulting in what has been described as a ‘methodological chaos' which is unlikely to disappear in the near future (A. Martelli, Scenario building and scenario planning: state of the art and prospects of evolution, Futures Research Quarterly Summer (2001)). This is reflected in the fact that literature reveals an abundance of different and at times contradictory definitions, characteristics, principles and methodological ideas about scenarios. It has been suggested that a pressing need for the future of scenarios is amongst other things, to resolve the confusion over ‘the definitions and methods of scenarios'. This paper makes a beginning at this need by tracing the origins and growth of scenarios and the subsequent evolution of the various methodologies; a classification of the methodologies into three main schools of techniques is given and the salient features of these schools are compared and contrasted.

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Cooper, M. (2010). Turbulent Worlds. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(2-3), 167-190.‏

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Focusing on the speculative methodologies used to generate models of the financial and meteorological future, this article develops a series of theses on the ‘evental’ and ‘atmospheric’ quality of contemporary power. What is at stake in the circulation of capital today, I argue, is not so much the exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutability of fluctuation. Whether we are dealing with the turbulence of world financial markets or that of complex earth systems, the non-dialectical relation can itself be extracted, recombined and liquefied, as it were, in a dimension of its own. In the same way that financial derivatives price the variable relation between and across national currencies, weather derivatives now make it possible to issue contracts on the unknowable contingencies embedded in complex atmospheric relations. This reconfiguration of value requires a thorough rethinking of classical sociological conceptions of debt, promise and political violence.

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Evans, B., & Reid, J. (2014). Resilient life: The art of living dangerously. John Wiley & Sons.‏

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In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reidexplore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.

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