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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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Kaufmann, M. (2017). Resilience, Emergencies and the Internet: Security In-Formation. Taylor & Francis.‏

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This book traces how resilience is conceptually grounded in an understanding of the world as interconnected, complex and emergent.

In an interconnected world, we are exposed to radical uncertainties, which require new modes of handling them. Security no longer means the promise of protection, but it is redefined as resilience - as security in-formation. Information and the Internet not only play a key role for our understanding of security in highly connected societies, but also for resilience as a new program of tackling emergencies. Social media, cyber-exercises, the collection of digital data and new developments in Internet policy shape resilience as a new form of security governance. Through case studies in these four areas this book documents and critically discusses the relationship between resilience, the Internet and security governance. It takes the reader on a journey from the rise of complexity narratives in the context of security policy to a discussion of the Internet’s influence on resilience practices, and ends with a theory of resilience and the relational. The book shows how the Internet nourishes narratives of connectivity, complexity and emergency in political discourses and how it brings about new resilience practices.

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Krasmann, S. (2015). On the boundaries of knowledge. Security, the sensible, and the law. InterDisciplines. Journal of History and Sociology, 6(2).‏

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Governing security means acting under conditions of uncertainty, that is, operating at the boundary of the knowable, as security is about dangers and threats that by definition have not yet materialized. Security in this sense relies on imagination, which renders the future accessible. Furthermore, security concerns the undesired and is therefore intertwined with emotions and affects. It is about dangers and threats that should not materialize. Drawing on the example of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court decision on deploying military forces within national boundaries in the name of security, the article examines the relationship of the law to the sensible, to moments of anticipation and imagination, and to emotions and affect that exceed language. Taking on the form of fictive realities, these moments come to affect and shape the law, they are inscribed into the law as security matters. Since this happens rather implicitly, these processes tend to remain unrecognized by legal theory. However, fictive realities are an important ingredient of law’s reality.

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Lakoff, A. (2007). Preparing for the next emergency. Public culture, 19(2), 247.

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This paper is an attempt to map out the historical background to a study of how future threats are brought into the present by contemporary security experts. The study is one part of a collaborative project on the anthropology of bio-security, under the auspices of the Laboratory for the Anthropology of the Contemporary.

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Lakoff, A. (2008). The generic biothreat, or, how we became unprepared. Cultural Anthropology, 23(3), 399-428.

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This essay concerns the current intersection of national security and public health in the United States. It argues that over the course of the past three decades, a new way of thinking about and acting on the threat of infectious disease has coalesced: for public health and national security officials, the problem of infectious disease is no longer only one of prevention, but also—and perhaps even more—one of preparedness. The essay describes the process through which a norm of preparedness came to structure thought about threats to public health, and how a certain set of responses to these threats became possible. The story is a complex one, involving the migration of techniques initially developed in the military and civil defense to other areas of governmental intervention. The analysis is centered not on widespread public discussion of biological threats but, rather, on particular sites of expertise where a novel way of understanding and intervening in threats was developed and deployed. It focuses in particular on one technique, the scenario‐based exercise, arguing that this technique served two important functions: first, to generate an effect of urgency in the absence of the event itself; and second, to generate knowledge about vulnerabilities in response capability that could then guide intervention. More broadly, the scenario‐based exercise is exemplary of the rationality underlying the contemporary articulation of national security and public health.

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Lakoff, A. (2017). Unprepared: Global health in a time of emergency. Univ of California Press.

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Recent years have witnessed an upsurge in global health emergencies—from SARS to pandemic influenza to Ebola to Zika. Each of these occurrences has sparked calls for improved health preparedness. In Unprepared, Andrew Lakoff follows the history of health preparedness from its beginnings in 1950s Cold War civil defense to the early twenty-first century, when international health authorities carved out a global space for governing potential outbreaks. Alert systems and trigger devices now link health authorities, government officials, and vaccine manufacturers, all of whom are concerned with the possibility of a global pandemic. Funds have been devoted to cutting-edge research on pathogenic organisms, and a system of post hoc diagnosis analyzes sites of failed preparedness to find new targets for improvement. Yet, despite all these developments, the project of global health security continues to be unsettled by the prospect of surprise.

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Lakoff, A., & Collier, S. J. (Eds.). (2008). Biosecurity interventions: global health and security in question. Columbia University Press.

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In recent years, new disease threats such as SARS, avian flu, mad cow disease, and drug-resistant strains of malaria and tuberculosis have garnered media attention and galvanized political response. Proposals for new approaches to "securing health" against these threats have come not only from public health and medicine but also from such fields as emergency management, national security, and global humanitarianism. This volume provides a map of this complex and rapidly transforming terrain. The editors focus on how experts, public officials, and health practitioners work to define what it means to "secure health" through concrete practices such as global humanitarian logistics, pandemic preparedness measures, vaccination campaigns, and attempts to regulate potentially dangerous new biotechnologies. As the contributions show, despite impressive activity in these areas, the field of "biosecurity interventions" remains unstable. Many basic questions are only beginning to be addressed: Who decides what counts as a biosecurity problem? Who is responsible for taking action, and how is the efficacy of a given intervention to be evaluated? It is crucial to address such questions today, when responses to new problems of health and security are still taking shape. In this context, this volume offers a form of critical and reflexive knowledge that examines how technical efforts to increase biosecurity relate to the political and ethical challenges of living with risk.

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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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