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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.

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

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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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