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Rapp, R. (1995). Risky business: genetic counseling in a shifting world. Articulating hidden histories: exploring the influence of Eric R. Wolf, 175-89.‏

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Since the mid-1990s risk management has undergone a dramatic expansion in its reach and significance, being transformed from an aspect of management control to become a benchmark of good governance for banks, hospitals, schools, charities, and many other organizations. Numerous standards for risk management practice have been produced by a variety of transnational organizations. While these many designs and blueprints are accompanied by ideals of enterprise, value production, and good governance, it is argued that the rise of risk management has also coincided with an intensification of auditing and control processes. The legalization and bureaucratization of organizational life has increased because risk management has created new demands for proof and evidence of action. In turn, these demands have generated new risks to reputation. In short, this important book traces the rise of the managerial concept of risk and the different logics and values which underpin it, showing that it has much less to do with real dangers and opportunities than might be thought, and more to do with organizational accountability and legitimacy.

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Revet, S., & Langumier, J. (Eds.). (2015). Governing disasters: beyond risk culture. Springer.‏

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Based on extensive ethnographic and historical research conducted in diverse field locations, this volume offers an acute analysis of how actors at local, national, and international levels govern disasters; it examines the political issues at stake that often go unaddressed and demonstrates that victims of disaster do not remain passive.

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Rose, N. (1996). Psychiatry as a political science: advanced liberalism and the administration of risk. History of the human sciences, 9(2), 1-23.‏

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Samimian-Darash, L., & Rabinow, P. (Eds.). (2015). Modes of uncertainty: Anthropological cases. University of Chicago Press.‏

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Modes of Uncertainty offers groundbreaking ways of thinking about danger, risk, and uncertainty from an analytical and anthropological perspective. Our world, the contributors show, is increasingly populated by forms, practices, and events whose uncertainty cannot be reduced to risk—and thus it is vital to distinguish between the two. Drawing the lines between them, they argue that the study of uncertainty should not focus solely on the appearance of new risks and dangers—which no doubt abound—but also on how uncertainty itself should be defined, and what the implications might be for policy and government.

Organizing contributions from various anthropological subfields—including economics, business, security, humanitarianism, health, and environment—Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow offer new tools with which to consider uncertainty, its management, and the differing modes of subjectivity appropriate to it. Taking up policies and experiences as objects of research and analysis, the essays here seek a rigorous inquiry into a sound conceptualization of uncertainty in order to better confront contemporary problems. Ultimately, they open the way for a participatory anthropology that asks crucial questions about our contemporary state.

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Van Munster, R., Aradau, C., & Lobo-Guerrero, L. (2008). Security, Technologies of Risk, and the Political: Guest Editors' Introduction. Security Dialogue, 39(2&3), 157-154.‏

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From natural disasters and terrorism to health and finance, risk is now everywhere. While risk had long been a problem of thought, from antiquity to modernity (Maso, 2007), its relation to security and politics has now encountered renewed interest. From anthropology and criminology to cultural studies and sociology, the problem of risk has been rendered as the signifier of our present condition (Beck, 1992; Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982;Luhmann, 1991; Foucault, 2007). But, as risks come to constitute more and more areas of social and political life, it is necessary to ask ourselves, echoing Michel Foucault (1997), what difference today introduces with respect to yesterday.

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Wynne, B. (1987). Risk management and hazardous waste: Implementation and the dialectics of credibility. Springer-Verlag.‏

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The proper management of hazardous wastes has become a major environmental and economic problem. Local opposition to siting of new treatment and disposal facilities has amplified international movements of wastes between different regulatory regimes. Inconsistent national regimes allow loopholes whose exploitation amplifies public concern and local opposition. Furthermore, inadequate understanding of public attitudes and political responses allows unpredictability to undermine industrial confidence and decision making. This IIASA book contributes original fieldwork from six countries and conceptual analysis aimed at improving understanding and the practical management of hazardous waste problems. It links the different forms of technical knowledge used in regulation with their institutional decision making context, and analyses the key question of public credibility in a systematic and novel way.

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Wynne, B. (2002). Risk and environment as legitimatory discourses of technology: reflexivity inside out?. Current sociology, 50(3), 459-477.‏

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Risk and environmental discourses have usually been regarded as critical, in the sense that they are the substantive focus of critical reflexive processes discussed under the rubric of the risk society, reflexive modernization and other theories of late-modern cultural politics and change. The forces of power which shape new technological trajectories have encountered some of their most effective criticism in the form of environmental risk critique and feminist critique. However, even environmental risk discourses have been fundamentally shaped by an assumption that any uncertainties which risk assessments might show will be resolvable by more science. The basic discourse of modern science and technology policy - that even if predictive control is not yet fully in our grasp, it soon will be - is not challenged by the cultural focus on risk. Indeed, the recent emphasis on rendering risk and regulatory science more accountable, inclusive and transparent actually diverts attention from the more difficult upstream arena of rendering innovation-oriented science more democratically accountable. In key respects, prevailing risk and environmental discourses can be seen to act by default as covers, and thus legitimators, of existing privileged forces driving technological innovation trajectories.

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Zeiderman, A. (2016). Endangered city: the politics of security and risk in Bogotá. Duke University Press.‏

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Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.

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Boehm, A., Enoshm, G., & Shamai , M. (2010). Expectations of grassroots community leadership in times of normality and crisis. Journal of contingencies and crisis management, 18(4), 184-194.‏

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This article analyses the conjunctures of risk and security that have recently emerged in the securitization of HIV/AIDS. Although these partially corroborate Ulrich Beck's notion of risk society, important elements of the securitization of HIV/AIDS resist his understanding of risk as a 'danger of modernization'. The article therefore turns to François Ewald's alternative theorization of risk as a 'neologism of insurance', and shows that insurance is a risk-based security practice widely used to manage the welfare of populations. Such a biopolitical approach to risk is also valuable for analyzing the securitization of HIV/AIDS, which, even though it is unfolding outside the domain of insurance, similarly draws upon multiple risk categories ('security risks', 'risk groups' and 'risk factors') in efforts to improve the collective health of populations. Analyzed through a wider concept of risk as a 'biopolitical rationality', the conjuncture of risk and security in the securitization of HIV/AIDS thus emerges as a principal site where the institutions of sovereign power in international relations are being absorbed and integrated within a wider biopolitical economy of power.

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Eshel, Y., Kimhi, S., Lahad, M., Leykin, D., & Goroshit, M. (2018). Risk Factors as Major Determinants of Resilience: A Replication Study. Community mental health journal, 1-11.‏

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The present study was conducted in the context of current concerns about replication in psychological research. It claims that risk factors should be regarded as an integral part of the definition of individual resilience, which should be defined in terms of the balance between individual strength or protective factors, and individual vulnerability or risk factors (IND-SVR). Five independent samples, including 3457 Israeli participants, were employed to determine the effects of resilience promoting and resilience suppressing variables on the IND-SVR index of resilience, and on its two components: recovery from adversity, and distress symptoms. Five path analyses were employed for determining the role of distress symptoms as a measure of psychological resilience, as compared to other indices of this resilience. Results indicated the major role of risk factors (distress symptoms) as an integral component of resilience. This role was generally replicated in the five investigated samples. Risk factors are legitimate, valid, and useful parts of the definition of psychological resilience. Resilience research has shifted away from studying individual risk factors to investigating the process through which individuals overcome the hardships they experience. The present data seem to suggest that this shift should be reexamined.

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