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Article Excerpt
The changing contours of conflicts, wars, and crises with and after the end of the Cold War have led to a semantic shift: Not the avoidance of threats, so the argument goes, but the management of risks characterizes contemporary security practices. By juxtaposing the well-known security "dilemma" with the new "security paradox," this contribution argues that a redefinition of "uncertainty" and "probability" is constitutive for this semantic shift. We argue that new security concerns like terrorism have (re)introduced "unstructured" uncertainty as the rationale for new security practices. To conceptualize this re-opening, we propose a topology of risk, uncertainty, and probability theories that highlights the multiple and conflicting logics of security policies currently at play. KEYWORDS: risk, security paradox, security dilemma, uncertainty, terrorism
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Until the end of the Cold War, both the theory and practice of security policy focused predominantly on interstate conflicts defined by immediate military threats. The changing contours of conflicts, wars, and crises with and after the end of the Cold War opened the door for broader security concerns wherein it became increasingly clear that military threats--in the traditional sense--were no longer the most eminent problem of world politics.
A first response was found in a broadening of the concept of security itself. The focus on military questions was increasingly augmented by economic, ecological, and cultural concerns. (1) Another approach was to reformulate the kind of danger that security policy addresses. Not threats, but risks dominate the security agenda, it was argued, thus redefining the task of security policy to proactively prevent or mitigate possible harm. (2)
By relocating the security dilemma problematique in the semantic field of risk, probability, and uncertainty, we seek to argue two things: (1) that the security dilemma, which dominated the security discourse during the Cold War, frames the security problematique in very specific ways by assuming that uncertainty is always well defined; (2) that new security concerns like terrorism have undermined this logic by introducing new, unstructured, and undefined uncertainties. We describe this change as a transformation from the security dilemma to a security paradox.
Within the security dilemma, actors know that the available options lead to equally suboptimal outcomes. Thus, there is no better way for action, but the option of nonaction is equally problematic. A paradox, by contrast, is the situation in which the condition of possibility is also the condition of impossibility. So while security policy provides security, it also creates insecurity. The dilemma and the paradox differ in their consequences. An actor facing a dilemma has to make a decision and face the consequences. An actor facing a paradox makes a decision and is still thrown back to the original position, which has deteriorated through the actor's action. (3)
By providing a reconstruction of contemporary changes on the basis of systems theory, we differ from those contributions to the new risk literature that argue in the traditions of Ulrich Beck and Michel Foucault, (4) a literature that has gained momentum with the advent of terrorism and the uncertainties and threats associated with it. (5)
Analyzing terrorism from a world risk-society perspective highlights dynamics that, according to Beck, (6) expose the false promises of neoliberalism. (7) The catastrophic features of the attacks highlight the "incalculability" of terrorism, and the very organization of terrorists in networks contradicts the logic of international politics as "border" management between states. Therefore, according to Beck, terrorism as a new kind of global risk breaks out of the spatial and temporal conditions of the nation-state. (8) As a consequence, traditional categories lose their meaning: What happened on 9/11 represents a fundamental shift in the political vocabulary of inside-outside, of solidarity and territory. Their old meaning no longer captures the current situation as the attacks were neither crime nor war, neither public nor private. Consequently, we do not even have a language to conceptualize the basic problems--despite the fact that the silence of words was quickly replaced by a war machinery and gross simplification of enemy images, constructed by governments and intelligence agencies without and beyond public discourse and democratic participation. (9)
A different approach to risk has emerged from writings inspired by Michel Foucault. (10) The emphasis is less on the evolutionary contours of contemporary society but on power understood as governmentality, on how particular ways of thinking and representing risks shape subjects and subjectivity. By treating life as being segmented into various fields in which specific "technologies of the self" shape the subjects, Foucault seeks to make visible the hidden assumption of modernity itself: a separation between power and reason. While reason is about the emancipation of the self, about freedom and necessity, power is usually described in terms of domination, as the capacity to pursue one's interests despite resistance.
By seeing knowledge and power as irremediably linked, Foucault analyzes the ways in which power constructs identities and "reason." In this sense, as Aradau and van Munster have recently argued, terrorism gives rise to a new dispositif that imposes a new truth regime. (11) While risk analysis traditionally focuses on authority of knowledge and statistical technologies in shaping the future, terrorism surpasses these technologies. Rather, the rationality of catastrophic risk translates into policies that actively seek to prevent future catastrophes--that is, policies that try to control the future via the precautionary principle.
This new risk paradigm links four rationalities that stand behind the current fight against terrorism: "zero risk, worst case scenario, shifting burden of proof and serious and irreversible damage." (12) This new risk paradigm leads to an extensive surveillance system targeted against one's own population, blurring the distinction between "potential terrorists" and "innocent neighbors." Their interpretation differs from Beck's approach insofar as
if Beck saw the insurability and incalculability of risks as the limit of governmentality, a pretence supported by expert systems, a Foucauldian approach understands precautionary risk as a dispositif that attempts to "tame" the limit and govern what appears to be ungovernable. (13)
As different as these two approaches are, they both highlight interesting aspects of how terrorism has introduced new uncertainties and dangers that challenge and transform both the modern political project of the nation-state and the traditional means of deterrence and detente as the specific states' policy to assess, address, and communicate those uncertainties. Applying systems theory, we certainly share this conviction. By understanding security as a "system," however, we differ from Beck by focussing not on substantive risks but on their semantic construction; and from Foucault by concentrating not on the distinction of power and knowledge but knowledge and non-knowledge. (14)
In our view, risk names both the very boundary of the unknown and the known and the particular mode in which the unknown is translated into knowledge and policies. (15) How the unknown is framed and conceptualized--that is, how uncertainties and enemies are presented as risks--determines what kind of knowledge regime and thus power relations might evolve as soon as this style of thinking is applied in practices of governance. The fight on terror does not just introduce the precautionary principle but also the idea of prevention as new risk paradigms. From this perspective, the notion of risk highlights that "security" is an empty concept. As much as we strive for it, it appears to be an unreachable ideal. Exactly because security is understood as a "system" that needs to reproduce itself, the system not only generates security but also new insecurity, which then can be "securitized." (16)
To propose this framework, we pursue it in three steps. The first section shows how a particular notion of "insecurity" is constitutive for the security dilemma and how terrorism has invalidated it. During the Cold War, the paradoxical relation between security and insecurity was mainly conceptualized as a security dilemma. It reduced a complex predicament to a simple conflict situation of two power maximizing actors. The end of bipolarity and the advent of "terrorists" as new nonstate actors have made this conceptualization obsolete as neither the game nor the other actor, two prerequisites of the security dilemma, can be treated as a given. Terrorism, in other words, has reopened Pandora's box and broadened the range of perceived dangers to the realm...
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