Security, risk, uncertainty

This course will offer an introduction to the study of risk and uncertainty through the lens of security. We will investigate how the issues of risk and uncertainty have been practically and politically entangled with security, bringing different kinds of stakeholders and experts to the field of security. Soldiers, diplomats, police officers, elected officials, but also teachers, scientists, engineers, insurers, NGO representatives, and even ordinary citizens are the actors mobilised within our societies 'of' and 'at' risk. The course will examine the effects of this international and transnational convergence between threat prevention and the management of increasingly uncertain risks in diverse domains: health, climate change, terrorism, border control, global finance, etc. It will pay particular attention to the implications of the use of technologies such as nuclear power, biometrics and AI; what kinds of knowledge are implicated; or what risk and uncertainty logic do to the idea of 'State' as the security provider.



Session 1: Methodological and key concepts introduction

Readings:

Mearsheimer John J. & Walt Stephen M. (2003), An Unnecessary War, Foreign Policy, Washington N° 134, (Jan/Feb 2003): 50-59.

Beck Ulrich (2001), Interview with Ulrich Beck, Journal of Consumer Culture, Vol 1(2): 261-277.



Session 2: Political security and risk society: Political risk approaches

Reading:

Jarvis Darryl S. L. (2007), Risk, Globalisation and the State: A Critical Appraisal of Ulrich Beck and the World Risk Society Thesis, Global Society, Vol. 21, No 1: 23-46.



Session 3: Security Studies and Global risk management: Reflexive modernity approaches

Reading:

Rasmussen Mikkel Vedby (2004), It Sounds Like a Riddle: Security Studies, the War on Terror and Risk, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol.33, No.2, pp. 381-395.



Session 4: Governmentality of risk and practices: Critical approaches

Reading:

Aradau Claudia & van Munster Rens (2008), Insuring terrorism, assuring subjects, ensuring normality: The politics of risk after 9/11, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 33(2): 191-210.



Session 5: Uncertainty as risk in Security politics: War on Global Terror

Reading:

Kessler Oliver and Daase Christopher (2008), From Insecurity to Uncertainty: Risk and the Paradox of Security Politics, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Apr.-June 2008, Vol. 33, No. 2: pp. 211-232.



Session 6: Managing risk and security through uncertainty: Nuclear Weapons

Reading:

Pelopidas Benoit (2017), The unbearable lightness of luck: Three sources of overconfidence in the manageability of nuclear crises, European Journal of International Security, Vol. 2, part 2: pp. 240-262.



Session 7: Riskification of security: Global warming

Reading:

Corry Olaf (2012), Securitisation and Riskification: Second-order Security and the Politics of Climate Change, in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(2): 235-258.



Session 8: Datafication of risk and biopolitics of uncertainty

Reading:

Aas Katja F. (2011), The body does not lie: Identity, risk and trust in technoculture, in Keith Hayward (Ed.), Cultural Criminology, theories of crime, London: Routledge, pp 413-428.



Session 9: Predicting uncertainty and risk through technologies

Reading:

Brayne Sarah & Christin Angèle (2020), Technologies of Crime Prediction: The Reception of Algorithms in Policing and Criminal Courts, Social Problems: pp. 1-17.