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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
112735
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, we examine contemporary 'resilience' through UK preparedness - an apparatus of security enacted under the legal and organizational principles of UK Civil Contingencies and civil protection legislation and practices. By examining the design, practices and technologies that constitute the exercises performed within Civil Contingencies, the article first suggests that the manner in which exercises have been mobilized as examples of preparedness and apocalyptical imaginations of the 'unthinkable' should be understood within the highly specific societal and political contexts that shape them. More substantially, the article then provides a nuanced understanding of the life of the security assemblage through an in-depth analysis of the exercise and its design, materials, play and contingent relations. Seeking to deepen and widen concerns for what matters in security studies, animated by concern for objects, bodily affects, contingencies and excess, the article contends for a more serious concern with how security and its practices can surprise, shock, enthral and disrupt in a manner that need not only be associated with failure.
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| 2 |
ID:
167408
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This article examines invocations of the future in contemporary security discourse and practice. This future constitutes not a temporal zone of events to come, nor a horizon of concrete visions for tomorrow, but an indefinite source of contingency and speculation. Predictive, preemptive and otherwise anticipatory security practices strategically utilize the future to circulate the kinds of truths, beliefs, claims, that might otherwise be difficult to legitimize. The article synthesizes critical security studies with broader humanistic thought on the future, with a focus on the sting operations in recent US counter-terrorism practice. It argues that the future today functions as an ‘epistemic black market’, a zone of tolerated unorthodoxy where boundaries defining proper truth-claims become porous and flexible. Importantly, this epistemic flexibility is often leveraged towards a certain conservatism, where familiar relations of state control are reconfirmed and expanded upon. This conceptualization of the future has important implications for standards of truth and justice, as well as public imaginations of security practices, at a time of increasingly preemptive and anticipatory securitization.
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| 3 |
ID:
132694
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2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Complex planning procedures often amplify the difference in investment time between generation and transmission. In this work we consider a transmission project in Italy and, relying on a recently proposed methodology, we compare costs and benefits of anticipating the planning process before the connection of new power plants becomes certain. Whereas the system faces lower congestion costs if the network is reinforced immediately, anticipation constitutes a sunk cost in case generation is not built. For realistic load and generation scenarios, anticipation costs, as well as differences in investment times, our results indicate that anticipation is the most efficient choice for a relatively low connection probability. Analyses of this sort are particularly relevant in light of the increasing complexity of public engagement processes and of the remarkable growth in renewable generation.
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| 4 |
ID:
189463
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| Summary/Abstract |
This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. ‘Technopolitics’ refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These technopolitical practices give rise to new forms of agency, producing effects unintended by their designers that may alter logics of political contestation and allow technologies to be reappropriated for different political purposes. To illustrate the distributed forms of agency and contingent encounters that the technopolitics approach evokes, the article develops three key aspects of technopolitics in its relationship to security governance: (1) an understanding of agency as distributed between human and non-human actors, but also asymmetric in that human intentionality plays an assembling role that is frequently overrun by the unintended effects; (2) the temporal horizons of imagination and action over which technopolitical interventions unfold, identifying the importance of logics of anticipation and eventization; and (3) the relationship between technopolitics and sovereignty, arguing that it encourages a decentred and materialized understanding of how claims to sovereignty are made and contested.
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| 5 |
ID:
178190
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores how the United States (US) has redefined the concept of ‘imminent threat’ in order to relax the rules for anticipatory use of armed force against insurgents. The article focuses on how two new definitions of imminent threat have changed the conduct of specific combat activities, namely, drone strikes and ground combat operations.
The central part of the article is divided into four sections. The first section examines the redefinition of imminent threat in the context of drone warfare, while the second section provides an analysis of the redefinition of imminent threat in ground combat operations. Both sections show how the new definitions of imminent threat abandoned two key elements of the classic definition, that is, the immediacy and certainty of the threat. The third and fourth sections of the article explore how the new definitions of imminent threat prevented the application of two key principles governing the use of armed force: the principles of necessity and proportionality. Both sections show how successive US administrations enabled the US military to conduct operations without observing these two key principles regulating the use of force.
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