Vital Systems Security

Der Derian defines it this way:  “Securitization is the political construction of an issue that is not objectively essential to national survival, but has been portrayed as such by the government in power. Once an issue is labeled as a threat to national security, the issue takes priority above all other political issues, and governments can violate laws that must otherwise be obeyed. Through the process of securitization the legitimacy and strength of the acting powers are reinforced – as is the authority to create policy.” 

How does this concept relate to our discussion of different ways of defining the state’s obligation to provide security?  Der Derian seems to assume there is clear distinction that can be made between issues that are “objectively  essential to national survival” and those that are not.  So it seems to be  a concept for distinguishing between legitimate and illegimate uses of the term “security.”  

I have been looking a bit into the problem of enactment and war games. In so doing, a couple of interesting links came up, including to a couple first-order practitioners of war gaming, James F. Dunnigan and Kenneth Watman and to an article by James Der Derian at the Watson Institute that is worth a read. In our article on “Distributed Preparedness” Andy and I put forward the idea that imaginative enactment is one of the key techniques of a future oriented (rather than archive-oriented) form of knowledge about collective life. The war game story is clearly an important part of the genealogy of imaginative enactment. Civil defense was one point of transfer from military to civilian affairs. Certainly there are others.

As an aside, Der Derian’s website is very much worth checking out as an effort to produce some online space for security discussions.

This is an excellent empirical paper on precaution: Henry F. Rothstein (2004) Precautionary Bans or Sacrificial Lambs? Participative Risk Regulation and the Reform of the UK Food Safety Regime. Rothstein presents a case study that works nicely as a contrast to and complement of Ewald’s work.

In an article published in 2003 on “Catastrophe Risk” in Economy and Society, Phillip Bougen follows the application of insurantial calculation to the unpredictable field of catastrophes and natural disasters. In fact, reinsurance for insurance companies faced with disasters beyond the scale of their actuarial analysis is a long-standing practice, though one whose forms of rationality are little known. As one analyst puts it, these rationalizations are “either a carefully guarded secret to be protected at all costs or . . . the methods [reinsurers] employ defy description or communication to interested parties.” Read the rest of this entry »

This paper seems very interesting: “From Risks to Second Order Dangers”. I haven’t read the entire piece, only the page on Luhmann which articulates very succinctly why the key problem is “time”. Risk is envisioned as entailing a decision that makes a difference in the present. Such a decision construes its own future. Hence the idea of a seamless continuity of past, present, and future is analytically entirely inadequate because every decision introduces a break. And since there is a general tendency to discover everywhere decisions (even in what once was called ‘nature’), the future appears as changing faster than ever.
This conceptual approach suggests a move against the historical consciousness that has dominated much of the 19th and 20th century. It also makes clear why social constructivism as a late child of historicism is an inadequate mode of observation. Rather, the anthropology of the contemporary and, in particular, the peculiar temporality of its mode of observation seems to be the most adequate entry point for an exploration of risk after the dominance of actuarial risk assessment.

Hungarian authorities on Wednesday [24 Jan 2007] reported an outbreak
of H5N1 avian influenza in the southeast of the country, the 1st instance of the virus in the EU since August 2006.

“With so much activity occurring in the field of public health preparedness, the 2007 Local, State, and Federal Public Health Preparedness Summit is the one opportunity each year for individuals from all parts of the country to come together and learn about new methods of meeting preparedness challenges.” Fieldwork, anyone?

I don’t recall whether this has come across our screen before, but this seems to be a center for risk related analytic work and critical social science at LSE. It includes some of the folks in the risk discussions (Beck, Ericson) as well as more technocratic types. Lots of working papers…worth a scan. The seminars look to be on the technical side; I was particularly drawn to one on participatory risk mapping. Also the research fellowships may be of interest to some.

An op-ed in the Times today discusses the threat of catastrophic failure of dams in the United States. It is written by a certain Jacques Leslie, who, according to his website, has long worked on a variety of issues concerning dam construction, particularly, it seems, in the context of development projects. The op-ed points to a number of classic U.S. vss problems. For one, a large percentage of dams in the United States are privately held, and, therefore, their vulnerability to failure is difficult to assess or manage (moreover, he notes, a substantial number of dams have no known ownership, so it is not clear who would even be responsible for their maintenance in principle, sort of like abandoned tenaments on the Lower East Side in the 1970s). What is more, there are a number of longstanding vss practices in this domain: for example, an Army Corps of Engineers National Inventory of Dams, which was mandated by Congress in 1972, and a “report card” on dams issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers. (I think that the latter may be a product of the late 1970s discussions around America’s decaying infrastructure.) In any case, this is clearly one of a number of sectoral domains in which there are longstanding practices of vital systems security, but, apparently, no clearly institutionalized mechanism for assigning responsibility.

A recent Boston Globe article describes how Boston Public Health is using syndromic surveillance to detect an ongoing large-scale outbreak of norovirus (a gastrointestinal disease).  The article explicitly distinguishes uses for bioterror and for natural disease: “Initially, the tracking systems, known as syndromic surveillance networks, were trumpeted for their potential to detect bioterror attacks.
But since dozens of public and private health agencies activated the networks, specialists have increasingly recognized that the first-generation systems now in operation may be better suited for identifying large outbreaks of gastrointestinal and respiratory illnesses.”

Read the rest of this entry »