Vital Systems Security

Here is a new and interesting article that engages some of the VSS work:

Increasingly, governmental responses to incalculable, but high-consequence, threats to life and security are framed by what has been described as the `precautionary principle’ (Ewald), `preparedness’ (Collier, Lakoff & Rabinow) or `pre-emption’ (Derrida). This article redescribes features common to these characterizations as the paradigm of prudence and examines how this approach to risk management is playing out in the context of fears that feature within the Australian political imaginary. We explore how the approach to the future entailed in the paradigm enframes `life’ and stifles democratic participation and innovation in ways of living. Three case studies (in biosecurity, bioecology and biomedicine) demonstrate not only how the paradigm pervades the government of everyday life, but also how it is challenged by human `agents’, material `life’ and the dynamic relations between these two. By formulating what this involves, we point to a concept of the political more conducive to democratic pluralism, diversity of life and innovative culture.

I am happy to introduce Amelia Moore to this blog. Amelia is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is conducting fieldwork in the Bahamas (and the U.S.). Her terrific research project focuses on biocomplexity and resonates with many other projects conducted by our little group over here at the vss blog. Amelia recently sent me a short description of her research project. To learn more, read on! Read the rest of this entry »

In the last chapter (entitled “Death”) of her new book, Dolly Mixtures, Sarah Franklin comments in interesting ways on the food and mouth crisis of 2001 and the so-called slaughter policy.

Melinda Cooper recently drew my attention to an interesting study conducted by Harvard Medical School Center and sponsored by Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme. The study predicts that “climate change will significantly affect the health of humans and ecosystems and these impacts will have economic consequences.” In addition, the study attempts to “survey” existing and future costs of climate change. It argues that the insurance industry “will be at the center of this issue, absorbing risk and helping society and business to adapt and reduce new risks.”

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In today’s Times David Brooks discusses a forum at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia on post-Bush foreign policy, which can be seen on video here. I have not had a chance to look at it in detail yet, and may report more when I do. Brooks sees a basic division in the participants, which he discussed through two exemplary figures. John Ikenberry presents what is curiously called a “milieu-based” approach (this seems to be Ikenberry’s word, not Brooks), where the U.S. works to strengthen international organizations that will work on problems like health care and poverty, as well as security. He seems to be proposing a kind of hybrid accommodation between population security and sovereign state security of the type seen after World War II. Robert Kagen, meanwhile, insists on the realist view of a “world of competing nations vying for power.” Classic sovereign state security. In any case, the videos seem very much worth watching as an index of where at least some of the more academically inclined foreign policy and security intellectuals are on these issues.