ABSTRACT
Risk management has been adopted by a host of state agencies and private corporations as the gold standard in dealing with the new terrorist threat; in large part because it is premised on the idea that increased interdependence brought about by globalization also yields increased vulnerability. The tighter our production chains, the more integrated our economies, the more frequent our mobility, the less slack in our society, and the less redundancy in our security measures: the greater the efficiency, the greater the susceptibility to attack. Risk management as a governance framework seeks to focus scarce resources on risks that are ranked according to frequency and impact. Focusing on a pragmatic assessment of the possible and likely sources of danger for an organization, institutions have been prompted to reconsider old models of governance to focus on the new environment of emergency and exception. Analyses of the 9/11 attacks, especially in the comparison with the Pearl Harbor attacks of 1941, conclude that, rather than a failure of policing, of empire, of society – the 9/ 11 attacks represent a failure of the imagination. If only the policing and military powers of the state had been directed at the eighteen hijackers or the one shoe bomber or the four transit bombers, then surely it would have been successful. To cover up the plain failure of the military might of the world’s only superpower and its handmaidens to prevent the dramatic attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid, and London, the blame is assigned to those ‘‘managers of unease’’ for failing to convince policymakers that the sky was falling. And, now those self-same managers are made re-responsible for creating and legitimizing new nightmare scenarios (Amoore, this volume). The recent moral panics regarding border security, port security, container shipping, or explosive liquids are illustrative of the way in which the public imaginary of the war on terror is dominated by risk managers who, in Bigo’s terms, ‘‘not only respond to threat but also determine what is and what is not a risk’’ (2002: 74). Faced with the failure of the policy imaginary (or rather the failure of policymakers to be convinced by the imagination of the analysts, as we see
below), there was frantic securitization of a number of sectors. In our exuberance to embrace the new realities of living under threat of terrorism, a raft of invasive and emergency programs was suggested – but not all programs were successful. For example, the following programs were cancelled or curtailed due to political and public pressure: total-then terroristinformation awareness program; the terrorist futures markets; the terrorist information and prevention system; the color-coded threat advisory system; the ‘‘ReadyAmerica’’ program run by the Department of Homeland Security. In short, how do we analyze the politics of the risk imaginary in the war on terror? Bigo (2002), Amoore (2004, 2006), de Goede (2003), and the contribu-
tions to this collection examine the extensive bleeding of the war on terror and its concomitant expansion of emergency surveillance, investigatory, and policing powers into new sectors of society and new aspects of behavior. The case that this expansion is in essence biopolitical is made by Dillon (2007), Dillon and Reid (2001), and others. Without diminishing the power of this thesis, I want to make a parallel argument – the battles over the commanding heights of the popular imagination are just as important as the struggle to control mobile bodies. Serious study of the consequences of imagination for conflict can be seen in Gregory (1994), Shapiro (1997), and Gregory and Pred (2007), in which the architectures of meaning for war or spatial politics are examined through a combination of cultural and governmental texts. Shapiro argues that
to analyze how things in the world take on meanings, it is necessary to analyze the structure of imaginative processes. The imaginative enactments that produce meanings are not simply acts of a pure, disembodied consciousness; they are historically developed practices which reside in the very style in which statements are made, of the grammatical, rhetorical, and narrative structures that compose even the discourse of the sciences.
