ABSTRACT
Many of the hazards faced by twenty-first century society reflect changes within the broader risk domain which are characterised by high levels of unpredictability,1 and low tolerance of risk.2 By these trends there emerges a ‘risk society’.3 In turn, the crises caused by the actual occurrence or simply the threat of terrorism, pandemic human and animal diseases, and climate disasters such as hurricanes and floods have all been taken to be reflexive outcomes of late modernity, which were much as predicted by the risk theorists. Thus, late modern terrorism can be interpreted as an unwanted by-product of networked modes of relationship, the removal of sovereign borders, and even the end of dialectical political progress in which we instead witness ‘triumphant globalisation fighting with itself’.4 Likewise pandemic diseases and disasters are posited as the darker sides of scientific or industrial ‘progress’.5
