Extract
From insecurity to uncertainty: risk and the paradox of security politics.
The changing contours of conflicts, wars, and crises with and after the end of the Cold War have led to a semantic shift: Not the avoidance of threats, so the argument goes, but the management of risks characterizes contemporary security practices. By juxtaposing the well-known security "dilemma" with the new "security paradox," this contribution argues that a redefinition of "uncertainty" and "probability" is constitutive for this semantic shift. We argue that new security concerns like terrorism have (re)introduced "unstructured" uncertainty as the rationale for new security practices. To conceptualize this re-opening, we propose a topology of risk, uncertainty, and probability theories that highlights the multiple and conflicting logics of security policies currently at play. KEYWORDS: risk, security paradox, security dilemma, uncertainty, terrorism
********** Until the end of the Cold War, both the theory and practice of security policy focused predominantly on interstate conflicts defined by immediate military threats. The changing contours of conflicts, wars, and crises with and after the end of the Cold War opened the door for broader security concerns wherein it became increasingly clear that military threats--in the traditional sense--were no longer the most eminent problem of world politics. A first response was found in a broadening of the concept of security itself. The focus on military questions was increasingly augmented by economic, ecological, and cultural concerns. (1) Another approach was to reformulate the kind of danger that security policy addresses. Not threats, but risks dominate the security agenda, it was argued, thus redefining the task of security policy to proactively prevent or mitigate possible harm. (2) By relocating the security dilemma problematique in the semantic field of risk, probability, and uncertainty, we seek to argue two things: (1) that the security dilemma, which dominated the security discourse during the Cold War, frames the security problematique in very specific ways by assuming that uncertainty is always well defined; (2) that new security concerns like terrorism have undermined this logic by introducing new, unstructured, and undefined uncertainties. We describe this change as a transformation from the security dilemma to a security paradox. Within the security dilemma, actors know that the available options lead to equally suboptimal outcomes. Thus, there is no better way for action, but the option of nonaction is equally problematic. A paradox, by contrast, is the situation in which the condition of possibility is also the condition of impossibility. So while security policy provides security, it also creates insecurity. The dilemma and the paradox differ in their consequences. An actor facing a dilemma has to make a decision and face the consequences. An actor facing a paradox makes a decision and is still thrown back to the original position, which has deter...See the full content of this document
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