Lentzos and Rose - 2009 - Governing Insecurity

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Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience

Filippa Lentzos a; Nikolas Rose a a BIOS Centre, London School of Economics, London, UK Online Publication Date: 01 May 2009
To cite this Article Lentzos, Filippa and Rose, Nikolas(2009)'Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection,
resilience',Economy and Society,38:2,230 254

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Economy and Society Volume 38 Number 2 May 2009: 230 254
Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose
Abstract
How should we understand the politics of security today? This article addresses this question from one particular perspective, that of biosecurity. It examines contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Europe, and that one can identify three different configurations: contingency planning, protection and resilience. Each of these embodies a significantly different way of reconciling fundamental imperatives for those who would govern a liberal society today the imperative of freedom and the imperative of security. Keywords: security; insecurity; biosecurity; risk; threat; bioterrorism; biological weapons.
security
I. The condition of being secure. 1. a. The condition of being protected from or not exposed to danger; safety. b. The safety or safeguarding of (the interests of) a state, organization, person, etc., against danger, esp. from espionage or theft; the exercise of measures to this
Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose, BIOS Centre, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online DOI: 10.1080/03085140902786611
Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity
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end; (the maintenance of) secrecy about military movements or diplomatic negotiations; in espionage, the maintenance of cover. Hence (with capital initial), a department (in government service, etc.) charged with ensuring this. (This sense tends towards the condition of making secure.) 2. Freedom from doubt; confidence, assurance. Now chiefly, well-founded confidence, certainty. 3. Freedom from care, anxiety or apprehension; a feeling of safety or freedom from or absence of danger. Formerly often spec. (now only contextually) culpable absence of anxiety, carelessness. . . . II. A means of being secure. ... 5. Something which secures or makes safe; a protection, guard, defence.
Insecurity
The quality or condition of being insecure; the opposite of security. 1. The condition of not being sure; want of assurance or confidence; (subjective) uncertainty. (Oxford English Dictionary Online)
How should we understand the politics of security today? Many authors suggest that concerns about terrorism have led some countries towards a whole-scale programme of securitization: border controls, regimes of surveillance and monitoring, novel forms of individuation and identification, notably those based on biometrics, preventive detention or exclusion of those thought to pose significant risks, massive investment in the security apparatus and much more. Have the political rationalities of advanced liberal democracies been displaced by new rationalities and technologies of government animated by the telos of security? In this article we want to explore some facets of this question in relation to bioterrorism, or the deliberate spread of disease in civilian populations.1 Across the twentieth century, many countries have sought to develop biological weapons, including Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, France, the Soviet Union, Iraq and South Africa, although, with one exception2 none of these programmes ever led to the use of biological weapons in war (Guillemin, 2005; Wheelis, Ro zsa & Dando, 2006). Indeed, the limited historical examples available to us show that biological pathogens are difficult to weaponize and use with precision and with large-scale effects. Aum Shinrikyo, for example, spent US$20 million over a four-year period to develop its chemical and biological weapons programme, which included a dedicated biological weapons laboratory and production facility with a dozen
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well-educated scientists and technicians, yet, despite seven attempts at disseminating its anthrax weapons in Tokyo, no cases of disease or death resulted and the programme failed to produce any kind of workable biological weapon (Leitenberg, 1999). However, to use Mary Douglass term, the ranking of potential threats or dangers in the risk portfolio of individuals, groups or cultures at any one time bears little relation to the actual probabilities of harm or injury from different sources (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982). And today, in many countries, the risk of bioterrorism certainly ranks high (Lentzos, 2006). After some preliminary remarks on security, we examine contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Europe, and that one can identify three different configurations: contingency planning, protection and resilience. We do not want to suggest that each of the states we examine France, Germany and the United Kingdom represents one pure or ideal type; indeed each is diverse and there are important crossovers and overlaps between the strategies they have adopted. But nonetheless we suggest that it is possible to identify, within this heterogeneity, different ways of reconciling the two fundamental imperatives for those who would govern a liberal society today the imperative of freedom and the imperative of security.
Freedom and insecurity Faced with the contemporary socio-political salience of security, some have turned to Michel Foucaults reflections recently published as Security, territory, population (Foucault, 2007). In these lectures, given some thirty years ago, Foucault distinguishes between a centripetal disciplinary mechanism and a centrifugal security mechanism. A centripetal mechanism, he suggests, circumscribes a closed space for its operations, and isolates and concentrates its technologies, trying to regulate everything within that space, establishing norms, operating according to the principle of the permitted and the forbidden, and taking up the smallest infraction and trying to control it. In a centrifugal mechanism of security, however: New elements are constantly being integrated: production, psychology, behavior, the ways of doing things of producers, buyers, consumers, importers, and exporters, and the world market. Security therefore involves organizing, or anyway allowing the development of ever-wider circuits (2007, p. 45). Security, in such centripetal logics, does not classify phenomena according to a fixed grid of good and evil, does not try to control and eliminate all infractions, but regards variations as inescapable in natural phenomena. This logic does not operate according to the binary of permitted and forbidden, does not judge a variation as evil in itself, but tries to grasp the reality of the natural phenomena that it addresses, to understand the way in which various components function together, to manage or regulate that complex reality towards desired ends.
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Security, for Foucault, is intrinsically linked to liberal notions of freedom, for: The game of liberalism . . . basically and fundamentally means acting so that reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself (2007, p. 48). And, he continues:
this freedom, both ideology and technique of government, should in fact be understood within the mutations and transformations of technologies of power. More precisely and particularly, freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the deployment of apparatuses of security. An apparatus of security . . . cannot operate well except on condition that it is given freedom, in the modern sense [the word] acquired in the eighteenth century: no longer the exemptions and privileges attached to a person, but the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things. (Foucault, 2007, pp. 48 49)
These early formulations contain many of the elements that Foucault later framed in terms of governmentality. Indeed security, here, describes the form of governmental reason that underpinned actually existing liberalism across the nineteenth century and as it developed into the social government of the twentieth century, which had social security as its central element. Indeed social government is essentially government of a certain type of social insecurity accident, illness, old age, unemployment in the name of social security, and as the underpinnings of a certain kind of freedom embodied in social citizenship. As Franc ois Ewald has argued, these insurantial logics are based on the presupposition that risk is calculable according to a logic of probability, that it is collectivized across a social space and that it is compensatable in the form of capital (Ewald, 1991). As we know, social government, with its social logics for securing security, was problematized in the last decades of the twentieth century in favour of a different notion of freedom and a different set of mechanisms for securing security that one of us has termed advanced liberal (Rose, 1999; Miller & Rose, 2008). The styles of governing that took shape in many Western democracies in the last decades of the twentieth century, endeavoured to govern without governing society to govern through the responsibilized choices of autonomous entities, whether these be organizations, enterprises, hospitals, schools, community groups or individuals and their families. Within these rationalities, security was to be secured in different ways, not all of which had the state as their ultimate guarantor or the social conceived of as a circumscribed national territory as their locus of operation. New technologies were invented or deployed which sought to govern through the activities of multiple quasi-autonomous agencies, from those responsible for regulating financial services and prisons to those charged with the tasks of neighbourhood security or food safety. In this new regulatory strategy for securing security, new links were formed between offices and departments of state, quasi-public agencies and private and corporate entities that were in business to calculate,
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advise and provide various kinds of security. This involved a reconfiguration of the agencies and expertise of security. It also involved a novel way of framing the relations between freedom, security and government, in which freedom, understood in the sense of the autonomization and responsibilization of actors, was to become the governing principle which had to be aligned in new postsocial ways with the imperatives of security. But, if freedom remained, in Foucaults terms the possibility of movement, change of place, and processes of circulation of both people and things, this was exactly the zone that was to be rendered problematic in the configurations for governing security in the early twenty-first century.3 How can openness, movement, circulation be made compatible with security? How can such freedom be secured in an open society, without destroying the possibility for these flows of persons and things in the very process of seeking to defend them? How can responsible autonomy of those mobile individuals and entities, including the devolution of responsibility for security, be reconciled with the reciprocal maintenance of the security of the population on which that depends? What aspects of the liberty of each can be maintained, and what must be restricted, in the interests of the security of all. For many, the focus on security reactivates the dream of discipline everything is to be known, everything is to be rendered visible and subject to calculation: a surveillance society, a Big Brother State or a state of exception where sovereign power over each and all is reasserted in a modern tat (cf. Lyon, 2007, for a helpful overview). Contemporary version of raison dE rationalities of security certainly seek to grid the spaces of existence with technologies for collecting and collating information, with algorithms for its analysis, criteria for judgement and strategies for coercive intervention. Yet they differ from discipline in a number of ways. First, they do not operate in the closed space of institutions, but across the many planes of movement of persons, commodities, knowledge, communications within and between nations. Second, because of this plurality of planes and vectors, and the plurality of agencies and forces involved, strategies of security cannot be those of a single, all-seeing and all-controlling State: they must give a high priority to mechanisms of coordination, the linking together of very diverse agencies, involving the invention of novel ways of thinking, calculating, acting and intervening. Third, the norms of security are no longer, as with discipline, fixed criteria for judging infractions of conduct, but neither are they the vicissitudes of natural phenomena. They are the patterns and regularities in flows across these planes, patterns that can be identified statistically, codified epidemiologically, rendered into probabilities, from which stochastic variations can be extracted that match patterns previously identified as suspicious. Fourth, strategies of security are as our epigraph suggested not simply addressed to states of affairs but also to beliefs, affects, feelings that is to say, to [t]he condition of being protected from or not exposed to danger; safety. One must not simply seek to safeguard the interests of a state, organization, person, etc., against danger, but also to produce a state of
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freedom from doubt, of confidence (preferably well-founded), of assurance and freedom from care, anxiety or apprehension; thus, paradoxically, the need to govern security through insecurity, by using and indeed intensifying subjective states of doubt, anxiety, apprehension and the like, with the aim of making individuals responsible for key aspects of security, that is to say, by ensuring the vigilance, preparedness and pre-emption required to secure security. Fifth, strategies of intervention are no longer focused on compensation after the event, but are those of anticipation, precaution and pre-emption. We want to focus on this fifth dimension. How are those in authority to bring potential undesirable futures into the present in order to pre-empt them? Preparedness has become the watchword, especially in the United States following the criticisms of policies prior to the attacks of September 2001 and the furore over disaster management in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005. The language of preparedness has spread from disaster preparedness, through preparedness for epidemic diseases, to preparedness for individual survival in an emergency.4 Indeed, this language has become so widespread in the United States that it is much parodied.5 But preparedness is not merely American. In July 2007, the European Commission issued its Green paper on biopreparedness (Commission of the European Communities, 2007). The paper highlights the potential challenge of bioterrorist attack, its relatively low risk but its potentially devastating consequences (2007, p. 2). It uses preparedness
in a generic way covering all aspects such as prevention, protection, first response capacity, prosecution of criminals/terrorists, surveillance, research capacity, response and recovery. The term will also cover the steps taken to minimise the threat of deliberate contamination of the food supply through biological agents . . . and to protect against biological warfare. (Commission of the European Communities, 2007, p. 3)
And it argues for a

biological all-hazards approach generic preparedness within overall crisis management capability. Indeed, such an approach aims at taking into consideration all potential risks, from a terrorist attack, other intentional releases, accidents or naturally occurring diseases, so as to be prepared to handle all crisis situations relating to food supply chain protection. (Commission of the European Communities, 2007, p. 3)
Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff, in their studies of biosecurity in the US, have coined the term distributed preparedness to recognize the multiple levels, agencies and actions that are to be brought together in such strategies, and the links established between preparations relating to naturally-occurring pathogens, accidental releases and deliberate attack.6 But, as the Green paper itself recognizes, this imperative of preparedness is not new: it builds on a framework of laws, procedures, safety guidelines, diverse agencies with their own areas of responsibility and mechanisms of inter-agency coordination,
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emergency and disaster preparation and planning and more that has been established in modern nation-states over many decades.7 So what is specific about today? Some suggest the key to understanding the specificity of our present lies in the distinction between risk and uncertainty (for the classical treatment of this distinction, see Knight, 1921). Risk thinking, from this perspective, implied a future that could be acted upon in the present because it could be calculated about in the present the futures that were to be acted upon pre-emptively were law-like, their likelihood could be inferred in various ways by means of the laws of probability (Hacking, 1990). In fact, as Ericson and Doyle have demonstrated, much more was involved in insurance than merely an objective actuarial calculation of risks: uncertainty which they define as the lack of secure knowledge about an unwanted outcome involving a way of calculating about the future that is overlain with non-probabilistic reasoning that is aesthetic, emotional and experiential was ever present (Ericson and Doyle, 2004, pp. 4 5). Perhaps then what has changed, if anything, is the configuration of modes of calculation employed in rendering the future into the present. Contemporary logics of security are certainly attuned to uncertain and multiple potential futures that do not operate according to statistical, probabilistic or epidemiological rules. But, while it is true that their attention to uncertainty poses problems for rationalities of risk management, nonetheless these uncertain futures must be rendered thinkable, prepared for and preempted or mitigated. Those who must undertake this task must certainly do more than simply calculate risks using algorithms derived from the past. However, this does not entail a resort to non-rational ways to bring the future into the present, but rather requires the use of different modes of rationalization (cf. OMalley, 2003, 2004). Thus one sees the development of multiple technologies of futurity, most of which seek to model potential futures, notably scenario planning construed as a part of strategic planning that seeks to develop the tools and technologies for imagining potential futures and then managing their consequences.8 Such endeavours must not remain simply paper games: hence the need to model them on the ground with exercises that simulate a variety of different potential attacks or threats and test capacities to cope with them. Such exercises preparing for eventualities through simulated events are not themselves new: they have formed a part of military planning, and of the planning of health and medical services, since the middle of the twentieth century. But their centrality to contemporary rationalities of futurity is more evident than ever, as is shown by the fact that, since the 1960s, rationalities of scenario planning, contingency management and so forth have spawned a new market for commercial consultancy and insurance. Uncertainty, too, can be capitalized and compensated. Let us turn to examine some current strategies in the area of bioterrorism and biosecurity to see the extent to which they exemplify novel strategies and technologies for framing and responding to biothreats. We make use of an excellent recent review of national and multilateral biodefence efforts Sergio
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Bonins International biodefence handbook (Bonin, 2007) to describe the rationalities of biodefence taking shape in France, Germany and the UK. Our aim is to see what can be learned from these examples about emerging rationalities and technologies for governing insecurity. But, first, let us briefly turn to the United States.
National configurations of biosecurity The United States can function as a useful point of comparison for European developments.9 The Bush administration considered building a biodefence capacity a critical national priority. In the words of George Bush: Bioterrorism is a real threat to our country. Its a threat to every nation that loves freedom. Terrorist groups seek biological weapons; we know some rogue states already have them. Its important we confront these real threats to our country and prepare for future emergencies. The Homeland Security Presidential Directive of April 2004 describes the Bush administrations biodefence strategy. This document is classified, but the non-classified version, Biodefense for the 21st century (White House, 2004), spells out its commitment to biodefence: The United States will continue to use all means necessary to prevent, protect against, and mitigate biological weapons attacks perpetrated against our homeland and our global interests. In addition to its vast array of threat and vulnerability-assessment exercises, prevention-and-protection efforts, surveillance-and-detection programmes and response-and-recovery initiatives, the administration has been developing and expanding the biodefence infrastructure, where efforts are primarily focused on a nationwide group of institutions collectively described as the Homeland Security Biodefense Complex (HSBC). Its centrepiece is the Department of Homeland Securitys National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), but it also includes the Plum Island Animal Disease Control Center, the Biodefense Knowledge Center at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ten newly-established university-based Regional Centers of Excellence for Biodefense and a number of high-containment laboratories still under construction. One estimate of US biodefence expenditure since 2001 is that $50 billion have been spent or allocated among eleven federal departments and agencies, and for fiscal year 2009 the Bush administration was proposing an additional $9 billion in bioweapons-related spending (Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, 2008).10 In comparison with the US, European responses look rather different. France, Germany and the UK each operates within a general concern to enhance bio-preparedness, and there are many overlaps and similarities between the strategies they have developed. Yet, despite the undoubtedly heterogeneous form of each strategy, and the no doubt messy and contingent processes that have been involved in assembling the strategies, it is possible to use this comparison for heuristic purposes, to draw out three slightly different
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rationalities for governing bio-insecurity today, each of which has a rather different logic and rather different implications.
France A classified strategy to counter bioterrorism has been developed in France. Following the Amerithrax letters in the US, thousands of suspected anthrax letters circulated in France in October of 2001, and, while all of these turned out to be hoaxes, their appearance together with experiences of SARS prompted the evaluation and improvement of French biodefence capacities. The result was the Biotox plan. Part of a series of intervention plans collectively entitled Vigipirate and including a chemical incidents plan (the Piratox plan) and a nuclear and radiological incidents plan (Piratome plan), the Biotox plan covers: the prevention of biological terrorism, including the possibility of deliberate contamination of drinking-water supply networks, as well as of the food and pharmaceutical supply chains; principal agents that can potentially be used as biological weapons; the strategic stockpiling of vaccines, antibiotics and antidotes; surveillance and alert mechanisms; the mandatory communication of infectious diseases; the network of microbiological and toxicological laboratories, including the assignment of reference laboratories; and response plans to various scenarios. The plan was developed by the General Secretariat of National Defense (SGDN), directly subordinated to the prime minister and tasked with the elaboration of the governments contingency plans for major risks and crises. However the lead authority for Biotox is the General Directorate of Health (DGS). DGS is responsible for the overall coordination and evaluation of French public health policy in general, and part of its role is consequence management of deliberate, accidental or natural outbreaks of infectious diseases and communicating related information to the public. As part of the Biotox plan the DGS has elaborated response plans for anthrax, plague, tularaemia and smallpox outbreaks. It is also responsible for managing the kind, quantity and storage of vaccines, and organizing their distribution and the vaccination of first responders. In the summer of 2003, the French minister of health appointed a Biotox coordinator, located within the DGS, who is responsible for coordinating the plan within and between ministries. A major exercise of the Biotox plan took place in 2004. More than forty distinct agencies and institutions, some formally part of the State, others semi-autonomous, are involved in aspects of biodefence and the Biotox plan.11 While there are undoubted differences between the approaches of these multiple bodies, we suggest that we can observe an integrating rationale at work that we term contingency planning. Contingency planning can be said to operate in terms of the following logic: assume that novel, natural or artificial threats will always be occurring; enumerate the potential threats no matter how unlikely some may seem; characterize each threat,
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paying particular attention to its development over time from and distance from the immediate aftermath to the period of recovery; allocate agencies to each potential threat, bearing in mind the timeline and the need to re-establish critical functions first; develop guidelines; plan coordination; train personnel; test the plan in a situation closely resembling a real incident; enhance methods of early detection of threats and procedures for rapid assessment and implementation of contingency plans; prepare for rapid response; keep plans under regular review. Contingency planning of this sort is nothing new. Thus while the French strategy is certainly elaborate, seeking to ensure preparedness, to model responses and to achieve coordinated responses, the reaction to the threat of biological terrorism has been to strengthen existing technologies designed for the detection and mitigation of non-terrorist incidents, rather than radically to reformulate governmental strategies in the name of a new logic of securitization.
Germany A large number of fake anthrax letters also circulated in Germany in the wake of the Amerithrax letters. Those reflecting on this period highlight a lack of preparedness and coordination of first responders as well as insufficient laboratory capacity for the identification of biological agents. Alongside the September 11 attacks in the US and the 2002 flooding of the river Elbe, this prompted a reconsideration of civil threats and risks, and gave rise to new strategic thinking on civil protection and disaster management, formalized in June 2002 through the New Strategy for Protecting the People of Germany. Previously, disaster preparedness and relief had been the individual responsibility of the sixteen federal states (or La nder), with the federal government assuming responsibility for civil emergency planning only during wartime. There is now stronger cooperation between federal and state officials on disaster management of national significance like natural or industrial hazards, epidemics and international terrorism. The main organizational change has been the establishment of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK). The BBK operates the German Joint Information and Situation Centre (GMLZ) and the German Emergency Preparedness Information System (deNIS), which provide new instruments for coordinating information, communication and resource management between the federal and state levels in case of large-scale events. The BBK also operates the Satellite-Based Warning System (SatWaS), established in October 2001 to provide an alert system and to enable hazard information and crisis communication to be disseminated to the population via the media. The BBKs Center for Civil Protection Research develops methods, procedures and technologies in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear
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(CBRN) protection including CBRN reconnaissance vehicles, decontamination vehicles and personal CBRN protection equipment. Its Center for Disease Medicine provides medical support to the population in emergency situations and is involved in the development of emergency plans, including medical concepts for CBRN incidents. Its central training centre, the Academy for Crisis Management, Emergency Planning and Civil Protection (AKNZ), offers courses on the management of CBRN incidents, including biological risks and ways of handling them. The BBK aims to develop a comprehensive and coordinated nationwide framework for the emergency management of largescale biological incidents, covering detection, diagnostics, clinical capacities, risk communication, decontamination and personal protective equipment. Further, the Koch Institute (RKI) has been given federal responsibility for disease control and prevention, tasked primarily with epidemiological and medical monitoring and analysis of public health in Germany and with the evaluation of dangerous or widespread diseases. In terms of biodefence, it is charged with the identification and prevention of attacks involving biological agents or natural disease outbreaks. It has elaborated national contingency plans for pandemic influenza and smallpox and it maintains an Outbreak Investigation Team that assists and coordinates the work of the La nder at their request and similar teams at the regional level in case of an infectious disease outbreak. It has also established a Centre for Biological Safety (ZBS) which focuses on the diagnostics of infectious agents, scenario modelling and the coordination of national and international programmes for biological safety and security. The centre also maintains the Federal Information Centre for Biological Safety (IBBS) which cooperates with civil defence sections at other federal ministries, with the La nder and their local authorities, and with European and international institutions, and teaches a training course on the Advanced Medical Management of Bioterrorist Incidents and Threats (AMBIT), targeted towards public health officers and physicians in order to raise their awareness and preparedness as first responders. In addition to these institutes under the overall umbrella of the BBK, at least thirty-five other state and non-state organizations or institutions are engaged in the work of governing bio-insecurity.12 The logic that underpins these arrangements does involve contingency planning as in France, but it is perhaps best captured by the notion of protection as in the very name of the strategy for Protecting the German People. Protection, as the dictionary definition indicates, suggests a rationale of care, providing shelter or defence. And in the German situation, in response to the perception of threat, risk, hazard and disaster, the State and its agencies enunciated their obligation to place the population under a kind of guardianship or patronage designed to secure each and all from the threat of harm or danger.
Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity The United Kingdom
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Protect and Survive was the title of a civil defence programme of public information produced by the British government in the 1970s to advise the civilian population on how to protect themselves in event of a nuclear attack (Home Office, 1976).13 The programme was much ridiculed, not merely for the seeming inadequacy of the measures it suggested, but also for the fatalistic tone this implied that attack was impending and that significant casualties were inevitable, but nonetheless people should not be alarmed and should be prepared to resume their normal duties within a few days (Thompson & Smith, 1980; Smith, 1980). In response, a review of civil preparedness for home defence was announced, though its results were not made public. Preparations appeared to consist of allocation of responsibilities to local authorities to make contingency plans, and the creation of hardened bunkers to act as seats of regional government after nuclear attack. A number of exercises were conducted to test out these arrangements, but with the end of the Cold War, in the 1990s, these plans appeared redundant. How, then has the UK construed the new risks and threats, and how has it responded? The terrorist attacks of September 11 and the hoax anthrax letters that also followed in the UK do not appear to have had the same impact on British biosecurity policy as they did in France and Germany.14 A few months before the September 11 attacks the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS) at the Cabinet Office was established, reporting directly to the Prime Minister. CCS is responsible for emergency planning and for assessing, anticipating and preventing future crises. Its aim is to improve UK resilience that is to say, the ability to handle any disruptive challenges that can lead to, or result in, crisis (not just terrorism but also eventualities like flood and fuel crisis). It does this primarily through the Capabilities Programme, which concentrates on ensuring that a robust infrastructure is in place to deal rapidly, effectively and flexibly with the consequences of conventional or non-conventional disruptive activity. The programme consists of a total of eighteen capability workstreams, one of which is on CBRN Resilience. Led by the Home Office, the CBRN Resilience workstream aims to ensure a quick and effective response from all parties concerned in the event of a terrorist incident to save lives and minimize the impact on property and the environment. To this end, the Home Office has provided: mobile decontamination units for nationwide use by ambulance and emergency departments; personal protection suits for key health workers and high performance gastight suits for fire-fighters; stockpiles of emergency medical equipment, strategically stored around the country and available within twenty-four hours; special training for police officers to deal with CBRN incidents. The Home Office also runs a programme of major exercises that specifically deal with terrorist scenarios. It simulates three full-scale live terrorist attacks and twelve to fifteen tabletop or workshop exercises each year, the results of which feed into the UK counter-terrorism contingency manual (2003) a
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classified document used by everyone involved in responding to terrorism incidents. The biggest CBRN exercise was Exercise Horizon, consisting of three separate exercises carried out in 2004 and 2005. Another key institution is the Health Protection Agency (HPA). The HPA provides a comprehensive service in support of health protection for all types of emergencies, regardless of whether they are natural, accidental or deliberate, and irrespective of whether they are conventional or involve a release of CBRN substances. This includes preventing and controlling infectious diseases; reducing the adverse effects of chemical, microbiological and radiological hazards, and preparing for potential and emerging threats. The HPA is also responsible for: providing training in preparedness and response to potential bioterrorist incidents and in the diagnosis and recognition of symptoms of unusual dangerous micro-organisms; carrying out and coordinating exercises at the local and national levels with the National Health Service (NHS), local authorities and the emergency services to improve national preparedness in the event of major bioterrorist incidents; maintaining surveillance of potential threats both nationally and internationally. In addition to this, the HPA is the sole manufacturer of the UKs licensed anthrax vaccine, it is responsible for the delivery of the Food, Water and Environmental Microbiology Testing Service and it maintains the National Collection of Type Culture. Institutions under the responsibility of the HPA include the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre (CDSC), the Centre for Infections (CfI), and the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response (CEPR). In addition, more than thirty other state, quasi-state and non-state bodies have some responsibilities in this domain.15 It would be mistaken to try to draw too clear a distinction between the logics underpinning the biosecurity strategy in the UK and that in France and Germany. But if one was to seek a single term to characterize it in the UK, this would be resilience. UK Resilience is the name of the website which links together all the various governmental initiatives aiming to reduce the risk from emergencies so that people can go about their business freely and with confidence.16 It brings together information on high-profile risks such as avian influenza, on emergency preparedness, response and recovery, on the civil contingencies initiative and much more, linking together procedures for addressing severe weather, flooding, drought, human health, terrorism, transport accidents, animal and plant diseases, public protest and industrial action, international events, industrial technical failure, structural failure, industrial accidents and environmental pollution. What, then, is a logic of resilience? Initially an act of rebounding, recoiling or springing back: in the nineteenth century the term became applied to the capacity of a property or a structure to regain its initial shape after compression, and then, later, to the mental state of being able to withstand stress or adverse circumstances or to recover quickly from their effects, and, later still, to the capacity of systems, structures or organizations to resist being affected by shock or disaster, and to recover quickly from such events.17
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Significantly, resilience, today, has become something that can be engineered into systems, organizations, perhaps nations and persons. In the words of the Resilience Engineering Network:
The term Resilience Engineering represents a new way of thinking about safety. Whereas conventional risk management approaches are based on hindsight and emphasise error tabulation and calculation of failure probabilities, Resilience Engineering looks for ways to enhance the ability of organisations to create processes that are robust yet flexible, to monitor and revise risk models, and to use resources proactively in the face of disruptions or ongoing production and economic pressures. In Resilience Engineering failures do not stand for a breakdown or malfunctioning of normal system functions, but rather represent the converse of the adaptations necessary to cope with the real world complexity. Individuals and organisations must always adjust their performance to the current conditions; and because resources and time are finite it is inevitable that such adjustments are approximate. Success has been ascribed to the ability of groups, individuals, and organisations to anticipate the changing shape of risk before damage occurs; failure is simply the temporary or permanent absence of that. (from http://www.resilience.org)
A logic of resilience, then, is not merely an attitude of preparedness; to be resilient is not quite to be under protection nor merely to have systems in place to deal with contingencies. Resilience implies a systematic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective and material arrangements so as to be better able to anticipate and tolerate disturbances in complex worlds without collapse, to withstand shocks, and to rebuild as necessary. Perhaps the opposite of a Big Brother State, a logic of resilience would aspire to create a subjective and systematic state to enable each and all to live freely and with confidence in a world of potential risks.
The logics of biosecurity Of course, the internal national arrangements that we have described are only one element within the novel strategies for governing bio-insecurity that are taking shape in a context of transnational threat and risk management. France, Germany and the UK have all signed and ratified the 1925 Geneva Protocol banning the use of chemical and biological weapons in war and the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention banning weapons, equipment and means of delivery designed to use biological agents for hostile purposes or in armed conflict as well as the development, production and stockpiling of biological agents that have no justification for peaceful purposes. All three countries are members of the Australia Group and participating states in the Wassenaar Arrangement networks of states focusing on export controls to prevent would-be proliferators from obtaining materials for, among other things, biological weapons.
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Further, a whole set of transnational strategies are being set in place. As Kofi Annan, the then Secretary General of the United Nations, noted in his address to the Biological Weapons Convention review conference in 2006:18
In the five years since the last review conference, global circumstances have changed, and risks evolved. We see today a strong focus on preventing terrorism, as well as renewed concern about naturally occurring diseases such as SARS and avian flu . . . Over the same period, advances in biological science and technology continued to accelerate, promising enormous benefits for human development, but also posing potential risks. These changes mean that we can no longer view the Convention in isolation, as simply a treaty prohibiting States from obtaining biological weapons. Rather, we must look at it as part of an interlinked array of tools, designed to deal with an interlinked array of problems. Certainly, we need to deal with disarmament and non-proliferation in the traditional sense. But we must also address terrorism and crime at the non-state and individual levels, with responses encompassing public health, disaster relief and efforts to ensure that the peaceful uses of biological sciences and technology can safely reach their potential.
The interlinked array of tools Annan spoke about has been the subject of numerous local, national and international conferences on the management of the threat of biological weapons, as well as the subject of several high-profile reports and initiatives, many led by the United States.19 Some of the key international organizations involved are the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), the World Health Organization (WHO), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Interpol has created a dedicated unit focused on bioterrorism (with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the US State Department), to build national and international capacity to counter the threat of bioterrorism. Its programme will: raise awareness of the threat; develop police training programmes; strengthen efforts to enforce existing legislation; promote the development of new legislation and encourage inter-agency co-operation on bioterrorism, as well as develop a resource base on bioterrorism.20 The World Health Assembly, operating within a similar logic of preparedness, passed a resolution in May 2002 on the global public health response to the natural occurrence, accidental release or deliberate use of biological and chemical agents or radio-nuclear material that affect health. Responding to this resolution the WHO strategy encompasses four main areas: international preparedness; global alert and response; national preparedness; preparedness for selected diseases/intoxication.21 It has established the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (also with US funding) to provide:
an operational framework to link the expertise and skills needed to keep the international community constantly alert to the threat of outbreaks and ready to respond. In the event of the intentional release of a biological agent, WHOs
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global alert and response activities and operational framework together with the technical resources of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network would be vital for effective international containment efforts in responding to potential use of biological agents.
The WHO aims to strengthen national preparedness and response strategies, laboratory capacities, and procedures for biosafety and biosecurity, and to strengthen surveillance systems leading to national plans of action for strengthening surveillance and early warning systems for epidemic-prone diseases, including those associated with deliberate use. The ICRCs initiative on biotechnology, weapons and humanity appeals to governments, the scientific community, the military and industry to recognize the risks of biotechnology being used for hostile purposes, and urges recognition of responsibilities under international humanitarian law.22 And the OECD is working towards developing global oversight mechanisms for biosecurity and hosts high-profile meetings bringing together individuals from industry, academic, public research organizations, scientific societies, science publishing and government.23 However, as we have seen, the national level has not been effaced in strategies for governing security. And, while we have focused on differences in our earlier analysis, we can identify many significant similarities in the strategies adopted in different European nation-states. Each has a more or less unified response to biological incidents whatever their origin, be they deliberate, accidental, or natural outbreaks of infectious diseases. The threat of bioterrorism is not singled out, but addressed within general strategies for combating threats posed by biological pathogens, whether naturally-occurring or used as weapons. Second, we can note the sheer number of institutions involved in various aspects of biodefence the same is true for the other countries studied in the report on which we have drawn (Bonin, 2007).24 Further, whatever the fragmentation and autonomization of agencies that is apparent here, and however many responsibilities are devolved to different agencies for their specific role in biodefence, in each of the countries that we have examined the State remains the coordinator of last resort. However state planning does not take the form imagined in popular representations of totalitarian societies: neither in reality nor in the dreams of the programmers is there a single all-seeing eye, a single all-powerful controller, a Big Brother State. Nor does this new configuration partake of the market logics characteristic of the reform of public-sector management of the late twentieth century. And there is no sign here of the declaration of a state of exception predicted by so many theorists indeed the operation of all these agencies and bodies happens within the routines of bureaucracy and to the extent that it ever describes a reality the rule of law. In the emerging assemblages for governing insecurity, the political apparatus of the nation-state functions as more than an animator to use the term of Jacques Delors (1992) yet it is less than a sovereign manager of such endeavours. These multiple bodies of expertise engaged in governing (in)security are not totalized into a single plane of surveillance. Indeed the empirical evidence whether from
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the intelligence community or from attempts to develop a unified system of biometrics or border control suggests that, even where such unification is a programmatic aspiration, it is an aspiration that is congenitally failing.25 What we can see here is a limited de-differentiation of internal and external security issues (Bigo, 2006, p. 14), as national agencies rely for their capacities on the links and associations that they can form with and between a multitude of forms of expertise, research and knowledge production, dispersed widely across national and international space, and embodied in many semiautonomous institutions. And, while a dream of a common and consensual epistemic community . . . haunts the imaginary of [many] professionals (Bigo, 2006, p. 20), the reality is that of a heterogeneous complex that requires a continual, and potentially fragile, labour of coordination among diverse agencies, a transactional space between national and transnational agencies and personnel, involving relays of intelligence, expertise, technique and strategy, and an interpenetration of scientific expertise, police, health management and intelligence agencies not so much a single programme, but the attempt to shape networks that will bring together a whole variety of diverse entities upon what is perceived as a common threat (Bigo, 2006).26 No doubt this space is traversed and fractured by inter-agency rivalries. But, while strategies seek to flatten it, to make relays possible and effective, they do not seek to unify it or merge all into a single structure or apparatus dispersal here functions as a strategic advantage, not a handicap, and coordination displaces integration as the watchword and, of course, as the locus of many problems and problematizations. Nonetheless, within this complex, and despite similarities among European states, differences remain in the ways in which issues of biosecurity are framed and addressed. These concern not merely the perceptions of the nature, proximity and seriousness of the threat of bioterrorism, but the immanent logics underpinning the preparations being put into place for governing insecurity. We have identified three distinct, if related, logics at work that of contingency planning (France), of protection (Germany) and of resilience (UK). Each represents a slightly different strategy for reconciling liberty and security without destroying the intensified and extended mobility, flow and circulation of persons and things upon which contemporary freedom is seen to depend. Of course, in this article we have addressed only one dimension of the emerging rationalities and technologies for governing insecurity. A wider analysis would need to locate the specific ways in which the insecurities around bioterrorism are being governed within a wider governmental complex and to explore the other dimensions that we have noted earlier. First, we would need to explore the techniques being brought into play to govern the many planes of movement of persons, commodities, artefacts, knowledge, communications across and between nations, the problem now being, not of halting circulation, but of managing, monitoring and regulating it.27 This entails multiple endeavours to redefine spaces and the relations between them, and to reclassify the entities that circulate, in order to differentiate the permitted, the suspicious and the prohibited without destroying those flows upon which globalized
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liberty depends: for example, developments such as e-borders, advance passenger information and computerized watchlists with their algorithms of suspicion.28 Second, we would need to say more about the forms of assemblage that are linking and coordinating the various entities involved in governing insecurity: analysis here would build upon the elegant mapping of the dynamic field of forces, agencies, contests and transactions involved in the political and professional definition and management of the forms and sources of insecurity and unease being undertaken by Didier Bigo and his colleagues (Bigo, 2006). Third, we would need to identify the new norms that are being set into place the genesis and characteristics of the algorithms being used to identify suspicious persons and activities: these algorithms and their problems have been much discussed in the United States in the context of controversies over the non-identification of the perpetrators of the attacks on 11 September 2001.29 Fourth, we would need to examine more carefully the means of governing through insecurity the ways in which the subjective state of insecurity and apprehension is both the means of extending and legitimating government through the instrumentalization of anxiety and the objective of many of the technologies being installed that seek to intensify and utilize the subjective states of alertness, suspicion and the monitoring of the daily conduct and attitudes of others as the means of extending or appearing to extend the reach of security into the interstices of everyday existence.30 Only then would we be able to identify with any precision the new forms of freedom and unfreedom that are being presupposed and constructed by these new rationalities for governing insecurity.
Acknowledgements An earlier version of this article was presented at a workshop on Security, Risk and Technologies of the Political organized by Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero at Keele University in November 2007. A German translation of an earlier and rather different version is published in Patricia Purtschert, Katrin Meyer, Yves Winter (Eds) (2008) Gouvernementalita t und Sicherheit. Zeitdiagnostische Beitra ge im Anschluss an Foucault. Thanks to all those who have given use helpful suggestions for revision, including three anonymous reviewers of this journal.
Notes
1 Although the term bioterrorism may also incorporate the deliberate spread of disease in plants/crops and animals, the focus of this article is primarily on the spread of disease in humans. See Hinchliffe and Bingham (2008) for an analysis of different forms of biosecurity, and the other articles in the themed issue of Environment and Planning A 40(7) for examples. 2 From 1939 to 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army spread plague and cholera in China under the guise of natural outbreaks.
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3 Others have also noted the centrality of the problematization of regulated circulation in the contemporary management of biosecurity as we were preparing this article for publication we were made aware of the discussion of this issue in a forthcoming paper by Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero (2008) reported in Hinchcliffe and Bingham (2008). 4 The characteristics of rationalities of preparedness have been at the centre of the analyses conducted by those associated with the Berkeley Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory and the Vital Systems Security collaboration see Lakoff (2007), Collier and Lakoff (2008), Collier (2008) as well as forthcoming publications and working papers available at http://anthropos-lab.net/vss/ 5 See, for example, the Zombie Preparedness Initiative: a knowledge base provided by a community of citizens concerned about the impending zombie invasion and the imminent disaster that is sure to follow. We are not claiming to be experts on anything, we are merely doing what we can to gather knowledge and share the acquired information with the public. By doing this, we hope to help people prepare for the very real threat that we shall face when zombies show up and governments have not taken the time to prepare. We are working to do what we can to help people nd others in their area that are interested in ghting against the zombies so that when the time comes there can be safe locations all around the world. http://ww2.zombieinitiative.org/ 6 See the working papers cited above, available at http://anthropos-lab.net/ and http://www.gpia.info/faculty/Collier.html 7 We can trace the idea of preparedness at least to the eighteenth century (Roosevelt, 1900). 8 Stephen Collier (2008) has recently used the term enactment to characterize these new rationalities, focusing specically on those that seem to estimate the likelihood and consequences of potentially catastrophic future events. 9 For a good analysis of US developments, see the work of Collier and Lakoff cited above. Note that we have followed national usage for the alternative spellings of defense and defence, Center and Centre, etc. 10 Available at http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/media/fy2009_bw_budget.pdf 11 These include: the National Institute for Public Health Surveillance (InVS) and its Departments of Infectious Disease, of Environmental Health, of Occupational Health, and of Training and Documentation, and its Alert Coordinating Unit; the Directorate of Hospitalisation and Organisation of Care (DHOS) which evaluates and ensures the preparedness of hospitals and other health institutions by elaborating crisis guidelines; the Urgent Medical Services (SAMU) responsible for emergency medical assistance and the pre-hospital medical response to major crisis; the Health Products Safety Agency (AFSSAPS) which issues recommendations on the treatment of people exposed to biological agents; the National Institute of Research and Security (INRS) which collects information on the use of dangerous biological substances and assesses potential risks, as well as providing an inventory of laboratories carrying out biological analyses and an overview of theoretical and practical aspects of biological exposure monitoring; the BSL3 and BSL4 research centre Laboratory Jean Me rieux administered by the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM); the Institut Pasteur, which among other efforts collaborates with relevant military actors and assists the national defense authorities in obtaining an effective bank of microbiological strains, and the Institutes Pathogenesis Department which developed tools to detect and identify pathogens and therapeutic and prophylactic strategies to ght them, and its Emergency Biological Intervention Unit (CIBU) which provides resources for emergency measures in the event of an epidemic or a bioterrorist attack; the General Directorate of Alimentation (DGAL) and its Sub-Directorate of Animal Health and Protection (SDSPA); the Food Safety Agency (AFSSA); the Directorate for the Prevention of Pollution and Risks (DPPR); the National Institute of the Industrial Environment and Risks (INERIS); the Directorate of Civil Defense and Security (DDSC), in charge of the preparation, coordination and implementation of civil defence
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and emergency preparedness measures, and its Sub-Directorates for the Management of Risks (SDGR), for Fire-Fighters and Security Actors (SDSPAS) and of Operational Services (DDSC); the National Police and the Directorate of Territorial Surveillance (DST), the General Intelligence Directorate (DCRG), the Central Intervention Detachment (DCI), the Anti-Terrorist Coordination Unit (UCLAT) and the Central Criminal Investigation Directorate (DCPJ) and its National Anti-Terrorist Division (DNAT); the French National Gendarmerie, its specialized CBRN unit (Cellule NRBC) and the Intervention Group of the National Gendarmerie (GIGN); the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE) responsible for counterterrorism and counterespionage outside of France; the Interministerial Committee for the Fight against Terrorism (CILAT); the French Armed Forces specialized CBRN unit the 2nd Dragoons Regiment, its 1st Medical Regiment which maintains CBRNprotected eld units, its Center for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense (CDNBC), its Arms Procurement Agency (DGA) and its Le Bouchet Research Center (CEB), and the Research Center of the Armed Forces Health Service (CRSSA). 12 These include: the Permanent Working Group of Centres of Expertise and Treatment (StAKoB) which holds expertise in the handling of highly contagious and dangerous diseases and maintains special negative-pressure isolation wards; the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) and its Board for Biological Substances (ABAS), which elaborates rules and best practices for activities involving hazardous biological substances; various civilian research institutes and laboratories including the Bernhard Nocht institute (BNI), the Institute for Virology at the University of Marburg, the national Reference Centers (NRZ) and Consultant Laboratories, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft (FhG), and the Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food (BfEL); the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) for sera and vaccines; the Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection (BMELV) which maintains the national crisis centre for infectious animal diseases, monitors and assesses the situation of animal diseases in Germany and abroad, and coordinates defensive measures in case of an outbreak, and its afliated authority the Federal Research Institute for Animal Health (FLI); the Federal Ofce of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) responsible for managing risks to consumer health and its Central Commission for Biological Safety (CCBS) and the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) responsible for actually assessing the risks to consumer health and providing scientic advise to federal ministries and the BVL; the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) and the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN); the Federal Ofce of Economics and Export Control (BAFA) which oversees the export of commodities of strategic importance, mainly weapons, armaments and dual-use items; the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) which is establishing local NBC Rescue Units that allow the agency to carry out its duties, such as rescuing victims or evacuation of large areas, in a contaminated environment; the Federal Ofce for the Protection of the Constitution (bfV), the domestic intelligence service, whose duties include combating all forms of extremism in Germany and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as counterintelligence and counter-sabotage activities; the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), one of whose tasks it is to monitor relevant developments and research activities on CBRN weapons as well as suspicious procurement attempts and transfers of know-how; the Federal Criminal Police Ofce (BKA) and its Research Institute on Terrorism/Extremism (FTE) established in 2003; the Joint Terrorism Defense Centre (GTAZ) bringing together the BKA and the BfV to foster daily information exchanges and common analyses and threat assessments, as well as to coordinate concrete counter-terrorism activities between the two bodies; the Bundeswehr, or the German armed forces, its NBC Defense Units trained and equipped to detect and cope with an attack involving nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, its NBC- and Self-Protection School (ABC/SeS), its Medical Service with medical CBRN protection expertise, its Medical Agencys Institute for Microbiology
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entirely devoted to biodefence and tasked with the development of methods for the prevention, detection, treatment and alleviation of the consequences of a biological agents release, its Central Institutes of the Medical Service in Koblenz and Munich, its Armed Forces Scientic Institute for Protection Technologies and NBC Protection (WIS), and its Center for Verication Tasks. 13 Details of this programme can be found at http://www.cybertrn.demon.co.uk/ atomic/ which also has some helpful details on the history of UK civil defence. In fact, the programme of civilian defence using this rationality emerges in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, for example advising families how to protect themselves in the event of air raids. 14 For some of these details, see the UK Working Paper on Emergency Preparedness and Response submitted to the BWC Meeting of Experts, 1 September 2003, BWC/ MSP.2003/MX/WP.64 15 These include: the Department of Health (DH), which has issued specic guidance to the National Health Service (NHS) on responding to a deliberate release of biological agents and increased its preparedness by stockpiling medical equipment, antidotes, antibiotics and vaccines, and the DHs Emergency Planning Coordination Unit (EPCU), which coordinates contingency planning to maintain the NHSs state of readiness to respond to major incidents involving infectious diseases; the National Institute for Biological Standards and Controls (NIBSC) divisions on Bacteriology and Virology, both actively engaged in research and standardization projects concerned with vaccines against potential biological weapons; the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) which funds a signicant amount of basic and enabling research in the biosciences that relates to prevention of bioterrorism, the Medical Research Council (MRC) which funds basic research on the effects of pathogens on human issue and how to counteract them, and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) which concentrates on responses to biological contamination of the natural environment; the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), its CBRN experts which provide technical advice to support planning for, response to and recovery from emergencies (especially, but not exclusively, events that involve major industrial hazard sites), and the Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP); the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the Exotic Disease and Emergency Preparedness Programme, the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA), the Government Decontamination Service (GDS), the Environment Agency (EA), and the Food Standards Agency (FSA); the Export Control and Non-Proliferation Directorate (XNP) and its Export Control Organization (ECO) which processes applications for licenses to export controlled military and dual-use goods and technologies from the UK; the Fire and Resilience Directorate (FRD) which produces guidance on counteracting the effects of CBRN incidents on buildings and infrastructures; the Local Resilience Forums and the rst responders; the Home Ofces National Mass Fatalities Working Group; the Emergency Planning Societys (EPS) CBRN Professional Interest Group; the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), and the Security Service (MI5), which investigates and seeks to disrupt attempts by countries of concern to acquire material, technology or expertise in the UK that could be relevant to a mass casualty weapons programme, and its International Counter Terrorism branch which monitors the threat from international extremist groups and their potential to acquire weapons of mass destruction; the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), created in 2003, which analyses all-source intelligence on the activities, intentions and capabilities of international terrorist groups that may threaten UK and allied interests, and sets threat levels; the CounterTerrorism and Intelligence Directorate (CTID) which develops policy and provides security measures to combat the threat from terrorism; the National Counter Terrorism Security Ofce (NaCTSO) which coordinates a nationwide network of specialist police advisors known as Counter Terrorism Security Advisors (CTSAs), and the Police
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National CBRN Centre which provides CBRN training to the national police services; the British Armed Forces Joint CBRN Regiment and the Defence CBRN Centre providing CBRN defense training; the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) which provides a science and technology platform to assess, manage, monitor and control biological hazards, conducts R&D of sensor and detection systems for biological agents, develops medical countermeasures to biological agents and provides a facility for testing suspected biological material. 16 http://www.ukresilience.info/ 17 Interestingly, resilience, as a mental, psychological or neurobiological capacity, has recently become the subject of considerable research in the 1990s, especially in the United States: this research turned away from the usual focus on the reasons why individuals exposed to various forms of traumatic events from childhood abuse to military conict suffered unpleasant psychological consequences, to concentrate instead upon the reasons why some, subjected to those same conditions, do not. 18 Available at http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B8954/(httpAssets)/BEDC339 6280025B3C125722C003A6459/$le/BWC-6RC-Statement-061120-UNSG.pdf 19 Some of the key events, reports and initiatives include: UNOG (2006) Final Document of the Sixth Review Conference of the States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention BWC/CONF.VI/6; OECD (2006) Chairmans Summary of Workshop on Biosecurity of Microbial Biological Resources Complementing Innovation; OECD (2004) Chairmans Summary of Workshop on Promoting Responsible Stewardship in the BioSciences: Avoiding Potential Abuse of Research and Resources; World Health Organisation (2006) Biorisk Management: Laboratory Biosecurity Guidance WHO/CDS/EPR/2006.6; International Committee of the Red Cross (2004) Preventing Hostile Use of the Life Sciences: From Ethics and Law to Best Practice; Interpol (2005) National Laws and Measures: Counter-Terrorism Regulation of Biology; Journal Editors and Authors Group (2003) Statement of the Journal Editors and Authors Group on Scientic Publishing and Security; National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (2007) Proposed Framework for the Oversight of Dual Use Life Sciences Research: Strategies for Minimizing the Potential Misuse of Research Information; UK Health and Safety Executive Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (2005) Biological Agents: Managing the Risks in Laboratories and Healthcare Premises; UK Health and Safety Executive Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (2001) The Management, Design and Operation of Microbiological Containment Laboratories; Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust (2005) Managing Risks of Misuse Associated with Grant Funding Activities: A Joint BBSRC, MRC and Wellcome Trust Policy Statement; National Academies of Sciences (2006) Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences; National Academies of Sciences (2005) Workshop on Education and Raising Awareness: Challenges for Responsible Stewardship of Dual Use Research in the Life Sciences; National Research Council (2004) Seeking Security: Pathogens, Open Access and Genome Databases; National Research Council (2004) Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism; Royal Society (2005) The Roles of Codes of Conduct in Preventing the Misuse of Scientic Research RS policy document 3/05; Royal Society and Wellcome Trust (2004) Do No Harm: Reducing the Potential for the Misuse of Life Science Research RS policy document 29/04; Royal Society (2004) The Individual and Collective Roles Scientists Can Play in Strengthening International Treaties RS policy document 5/04; Royal Society (2000) Measures for Controlling the Threat from Biological Weapons; Royal Society (1994) Scientic Aspects of Control of Biological Weapons; American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs Report 9 A-04 Guidelines to Prevent Malevolent Use of Biomedical Research adopted at the 2004 AMA Annual Meeting; British Medical Association (1999) Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity and (2004) Biotechnology, Weapons and Humanity II.
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20 http://www.interpol.int/Public/BioTerrorism/default.asp 21 http://www.who.int/csr/delibepidemics/en/ 22 http://www.icrc.org/Web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/bwh 23 http://www.biosecuritycodes.org/ 24 Bonin lists 434 institutions in the seven countries and ve international organizations that are studied in the report cited earlier. 25 We take this notion from Rose and Miller (1992, p. 190). 26 Bigo suggests that we can observe the formation of a novel dispositif, an apparatus that works under a new logic that he terms a ban-opticon; however, we prefer to emphasize interconnections among heterogeneous rationalities and apparatuses that are lashed together in diverse ways. 27 Of course, the tactic of halting mobility can be deployed in emergencies, but only for very limited periods as occurred in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 11 September 2001. 28 http://www.ukba.homeofce.gov.uk/managingborders/technology/eborders/ See also the debate between US Secretary of Homeland Security and Members of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of European Parliament on 14 May 2007, where Chertoff explicitly poses the question in terms of the trade-off between liberty and security: http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/speeches/sp_118062704 1914.shtm. Our thinking on these issues has been greatly assisted by the ongoing research of Mathew Kabatoff at LSEs BIOS Centre. 29 See, for example, the 2005 report by the US Ofce of the Inspector General which notes that: On September 16, 2003, the President signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive-6 (HSPD-6), requiring the establishment of an organization to consolidate the Governments approach to terrorism screening and provide for the appropriate and lawful use of Terrorist Information in screening processes. Specically, the Attorney General was directed to create a new organization to consolidate terrorist watch lists and provide twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week operational support for federal, state, local, territorial, tribal and foreign government as well as private sector screening across the country and around the world . . . As a result of this presidential directive, the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) was created. As of the end of scal year (FY) 2004, the TSC was a $27 million organization with approximately 175 staff. The report, which is available in redacted form on the Internet, audited the Terrorist Screening Centre and its efcacy, including the algorithms that it used: http:// www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a0527/exec.htm. Some of the issues are helpfully discussed by Paul Rosenzweig and Jeff Jonas in a paper for the Heritage Foundation available at http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandSecurity/lm17.cfm. More recently, the technical details of the various algorithms were explored at the 2008 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers conference on Technologies for Homeland Security, which was held on 12 13 May 2008: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber4534402&isYear2008. 30 Rose (1999, 2000) has analysed some of these mechanisms in relation to changing strategies of control. See also the discussion by Jeff Huysmans (2006).
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Economy and Society
Filippa Lentzos is a Senior Research Fellow in the BIOS Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science focusing on biosecurity and the range of social, ethical, political, legal, economic and geographical issues associated with it. She is especially interested in the social shaping of risks and threats, and in the social organization and deployment of evidence, facts and knowledge. In addition to her research post she is the Managing Editor of BioSocieties, an interdisciplinary journal for the social studies of life sciences.
Nikolas Rose is Martin White Professor of Sociology and Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The main focus of his current research is on the social implications of developments in the new brain sciences, but he also works on the regulation of biomedical research, biosecurity and synthetic biology. His most recent books are The politics of life itself (Princeton, 2006) and Governing the present (with Peter Miller, Polity, 2008.)

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Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience

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Economy and Society Volume 38 Number 2 May 2009: 230 254

Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience

Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose

Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

Economy and Society

Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

Economy and Society

Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

Economy and Society

Filippa Lentzos and Nikolas Rose: Governing insecurity

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