Insuring Security

Insurance is the world’s largest economic industry, providing a form of security that more than triples global defence expenditure. However, little is know about the form of security insurance provides. This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance. This work seeks to argue that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security central to the understanding of contemporary liberal governance and security. Lobo-Guerrero theorizes insurance as a biopolitical effect that results from the continuous interaction of an ‘entrepreneurial form of power’, and traditional forms of sovereign security. Through rich empirical cases and a unique theorization, the book breaks apart the traditional division between security studies, political economy and political theory. The author explores this theory in relation to specific issues such as the use of life insurance in the molecular age, the use of insurance to securitize against environmental catastrophic risk, specialist products such as kidnap and ransom insurance, as well as the use of insurance to counter maritime piracy in the twenty-first century. Providing an important and original contribution to the study of the biopolitics of security, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of security studies, international relations and international political economy.

This book is a contribution to the scholarly engagement with the wider problem of governing through risk and the politics of uncertainty. It takes life insurance as an empirical site from which to ask: what is the kind of governance created through insurance an instance of, and how does it contribute to the transcendence of liberalism? By making a distinction between capable life as object of insurance, and potential life as that which escapes its control, the book conducts a historical epistemological analysis of the problems of valuation, truth production, securitisation, classification, and gendering that constitute life insurance products and practices. Insuring Life offers a critical engagement with the epistemology of life insurance to demonstrate the unnecessary and precarious character of the conditions that make this instrument of liberal governance possible. It concludes that the transcendence of liberalism relies on the technological agency of these instruments and that its challenge begins by redefining the terms under which the potential of life, if invaluable, is to be thought as event. The book follows Insuring War as the third of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. It will be of great use to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students of political economy, critical security studies and political theory, the biopolitics of security and post-structural politics. Insuring War: https://www.routledge.com/products/search?keywords=insuring+war Insuring Security: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Security-Biopolitics-security-and-risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415522854

Insurance is a central, if until now ignored, instrument of war in the modern period. Ever since the eighteenth century, interaction between governments and insurers in Western countries has materialised in the form of war risk schemes that have contributed to the waging of war and the preservation of peace. The operation of those schemes has given rise to a curious, if not innocent, association between practices of statehood and practices of risk, which are theorised here under the label of ‘insurantial sovereignty’. The book draws on the British experience of using maritime insurance as an instrument of war during the Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, and the early twenty-first century. It asks, what happens, when, under conditions of war, the sovereign adopts insurantial imaginaries and practices into its rationalities of government? In doing so the book makes a novel contribution to the understanding of liberal security and liberal governance which is central to the theory of Political Science and International Relations, the understanding of international political sociology, and international political economy. The book follows Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk as the second of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. Insuring Security: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Security-Biopolitics-security-and-risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415522854 Insuring Life: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Life-Value-Security-and-Risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415716079

Charts the social and cultural life of private insurance in postwar America, showing how insurance institutions and actuarial practices played crucial roles in bringing social, political, and economic neoliberalism into everyday life. Actuarial thinking is everywhere in contemporary America, an often unnoticed byproduct of the postwar insurance industry’s political and economic influence. Calculations of risk permeate our institutions, influencing how we understand and manage crime, education, medicine, finance, and other social issues. Caley Horan’s remarkable book charts the social and economic power of private insurers since 1945, arguing that these institutions’ actuarial practices played a crucial and unexplored role in insinuating the social, political, and economic frameworks of neoliberalism into everyday life. Analyzing insurance marketing, consumption, investment, and regulation, Horan asserts that postwar America’s obsession with safety and security fueled the exponential expansion of the insurance industry and the growing importance of risk management in other fields. Horan shows that the rise and dissemination of neoliberal values did not happen on its own: they were the result of a project to unsocialize risk, shrinking the state’s commitment to providing support, and heaping burdens upon the people often least capable of bearing them. Insurance Era is a sharply researched and fiercely written account of how and why private insurance and its actuarial market logic came to be so deeply lodged in American visions of social welfare.

Insurance is the world’s largest economic industry, providing a form of security that more than triples global defence expenditure. However, little is know about the form of security insurance provides. This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance. This work seeks to argue that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security central to the understanding of contemporary liberal governance and security. Lobo-Guerrero theorizes insurance as a biopolitical effect that results from the continuous interaction of an ‘entrepreneurial form of power’, and traditional forms of sovereign security. Through rich empirical cases and a unique theorization, the book breaks apart the traditional division between security studies, political economy and political theory. The author explores this theory in relation to specific issues such as the use of life insurance in the molecular age, the use of insurance to securitize against environmental catastrophic risk, specialist products such as kidnap and ransom insurance, as well as the use of insurance to counter maritime piracy in the twenty-first century. Providing an important and original contribution to the study of the biopolitics of security, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of security studies, international relations and international political economy. Insuring War: https://www.routledge.com/products/search?keywords=insuring+war Insuring Life: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Life-Value-Security-and-Risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415716079

This book is a contribution to the scholarly engagement with the wider problem of governing through risk and the politics of uncertainty. It takes life insurance as an empirical site from which to ask: what is the kind of governance created through insurance an instance of, and how does it contribute to the transcendence of liberalism? By making a distinction between capable life as object of insurance, and potential life as that which escapes its control, the book conducts a historical epistemological analysis of the problems of valuation, truth production, securitisation, classification, and gendering that constitute life insurance products and practices. Insuring Life offers a critical engagement with the epistemology of life insurance to demonstrate the unnecessary and precarious character of the conditions that make this instrument of liberal governance possible. It concludes that the transcendence of liberalism relies on the technological agency of these instruments and that its challenge begins by redefining the terms under which the potential of life, if invaluable, is to be thought as event. The book follows Insuring War as the third of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. It will be of great use to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students of political economy, critical security studies and political theory, the biopolitics of security and post-structural politics. Insuring War: https://www.routledge.com/products/search?keywords=insuring+war Insuring Security: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Security-Biopolitics-security-and-risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415522854

This classic social insurance work has been updated to cover a decade of policy developments and the impact of the recent economic crisis.The book includes in-depth discussion of all major programs to reduce economic insecurity in the United States, including Social Security, Medicare, workers' compensation, unemployment compensation, and temporary disability insurance. The principles, characteristics, and policy issues associated with social insurance and public assistance programs are discussed in detail. The book examines each major cause of economic insecurity and analyzes the appropriate social insurance program for dealing with the problem.

Tackling the cybersecurity challenge is a matter of survival for society at large. Cyber attacks are rapidly increasing in sophistication and magnitude—and in their destructive potential. New threats emerge regularly, the last few years having seen a ransomware boom and distributed denial-of-service attacks leveraging the Internet of Things. For organisations, the use of cybersecurity risk management is essential in order to manage these threats. Yet current frameworks have drawbacks which can lead to the suboptimal allocation of cybersecurity resources. Cyber insurance has been touted as part of the solution – based on the idea that insurers can incentivize companies to improve their cybersecurity by offering premium discounts – but cyber insurance levels remain limited. This is because companies have difficulty determining which cyber insurance products to purchase, and insurance companies struggle to accurately assess cyber risk and thus develop cyber insurance products. To deal with these challenges, this volume presents new models for cybersecurity risk management, partly based on the use of cyber insurance. It contains: A set of mathematical models for cybersecurity risk management, including (i) a model to assist companies in determining their optimal budget allocation between security products and cyber insurance and (ii) a model to assist insurers in designing cyber insurance products. The models use adversarial risk analysis to account for the behavior of threat actors (as well as the behavior of companies and insurers). To inform these models, we draw on psychological and behavioural economics studies of decision-making by individuals regarding cybersecurity and cyber insurance. We also draw on organizational decision-making studies involving cybersecurity and cyber insurance. Its theoretical and methodological findings will appeal to researchers across a wide range of cybersecurity-related disciplines including risk and decision analysis, analytics, technology management, actuarial sciences, behavioural sciences, and economics. The practical findings will help cybersecurity professionals and insurers enhance cybersecurity and cyber insurance, thus benefiting society as a whole. This book grew out of a two-year European Union-funded project under Horizons 2020, called CYBECO (Supporting Cyber Insurance from a Behavioral Choice Perspective).