Risk And The War On Terror

This book offers the first comprehensive and critical investigation of the specific modes of risk calculation that are emerging in the so-called War on Terror. Risk and the War on Terror offers an interdisciplinary set of contributions which debate and analyze both the empirical manifestations of risk in the War on Terror and their theoretical implications. From border controls and biometrics to financial targeting and policing practice, the imperative to deploy public and private data in order to ‘connect the dots’ of terrorism risk raises important questions for social scientists and practitioners alike. How are risk technologies redeployed from commercial, environmental and policing domains to the domain of the War on Terror? How can the invocation of risk in the War on Terror be understood conceptually? Do these moves embody transformations from sovereignty to governmentality; from discipline to risk; from geopolitics to biopolitics? What are the implications of such moves for the populations that come to be designated as ‘risky’ or ‘at risk’? Where are the gaps, ambiguities and potential resistances to these practices? In contrast with previous historical moments of risk measurement, governing by risk in the War on Terror has taken on a distinctive orientation to an uncertain future. This book will be of strong interest to students and researchers of international studies, political science, geography, legal studies, criminology and sociology.

This book applies risk society theory to the 'War on Terror', steering the discussion away from the militaristic discourse of the Bush era towards an emphasis on global cooperation and a new cosmopolitan agenda. The literature and rhetoric of the 'War on Terror' has been dominated by dramatic high-profile military campaigns and division in the international community. This overlooks the various multilateral practices and cooperative processes that are emerging to combat global terrorism. President Bush himself had initially been at pains to stress that his 'war' on terror would be like no other; it would involve not just military tools but financial, intelligence, police and diplomatic measures too. More than eight years later, the time is right for an in-depth evaluation of this 'other' war on terror. Yet these relatively mundane regulatory dimensions have received much less attention than the 'hot' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where ongoing difficulties suggest that military force alone is inadequate in controlling globalised terrorism. This book aims to redress this imbalance, by foregrounding these initiatives, tracing their implementation and reflecting on the implications for International Relations. Adopting an analytical approach that seeks to incorporate theories of risk, global governance and security, this book aims to explore the overlapping multi-level and multi-lateral dynamics of the emerging global security architecture which have remained neglected and unmapped thus far in the war on terror. This book will be of interest to students of risk politics, security studies, global governance and IR in general. Yee-Kuang Heng is Lecturer in International Relations, University of St Andrews, UK. Kenneth McDonagh is Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University.

This major new study shows how war can be thought of in terms of proactive risk management rather than in terms of conventional threat response. It addresses why the study of ‘risk management’ has helped fields such as sociology and criminology conceptualize new policy challenges but has made limited impact on Strategic Studies with new case studies of recent Anglo-American military campaigns in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The author shows how ‘risk' is now a key defining feature of our globalized era, encompassing issues from global financial meltdown, terrorism, infectious diseases, to environmental degradation and how its vocabulary, such as the Precautionary Principle, now permeates the way we think about war, and how it now appears in US and UK defence policy documents, and speeches from both civilian and military staff. This book will be of great interest to all students and scholars of strategic studies, war studies, international relations and globalization.

A decade after 9/11, it is increasingly difficult to deny that terror has prevailed - not as a specific enemy, but as a way of life. This book examines the social, cultural, and political drivers of the war on terror through the framework of a 'political moral panic'.

Terrorism kills far fewer Americans annually than automobile accidents, firearms, or even lightning strikes. Given this minimal risk, why does the U.S. continue expending lives and treasure to fight the global war on terror? In Monsters to Destroy, Navin A. Bapat argues that the war on terror provides the U.S. a cover for its efforts to expand and preserve American control over global energy markets. To gain dominance over these markets, the U.S. offered protection to states critical in the extraction, sale, and transportation of energy from their "terrorist" internal and external enemies. However, since the U.S. was willing to protect these states in perpetuity, the leaders of these regimes had no incentive to disarm their terrorists. This inaction allowed terrorists to transition into more powerful and virulent insurgencies, leading the protected states to chart their own courses and ultimately break with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Bapat provides a sweeping look at how the loss of influence over these states has accelerated the decline of U.S. economic and military power, locking it into a permanent war for its own economic security.

This book explores the ideas of key thinkers and media practitioners who have examined images and icons of war and terror. Icons of War and Terror explores theories of iconic images of war and terror, not as received pieties but as challenging uncertainties; in doing so, it engages with both critical discourse and conventional image-making. The authors draw on these theories to re-investigate the media/global context of some of the most iconic representations of war and terror in the international ‘risk society’. Among these photojournalistic images are: Nick Ut’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of a naked girl, Kim Phuc, running burned from a napalm attack in Vietnam in June 1972; a quintessential ‘ethnic cleansing’ image of massacred Kosovar Albanian villagers at Racak on January 15, 1999, which finally propelled a hesitant Western alliance into the first of the ‘new humanitarian wars’; Luis Simco’s photograph of marine James Blake Miller, ‘the Marlboro Man’, at Fallujah, Iraq, 2004; the iconic toppling of the World Trade Centre towers in New York by planes on September 11, 2001; and the ‘Falling Man’ icon – one of the most controversial images of 9/11; the image of one of the authors of this book, as close-up victim of the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, which the media quickly labelled iconic. This book will be of great interest to students of media and war, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, terrorism studies and security studies in general.

Over the last fifteen years there has been a significant growth in literature dealing with terrorism. Nevertheless, scholars within mainstream criminology have only recently begun to grapple with the problem of terrorism in a sustained fashion. In this provocative book the authors provide both an exposition of the contradictions that have emerged around the regulation of terrorism and an incisive analysis of the questions that the management of terrorism poses for the discipline. Focusing primarily on the processes and practices that have emerged in the United States and the United Kingdom, the book provides a critical account of the political construction, mediation and regulation of terrorist threat since the events of 9/11. The authors explore the ways in which new institutional modes of risk assessment based on the principle of pre-emption have impacted on individuals targeted by them. Noting the dilemmas produced by the pre-emptive turn, the authors also elucidate more recent moves to develop the idea of resilience in counter-terrorism and security policy. This book will be suitable for academics and students interested in political violence, terrorism, geopolitics and risk, as well as for practitioners and experts working in the security industries.

This book steers discussion of the 'war on terror' away from the militaristic tinge it has acquired, back to the idea that increased global cooperation and a cosmopolitan agenda would be the best solution to managing globalised risks like terrorism.