Insuring terrorism, assuring subjects, ensuring normality: The politics of risk after 9/11

Alternatives

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 191-210

  Aradau, Claudia ^a   Van Munster, Rens ^b  

^a OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK   (Denmark)

Author keywords

Capitalism; Insurance; Security; Subjectivity; War on terror

Indexed keywords

EID: 49349109199     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437540803300205     Document Type: Review

References (73)

1. AON, An Integrated Counter-Terrorism Solution (2005); cited August 8, 2006; available at www.aon.com/uk/en/risk_management/insurance/terrorism. jsp.
2. François Ewald, "Insurance and Risk," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 197-210.
3. Richard V. Ericson, Aaron Doyle, and Dean Barry, Insurance as Governance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p. 6.
4. Michel Foucault, "The Risks of Security," in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 365-381.
5. Mark Neocleous has argued that, in excluding social security, the Copenhagen school has missed perhaps the most remarkable historical example of this process; namely, in the political fabrication of a set of concerns as "social security": Mark Neocleous, "From Social to National Security: On the Fabrication of Economic Order," Security Dialogue 37, no. 3 (2006): 363-384, at 366.
6. Joseph Lieberman, In My Opinion: America Needs Terrorism Insurance (2005); http://www.forbes.com/2005/07/12/terrorism-insurance-security- cz_jl_0712opinion.html, accessed 1 June 2008.
7. Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, "Governing Terrorism Through Risk: Taking Precautions, (Un)knowing the Future," European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007): 89-115.
8. Didier Bigo, "Globalized (In)Security: The Field and the Ban-opticon," in Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes: The (In)Security Games, Collection Cultures and Conflits (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006), pp. 5-50.
9. Jonathan Simon, "The Ideological Effects of Actuarial Practices," Law and Society Review 22 (1988): 771-800, at 772.
10. Ericson, Doyle, and Barry, note 3. See also Michael Dillon, "Underwriting Security," Security Dialogue 39, no. 2-3 (2008): 309-332.
11. Wendy Brown, "Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," Theory and Event 7, no. 1 (2003): http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ theory_and_event/v007/7.1brown.html;
12. Gordon Lafer, "Neoliberalism by Other Means: The 'War on Terror' at Home and Abroad," New Political Science 26, no. 3 (2004): 323-346.
13. The phrase used in the heading to this section, underwriting security, was coined by Mick Dillon in a discussion of the panel "Governance, Threats, and Risks" at the forty-eighth annual ISA convention, San Diego, Calif., 2006.
14. Joe Gunset, Statement of Lloyd's of London to the Terrorism Risk Working Group Meeting, March 29, 2006, cited September 1, 2006: http://www.lloyd's.com.
15. RMS, A Risk-Based Approach for Extending TRIA (2005); cited October 11, 2007: http://www.rms.com/Publications/ A%20Risk%20Based%20Approach%20for%20Extending%20TRIA.pdf, pp. 20-21.
16. David A. Moss, When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).
17. Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle, "Catastrophe Risk, Insurance, and Terrorism," Economy and Society 33, no. 2 (2004): 135-173, at 167.
18. This continuity has also been noted by Neocleous in a discussion of the imbrication of national and social security in the United States in the 1930s: Neocleous, note 5. Unlike Neocleous, we argue that the immanent connection between the two does not solely reside in the concept of economic security, but in the logic of governing the social.
19. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Fordgn Policy and the Politics of Identity, 2nd ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998 [1992]), p. 3.
20. Governmentality scholars, by comparison, have largely ignored national security, instead focusing upon the split within social security between collective insurance, on the one hand, and neoliberal schemes of private and individualized forms of insurance, on the other. See for example Tom Baker and Francois Ewald, eds., Embradng Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
21. For an exception, see Richard V. Ericson, Crime in an Insecure World (London: Polity, 2007). Ericson considers national security and social security as neoliberal instances of governing through crime.
22. Ole Waever, "Securitization and Desecuritization," in On Security, ed. Ronnie Lipschutz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995): 46-86, at 48.
23. On the "school" terminology and their role in the recent debates in critical security studies, see c.a.s.e. collective, "Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto," Security Dialogue 37, no. 4 (2006): 443-487.
24. Didier Bigo, Polices en Réseaux: L'expérience européenne (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1996).
25. Richard V. Ericson and Kevin D. Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).
26. Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, "'It Sounds Like a Riddle': Security Studies, the War on Terror, and Risk," Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 2 (2004): 381-395.
27. Ulrich Beck, "The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited," Theory, Culture, and Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 39-55.
28. Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999), p. 142.
29. Aradau and van Munster., note 7.
30. Ericson and Doyle, note 16.
31. Mark Duffield and Nicholas Waddell, Human Security and Global Danger: Exploring a Governmental Assemblage (University of Lancaster, 2004); cited July 5, 2007: http://www.bond.org.uk/pubs/gsd/duffield.pdf.
32. Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999);
33. François Ewald, L'Etat providence (Paris: Editions Grasset, 1986).
34. Tom Baker, "Insuring Morality," Economy and Society 29, no. 4 (2000): 559-577.
35. Ewald, note 30.
36. For example, Swiss Re, Terrorism Risks in Property Insurance and Their Insurability After 11 September 2001 (2002); cited October 11, 2007: http://www.swissre.com/resources/cd7d5100462fcc2183dcd3300190b89f- Terror_Risks_Prop_en.pdf.
37. Jonathan Simon, Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
38. Nikolas Rose, "The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government," Economy and Society 25, no. 3 (1996): 327-356.
39. Eqecat, Eqecat releases probabilistic terrorism model (2002); cited August 31, 2006: http://www.eqecat.com/resources/terrorism97.pdf#search= %22Eqecat%20modelling%20terrorism%22.
40. See, for example, OECD, "Catastrophe Risk and Insurance," Policy Issues in Insurance 8 (2005).
41. The most acute illustration of transferring risks to the financial market is the Pentagon's failed attempt to create a futures market in terrorism, the so-called Policy Analysis Market (PAM): R. Looney, "DARPA's Policy Analysis Market for Intelligence: Outside the Box or Off the Wall?" in Strategic Insights, 2, no. 9 (2003): http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/sept03/terrorism. asp.
42. Ericson and Doyle have offered detailed analyses of how these technologies have been deployed or invented in the wake of 9/11: Ericson and Doyle, note 16, and Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle, Uncertain Business: Risk, Insurance, and the Limits of Knowledge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
43. Ericson, Doyle, and Barry, note 3, p. 8.
44. Robert Castel, "From Dangerousness to Risk," in Burchell, Gordon, and Miles, note 2, pp. 281-298.
45. Luis Lobo-Guerrero, "Biopolitics of Specialist Risk: Kidnap and Ransom Insurance," Security Dialogue 38, no. 3 (2007): 315-334.
46. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
47. Jacques Donzelot, "The Promotion of the Social," Economy and Society 17, no. 3 (1988): 106-137, at 399.
48. Howard Kunreuther and Erwann Michel-Kerjan, "Terrorism Insurance 2005," Regulation (Spring, 2005): 44-51, at 51.
49. George Bush, President Signs Terrorism Insurance Act (2002); cited August 19, 2007]: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/11/20021126-1. html.
50. OECD, note 37, p. 65.
51. François Ewald, "The Return of Descartes' Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution," in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed. Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 284.
52. For example, AON, note 1, and MARSH, Market Watch: Terrorism Insurance 2006 (2006); cited August 19, 2007: http://global.marsh.com/news/articles/ terrorism/documents/MarketwatchTerrorism2006.pdf; RMS, op. cit., note 14.
53. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Soverdgn Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998);
54. Michael Dillon and Luis Lobo-Guerrero, "The Biopolitics of Security," Review of International Relations 34, no. 2(2008): 265-292.
55. Cabinet Office, "Draft Civil Contingencies Bill: Consultation Document" (London: HMSO, 2003), p. 1.
56. Mark Duffield, "Development, Territories, and People: Consolidating the External Sovereign Frontier," Alternatives 32, no. 2 (2007): 225-246.
57. Ewald, note 30, p. 384.
58. AON, note 1.
59. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter on Providence of 18 August 1756; cited September 6, 2006]): http://courses.essex.ac.uk/cs/cs101/VOLT/rousseau. htm.
60. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (New York: Prometheus, 1996).
61. The concept of possessive individualism was coined by MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).
62. Robert Castel, "The Emergence of Social Property," Constellations 9, no. 3 (2002): 318-334, at 319.
63. It is important to note, though, that property is not, by definition, right. Property can be fraudulent. We have seen that the rationality of insurance leads to a concern with fraud. Hence, the surveillance of all forms of money and property transfer deemed fraudulent become linked to terrorism. See Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, "Governance, Risk, and Dataveillance in the War on Terror," Crime, Law, and Social Change 43 (2005): 149-173.
64. Étienne Balibar, "Difference, Otherness, Exclusion," Parallax 11, no. 1 (2005): 19-34, at 32.
65. MARSH, note 49.
66. Swiss Re, note 33, p. 20.
67. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 166.
68. Ibid., p. 168.
69. Ibid.
70. Gordon Woo, The Art of Terror (2002); cited August 8, 2006: http://www.rms.com/NewsPress/NEWS_GW_RT_101702.asp.
71. AON, note 1.
72. ACE, ACE Terrorism Risk: Claim Scenarios (2006); cited August 23, 2006: http://www.aceterrorismrisk.com/claimsScen.asp.
73. TRIA defines a terrorist attack as being committed by foreigners in the United States with a total damage of more than $5 million. Companies, however, have extended the meaning of terrorism to also include domestic attacks and/or attacks with less than $5 million total damage.