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This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call 'distributed preparedness'. Distributed preparedness was initially articulate...
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... providing a spatialized assessment of vulnerability, this mapping technique also enabled local planners to apply the framework of emergency federalism to the specific needs of a given community in a likely attack scenario, effectively bringing the process of civil defense planning full circle. Using vulnerability maps, civil defense services could assess their own capacities and determine requirements for mutual aid and mobile support. As USCD summarized this logic of coordinated planning: ``Civil Defense is conceived as a system which will depend largely on cooperation between critical target areas and the communities around them'' (NSRB, 1950, page 4) (see figure 5). This overall vision was a distinctive adaptation of the needs of civil defense in an air-nuclear age to the US governmental system. Distributed preparedness linked emergency federalism to vulner- ability mapping, grafting spatial knowledge of likely targets onto the federal organization of the government. It is important to bear in mind that proposed civil defense programs were never fully implemented over the course of the Cold War. But these programs established a schema for the provision of security that continued to guide governmental efforts after the Cold War. As we will show in the concluding section, the techniques, organizational principles, forms of reasoning, and political maxims that had initially been given shape in civil defense were, in ensuing years, gradually extended to address a wide range of threats. In this paper we have described distributed preparedness as a novel schema for the provision of security that emerged in the context of superpower confrontation during the early Cold War. We conclude this paper in two steps. First, we briefly track the diffusion of distributed preparedness from civil defense to other domains over the course of the period after WWII. Second, we consider the significance of this process for the critical analysis of contemporary security. Beginning in the mid-1950s, some local civil defense officials öskeptical about the very possibility of preparing for a nuclear attackörecognized that elements of distributed preparedness could be used to approach other possible threats, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods (Flemming, 1957; Quarantelli, 2000; Roberts, 2006). These officials applied the techniques of vulnerability mapping, and the emergency federalist model of coordination to the challenges of domestic natural disaster response. In doing so, they defined a new field of expertiseö`emergency management'. (20) During the 1970s this field and the forms of response associated with it were institutionalized at the national level. A concern with environmental dangers such as nuclear accidents and toxic spills prompted state governments to request that governmental preparedness efforts be centralized. In 1979, FEMA was established to coordinate state and local response to major disasters. The new agency con- solidated various federal emergency management and civil defense functions under the rubric of `all-hazards planning'. All-hazards planning formalized the application of vulnerability mapping to a range of possible emergencies. FEMA adopted the emergency federalist model of response coordination as well, taking shape as a small coordinative agency rather than an extensive bureaucratic organization with hierarchical authority. Over the following two decades, the schema of distributed preparedness was articulated as the model for emergency management in a number of domains. For example, in current pandemic flu preparedness efforts, the Department of Health and Human Services serves as a coordinative agency in a distributed federal structure, and uses imaginative enactment to exercise public health emergency response capacity. Distributed preparedness is now most visible in DHS, established after the attacks of 9/11. When FEMA was incorporated into the department in 2002, DHS inherited the techniques and organizational framework that had been developed in emergency management and civil defense. DHS also inherited FEMA's orientation to all- hazards planning, combining preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters in a single agency. For example, the National Preparedness Guidance öthe basic DHS strategy document released in spring 2005öis based on fifteen `scenarios', including a dirty bomb attack, a major hurricane, and an influenza pandemic (US DHS, 2005). As in the `hypothetical attack problem' from USCD , these scenarios are imaginatively enacted in order to determine needed response capacities and to identify vulnerable nodes in critical response systems. Thus, the novel formation of `homeland security' involves, among other things, a new institutionalization of the distributed preparedness schema. With the establishment of DHS, and with increased concern across the government about potential emergencies, distributed preparedness is now central to US domestic security policy. And it has become so during the largest reorganization of the federal government since the 1947 National Security Act (US Congress, 1947). (21) As in the early Cold War, this reorganization has raised important questions about the politics of security and about its relationship to liberal-democratic institutions of citizenship and civilian administration. A number of critical scholars have understood recent domestic security measures in terms of a process of `militarization' (Farish, 2003; Graham, 2005; Light, 2002; Stoler and Bond, 2006). Through reference to examples such as the Patriot Act, extrajudicial handling of terror suspects, and urban security ...
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Citations
... Across debates, responsibility appears in various guises. It is a spatialised phenomenon configured over myriad geographical scales and social sites Coaffee, 2013;Collier & Lakoff, 2008, 2021Grove, 2018). But as narratives have surfaced about individuals and communities that have self-organised in the face of emergencies, the distribution of responsibility is said to indicate emergent forms of political subjectivity too Evans & Reid, 2013, Grove & Adey, 2015Hill & Larner, 2017;O'Malley, 2010). ...
... Responsibilization has risen to prominence to address how appeals for resilience redistribute the obligation, agency or authority to attend to emergencies across different people, institutions and places (Collier & Lakoff, 2008;Gray, 2009;Lentzos & Rose, 2009;Löwenheim, 2007;Rådestad & Larsson, 2020;Roth & Prior, 2014). We can trace one commonplace understanding of resilience's effects on responsibilization to Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper's influential work (2011). ...
Scholars have explored how governmental agendas pursued in the name of resilience redistribute the responsibility for attending to emergencies amongst governments and communities. In this paper, we draw on two years of research with community groups responding to Covid-19 in the United Kingdom to deepen these debates concerning the effects of so-called 'responsibilization' amid appeals for resilience. Against popular claims that equate resilience to state abandonment in an era of neo-liberal reform, we argue that resilience has also prompted new forms of coordination between government and non-government community actors that in themselves are fraught with political complications warranting critical scrutiny. After years of public spending cuts, the government increasingly plays an enabler role in emergencies; orchestrating other actors rather than directly intervening themselves. This role is important to consider because it reshapes people's affective encounter with the figure of ‘the government’ when emergencies happen by sequestering the government's activities and generating feelings of government inaction. With the government's obfuscation, community actors valorise their own interpretation of 'resilience' as a way to deal with emergencies without government support, despite the government's ongoing presence. This belief in successful non-state resilience could have grave consequences if it is used to justify future government-led attempts to accelerate a long-established policy of reducing expenditure on public services, thus engendering in the future the very state abandon through which some scholars diagnose the present. Overall, the paper challenges popular conceptualisations of the re-distribution of responsibility under resilience agendas, unpacks how resilience agendas reconfigure relationships between people and governments in times of crisis and elaborates on the ramifications for public emergency governance if belief in resilience as non-state responsibility proliferates in the future.
... Within the sociocultural scholarship addressing scenarios, scholars have oft en referred to them as part of future preparedness and anticipation technologies (Adey and Anderson 2012;Anderson 2010;Cooper 2010;Keck 2018;Lakoff 2007Lakoff , 2008; Lentzos and Rose 2009;Mathews and Barnes 2016;Opitz and Tellmann 2015), looking at the concrete aspects of preparing for future uncertainties, discussing the problem of the time gap between present actions (of preparedness) and the future potential threat -that is, the legitimacy of preparedness actions for an event or crisis that is yet to happen (Weszkalnys 2014), or studying the emergence of a site of knowledge production that fi lls the 'gap between present and future' (Krasmann 2015: 187). In such studies, scenarios are oft en connected to the 'future present' (that will happen in the real future) rather than to that which is actualised (i.e. an already happening event). ...
... Preparedness addresses uncertainties that cannot be calculated or assessed, and is aimed at unpreventable future catastrophic events that can only be managed once they happen. Preparedness interventions such as vulnerability mapping, exercises and stockpiling therefore seek to reduce or control damage rather than to prevent particular threats (Collier and Lakoff 2008;Cooper 2006;Diprose et al 2008;Samimian-Darash 2009, 2013Stephenson and Jamieson 2009). Indeed, a central assumption in preparedness thinking is that, while they cannot be calculated, disastrous events will certainly occur (Diprose et al 2008;Schoch-Spana 2004). ...
This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario technology is adapted to the new temporality in terms of its form and content. In correspondence with the scholarship of ‘the anthropology of the future’, the article focuses on changes in temporal orientations – specifically, with a shift from a temporality of (future) preparedness to a temporal orientation of (immediate) urgency and how such a shift in temporality affects the technology of the scenario. Moving from preparing for potential future uncertainties to responding to an urgent event set in a present that is unfolding into an uncertain, immediate future provokes a new temporal orientation, for which the initial temporality of the scenario technology becomes its limitation.
Cet article explore le lien entre technologie et temporalité, et discute spécifiquement de la technologie des scénarios et de la temporalité de l'urgence, dans le contexte de la pandémie de coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19). Il illustre comment, malgré l'orientation inhérente de cette technologie vers la potentialité future, une fois qu'un événement réel se produit et que la temporalité de la préparation est remplacée par une temporalité d'urgence, la technologie du scénario est adaptée à la nouvelle temporalité en termes de forme et de contenu. En correspondance avec la recherche de “l'anthropologie du futur ” , l'article s'intéresse aux changements d'orientations temporelles — plus précisément, au passage d'une temporalité de préparation (future) à une orientation temporelle d'urgence (immédiate) et à la manière dont un tel changement de temporalité affecte la technologie du scénario. Passer de la préparation à des incertitudes futures potentielles à la réponse à un événement urgent dans un présent qui se déroule dans un futur incertain et immédiat provoque une nouvelle orientation temporelle, pour laquelle la temporalité initiale de la technologie du scénario devient sa limite.
... Firms and governments increasingly cite global uncertainty, "disruptive" technical innovation, and change pace as planning challenges. "Preparedness" replaces "planning" in strategy (Collier and Lakoff, 2008). We must "prepare" for a future that is unknown, beyond our control, and getting farther away while approaching faster. ...
Purpose- The goal of this study is to analyze the historical evolution, contributions, turning moments, and prospects of a creative movement called "Strategy As Practice". Methodology- The methodology of this study is a thorough literature review of Strategy as Practice from past to the present. Findings- There are several different sources of research on Strategy As Practice. The roots of Strategy As Practice research can be found in the classics of strategy process research as well as countless initiatives to widen and innovate strategic management. Strategy As Practice has just recently emerged as a well-defined area of study in the field of strategy research, uniting experts with similar viewpoints. Strategy As Practice was defined and published in a special issue of the Journal of Management Studies as "micro strategy and strategizing," and afterwards, its studies and research were featured in numerous significant publications. Conclusion- Strategy As Practice has been the subject of many studies and presentations of various methodologies. However, it is crucial for future study that these studies are methodical or well-coordinated. The literature on Strategy as Practice needs recent studies that demonstrate how it has changed over time and offer guidance for upcoming study in this field. Keywords: Roots of strategy, practice, praxis, practitioner, strategy as practice. JEL Codes: M10, M16, M19
... Evidencing the political resonance with which the term is now loaded, community has proven pivotal for engendering the spatial redistribution of governmental responsibilities promoted across resilience discourses. An emphasis on community, for example, has figured as crucial in attempts to enhance resilience by affording an array of dispersed local and national actors more agency in making decisions about how emergencies should and could be governed (Collier and Lakoff, 2008a, Grove et al., 2020, Lentzos and Rose, 2009, Smirnova et al, 2021. The prominence of community in these debates, furthermore, has accompanied a new operational dynamic for emergency governance when conceived through resilience. ...
... Under command and control, centralised agencies, often operating remotely, coordinate the response to emergencies. Replacing command and control, decentralised governmental arrangements, characterised by coordination across various agencies and actors distributed disparately through space and acting within localities, have risen to prominence (Amoore, 2009, Collier and Lakoff, 2008a, Grove, 2018, Lentzos and Rose, 2009. ...
How has the idea of community featured in attempts to build resilience to emergencies? The paper explores this question by presenting evidence from interviews with emergency responders across the world in the midst of the early and uncertain phases of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although reflecting different contexts, we discern two ways in which the notion of community featured in authorities’ narrations of their efforts to respond to the pandemic. Firstly, we demonstrate how community was deployed as a discursive mechanism that offered a particular framing of the vulnerabilities the pandemic instigated. Departing from accounts that reduce people’s identities to demographic categories, the deployment of community stressed that the pandemic’s effects should be understood by the different, yet coexistent, vulnerabilities it brought to the surface for people. Such renditions of vulnerability paved the way for styles of governance that prioritised adapting to the pandemic’s uncertain and indeterminate unfolding in the absence of prepared plans. Secondly, addressing a register of collective social life between individuals and the state, an emphasis on community engendered the decentralised arrangement of emergency governance with which resilience has become synonymous. Here, community proved pivotal in temporarily expanding resources to deal with an emergency whose effects threatened to exceed governments’ pre-existing capabilities. We substantiate this claim through examining how allusions to community worked to enrol non-state based efforts at response into a broader public security apparatus. Enveloped within the broader politics of emergency resilience, community shaped how the pandemic’s effects were understood whilst also ensuring adequate provisions for its governance.
... A global viral pandemic has long been considered a future event that was both inevitable and essentially unpredictable. As an unpredictable virtual event that generates a 'variety of actualities' (rather than representing an absence of knowledge), such an event is characterised by a problem of 'potential uncertainty' (Samimian-Darash, 2013: 3;Samimian-Darash & Rabinow, 2015). 1 The governmental rationality of preparedness, for example, addresses the potential uncertainty of an inevitable future disaster through interventions that aim at a reduction in the resulting damage rather than the prevention of the particular threat (Collier & Lakoff, 2008;Samimian-Darash, 2013). While the scholarly literature on uncertainty as a future-oriented problem has expanded in recent years, there has been little attention to what happens to uncertainty when a potential pandemic event actualises, as it did in 2020. ...
... In using the term 'preparedness', we are referring to the concept used to describe a shift towards new forms and techniques for governing unknown or uncertain future threats that cannot be prevented but only managed. Originating in Cold War civil defence planning, preparedness techniques such as exercises have become a primary, non-quantitative way of intervening on future events that are considered possible, likely or even just plausible (Collier & Lakoff, 2008;Cooper, 2006;Diprose et al., 2008;Lakoff, 2008). ...
The coronavirus pandemic has revived scholarly engagement with the concept of biopolitics, with interpretations diagnosing either the widespread adoption of a classic biopolitical regime or the full‐blown emergence of totalitarian repression (or both of these simultaneously). Relying on a close analysis of different interventions taken by Israeli authorities in response to the pandemic, this article argues that, rather than classic biopolitical strategies, such governmental interventions are better understood in relation to a problem of actual uncertainty. The case of Israel demonstrates how state apparatuses responded to actual uncertainty with technologies that are linked to different rationalities and how these technologies enabled the creation and management of a new milieu. The article further argues that, in making and intervening upon this milieu, state apparatuses employed a particular normalisation strategy that is tied to a form of power that we term encapsulation.
... The historical analyses in this book turn up many examples of howwithin civil defence organisations, among civil defence personnel and in material civil defence structures-such dynamics translated into complex representations and constructions of technologies, often with a view to entrenching or shifting social norms (see also Clarke 1999). In this context, a key ambition invested in the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries is to illuminate how power relations and governance affect-and are affected by-visions of the role of technoscience in society. ...
The introduction to the volume lays out the rationale and ambitions of the book, delineates its chronological and geographical focus and situates it in the existing historiography of civil defence. One central ambition is to advance civil defence history by attuning it more explicitly to the study of science and technology and to pave the way for transnational and comparative efforts. We do so in two steps. We introduce and explore the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries developed by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, before applying and adjusting it to civil defence history. Finally, the introduction provides a brief overview of the chapters in the volume.
... Појава светске кризе и услови повезани са кризом, евоцирају слике радикалне промене, и као такав појам криза постао је у модерној историји синоним за појмове као што су побуна, конфликт или револуција (Koselleck et al., 1982:619). Током раног периода хладног рата, појам критичности је укључен у стратегију цивилне одбране Сједињених Америчких Држава, где је коришћен у контексту "мапирања рањивости", као врста процене виталних делова државе, односно важне техничке инфраструктуре (Collier, Lakoff, 2008). То је уједно и почетак интензивније употребе предметног појма у политичким и другим дебатама ради означавања и идентификације организација и институција које су на било који начин важне, релевантне или неопходне за континуитет снабдевања становништва и привреде добрима и услугама. ...
... Појава светске кризе и услови повезани са кризом, евоцирају слике радикалне промене, и као такав појам криза постао је у модерној историји синоним за појмове као што су побуна, конфликт или револуција (Koselleck et al., 1982:619). Током раног периода хладног рата, појам критичности је укључен у стратегију цивилне одбране Сједињених Америчких Држава, где је коришћен у контексту "мапирања рањивости", као врста процене виталних делова државе, односно важне техничке инфраструктуре (Collier, Lakoff, 2008). То је уједно и почетак интензивније употребе предметног појма у политичким и другим дебатама ради означавања и идентификације организација и институција које су на било који начин важне, релевантне или неопходне за континуитет снабдевања становништва и привреде добрима и услугама. ...
... to compel action in the present. The aim is to develop specific response capacities that will prevent future unexpected events from unfolding into catastrophic systemic breakdowns (Collier & Lakoff, 2008;O'Grady, 2018). Logics of resilience, in contrast, view future systemic disruptions as inevitable and utilise techniques such as communitybased training and simulations to work on affective relations between individuals and their environments. ...
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption–response–post-event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy and emergency. This distended temporality brings into sharp relief other slow emergencies such as racism, poverty, biodiversity loss, and climate change, which inflect how the pandemic is known and governed as an emergency. In this article, we reflect on COVID-19 responses in two settler colonial societies—Australia and the United States—to consider how distinct styles of pandemic responses in each context resonate and dissonate across the racially uneven distribution of futurity that structures liberal order. In each case, the event of COVID-19 has indeed opened a window that reveals multiple slow emergencies; yet in these and other responses this revelation is not leading to meaningful changes to address underlying forms of structural violence. In Australia and the United States, we see how specific slow emergencies—human-induced climate change and anti-Black violence in White supremacist societies, respectively—become intensified as liberal order recalibrates itself in response to the event of COVID-19.
... What is new in connection to the emergence of public simulation centers is the accessibility for all citizens to advanced simulations for the specific purpose of training emergency preparedness. Traditionally, the involvement of citizens into security practices has been limited to educational campaigns and school programs (Collier and Lakoff 2008;Davis 2007), including drills and movies (like the famous Duck and Cover cartoon in the 1950s, which taught American children what to do when they saw the flash of an atomic bomb) (DHS 2006), or the exhortation to report suspicious behavior (Kaufmann 2016, 100;Aradau and van Munster 2013, 100), hence without access to advanced simulation exercises. Simulation-based exercises, as noted, has been mostly reserved for "professionals" in various organizational settings, like the military and civil defense, rescue services, and civil contingencies (Lakoff 2007). ...
In this paper, I analyze the use of architecture and affect as means for ensuring a prepared and resilient population. I do this by exploring an empirical case of public simulation centers, which are an emerging type of educational facility with the purpose of training the public for future emergencies using advanced simulations. Accordingly, existing anticipatory techniques are being redeployed and applied to a new target group, the public, which calls for renewed engagement with the use of space, physical design, and affect as means for involving and fostering the public in societal preparedness. Drawing on literature on anticipatory governance, I focus on two questions, elaborating first how public simulation centers produce and enable security affects and, second, exploring the means, material and immaterial, by which these centers attract and involve citizens in security practices.
