Introduction: Risk, Risk Management and International Relations

The international political sociology (IPS) of risk is generally concerned with understanding the governance of uncertainty. As economists Bodie and Merton (1999) have classically described it, risk is uncertainty that matters. Risk is a rationality of governing the uncertain that affects the ways in which individuals and collectivities live, organize themselves, and exercise power. However, there is no single rationality of risk, and, as illustrated in this essay, rationalities of risk change as a function of the knowledge that informs them. A major concern of the IPS of risk is the ways in which uncertainty has become a central problem for governance. The ways in which risks are assessed and managed are taken as problematic spaces from which to question the roles of states, societies, economic actors, and individuals in coping with uncertainty. International Relations (IR) as a discipline has slowly begun to incorporate theoretical developments in risk theory arising from sociology, economics, and anthropology. This is a recent development that begins mainly with the end of the Cold War, although there are traces of risk theory having been applied to security analysis prior to this period. This essay contextualizes the introduction of risk as a problem for analysis within IR and explores three main approaches: the risk society thesis, the governmentality ...

US Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today's …

The United States currently has some 10,000 nuclear weapons in its stockpile. 1 They are there because of a long chain of technical and political decisions made in the past. Although current U.S. nuclear weapons policy may be understood in light of this history, it should be assessed in the context of present international security risks. These risks include dangers left over from the cold war era, challenges posed by states that are newly growing in power, and the dramatic new presence of nonstate actors. The salient features of this new environment, the context of technology and international politics in which nuclear weapons decisions must now be made, are the subject of this chapter.

Comparative Strategy, 2016

According to a widespread conventional wisdom in the scholarly literature, the threat of nuclear weapons resides largely in the risk of accident, inadvertent use, and nuclear terrorism. In this article, we argue that this conventional wisdom is inconsistent with the increasing danger of nuclear use by leaders intentionally employing nuclear weapons as tools of statecraft. This article identifies the theoretical processes that could give rise to deliberate nuclear use. Next, it marshals empirical evidence through an examination of developments in several salient geopolitical rivalries between nuclear-armed actors in the world today, demonstrating that deliberate nuclear use may be becoming increasingly likely. Finally, it offers concluding remarks regarding the steps world leaders can take to deter and prevent intentional nuclear strikes. This article seeks to bring back in an appreciation of deliberate nuclear use to academic studies of nuclear deterrence and instructs policymakers on the appropriate understanding of the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation. The primary danger from nuclear weapons in the current era stems from accidents, miscalculations, or terrorism. As President Obama stated in his 2009 Prague speech, "In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up. " 1 Or as the advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility puts it on their website, "While the risk of deliberate global nuclear war has receded, the accidental launch of thousands of nuclear weapons remains a possibility. " 2 Eric Schlosser's widely acclaimed book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, details a 1980s accident involving a wrench dropped in a U.S. nuclear missile that could have detonated and illustrates for many the greatest threat posed by nuclear weapons. Academics largely share this perception. The nuclear taboo literature suggests that nuclear use in warfare has become increasingly unthinkable. In the optimist-pessimist debate over the effect of the spread of nuclear weapons, optimists-a group which includes many prominent defensive realistsmaintain that nuclear weapons will never be used because states will be deterred by the high costs of nuclear warfare. Even the pessimists, who are wary of additional nuclear weapons states, primarily focus their reasoning on the risk of accidental or miscalculated launch based on the pathologies of military organizations, not deliberate nuclear use. 5 A perusal of recent academic journal articles on nuclear topics indicates that nuclear proliferation remains the dominant area of study, with some consideration of nuclear terrorism, but scholars have devoted less attention to nuclear deterrence. In recent years, there has been something of a renaissance of academic interest in nuclear strategy. While these scholars have conducted rigorous research on how nuclear weapons and posture affect conventional deterrence and compellent successes, they have not drawn out the implications of their research CONTACT Rebecca Davis Gibbons

British Journal of Sociology, 2017

Debates on risk have largely assumed risk to be the outcome of calculative practices. There is a related assumption that risk objects come only in one form, and that the reason not everything can be transformed into a risk is because of the difficulties in calculating and creating universal quantitative comparisons. In this article, building on recent studies of preparedness that have broadened understandings of risk, we provide an analysis of how preparedness measures might themselves produce risk, in particular through risk’s durable instantiation, or what we call ‘concretisation’. Our empirical focus is on how government agencies in two countries shifted their attention from the risk of nuclear attack during the Cold War to an all hazards approach to preparedness. Comparing the mid- to late-twentieth century histories of the UK and Switzerland, we show that both countries shifted from focusing from a single risk to plural risks. This shift cannot be explained by a change in prevailing calculative practices, or by the fact that the risks changed historically. Instead, it is driven by historically specific changes in how risks are produced and reproduced in relation to how materialisations of risk operate over time.

2012

Aiming at the measurement, comparison and ranking of all kinds of public dangers, ranging from natural hazards to industrial risks and political perils, the preparation of national risk registers stands out as a novel and increasingly popular Western security practice. This article focuses on these registers and the analytical power politics in which they are complicit. We argue, first, that positing science as an objective determinant of security truth, national risk registers advance a modernist understanding of how knowledge of national dangers can be arrived at, discounting both sovereign and popular authorities; second, that by operationalizing a traditional risk-assessment formula, risk registers make possible seemingly apolitical decisions in security matters, taken on the basis of cost–benefit thinking; and, third, that risk registers’ focus on risk ‘themes’ tiptoes around the definition of referent objects, avoiding overt decisions about the beneficiaries of particular security decisions. Taking all these factors into account, we find that risk registers ‘depoliticize’ national security debates while transforming national insecurity into something permanent and inevitable.

Proceedings of the Workshop on Quantifying Global Catastrophic Risks, 2019

This paper presents reflections on the use of risk analysis for understanding and informing policy decisions about nuclear war. A quantitative evaluation of risk arguably should be central to many important nuclear weapons decisions, such as disarmament and launch alert status, because these decisions involve tradeoffs between different risks. However, nuclear war is a difficult risk to analyze, little effort has been made to analyze it, and nuclear war policy decisions have made little use of risk analysis. The paper demonstrates this via a detailed review of the nuclear war risk literature, a summary of a new model for nuclear war risk produced by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, and a discussion of the use of risk analysis in nuclear war decision-making. Despite the challenges, there are significant opportunities for progress on both the analysis and the decision-making. The paper finds that, at this time, the limiting factor is mainly the use of risk analysis for decision-making, such that people working on nuclear war risk should emphasize outreach to decision-makers. The paper’s discussion is of relevance for guiding efforts to understand and reduce nuclear war risk, and is likewise applicable to many other risks, especially other global catastrophic risks.

International Relations, 2009

This paper looks at the way in which the idea of the Precautionary Principle, increasingly influential in environmental and other policy areas, is being and might be used in foreign and security policy. It aims to contrast the relative precision with which the term is used in the environmental arena with the current usage in international relations. Contrasting the Precautionary Principle with ideas of precaution, prevention, pre-emption and similar terms in poststructuralist analyses of risk, humanitarian intervention and US foreign-policy in the aftermath of September 11 th 2001, the paper identifies costs and benefits in deploying a more carefully specified account of the Precautionary Principle. In particular, it highlights key issues of regulatory authority and the way in which policy-makers and analysts understand and respond to the limits of knowledge and knowledge-systems as important challenges to which careful use of the Precautionary Principle can potentially contribute. The paper concludes by suggesting that both policy-making and policy analysis could potentially be improved by adapting and extending the idea of the Precautionary Principle as it is deployed in other policy arenas.

Interdisciplinary Research Methods in EU Law , 2024

Although the popularity of political risk is growing in several academic fields such as business studies, political science, and more, as it stands, there lacks a developed conceptual framework that theorises distinct intensity levels of political risk and which takes account of context. The closest attempt at theorising political risk is perhaps the division into macro and micro political risk. While important, this differentiation is increasingly rejected as ham-fisted by scholars of political risk. This chapter is an attempt to advance a conceptual framework enabling greater clarity and understanding of political risk, including its sources. 1 All the while capturing the relative 'riskiness' of distinct political risks through the lens of security. The categories of the framework are imported from the discipline of security studies. This is justified for two reasons: First, security and risk tend to share the same political and operational space. Indeed, one cannot hope to forecast political risk without knowledge of the security situation in each context. Second, unlike political risk, security has benefitted from years of work on the meaning of security, sources of threats and much else besides. In this chapter, I bring to bear the sectors of security and distinct types of threateners into a matrix that give way to a rudimentary conceptual framework on political risk, differentiating into manageable political risk, partially manageable political risk, and unmanageable political risk.

Aiming at the measurement, comparison and ranking of all kinds of public dangers, ranging from natural hazards to industrial risks and political perils, the preparation of national risk registers stands out as a novel and increasingly popular Western security practice. This article focuses on these registers and the analytical power politics in which they are complicit. The authors argue, first, that positing science as an objective determinant of security truth, national risk registers advance a modernist understanding of how knowledge of national dangers can be arrived at, discounting both sovereign and popular authorities; second, that by operationalizing a traditional risk-assessment formula, risk registers make possible seemingly apolitical decisions in security matters, taken on the basis of cost-benefit thinking; and, third, that risk registers' focus on risk "themes" tiptoes around the definition of referent objects, avoiding overt decisions about the beneficiaries of particular security decisions. Taking all these factors into account, we find that risk registers "depoliticize" national security debates while transforming national insecurity into something permanent and inevitable.