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The origins and development of the modern American emergency state
From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global
warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of
catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of
these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms:
as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable
systems upon which modern life depends. The Government of Emergency
tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of
understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great
Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and
officials working in obscure government offices developed a new
understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable
systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to
mitigate the nation's vulnerability, and organized a distinctive
form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare
for and manage potentially catastrophic events. Through these
conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew
Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of
problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts,
officials, and policymakers to future emergencies.
In recent years, new disease threats& mdash;such as SARS, avian
flu, mad cow disease, and drug-resistant strains of malaria and
tuberculosis& mdash;have garnered media attention and
galvanized political response. Proposals for new approaches to
"securing health" against these threats have come not only from
public health and medicine but also from such fields as emergency
management, national security, and global humanitarianism.
This volume provides a map of this complex and rapidly
transforming terrain. The editors focus on how experts, public
officials, and health practitioners work to define what it means to
"secure health" through concrete practices such as global
humanitarian logistics, pandemic preparedness measures, vaccination
campaigns, and attempts to regulate potentially dangerous new
biotechnologies.
As the contributions show, despite impressive activity in these
areas, the field of "biosecurity interventions" remains unstable.
Many basic questions are only beginning to be addressed: Who
decides what counts as a biosecurity problem? Who is responsible
for taking action, and how is the efficacy of a given intervention
to be evaluated? It is crucial to address such questions today,
when responses to new problems of health and security are still
taking shape. In this context, this volume offers a form of
critical and reflexive knowledge that examines how technical
efforts to increase biosecurity relate to the political and ethical
challenges of living with risk.
The origins and development of the modern American emergency state
From pandemic disease, to the disasters associated with global
warming, to cyberattacks, today we face an increasing array of
catastrophic threats. It is striking that, despite the diversity of
these threats, experts and officials approach them in common terms:
as future events that threaten to disrupt the vital, vulnerable
systems upon which modern life depends. The Government of Emergency
tells the story of how this now taken-for-granted way of
understanding and managing emergencies arose. Amid the Great
Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, an array of experts and
officials working in obscure government offices developed a new
understanding of the nation as a complex of vital, vulnerable
systems. They invented technical and administrative devices to
mitigate the nation's vulnerability, and organized a distinctive
form of emergency government that would make it possible to prepare
for and manage potentially catastrophic events. Through these
conceptual and technical inventions, Stephen Collier and Andrew
Lakoff argue, vulnerability was defined as a particular kind of
problem, one that continues to structure the approach of experts,
officials, and policymakers to future emergencies.
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity,
developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of
millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities
spread across a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism
these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes
of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with
neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In "Post-Soviet
Social," Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia "beyond" the
Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles
over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent
reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires,
bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the
Soviet social state.
Drawing on Michel Foucault's lectures from the late 1970s,
"Post-Soviet Social" uses the Russian case to examine neoliberalism
as a central form of political rationality in contemporary
societies. The book's basic finding--that neoliberal reforms
provide a justification for redistribution and social welfare, and
may work to preserve the norms and forms of social modernity--lays
the groundwork for a critical revision of conventional
understandings of these topics.
This issue of Limn examines the concept of "Systemic Risk." It
includes contributions from Stephen J. Collier, Andrew Lakoff,
Martha Poon, Grahame Thompson, Douglas Holmes, Deborah Cowen,
Christopher Kelty, Brian Lindseth, Onur Ozgode, Elizabeth Dunn,
Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Benjamin Sims, Philip Bougen and Rebecca Lemov
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