Environmental Terror : Uncertainty , Resilience
نویسنده
چکیده
Total war is usually understood as the blurring of erstwhile political distinctions among people, armies, and government. It is more than this. Total war is a modus operandi involving the destruction—from the cellular to the planetary—of an enemy’s environmental life-world. Working through uncertainty and surprise, total war presents itself as environmental terror. Through the concept of resilience, this essay examines environmental terror in the practices of civil defence and how, when harnessed to liberal critiques of modernity, this terror has been generalized in the current all-hazard turn in national security. The uncertainty that lies at the heart of environmental terror calls forth the bunker as a site of defence and the strategization of power. In light of the bunker’s military origins, the spatial propagation of the bunker is traced in the growing polarization between public and private urban space. Reflected in the gated communities, green zones, fortified aid compounds, shopping malls, and tourist enclaves of the global city, bunkers offer sites of elite refuge, private consumption, and a secure base from which power, in an uncertain and divided world, can be strategized without negotiation.
منابع مشابه
Financial Uncertainty in Germany and its Impact on Western European Terrorism
This paper analyses the link between the VDAX as a proxy for European fi nancial uncertainty and the number of terror incidents in Western Europe. Considering data of the Global Terrorism Database, the number of terror incidents does – on average – not aff ect fi nancial uncertainty. In contrast, based on a behavioral model of terrorism motivated by Schmid and de Graaf (1982), lagged fi nancial...
متن کاملMitigating Terror and Avoidance Behavior through the Risk Perception Matrix to Augment Resilience
Terrorism is a psychological “mind game” with terrorists and leaders of the targeted society competing to influence and control the terror generated. While terrorists look to maximize their terror, government and public health entities seek to blunt fear and adverse avoidance behaviors that may ensue amongst the public. Drawing upon case studies, the paper employs the risk perception matrix fro...
متن کاملBarriers and bridges to the integration of socialecological resilience and law
www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America E and lawyers deal with uncertainty in very different ways. Ecologists and environmental scientists approach uncertainty as an opportunity to do research, while lawyers (including judges) often view uncertainty as a barrier to enforceability and action. This tension at the intersection of law and science is particularly troublesome ...
متن کاملAn Info-Gap Approach to Policy Selection for Bio-terror Response
Bio-terror events are accompanied by severe uncertainty: great disparity between the best available data and models, and the actual course of events. We model this uncertainty with non-probabilistic information-gap models of uncertainty. This paper focuses on info-gaps in epidemiological models, in particular, info-gaps in the rate of infection. robustness to uncertainty is defined as a functio...
متن کاملCodesigning a resilient food system
Global changes, especially the progression of climate change, create a plethora of adaptation needs for social-ecological systems. With increasing uncertainty, more resilient food systems that are able to adapt and shape their operations in response to emerging challenges are required. Most of the research on this subject has been focused on developing countries; however, developed countries al...
متن کامل