Trine Villumsen Berling, Ulrik Pram Gad, Karen Lund Petersen and Ole Wæver: Translations of Security: A Framework for the Study of Unwanted Futures

Abstract

This book scrutinizes how contemporary practices of security have come to
rely on many different translations of security, risk, and danger.
Institutions of national security policies are currently undergoing radical
conceptual and organisational changes, and this book presents a novel
approach for how to study and politically address the new situation.
Complex and uncertain threat environments, such as terrorism, climate
change, and the global financial crisis, have paved the way for new forms of
security governance that have profoundly transformed the ways in which
threats are handled today. Crucially, there is a decentralisation of the
management of security, which is increasingly handled by a broad set of
societal actors that previously were not considered powerful in the conduct
of security a!airs. This transformation of security knowledge and
management changes the meaning of traditional concepts and practices,
and calls for investigation into the many meanings of security implied when
contemporary societies manage radical dangers, risks, and threats. It is
necessary to study both what these meanings are and how they developed
from the security practices of the past. Addressing this knowledge gap, the
book asks how di!erent ideas about threats, risk, and dangers meet in the
current practices of security, broadly understood, and with what political
consequences.
This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies,
anthropology, risk studies, science and technology studies and
International Relations.