At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagin...

The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies

How can one distinguish the concept of second modernity from the concept of postmodernity? Postmodernists are interested in deconstruction without reconstruction, second modernity is about deconstruction and reconstruction. Social sciences need to construct new concepts to understand the world dynamics at the beginning of the 21st century.Modernity has not vanished, we are not post it. Radical social change has always been part of modernity. What is new is that modernity has begun to modernize its own foundations. This is what it means to say modernity has become reflexive. It has become directed at itself. This causes huge new problems both in reality and in theory. There has been a pluralization of the boundaries within and between societies, between society and nature, between Us and Other, between life and death. This pluralization also changes the inherent nature of boundaries. They become not so much boundaries as a variety of attempts to draw of boundaries. Border conflicts become transformed into ...

The Theory of Reflexive Modernization: Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme

This article differentiates between three different axes of conflict in world risk society. The first axis is that of ecological conflicts, which are by their very essence global. The second is glo...

The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited

The events of 9/11 appeared to make good on Ulrich Beck's claim that we are now living in a (global) risk society. Examining what it means to ‘govern through risk’, this article departs from Beck's thesis of risk society and its appropriation in security studies. Arguing that the risk society thesis problematically views risk within a macro-sociological narrative of modernity, this article shows, based on a Foucauldian account of governmentality, that governing terrorism through risk involves a permanent adjustment of traditional forms of risk management in light of the double infinity of catastrophic consequences and the incalculability of the risk of terrorism. Deploying the Foucauldian notion of ‘dispositif’, this article explores precautionary risk and risk analysis as conceptual tools that can shed light on the heterogeneous practices that are defined as the ‘war on terror’.

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Governing Terrorism Through Risk: Taking Precautions, (un)Knowing the Future:

The events of September 11th shocked the nation and painfully illustrated our vulnerability to international terrorist attacks. Despite some of the most sophisticated models, monitoring systems, and science in the world, officials were unable to anticipate and predict these cascading events. The collective scientific ability to geographically represent environmental threats, map exposures, and map consequences is relatively straightforward when the threats are recognized. But what happens when we cannot recognize threats or some of their unintended consequences? This article examines the twin issues of the inadequacies in our current modes of understanding (the vulnerability of science) and the need for more integrative approaches in understanding and responding to environmental hazards (vulnerability science).

Hannot Rodríguez

Papers

World Risk Society