The End of History and the Last Man

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

Culture and Imperialism

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Aihwa Ong. Durham, NIC: Duke University Press, 1999. ix. 322 pp., notes, bibliography, index.

Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality

Risk and the War on Terror

Terrorism and climate change are frequently perceived as ‘total threats’ articulated and imagined through a wide array of arts and technologies. If the construction of these threats appears similar then so are the pleas for preemptive and precautionary action. In this paper we explore the ways in which terrorism and climate change are imagined, drawing on a conjoined history in which preemption and precaution are not easily separable. We then trace this through the knowledges, models, and ideas of risk that inform contemporary debates on these issues and suggest that these are caught between a desire for rationality and affective governance through catastrophic visions. Furthermore, we argue that these imaginations of an actionable future have political consequences that depoliticize and delegitimate debate and that potentially bring the unimaginable into being. Reconceiving precautionary politics is thus vital if we are to engage ethically with the world.

Precaution, preemption: arts and technologies of the actionable future

Increasingly, private companies – including Twitter, airlines, and banks – find themselves in the frontline of fighting terrorism and other security threats, because they are obliged to mine and expel suspicious transactions. This analytical work of companies forms part of a chain, whereby transactions data are analysed, collected, reported, shared, and eventually deployed as a basis for intervention by police and prosecution. This article develops the notion of the Chain of Security in order to conceptualise the ways in which security judgements are made across public/private domains and on the basis of commercial transactions. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, this article understands the security chain as the set of practices whereby commercial transactions are collected, stored, transferred, and analysed, in order to arrive at security facts. Understanding the trajectory of the suspicious transaction as a series of translations across professional domains draws attention to the processes of sequencing, movement, and referral in the production of security judgements. The article uses the chain of financial suspicious transactions reporting as example to show how this research ‘thinking tool’ can work. In doing so, it aims to contribute to debates at the intersection between International Relations (IR) and Science-and-Technology Studies (STS).

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The Chain of Security

In December 2006, a new computer-based screening program called Automated Targeting System (ATS), deployed by the US to screen international
travelers at all air, land and sea borders, became the subject of public discussion. ATS was developed for the specific purpose of screening cargo and
container shipments into US ports, assigning a risk score to all imports in
advance of their arrival at the border. As the Department of Homeland
Security’s Privacy Impact Assessment for ATS states, the risk assessments
enable the ‘‘identification of previously unknown areas of note, concern or
pattern’’ (2006: 9). The system for identifying ‘‘unknown’’ threats in mobile
goods and objects has now been exported in full to the risk management of
mobile people at US borders. ATS analyzes a variety of passenger data –
including address, financial records, ‘‘no show’’ history, how tickets were
purchased, motor vehicle records, past one-way travel and seating preference – in order to assign a risk score to individual travelers. The score is
used to determine whether passengers or border crossers are placed on a
‘‘selectee list’’ for further attention, stopped and questioned at the border or,
indeed, denied entry. The risk assessment calculation in ATS is classified,
and the results can be kept on file for up to forty years (Sniffen 2006).
Civil liberties groups voiced objection to the program. According toBarry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), ATS casts
suspicion on millions of innocent travelers, while seriously threatening
privacy and constitutional liberties. While the system explicitly seeks tomake visible an unknown person who would not otherwise be seen, assigning a risk value to every recoverable life transaction, the risk calculation
itself is never made visible. Because the system screens the entire population
of travelers in the search for the ‘‘unknown terrorist,’’ people can never
meaningfully access, challenge or correct their risk category. One of Steinhardt’s concerns is the absence of limits to the data authorities may want to
access for security screening. ‘‘Does the government get to scrutinize every
address at which you’ve ever lived?’’ wonders Steinhardt (2007), ‘‘Quiz you
about the fact that you once went for 12 months without a job? About your
web surfing, your online book purchases, your school transcripts . . . your
associations?’’
However, Stewart Baker (2006) of the Department of Homeland Securityasserts that ATS has been successful in turning back individuals who pose a
high security risk while offering ‘‘faster service for most travelers.’’ Baker
reveals that the most important feature of ATS is its ability to do ‘‘a quick
link analysis’’ that checks travelers against terrorism watch lists, so being
able to identify, for example, ‘‘travelers who gave the airline a phone number
that’s also used by a known terrorist.’’ Baker concludes by emphasizing the
need to connect the dots of available data, suggesting that data analysis may
have prevented 9/11:This is a lesson we learned from September 11. After-the-fact reviews of
the hijackers’ travel reservations showed that we might have been able
to uncover the plot if we’d had better computer systems and better
access to travel data . . . We didn’t connect those dots before 9/11, but we
should have. We learned that lesson, and now ATS allows us to look for
these links.

M. de Goede

Papers

Risk and the War on Terror

Precaution, preemption: arts and technologies of the actionable future

The Chain of Security

Introduction: Governing by risk in the war on terror

Carnival of Money: Politics of Dissent in an Era of Globalizing Finance