Performing preemption

Abstract

Nearly 15 years after 9/11, it is time to grapple with the way in which imperatives of preemption have made their way into routine security practice and bureaucratic operations. As a growing literature in security studies and political geography has argued, preparing for catastrophe, expecting the worst, and scripting disasters are central elements of contemporary, speculative security culture. One of the most-discussed findings of the 9/11 Commission Report was that US security services had insufficiently deployed their imagination to foresee and preempt the attacks. This article introduces a special issue that offers a range of in-depth empirical studies that analyse how the imperative of 'routinizing the imagination' plays out in practice across different policy domains. It deploys the lens of performativity in order to conceptualize and explain the materialization of preemption and its situated entanglements with pre-existing security bureaucracies. We detail the idealized traits of a 'security of the interstice', which include interoperability, emergence, flexibility and analytical foresight that are meant to bridge the perceived gaps of security spaces and the temporal bridges between present and possible futures. The lofty rhetoric of preparing for the worst and bridging the gaps encounters numerous obstacles, challenges and reversals in practice. As becomes clear through the notion of performativity, such obstacles and challenges do not just 'stand in the way' of implementation, but actively shape the materialization of preemption in different sectors.

Governing emergencies: the politics of delay and the logic of response

“…Response is oriented to (quasi/non)events and so takes place at the limit of pre‐emptive logics that act speculatively over emergent threats (De Goede et al . ). It is based on the promise that the harmful effects of any event – from a heart attack to infrastructure disruption – can be ended by fast, correct action.…”

The Crisisification of Policy‐making in the European Union

“…argue that pre‐emptive security ‘reorients and thwarts spaces for politics and critiques of contemporary security’. Crisisification, the authors are likely to agree, ‘has the capacity to generate its own benchmarks’ (De Goede et al, , p. 419) of what matters for the European agenda and what does not. For scholars of EU public policy‐making, such trends have gone unnoticed as they do not conform to more traditional modes of interest mobilization and agenda setting.…”

Surveillance at sea: The transactional politics of border control in the Aegean

“…As Amoore (2009) has stated, border control is not ‘primarily a way of seeing or surveilling the world, but rather a means of dividing, isolating, annexing in order to visualize what is “unknown”’ ( Amoore, 2009 : 25). Amoore (2013) emphasizes the idea that the sovereign decision is thick with lively mediations, and the politics of security is shifting from prevention to preemption and calculation ( Amoore, 2014 ; Amoore and Raley, 2016 ; see also De Goede et al, 2014 ). The anticipatory logic of preemption does not seek ‘to forestall the future via calculation’; instead, it incorporates ‘the very unknowability and profound uncertainty of the future into imminent decision’ ( Amoore, 2013 : 9).…”