Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency

Abstract

This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, when planners and policy-makers recognized the increasing dependence of collective life on interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. Over the following decades, new security mechanisms were invented to mitigate the vulnerability of these vital systems. While these techniques were initially developed as part of Cold War preparedness for nuclear war, they eventually migrated to domains beyond national security to address a range of anticipated emergencies, such as large-scale natural disasters, pandemic disease outbreaks, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. In these various contexts, vital systems security operates as a form of reflexive biopolitics, managing risks that have arisen as the result of modernization processes. This analysis sheds new light on current discussions of the government of emergency and ‘states of exception’. Vital systems security does not require recourse to extraordinary executive powers. Rather, as an anticipatory technology for mitigating vulnerabilities and closing gaps in preparedness, it provides a ready-to-hand toolkit for administering emergencies as a normal part of constitutional government.

Waiting for the flood: technocratic time and impending disaster in the Himalayas

“…Anthropologists have shown that administrators and planners increasingly respond to this futurity and its dimension of risk through ‘prognosis’ (Mathews and Barnes, 2016), regimes of preparedness (Samimian‐Darash, 2009), and manipulations of time (Guyer, 2007). When they conflate disaster with national security, regimes of anticipation increase government control over spaces, populations, and bodies (Lakoff and Collier, 2008; Collier and Lakoff, 2015). When they aim to manage risk related to the materiality and unpredictability of nature, anticipatory models can affect the mobility of populations (Adey and Anderson, 2011).…”

Adaptive Publics: Building Climate Constituencies in Bogotá

“…16 A similar point has been made by Stephen J. Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2014) in their genealogy of "vital systems security." They, too, suggest an alternative view of the emergence of "resilience" and its political implications relative to neoliberalism.…”

Regulating epidemic space: the nomos of global circulation

“…It is instead the very global movement of animate and inanimate entities across boundaries, which has to be protected against immanent threats. The management of public health risks is therefore concerned primarily with what Collier and Lakoff (2014) have identified as 'vital systems'. It is attentive to those infrastructures, hubs and nodal points that 'operate' world traffic and realise global connectivities .…”