Readings
Lecture notes
VI summary - Readings
VI summary- Lecture
1. What is a vital interest and to whom?
a. An interest is always an interest to someone (including institutions like the state)
b. Who benefits, who doesn’t?
c. WHo defines? (conflict/power/calculation/ rational bureaucracy/ agenda setting)
2. How are vital interests identified?
a. What is the role of experts and instruments n shaping vital interests?
b. What are the challenges in assessing risks and threats? What is the role of
likelihood, probabilities, risk assessment>
c. Why do people perceive interests differently?
3. How do decision-makers prioritise and choose interests to protect?
a. Who decides? Who/want do they favour-promote>
b. On what basis: risk/vulnerability assessment, political considerations, etc?
● Definition of safety and security: Protection from harm against acquired values
○ Acquired values: what is of high value to a state, nation, group or individual
■ Subjective - objective
■ Thresholds are hard to determine
■ Cost-benefit analyses are necessary to determine what our vital interests are
■ Determining what is vital depends on different systems. There are systems to
determine who says what is vital: politics, governances...
○ Harm: as a result of actors (security threats) and/or circumstance (safety dangers)
○ Protection: (political) priority, means, organisation, attention
● Vital is what the state protects
○ There are different forms of protection
■ Basic: foreign invaders, public orders, water, disease
■ From the late 19th century onwards the state’s idea of protection becomes
more and more encompassing
■ Protection is always a trade-off with freedom
○ Means are necessary to protect, so threats are competing for resources
● How preventive is the state?
○ Eliminating accidents and tragedy, the spread of prevention
○ Prevention and pre-emption
○ The more the state tells you that they are going to protect you, the more annoyed
you are when they fail to do so
, ○ Law enforced used to be reactive, now law enforcement is looking to predict who is
going to commit a crime/
● The many faces of risk
○ The state protects against risk, but also uses it as a governance technique
○ Risk and collective versus individual responsibility
● Security and securitization
○ Security as raison d’etre of the state, but an expansive concept
○ Safety versus security, internal versus external security
○ Security can also be a tool, things get easier to do if people believe it will make the
state more secure
○ Things that are safety concerns can be turned in security concerns to draw more
attention to the topic
● Protection is a moving target
○ Protection is politics
■ Power politics
■ Framing and agenda-setting
■ (international) governance
○ Protection is layered
■ History adds layers to the protection. Change in political thinking will
change the way we perceive risks.
■ Technology adds layers to the protection
■ Globalization adds layers to the protection
● NOt all protection can be organized at the national level
● Not all vital interests can be achieved at the national level
● International cooperation is something needed to avoid problems
(global public bad - war, climate change) or to safeguard an interest
(global public good)
● National to global
○ The global arena lacks a government (singular) - there are no hierarchical states (in
theory)
○ The global arena requires thinking about ‘the public’ - who are the beneficiaries, who
are the free riders-
○ It is difficult to determine what the global public (countries? socio-economic
groups? generations?).
○ Politics works best of short term
,Global public Goods as vital interests - Collier and Lakoff
● Global public goods: benefit a large international public (non-rival and non-exclusive).
Benefits must be quasi-universal in terms of countries, people, and generations. E.x Peace,
good climate, clean air.
● Catastrophes are seen as sudden and unpredictable events that disrupt systems that are
critical to economic and social life.
● The government is responsible for reducing the vulnerability of these events and ensuring
the operation of critical response systems in their wake.
● Pure public good: non-rival in consumption and non-excludable. It is, nailed by
universality- that is, it benefits all countries, people and generations
● Impure public goods: goods that only part partially meet either or both of the criteria.
Tends towards universality in that it would benefit more than one group of countries, and
would not discriminate against any population segment or set of generations
○ Club good: non-rivalrous in consumption, but excludable
○ Common pool resources: mostly non-excludable, but rivalrous in consumption
● Global public bad: economic crisis
● Supply problems and collective action problems
○ Free rider problem: why contribute if it is non-excludable?
○ The tragedy of the commons: why limit yourself if you are not sure others will
○ Prisoners’ dilemma: lack of information leads to a collective suboptimal outcome
● In the absence of a global government, how do we produce GPGs?
○ Final global public goods (i.e the outcomes: environment, peace)
○ Intermediate global public goods (i.e the regiments that work towards the provision
of final GPGs, such as the UN, Paris Climate Agreement, protocols, standard
● So, we cooperate and negotiate
○ Two-tier negotiation: among states, and each state with its own constituency
● Two main questions for GPGs
○ Prioritisation: who defines the political agenda, and hence the priorities form
resource allocation>
○ Access: who determines whether GPG are in fact accessible o which population
groups
● Reflexive Biopolitics
○ Modern biopolitics aims to ensure the health and wellbeing of national populations
○ Vital systems and populations share the same broad aim of biopolitics: to foster the
health and wellbeing of the populations. They differ in their objects of concern,
, practice and norms. Vital systems security does not rely on a statistical analysis of
past events to generate knowledge about security threats, but rather on the
simulation or enactment of potential future events.
○ Population security addresses regularly occurring events that are spread across the
population predictable, vital systems security deals with events that cannot be
calculated, but the consequences are catastrophic.
Lakoff & Collier Reading
> Catastrophes - sudden and unpredictable events that disrupt the systems that are critical to
economic and social life & government is held responsible for reducing vulnerability and for
ensuring the operation of critical systems in their wake.
> Reflexive biopolitics: poverty, unemployment, crime and endemic disease had regular patterns
occurrence
of Beginning of the 19th century - new apparatuses of population security were invented
to manage these problems. (Central role of risk)
> Vital systems security (early 20th century) - intensification of modernization and
industrialization processes, planners and policy-makers recognized that collective life had
become dependent upon interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. *
Modernity became a theme and a problem for itself
> To organize conscription for war, reduce the toll of epidemics, or manage economic
fluctuations, government bureaucracies’ generated vast amounts of systematic data about rates of
marriage, birth, illness, and death; suicide and crime; and levels of production and
unemployment.
> a new, statistical understanding of collective life as a field of regular events that could be traced
from a known past to a future that was understood in terms of a distribution of probabilities
> Constitutional liberalism, with its emphasis on limited executive authority and adherence to
legal formalism, was inherently incapable of responding to rapidly changing situations that
required urgent executive (rather than deliberate legislative) action - For some contemporary
critics, this provides a penetrating guide to recent transformations of politics in the United States
and elsewhere, particularly in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 > The state of exception tends
increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’
Ansell Reading Chapter 1 – Thou Shalt Protect
● States have a responsibility to protect – social contract. Result of failure to protect is
outrage.
● State protection is a partisan issue – Left (protection from the market) vs. Right
(protection from social disorder)
● Policy- making is very politicized because of this. Protective state politics:
Lecture notes
VI summary - Readings
VI summary- Lecture
1. What is a vital interest and to whom?
a. An interest is always an interest to someone (including institutions like the state)
b. Who benefits, who doesn’t?
c. WHo defines? (conflict/power/calculation/ rational bureaucracy/ agenda setting)
2. How are vital interests identified?
a. What is the role of experts and instruments n shaping vital interests?
b. What are the challenges in assessing risks and threats? What is the role of
likelihood, probabilities, risk assessment>
c. Why do people perceive interests differently?
3. How do decision-makers prioritise and choose interests to protect?
a. Who decides? Who/want do they favour-promote>
b. On what basis: risk/vulnerability assessment, political considerations, etc?
● Definition of safety and security: Protection from harm against acquired values
○ Acquired values: what is of high value to a state, nation, group or individual
■ Subjective - objective
■ Thresholds are hard to determine
■ Cost-benefit analyses are necessary to determine what our vital interests are
■ Determining what is vital depends on different systems. There are systems to
determine who says what is vital: politics, governances...
○ Harm: as a result of actors (security threats) and/or circumstance (safety dangers)
○ Protection: (political) priority, means, organisation, attention
● Vital is what the state protects
○ There are different forms of protection
■ Basic: foreign invaders, public orders, water, disease
■ From the late 19th century onwards the state’s idea of protection becomes
more and more encompassing
■ Protection is always a trade-off with freedom
○ Means are necessary to protect, so threats are competing for resources
● How preventive is the state?
○ Eliminating accidents and tragedy, the spread of prevention
○ Prevention and pre-emption
○ The more the state tells you that they are going to protect you, the more annoyed
you are when they fail to do so
, ○ Law enforced used to be reactive, now law enforcement is looking to predict who is
going to commit a crime/
● The many faces of risk
○ The state protects against risk, but also uses it as a governance technique
○ Risk and collective versus individual responsibility
● Security and securitization
○ Security as raison d’etre of the state, but an expansive concept
○ Safety versus security, internal versus external security
○ Security can also be a tool, things get easier to do if people believe it will make the
state more secure
○ Things that are safety concerns can be turned in security concerns to draw more
attention to the topic
● Protection is a moving target
○ Protection is politics
■ Power politics
■ Framing and agenda-setting
■ (international) governance
○ Protection is layered
■ History adds layers to the protection. Change in political thinking will
change the way we perceive risks.
■ Technology adds layers to the protection
■ Globalization adds layers to the protection
● NOt all protection can be organized at the national level
● Not all vital interests can be achieved at the national level
● International cooperation is something needed to avoid problems
(global public bad - war, climate change) or to safeguard an interest
(global public good)
● National to global
○ The global arena lacks a government (singular) - there are no hierarchical states (in
theory)
○ The global arena requires thinking about ‘the public’ - who are the beneficiaries, who
are the free riders-
○ It is difficult to determine what the global public (countries? socio-economic
groups? generations?).
○ Politics works best of short term
,Global public Goods as vital interests - Collier and Lakoff
● Global public goods: benefit a large international public (non-rival and non-exclusive).
Benefits must be quasi-universal in terms of countries, people, and generations. E.x Peace,
good climate, clean air.
● Catastrophes are seen as sudden and unpredictable events that disrupt systems that are
critical to economic and social life.
● The government is responsible for reducing the vulnerability of these events and ensuring
the operation of critical response systems in their wake.
● Pure public good: non-rival in consumption and non-excludable. It is, nailed by
universality- that is, it benefits all countries, people and generations
● Impure public goods: goods that only part partially meet either or both of the criteria.
Tends towards universality in that it would benefit more than one group of countries, and
would not discriminate against any population segment or set of generations
○ Club good: non-rivalrous in consumption, but excludable
○ Common pool resources: mostly non-excludable, but rivalrous in consumption
● Global public bad: economic crisis
● Supply problems and collective action problems
○ Free rider problem: why contribute if it is non-excludable?
○ The tragedy of the commons: why limit yourself if you are not sure others will
○ Prisoners’ dilemma: lack of information leads to a collective suboptimal outcome
● In the absence of a global government, how do we produce GPGs?
○ Final global public goods (i.e the outcomes: environment, peace)
○ Intermediate global public goods (i.e the regiments that work towards the provision
of final GPGs, such as the UN, Paris Climate Agreement, protocols, standard
● So, we cooperate and negotiate
○ Two-tier negotiation: among states, and each state with its own constituency
● Two main questions for GPGs
○ Prioritisation: who defines the political agenda, and hence the priorities form
resource allocation>
○ Access: who determines whether GPG are in fact accessible o which population
groups
● Reflexive Biopolitics
○ Modern biopolitics aims to ensure the health and wellbeing of national populations
○ Vital systems and populations share the same broad aim of biopolitics: to foster the
health and wellbeing of the populations. They differ in their objects of concern,
, practice and norms. Vital systems security does not rely on a statistical analysis of
past events to generate knowledge about security threats, but rather on the
simulation or enactment of potential future events.
○ Population security addresses regularly occurring events that are spread across the
population predictable, vital systems security deals with events that cannot be
calculated, but the consequences are catastrophic.
Lakoff & Collier Reading
> Catastrophes - sudden and unpredictable events that disrupt the systems that are critical to
economic and social life & government is held responsible for reducing vulnerability and for
ensuring the operation of critical systems in their wake.
> Reflexive biopolitics: poverty, unemployment, crime and endemic disease had regular patterns
occurrence
of Beginning of the 19th century - new apparatuses of population security were invented
to manage these problems. (Central role of risk)
> Vital systems security (early 20th century) - intensification of modernization and
industrialization processes, planners and policy-makers recognized that collective life had
become dependent upon interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. *
Modernity became a theme and a problem for itself
> To organize conscription for war, reduce the toll of epidemics, or manage economic
fluctuations, government bureaucracies’ generated vast amounts of systematic data about rates of
marriage, birth, illness, and death; suicide and crime; and levels of production and
unemployment.
> a new, statistical understanding of collective life as a field of regular events that could be traced
from a known past to a future that was understood in terms of a distribution of probabilities
> Constitutional liberalism, with its emphasis on limited executive authority and adherence to
legal formalism, was inherently incapable of responding to rapidly changing situations that
required urgent executive (rather than deliberate legislative) action - For some contemporary
critics, this provides a penetrating guide to recent transformations of politics in the United States
and elsewhere, particularly in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 > The state of exception tends
increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics’
Ansell Reading Chapter 1 – Thou Shalt Protect
● States have a responsibility to protect – social contract. Result of failure to protect is
outrage.
● State protection is a partisan issue – Left (protection from the market) vs. Right
(protection from social disorder)
● Policy- making is very politicized because of this. Protective state politics:
