Suchergebnisse

"Die Gefahr des Terrorismus mit Massenvernichtungswaffen ist nicht zu vernachlässigen. Sie sollte aber differenziert betrachtet werden. Dafür ist ein Modell zur Risikoabschätzung notwendig. Anhand der Analyse von vier Faktoren - Motivation, Gelegenheit, Verwundbarkeit und Kapazität - kann das Risiko von Terroranschlägen mit nuklearen, biologischen oder chemischen Waffen eingeschätzt und konkrete Politikempfehlungen gegeben werden." (Autorenreferat)

The changing contours of conflicts, wars, and crises with and after the end of the Cold War have led to a semantic shift: Not the avoidance of threats, so the argument goes, but the management of risks characterizes contemporary security practices. By juxtaposing the well-known security "dilemma" with the new "security paradox," this contribution argues that a redefinition of "uncertainty" and "probability" is constitutive for this semantic shift. We argue that new security concerns like terrorism have (re)introduced "unstructured" uncertainty as the rationale for new security practices. To conceptualize this re-opening, we propose a topology of risk, uncertainty, and probability theories that highlights the multiple and conflicting logics of security policies currently at play.

Knowledge and non-knowledge are equally constitutive for political decisionmaking. The relationship between what we know, what we do not know, what we cannot know and what we do not like to know determines the cognitive frame for political practice. This article analyses how uncertainty is perceived and how danger is constructed in the global `war on terror'. We fist identify threats, risks, catastrophes and ignorance as distinct kinds of danger. We then demonstrate how different notions of probability are used to determine their magnitude and to assign political responsibility. In the third part, we show how these `logics of danger' play out in current anti-terror strategies. Security policy in general and the `war on terror' in particular can only be explained, we argue, if ways of managing non-knowledge are taken into account.

In recent years, constructivists in International Relations have been attempting to `seize the middle ground' between positivist objectivism and postmodernist relativism. Yet, while useful in rendering the approach more palatable to mainstream researchers, these efforts risk leading to premature ontological closure. We therefore propose that constructivist research be extended to a `sociational' research agenda. Based on Georg Simmel's process theory of Vergesellschaftung, it joins contemporary constructivists on the epistemological middle ground while liberating itself from some of their ontological restrictions. The sociational perspective endogenizes the actors' corporate identities as a way to trace `entity processes' such as the creation and dissolution of actors as well as boundary change. Such an analytical shift makes it possible to imagine, and thus also to analyze, past, present and even future worlds constituted by co-evolving social formations, such as nations, ethnic groups, supranational organizations and states. We show how sociational analysis complements and surpasses conventional explanations of cooperation and conflict as applied to the democratic peace and ethnic conflict.