Risk, Law, and Security

Abstract

Thirty years ago, it was possible to see the dawning of a new age of predictive governance of crime and security based on probabilistic ‘risk’ modelling. Now especially since 9–11 and the rise of the ‘new terrorism’, many challenges are argued to be generating ‘post-risk’ responses. Probabilistic risk techniques rely on two related conditions: the building up of a large body of data from which statistically based predictions may be calculated; and an environment that is sufficiently stable into the future for such predictions to apply. As Ulrich Beck (1992) suggested some time ago, these conditions are no longer to be relied upon. For example, terrorist incidents are said to be too few in number and too dispersed and diverse in nature to permit the required accumulation of mass statistical data; the increased autonomy of terrorist cells and individuals render surveillance and interception much harder; and terrorists take steps to avoid conforming to predictable patterns — for example by selecting operatives who do not fit risk-profiles (Beck 2002). Faith in preventive government appears to have given way to the emergence of an array of non-probabilistic manoeuvres that do not rely on prevention — or that change its meaning considerably. These ‘post-risk’ forms of governance can be grouped into several broad, and increasingly familiar, categories.