Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience

Abstract

How should we understand the politics of security today? This article addresses this question from one particular perspective, that of ‘biosecurity’. It examines contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Europe, and that one can identify three different configurations: contingency planning, protection and resilience. Each of these embodies a significantly different way of reconciling fundamental imperatives for those who would govern a liberal society today – the imperative of freedom and the imperative of security.