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Summary Security Studies - Lecture notes and summaries of mandatory readings of Vital Interests
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This document contains all the lecture notes and summaries of mandatory readings for the course Vital Interests.
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💗Vital Interests Reading
Summaries + Lecture Notes
Week 1-6
The summaries are mostly copied from the documents and not paraphrased. Do not
copy and paste from this document on the exam!!
Some notes:
Guest lecture 13 from Leonie Leliveld on her experience managing the Covid-19
crisis is missing, because the slides are still not uploaded. Besides, I don’t think it
was that important.
The wrap up lecture is also not included.
The speech from Eisenhower is also not included in the summaries.
Lecture 5 doesn’t exist, because it was the day of the midterm.
The structure of a week is as follows:
Week number:
Readings for that lecture
Lecture notes
Etc.
Good luck on the final!! :))
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 1
, Vital Interests Reading
Summaries + Lecture Notes
Week 1-6
Week 1
Ansell, Christopher (2019). The Protective
State. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Chapter 1 & 2
Chapter 1: Thou Shalt Protect?
The role of the state to protect citizens from harm can be traced back before the origins
of the modern state, but it has changed dramatically over the past half century,
becoming more extensive, elaborate, and politically contested.
This protective role is at the heart of an implicit social contract between state and
society.
Citizens give up certain rights and in return they expect protection.
The protective state even extends to international politics where an international
doctrine known as “responsibility to protect” requires states to proactively intervene to
protect citizens of other states from genocide or humanitarian disaster.
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 1
, The state’s protective role is not limited to protecting people from physical harm, but
also extends to
property and property rights,
critical infrastructures,
data,
animals
and the environment.
While the “welfare state” and the “protective state” are overlapping concepts, they
also diverge in important respects.
The welfare state provides “social protection” to individuals and families in the
face of the vagaries of the labor market.
The protective state seeks to protect against discrete harms, accidents,
hazards, threats, and risks.
Demands for state protection cross partisan lines, with the left prioritising the welfare
state and the right the protective state.
The state’s protective role is often fraught with moral ambiguity.
To protect, the state may sometimes infringe on civil liberties or rights.
The term “state” is used here to signify all the democratic and authoritative institutions
of modern government, including legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
As an analytical concept, the protective state is meant to illuminate how protection
serves as a basic source of political legitimation, the increasing salience of
protection as a logic of governing and it offers a lens for understanding a range of
trends and developments that fall between or cut across traditional analytical
categories like social welfare, public health, consumer protection, criminal justice, or
international security.
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 2
, The mission is to explore the political and institutional dynamics that
arise around the state’s protective role.
Three broad features of protective state politics are noted at the outset:
1. Its debates about prevention
2. Its focus on risk
3. Its tendency to securitize issues
Prevention versus Reaction
The protective state is judged by how preventive versus reactive it is.
Although the public may only expect compensation and relief after an injurious
event has occurred, it often expects the state to prevent accidents and disasters
from happening in the first place.
In part, this shift toward prevention represents changing perceptions about the
causes of harm.
For example, the meaning of “accident” has changed over time from an event that is
unavoidable to something that can be prevented.
This preventive focus also partly reflects expectations about the capacity to control
harms.
The public health community has traditionally argued for prevention strategies.
A distinctive feature of the protective state is that this preventive approach is
extended to policy domains like criminal justice that have traditionally been more
reactive.
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 3
, The politics of the protective state tend to become structured along a reactive-
preventive dimension.
The limits of a reactive approach often become the basis for arguing for more
preventive action.
Risk
A second prominent feature of the protective state is its expanding focus on risk and
increasing contestation about how to respond to it.
While risk assessment and management have expanded, so have criticisms of their
ability to address uncertainty.
Greater public and scientific concern about uncertainty and the irreversibility of
consequences has reinforced a precautionary approach to risk. Leading to “worst
case” or “possibilistic” thinking that can in turn lead to the overestimation of threats.
A central theme of the protective state is “who bears the risk?” – a theme often linked
to debates about whether risk is an individual or a collective responsibility.
Security and Securitization
If “threat” is understood broadly as a potential but intentional harm, we then come to
appreciate that security is not limited to military threats and may be more generic.
The process of extending the logic of security to issues beyond military security as
“securitization”
The politics of the protective state tend to widen the scope of securitization, raising
questions about which problems and risks will be brought under the security umbrella.
Chapter 2: The Rise of the Protective State
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 4
, “The developmental path of the protective state basically follows the
trajectory of state building.”
As states extended their geographical reach and control, as they developed a
regularized administrative machinery to deliver services, as the sense of the state
as a nation was consolidated, and as democratic modes of political contestation
were institutionalized, so too was the protective role of the state elaborated,
expanded, and constrained.
The state’s protective role was primarily focused on preventing foreign invasion,
maintaining public order, and to some extent safeguarding public health.
The first modern wave of protective state building occurred in the last third of the
nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century.
Militaries expanded and professionalized police forces expanded and began to
specialize in crime control and a “sanitation revolution” led the state to expand
its role in disease prevention.
The late-nineteenth-century state also expanded into new areas of protection –
notably, into “protective” legislation regulating the conditions of labor, often with
a special focus on protecting women and children.
A second wave of organizing occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, consolidating and
extending the incipient protections developed at the turn of the century.
A third wave of protective state building began in the 1960s and 1970s.
Legislative developments in the 1960s and 1970s expanded and consolidated
consumer and environmental protection.
The fourth wave is hard to distinguish from the third, but through a series of events
beginning in the mid-1980s, like the AIDS crisis and 9/11, the most recent set of
developments in the protective state were triggered.
Each wave built on political and institutional developments in prior waves.
Although state protections are typically instantiated in particular sectoral policies or
programs (food safety, human trafficking, etc.), state protection often expands in a
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 5
, more general fashion, affecting several sectors at once.
The Contemporary Transformation of the Protective
State
In the mid-1980s, the sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) made the provocative argument
that a “risk society” was replacing “industrial society.”
In this new society, concerns about the consequences of risk were magnified and
fell on rich and poor alike.
As a result, the ethical rationale of society shifted from equality to safety, and the
risk society became oriented toward the future and the potential for harms.
Rising Expectations and Loss of Control
The contemporary protective state is born of the paradoxical tensions between rising
expectations about being protected and the fear, anxiety, and distrust that comes
with personal loss of control over protection.
“Cultural changes in the past two decades have increased our
intolerance of risk, resulting in greater expectations of security
from physical hazards, illness, environmental degradation, and
even from being cheated in the marketplace.”
Citizen fear and anxiety about risks is one of the driving factors of the development
of the protective state.
The Policy State and the Expanding Role of Science
A very broad factor in the rise of a protective state is the major expansion of the “policy
state” in the second half of the twentieth century.
By creating policies and programs, the policy state can institutionalize concern
about protecting citizens.
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 6
, Furthermore, by extending surveillance, funding research, or collecting statistics,
the policy state may increase concern about some risks and reveal new risks.
The expansion of the protective state also reflects the expanding role of science in
policy making.
In a broad cultural sense, science has largely replaced religion in explaining and
giving meaning to disasters.
More politically, science has authority that has been woven into the fabric of
governing.
Rights and Changing Social Structure
Another source of the protective state has been a “rights revolution.”
WIth the expansion of the concept of rights to an ever more diverse array of issues
and problems, come the claims that can be made about the protection of these
rights.
Examples are protection against pollution (as a healthy environment is a human
right), data protection, protection of ethnic minorities, protection of the LGBTQ+
community, etc.
Welfare, Regulation, and Crime
A focus on protecting citizens from specific harms may, in part, reflect a retrenchment
of the more commodious social protections of the classic welfare state.
It is argued that welfare states have moved away from a concept of “social
citizenship,” a change that has been accompanied by a relative shift from
redistributive to regulatory and coercive policies.
In advanced industrial nations, the regulatory state has expanded in part in response to
the privatization and the deregulation of markets.
Ironically, “freer markets” have led to “more rules”.
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 7
, The combination of welfare state retrenchment (bezuiniging) and the expanding use of
regulatory instruments may, in turn, be related to a greater emphasis on extending
protections to individual victims and vulnerable groups.
Consumerism
Consumer mobilization is another source of the expanding protective state.
Although product liability law favored producers through much of the twentieth
century, consumer-oriented legal scholars and the consumer movement succeeded
in partially shifting responsibility and the burden of proof onto producers.
Public health
The shifting role of public health has also contributed to the transformation of the
protective state.
In the nineteenth century, the state’s role in population health increased across
urbanizing and industrializing countries, and its capacity to intervene to improve
sanitation and prevent infectious diseases continued to develop throughout the
twentieth century.
Science and medicine played a central role in supporting and defending this
expanded state role.
While expanding its role to include chronic disease and widening its focus to
consider social and political determinants of health, public health’s attitude toward
infectious diseases also shifted.
Taken together, these various developments have encouraged the public health sector
to engage in a more expansive protective agenda.
Changing Security Demands, Terrorism, and
Globalization
Reconfigured by the end of the Cold War, the rise of terrorism, and globalization, a new
security environment has also contributed to the transformation of the protective state.
The breakdown of the bipolar Cold War security logic has led to a more fluid and
pluralistic situation characterized by amorphous threats and porous borders.
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 8
, Among the consequences of these shifts has been the securitization of a
wider range of issues and an erosion of the boundary between domestic
and international security.
Collier, Stephen J, and Andrew Lakoff
(2015). ‘Vital Systems Security: Reflexive
Biopolitics
and the Government of Emergency.’ Theory,
Culture & Society 32, nr. 2, 19–51.
Introduction
It is striking that in so many different policy arenas we find a shared understanding in
political discourse both of what constitutes a catastrophe and of the expected
government role in preparing for and responding to potentially catastrophic events.
Catastrophes are understood as sudden and unpredictable events that disrupt the
systems that are critical to economic and social life.
And government is held responsible for reducing vulnerability to such events as well
as for ensuring the operation of critical systems in their wake.
These matters are taken to be a matter of common sense.
However, as we will show, such common sense is the result of a relatively recent ‘event
in thought’.
It is only in the last several decades that American planners and policymakers have
come to understand collective life as dependent upon a complex of critical
systems that are vulnerable to catastrophic disruption.
And it is only over the same period that vital systems security has come to be
regarded as a central problem for government.
Reflexive Biopolitics
Vital Interests Reading Summaries + Lecture Notes Week 1-6 9
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