Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown, Routledge, London and New York, 2011, 176 pages, $130.00 cloth, $49.95 paper, ISBN 978-0-415-49809-8 (cloth), 978-0-415-62738-2 (paper).

Part textbook, and part a more fundamental attempt to analyze a number of philosophical and political issues that surround modern security studies, this book begins with an etymological description of the word "catastrophe" as a "reversal of what is expected" or "an overturning." In Politics of Catastrophe, Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster aim to demonstrate how catastrophes—whether climate change, terrorism, or health outbreaks—shape security and governance practices. The term catastrophe has been carefully chosen by the authors for two reasons: first, to represent a sense of limit, and second, because of its etymological roots as an "overturning." In this context, catastrophes express the limits of our knowledge and our capacity to manage unforeseen events. Catastrophes also work to overturn what is expected in normal governance, politics, and security by introducing a series of unknown and unpredictable occurrences.  By conceptualizing catastrophe in this way, Aradau and van Munster champion a new type of imaginary knowledge that draws on many unexpected areas to allow for conjectural reasoning about the unknowns and potential of future catastrophes.

Catastrophes represent such a stark shift from expected reality, and are an overturning of what we know, because they are mostly unimaginable and certainly unexpected.  The need for imagination in understanding and predicting potential catastrophes serves for increased prevention and preparation.  Sci-fi writers have joined the US Department of Homeland Security in its ‘war on terror’ as part of the Science Fiction in Service of the National Security group. Things that were once thought to be outlandish are now being used to assist in formulating and building knowledge on genealogies of the unknown. The idea of catastrophe is not new as seen during the Cold War when rational choice theory subsumed the intellectual and social imagination by reducing calculable inputs into scenarios and simulations. As the authors argue, “imagination creates the future as a new epistemic ‘reality’ by mediating between the senses and understanding” (page 84). Of prime importance to formulating an aesthetics of catastrophe, subjects are invited to simulate a future catastrophe and to use the sensorial knowledge that they experience in a given simulation in order to enhance their perception and preparedness for potential catastrophes.  These scenarios not only create an “anticipatory regime” through fear, but through pleasure because many exercises seem like theatrical sites rather than ones of catastrophe or fear.  Normalizing reactions to the unexpected, mapping paths and creating plans are all beneficial to reduce chaos when catastrophes occur; simulating catastrophes allows for a better reaction if and when a real catastrophe occurs.

Throughout the book, catastrophe is represented as the limit of knowledge and the limit of governmental practice.  Therefore, the authors ask what attempts already exist to counter future catastrophes as well as new ways to prepare, prevent and expand our knowledge of "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." Their key question is also one that seeks to make sure that the politics of catastrophe does not become an all-encompassing politics of fear. As Giorgio Agamben’s work on exceptionalism tells us, the sovereign’s ability to create a space between norm and exception creates a zone of indistinction where people lose their ability to be a part of normal discourse.  Legal, political, and social appeals are not possible when a state of exception occurs. The categorization, sorting and surveillance of individuals that are initially introduced as a state of exception, as after 9/11, become normalized and are applied as conjectural technologies indiscriminately across the whole population. When catastrophic events cannot be predicted in terms of time or type, regimes of expert knowledge are shattered, and those that govern are as clueless as the governed. However, conjectural styles of knowledge that reshape and reformulate existing knowledge are invaluable to such experts so that the “politics of catastrophe is anticipatory and deployed largely pre-event” (page 117).

The evolution of risk management and securing against catastrophe suggests that the preservation of security against “catastrophic futures has been central to security experts since the development of nuclear weaponry and interballistic missiles” (page 18). Despite the seemingly new threats and mobilizations against terrorism, possible catastrophic futures have been a real threat for a much longer period.  With catastrophe, knowledge shifts from investigating and understanding the “possible instead of the probably and the plausible instead of the true” (page 19, emphasis added). Acknowledging the contribution of securitization theory and critical security studies, the authors maintain that the concept of risk is relatively new to security studies overall. They draw on Didier Bigo’s work on security professionals as managers of unease in order to prove that risk management is not only about statistical analysis but that it is a field that is shaped and managed through power relations, experts, and technology as well. Drawing on both theoretical work such as that of Ulrich Beck’s theorization of uncertainty as the residual of risk management, and using practical examples such as the discussion of the Unites States’ Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the authors continually link their discussion of the theoretical with the empirical realities in particular case studies.

The next section of the text addresses the question of how can we govern and manage what it is that we do not know? In response, the author’s develop a “conjectural style of reasoning” which allows some attempt to govern the unknown through the “construct[ion of] an explanation out of apparently insignificant details” (page 31). Carlo Ginzburg’s understanding of conjectural style in historical research and Michel Foucault’s logic of strategy are discussed in order to exemplify how conjectural reasoning “brings together different and disparate forms of knowledge that function together, without presupposing or necessitating homogeneity” (page 32). The counter-terrorism policies and practices of the United Kingdom and the United States use various "Ps" in order to problematize the unknown threats of terrorism.  They include protection, prevention, precaution, preparedness, pursuit, and persecution. All of these Ps, the authors argue, function together in a conjectural style in order for state actors to be better able to manage any impending terrorist attacks. Data mining, social networking analysis, and inter-personal / social surveillance are a few of the many tools employed in the dispositif of counter-terrorism.  Environmental catastrophes are also high on the agenda for governance, because both terrorism and environmental catastrophes are a threat to critical infrastructure. However, whereas risk management governs security catastrophes, environmentally catastrophic risks are governed using what has been referred to as the precautionary principle.  With its roots in German environmental law and implemented internationally at the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, the precautionary principle aims “to take regulatory action on the basis of possible ‘unmanageable’ risks, even after tests have been conducted that find no evidence of harm” (page 41). Therefore, regardless of any real or viable evidence of a threat, steps are taken to control and limit risks at all times. This falls clearly with the purview of catastrophe governance however, as Aradau and van Munster point out, both prevention and precaution aim to detect the invisible patterns or signs of potentially dangerous situations.

The question of economies of catastrophe examines the role of insurance companies and how it adjusts in response to the problematization of potential terrorist attacks. The authors critique academia for relegating insurance and its centrality in social security to the margins of their study arguing instead for a more holistic approach to security studies. Insurance must surely be considered in security studies when governance, critical infrastructure, and policy are all tied to it, and all of these help guide and shape one another. Insurance is a practice of security, and perhaps more so, it also is intrinsic in maintaining the capitalist way of life. In a time where catastrophe is an all-pervasive threat, the message is to behave as if you were uninsured in order to minimize your losses.

Since the threat of catastrophe permeates every aspect of our modern society, this book is a timely attempt to emphasize the importance of shifting our ideas of what knowledge is and how we can know it. Aradau and van Munster offer a discussion on the politics of catastrophe and how this shapes and is re-shaped by our social world.  It offers a significant contribution in highlighting a number of different areas that are not often brought together and provides a novel contribution to security studies. However, it seems the authors could have taken more of a normative stance on the question of governing the unknown. While they touch upon the work of a number of important theorists and empirical cases, the authors seem to leave judgment about the ethics of governing catastrophes to the readers. Named The Politics of Catastrophe, the authors do not make any predictions about where this type of governance might lead but instead broach the topic of catastrophe as a real and tangible issue for discourse and expand our understanding of knowledge.