The Governmentality of Terrorism: Uncertainty, Risk Management, and Surveillance

This chapter analyses terrorism as a form of biopolitical governmentality made possible by the crisis of uncertainty of the modern condition. It argues that precautionary risk management has been a key tool for the implementation of governmental practices and explores surveillance as a specific instantiation of the logic of risk management. At the heart of this development, it is suggested, lies an underlying tension between universalism and particularism whereby, although we may be all equal in the face of the terrorist threat, we are not equal when it comes to counter-terrorism measures. Precautionary risk management rests on practices of identification, measurement and attribution of risk to different social, ethnic and religious groups that ultimately (re)produce hierarchies, exclusion, inequalities, and logics of class. The multiplication, fragmentation, and heterogeneous reproduction of sovereign power that comes with this process performs a disciplinary function geared towards the production of docile subjects compliant with the neoliberal biopolitical order, and the parallel production of ‘threatening others’ which justifies the adoption of exceptional measures and universal practices of surveillance.