Event and Anticipation

UK Civil Contingencies and the Space-Times of Decision

Bibliographic Data

ID4139631
AuthorsP Adey (0000-0001-6807-4282, Physical and Geographical Sciences, William Smith Building, Keele University, Keele ST5 5BG, England, corresponding author), Ben Anderson (0000-0002-9541-6142, Durham University, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume43
Issue12
Pages2878-2899
Publication date2011-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1068/a43576
OpenAlexW1988937126
LanguageEN
Citations received47
References cited32

What is the relation between security and a decision? How should decisions be taken as events unfold in unpredictable, aleatory, ways? And how are decisions made and constituted in particular and therefore differential security contexts? The paper draws on observations of 'strategic' exercises in UK Civil Contingencies, sites in which 'multiagency' responders take decisions in relation to the events that make up a range of crises, breakdowns, and interruptions. UK Civil Contingencies has a complicated relation with decision which challenges the predominance of approaches which prioritise the 'sovereign decision' as a preemptive act. On the one hand, the dream of emergency planners is of a decentred anticipatory system without the need for the event of decision, in which a distributed set of responders are primed to snap into action at the onset of an event and to follow protocols for how to connect and act together. On the other hand, and faced with the contingency of events and the mutability of the response network, decision is not erased, automated, or deferred but proliferates and, sometimes, is very difficult to make. Decisions have to constantly be taken about who to act with and how to act when faced with what the event could become: that is, when faced by the event's potential and, importantly, the complexity of response. In the paper we explore the relation between security and decision by outlining how the 'exercise' functions within emergency planning as a privileged site for the staging and performing of decisions

Computer security · Contingency · Contingency plan · Economics · Epistemology · Operations management · Operations research · Computer Science · Disaster Management and Resilience · Engineering · Global Security and Public Health · Peacebuilding and International Security · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence

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