Lunch Lecture - Stefan Kaufmann

Governing fear: resilience as antidote to a catastrophic future

The driving force in the risk society, as Ulrich Beck has put it, is expressed by the statement “I’m afraid”. After 9/11 this diagnosis from 1986 is still gaining in persuasiveness. It is reflected in the tendency to address more and more areas of social life as security problems. On the surface, this is the effect of political mobilization through fear. Far more fundamental, however, seems to be a change in the epistemology and in the practices of institutionalised security management. These translate the fear of a potential catastrophe into policies under the guideline of resilience.