RISK AS A DRIVING FORCE OF CONTEMPORARY SOCIETIES, ECONOMY & POLITICS

This paper discusses understandings of risk as a driving force of societies not only as a tenet of the risk society thesis but also in terms of the economy, risk governance, risk regimes and as a technology for risk governmentality. Risk policies has also, during the last couple of decades, been developed in association with concepts such as vulnerability and resilience which we would say, implicates a certain understanding of the world. The dilemmas of materialism and idealism in addition to actors and structure will be analysed in relation to how risk concepts express notions of social, economic and political stability or instability and relationships between individuals, organisations and societies in different ideological systems, e.g., liberal or state-oriented. We suggest that there is a need for a genealogical questioning of the relationships between the self, markets and society, a questioning that can illustrate the contingency of these relationships, or, as we would have it, release them from their black boxes. Using illustrative local examples we will reflect upon the role of individualisation, marketization, and globalisation and anticipated catastrophes for the governing through risk. The analyses show the interaction between economic, social and technical systems through the normalisation of risk (de) responsibilisation and that the developments of neoliberal governance in terms of freedom and security interacts with the management of global terrorism and climate change.