Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235

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Geoforum

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Security and the future: Anticipating the event of terror

Ben AndersonDepartment of Geography, Science Laboratories, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Received 22 February 2008Received in revised form 31 October 2009

Keywords:FutureSecurityAnticipationEventTerror

0016-7185/$ - see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. Adoi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2009.11.002

E-mail address: Ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk

a b s t r a c t

This paper explores the relation between processes of security and futurity in the context of efforts togovern the complexity and contingency of events of terror. It argues that processes of securing functionby generating a dangerous or promissory supplement to the present that thereafter propels the extensionof forms of security. The paper develops this argument through an example of how an event of terror wasanticipated: a RAND exercise into the aftermath of a ‘ground burst’ nuclear explosion in Long Beach, Cal-ifornia on March 14th 2005. It argues that exercises (in)secure through three quasi-causal operations,each of which render events of terror actionable and result in specific relations between the presentand future. First, ‘hypothetically possible’ generic events are named. The future takes place as a threaten-ing horizon. Second, the defined phases of an event’s happening are staged (an advent, its multiplicationinto a crisis in the context of a milieu, and a response/recovery phase). The here and now is suspendedbetween an ‘as if’ future and the present. Third, the consequences of the event are played. The future isboth an intensified ‘practical’ presence embodied by exercise participants and an outside that exceedsattempts to definitively know it. The conclusion summarises the implications of the paper for work onfuturity, security and the event.

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1. Prologue: no bad surprises

At 12.00 pm on the then future date of Monday 14th March2005 an event happens. An event that is potentially catastrophic.It is imagined in a scenario:

‘‘At the Port of Long Beach a nuclear weapon detonates in atremendous explosion heard and seen throughout the LosAngeles basin. Large quantities of materials and water areimmediately sucked into a forming cloud of debris and alarge mushroom cloud begins to rise from the Port area”

(RAND, 2006, p. 13)

The advent of the event is imagined to disrupt the connectionsand circulations that make up life in the Los Angeles basin. Peopledie and are injured from flash burns, radiation poisoning, flyingdebris, and traffic accidents. Infrastructure is damaged, causingpower outages, and the loss of telecommunications. Global equitymarkets plummet. All commercial air traffic is halted. Millions fleethe LA basin. What else will happen after the advent of event is,however, unpredictable. Uncertainties multiply about the charac-ter and scope of the event as it destroys normal life. The eventexceeds attempts to predict it.

The imagined event and its imagined effects were part of aseries of ‘table top’ strategic games undertaken by the military-

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strategic think tank RAND1 in 2004. The exercise addressed a setof questions about the effects of the event:

‘‘Within the first 72 hours, what would the direct effects ofsuch an attack be? What human causalities, property dam-age, and destruction of infrastructure would result immedi-ately? In the weeks and months after the attack, what wouldthe longer-term economic implications be?”(RAND, 2006, p. xv)

The exercise is not used to predict when or where an attack willoccur. Rather, it explores the contingency and complexity of anevent – the uncertain character and effects of a ‘catastrophic ter-rorist attack’ as it unfolds to damage and destroy life.

2. Introduction: preparing for an event that doesn’t come topass

‘‘What comes to pass, as an event, can only come to pass ifit’s impossible. If it’s possible, if it’s foreseeable, then itdoesn’t come to pass”.(Derrida, 2007, p. 451)

The relation between security, futurity and the event has re-cently perplexed geographers, amongst others. How do events be-come problems to be governed (Foucault, 2007)? How are events

1 RAND is commonly thought to be an acronym for Research ANd Development.

228 B. Anderson / Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235

thereafter secured (Dillon, 2007)? How, in contrast, could we re-spond with events, in doing so learning to affirm the new, surpris-ing or untimely? (see Dewsbury, 2007; Kraftl and Horton, 2007;Donaldson, 2008). Notwithstanding differences in the contestedconcept of ‘the event’,2 the relation between security and ‘the event’has for the main been posed in a particular way; the assumption isthat to think ‘the event’ is to think an open future that cannot be se-cured. From this perspective, once an event has been secured it cannever catch us off guard, jolt or disturb us. For the aim of security is,supposedly, to control and manage the future, ensuring that an eventdoes not come to pass. In this paper, I contribute to work on the rela-tion between events, security and futurity by arguing that, on thecontrary, processes of securing generate excess, that is they openup futures. Invoking a future that cannot be predetermined, that es-capes being fully known, is integral to the invention, deploymentand legitimation of forms of security. This argument follows fromanother – that ‘the future’ is an effect of specific relations and acts.How the future relates to past and present will vary and does notpre-exist specific processes of securing and forms of security. Withthe result that the key task for work on security, the event and futu-rity is, I will demonstrate through the paper and argue in conclusion,to describe how ‘the future’ is disclosed and made present.

I develop this argument through the example of the RANDexercise cited in the prologue, exploring the use of a scenarioand a set of strategic games to anticipate the effects of a ‘cata-strophic nuclear explosion’ (RAND, 2006). My analysis is basedon two questions about the relation between exercises and the fu-ture. First, how is the future disclosed and related to as a certainsort of problem? Second, how is a specific future rendered action-able through the exercise? Exercises are one of a suite of anticipa-tory techniques that have been deployed in response toinvocations of the complexity and contingency of events of terror.In relation to the threat of terror the fear is of belatedness – thataction to secure will be too late when faced with the problem ofthe advent and unfolding of events. The expansion of what haveelsewhere been termed ‘imaginative’ (Salter, 2008) or ‘visionary’(O’Malley, 2004) anticipatory techniques is inseparable from acertain problematisation of terror. In the so called ‘war on terror’events of terror pose the problem of ‘the aleatory’ (Dillon, 2007).Events of terror have been problematised as unpredictable inoccurrence, characteristics, and effects. Consequently, the futureevent of terror will exceed attempts to predict it. The surpriseof the future event has been given various names – unpredictabil-ity, radical uncertainty, and unknowability, to name just some(Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; Best, 2008; Amoore, 2007).Whilst these terms are not equivalent, they all herald a way ofdisclosing and relating to ‘the future’. The future is not a repeti-tion of what has been, nor a teleological end, but a surprise,where ‘surprise’ denotes an openness, surplus, or excess overthe present (Nancy, 2000). A range of work has shown how thisproblematisation of the future is intertwined with the limit ofone form of anticipatory practice – what Collier (2008) terms‘archival–statistical’ forms of knowledge that predict futures onthe basis of the past dispersion of events – and the deploymentof ways of governing through uncertainty (O’Malley, 2004), ambi-guity (Best, 2008), or indeterminacy (Aradau and Van Munster,2007).

In this context, the paper focuses on the specific relation (or setof relations) that are established between the present and future

2 Although space precludes me from discussing differences within the contestedconcept of the event, we could note some broad contours within a shared concernwith what comes to us by surprise; the event as background noise; the event aswhat–is-happening; the event as a rupture; the event as the collapse of thetemporality of before and after; the event as an incorporeal entity, a becoming; andthe event as a rare evanescent that subtracts itself from what is.

when anticipating terror. In doing so, I will argue that securingthrough exercises is a ‘heterogenetic’ process. By which I mean thatexercises function by opening up a gap between the present andthe future which is used to justify the deployment of new formsof security. In the first section I develop these introductory remarksby exploring the relation between futurity and two meanings ofsecurity – security as condition and securing as process. Securityand securing are both dependent on nonexistent phenomena –threats and promises (after Massumi, 2005, 2007; Anderson,2007). This opens up a novel focus on the specific processes where-by futures are made present. In the remaining sections of the paperI return to the RAND report cited in the prologue and argue that theevent of a ‘nuclear explosion’ in Long Beach, CA is anticipatedthrough three quasi-causal operations: naming, staging and play-ing. The result is that the disruptive excess of the future event issimultaneously effaced and called forth. In conclusion I summarisethe implications of this argument for emerging work in Geographyand elsewhere on the event, futurity and security.

3. Futurity and (in) security

A range of research has shown that a necessary component ofspaces of security is the presence of some form of threat to a valuedlife (see Adey, 2009; Amoore, 2009; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero,2008; Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008). From this work, we learnthat the substantive geographies of (in)security are inseparablefrom what, after Bourdieu (2000), we could term the time of the‘forth-coming’. By which Bourdieu means the immediate futurethat is apprehended through acts of practical anticipation andexpectation. We also learn of the performative role that ‘‘precur-sory signs of what threatens to happen” (Derrida, 2003, p. 96) havein legitimising the need to protect, care for, and sustain some formof valued life (Hannah, 2006). These starting points for thinkingabout the relation between security, events and futurity can bedeveloped by distinguishing between two meanings of security –security as condition and securing as process.

The first meaning of security is as a present condition – the con-dition of being protected from danger, or freedom from care, anx-iety or apprehension (Dillon, 1996). Here the future takes placeaffectively. Being secure is composed of cluster of positive (safety,confidence) or negative (freedom from anxiety or fear) affects. Thisis in two ways. First, a relation to a future is expressed in the bodilyfeelings of being-secure that are a constant part of the backgroundof everyday life. Second, those feelings of being secure may bemomentarily qualified in specific emotions, in which feelings ofbeing-secure are named, reflected on and narrated.3 We could thengo onto say that the feelings and emotions of being-secure resonatewith one another as part of vague, indefinite, atmospheres of(in)security – defined as spatially diffuse collective moods (Ander-son, forthcoming-a).

The emphasis here is on being-(in)secure as an affectively im-bued condition in which a felt relation with the future is emergentfrom everyday life. There is, however, a second and quite differentsense that the word security has – a sense of unwarranted confi-dence, a culpable absence of anxiety, or a carelessness (Dillon,1996). This opens up a slightly different relation with the future.Here the emphasis is on securing as a continuous, never ending,process of attempting to make life secure. On this understandingsecurity and insecurity are imbricated in one another in morecomplex ways than their opposition would suggest (after Dillon,

3 This distinction between affects, feelings and emotions in this section is based ona distinction between; affects as transpersonal capacities to affect and be affected,feelings as the expression of those capacities in different corporeal intensities, andemotion as the qualification of those intensities (see Anderson, 2006; McCormack,2003 for further discussion).

B. Anderson / Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235 229

1996). As a starting point we could say that any process of securinga valued life involves two characteristic modes of relation. First,securing involves disclosing some form of dangerous supplement4

to the present that threatens to bring disappearance, damage, or lossto a valued life. The existence of threat is then used to call forth ac-tion in the present that stops or halts that which threatens, or miti-gates and alleviates its effects. Second, securing involves acting overwhatever is to be secured, forcing or inducing it to undergo someform of transformation. The action of securing a valued life is under-taken in the name of a hoped-for future. It involves a promise beingattached to particular ways of managing and controlling threat(through neutralisation, mitigation, protection or some other formof action). Securing works, then, through the creation of supple-ments to the present – threats and promises. Hence the radicalambiguity of security. It can never be fully achieved. We can neverbe done with securing because it is dependent on invoking the futurein a way that disrupts and opens up the here and now.

Massumi’s (2005) work on threat as a ‘future cause’ of action canbe used to understand how threats and promises function as part ofprocesses of securing. In his focus on one governmental technology –the Department of Homeland Security’s 2002 colour-coded terroralert system – Massumi shows how threats (and by implicationpromises) are used to justify and enable action in the present. Hedescribes their specific mode of action in the following terms:

‘‘Threat [and promise] is the future cause of a change in thepresent. A future cause is not actually a cause; it is a virtualcause, or a quasicause ... The causality is bidirectional, oper-ating immediately on both poles [the actual and virtual, thepresent and future], in a kind of time-slip through which afuturity is made directly present in an effective expressionthat brings it into the present without it ceasing to be afuturity”.

(Massumi, 2005, p. 35, 36)

Securing functions through the seemingly paradoxical ‘reality’ ofthreats and promises. On the one hand, a threatening or promisingfuture achieves some form of effect in the present. On the other hand,that future has no actual existence because it has not and may neverhappen. Hence Massumi’s use of the term ‘quasi-cause’. The word‘cause’ is used because the presence of threat induces effects else-where, if only in fear or anxiety, and always as part of a process ofsecuring. The word ‘quasi’ clarifies the term ‘cause’ because a threatonly works through its effects. Without the effects of threat –whether representational or non-representational – a threat wouldhave no handle on actual existence (Massumi, 2007). It would bepurely ideal. With the result that threats and promises are used tojustify or demand forms of action in the present. Data is tracked, air-ports are closed, and passengers are screened on the basis of whathas not and may never happen (Amoore, 2009; Masusmi, 2005;Adey, 2009; Anderson, forthcoming-b).

Massumi’s discussion of threats/promises as ‘quasi-causal’ en-ables us to attend to how securing involves complicated relationsbetween present and future. From his account we learn that the fu-ture can act as a present cause for action, the present can becomethe past of a future, or a past future can be made present. In short,there are many forms the relation between the present and futurecan take. Identifying just some of these relations from outside of

4 The term ‘supplement’ is used in this passage in the sense of an exterior additionor extra that transforms that which is supplemented (without the slightly differentsense of ‘supplement’ as something inessential that is merely added on – such as anewspaper supplement). In this paper I am interested in the particular type ofsupplementarity involved in processes of securing. My use here is informed byDerrida’s sense of the ‘maddening’ logic of the supplement as that which is bothinside and outside, presence and absence, both less than nothing and much more thannothing (see, in particular, Derrida, 1976).

the sphere of security is useful to further denaturalise the spatio-temporal category of ‘the future’. The future may take place as; arepetition of the present, a recurrence of the present, a virtualitythat animates the present, a to-come that surprises the present,and a not-yet that breaks open the present, to name only somerelations (see Anderson, forthcoming-b). How, then, does the fu-ture take place in the context of the threat of terror and attemptsto anticipate that threat? And how do certain techniques promiseto secure against such a threat?

4. Exercises and anticipation

Threats and promises are not reflections of objective danger oropportunity. They must be enacted through some form of anticipa-tion – understood as an attempt to capture, seize, take in, or takepossession of something beforehand or in advance of. Anticipationis itself a generic relation with futurity. On the one hand, to antic-ipate implies a heightened attentiveness to things to come, an ori-entation to what presently exceeds possession. On the other hand,to anticipate implies an impatient denial of the otherness, mysteryor unknowability of things to come, and an active striving thataims to control the future. I understand anticipation, then, as a per-formative process of rendering the future actionable. There are, ofcourse, many forms of anticipation (see Bissell (2007) and Ander-son (2006) on waiting and hoping).

Exercises are one technique that are used in the context of theso called ‘war on terror’ to anticipate futures that are assumed tobe ‘unimaginable’ or ‘incalculable’. Salter (2008) and de Goede(2008) both describe the use of forms of visualization and narrati-visation to ‘imagine the unimaginable’ in governing the circulationof, respectively, people and money. Slightly differently, but broadlycomparable, Ericson and Doyle (2004) show how techniques of ex-pert ‘elicitation’ were used by insurance companies post 9/11 tomake guesses about likely targets. Grusin’s (2004) description of‘premediation’ is useful to understand the specific style of anticipa-tion common to exercises and these other techniques. Despite dif-ferences between the techniques in terms of forms of evidence,expertise and end result, the unique thing about them is that theydo not anticipate by predetermining the form of the future. Insteadthey aim to make present ‘‘[a]s many of the possible paths, or pos-sible worlds, that the future could be imagined to take” (Grusin,2004, p. 28). What they share is a style of relating to the future thatis based on multiplying versions of what could happen. Techniquesof premediation occur, then, at the limit of two other ways of relat-ing to uncertain futures. The first is probabilistic prediction basedon archival–statistical knowledge (Collier, 2008). Premediation isprospective. Its object is the future as an inexhaustible reserve ofdifference. It is therefore organized around plausible possibilitiesthat cannot be extrapolated from the past dispersion of events.The second is reasonable foresight (O’Malley, 2004). Premediationis a type of foresight, but is based on the limit case and theimprobable.

Exercises are now embedded throughout multiple ways of gov-erning, and are by no means homogenous. They must, therefore, beunderstood as a specific technique for premediating futures andreducing exposure to bad surprises. Briefly, we could identify threedirect antecedents in relation to security, whilst also noting theextensive use of exercises in the commercial sphere. These drawexercises into relation with the use of linked techniques such asdrills, simulations, and war games (Graham, 2007; Budd and Adey,2009). The first is war gaming. In the context of the Cold War, wargames were valorised for how they generated an ‘anticipatoryexperience’ through the play of the game (Ghamari-Tabrizi,2005). The second is the political exercise or syndicate. The politi-cal exercise was described as a ‘laboratory for political inventive-ness’ that enabled an experimentation in the realm of policy

5 The 2007 ‘National Preparedness Guidelines’ (DoHS, 2007) defines an ‘all hazards’approach as; ‘‘capabilities-based preparedness to prevent, protect against, respond to,and recover from terrorist attacks, major disasters, and other emergencies”.

6 The 2002 US National Security Strategy defines ‘catastrophic’ threats as thosewith ‘‘the greatest risk of mass casualties, massive property loss, and immense socialdisruption”. This is the definition used in the 2007 ‘National Preparedness Guidelines’(DoHS, 2007).

230 B. Anderson / Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235

(Ghamari-Tabrizi, 2000). The final antecedent to exercises werecivil defence rehearsals. Compliance with civil defence was perfor-mative – the phases of nuclear war were performed ‘as if’ theywere happening (Davis, 2007). War gaming, political exercises,and civil defence rehearsals all exercised response to a specific typeof event – the ‘uncanny’ event of nuclear war (Masco, 2006). Theyfunctioned in the context of a specific anticipatory logic – mutualdeterrence – and a specific condition – radical uncertainty focusedon the advent of war and its consequences (Edwards, 1996; Oakes,1994).

As Lakoff (2007) demonstrates, preparedness exercises havemost in common with the political exercises that were formalisedby RAND in the early 1950s. These techniques make the futurepresent in a particular way. Consider the use of scenarios and stra-tegic games in the context of the logic of deterrence. As we haveseen the referent object for both techniques was the event of nu-clear war; described in one of the first texts to discuss the use ofscenarios and strategic games as a ”[r]eality which does not yet ex-ist” (Kahn, 1962, p. 143). In this context the scenario was valorisedbecause it permitted the comprehension of multiple, interacting,possibilities. So: ‘‘[t]he scenario is simply one of many devices use-ful in stimulating and disciplining the imagination” (Kahn, 1962, p.143). As an aid to thinking that addresses the ‘plausible’ ratherthan ‘probable’ case, scenarios act ‘dramatically’, ‘persuasively’, or‘with force’ (Kahn, 1962, p. 144). They ‘stimulate’ and ‘discipline’individual and institutional imagination and thus offer a pragmatic‘‘[s]et of organized ways for us to dream effectively about ourfuture” (Kahn, 1962, p. 101). The strategic game works slightly dif-ferently. It enables those possibilities to be ‘explored’ through an‘‘anticipatory experience” or ‘‘synthetic experience” that was lik-ened to the immersive experience of art and dreams (Kahn andMann, 1957; Goldsen, 1956; Speier and Goldhammer, 1959). Assuch the strategic game was valorised because it was able to‘‘[m]ake the analysis less icily rational, to give it explicitly colour,emotion, accident, irrationality, and so forth” (Kahn, 1962, p. 174).

What we learn from this brief discussion is that exercises arebound up with two practices of invention – imagination and per-formance. Scenarios and strategic gaming are imaginative in thesense that they involve the capacity to postulate that which isnot, that which is nonexistent (Casey, 1976). They are also perfor-mative in that they make use of a set of explicitly dramaturgicalacts (imitating, pretending, playing) in order to create a transientmake-believe world (Thrift, 2000). Techniques of performanceand imagination function differently to the alerts discussed inthe previous section. Masusmi (2005) argues that the alert systemis based on a continuous modulation of affectivity. Because theyare ‘formless’ and ‘contentless’ (Masusmi, 2005, p. 35), alerts workby channelling ‘‘a variation in intensity of feeling over time”(Masusmi, 2005, p. 32) through ‘‘[a]n assisted germination ofpotentials for action whose outcome could not be accurately deter-mined in advance – but whose variable determination could bedetermined to occur, on hue [i.e. through changes in the colourof the alert level]” (Masusmi, 2005, p. 33). Whilst the descriptionof this operation is convincing, the alert is, however, a unique tech-nique in leaving the threat ‘formless’ and ‘contentless’. In contrast,imagination and performance work precisely by giving a form andcontent to threat. Both are based on what Casey (1976, p. 115)terms an ‘as if’ process – a process of regarding the performed orimagined events, states of affairs, or persons ‘as if’ they were real.

Scenarios and gaming were described as ‘strange’ aids tothought in one of the first texts that discusses them, Kahn’s(1962) Thinking About the Unthinkable. They have now lost someof that initial strangeness as exercises have become a routine partof the processes through which terror and other threats are gov-erned. Exercises now have multiple functions; as training sessionsbased on a form of experiential knowing and learning; tests of

existing response capability; audits of emergency plans; drills forhabituated response, as well as laboratories to generate knowledgeof future disruptive events (see de Goede, 2008; Lakoff, 2007; Salt-er, 2008; Schoch-Spana, 2004). And they differ significantly instructure, ranging from table top exercises involving a small num-ber of participants to multi-site exercises staged for publics; inmaterial composition, with some exercises including the carefulplacements of fake dead bodies and debris, whilst others are orga-nized around the mundane architecture of meeting rooms; and intheir intended audiences, some attempt to create publics whilstothers are restricted to emergency response personnel.

The most in-depth account of the use of exercises to secure lifeis Lakoff (2007, 2008), Collier (2008) and colleagues’ genealogy ofpreparedness as a specific anticipatory logic. Preparedness is alsothe background to the RAND exercise. It has two characteristics(after Collier et al., 2004; Collier and Lakoff, 2008). First, prepared-ness is an ‘all hazards’5 mode of securing orientated to the disrup-tive consequences of ‘major events’ (see Homeland SecurityPresidential Directive 2003). This involves a shift from the uncannyapocalyptic Event of nuclear war to a series of events that wouldbring a disruption, and suspension, of normal life. These are eventsof a particular frequency and magnitude, normally designated ‘cata-strophic’.6 Second, the emphasis is on the response needs and capa-bilities of a distributed set of actors after an event, rather thanprevention or preemption before the event. Capabilities are formsof practical know-how that enable immediate and predictable re-sponse after an event. When articulated as part of this anticipatorylogic, Lakoff (2007) shows how the exercise functions as a techniqueof ‘imaginative-enactment’ through two effects. First, exercises gen-erate experiential knowledge of vulnerabilities to the object secured(vital systems) and in response capacity. Second, and closely related,exercises (and their codification) direct attention, generate urgency,and galvanise action. In short, exercises have a double effect within‘preparedness’; a pedagogical effect – to convince of the need to plan(Lakoff, 2007, p. 411) – and an evidential effect – to authorise claimsabout present vulnerabilities (Lakoff, 2007, p. 419).

The emphasis of Lakoff and Collier is on the role of exercises inthe context of changes in the object and aims of security (frompopulation to vital systems). A more detailed focus on the mechan-ics of the scenario based exercise is offered by Schoch-Spana(2004), again in the context of US responses to bioterrorism. Sheargues that exercises function through a reciprocal determinationbetween ‘‘confused and tragic scenario” time and ‘‘actual, historictime” (Schoch-Spana, 2004, p. 12). Inhabiting the former throughan exercise is supposed to generate action in the latter. In addition,the exercise she discusses – Exercise Dark Winter – was infusedwith an apocalyptic mode of relation. The future could be a disas-trous end, if not for the redemptive actions of biopreparedness.Schoch-Spana, more than Lakoff, opens up a focus on what wastermed in the previous section the ‘quasi-causal’ operation ofsecuring. I want to push this work further by asking two questionsabout how the exercise cited in the prologue generates the prom-issory and dangerous supplements that are a necessary element inprocesses of securing. First, what relation between the future (andspecific futures) and the present (and specific presents) is estab-lished within and through the exercise, and how do those relationscoexist, resonate and interfere with one another? Second, and fol-lowing on, how are specific futures made present in a way that en-

B. Anderson / Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235 231

ables the event to be handled and grasped as a governable object?Both questions are a means of attending to the specific relationsbetween futurity, the event and processes of securing.

7 The 15 scenarios are; improvised nuclear device; aerosol anthrax, pandemicinfluenza, plague, blister agent, toxic industrial chemicals, nerve agent, chlorine tankexplosion, major earthquake, major hurricane, radiological dispersal device; impro-vised explosive device, food contamination, foreign animal disease, cyber attack (SeeDoHS, 2007; HSC, 2004).

5. Naming, staging, playing

There is a first and most obvious thing we could say about exer-cises as anticipatory techniques that ‘grasp and handle’ (Foucault,2007) the problem of the event. Although exercises are not a tech-nique of probabilistic prediction, that is they are not based oninduction from the past dispersion of events, they are neverthelessabout ensuring a future does not come to pass, about making theunforeseeable foreseeable, about rendering the event repeatable,about foreseeing and foresaying the event (paraphrasing Derrida,2007). And there are numerous ways in which this is done; plansare produced from exercises, lessons learnt are extracted fromexercises, vulnerabilities are identified, and capabilities are tested.In these and other ways the exercise is a technique of standardisa-tion, and a demonstration that potentially any event can be ended.Exercises are a means of effacing the singularity and unpredictabil-ity of events and producing the opposite of an event – a recognisedoccurrence. For, as Derrida (2007, p. 441) and some other writerson the event repeatedly emphasise, ‘‘[i]f there is an event, it mustnever be something that is predicted or planned, or even reallydecided upon”.

This interpretation is compelling. But because it is dependenton a set of contestable theoretical manoeuvres around ‘the event’it tells us nothing about how exercises function, or about the con-sequences for how events and the future are related to. I want to,therefore, offer a different account of how anticipation worksthrough an analysis of the structure of the RAND exercise.

5.1. Naming plausible generic events

A future event is named – ‘catastrophic terrorist attack’, or‘improvised nuclear device’. This is the first act through which arelation is established between present and future. As Riley(2005) argues, naming both individuates and connects. The namefolds the RAND exercise into three sets of connections; the focuson a ‘nuclear explosion’ reactivating in the present what Masco(2006) calls the ‘uncertainly haunted universe’ of the nuclear un-canny; the term ‘terrorist’ designating post-Cold War anonymousand unforeseeable forces; and the qualification ‘catastrophic’directing attention to the ‘low probability, high impact’ events thatmight befall us. As well as reactivating these different senses ofthreat, perhaps there is also an element of the ‘strange magic’ wegive to naming at work in exercises. Perhaps in this name – andin all the other names given to events that might befall complexnetworked societies – we have an example of what Riley (2005)terms ‘wishful naming’, a naming that would ward off dangerand avert crises as it enables anticipation.

The RAND exercise focused on one of a number of potentiallycatastrophic events that were named in a set of national planningscenarios as threats to the US ‘homeland’ (see HSC, 2004). TheHomeland Security Presidential Directive on ‘National Prepared-ness’ describes how these scenarios were intended to be used(see Lakoff (2007) for further discussion):

‘‘In a world of evolving threat and terrorist tactics, it is notpossible to identify the exact events for which we need tobe prepared at any and every given time. Instead, utilizinga Capabilities-Based Planning process enables the identifica-tion of capabilities that will enable us to prevent, respond to,and recover from any major event. The National PlanningScenarios present a standardized set of plausible scenariosfor major events or Incidents of National Significance and

provide the foundation for development of capabilityrequirements”.(DoHS, 2005, p. 5)

The assumptions about the events that might befall complex net-worked societies are twofold. On the one hand, the background con-dition is complexity and contingency. It is not possible to identify‘exact events’ because of the dynamism in threats and tactics. Onthe other, events with a certain disruptive severity (major events)are assumed to share structural features that enable them to be pre-pared for. To be able to act against events that can be prepared forgenerically, but not identified specifically, a distributed set of actorsmust prepare for events that could take place in a complex ‘‘world ofevolving threat and terrorist tactics” (DoHS, 2005, p. 5).

To prepare for what could be termed the essence of an event –an event in its generic effects – a set of events were named as plau-sible threats. At the federal level, 15 ‘all purpose hazard’ scenarioswere developed that named different ’standardised’ events.7 TheRAND scenario and strategic game was based on one of the scenar-ios, given the name ‘Improvised Nuclear Device’. The scenariosaimed to ‘‘illustrate the potential scope, magnitude, and complexityof a range of major events” (DoHS, 2007, p. 31; HSC, 2004). The dif-ferent named events have a particular status. Unlike in justificationsof preemptive action no claim is made that they are about to occur(compare with Dershowitz, 2006). Neither, however, are they ‘purepossibilities’ that could never actualise or materialise. A claim ismade that all of the ‘homeland’ is potentially vulnerable to all ofthe potential events. So the 2004 document stresses that whilstthe scenarios are not based on ‘‘credible intelligence” of capabilitiesor intentions (HSC, 2004, p. iv/v) nevertheless ‘‘every part of thecountry is vulnerable to one or more major hazards” (HSC, 2004, p.iv/v). We could say that, in distinction from justifications of preemp-tion or precaution, each event has the status of a ‘hypothetical pos-sibility’ (Casey, 1976). What is hypothetically possible are thegeneric effects an event may have – how an event such as a majorearthquake or improvised explosive device will destroy life – ratherthan the intentions or capabilities of an enemy.

The first effect of the act of naming is to give relatively stableunity to that which threatens. Threats are contained and on theroad to being controllable and manageable once housed within aname. They are also drawn into forms of connection with othersecurity concerns and various past and future events. Each of the15 common names for types of event reactivate past threats (Tay-lor, 2003). ‘Aerosol anthrax’, for example, depends for its power onfears of a replicating, mutating, biosphere manipulated and con-trolled by malicious agents. As Caputo (2007) might put it, a namedepends for its power on chains of association that extend beyondit. The scenarios also draw attention to the complex nature of eachevent. Each demonstrates the multiple potential effects of a poten-tially catastrophic event, the disruptive excess of the event that ageneric name can only temporarily contain. They do this bydescribing the dynamics of events, rather than the intentions ofan adversary. Take, for example, the ‘Biological Attack: Aerosol An-thrax’ scenario which begins with an act of imagining-that an at-tack takes place before imagining-how it may unfold:

‘‘This scenario describes a single aerosol anthrax attack inone city delivered by a truck using a concealed improvisedspraying device in a densely populated urban city with a sig-nificant commuter workforce”(HSC, 2004, p. 2-1)

232 B. Anderson / Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235

The scenario thereafter disentangles the multiplicity of theevent into three generic features; its ‘timeline/dynamic’, its various‘impacts’, and its ‘secondary hazards or events’. These are the gen-eric features that combine to give an event its character. None ofthese aspects of the structure of an event can be predicted in ad-vance. A huge range of contingencies will determine the magnitudeand intensity of the event. What can be imagined, however, are arange of potential ways that it might occur, and thus a range of po-tential issues to be ‘alert’ to, and develop ‘capabilities’ for. So the‘secondary hazards/events’ of the ‘Anthrax attack’, for example, de-pend on; the reaction of the public, the availability of multi-lingualpublic health guidance; the type of wind currents, and hospitalsurge capacity (HSC, 2004, p. 2-1, 2-2). Whilst the ‘impacts’ woulddepend on, amongst other things; the costs of remediation anddecontamination, the effects on consumer confidence, and poten-tial decrease in tourist revenue (HSC, 2004, p. 2-2).

Naming establishes a specific relation with the event and with thefuture. First, an horizon of expectation is created that is made up of aset of plausible threat events. The national future is menaced byevents that threaten an irreversible break in life that would bring‘‘contingency, unpredictability, and chance into the world” (Dastur,2000, p. 179). Here naming is referential. The scenarios refer to thepresent existence of plausible events. These events supposedlypre-exist the act of naming. Second, through their emphasis on thedynamics of the event – its impact, scope, and timing – the scenariosdemonstrate what is currently unknown about the event. Herenaming evokes the unknowable futures that will happen afterevents. The scenarios evoke the disruption of life that may followfrom each event, without giving specific details. The referentialand evocative effects of naming (see Galloway and Thacker, 2007)summon the future as a potential disaster – the future as whatDerrida (2003, p. 97) in conversation terms ‘[t]he possibility to comeof the worst, from the repetition to come through worst”. It is in thiscontext that a redemptive promise is attached to capabilities, andother techniques of preparedness. They become the only way toavoid the disaster that the future could become once the present ismenaced by a set of ‘generic possibilities’.

5.2. Staging the ‘possible’ specific event

A named future event is staged. Staging is the second quasi-causaloperation whereby present and future are related. The RAND exer-cise cited in the prologue involved a set of private time limited ‘tabletop’ strategic games that explored the open-ended consequences ofthe event named ‘nuclear explosion’. Its immediate antecedents arepolitical exercises and syndicates (rather than large scale civildefence rehearsals) (Davis, 2007). In this case the aim of the exercisewas to generate an alertness regarding the possibility of a‘catastrophic’ event and insights into the consequences of that event.The set of exercises emerged as a response to an intensified ‘concern’about the type of event that terror is taken to be. The effects of terrormultiply. This is described in the following terms:

‘‘A quickly growing concern about terrorism is that a devas-tating attack would send social and economic aftershockscascading through multiple sectors long after the initialstrike was over.”(RAND, 2006, p. XV)

The problem to be both evoked and avoided is the movement ofthe effects of an event by anticipating how the impacts of an eventof terror could expand from a specific site (a port in Long Beach) tothe wider economy.

This makes the exercise different from large scale ‘live’ exercisediscussed above, such as Exercise Dark Winter (on which seeSchoch-Spana, 2004). Defined capabilities are not being tested,and plans are not being validated. Neither is the aim to simulta-

neously demonstrate the providential function of the state, whilstgenerating an affective public aware of both threat and response.The public is present in this exercise as an imagined object, specif-ically dead and dying victims of the event, a population with cer-tain needs to be provided (such as various essential services),and a problem to be managed (in relation to rioting or panic).The participants were a series of expert ‘stakeholders’. The exerciseis better thought of as an occasion for anticipating an event’s hap-pening. In relation to this problem, gaming and scenarios are prac-ticed, and valorised, as ‘‘tools” that provide a ‘‘means of exploringhighly uncertain policy landscapes” (RAND, 2006, p. xv). The twotechniques are legitimized through direct reference to their emer-gence and use in the RAND corporation during the Cold War.Whilst they share an object of concern (the circulations that makeup an ‘uncertain’ policy landscape), and a specific way of premedi-ating (exploration rather than prediction), as tools they do differ-ent things. Their use is described below:

‘‘In scenario analysis, researchers posit a ‘‘what if” frame-work and examine how various factors might interact togenerate a sequence of events i.e. ‘‘What if such and suchhappened next?”. In strategic gaming, participants are realis-tically immersed in a stressful event and directed to explorethe resulting policy challenges for various stakeholders”(RAND, 2006, p. xv)

What both techniques enable to be experimented with is howthe flows, and connections, that make Long Beach Port a node ina set of global geographies fail. From the collapse of the insuranceindustry and global shipping routes, to death and damage, theexercise stages the multiple ways in which the relations constitut-ing a place can break or fail due to the multiplying effects of a pre-cipitating event.

The RAND scenario begins by modelling the event as a discon-tinuity which interrupts life. Unlike in civil defence scenarios,there is no initial escalation or pre-attack phase (Davis, 2007). Inthe scenario the event happens despite an early warning systemdesigned to detect radiation. The event of terror surprises. This isall that can be known about its occurrence. The effects of the initialevent are then modelled through predictive techniques that estab-lish ‘immediate’ and ‘delayed’ effects for explosions of varyingyields in varying geometries. These are based on a predominantlyCold War era literature on developing, testing, and using nuclearweapons, and recall the modelling techniques used to establishtargets to be protected and destroyed in World War 11 and ColdWar civil defence (Galison, 2001). The attack is later attributedto Al Qaeda, but this is the only ‘enemy’ action the scenario refersto. It differs then from war games which are dialogic events thatsimulate the imagined (re)actions of an enemy. Instead, thescenario describes the opening up of a world of damage anddestruction after an event. The scenario narrates what it terms a‘‘future history” involving ‘‘[h]ow various factors might interactto generate a sequence of events” (RAND, 2006, p. xv). The reportstresses, in an echo of Cold War RAND, that ‘‘Although scenarioanalyses articulate a possible view of the future, they should notbe interpreted as predictions of future events” (RAND, 2006, p.xv). Instead the scenario plots the potential effects that will unfoldimmediately after the initial event. It constructs the problem ofhow ‘effects’ interrelate by imagining the connections betweenimagined events (explosion, panic, insurance industry collapse),imagined units (individuals, houses, etc.) and imagined flows (ofmoney, people, and goods).

As such the scenario works by dividing the event into a set ofphases (Davis, 2007) based around, first, an initial surprise [theevent as an discontinuity] and, second, the complex effects of thatevent as life is disordered [the event crystallized into a crisis]. Thespace–time imagined is that in which the event’s effects and causes

8 Analysing paranoid forms of knowing, Sedgwick’s (2003) point is not thateveryone caught up in the hermeneutics of suspicion feels something called‘paranoia’. Her analysis does not take place at the phenomenological register.Paranoia is, rather, a name given to a certain anticipatory relation. As a mode ofrelation ‘paranoia’ can be found across diverse domains; individuals may move in andout of paranoid practices, whilst paranoia can infuse shared histories, intertextualdiscourses, and emergent epistemological communities (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 150).

B. Anderson / Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235 233

will circulate, or, to paraphrase Dastur (2000), what is staged is theworld that opens up through the event’s happening. This has afamily resemblance to Foucault’s (2007) use of the term ‘milieu’as the space and target of apparatuses of security that try to inter-vene on a population. A milieu is described by Foucault as ‘‘[s]pacein which a series of uncertain elements unfold” then as both ‘‘[t]hemedium of an action and the element in which it circulates” (Fou-cault, 2007, p. 20). It is not equivalent to a capitalised territory, or aspace of discipline (Foucault, 2007, p. 20, 22). Instead a milieu asthe space of security is:

‘‘[w]hat is needed to account for action as a distance of onebody on another [...] The milieu is a certain number of com-bined, overall, effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an ele-ment in which a circular link is produced between effectsand causes, since an effect from one point of view will be acause from another.”(Foucault, 2007, p. 21)

The notion is useful in this context as what is staged is a set ofpossible dynamic reversals and loops between what are effectsfrom one view and causes from another. What is imagined is thecombination of interacting elements in which the event unfolds,and an account of how ‘effects’ work by expropriating those ele-ments. As such it shows that effects and causes move as the eventunfolds. Questions it enables the exercise as a whole to ask in-clude; what would be the effect of changes in wind direction orwhat would be the effects of closing the nation’s ports? There is,however, a key difference from Foucault’s (2007) use of milieu.The milieu targeted in population security is an autonomous real-ity in the sense of a set of artificial and natural givens (Foucault,2007, p. 21). Milieus pre-exist techniques of security. In contrast,in the case of the RAND exercise the imagined space is both themedium of an event’s happening and the consequence of that hap-pening. The circulation of causes and effects is unfinished. More-over, the dynamic event disrupts the medium that it isconnected to – that is the milieu – by virtue of effects that circulatebeyond the site of the initial event. These effects are in some wayexternal to the milieu. With the consequence that the event dis-rupts and remakes the milieu.

So the exercise works through a theatrical relation involving aplacement, a deliberate arrangement of imaginative objects, thatestablishes a juncture or meeting place where linear relations be-tween the future and present are suspended. Exercises are basedon the effect of theatricality (Weber, 2004) in two ways. First,the scenario is the medium around which the play of the strategicgame will occur. It provides a formulaic set-up for action. Thischanges the event from a generic ‘hypothetical possibility’ pro-duced through an act of naming – an ‘improvised nuclear explo-sion’ – to a specific possible event – a nuclear explosion thathappens in a specific place on a specific date in a specific way. Sec-ond, the scenario enables a dislocation in which the user of a sce-nario is suspended between a here and now and a future. Instaging, an ‘in-between’ opens up between the present and the fu-ture in which the consequences of the event can be experimentedwith. The scenario is therefore best conceptualised as a theatricaldevice that enables an ‘as if’ future to be made present. As befitsits origins. The term ‘scenario’ is first credited with being used todenote an ‘imagined situation’ in Thinking about the Unthinkable(Kahn, 1962). Its roots are in the plots of drama and the props ofstage design (Anderson, 2007).

5.3. Playing the ‘as if’ event

Naming and staging aim to ensure that there can never be anybad surprises. Here the promise of preparedness is based on a para-noid mode of relation. One structured around disclosing ever more

bad surprises by exposing how ‘hypothetical possibilities’ couldbecome ‘specific possibilities’ (Sedgwick, 2003).8 Paranoia is notnecessarily phenomenal. Instead, paranoia is an anticipatory modeof relation in which it is never too early to know bad surprises.But both the event as disruption, and the future as outside, returnbecause the event must be played. The play of strategic gaming is‘‘stimulated” (RAND, 2006, p. 6) by the scenario but must exceedit. And it exceeds it because of the event’s unruly happening. After72 hours, the staged event could bring forth a set of bad surprises.But we don’t know, there are too many contingencies to predictthe circulation and multiplication of the effects of the event:

‘‘At times greater than approximately 72 hours after theattack, the consequences of the Long Beach attack will bedifficult to predict because they will depend on complexinteractions involving social, economic, and political factors,with influences from distant regions and stakeholders”(RAND, 2006, p. 6)

To develop knowledge about how the milieu of the event is dis-rupted the strategic game begins in the response/recovery phasepost the event. This involved a practice of stakeholders from gov-ernment, business and the insurance and real estate industries‘‘exploring” the open-ended ‘‘consequences” of the event.

The staged future event comes to be present in the space of anexercise. The goal of the play is described by RAND in the followingway:

‘‘The goal for these types of games is to immerse participantsin the realism of a stressful event (in this case the Long Beachattack) and to explore the decision making challenges forvarious stakeholders”(RAND, 2006, p. 6)

The impression of a future event is made present through a setof techniques that aim, even if they do not necessarily succeed, tofoster a ‘realistic immersion’. What the play of the game aims tocreate is the event as an intensified felt presence. However, weshould note that the affectivities of exercises are likely to exceedefforts to design affective experience (see Crandall (2008) on the‘thrill of inhabitation’ in exercises).

Strategic gaming can therefore be thought of as a way of inhab-iting the medium staged by the scenario and exploring the dy-namic unfolding of the event. The result is that the staged,possible, event of a ‘nuclear explosion’ is conjured up in an ‘as if’world and embodied in the forms of action that make up the ‘tabletop’ game. Two elements of the structure of exercise play areimportant to note. First, the play of the game involved ‘as if’ actioninternal to the event of a nuclear explosion instigated by a player(e.g. an act such as a decision in relation to an effect of the event).Here responder actions and decisions become part of the event’shappening. Second, the game involved acts by a controller that dis-rupted the rhythm of the exercise in order to play the ‘maliciousdemon’ of the event’s happening (including releasing the full sce-nario in stages to portray the event’s happening, having set ‘inter-jects’ as new events occur, and disrupting discussion by releasingnew information at unpredictable junctures to give a sense of con-fusion) (see RAND, 2006).

Because of how the future event is played, both the dynamicsand consequences of a ‘nuclear explosion’ are open-ended and sub-

234 B. Anderson / Geoforum 41 (2010) 227–235

ject to a radical indeterminacy. The dangerous supplement thatpropels processes of securing is once again conjured forth throughthe open-ended act of playing the event. This is the final way inwhich a relation is established between present and future – thefuture is an outside that will exceed attempts to definitively knowit. The two concluding ‘insights’ of the RAND study testify to theontological and epistemological excess of the future:

‘‘First, the research elucidated a number of important gaps inthe capability to respond to a large-scale terrorist event. Sec-ond, it also suggested that the effects could extend farbeyond the time and location of the initial attack as societyand the business community struggled to absorb the large-scale after effects”(RAND, 2006, p. vii).

An interval is opened up between present capabilities and a fu-ture that is constantly escaping attempts to manage and control it.This haunts hopes of a future where damage does not become loss,and threatens to disappoint it. The only response to the demonstra-tion of an imbalance between present capabilities and a future pos-sible event is to become more prepared. So as Lakoff (2005) andSchoch-Spana (2004) have shown the demonstration of potentialfailure by exercises has acted as a rationale for the extension ofprocesses of security. But faced with the possibility of impossibleevents no one can know if they are prepared. So more anticipationis needed. The RAND report concludes with a call for furtherrounds of strategic gaming and further exploratory modelling.The openness of the played future enables exercises to become partof a self-perpetuating logic. It goes something like this. Exercisesgenerate dangerous supplements. Those dangerous supplementsdemand ever more preparedness. But the promise of preparednesscan only be fulfilled through ever more anticipation. This, in turn,generates ever more bad surprises and affirms the possibility offurther bad surprises to come. The system is, in short, heterogenet-ic. It incites surprise.9

6. Concluding comments

This paper has described the use of one technique – exercisesinvolving a scenario and set of strategic games – to anticipate fu-ture events of terror. As such, it has three implications for emerg-ing research on security, futurity, and the event.

First, processes of securing work not by eliminating or manag-ing uncertainty (c.f. Dalby, 2002), but through a proliferation ofthreatening or promissory futures. That security reduces the futureto a conservative continuation of what is or has been is theassumption behind work that affirms becoming (McCormack,2003), patiently waits for a messianic to-come (Rose, 2007), hopesfor a not-yet (Anderson, 2006), or is disturbed by the untimely(Kraftl, 2007). On the contrary, I have argued that securing opensup a future, and as such throws some aspect of the here and nowinto question. Indeed, we could say that processes of securingthrough premediation open up a non-representational excess –in which the unforeseeable is invoked, and in relation to whichcurrent security will fall short. The surging forth of threat is whatpropels the deployment of security, as it reveals the here andnow to lack security. This is, then, the first implication the paperhas for work on security. The most important phase in processesof securing is that the here and now is disrupted. The present is ex-posed to an excess, in the form of threats to a valued life and prom-ises to secure that valued life. Securing is gratuitous, then. Itgenerates dangerous and promissory supplements, opening up

9 Heterogenetic systems actively incite an otherness to emerge, and that othernessis immanent to its logic. In contrast autopoietic systems are based on operativeclosure (see Massumi, 2007).

the present to something exterior to it. Consequently, we mustavoid assuming that to secure is to impose a (more or less violent)closure that reduces the mystery or unknowability of futures.

Second, and following on, processes and acts of securing vary inhow they create a supplement to the present. Consider the RANDexercise. It involved three quasi-causal operations; hypotheticallypossible generic events were named; the defined phases of a possi-ble event’s happening were staged (a discontinuity, its multiplica-tion into a crisis in the context of the milieu, and a response/recovery phase); and finally the impression, consequences and ef-fects of the event were played. This variation is important to under-stand. It is more complex than distinctions between types oftechnique (e.g. imaginative-enactment rather than statistical–archival (Collier, 2008)), or between generic relations to the uncer-tain (e.g. ‘calculable’ and ‘incalculable’ (Beck, 1992)) would sug-gest. The former is too focused on techniques rather than acts orprocesses of securing, the latter is too general. This is the secondimplication of the paper. The focus of work on security and futurityshould be on the specific ‘quasi-causal’ operations that gasp andhandle the problem of the event. It is through processes such asnaming, staging and playing that the excess that propels securityis created and achieves effects.

Finally, and drawing the first two concluding comments to-gether, ‘the future’ and specific ‘futures’ will vary in their relationsto the present and past. As the event of an ‘improvised nuclearexplosion’ is anticipated in the RAND exercise, the future takesplace as; a threatening horizon, an ‘as if’ possibility, a felt presence,and an outside that exceeds attempts to anticipate. There will bemany other relations between the future and present amid otherforms of security. Hence the final implication of the paper. The taskfor work is not only to affirm or wait for an open future in excess ofanticipations or expectations, but to attend to what we could term,paraphrasing Latour (1988), ‘futures in action’. Specifically; how‘the future’ is invoked as a problem for governing in different sub-stantive domains of security; how ‘the future’ is thereafter dis-closed and related to in a way that renders it actionable; howfutures are made present; and how those futures become part ofaffectively imbued conditions of being-(in)secure. The key taskfor work on security is, in short, to describe how securing functionsthrough what the RAND strategist Herman Kahn, when first advo-cating the use of scenarios and strategic games, described as ‘‘areality which does not yet exist” (1957, p. 145).

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper have been given at seminars inthe geography departments at Edinburgh, Exeter, the Open Univer-sity and Bristol and at workshops at Keele and Lancaster. Mythanks to David Campbell, Ash Amin, Martin Coward, Michael Sa-mers and four anonymous referees for comments on previous ver-sions of the paper. Special thanks to Peter Adey and Rachel Colls fordiscussion about exercises, comments on the paper and muchappreciated encouragement.

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