The Government of Emergency – Vital Systems, Expertise and the Politics of Security

The concepts of vital systems, vulnerabilities, critical infrastructure as well as increased resilience and preparedness are today’s key concepts and widely discussed by traditional and critical security scholars. Critical security scholars and policy analysts have pinpointed and warned us of the neoliberal dimensions of resilience, its programmatic functions, the advancement of self-discipline, and the potential for social and political control (Baker and Ludwig 2016; Reid and Chandler 2016; Rådestad and Larsson 2018). Recently, we can also see how resilience has expanded to include, almost seamless, new forms of military preparedness and civil defense with the same commonsensical logic that it has in crisis management and the discourse of societal security (Larsson 2021). Critical security scholars can be accused of being preoccupied with the present and the (constant) re-discovery of neoliberal rationality in the field of security. This book, with a longer-time perspective, reverses the relationship between crisis management and national security. It shows how traditional security and war preparedness during the WWII came to deploy today's key concepts in the planning of the total defense and as a way to ensure the continuation of the war machine of America even after being attacked. Only later, the concepts came to be adopted by crisis and emergency planning. The book can thus offer a genealogy of emergency management and further show the deeper and more profound connection between emergency and security management (p5).