Post-Soviet social Collier, Stephen J
2011., 20110808, 2011, 2011-08-08
eBook
The Soviet Union created a unique form of urban modernity, developing institutions of social provisioning for hundreds of millions of people in small and medium-sized industrial cities spread across ...a vast territory. After the collapse of socialism these institutions were profoundly shaken--casualties, in the eyes of many observers, of market-oriented reforms associated with neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus. In Post-Soviet Social, Stephen Collier examines reform in Russia beyond the Washington Consensus. He turns attention from the noisy battles over stabilization and privatization during the 1990s to subsequent reforms that grapple with the mundane details of pipes, wires, bureaucratic routines, and budgetary formulas that made up the Soviet social state.
This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, when planners ...and policy-makers recognized the increasing dependence of collective life on interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. Over the following decades, new security mechanisms were invented to mitigate the vulnerability of these vital systems. While these techniques were initially developed as part of Cold War preparedness for nuclear war, they eventually migrated to domains beyond national security to address a range of anticipated emergencies, such as large-scale natural disasters, pandemic disease outbreaks, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. In these various contexts, vital systems security operates as a form of reflexive biopolitics, managing risks that have arisen as the result of modernization processes. This analysis sheds new light on current discussions of the government of emergency and ‘states of exception’. Vital systems security does not require recourse to extraordinary executive powers. Rather, as an anticipatory technology for mitigating vulnerabilities and closing gaps in preparedness, it provides a ready-to-hand toolkit for administering emergencies as a normal part of constitutional government.
Topologies of Power Collier, Stephen J.
Theory, culture & society,
11/2009, Volume:
26, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the late
1970s has provided new insight into crucial developments in his late work, including
the return to an analysis of ...the state and the introduction of biopolitics as a
central theme. According to one dominant interpretation, these shifts did not entail
a fundamental methodological break; the approach Foucault developed in his work on
knowledge/power was simply applied to new objects. The present article argues that
this reading — which is colored by the overwhelming privilege afforded to
Discipline and Punish in secondary literature — obscures an
important modification in Foucault’s method and diagnostic style that occurred
between the introduction of biopolitics in 1976 (in Society Must Be
Defended) and the lectures of 1978 ( Security, Territory,
Population) and 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics). Foucault’s
initial analysis of biopolitics was couched in surprisingly epochal and totalizing
claims about the characteristic forms of power in modernity. The later lectures, by
contrast, suggest what I propose to call a ‘topological’ analysis that examines the
‘patterns of correlation’ in which heterogeneous elements — techniques, material
forms, institutional structures and technologies of power — are configured, as well
as the redeployments through which these patterns are transformed. I also indicate
how attention to the topological dimension of Foucault’s analysis might change our
understanding of key themes in his late work: biopolitics, the analysis of thinking,
and the concept of governmentality.
Reduced dietary protein intake induces adaptive physiological changes in macronutrient preference, energy expenditure, growth, and glucose homeostasis. We demonstrate that deletion of the FGF21 ...co-receptor βKlotho (Klb) from the brain produces mice that are unable to mount a physiological response to protein restriction, an effect that is replicated by whole-body deletion of FGF21. Mice forced to consume a low-protein diet exhibit reduced growth, increased energy expenditure, and a resistance to diet-induced obesity, but the loss of FGF21 signaling in the brain completely abrogates that response. When given access to a higher protein alternative, protein-restricted mice exhibit a shift toward protein-containing foods, and central FGF21 signaling is essential for that response. FGF21 is an endocrine signal linking the liver and brain, which regulates adaptive, homeostatic changes in metabolism and feeding behavior during protein restriction.
This paper examines the growing importance of private insurance in urban resilience, drawing on research in three US cities that are bellwethers of climate adaptation: New Orleans, New York and ...Greater Miami. A number of scholars have suggested that insurance shifts the management of climate risks from governments to private actors and places the burden of risk on the shoulders of individuals. Drawing on and extending Michel Callon's work on the problematization of climate change, we suggest that such analyses overlook a significant dimension of the insurance industry's role in urban resilience. Namely, the tools and techniques of insurance are increasingly central to the constitution of climate change as a public problem that can be addressed by collective decision-making institutions.
This article examines 'enactment' as a significant new form of knowledge about collective life that differs fundamentally from familiar forms of 'social' knowledge. The emergence of enactment is ...traced through a series of domains where the problem of estimating the likelihood and consequence of potentially catastrophic future events has been made an explicit object of expert reflection: response to a possible nuclear attack in US civil defence planning in the late 1940s; the emergence of natural hazard modelling in the 1960s and 1970s; and the emergence today of terrorism risk assessment and its proposed application to federal budgetary distributions. The article engages with central questions in debates around 'risk society' and insurance, holding that new approaches to understanding and assessing risk are not merely idiosyncratic or subjective. Rather, they should be treated as coherent new forms of knowledge and practice whose genealogy and present assemblies must be traced.
Essay in a symposium on the historicity of neoliberalism. This article responds to Loic Wacquant's "Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism" (2012) and Mathieu ...Hilgers' "The historicity of the neoliberal state" (2012). Adapted from the source document.
This paper examines the genealogy of domestic security in the United States through an analysis of post-World War II civil defense. Specifically, we describe the development of an organizational ...framework and set of techniques for approaching security threats that we call ‘distributed preparedness’. Distributed preparedness was initially articulated in civil defense programs in the early stages of the Cold War, when US government planners began to conceptualize the nation as a possible target of nuclear attack. These planners assumed that the enemy would focus its attacks on urban and industrial centers that were essential to US war-fighting capability. Distributed preparedness provided techniques for mapping national space as a field of potential targets, and grafted this map of vulnerabilities onto the structure of territorial administration in the United States. It presented a new model of coordinated planning for catastrophic threats, one that sought to limit federal intervention in local life and to preserve the characteristic features of American federalism. Over the course of the Cold War, distributed preparedness extended to new domains, and following 9/11 it has moved to the center of security discussions in the US.
Climate change and insurance Collier, Stephen J.; Elliott, Rebecca; Lehtonen, Turo-Kimmo
Economy and society,
04/2021, Volume:
50, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This special collection examines insurance as an increasingly central mechanism in shaping how the effects of climate change are transforming local economies and ways of life. The papers study a ...range of exemplary cases, ranging from agricultural micro-insurance in development policy and regional sovereign risk facilities in the Caribbean to public and private insurance in the United States. This framing essay situates these papers in a longer tradition of scholarship on the government of risk and security. It also describes three themes that run through the papers: the economization of climate change; the moral economy of risk and responsibility; and the plasticity of insurance as an abstract technology that may be taken up in various governmental assemblages, in the name of various political projects.
A substantial recent literature has examined insurance as a mechanism for economizing uncertain but potentially catastrophic events. Less attention has been paid to how insurantial techniques for ...economizing catastrophe have been deployed as political technologies. Focusing on discussions of US flood policy in the 1960s, the present article examines how insurance was used to forge new articulations and accommodations between political government and processes of rationalization. On the one hand, insurance provided a technical solution to problems that had long confronted US policy-makers: How to reduce losses from floods? How to fully compensate individuals who suffered losses? On the other hand, insurance was a device for reshaping the aims and objects of government, and for reframing questions that are more frequently situated at the level of political philosophy: What are the respective responsibilities of individual citizens and government in providing security? What tradeoffs must be made between the provision of security and economic rationality? What values are relevant in orienting public policy? In examining these issues, the article raises questions about standard narratives about the changing relations among risk, responsibility, and security in recent decades, particularly as they relate to neoliberalism.
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