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The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union have moved the principal zone of political uncertainty, and the interest in WMD and missiles, eastward, across the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific basin.4 Major states in Asia, and in the Middle East within the range of long-range missiles based in Asia, see nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles as potential trumps. The appeal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems for these states is at least threefold.5 First, they enable “denial of access” strategies against foreign powers who might want to interfere in regional issues (read: the US and NATO). US military success in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003 only reinforced the appeal of access denial based on WMD for aspiring regional hegemons or nervous dictators. Second, nuclear weapons might permit some states to deter others who lack countermeasures in the form of survivable retaliatory forces. Israel’s nuclear weapons, not officially acknowledged but widely known, have appealed to Tel Aviv as a deterrent against provocative behavior by Arab neighbors and as a possible “Samson” option on the cusp of military defeat leading to regime change.

Third, nuclear weapons permit states to maintain high-end deterrence against any outbreak of major war and to cover military power projection even against states or alliances with superior conventional forces. Russia is the most obvious example of this syndrome. Without its large nuclear arsenal, Russia would be more hesitant to assert its claims for special interests in former Soviet territory, including its opposition to US missile defense systems deployed in Eastern Europe, as well as its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent destabilization of eastern Ukraine.6 North Korea is another example of a state whose putative capabilities for deterrence or for coercion were at least temporarily enhanced by its deployment of nuclear weapons together with medium and longer range ballistic missiles.

Will the Asian nuclear powers of the twenty-first century have similar political and institutional controls over military operations in time of crisis or conventional war with the possibility of nuclear escalation? We know distressingly little about the command and control systems for nuclear weapons among existing, and possible future, post-Cold War proliferators. For the duration of the Cold War and most of the post-Cold War, until very recently, North Korea was an opaque target for intelligence collection and net assessment. Iran, although located in the Middle East, has potential geostrategic reach into Asia with its expanding ballistic missile program. Iran’s future nuclear weapons could presumably be held under the political control of its supreme religious council and/or its government— with its military, intelligence and other security organs mostly controlled by the former.8 Both Iran and Pakistan could be torn by political rivalries within their security and defense establishments that cut across bureaucratic lines of authority and responsibility. Conflict between Islamic fundamentalists and political reformers in both states could raise uncertainties about the crisis management of nuclear force and might leave commanders with de facto authority to fire or withhold weapons.

Unstable command and control over nuclear forces could be joined at the hip to nationalist or religious hostility in Asia.

Nuclear weapon use in a limited manner may be a serious threat, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the changing state of the world into a multipolar nuclear order may encourage this. Despite tensions between the U.S. and USSR, they were ultimately able to manage this competition in a bipolar nuclear world; this competition for advantage and security ended with the eventual collapse of the USSR. The security dilemma ran its course without the use of nuclear weapons, and the U.S. rose to become the hegemon of a unipolar world. However, in a multipolar nuclear world, the challenges faced previously are significantly exacerbated. Currently, the nine known nuclear-weapon states are the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea.[14] Strategies that worked in a bipolar world may not be as effective in the modern landscape, thus preventing the failure of deterrence—and the subsequent use of a nuclear weapon—may be more challenging than before.

The most recent nuclear state, North Korea, is one of the most troubling in the current group of nuclear states. North Korea is one of the world’s poorest states, facing harsh sanctions and isolation from much of the international community. Yet, despite the hardships, poverty, and poor economy of this autocratic state, it managed to defy the nonproliferation regime and create a fully operational nuclear arsenal.[15] Pyongyang is not bashful about its willingness to use its weaponry either, stating that it will use its weapons to “reduce the U.S. mainland to ashes and darkness.”[16] Such a clear security threat may increase proliferation elsewhere in response. Allison calls this the “nuclear cascade,” and suggests that if a state as weak and isolated as North Korea can defy the non-proliferation regime, other states are likely to follow suit.[17] If the United States is incapable of preventing such a clear security threat, why would Tokyo and Seoul rely on Washington to defend them in the face of a nuclear threat? Japan already has the capability to build nuclear weapons, possessing well-developed uranium enrichment and missile programs that could allow Japan to rapidly create a credible nuclear weapons program to defend itself and its national interests without the United States. According to The Council on Foreign Relations, there are thirty states that have the technological ability to quickly build nuclear weapons.[18]

But countries do not obtain the bomb in a vacuum. The nuclear posture and strategic decisions of nuclear-armed nations have a significant, often immediate, impact on the nuclear acquisition decisions of other nations. More simply: If your adversary or your neighbor goes nuclear, you will, too.

There is nothing automatic about the nuclear domino theory, and it has been successfully countered in some regions, but the theory is generally correct. The Soviet Union got the bomb because, as Stalin told his scientists after Hiroshima, “The balance has been broken. Build the bomb. It will remove the great danger from us.” Britain and France got the bomb because the Soviets (and the U.S.) had it. China did the same, then India got the bomb because China did; Pakistan because India did.

In more scholarly terms, a negative spiral in relations is intensified when the other is securitized, i.e., construed, through speech, as different and dangerous at every encounter, and when every policy move in any issue-area is represented as a tool in the hands of this threatening other. Such multifaceted securitization pushes the representation of the other upward on the scale of difference and danger and can create a situation where positive recognition is not granted in any sphere. In this situation, the collective actor experiences an exogenous rejection of its self-ascribed identity in every policy sphere where it seeks outside confirmation—making the experience acute. In turn, this experience of acute ontological dissonance may be met by a strategy of avoidance and externalization: a counter-securitization that mirrors and matches the near-total rejection to which the political entity itself has been subjected. In the course of the ensuing spat, with hostile representations flung back and forth on every arena of encounter, the other is finally left with no face but that of an enemy. That resolves the dilemma of knowing what the intentions of the other are, as each party is now quite certain that the other has offensive designs. From this understanding, logically flow policies of positioning and armament in the military sphere, and disengagement and non-communication in non-military issueareas. In contrast to endogenously generated avoidance noted by Lupovici (2012, 813), the problem is not that a collective actor undertakes contradictory measures to alleviate ontological dissonance, but rather that the same measures of disengagement and confrontation seem logical and legitimate in every sphere of interaction between two political entities. In this situation, the parties have few possibilities of extricating themselves from the spiral that leads to confrontation. If the other is securitized and denied recognition across issue-areas and arenas, that leaves no space for responding with friendship to overcome mistrust—which would be the opening through which to start pushing the spiral downward. A high level of mutual and multifaceted securitization can produce, in Jervis’ terminology (2001, 41), a “deep security dilemma” ... “a situation where mistrust cannot be overcome” and where there are “no missed opportunities for radically improving relations.” But in contrast to Jervis’ conception, the road toward this high level of mutual securitization, with the ensuing minimal trust, is gradual and contingent, and produced through a plethora of representations. Moreover, in this approach, the key “mover” in the security dilemma—the perception of each party that the other has offensive intentions—emerges from their discursive practices, their representations of each other. Mutual and multifaceted securitization answers Mitzen and Schweller’s (2011) call to understand how certainty about the other actor’s aggressive intentions can contribute to the onset of war.9 But this certainty, with the tragic outcome it can result in, should not be seen as conditioned by structural uncertainty at the 9 Mitzen and Schweller (2011, 5) indicate that “structural uncertainty, not alone, but coupled with individuals’ misplaced certainty, causes conflict.” Misplaced certainty is “thought of as a particularly stubborn misperception that leads to suboptimal choice.” Spiraling toward a New Cold War in the North? outset; nor is the misplaced certainty in the next phase built from “inside” an individual decision-maker with reference to cognitive and affective causes (Mitzen and Schweller’s (2011; Jervis 1976, 387–406). I submit that it is built through the multiple and spreading self/other representations that bring the “offensive intent” of the other into being as a social reality, making it reasonable and logical to undertake policy steps to counter this aggressive intent.

Security never seems to make any progress. Despite military investments, security reviews and ever more powerful technological surveillance, European and North American populations are continually represented as unsafe. The most powerful states in the world, enjoying historically unprecedented levels of health, prosperity and stability, are simultaneously the most hysterically possessed by security-related fears. The compulsion to experience the self as insecure, despite evidence to the contrary, is the starting point for this paper. ¶ Much has been written about political anxiety in the fields of political theory and sociology. Corey Robin has explored the developing permutations of fear in Western philosophical thought as an operational concept (Robin 2004); Frank Furedi has explored how the social alienation and declining community ties associated with contemporary neoliberalism have led to cultures of insecurity (Furedi 2002), and Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have both written about the transformation of risk and anxiety in an age where technology produces its own, sometimes existential, dangers (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990). Fear and risk are prominent topics on sociological and philosophical landscapes.¶ Not wanting to be left behind, international relations has also produced substantial literatures on the risk discourses and anxieties which dominate contemporary political life. Much of this research was initially located within the Copenhagen School of securitisation theory, which analysed the construction of threat by political elites and the centrality of speech acts to processes of securitisation (Buzan, Wæver, and De Wilde 1998; Hansen 2012a; McDonald 2008). The functionality of securitisation is here understood in terms of identity: identifying and invoking an external threat serves to performatively constitute the nation (Jackson 2005; McCrisken 2003).¶ In the wake of securitisation theory, European international relations developed a poststructuralist critique of Beck’s ‘Risk Society’ thesis. In their rethinking of risk, Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster critiqued Beck’s macro-sociological assumptions that risks exist independently in the world from the governmental technologies which invoke them (Aradau and Van Munster 2007). The incalculability of contemporary risks does not make them ungovernable, as Beck suggests; rather governance structures have shifted to incorporate the unpredictability of certain dangers into precautionary risk management. Incalculability becomes the modality of security.1 Poststructuralist International Relations has found fertile terrain in the idea of risks and their governance. Pushing this research beyond its focus on the security sector, Emmy Eklundh, Andreja Zevnik and Emmanuel Pierre-Guittet have explored the logics of anxiety at play in austerity politics and security governance, and the anxious and resistant subjectivities produced therein (Eklundh, Zevnik, and Pierre-Guittet 2017).¶ But what does it mean to centralise anxiety, fear and risk in Western political and sociological thought at a time of relative geopolitical stability and wealth? In his own take on the politics of anxiety, Mark Neocleous (2000) tackled the proliferation of (in)security and risk discourse in sociology and international relations, arguing that the acceleration of (in) securitisation reflects the policing of civil society to protect bourgeois property and status. The articulation of pollution, terrorism and migration as security threats depoliticises them; it silences the social and political creation of these issues, enabling governing structures to pursue technocratic solutions which efface the real genesis of threats: capital accumulation.¶ It is important to note that the arguments made by Neocleous, poststructuralist scholars of risk and securitisation theorists share more in common than their focus on political anxiety. They all also describe ambivalence within security practices towards the threat object. While politicians promise that destroying the enemy will bring about resolution and ontological stability, IR literatures show that frames of enmity enable the pursuit of other goals: biopolitical governance, identity consolidation and the furtherance of capital accumulation. There is a gap between security and its threat object. The threat object is made hypersignificant in political discourse, but it is simultaneously treated ambivalently and can be replaced at will. New objects wait in the wings as potential vessels for enmity.

Calls for alternative approaches to the phenomenon of state failure are often met with the criticism that such alternatives could only work in the long term whereas 'something' needs to be done here and now. Whilst recognising the need for immediate action, it is the role of the political scientist to point to the fallacy of 'short-termism' in the conduct of current policy. Short-termism is defined by Ken Booth (1999, p. 4) as 'approaching security issues within the time frame of the next election, not the next generation'. Viewed as such, short-termism is the enemy of true strategic thinking. The latter requires policymakers to rethink their long-term goals and take small steps towards achieving them. It also requires heeding against taking steps that might eventually become self-defeating.  The United States has presently fought three wars against two of its Cold War allies in the post-Cold War era, namely, the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Both were supported in an attempt to preserve the delicate balance between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War policy of supporting client regimes has eventually backfired in that US policymakers now have to face the instability they have caused. Hence the need for a comprehensive understanding of state failure and the role Western states have played in failing them through varied forms of intervention. Although some commentators may judge that the road to the existing situation is paved with good intentions, a truly strategic approach to the problem of international terrorism requires a more sensitive consideration of the medium-to-long-term implications of state building in different parts of the world whilst also addressing the root causes of the problem of state 'failure'.  Developing this line of argument further, reflection on different socially relevant meanings of 'state failure' in relation to different time increments shaping policymaking might convey alternative considerations. In line with John Ruggie (1998, pp. 167–170), divergent issues might then come to the fore when viewed through the different lenses of particular time increments. Firstly, viewed through the lenses of an incremental time frame, more immediate concerns to policymakers usually become apparent when linked to precocious assumptions about terrorist networks, banditry and the breakdown of social order within failed states. Hence relevant players and events are readily identified (al-Qa'eda), their attributes assessed (axis of evil, 'strong'/'weak' states) and judgements made about their long-term significance (war on terrorism). The key analytical problem for policymaking in this narrow and blinkered domain is the one of choice given the constraints of time and energy devoted to a particular decision. These factors lead policymakers to bring conceptual baggage to bear on an issue that simplifies but also distorts information.  Taking a second temporal form, that of a conjunctural time frame, policy responses are subject to more fundamental epistemological concerns. Factors assumed to be constant within an incremental time frame are more variable and it is more difficult to produce an intended effect on ongoing processes than it is on actors and discrete events. For instance, how long should the 'war on terror' be waged for? Areas of policy in this realm can therefore begin to become more concerned with the underlying forces that shape current trajectories.  Shifting attention to a third temporal form draws attention to still different dimensions. Within an epochal time frame an agenda still in the making appears that requires a shift in decision-making, away from a conventional problem-solving mode 'wherein doing nothing is favoured on burden-of-proof grounds', towards a risk-averting mode, characterised by prudent contingency measures. To conclude, in relation to 'failed states', the latter time frame entails reflecting on the very structural conditions shaping the problems of 'failure' raised throughout the present discussion, which will demand lasting and delicate attention frompractitioners across the academy and policymaking communities alike. 

1. Introduction the definition and framings of existential risk¶ In recent years, a growing body of scholarship has argued that a new class of risks bears closer study, for their potential extreme impact on the survival of humanity (Bostrom, 2002, 2013; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011; Matheny, 2007; Rees, 2004). Prior research has identified a range of such human extinction risks (Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2008; Haggstrom, 2016; Pamlin & Armstrong, 2015), both natural and manmade, including risks from supervolcano eruption, asteroid impact, global warming, nuclear war, as well as more speculative risks from emerging technologies such as biotechnology, high-energy physics experiment disasters, or misaligned artificial intelligence. (Asimov, 1981; Baum & Barrett, 2016; Bostrom, 2014; Ord, Hillerbrand, & Sandberg, 2010; Posner, 2004; Sagan, 1983; Smil, 2005; Tegmark & Bostrom, 2005; Yudkowsky, 2008a).¶ While it is encouraging to see greater attention for a critical topic that has long remained understudied, it is relevant to ask how the framing of the field’s basic concepts shapes both which problems it identifies and prioritizes, as well as which policy approaches it considers and engages. In his seminal paper, Bostrom defined an existential risk as ‘[o]ne where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential’ (Bostrom, 2002). Thus in Bostrom’s view, existential risks are characterised both by their scope (pan-generational) and their intensity (crushing): the size of the group of people who are at risk1 and how badly each individual within that group is affected, respectively (Bostrom, 2002).¶ Much prior research on existential risks has thus deployed criteria and methodology which have identified discrete and independent challenges of sufficient severity and pervasiveness to bring about the ‘adverse outcome’ in a direct causal manner. In this reading, existential risks are an extreme offshoot of global catastrophic risks—disasters which “might have the potential to inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale” (Bostrom, 2013; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2011, p. 2), but which fall short of permanent collapse. While we are not necessarily averse to the Bostromian definition of ‘adverse outcomes’—a definition which indeed seems to characterize the space of eventual outcomes to be avoided—we take more issue with the limited range of pathways towards this dreaded outcome-space, which much of the literature has focused on exploring. Specifically, as noted by others in the community, much prior research “has focused mainly on tracing a causal pathway from a catastrophic event to global catastrophic loss of life” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 1). As such there remains an event-focus, in the sense that only discrete events that are causally connected to the demise of humanity within a relatively short time-frame qualify as an existential risk (rather than a ‘merely’ globally catastrophic one, or a background risk).¶ 1.1. Existential risk (re)framings as crucial consideration for law & governance approaches¶ Distinguishing existential risks as a uniquely threatening outlier along the spectrum of global risks, however, is arguably an unnecessarily narrow framing of the field of study. Indeed, a high-profile ‘one-hit-KO’ existential risk such as a global nuclear war or a pandemic may constitute only one avenue towards that ‘adverse outcome’, and concentrating predominately upon (ways to intervene in) its origin and direct pathway, risks overshadowing other potential paths or disaster interaction effects2 that functionally converge towards that same disastrous outcome, even if only indirectly or over longer timescales, with a potentially higher probability. Indeed, as recently noted by scholars in the field, a full mapping of scenarios that lead to catastrophic outcomes “requires exploring the interplay between many interacting critical systems and threats, beyond the narrow study of individual scenarios that are typically addressed by single disciplines” (Avin et al., 2018, p. 2).The precise framing of ‘existential risks’ is therefore a crucial consideration, informing ethical, strategic, and epistemological (cf. academic) priorities in facing ‘adverse outcomes’. This is particularly the case in the context of studying how global political dynamics may interact with certain existential risks, and in formulating meaningfully effective policies and governance approaches to such risks. Of course, this is not to say that the field of existential risk studies has not sought to involve and engage with policy and governance approaches and solutions. Indeed, to its credit, research in the field of existential risks has actively sought to engage with these issues—given that, as Bostrom himself observes (2013:27), global cooperation is critical to mitigating a wide range of existential risks. Likewise, researchers within the ‘AI safety’ community are beginning to highlight fields such as policy and psychology, as under-represented but potentially promising approaches to addressing risks arising from AI (Brundage, 2017; Sotala, 2017b).¶ Accordingly, there has been research into the interaction effects between technologies and politics—such as the possibility that arms races might increase the risk that untested, powerful AI systems are deployed rashly or prematurely (Armstrong, Bostrom, & Shulman, 2013; Shulman, 2009). Other work has drawn on cognitive psychology, to study how people might structurally (mis)judge the probability of risks (Yudkowsky, 2008b). Likewise, work exploring policy- and governance approaches to mitigating existential risks has explored policy approaches that include insurance arrangements for large catastrophes (Taylor, 2008); technology taxes and subsidies (Posner, 2008); and work drawing on social (and organizational) psychology to assess ways to motivate AI researchers to choose beneficial AI designs (Baum, 2016). Yet, other work has examined the cost-effectiveness of biosecurity interventions (Millett & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); pricing externalities to balance public the risks and benefits of scientific research generally (Farquhar, Cotton-Barratt, & Snyder-Beattie, 2017); and proposing a general international regulatory regime to govern global catastrophic and existential risks from emerging technologies (Wilson, 2013). At present, a majority of existential risk research centres3 have articulated law and policy research as areas of interest, and scholars in this space have begun to translate such work into concrete proposed policy interventions—notably the 2017 GPP report, which included proposals to develop governance for geoengineering research; establish international scenario plans and exercises for engineered pandemics, and build international attention for existential risk reduction (Farquhar, Halstead et al., 2017).¶ Such work is highly encouraging, and the existential risk research agenda has benefited from it. Nonetheless, the risk remains that a too-narrow conception of ‘existential risks’ prematurely closes down the space of law and governance solutions that are possible—or necessary—in assuring humanity a non-catastrophic future—for instance, a future that, in Bostrom’s framing, meaningfully ‘maximize[s] the probability of an ok outcome’ (Bostrom, 2013, p. 19). However, if human extinction and the persistent and pervasive truncation of technological potential are not completely homologous, then tailoring our portfolio of policy responses exclusively to closing off the pathways these risks could take—and then calling it a day—would be insufficient. In fact, this might only afford future policymakers with a false sense of security, even as the world continues to reside in an overall state of ‘super-risk’ (Bermudez & Pardo, 2015).¶ This is especially the case when there is a narrow ‘technological’ (re)solution on offer—such as ‘improve global vaccine synthesis and production capability’, or ‘subsidize international technical AI safety research’—which promise to address or prevent the risk at its root. While such direct technological solutions may certainly be indispensable to averting some existential risks, they may not suffice in actually ‘plugging all the holes’ in our risk space. In a disciplinary context, there is a risk (admittedly self-correcting, given publication incentives) of the research agenda ‘halting’ early. In a real-world context, the availability of simple, straightforward ‘fixes’ might even pose a ‘moral hazard’, if policymakers or global governance systems which lack political will or the attention to explore more complex or costly changes, seize upon the ‘symbolic action’ of the straightforward, first-order mitigation strategies. Even where this is not the case, certain policy recommendations to mitigate existential risks might depend on too-optimistic a view of institutional rationality or capability.¶ 1.2. ‘Boring Apocalypses’: from existential hazards, to existential risks¶ While such efforts might mitigate specific existential risks, this might not translate into significantly lowering the overall probability of the ‘adverse outcome’, if only a part of the problem, or only one problem among many, is addressed. An alternative articulation is that only one path to the ‘adverse outcome’ is being explored by much research into existential risks: erecting obstacles along that path may indeed reduce the overall likelihood of manifesting these risks, but this might have little impact, or even no effect, upon the manifestation of the ‘adverse outcome’.¶ Thus, our view is that a materialised existential risk (what we call an ‘existential hazard’) is sufficient to lead to an (existentially) ‘adverse outcome’, but crucially, that this is unnecessary to reach that result. If the overarching objective is to lower the probability of human extinction or significant technological curtailment, adopting an array of approaches which complement the mitigation of direct existential risks are required. Within this broad spectrum of aligned approaches, we propose to introduce law, policy, regulatory and governance tools in this paper as an example. The choice of law and policy perspectives is two-fold: on one hand, they make it possible to take second-order considerations, which involve indirect and socially and culturally mediated paths towards ‘adverse outcomes’ into account; on the other hand, these recognise both the complexity of social organisation and the prospect that civilizational collapse may trigger or possibly instantiate existential outcomes. In this sense, law and policy approaches offer the possibility of complementing and enhancing the narrower approach adopted by contemporary existential risk research, to take into consideration other paths to existentially adverse outcomes; and to better anticipate vulnerabilities, exposures and failure modes in societal efforts to address existential risks.¶ 1.3. Exploring the implications of the existential risk framing: risks from AI¶ An example of this can be drawn from the prospect of super intelligent artificial intelligence (Bostrom, 2014; Yudkowsky, 2008a). Although the landmark research agenda articulated by Russell, Dewey, and Tegmark (2015) does call for research into ‘short-term’ policy issues, debates in this field of AI risk4 have—with some exceptions—identified the core problem as one of value alignment, where the divergence between the interests of humanity and those of the superintelligence would lead to the demise of humanity through mere processes of optimisation. Thus, the existential risk posed by the superintelligence lies in the fact that it will be more capable than we can ever be; human beings will be outmanoeuvred in attempts at convincing, controlling or coercing that superintelligence to serve our interests. As a result of this framing, the research agenda on AI risk has put the emphasis on evaluating the technical feasibility of an ‘intelligence explosion’ (Chalmers, 2010; Good, 1964) through recursive self-improvement after reaching a critical threshold (Bostrom, 2014; Sotala, 2017a; Yudkowsky, 2008a, Yudkowsky, 2013)5; on formulating strategies to estimate timelines for the expected technological development of such ‘human-level’ or ‘general’ machine intelligence (Armstrong and Sotala, 2012, Armstrong and Sotala, 2015; Baum, Goertzel, & Goertzel, 2011; Brundage, 2015; Grace, Salvatier, Dafoe, Zhang, & Evans, 2017; Müller & Bostrom, 2016); and on formulating technical proposals to guarantee that a superintelligence’s goals or values will remain aligned with those of humanity—the so-called superintelligence ‘Control Problem’ (Armstrong, Sandberg, & Bostrom, 2012; Bostrom, 2012, Bostrom, 2014; Goertzel & Pitt, 2014; Yudkowsky, 2008a).6¶ While this is worthwhile and necessary to address the potential risks of advanced AI, this framing of existential risks focuses on the most direct and causally connected existential risk posed by AI systems. Yet while super-human intelligence might surely suffice to trigger an existential outcome, it is not necessary to it. Cynically, mere human level intelligence appears to be more than sufficient to pose an array of existential risks (Martin, 2006; Rees, 2004).¶ Furthermore, some applications of ‘narrow’ AI which might help in mitigating against some existential risks, might pose their own existential risks when combined with other technologies or trends, or might simply lower barriers against other varieties of existential risks. To give one example; the deployment of advanced AI-enhanced surveillance capabilities7—including automatic hacking, geospatial sensing, advanced data analysis capabilities, and autonomous drone deployment—may greatly strengthen global efforts to protect against ‘rogue’ actors engineering a pandemic (“preventing existential risk”). It may also offer very accurate targeting and repression information to a totalitarian regimes,8 particularly those with separate access to nanotechnological weapons (“creating a new existential risk”). Finally, the increased strategic transparency of such AI systems might disrupt existing nuclear deterrence stability, by rendering vulnerable previously ‘secure’ strategic assets (“lowering the threshold to existential risk”) (Hambling, 2016; Holmes, 2016; Lieber & Press, 2017).¶ Finally, many ‘non-catastrophic’ trends engendered by AI—whether geopolitical disruption, unemployment through automation; widespread automated cyberattacks, or computational propaganda—might resonate to instil a deep technological anxiety or regulatory distrust in global public. While these trends do not directly lead to catastrophe, they could well be understood as a meta-level existential threat, if they spur rushed and counter-productive regulation at the domestic level, or so degrade conditions for cooperation on the international level that they curtail our collective ability to address not just existential risks deriving from artificial intelligence, but those from other sources (e.g. synthetic biology and climate change), as well.¶ These brief examples sketch out the broader existential challenges latent within AI research and development at preceding stages or manifesting through different avenues than the signature risk posed by superintelligence. Thus, addressing the existential risk posed by superintelligence is both crucial to avoiding the ‘adverse outcome’, but simultaneously misses the mark in an important sense.¶ 2. Re-examining existential risks: hazard, vulnerability, and exposure¶ While Bostrom’s leading typology identifies the general area inhabited by existential risks, it provides little guidance for how to differentiate among the diverse risks within that category (the box marked ‘X’), because these risks are not distinguished according to their source, characteristics, or complexity, but only their impact (“crushing”) and scope (“pan-generational”).9¶ However, given the range of distinct risks falling within the ‘X’ box—that is, risks that could cause or feed into an eventual terminal and crushing ‘adverse outcome’ for humanity—we suggest it relevant to deconstruct existential risks, and instead consider the broader category of ‘risks as a function of hazard, vulnerability and exposure’10,11:¶ Existential Risk = Hazard* Vulnerability * Exposure¶ Here, hazard denotes the external source of peril (which is captured within the prevailing agenda studying existential risks)—the ‘spark’ that threatens the pan-generational/crushing harm.¶ Vulnerability denotes propensities or weaknesses inherent within human social, political, economic or legal systems, that increase the likelihood of humanity succumbing to pressures or challenges that threaten existential outcomes.¶ Finally, exposure denotes the ‘reaction surface’—the number, scope and nature of the interface between the hazard and the vulnerability.¶ Thus, a hazard is what kills us, and a vulnerability is how we die. Exposure is the interface or medium between what kills us, and how we die. To take an example from disaster studies, a major earthquake only becomes a risk if the built, social or institutional environment can be destabilised during earthquakes of the threatened magnitude (“is vulnerable to”), and if such an environment is located in (“exposed to”) an earthquake zone. Thus, vulnerability and exposure refer to two different aspects of the affected system: how it breaks, and how it intersects with a given hazard’s operating space or pathways of impact (Fig. 1).¶ As a species of global catastrophic risks, the study of existential risks is often conflated with, and perhaps even collapsed into, the identification and mitigation of existential hazards. Where attention is paid to issues of vulnerability and exposure, these are often identified in light of an existential hazard. One of the leading sources and reference points in the field symptomatically organizes the field as a collection of existential hazards (Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2008). A caveat applies for a small subset of hazards of such enormous magnitude that it renders mitigation strategies focussing upon vulnerability and exposure less relevant, or perhaps even irrelevant. The paragon might be the scenarios of ‘simulation collapse’, or a high-energy physics experiment going awry, altering the astronomical vicinity and rendering life untenable (Ord et al., 2010). Such extreme hazards constitute the archetype of existential risks as a subset of global catastrophic risks and can only be addressed by managing the hazard head-on, with vulnerability and exposure components relegated to marginal roles:¶ Existential Risk = Existential Hazard * Vulnerability * Exposure¶ Thus, our claim is not that the field of existential risks research is looking in the wrong places—the emphasis on existential risks has enabled this field to identify a core group of existential hazards which would on their own suffice to bring about the ‘existentially adverse outcome’.¶ Nonetheless, there are also many other, slower and more intertwined ways in which the world might collapse, without being hit by spectacular hazards. To complement the study of existential risks we can draw upon lessons learnt through historical and anthropological studies of civilizational collapse. Thus, while existential risks concentrate upon clear-cut existential hazards, civilizational collapse research infers influential factors that were involved in trajectories of decline. These studies are beginning to challenge the traditional conceptual framework which set out a cyclical history, wherein a civilisations rise and fall, progressing through a predictable pattern of growth, zenith and decline in a gradual manner (Ferguson, 2011). In other words, historically civilizational collapses are boring. Diamond refined this model by recognising that civilizational collapse could be a slow and protracted process emerging from complex interactions (Diamond, 2006).¶ 3. Beyond hazards: vulnerability and exposure¶ In this paper, we set out to foreground the other two variables involved in the existential risk equation.¶ Thus, as noted, ‘vulnerability’ denotes propensities or weaknesses inherent within human social, political, economic or legal systems that increase the likelihood of humanity succumbing to pressures or challenges that threaten existential outcomes.¶ ‘Exposure’ indicates the nexus between external hazards and internal vulnerabilities: the interface at which the ‘adverse outcome’ precipitates from their interaction. Historical studies of civilizational collapses indicate that even small exogenous shocks can destabilise a vulnerable system (Diamond, 2006; Ferguson, 2011). Given this, studying ‘exposure’ is relevant in systematically analysing interaction effects: a cataclysmic hazard interacting with robust and resilient human systems may be survivable, but conversely, at the interstices at which our human technology, institutions or culture are most vulnerable, even minor (initially ‘non-catastrophic’) hazards can be the inflection point that tips these susceptible systems towards trajectories of collapse (Gladwell, 2001).12¶ In order to offset the tight coupling between existential risks and existential hazards, we will further dissect the vulnerability and exposure factors introduced in the existential risk calculus. Our proposed taxonomy distinguishes four general categories of vulnerability and exposure (see Table 1).¶ •Ontological: vulnerability through existing in a given location and time in our universe13;¶ •Passive: vulnerability through lack of action; ‘indirect’ exposure;¶ •Active: vulnerability because of insufficient/mis-specified action.¶ •Intentional: vulnerability or exposure knowingly maintained, for that purpose.¶ Note that for vulnerability, the Passive, Active and Intentional categories correspond to the jurisprudential concepts of ‘omission’ (‘failure to act’), ‘negligence’ (action, but with failure to exercise the appropriate care to prevent foreseeable future harm) and ‘intention’ (action with the known purpose to bring about a consequence).¶ Drawing such distinctions offers the opportunity to be more precise about the features or characteristics which give rise to the existential dimension of the challenge, and thus suggest specific points for targeted intervention, as well as potential failure modes to caution against.¶ Below, we combine these categories and their sub-divisions, in twin taxonomies of existential ‘vulnerabilities’ and ‘exposure’. We also seek to give concrete examples. Obviously, not all of these examples are currently unstudied—indeed many feature prominently in the existing literature—though in other cases they remain understudied. While this list is naturally not comprehensive, we hope that such examples enable researchers in the field of existential risks to locate their research in an overarching framework, as well as facilitating links to established scholarly fields which have studied given issues, without considering their bearing on larger existential risks.¶ 3.1. A taxonomy of ‘existential vulnerability’¶ Our proposed taxonomy for distinguishing between different manifestations of existential vulnerabilities is summarised in Table 2: note that the salience or tractability of these existential vulnerabilities to law and policy approaches increases as one goes down: ontological vulnerabilities appear (at present) highly intractable to mere law and policy—it would be a vain regulator indeed who would try to legislate against physical laws. However, as one proceeds to passive, active, or intended vulnerabilities, the salience of governance approaches increases (Table 3).¶ 3.1.1. Ontological vulnerability¶ The category of ontological vulnerability denotes intrinsic vulnerabilities associated with human existence. These include the possibility that we inhabit a computer simulation (Bostrom, 2002), which might be terminated or altered at any time. More conceptual and basic vulnerabilities—so fundamental that we often would not even consider them as such—include our existence as biological beings that are dependent (potentially more so than other species such as tardigrades) on continuous or relatively uninterrupted inputs of energy & resources (such as food, water, air, light, …), which renders the human species one comparatively vulnerable to ‘extinction’ events such as a supervolcano- or meteor-induced global winter. On a deeper level yet, all biochemistry is dependent on the existing laws of physics within which it evolved, rendering us acutely and terminally vulnerable to any processes (e.g. vacuum decay) which would profoundly alter these processes. Biological deterioration due to aging processes, or exterior damages, might also rank amongst these, although that is conditional on whether or not there exists a physical ‘hard ceiling’ to how far medical senescence research might extend human lifespans and reduce other vulnerabilities.¶ As these are background conditions at the frontiers of epistemology, we are unlikely to be able to unveil more than a fraction of these vulnerabilities. Also, as inherent features of human existence we have limited abilities to act effectively in this category. Perhaps the most utility we can extract from delimiting ontological vulnerability is to restrict its reach: in other words to leave this as a residual class of vulnerabilities inherent in existence.¶ 3.1.2. Vulnerabilities, passive and active; built, institutional and cultural¶ Passive vulnerabilities are characterised by inaction: the susceptibility to existential outcomes by virtue of failure to take appropriate measures. Conversely, active vulnerabilities arise in association with human activities, as by-products or unintended consequences.¶ Three cross-cutting sub-distinctions can also be made for both passive and active vulnerabilities: built, cultural, and institutional.¶ Built vulnerabilities are characterised by our (passive) failure to put into place relevant solutions or defences to existential challenges, or by our (active) failure to repair or correct the extant vulnerabilities in the legacy infrastructures we deploy, or the path-dependent ways we deploy them—even if we have such solutions or repairs at our disposal. Such solutions can in fact include some interventions proposed by the existential risk research agenda, such as an asteroid defence programme or the ability to systematically monitor for supervolcano eruptions (Denkenberger & Blair, 2018); they also cover the active existential risks posed by the technologies which humanity has introduced, but which go unfixed—such as architectural deficiencies creating intractable cybersecurity vulnerabilities in universally used computing chips. Because of the technical nature of engineered vulnerabilities, some of these are perhaps closest to the existing (policy) research agenda of the existential risk community—and at present some may consider that law and policy tools have less of a role to play, other than to coordinate efforts aimed at addressing them.¶ In contrast, top-down vulnerabilities resulting from suboptimal direction and coordination are captured by our sub-category of institutional vulnerability. Here, the line between active and passive is admittedly thin, where recklessness can be the distinguishing feature. Active institutional vulnerability may be characterised by failure to coordinate to address a known risk, such as climate change, or cyclical global economic melt-down. Passive institutional vulnerability may then be understood as directional and coordination failures that limit the scope of knowledge related to existential risks—perhaps an implicit ‘unwillingness to know’, which translates in an unwillingness to fund blue-sky research into charting ‘unknown unknowns’ (Rumsfeld, 2002).¶ Cultural vulnerability encompass the bottom-up societal dimensions, reflecting how certain social practices may affect susceptibility to existential challenges. Active cultural vulnerabilities include customary practices that facilitate the spread of pathogens, increasing susceptibility to pandemics, for example integrated commercial travel networks and interpersonal greeting rituals which encourage physical proximity or contact. Passive cultural vulnerabilities include the exclusion or ridicule of existential risks from serious discussion in public forums (let alone the halls of power). This increases collective vulnerabilities insofar as the public and policymakers underrate the prospects for existential risks (cognitive biases exacerbate these effects, Kahneman, 2012) resulting in further marginalisation.¶ 3.1.3. Intended vulnerabilities¶ Intended vulnerabilities are those which are created or retained specifically for that purpose, and within the existing research agenda are reflected in the premises of the ‘AI risk’ or ‘Apocalyptic AI’ movement (Geraci, 2010). Another salient example can, however, be found in nuclear force postures which (in the US context) features centralization of launch command authority along with a ‘launch-on-warning’ doctrine that relies on input from fallible early launch warning systems (Borrie, 2014; Sagan, 1993). Together, this gives rise to the catastrophic risk of an accidental nuclear war (Barrett, Baum, & Hostetler, 2013). Yet far from incidental, this is arguably by design. As the theorist Kenneth Boulding once observed: “if [deterrence] were really stable … it would cease to deter. If the probability of nuclear weapons going off were zero, they would not deter anybody” (Boulding, 1986, p. 32).14 The nuclear force knowingly renders itself more vulnerable to catastrophic accidents—sacrificing a degree of safety for the sake of strengthening operational readiness and deterrence. While less dramatic, similar intentional vulnerabilities could emerge from a state intelligence service knowingly holding back-doors or ‘zero-day-exploits’ which it identifies in critical infrastructure software, in the hope that this may enable more effective cyberattacks against rival states at a later state.¶ 3.1.4. Existential vulnerability: mitigation and adaptation strategies¶ This taxonomy of vulnerabilities can provide concrete suggestions for addressing existential risks. While the categories of ontological and intended vulnerabilities may seem superfluous, their treatment as additional classes allow limited resources to be concentrated into the most tractable areas. Perhaps the main contribution of this taxonomy is to highlight how existential risks need not be active and discernible, in the manner of the ‘hazards’ identified in the field. Instead, many of these risks can be latent, and slow-moving. Moreover, this taxonomy aids in understanding how human activities can impact paths towards ‘existential outcomes’ in several ways: (1) intent: by directly creating technologies which pose existential hazards (i.e. emerging technologies such as AI, nanotechnology and synthetic biology); (2) (negligence) by establishing complex systems for which failure is unavoidable (Perrow, 2011); (3) and by omission, the failure to take steps to confront existential risks.¶ Beyond merely refining the sources of existential risks, the contribution of this taxonomy lies in creating a roadmap for the study and integration of risks that have not yet received much or consistent attention in the field of existential risks. In doing so, we emphasise a number of existential vulnerabilities, such as global dependency upon a few species of staple crops, or certain types of globalised technologies (e.g. SCADA-based systems in critical infrastructure) that are not commonly recognised as sources or failure points of existential risks.¶ The study of existential ‘vulnerability’ may suggest that adaptation strategies are preferable to those of mitigation, both because of the inherent complexity underlying both forms of structural vulnerability and because adaptation can now occur simultaneously with mitigation. This is because the vulnerability analysis in effect opens up a parallel system where other trajectories of existential risks are at play. The rough equivalence drawn between traditional existential risks with existential hazards might have the effect of underselling adaptation strategies: it is illogical to conceive of robustness as a defence against the apocalypse, after all. Along with efforts to mitigate or avert existential hazards, however, we can now also plan for adaptation against vulnerabilities. Thus, adaptation strategies are not limited to actions undertaken after ‘the Fall’: instead they may become rational reactions towards limiting susceptibility to existential risks. In order to explore this potential further, we proceed to examine a taxonomy of exposure.¶ 3.2. A taxonomy of ‘Existential exposure’¶ As a parallel effort to our taxonomy on existential vulnerabilities, we set out a classification system to differentiate between different forms of exposure. It is worth recalling at this point that we use exposure to express the interface between hazards and vulnerabilities—between what kills us, and how we die. Both hazards and vulnerabilities in isolation remain as potentials: exposure is thus a means of actualising such potential into existential risks.¶ Such exposure can further be directed towards either the societal or the natural environment. This is about what is directly at risk: our (human) society and the common capabilities and support structures preventing existential risks; or nature and its carrying capacity and resilience to future shocks. Thus, we assert that devastating results for humankind can follow from the collapse of both the societal structures we have built, as well as the natural environments within which these constructed systems are embedded. Again, the distinction allows us to single out different examples and trajectories to build alternative strategies for human survival. As is clear from the examples above, it also draws out lessons for existential outcomes which might not be immediately evident from an analysis of existential hazards alone. For example, when ‘exposure’ is seen from the perspective of the natural environment on which mankind depends, pervasive over-fishing and deforestation, combined with trends in resource demands tracking population growth, may become potentially hazardous activities with the potential to curtail human development in the long run (Diamond, 2006), even if they do not affect most humans directly in the short run.¶ 3.2.1. Ontological exposure¶ Some exposures are inherent in residing on Earth. Those falling in the category of natural exposure denote existence on earth itself as the exposure, and include our exposure to Near-Earth Objects (NEO) hitting earth or supervolcanoes triggering a protracted volcanic winter. The common denominator underlying this form of exposure is their requirement for measures beyond our present technological capacity to overcome (which admittedly, can be a moving threshold).¶ 3.2.2. Indirect and direct exposure¶ As with the discussion of existential vulnerabilities set out above, the potential of our proposed taxonomy lies in the analysis of indirect and direct exposures. This distinction identifies the exposures that are a direct consequence of human activity, from those that are caused by more complex interactions with other systems.¶ The theoretical example of high-energy physics research going awry15 provides an example of societal exposure.16 A final example of direct exposures are private or unilateral attempts to undertake ‘Active SETI’—alternately called METI (‘Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence’) (Zaitsev, 2006)—which might expose the rest of mankind to catastrophic risk, should any future contacted alien species prove hostile and capable of interstellar-scale interdiction. These examples illustrate how surfaces of direct exposure (and ways to reduce it) might be overlooked when concentrating upon the hazard alone.¶ Beyond direct exposures, an array of arrangements which jeopardise the human societies that have become dependent on them. This category includes any activity or arrangement which might expose the world to extinction through cascading effects. The development of critical common global infrastructures such as the internet, energy markets, and cultural and scientific harmonization might be classified as exposures, rather than vulnerabilities because these reveal new interfaces between hazards and vulnerabilities. Thus collapse of common infrastructures would trigger cascades which jeopardise civilizational sophistication at the global level (Wright, 2006), the edifice upon which humanity’s long-term potential has been built. Similarly, developments like urbanisation, intensification of agriculture, and even increasing global inequality () appear to be factors that create fault lines and further drive exposures to existential vulnerabilities. Here the exposure perspective shows us that only by certain actions or inactions do risks actually materialise fully against civilization.¶ 3.2.3. Intentional exposure¶ Finally, some of these exposures appear to exist intentionally, or at least knowingly or recklessly. The city of New Orleans, Louisiana, provides a microcosm of how dysfunctional behaviour, seen from an existential risk perspective, might be driven by human incentives or rationales operating at different orders. The city is, in design and position, incredibly vulnerable to its natural environment—pinched in between the Mexican Gulf and Lake Pontchartrain and built on the banks of the Mississippi River. Accordingly, some have argued that the most reasonable strategy following hurricane Katrina would have been to abandon the city permanently (Richards, 2011). Instead, the affected populations were given incentives to return, with the US government investing billions in the reconstruction of the city, aware that even with improved defences, the city remains unsafe (Cutter et al., 2014).¶ Similarly, many populations worldwide, from Tehran and Kathmandu, to San Francisco and Port-au-Prince, persist in known disaster-prone zones, for (legitimate) reasons of culture, history, identity or economy. The purpose of these examples is not to warn the populations of these cities, nor to judge their decision to remain: rather the point is that individuals and societies often make decisions based upon entirely different rationales than a concern for survival. This is an insight that seems to scale to any level of government. In simpler terms, sometimes we choose exposure over safety because of competing considerations, and while this might be productive from a cultural heritage perspective, it remains problematic when seen through the lens of existential risks.¶ 4. Are existential hazards necessary for existential risks?¶ Having set out taxonomies for differentiating between factors which influence existential risks the question remains whether all components are necessary to bring about an ‘adverse outcome’. Our initial claim was that existential hazards could be sufficient existential risks, but that they were not necessary to pose such risks.¶ Returning to the civilization collapse literature cited above, Ferguson provides a critical insight in contesting the traditional view of cyclical history itself. He posits an alternative conceptual framework by asking the question: ‘What if history is not cyclical and slow-moving, but arrhythmic?’ (Ferguson, 2011, p. 299). Continuing, he summarises the perspective we adopt succinctly:¶ Civilisations… are highly complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organised, so that their construction more closely resembles a Namibian termite mound than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder − on ‘the edge of chaos’, in the phrase of computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time, apparently in equilibrium, in reality constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when they “go critical”. A slight perturbation can set off a “phase transition” from a benign equilibrium to a crisis − a single grain of sand causes an apparently stable sandcastle to fall in on itself. (Ferguson, 2011, pp. 299–300).¶ Wright echoes this sentiment: ‘Civilisations often fall quite suddenly − the House of Cards effect − because as they reach full demand on their ecologies, they become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations’ (Wright, 2006, p. 130). When combined with the observation that hitherto isolated civilizational experiments have now been merged (Harari, 2015), this raises the spectre that existential risks can coalesce from factors that historically brought about only limited civilizational collapses. Thus, the question we need to pose in this regard is whether vulnerabilities themselves contain the seeds of existential risks?¶ In this context, we should note that vulnerabilities have often been considered mostly as aggravating factors. As aggravators then, vulnerabilities are subsidiary considerations restricted to influencing borderline events: where a potential existential hazard impacts humanity, its susceptibility or resilience could determine whether or not that hazard was transmuted into an existential outcome.¶ In line with vulnerabilities being developed as a separate sphere where existential risks are at play, this section explores the possibility of removing the existential character of the hazard and thus plausibly reducing the calculus to:¶ Existential Risk = Hazard * Existential Vulnerability * Exposure¶ [and/or]¶ Existential Risk = Hazard * Vulnerability * Existential Exposure¶ An initial issue is that a catalyst of some sort is required to precipitate the existential risk, because even a system with well-exposed inherent susceptibilities will need something to set it motion. Removing the existential hazard component allows us to explore the possibility that relatively minor occurrences can trigger cascades that emerge as existential risks. But a vulnerability cannot by definition transmute into the existential risk itself absent external input: for this reason we diminish the stature of ‘hazard’ in the equation to represent our proposition that exogenous shocks need not be the spectacular existential hazards recognised by the study of existential risks. Instead, the external hazards in our revised equation can include insignificant events which go unnoticed (and quite probably involve a large number of minor occurrences).¶ 5. Contributions and limitations of law and policy tools for existential risks¶ While our deconstruction of existential risks lead to fairly broad claims, it also provides a few concrete questions and insights. First and foremost, if existential risks can indeed be triggered by non-existential hazards, we need to broaden the scope of investigation in order to draw a more accurate roadmap of the existential risks field, one which can deal with questions of vulnerability and exposure explicitly.¶ Second, the type of perceived challenge channels the range of appropriate responses which can be developed. While existential hazards may appropriately be met by narrower forms of technical solutions and technologically-oriented mitigation strategies, our broader perspective of existential risks open up other toolboxes to confront existential risks. In particular, social vulnerability and human-driven (anthropogenic) exposure require improved governance and coordination for adaptation strategies. Thus, when we reconstruct existential hazards through the optics of the social systems’ inability to withstand them they, per definition, become social phenomena. As noted, many existential risk scholars have recently recognised the importance of reaching out to, and incorporating, law and governance approaches, even where the origin of the existential hazard itself is technological. The critical role of such law and governance approaches should be even more self-evident where the problems in question—the origins of existential vulnerability and exposure—are themselves social, not technological.

C. J. Polychroniou: Richard, US foreign policy under the Biden administration is geared toward escalating the strategic competition with both China and Russia. Indeed, the Interim National Strategic Guidance, released in March 2021, makes it abundantly clear that the US intends to deter its adversaries from “inhibiting access to global commons, or dominating key regions” and that, moreover, this work cannot be done alone, as was the case under Trump, but will require the reinvigoration and modernization of the alliance system across the world. Does this read to you like a call for the start of a new New Cold War?

Richard Falk: Yes, I would say it is more than ‘the call’ for a New Cold War, but its start. The focus is presently much more China than Russia, because China is seen by Washington as posing the primary threat, and besides, it regards Russia as a traditional rival while China poses novel and more fundamental challenges. Russia, while behaving in an unsavory manner, dramatized by the crude handling of the opposition figure Alexei Navalny, is seen as manageable geopolitically. Euro-American strategy is to stiffen resistance to Russian pressure being exerted along some of its borders, and as in the Cold War can be handled by refurbished versions of ‘containment’ and ‘deterrence.’

Our analysis sheds light on how pandemic influenza has been conceived of as a political problem by the WHO and, by extension, one that requires a particular form of intervention. The texts analyzed here construct specific versions of reality that are implicated in both the problematization of, and the solution to, a future pandemic. This in-depth empirical work contributes to contemporary understandings of biopolitical regulation by exposing the organizing logic underpinning preparedness, and by considering the possible implications of this imagining for intervention into a future global pandemic. The construction of the natural features of the influenza virus in terms of its potential to transform into the next pandemic virus and spread across multiple boundaries, necessitates the integration of preparedness activities (characterized by flexibility and contingency) into everyday practice. Thus, the potentiality and inherent uncertainty of the virus becomes at once the target of intervention and representative of the underlying reasoning of response mechanisms.

Pandemic preparedness discourse operates as a technology of (in)security that renders the uncertainty of pandemic emergence governable. The threat of pandemic influenza to the health of the global population is conceived of, and responded to, through specification of the very features of the virus and its potential to disrupt society in numerous ways. The construction of the virus, both in terms of its pandemic potentiality and its capacity to transgress corporeal and territorial boundaries, is key in this regard; these features reveal the interconnectedness of territories, and how such interconnectedness constitute zones of vulnerability to pandemic emergence, and thus threats to global health.

The imaginaries of biological threats and the prominence of these issues on the political agenda of Western governments have undergone major changes. What started to be seen as a security concern has been not only a deliberate spread of disease, but also much broader scope of biological risks related to the increasing global circulation of bodies, materials, and technologies (Braun, 2007; Cooper, 2006). The narratives of how biological agents may be used in political violence changed further in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the anthrax letters incidents as a part of a broader concern that malign nonstate actors may seek to develop and use WMD (Guillemin, 2005; Wright, 2006). The taxonomy of biological threats and risks started to increasingly include not only biological warfare, but also biological terrorism, biological crimes, laboratory incidents, and dual-use research, and some add even naturally occurring pandemics to this issue-area as well (Koblentz, 2010). To address biological risks and threats, many governments started to develop new strategies for managing these issues (Bonin, 2007; Lentzos and Rose, 2009).

These changes have been compiled under the notion of biosecurity (Lakoff and Collier, 2008; Rappert and Gould, 2009). Biosecurity embodies a new approach to secure society against biological threats and risks, legitimizing a state of continuous bio-emergency (Braun, 2007). As such, biosecurity leads to not only new understanding of values and vulnerabilities in security politics but also new techniques of anticipatory governance (cf. Anderson, 2010), which justify the establishment of new preparedness policies and practices crossing the boundaries of disarmament, policing, public health, science governance, etc. (Caduff, 2012; Cooper, 2006; Dobson et al., 2013).

A relentless focus on technological innovation alone, however, can create as much harm as good. The kinds of innovations that are most needed today are as much in ourselves and our societies as they are in our inventive prowess. If we cannot work collectively to make a world that provides genuine forms of meaning, purpose, and decency for everyone—what I call a “good-enough world”—then our technological innovations will simply lead into the next major set of crises. In fact, we can achieve greater innovations simply by working together in a collaborative and ethical manner than if we continue on our current path of competitive greed.

Most contemporary pursuits of innovation aim to find the most talented people in the world and let them compete with each other to win the vast rewards that can come with their inventions. On the surface, this seems to make sense. Obviously to make progress we need talented people. And, we assume, those people need to be offered incentives in the form of great wealth and power. Otherwise, they would not work so hard or so quickly.

A year after Cadigan’s novel was published, disaster porn was thrust into a growing debate around humanitarian and military interventions and the role of aid agencies in developing countries. On December 10, 1992, a Los Angeles Times editorial entitled “Disaster Pornography from Somalia” and a London Independent article entitled “Somalia: White House ‘steamrolled’ into intervention” framed the terms of the debate over disaster pornography in a way that would resonate for most of the rest of the decade. The articles were written by Rakiya Omar and Alex de Waal, former members of the human rights organization Africa Watch, who quit over its support for U.S. intervention in Somalia. The LA Times piece accused Western journalists of exaggerating the Somali famine in order “to compose the ‘right’ image”—one that justified U.S. involvement. The next year, in the September 29, 1993 edition of The Times of London, de Waal again deployed this term to describe the dilemmas faced by reporters hoping to inspire humanitarian action, but leery of creating false impressions or exacerbating stereotypes. “This is the dilemma for sensitive journalists,” he wrote, “disaster pornography and reassuring archetypes are needed to make a disaster into front-page news; then the journalistic pack follows, and coverage degenerates.” In its first decade in print, then, disaster pornography was primarily employed as an epithet directed at depictions of extreme suffering in developing countries. Such depictions were identified as problematic because of their tendency to sensationalize and simplify complex geopolitical realities, and thereby encourage Western military adventurism under the guise of humanitarian action. However, this usage began to shift as the decade wore on and the Western world began to tire of such interventions. For instance, an April 11, 1999 Toronto Star article bemoaned the small number of television viewers tuning in to coverage of the war in Kosovo, and noted that, “We have all seen so much Disaster Porn, whether Somalian or Rwandan, Ethiopian or Biafran, that we’re almost numb to it.” Four months later, in a New York Times piece entitled “The Precarious Triumph of Human Rights,” journalist David Rieff argued that “Human solidarity is a real fact of the world, but so is compassion fatigue. You can no longer build a political consensus for action, assuming you ever could, by showing yet another clip of disaster pornography on television.” While still applied primarily to images of suffering people in famine-stricken or war-torn corners of the globe, the essential problem associated with disaster pornography had taken a 180-degree turn. No longer accused of over-hyping tragic circumstances and leading to public overreaction, disaster porn, by the end of the decade, had come to be seen as a force that muted public reaction to important issues, rather than enflaming them. Though sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton had identified a general “narcotizing dysfunction” of mass media as early as 1948, in which increased media coverage of a topic tended to paradoxically decrease the likelihood of public action, today these alleged sympathy-deadening effects extend to media coverage of specifically global problems. With the growth of 24-hour cable news coverage and the increasing scope and sophistication of global news broadcasting during the 1990s, critics began to worry that Americans and citizens of other Western nations had seen their emotional reserves drained by an increasing procession of televised war and disaster victims from across the globe. But this view was about to change. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 dramatically recast the problem of disaster pornography, expanding its definition and recalibrating American reactions to it. Fittingly for a world in which the influence of print news organizations had arguably already begun to decline, the website Slate led the way in this redefinition. In his column for Slate, film critic David Edelstein noted just three days after the attacks that Americans were renting movies and looking for escapist cinema, but avoiding any films having to do with disasters. Referencing the 1974 disaster epic The Towering Inferno, he suggested, “It will be a while, after footage of people fleeing clouds of lethal debris, before we surrender to disaster-porn like that again.” Similarly, a Time International article from October 1 of that year noted that “the purveyors of cinematic disaster porn [had begun] soul searching,” ultimately cancelling several big-budget action movies whose plots or visuals were too reminiscent of the 9/11 attacks. While the reasoning behind the culture industry’s sudden post -9/11 sensitivity are obvious, it appears to have been accompanied by a new public distrust or disdain for entertainments previously seen as harmless. Thus, one sees after September 11 the expansion of disaster porn terminology to encompass not just news reports of actual disasters, but the kinds of fictional disaster films that had been uncritically consumed for decades. Criticism of Hollywood blockbusters such as 2012, which was more frequently labeled disaster porn than anything else in a Lexis Nexis and Proquest search of newspaper articles using this term, has indeed become commonplace. But this shift in meaning remains puzzling, given that the term was initially rooted in concerns over real-life disaster news coverage and genuine human suffering, not fantastic computer-generated graphics with actors running around in front of green screens. We run the risk of ignoring the suffering of others and relieving our own anxieties about viewing their misfortunes. While not deploying the term itself, film critic Anthony Lane’s September 24, 2001 essay in The New Yorker exposes one motivation behind this extension of disaster porn’s domain. Making the case that people “literally saw, and are continuing to see, as it airs in unforgiving repeats—that day as a movie,” Lane asserted that “it was the television commentators as well as those on the ground who resorted to a phrase book culled from cinema: ‘It was like a movie.’ ‘It was like Independence Day.’ ‘It was like Die Hard.’ ‘No, Die Hard 2.’ ‘Armageddon.’ And the exclamations from below, from the watchers of the skies caught on video, as they see the aircraft slice into the side of the tower: where have you heard those expressions most recently—the wows, the whoohs, the holy shits—if not in movie theatres, and even on your own blaspheming tongue?” For Lane, such a heavily mediated understanding of suffering and tragedy—one gleaned from fictional, spectacular, and ultimately enjoyable representations of disaster and destruction—violated some emergent norm about the proper limits of spectatorship, or respect for the reality of human suffering. But this dimly understood norm was one we had, of course, all violated in a pre-September 11 world largely untroubled by consumption of the occasional big-budget disaster epic. It is worth remembering that after September 11, many Americans came to see themselves as victims of an attack perpetrated against the entire nation, or at least, as potential victims of future terrorist attacks. A September 25, 2001 Pew poll found that 53 percent of Americans were very or somewhat worried that they or someone in their family “might become a victim of a terrorist attack.” As Americans came to see themselves as victims, they engaged in a kind of retroactive condemnation of Hollywood disaster epics that had, it turned out, quite accurately anticipated the audio-visual qualities of jetliner crashes and skyscraper collapses amid a bustling metropolis. When they suddenly hit much closer to home, it was much more difficult to simply enjoy such spectacles.

“Why Does the United States Intervene Abroad? Democracy, Human Rights Violations, and Terrorism” [https://whanchoi.people.uic.edu/Why-Does-The-US-Intervene-Abroad.pdf]//saginator

While relatively frequent as a foreign policy tool implemented by the US government, military intervention is not easy to characterize in a straightforward manner. According to Peceny (1995, 371), ‘‘since 1998, U.S. presidents have consistently combined military intervention and democracy promotion despite the apparent contradictions involved in promoting self-determination through coercion or military victory through limitations on what allied states can do to win wars.’’ Put differently, the most powerful and active state appears Janus-faced, at least by reputation, because of its use of the military overseas to implement security policy: ‘‘The U.S. government’s professed goals—the promotion of human rights, democracy, and global peace—and the U.S. position as the largest exporter of conventional weaponry may be in conflict’’ (Blanton 2000, 124). The purpose of this study is to account for US military interventions through multivariate logit models that bring together and build upon insights from previous studies. To be specific, this study is the first to assess the relative importance of the following three major US foreign policy issues in the same empirical model: encroachment on democratic institutions, human rights violations, and terrorist activity. The US military ‘‘truly shines’’ with respect to global power projection (O’Hanlon 2003, 80), and thus, the capacity exists for Washington to act beyond a purely national interest and consider a wider range of criteria in its deployments. One point of view is that the United States is moving away from old notions related to containment of its former Soviet rival and toward ‘‘a more expansive notion of humanitarian intervention.’’ Military interventions in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, and Somalia received at least partial justification on humanitarian grounds and appeared consistent with the U.N.’s doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect. Even the ‘‘most optimistic’’ human rights advocate, of course, may not expect the United States to favor such concerns over its strategic interests (Apodaca and Stohl 1999, 187). At the same time, the United States seems to operate without ‘‘clear guidelines for when and how’’ to use force (Haass 1994, 13, 6). The resulting question then is where do US priorities lie?

Ideation and hegemony are also evident politically speaking. Economic neoliberalism’s political counterpart, democracy, is a parallel projection of global governance. Democracy is advanced, rightly or wrongly, as the means by which we may secure a less violent interstate system, as the institutional architecture in which to embed liberal economic practices; and as a panacea for producing peace in conflict and post-conflict environments (Paris 2004; Chesterman 2004; Sorensen 2oo6).Western states and international institutions coerce democratic development through lending conditionality, human rights bodies observe concordance with democratic practices concerning prison conditions, media freedom and judicial impartiality, and democratic standards like accountability and transparency are applied in Weberian fashion to audit, evaluate, reward and punish conformity and non-conformity with liberal values and practices. Even where the evidence shows that political liberalization fails to change elite behaviour, or fails to enhance everyday lives in any meaningful way, the idea of liberal democracy and the Liberal Peace enjoys institutional, productive and ideational hegemony and authority (Roberts 2008a; Richmond 2008). Global governance is biopolitical in this sense: it disciplines the international system into conforming to liberal political values, reaching into supposedly sovereign territory and, where conformity is absent, punishing a state and its people. Transiting states are audited for such conformity; there is no shortage of organizations in the West, public and private, that scrutinize the Other for conformity with global governance demands. Transparency International, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the World Bank — all act to check that particular liberal political and economic processes are being adhered to, with requisite punishments for nonconformity. The power of global governance is profoundly capillary in this sense; but it is focused primarily on top-down institutional transformation that anticipates trickle-down democracy. In practice, liberal peace is often a limited peace for a limited minority, since institutional democracy is not meaningful in any immediate sense for the majority of a ‘democratizing’ society because its top-down institutional metropolitan emphasis has very limited impact on urgent everyday needs in very poor societies, since immediate—to—medium-term needs are normally governed by and a product of access to socio-economic resources, rather than abstract political rights (Roberts 2oo8c5 Mac Ginty 2008). Thus, both political and economic liberalism are advanced as means to ends as well as ends in themselves. Gill calls this the ‘new constitutionalism’, which is ‘the political project of attempting to make transnational Liberalism, and if possible liberal democratic capitalism, the sole model for future development’ (1995: 412), in a discourse that parallels Tom Young’s consideration of the ‘Liberal Project’ as a means of assimilating the non—liberal Other into ‘Westernity’ (I004). The means by which they are propelled are the institutions and productive values of global governance with the explicit intention of disciplining and assimilating the non-liberal Other. Global governance, then, can be understood as the ideationally hegemonic biopolitical process by which neoliberalism disciplines and punishes polities, economies and societies globally through asymmetrically orientated public and private international institutions.

Pinker’s establishment ideology kicks-in very clearly in his comparative treatment of communism, on the one hand, and democracy and capitalism, on the other. He is explicit that whereas communism is a “utopian” and dangerous “ideology” from which most of the world’s serious violence allegedly flowed during the past century, democracy, capitalism, “markets,” “gentle commerce,” and the like, are all tied to liberalism—or more exactly to “classical liberalism.”[133] These institutional forms are not the result of ideologies, much less utopian and dangerous; they are the historically more advanced permutations of the Leviathan that help to elicit those components of the neurobiology of peaceableness (or “better angels” as opposed to “inner demons”) for which the human brain has been naturally selected over evolutionary time. Hence, they are sources of the alleged decline in violence, and their spread is a force for positive and more peaceful change in the world.[134]¶ Not so communism. At the outset of Chapter 6, “The New Peace,” Pinker approvingly quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s line that, unlike the communists, “Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses [b]ecause they had no ideology” driving them. (295) In discussing the alleged mental traits of the members of a society mobilized to commit genocide, he argues that “Utopian creeds that submerge individuals into moralized categories may take root in powerful regimes and engage their full destructive might,” and highlights “Marxism during the purges, expulsions, and terror-famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia.” (328) In his 2002 book, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, he devoted several pages to what he called the “Marxist genocides of the twentieth century,” and noted that “Historians are currently debating whether the Communists’ mass-executions, forced marches, slave labor, and man-made famines led to one hundred million deaths or ‘only’ twenty-five million.”[135] And in the section of the current book titled “The Trajectory of Genocide,” Pinker cites the authority of the “democratic peace” theorist and “atrocitologist” Rudolph Rummel, who in his 1994 book Death By Government wrote that whereas “totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions[,]…many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute serial murderers.”[136] (357)¶ As we have seen, Pinker rewrites history to accommodate this familiar establishment perspective, so that the Cold War was rooted in communist expansionism and U.S. efforts at containment, and the several million deaths in the Korean and Vietnam wars were attributable to the communists’ fanatical unwillingness to surrender to superior force, not to anti-communist and racist attitudes that facilitated the U.S. military’s mass killings of distant peoples. He deals with U.S. state-capitalism’s support and sponsorship of the corrupt open-door dictatorships of Suharto, Marcos, Mobutu, Pinochet, Diem, the Greek Colonels, and the National Security States of Latin America (among many others), and the “burgeoning” of torture following the end of the Cold War, by eye aversion. ¶ In Pinker’s view, the Third World’s troubled areas are suffering from their failure to absorb the civilizing lessons modeled for them in the United States and other advanced countries. He ignores the eight-decades-long massive U.S. investment in the military and ideological training, political takeovers, and subsequent support of Third World dictators in numerous U.S. client terror states, including Guatemala, transformed from a democracy to terror state in 1954, Brazil, shifted from a democracy to military dictatorship in 1964, the Philippines in 1972, and Chile the same in 1973, among many others. A tabulation by one of the present authors in 1979 found that 26 of the 35 states in that era that used torture on an administrative basis were U.S. clients, all of them recipients of U.S. military and economic aid.[137] These clients were capitalist in structure, but threatened and employed force to keep the lower orders disorganized and more serviceable to the local elites and transnational corporations investing there. One Latin American Church document of that period spoke of the local U.S.-supported regimes as imposing an economic model so repressive that it “provoked a revolution that did not exist.”[138] This was a deliberate “decivilizing” process, with the civilized serving as co-managers.¶ We have seen that Pinker finds the modern era peaceful by focusing on the absence of war between the major powers, downplaying the many murderous wars carried out by the West (and mainly the United States) against small countries, and falsely suggesting that the lesser-country conflicts are home-grown, even where, as in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was U.S. military assaults that precipitated the internal armed conflicts, with the United States then actively participating in them. The Israeli occupation and multi-decade ethnic cleansing of Palestine he misrepresents as a “cycle of deadly revenge,” with only Israel fighting against “terrorism” in this cycle. He speaks of Islamic and communist ideology as displaying violent tendencies, and congratulates the U.S. military for allegedly overcoming the kind of racist attitudes reported at the time of the Vietnam war (U.S. soldiers referring to Vietnamese as “gooks,” slopes,” and the like)—but the military’s new humanism is another piece of Pinker misinformation and pro-war propaganda. And he fails to cite the numerous instances of Israeli leaders referring to Palestinians as “grasshoppers,” “beasts walking on two legs,” “crocodiles,” “insects,” and a “cancer,” or Israeli rabbis decrying them as the “Amalekites” of the present era, calling for extermination of these unchosen people.[139]¶ As regards Israel, Pinker never mentions the Israeli belief in a “promised land” and “chosen people” who may be fulfilling God’s will in dispossessing Palestinians.[140] Although the lack of angelic behavior in these assaults and this language, ethnic cleansing, and dispossession process is dramatic, and has had important effects on the attitudes and behavior of Islamic peoples, it fails to fit Pinker’s ideological system and political agenda, and therefore is not a case of conflict with ideological roots. ¶ For Pinker, there is also nothing ideological in the “miracle of the market” (Reagan), no “stark utopia” in Friedrich von Hayek’s assertion that the “particulars of a spontaneous order cannot be just or unjust,”[141] no ideology in the faith that an unconstrained free market will not produce intolerable inequalities and majority resistance that in turn require the likes of Pinochet, Suharto, or Hitler to reassert the requisite “stability.” It is simply outside of Pinker’s orbit of thought that liberalism and neoliberalism in the post-Soviet world are ideologies that have serviced an elite in a class war; that the major struggles and crises that we have witnessed, over climate change, the massive upward redistribution of income and wealth, the global surge of disposable workers, and the enlargement of NATO and the police-and-surveillance state, are features of a revitalized consolidation of class power, under more angelic names like “reform,” “free markets,” “flexibility,” “stability,” and “fiscal discipline.” For Pinker, the huge growth of the prison population shows the lack of “self-control” of the incarcerated savages still with us; and it is one merit of the liberal state that it gets the bad guys off the streets. ¶ Another device that Pinker uses when weighing capitalism versus communism is to take notorious state abuses committed in the name of communism (e.g., under Joseph Stalin), not as perversions of communism, but as inherent in its ideology, and flowing directly from it. Many historians and leftists have long argued that Stalinism constituted a radical betrayal and perversion of genuine communism, and that it emerged out of crises and stresses that made anything approaching genuine communism unreachable.[142] Pinker never addresses this kind of explanation and exemption of real-world communism, but he does this implicitly for real-world degenerate forms of capitalism. Thus, Nazi Germany and its mass murders are not credited to capitalism’s account, even though Germany under the Nazis was still capitalist in economic form and surely a variant of capitalism arising under stress and threat from below, with important business support.[143] Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile could be said to fit this same pattern. Rightwing believers in the crucial importance of free markets, such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, approved of Pinochet’s rule, which ended political freedom and freedom of thought, but worked undeviatingly for corporate interests and rights. But it took only one decade of the Chicago Boys’ privatizations and other “reforms” for Chile’s economy and financial system to collapse. In the harsh depression that ensued, the banks were re-nationalized and their foreign creditors bailed-out in a process sometimes called the “Chicago Road to Socialism,” but then shortly thereafter they were re-privatized all over again, at bargain-basement prices.[144] (Pinochet does not show up in Pinker’s index; Chile does, but never as a free market state loved by von Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago School of Economics, and supported by the United States.)¶ In one of his book’s more outlandish moments, Pinker even allocates Nazism and the holocaust to communism. He writes that since “Hitler read Marx in 1913,” Marxism led definitively if “more circuitously” to the “[dekamegamurders] committed by the Nazi regime in Germany.”[145] (343) But while there is no evidence that Hitler really examined Marx or accepted any of his or his fellow Marxist writers’ ideas,[146] it is incontestable fact that Hitler held Marxism in contempt, and that communism and communists ranked very high among Hitler’s and the Nazi’s demons and targets (along with Jews) when they held power in Germany.[147] So is the fact that racist theories and “mismeasure of man” literature in the Houston Stewart Chamberlain tradition—of which Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray arguably are heirs—were fanatically embraced by Hitler, and therefore linked to Nazism—and not very “circuitously,” either. ¶ Pinker not only doesn’t credit the Nazi holocaust to capitalism, he also fails to give capitalism credit for the extermination of the Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere and the huge death tolls from the Slave Trades,[148] which should have been prevented by the rising “better angels.” As noted, he also ignores democratic capitalism’s responsibility for the surge of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, the associated holocausts,[149] and the death-dealing and exploitation of the Western-sponsored terror states in Indonesia, the Philippines, Latin America and elsewhere. He also fails to address the huge toll of structural violence under capitalism flowing from its domestic and global dispossession processes, and, interestingly, intensifying with the post-1979 transformation of China and the breakup of the Soviet bloc and Soviet Union (1989-1991), which reduced any need on the part of Western capitalism to show concern for the well-being of its own working class majority. This helps explain the significant global increases in inequality and dispossession and slum-city enlargement over the past two decades, a period that Pinker calls the “New Peace” and depicts as an age of accelerating “Civilization”!¶ Pinker refers to the deaths during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) as a “Mao masterminded…famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people.”[150] (331) For Pinker, clearly, the dead were victims of a deliberate policy that demonstrates the evil behind communist ideology. But as the development economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have pointed out, China under Mao installed a massive and effective system of public medical services, as well as literacy and nutrition programs that greatly benefitted the general population in the years prior to the famine—a fact that is difficult to reconcile with the allegation that Mao regarded mass starvation as an acceptable means to some other end. Instead, Drèze and Sen blamed this tragedy on the lack of democracy in China, with the absence of pressure from below and a lack of timely knowledge of policy failure significantly offsetting the life-saving benefits of communist China’s medical and other social welfare programs.[151] ¶ Drèze and Sen also compared the number of deaths caused by this famine under Mao with the number of deaths caused by what they called the “endemic undernutrition and deprivation” that afflicts India’s population year-in and year-out. “Estimates of extra mortality [from China’s famine] vary from 16.5 million to 29.5 million,” they wrote, “arguably the largest in terms of total excess mortality in recorded history.”[152] But “despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine,” they continued, the “extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India’s death rate of 12 per thousand with China’s 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to India’s population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine….India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of famine.”[153] Indeed, by 2005, some 46 percent (or 31 million) of India’s children were underweight, and 79 percent suffered anemia. “Forty years of efforts to raise how much food-grains Indians are able to eat has been destroyed by a mere dozen years of economic reform,” Jawaharal Nehru University economist Utsa Patnaik observes.[154]

Exporting wars, launching "color revolutions," fomenting extremist ideologies, and promoting economic instability...the US has left countless trails of bloodshed and turmoil around the world. While the "model of democracy" loses its shine, the US still attempts to establish exclusive cliques through the so-called democracy summit. To expose the nature of "American democracy," the Global Times is publishing a series of stories to unveil the US' four democratic hegemony sins. This is the first piece.

"War is the American way of life," said US historian Paul Atwood, noting that the US was born, grew, and became a superpower out of war, slavery, and human slaughter.

Xi Jinping’s announcement of three global initiatives since 2021 has sparked considerable debate about Beijing’s articulation of the international order. However, much of the analysis and commentary surrounding these initiatives have focused on the degree to which they illustrate China’s revisionism. As a result, they fall short in three regards.

First, the status quo-revisionist binary is inherently flawed as a means of assessing state intentions. This is particularly important when the United States, the assumed status quo power and architect of the existing order, has often taken actions that are revisionist.

Once we acknowledge that academic concepts and analyses can have constitutive effects, we need to analyze their performative role. This means addressing the “double hermeneutic”—the way “‘findings’ of the social sciences very often enter constitutively into the world they describe” (Giddens 1987, 20)—and reflecting on what our interpretations might “do” (Guzzini 2007, 23). It is not necessary to accept social constructivism to recognize that the practice of social science is interlinked with power relations outside of academia. Far from scholarly navel-gazing, a reflexive attitude is arguably a necessary ingredient of any rigorous social science practice (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992).¶ Hence, since the power-shift discourse is not simply a descriptive account of an independent reality but is destined to be constitutive of that reality, it is essential to explore its power. Thomas Diez (2005) makes a similar investigation into the power of the concept of “normative power Europe” (NPE). He finds that NPE constructs a benevolent and peaceful identity for Europe, but also that its alleged peacefulness is contrasted with and therefore dependent on an idea of what Europe is not—an outside consisting of “challenging threats” (2005, 636). The double hermeneutic twist is that the coining of the originally academic NPE concept has become an important instance of Europe’s “normative power.”¶ Diez (2013), however, seems to take for granted the distinction between post-Westphalian normative powers, which engage in a struggle over the definition of “normality” in world politics, and Westphalian great powers, which engage in war, empire building, and physical conquest. “Great powers,” however, are also the products of normative, discursive pressures, and they reproduce ideas of what is “normal” great-power behavior. Much of the power-shift discourse reproduces the same familiar self/ other dichotomy as the NPE literature. Here, the other is a rising and potentially threatening China, while the self is a weak but inherently righteous United States/West/Japan.¶ Pan argues that the “China threat discourse” is “always intrinsically linked to how US policymakers/mainstream China specialists see themselves (as representatives of the indispensable, security-conscious nation, for example)” (2004, 306). Hagström demonstrates how the discourse on Japan’s “abnormality” and “weakness” reproduces a standard of “normality” in world politics that is centered on the ability to go to war. Postwar Japan is socially constructed as deviant from this norm and thus as a threat to itself. This discourse, which emerges in both Japanese and Western academia and in Japanese political debate, legitimizes a road map for a more “realistic,” “active,” “responsible,” and “normal” Japan (Hagström 2014).¶ The power of the power-shift discourse does not stop at the production of identities and standards. The point is that identities and standards produce effects. Pan illustrates this by showing how the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1995–1996 was often understood as “further objective proof of the long-suspected ‘China threat,’” but few acknowledged that “the ‘China threat’ discourse itself had played a constitutive role in the lead-up to that crisis” (2004, 323, 320). Moreover, standards in Japan’s “normalization” discourse have enabled Realpolitik changes in its foreign security policy. Chinese vigilance vis-à-vis Japan and the United States might also be interpreted as discursive phenomena—the theme of national reinvigoration is a product of the lingering notion that China has been continually humiliated and victimized by the great powers since the nineteenth century. As these examples illustrate, the ultimate power of discourse is the production of self-fulfilling prophecies. When self-fulfilling prophecies occur on both sides of a dyad, we might end up with a socially generated security dilemma (Johnston 2004).¶ Much research has warned of self-fulfilling prophecies in the East Asian context. Some observers suggest that US or Japanese discourses about China might produce policies of containment, Japanese “normalization” and “remilitarization,” and US “rebalancing” toward East Asia (Pan 2004; 2012; Hagström 2012; Turner 2014a; 2014b). Nonetheless, Japan and the United States have not yet embarked on containing China. Instead, both countries have on the whole accommodated China’s rise (Christensen 2006; Jerdén and Hagström 2012). In a similar manner, perceived increases in bellicose or nationalistic representations in Chinese discourses led some observers to jump to the mistaken conclusion that this had already resulted in a more assertive Chinese foreign policy (Jerdén 2014). As important as it is to remain vigilant against the emergence of socially constructed security dilemmas, we need to bear in mind that there is no deterministic connection between discourse and policy—just an enabling one. Dominant discourses create propensities for action but do not make any action inevitable. More empirically informed theorizing is needed to address the questions of how, when, and why discourses make some actions politically conceivable, easy to communicate, and sometimes even coercive (Holland 2013).¶ Reflecting on the possible power exercised through the alternative approaches introduced in this special issue is also necessary. In this article we raise analytical and normative concerns about the ideas of a more “powerful” and “threatening” China, a “weak” Japan, and a “declining” United States. We argue that such representations risk offsetting balancing policies and a security dilemma in East Asia, in line with the self-fulfilling prophecy logic discussed above. These arguments clearly belong to another site of discursive power production. That we have not seen any obvious balancing policies in East Asia thus far might arguably be interpreted as one of its effects.

Until recently, many dismissed the view that the United States and China could go to war as outlandish. Many people pointed to the fact that the two countries maintain robust economic ties. Others contended that China would never be powerful enough to truly challenge America’s primacy. Still others argued that a great power war is simply unimaginable in the modern era of globalization. I never subscribed to this view point. While not completely without merit, the arguments put forward to dismiss the possibility of a war are not overly persuasive. For instance, while it is true that China and the United States have a strong economic relationship, Germany and Britain were each other's largest trading partners before World War I. Similarly, even if China grows old before it grows rich, that doesn’t mean it can’t challenge America militarily. In the run-up to both world wars, Germany was poorer than Great Britain (and roughly equal to France) yet it nearly conquered Europe on two separate occasions. This was in large part because Germany had a larger population than Britain and France, which translated into a larger economy. China has a population four times the size of the United States today, meaning its GDP can be twice the size of America’s even if it’s citizens are half as rich. And the idea that the human race has outgrown great power war was famously in vogue in the years prior to World War I for nearly identical reasons as one hears today. In recent years, many observers have woken up to the fact that a war between the United States and China is not unthinkable. Although this is true, there are still strong pacifying forces. Two factors strike me as the most important. The first, and most obvious one, is that both sides maintain secure nuclear arsenals. As Thomas Schelling and others have pointed out, nuclear weapons are not a game-changer simply because of their massive destructive capabilities. The speed and certainty of nuclear retaliation is just as important. These two characteristics simply aren’t present with conventional weapons. Leaders can delude themselves into thinking their conventional forces, however improbably, will end up victorious in battle. In any case, the consequences of being wrong are far in the future. For instance, Imperial Japanese leaders knew it was a tremendous gamble to take on the United States. Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese admiral who planned Pearl Harbor, warned his civilian leadership beforehand: “In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.” After the American economic embargo, however, Japanese leaders were only faced with bad options: capitulating in the face of American pressure or fighting a more powerful enemy in a likely futile effort. In these circumstances, Tokyo decided to gamble. After all, it was conceivable that America would be so exhausted from fighting Nazi Germany in Europe that it would ultimately sue for peace in Asia, especially in the face of fierce Japanese resistance. While the outcome of conventional wars hinges on a number of unknowable factors, nuclear retaliation is certain. And, unlike with conventional weapons—especially before airplanes and missiles—one doesn’t have to defeat the other side’s military to wreak havoc on its cities. Nuclear weapons can do so immediately. Moreover, as Robert Jervis points out, when two countries with secure, thermonuclear arsenals go to war, “the side that is ‘losing’ the war as judged by various measures of military capability can inflict as much destruction on the side that is ‘winning’ as the ‘winner’ can on the ‘loser.’” This changes the calculation of leaders, and makes it inconceivable that rational leaders would opt for total war. This is not foolproof of course— there is still the possibility that miscalculations, gradual escalation, or the “threats that leave something to chance” will produce an outcome neither side wanted— but it is a strong incentive for peace. While it is widely recognized that nuclear weapons make a U.S.-China conflict less likely, the pacifying effect of geography is often overlooked. Geography works to attenuate tensions in two interrelated ways. First, both China and the United States are massive countries that would be extremely difficult to conquer and occupy. Second, both are separated by the largest ocean on earth, and it is extremely difficult to project power over large bodies of water. As John Mearsheimer has written: “When great powers are separated by large bodies of water, they usually do not have much offensive capability against each other, regardless of the relative size of their armies. Large bodies of water are formidable obstacles that cause significant power-projection problems for attacking armies.” These two geographical factors reduce the intensity of the so-called security dilemma. Despite all their disputes over issues like Taiwan and the East and South China Seas, China and the United States generally do not have to fear that the other side will seek to invade and conquer them. This has usually not been the case for rising and ruling powers that went to war. In many of these instances, the rivals were located on the same continent or even shared a border, which generated significant insecurity and led to conflict. As Mearsheimer again explains, “Great powers located on the same landmass are in a much better position to attack and conquer each other. That is especially true of states that share a common border. Therefore, great powers separated by water are likely to fear each other less than great powers that can get at each other over land.” Just like nuclear weapons, these geographical factors are not an absolute guarantee against conflict. Japan and the United States went to war despite being separated by the Pacific Ocean, and so did Spain and the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Still, China and America’s large land size and separation are both conducive to peace, and—combined with nuclear weapons—provide hope that they can avoid conflict.