Catastrophic descriptions of a bioterror threat justify violent management of life at the population level, along with a continuous state of bio-emergency

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).

The attempts to develop new governmental techniques to address bio-insecurities can also be observed in the biological weapons regime, with an effect on science–security relations. Similarly to the chemical weapons regime, biological disarmament is thought of as facing the challenge of “global shifts in the nature and mode of organized violence and conflicts, and incremental and interlinked changes in science and technology” (Ilchmann and Revill, 2014: 754). These challenges have been recognized at the BWC especially after 2002, when new ways to approach biological disarmament started to be sought.5 Scholars point out several dimensions of this development in this regard.

On-the-one-hand, linking bioweapons with terrorism and other nontraditional forms of political violence caused changing understandings of the referent object threatened by bioweapons. Not militaries, but whole populations are perceived as the risk group to be protected. As a result, the preparedness for biological risks started to be linked more with the governance of public health—both in national and international contexts (Kelle, 2007).6 On-the-other-hand, what came to be seen as a key concern for the BWC has been the pace of techno-scientific progress in life sciences and the convergence of life sciences with chemistry, engineering, and other academic fields. Because biowarfare programs of the 20th century were established in close conjunction with broader scientific developments, the capacity of disarmament practices to keep up with the rapid advances in life sciences is seen as crucial for the success of the regime (Dando, 1999). Scholars and practitioners alike in this regard point out especially the increasing scope of facilities, equipment, agents, and knowledge that have socalled dual-use and may be thus used in legitimate research and development and for causing harm (Atlas and Dando, 2006; Buchanan and Kelley, 2013; Revill and Jefferson, 2013; Tucker, 2012). Given the apparent accessibility of biological materials and technologies, the rising power of science and technology is seen as increasing the opportunities of state and nonstate actors to obtain bioweapons and enhance their lethality (Atlas and Dando, 2006; Chyba and Greninger, 2004; McLeish and Nightingale, 2007; Tucker and Zilinskas, 2006).