Making Threats

Making Threats is designed to make students, scholars, activists and policymakers think critically about how environmental and biological fears are implicated in the construction of threats to local, national and global security. Writing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, the authors contribute to scholarship on environment and security that engages with some of the more potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

Today we live in times of proliferating fears. The daily updates on the ongoing 'war on terror' amplify fear and anxiety as if they were necessary and important aspects of our reality. Concerns about the environment increasingly take center-stage, as stories and images abound about deadly viruses, alien species invasions, scarcity of oil, water, food; safety of GMOs, biological weapons, and fears of overpopulation. Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties addresses how such environmental and biological fears are used to manufacture threats to individual, national, and global security. Contributors from environmental studies, political science, international security, biology, sociology and anthropology discuss what they share in common: the view that fears should be critically examined to avoid unnecessary alarm and scapegoating of people and nations as the 'enemy Other'. In these highly original and thought-provoking essays, Making Threats focuses on five themes: security, scarcity, purity, circulation and terror. No other book has systematically examined the proliferation of fear in the context of current world events and from such a multidisciplinary perspective. It consolidates in one place cutting edge research and reflection on how the contemporary landscape of fear shapes and is shaped by environmental and biological discourses. By uncovering the linguistic tools that make fear resonate in the public consciousness, by identifying the interests that create or are sustained by fears, in short by giving fears histories, Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties engages with some of the most potent and disturbing political and cultural aspects of the contemporary scene.

Chapter 1 Wild in the Streets: The Political Economy of Threats and the Production of Fear
Chapter 2 Making Civilian-Soldiers: The Militarization of Inner Space
Chapter 3 Reflections: Consuming National Security
Chapter 4 Malthusianism and the Terror of Scarcity
Chapter 5 Reflections: Scarcity, Modernity, Terror
Chapter 6 De-coding the Debate on Frankenfood
Chapter 7 The Aliens Have Landed: Reflections on Biological Invasions
Chapter 8 Reflections: (Im)Pure Biology: Deadly Synergy of Racialization and Geneticization
Chapter 9 Emerging Cartographies of Environmental Danger: Africa, Ebola, and AIDS
Chapter 10 Reflections: Feeling Invasion
Chapter 11 Embedded Terrorism: Political Determinants of Bioterrorism and Global Epidemic
Chapter 12 Pernicious Peasants and Angry Young Men: The Strategic Demography of Threats
Chapter 13 Reflections: Bioterrorism and National Security: Peripheral Threats, Core Vulnerabilites