From Beck to Baudrillard: Risk, war, terror and the ungovernable

George W. Bush's declaration of pre-emptive, risk-preventative war, first in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and subsequently in Iraq less than a year later, marks a decisive shift in the language that authorizes war in contemporary Western culture. Where risk-taking was once considered a necessary element of war waged for the sake of the greater good, wars today are being presented predominantly as a means of preemptively eliminating the risk of terrorism. Where work has emerged to address the commingling of attitudes toward risk-prevention and war, it has tended to adopt one of two conventional understandings of risk while under-theorizing 'terrorism'. The realist position, found to different degrees in both the official policy of the US government and in Ulrich Beck's work on the theory of 'risk society', treats risk as a recognizable failing of the social and/or technological systems which are meant to secure against damage or loss. Accordingly, the terrorism-risk is considered to be manageable through the concentrated modulation of causal factors believed to facilitate the reproduction of future terrorism. Constructivist approaches, typified by the work of Mary Douglas and those working from Michel Foucault's late work on 'govern mentality', view risk strictly as a cultural or discursive tool invested with power and/or prestige for the purpose of problematizing action and giving cause for the imposition and/or maintenance of an established order. Proponents of each position intuit the impossibility of absolute control over risk. However, none sufficiently addresses how terrorism is an active and intuitive form of resistance that mobilizes risk in order to affect a change in consciousness capable of bringing about reversion of a dominant geo-political order. To open up a space for discussing an objective, albeit discursively overcoded, force of resistance that operates through the mobilization of risk, I will turn to Jean Baudrillard's work on terrorism. While largely unconcerned with risk, Baudrillard presents terrorism as an object simulated in culture for the purpose of state control which, nevertheless, maintains the capacity to exceed its definition through acts of symbolic exchange. With terrorism, actors assume the status of objective other only to exceed their objective definition; they become more risky than risk not for the purpose of imposing a governmental order but in a form that appears ambivalent with respect to the predominant rationalities of control they seek to upset. Taking Baudrillard's position on terrorism as a paradigm of ungovernable risk, we are given cause not only to begin to think of a pre-emptive, risk-preventative war as a course of management that gives form to its own specific reversal of power, but we are also led to question the assumptions about manageability.;Keywords. Risk, Terrorism, War on Terror, Ungovernable Risk, Ulrich Beck, Mary Douglas, Governmentality, Jean Baudrillard.