Description
When critical security studies scholars engage with questions of risk management in international politics, most focus on the post-Cold War era and the challenges posed by terrorism, migration, international finance, and environmental degradation. Their contributions add value, but give the misleading impression that risk is the ‘new security’, i.e. that policymakers only started thinking in terms of risk after the USSR collapsed. I suggest that CSS scholarship tends to conflate the discovery of risk as a useful category of analysis with its novelty as a category of practice, and therefore misreads history in the same way as mainstream security studies theorists, who claim that the ‘traditional’ focus of national security has been mitigating threatening actors. Through a close reading of key policy documents of the postwar era, I show how America's leaders came to regard the world as a single entity facing an array of social, economic, and biospheric risks which required management. Risk management was an approach that was distinct from meeting the threat posed by the Soviet Union and its allies, and just as fundamental to conceptions of national security during the early Cold War. I illustrate this argument using the example of the Kennedy Administration's Alliance for Progress.
