Worst-Case Scenario?: Governance, Mediation and the Security Regime
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About this ebook
Using a wide range of official sources and case studies, from 9/11 to the Stockwell shooting, Price analyses the paramilitary, political, economic and cultural manoeuvres of the security regime as it attempts to reproduce a 'command structure' within civil society.
In doing so, he demonstrates that, unlike the openly totalitarian states of the past, bureaucratic rule is favoured over charismatic leadership, and the ostentatious display of coercive authority is characterised as a temporary measure. It is, he argues, a process that must be recognised and resisted.
Doctor Stuart Price
Stuart Price is reader in media discourse and principal lecturer in media, film and journalism at De Montfort University, UK. He is the author of 'Brute Reality' (2010), 'Discourse Power Address' (2007), and a number of other books on media and communication theory. His research encompasses studies of politics, rhetoric, cultural formations in antiquity, film and adaptation, and configurations of state power. He produced one of the few academic analyses of the Stockwell shooting, for Boehmer and Morton's 'Terror and the Postcolonial' (2010), and is particularly interested in the development of the Western 'security regime'.
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Reviews for Worst-Case Scenario?
5 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stuart Price discusses the practice at the center of security planning - the projection of the worst-case scenario. Security issues are now implanted in such a manner as to prevent the worst possible attack/incident/crime regardless of the likelihood of it occurring. Price argues that this process must be recognized and resisted. As mentioned in other eviews, Price makes his argument somewhat more complicated then it needs to be due to his writing style.The modern security state is not necessarily your friend.I received this book as a part of the LT Early Reader program.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Price maintains that ". . . the practice of scenario planning extends the culture of an essentially authoritarian form of governance into public and commercial structures. . . " (p.6) The security regime is largely independent of democratic control; ". . . emergency planning represents the creation of an auxiliary system of semi-privatized hierarchial authority . . ." (p.8) The "supposedly extraordinary practices" rehearsed in drills for a "worst case" terrorist event '"infiltrate the ordinary legal system, becoming regularized as a [recognized] techinque of government.'" (p.21) And government, it goes without saying, is the tool of a class that exploits its own people as well as those overseas. In all, this is not entirely without plausibility. "Fledgist" succinctly describes the book (see review below) as "a Marxist take on the Foucauldian argument"; but contrary to "Fledgist", I maintain that it is NOT well done. Price uses far too much abstract and abstruse communications theory. Much of the text is little more than lengthy, wordy, explicit and far too detailed theorizing about interactions between those in power and the public that intelligent and skeptical people are likely to have intuited long ago. The worst parts sound rather like English but have little readily discernable meaning or relevance to the central argument. Why so many pages devoted to defining an "event"? More concrete examples describing in detail actions to which the author objects would be in order. The British used to be known for their empiricism. On the other hand, some highly motivated Americans will find the book of interest if for no other reason than that so little of this kind of leftist argument seeps into the mainstream of contemporary American cultural and intellectual life.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An examination of how security forces and agencies in the Western world have used 'worst-case scenarios' to justify increased use of coercion and increased imposition of greater authority. In essence, this is a Marxist take on the Foucauldian argument, and very well done. Price is contending that bureaucracies are pushing democracy aside and using alleged external threats to suppress internal dissent.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book looks at the current reactions to international terrorism from economic, cultural and political viewpoints, investigating how these events are portrayed through political systems and the media. One for people versed in cultural studies / media studies, as the register used is quite academic and technical.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Stuart Price’s Worst-case Scenario? attempts to examine the use of security drills, “worse-case scenarios”, and how government and hybrid public/private institutions use them for more than just practicing emergency response. The book reads like a graduate school school textbook with tangled sentences full of polysyllabic words. Normally I would wait to the end of a review to mention this, after all sometimes polysyllabic words are all that is available with the precise definition needed for an argument. Life is not simple and complicated sentences are sometimes necessary to explain it. The reading in Price’s book is difficult but his reasoning does, after some effort on the reader’s part, go from point A to point B. The problem is that Dr. Prices destination is not worth the effort.The revelation that government agencies tend to perpetrate themselves is no revelation. The fact that emergency drills are less about real threats and more about practicing obedience was fairly obvious after a few ridicules scenarios involving non-targets such as rural shopping centers. The idea that fear is not a permanent method of control would have been news in 2004, it would have been a fresh idea in 2006 but by 2011 it is old news. It was unnecessary for Price to spend such an effort in defining the differences between “regime” and “regimen”. While I understand as well as anybody the need to properly define the terms used in an argument sometimes a dictionary is all that is needed. Sometimes not even that. The unofficial rational and perceived benefits of “worst case” security drills could make for an interesting discussion. There are some interesting bits in Price’s book, but they are far to few. The fact is that even with revisions that would knock a few hundred Lexile points off of the book, and in the process make his points much clearer, it would still not be worth the time to read it. On the next to the last page (Isn’t that much easier to process than ‘on the penultimate page’?) Price writes “The problem is not so much that individuals enter into social relations through the dominance of unitary spectacle, but rather that they are trained to know their place in a ‘free’ society. It is not the promotion of the worst-case scenario in particular...but in the general attempt to keep the population in a condition of dependent stasis which helps to thwart the development of social equality and the onset of rational economic planning - simple goals that are rapidly assuming the appearance of revolutionary demands.” Sentences that demonstrate the books problem and it’s failed possibility. A book that examined those ideas would have been an interesting read.