Contagious insecurity: war, SARS and global air mobility

Abstract

Neglect of the cross-cutting confluences between different domains of security can lead to insular notions of global security as well as to lost opportunities for security sensitive contributions to the adjoining issue areas. This article attempts to overview the patterns of interactions during three security scenarios of early 2003: wars, as, for example, the War against Terror and the war in Iraq; pandemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS); and air mobility. The overview approach is meant to draw attention to the synoptic interplay between global security scenarios that go beyond the usual disciplinary and conceptual boundaries separating security studies, global health and mobility infrastructures. How does the context of war amplify other security concerns? What were the synoptic interactions within temporally situated ‘bundles’ of security-related concerns? How did global air mobility politics and pandemic politics construct their combined security problematiques? The main research findings point to the relatively unique yet momentary qualities of the emergent nexus of security scenarios. This sheds light on the difficulties of managing pandemic diseases as purely epidemiological processes, on the complexities of securing global air mobility networks, and on how tense situations are prone to lead to speculative projections as people's fears find different somatic, material and political manifestations. The primary material for the textual analysis is provided by World Health Organization's SARS chronology.