Death and security: a forum

Abstract

In this forum, three scholars of resilience, biopolitics and memory come together to discuss themes raised in Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite (Heath-Kelly 2016 Heath-Kelly, C. 2016. Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite. Manchester: Manchester University Press. The book is a comparative study of the reconstruction and memorialisation of four bombsites in Europe, the US and Indonesia (the Norwegian case study involves both a bombsite and a shooting massacre). While disaster recovery is treated as a common-sense process within contemporary security policy in the US and UK, the book complicates this assumption. It asks how security policies identify threat as emanating from past events and bombsites, such that recovery procedures and memorialisation are now written into the security responsibilities of governments and responders. The retrospective construction of threat does not follow the same logics of anticipatory risk assessment or contingency planning. As such the book enquires into the management of destructive spectacles and their effacement. It explores disaster recovery and memorialisation as practices which attempt to efface mortality and to undo the disruption posed to political sovereignty by visceral scenes of destruction. Mortality is figured as an aporia within biopolitical sovereignty, and memorialisation at post-terrorist sites is the ritualised attempt to reconstitute that sovereignty.