Blackwell Reference Online

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Comment on this article   The international political sociology (IPS) of risk is generally concerned with understanding the governance of uncertainty. As economists Bodie and Merton (1999) have classically described it, risk is uncertainty that matters. Risk is a rationality of governing the uncertain that affects the ways in which individuals and collectivities live, organize themselves, and exercise power. However, there is no single rationality of risk, and, as illustrated in this essay, rationalities of risk change as a function of the knowledge that informs them. A major concern of the IPS of risk is the ways in which uncertainty has become a central problem for governance. The ways in which risks are assessed and managed are taken as problematic spaces from which to question the roles of states, societies, economic actors, and individuals in coping with uncertainty. International Relations (IR) as a discipline has slowly begun to incorporate theoretical developments in risk theory arising from sociology, economics, and anthropology. This is a recent development that begins mainly with the end of the Cold War, although there are traces of risk theory having been applied to security analysis prior to this period. This essay contextualizes the introduction of risk as a problem for analysis within IR and explores three main approaches: the risk society thesis, the governmentality ... log in or subscribe to read full text