The Politics of Uncertainty

"Why is uncertainty so important to politics today? To explore the underlying reasons, issues and challenges, this book’s chapters address finance and banking, insurance, technology regulation and critical infrastructures, as well as climate change, infectious disease responses, natural disasters, migration, crime and security and spirituality and religion. The book argues that uncertainties must be understood as complex constructions of knowledge, materiality, experience, embodiment and practice. Examining in particular how uncertainties are experienced in contexts of marginalisation and precarity, this book shows how sustainability and development are not just technical issues, but depend on deeply political values and choices. What burgeoning uncertainties require lies less in escalating efforts at control, but more in a new – more collective, mutualistic and convivial – politics of responsibility and care. If hopes of much-needed progressive transformation are to be realised, then currently-blinkered understandings of uncertainty need to be met with renewed democratic struggle. Written in an accessible style and illustrated by multiple case studies from across the world, this book will appeal to a wide cross-disciplinary audience in fields ranging from economics to law to science studies to sociology to anthropology and geography, as well as professionals working in risk management, disaster risk reduction, emergencies and wider public policy fields.

Understanding the Creeping Crisis

This open access book explores a special species of trouble afflicting modern societies: creeping crises. These crises evolve over time, reveal themselves in different ways, and resist comprehensive responses despite periodic public attention. As a result, these crises continue to creep in front of our eyes. This book begins by defining the concept of a creeping crisis, showing how existing literature fails to properly define and explore this phenomenon and outlining the challenges such crises pose to practitioners. Drawing on ongoing research, this book presents a diverse set of case studies on: antimicrobial resistance, climate change-induced migration, energy extraction, big data, Covid-19, migration, foreign fighters, and cyberattacks. Each chapter explores how creeping crises come into existence, why they can develop unimpeded, and the consequences they bring in terms of damage and legitimacy loss. The book provides a proof-of-concept to help launch the systematic study of creeping crises. Our analysis helps academics understand a new species of threat and practitioners recognize and prepare for creeping crises

Ethnographies of Protests

Protests are at the center of political debates across the globe. Apart from questions of their cultural content and political efficacy, organization and scope, there is a need to look at attempts at their control, delegalization and surveillance. The ideology of these protests is socially liberal or, on the contrary, express nationalist and populist ideas. They are also widespread; while the attention is often focused on big cities, they take place also in provincial towns and villages, where questions of ideology, control, and efficacy can have a very different character. Despite the multiplicity of these movements’ goals, observers point out the similarity of their tools, rhetoric and organizational aspects, as well as of the methods of subjugation and control used against them. These include, for instance: an increased emphasis on the use of emotions; importance of digital tools and social media both in organization and in control;transnational networking; “horizontal” leadership; and frustration with traditional parliamentary representation and politics in general, to name but some. While the intensification of protest activity is beyond any doubt, the question of what all this means or where it is heading is open. Central and Eastern Europe has an important history of protest – contentious mobilizations were an important part of social and political life under the socialist regimes, had a decisive role in the transformations of the 1980s and 1990s, and have been prominent, if often peculiar, part of social and political life ever since. How can we locate them within a broader field of international or global protest activity? How do they relate to the social and political changes of recent decades? Can we situate them with respect to the practices, discourses, and ideals of modernization, political transformation, and democratic backsliding

Understanding the Creeping Crisis

This open access book explores a special species of trouble afflicting modern societies: creeping crises. These crises evolve over time, reveal themselves in different ways, and resist comprehensive responses despite periodic public attention. As a result, these crises continue to creep in front of our eyes. This book begins by defining the concept of a creeping crisis, showing how existing literature fails to properly define and explore this phenomenon and outlining the challenges such crises pose to practitioners. Drawing on ongoing research, this book presents a diverse set of case studies on: antimicrobial resistance, climate change-induced migration, energy extraction, big data, Covid-19, migration, foreign fighters, and cyberattacks. Each chapter explores how creeping crises come into existence, why they can develop unimpeded, and the consequences they bring in terms of damage and legitimacy loss. The book provides a proof-of-concept to help launch the systematic study of creeping crises. Our analysis helps academics understand a new species of threat and practitioners recognize and prepare for creeping crises

Covid Conspiracy Theories in Global Perspective

Covid Conspiracy Theories in Global Perspective examines how conspiracy theories and related forms of misinformation and disinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic have circulated widely around the world. Covid conspiracy theories have attracted considerable attention from researchers, journalists, and politicians, not least because conspiracy beliefs have the potential to negatively affect adherence to public health measures. While most of this focus has been on the United States and Western Europe, this collection provides a unique global perspective on the emergence and development of conspiracy theories through a series of case studies. The chapters have been commissioned by recognized experts on area studies and conspiracy theories. The chapters present case studies on how Covid conspiracism has played out (some focused on a single country, others on regions), using a range of methods from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, politics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Collectively, the authors reveal that, although there are many narratives that have spread virally, they have been adapted for different uses and take on different meanings in local contexts. This volume makes an important contribution to the rapidly expanding field of academic conspiracy theory studies, as well as being of interest to those working in the media, regulatory agencies, and civil society organizations, who seek to better understand the problem of how and why conspiracy theories spread

Cyber Counterintelligence: Assets, Audiences, and the Rise of Disinformation

In April 2021, Facebook suffered yet another data breach that affected hundreds of millions of accounts. The private information of over 500 million people had been stolen by hackers - names, phone numbers, email addresses, locations and more. The cache is potentially valuable to a host of malicious actors, from criminals motivated by financial gain to hostile foreign actors microtargeting voters through information operations. It follows an evolution of threats in cyberspace targeting government agencies, utilities, businesses, and electoral systems. With a focus on state-based actors, this thesis considers how state threat perception of cyberspace has developed, and if that perception is influencing the evolution of cyber counterintelligence (CCI) as a response to cyber-enabled threats such as disinformation. Specifically, this thesis traces the threat elevation of cyberspace through the evolution of the published national security documentation of the United Kingdom, asking how threat elevation corresponds to the development of CCI, if at all, and what sort of responses these processes generate to combat the rising threat of disinformation campaigns conducted against liberal democracies. Democratic audiences are a target of influence and information operations, and, as such, are an intelligence and security vulnerability for the state. More so than in previous decades, to increase national resilience and security in cyberspace, the individual, as part of the democratic audience, is required to contribute to personal counterintelligence and security practices. This research shows that while assets and infrastructure have undergone successful threat elevation processes, democratic audiences have been insufficiently recognised as security vulnerabilities and are susceptible to cyber-enabled disinformation

Viewing Trends in Graph Connectivity as Early Warnings of Epidemics and Vaccine Crises

When measles was rampant, suffering apparent, and relief desired, the prospect of vaccination was received with open arms by a grateful public. But it worked \emph{too} well, and opinions slowly diverged; scientists saw aggregate health as proof of the efficacy of intervention, while some of the lay public wondered "But do we really need this vaccine, though? I don't see sick people..." Spurious 1998 research linking the MMR vaccine to autism was published and our dreams of eradication evaporated; the diseases were back to stay. The spread of vaccine disinformation through social networks is immediately apparent and easily exploited, even more so due to the strong assortativity of social networks (both online and face-to-face). Therein lies the focus of this thesis; we investigate different measures of spatial grouping as early warnings signals (EWS) of epidemics through the simulation of social and contact networks and the use of various statistical and graph theoretical tools. Using an agent-based model coupling a binary voting dynamic with an SIRVp model of infection, we simulate a vaccine preventable disease. Each week, agents are given the opportunity to change opinion to that of a friend, while having potentially disease-spreading interactions with many people. The first study confirms that changes in trend of the Moran's I, Geary's C and mutual information statistics give early warnings of the critical transitions representing both vaccine crises and epidemics. This is independent of the strength of an injunctive social norm, though through change point testing we confirm that these warnings come closer to vaccine crises as the norm becomes stronger. We find also that the observable distance between vaccine crisis and epidemic spread decreases as the norm strengthens. Confirmation of these results for other different models boosts our confidence in our results. Our second study shows that graph theoretical changes in incidences of opinion-based communities and echo chambers coincide reliably with outbreaks. Clustering, network modularity and the rate of opinion change also provide EWS of both vaccine crises and epidemics in the population. Due to the immense size and traffic of current social networks, only portions of interactions can be observed at any one time, and therefore our third study tests previously effective signals against an incorporation of vaccine hesitance and network sampling. We find that these identified tools remain good EWS, though experiencing penalties on effectiveness dependent on the sampling rate of the population. In sum, our work provides easily employable tools to predict important negative epidemiological events using readily available data, the best-performing of which is the entropy-based mutual information statistic. Given current and expected events, we believe that this thesis makes a solid contribution to the sparse EWS literature for coupled disease-behaviour systems, as well as providing tools that can be used to inform policy decisions surrounding the mitigation of human folly and critical infection events