A Formula for Disaster: The Department of Homeland Security's Virtual Ontology

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to theorise the spatialities of post-9/11 security knowledge and practice in the US. It analyses the organisational discourses that animate homeland security work, such as preparedness, vulnerability, the new threat environment, risk analysis and capabilities-based planning, and considers the implications of these practices for contemporary geographies of security. It is argued that DHS operates through a virtual ontology of threat, whereby potential, future threats are addressed as present possibilities that emerge in the spaces of everyday life. The sources of American freedoms and insecurities, the everyday, emerging circulations of goods and people, present DHS with a terrain of shifting threats from which both emergencies and preparedness may materialise. Disaster looming, the potential suspension of everyday life forms the basis for security practice as the emergency becomes a fact of life itself. The spatialities of this environment of imminent threat are considered and it is argued that the everyday emergency operates topologically as a continuous process of spatialisation.

The authors are grateful for comments from Patricia Ehrkamp, Anna Secor, Chris Blackden, Oliver Belcher and Taro Futamura on an earlier draft of this paper, and for the suggestions of two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to Dick Gilbreath for his help with graphics. The authors contributed equally to the research and writing of this article and any mis-steps belong to them. Versions of this article were presented at the International Social Theory Consortium Conference, Roanoke, VA (May 2006) and the Critical Geography Mini-conference, Columbus, OH (October 2006).

Notes

The transfer of people and resources to the new department was not without contest. Intelligence operations at the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Central Intelligence Agency were not included in the new department and retained their primary roles as intelligence gatherers. In addition, the Plum Island Agricultural Research Facility experienced months of labour strikes, after it was announced that DHS employees would not receive—and would be stripped of—their Title V Civil Service benefits. Other examples of bureaucratic friction abound in popular media accounts of the transition, showing a complex picture of competitive governmental ‘turf wars’. These conflicts are not the subject of this paper, but offer important opportunities for future research.

Throughout, we use both ‘imminent’ and ‘immanent’ to refer to the threat environment as conceived by DHS. Because of DHS' particular construction of threat—threat is imminent because the way of life makes threat immanent—each term implicates the other and we use this vocabulary somewhat interchangeably.