Danger, innovation, responsibility: Imagining future security

TY - CHAP

T1 - Danger, innovation, responsibility: Imagining future security

AU - Burgess, J. Peter

PY - 2018/1/1

Y1 - 2018/1/1

N2 - Introduction Security research has intensified at a break-neck speed in the months and years since 11 September 2011, when terrorism became an agenda-setting, globalized phenomenon. The particularly European approach to this global challenge has, however, set itself apart. The master-narrative of security governance in Europe has since the early 2000s focused on the development of an autonomous European security industrial sector and a corresponding Europe-wide market for the industrial development of security technologies. Research and development in security technologies has flourished in the last decades, supported by the good will of an industrially oriented security research programme, and a robust palette of liberalizing initiatives for the new digital market. The common value supporting these initiatives is a reborn concept of security innovation. Through the instruments at its disposition, the European Commission has advanced an agenda where security, the well-being of peoples and property, has become virtually synonymous with security innovation. 'Security' has become a tag for securityindustrial dominance in relation to potential security threats. In short, security does not simply benefit from innovation; it is innovation. The overall set of issues addressed by this volume revolves in one way or another around the question of what innovation understood as a kind of security measure can be. A first-cut answer to this question would situate innovation in relation to our own history, to what has been and to what will be, to what has had value in the past, and to what we hope will or expect to have value in the future. It is the search for improvement, for a better future, better quality, better performance and better alignment with the values that we hold dear. Yet if this is innovation, then surely security innovation redoubles the complexity of the problem. This is because security and security governance are precisely about safeguarding those things. In his recent book, Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation over the Centuries, Benoît Godin documents how in the European sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, innovation was widely regarded not as a virtue, but as an evil. An 'innovator', according to Godin, was considered a threat to the recalcitrant church doctrine, and 'innovation' was in some cases severely punished (Godin, 2015, pp. 75-101). What was new, uncharted, unthought or unrealized was regarded as detrimental to doctrine, a challenge to orthodoxy, even an existential threat to the institution of the church as it stood. Today, on the scene of contemporary security research, the notion of innovation is of course regarded with unmitigated enthusiasm or even fetishized.1 Innovation, an idea deployed with uncritical eyes, is a traditional key to understanding and analysing modernity. This fascination with the New has changed little, even while a multifaceted awareness of the limits and pitfalls of the pursuit of modernity and the critique of the modern remains an object of fascination and an axis of value and privilege. We seldom hear bad news about innovation. Even when the umbrella concept 'modernity' is subjected to post-modern critical scrutiny and the scepticism it provokes, 'innovation' as an idea and as an ideology seems to be an uncritical success. What we do notice, however, is that the idea of innovation generates a range of secondary or adjacent questions. These questions concern, on the one hand, the sources of innovation, its motivations and justifications, its aims and ambitions; and on the other hand, the actual impact innovation has, how it affects the processes which it is meant to innovate, how it affects the consumers and citizens touched by it, how it influences the scientific or commercial environments where it functions and the natural environments in which it is played out. It is one subset of these questions that leads us to the idea of 'responsible innovation', and to the question of how best to govern innovation for the benefit of both society and research itself. 'Responsible innovation' - as a concept and political strategy - seeks to take account of the criticisms of modernity, to counter-claims linked to the environment, development, health, safety and security, and builds an infrastructure of ethical consideration. Responsible innovation is thus both the name of a kind of modernity and the name of a normative project, a project to be realized, an impulse and proposition for change. On the one hand, it is an analytic tool, the specification of a subset of the modern project, of creating new knowledge and new practices in which commercial progress and economic modernization are key points of valorization. On the other hand, it is a campaign designed to reinvent the fading momentum of modernity. It is a strategy for addressing one of the many political criticisms of modernization, namely its indifference to morality, its disdain for spirituality, its pretence of superiority in relation to human values. While it is more or less clear that all of these criticisms are problematic in their own way, the project of responsible innovation suspends these issues and forges on autonomously. Another, highly relevant, subset of the general modernization project is the considerable research, development and investment that have taken place in security and security research in the last decades. While responsible innovation comprises a set of principles that might very well be applied to any project of Western industrial development, few such projects hold the same force and political sway as security. No other subfield of industrial innovation offers the same promise, political impact or economic consequences as security research and development.

AB - Introduction Security research has intensified at a break-neck speed in the months and years since 11 September 2011, when terrorism became an agenda-setting, globalized phenomenon. The particularly European approach to this global challenge has, however, set itself apart. The master-narrative of security governance in Europe has since the early 2000s focused on the development of an autonomous European security industrial sector and a corresponding Europe-wide market for the industrial development of security technologies. Research and development in security technologies has flourished in the last decades, supported by the good will of an industrially oriented security research programme, and a robust palette of liberalizing initiatives for the new digital market. The common value supporting these initiatives is a reborn concept of security innovation. Through the instruments at its disposition, the European Commission has advanced an agenda where security, the well-being of peoples and property, has become virtually synonymous with security innovation. 'Security' has become a tag for securityindustrial dominance in relation to potential security threats. In short, security does not simply benefit from innovation; it is innovation. The overall set of issues addressed by this volume revolves in one way or another around the question of what innovation understood as a kind of security measure can be. A first-cut answer to this question would situate innovation in relation to our own history, to what has been and to what will be, to what has had value in the past, and to what we hope will or expect to have value in the future. It is the search for improvement, for a better future, better quality, better performance and better alignment with the values that we hold dear. Yet if this is innovation, then surely security innovation redoubles the complexity of the problem. This is because security and security governance are precisely about safeguarding those things. In his recent book, Innovation Contested: The Idea of Innovation over the Centuries, Benoît Godin documents how in the European sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, innovation was widely regarded not as a virtue, but as an evil. An 'innovator', according to Godin, was considered a threat to the recalcitrant church doctrine, and 'innovation' was in some cases severely punished (Godin, 2015, pp. 75-101). What was new, uncharted, unthought or unrealized was regarded as detrimental to doctrine, a challenge to orthodoxy, even an existential threat to the institution of the church as it stood. Today, on the scene of contemporary security research, the notion of innovation is of course regarded with unmitigated enthusiasm or even fetishized.1 Innovation, an idea deployed with uncritical eyes, is a traditional key to understanding and analysing modernity. This fascination with the New has changed little, even while a multifaceted awareness of the limits and pitfalls of the pursuit of modernity and the critique of the modern remains an object of fascination and an axis of value and privilege. We seldom hear bad news about innovation. Even when the umbrella concept 'modernity' is subjected to post-modern critical scrutiny and the scepticism it provokes, 'innovation' as an idea and as an ideology seems to be an uncritical success. What we do notice, however, is that the idea of innovation generates a range of secondary or adjacent questions. These questions concern, on the one hand, the sources of innovation, its motivations and justifications, its aims and ambitions; and on the other hand, the actual impact innovation has, how it affects the processes which it is meant to innovate, how it affects the consumers and citizens touched by it, how it influences the scientific or commercial environments where it functions and the natural environments in which it is played out. It is one subset of these questions that leads us to the idea of 'responsible innovation', and to the question of how best to govern innovation for the benefit of both society and research itself. 'Responsible innovation' - as a concept and political strategy - seeks to take account of the criticisms of modernity, to counter-claims linked to the environment, development, health, safety and security, and builds an infrastructure of ethical consideration. Responsible innovation is thus both the name of a kind of modernity and the name of a normative project, a project to be realized, an impulse and proposition for change. On the one hand, it is an analytic tool, the specification of a subset of the modern project, of creating new knowledge and new practices in which commercial progress and economic modernization are key points of valorization. On the other hand, it is a campaign designed to reinvent the fading momentum of modernity. It is a strategy for addressing one of the many political criticisms of modernization, namely its indifference to morality, its disdain for spirituality, its pretence of superiority in relation to human values. While it is more or less clear that all of these criticisms are problematic in their own way, the project of responsible innovation suspends these issues and forges on autonomously. Another, highly relevant, subset of the general modernization project is the considerable research, development and investment that have taken place in security and security research in the last decades. While responsible innovation comprises a set of principles that might very well be applied to any project of Western industrial development, few such projects hold the same force and political sway as security. No other subfield of industrial innovation offers the same promise, political impact or economic consequences as security research and development.

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9780815371397

T3 - Routledge New Security Studies

SP - 12

EP - 22

BT - Socially Responsible Innovation in Security

A2 - Burgess, J. Peter

A2 - Reniers, Genserik

A2 - Ponnet, Koen

A2 - Hardyns, Wim

A2 - Smit, Wim

PB - Routledge

CY - London; N.Y.

ER -