The rise of emergency governance in global public health has driven a number of changes in this field. In this article, we investigate one of the practices of emergency governance – border screening – and identify a new form of screening that emerged in the UK during the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Analysing the UK’s deployment of Ebola entry screening and the public debate that emerged around it, we show how this technology was constructed to identify potentially risky individuals, assess their risk level and pre-accelerate future response to potential cases. Engaging with Foucault’s notion of a ‘crisis of circulation’, we argue that this approach expresses a response to an emergency of circulation: the alarming prospect of a concrete threat with the potential to infiltrate the population through circulation systems. We show that entry screening, in this case, addresses such a problem by enabling, rather than …

As a social technology, the scenario differs from other techniques usually associated with managing future uncertainties. These draw mainly on the construct of risk and the related notion of risk management – that is, calculation and evaluation based on knowledge of past events, leading to possible control, prevention or prediction of unknowable futures. Scenarios create stories of the future neither to translate them into assessed possibilities nor to predict it in advance, but rather to destabilize perceived futures and to mitigate overreliance on existing knowledge and models when addressing the unknown future. This article addresses three questions through ethnographic insights: firstly, why do organizations create scenarios and use this technology? Secondly, does deliberately creating crisis events and tracking their cascades and responses help organizations encounter the future? Thirdly, can organizations …

As a social technology, the scenario differs from other techniques usually associated with managing future uncertainties. These draw mainly on the construct of risk and the related notion of risk management – that is, calculation and evaluation based on knowledge of past events, leading to possible control, prevention or prediction of unknowable futures. Scenarios create stories of the future neither to translate them into assessed possibilities nor to predict it in advance, but rather to destabilize perceived futures and to mitigate overreliance on existing knowledge and models when addressing the unknown future. This article addresses three questions through ethnographic insights: firstly, why do organizations create scenarios and use this technology? Secondly, does deliberately creating crisis events and tracking their cascades and responses help organizations encounter the future? Thirdly, can organizations prepare for extreme uncertainty or polycrisis, and could scenarios help resolve such complexity?

 In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel’s annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities can be distinguished from each other in terms of their approaches to future uncertainty, their temporalities and the role of imagination within their enactment. To further conceptually develop the logics of imagination, I draw on Deleuze’s and Bergson’s discussions of the concept of fabulation, and I suggest that scenarios and simulations represent two different logics of future-governing that are based on practices of imagination. 

 מגיפת הקורונה החיתה את המעורבות המלומדים במושג הביופוליטיקה, עם פרשנויות המאבחנות אימוץ נרחב של משטר ביו-פוליטי קלאסי או הופעתה המלאה של דיכוי טוטליטרי (או שניהם בו זמנית). בהסתמך על ניתוח מדוקדק של התערבויות שונות שננקטו על ידי הרשויות הישראליות בתגובה למגיפה, מאמר זה טוען כי במקום אסטרטגיות ביו-פוליטיות קלאסיות, התערבויות ממשלתיות כאלה מובנות טוב יותר ביחס לבעיה של אי ודאות ממשית. המקרה של ישראל מדגים כיצד מנגנוני המדינה הגיבו לאי ודאות ממשית באמצעות טכנולוגיות הקשורות לרציונליות שונות וכיצד טכנולוגיות אלו אפשרו יצירה וניהול של סביבה חדשה. המאמר טוען עוד כי, 

This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario technology is adapted to the new temporality in terms of its form and content. In correspondence with the scholarship of ‘the anthropology of the future’, the article focuses on changes in temporal orientations–specifically, with a shift from a temporality of (future) preparedness to a temporal orientation of (immediate) urgency and how such a shift in temporality affects the technology of the scenario. Moving from preparing for potential future uncertainties to responding to an urgent …

 In Uncertainty by Design Limor Samimian-Darash presents cases of the use of scenario technology in the fields of security and emergency preparedness, energy, and health by analyzing scenario narratives and practices at the National Emergency Management Authority in Israel, the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe, and the World Energy Council.Humankind has long struggled with the uncertainty of the future, with how to foresee the future, imagine alternatives, or prepare for and guard against undesirable eventualities. Scenario—or scenario planning—emerged in recent decades to become a widespread means through which states, large corporations, and local organizations imagine and prepare for the future.The scenario technology cases examined in Uncertainty by Design provide a useful lens through which to view contemporary efforts to engage in an overall journey of discovering the future, along with the modality of governing involved in these endeavors to face future uncertainties. Collectively, they enable us to understand in depth how scenarios express a new governing modality. This book sheds light on a technology for systematically thinking, envisioning, and preparing for future uncertainties: the scenario – an uncertainty-based technology that not only accepts the potential uncertainty of the future but also promotes uncertainty as a mode of observing and acting in the world. The book presents sociocultural perspectives and anthropological research on cases where the scenario has been used within the fields of security and emergency preparedness, energy, and health, analyzing and comparing scenario narratives and practices at Israel’s National Emergency Management Authority, the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe, and the World Energy Council. Taken together, these cases provide a useful lens through which to view contemporary attempts to address future uncertainties with a new modality of governing here termed “uncertainty by design” – a mode of governing that is based on imagination, potentiality, and acceptance of the emergent and the unpredictable, but that is nonetheless a designed practice, one that has specific rules and systems for creating, narrating, and using the future stories that make up the scenario.

 The chapter provides an overview of the field of biosecurity mostly as it developed in the US. It begins by providing essential insights about historical and political developments in the biosecurity arena. It shows that biosecurity has origins as early as World War II, when the fighting parties were developing both biological weapons and countermeasures. Since then and to this day, the biosecurity apparatus has evolved to face various kinds of threats including accidental, intentional and unintentional release of pathogens – each deserving appropriate action. The chapter then directs its attention to the most recent development, namely the risk that well-intended life sciences research might be abused to cause harm – i.e. dual-use research of concern. To illustrate the biosecurity risks of dual-use research, the chapter uses the H5N1 controversy as a case study. Through describing the H5N1 case, the chapter delineates the biosecurity risks it generated and the various ways in which US policy has evolved to address them. It demonstrates that the US government as well as international bodies have been moving away from the notion that scientists should police themselves with regard to dual-use research towards an understanding that specific regulations are needed in order to protect national security and public health. 

 In this article, I examine several expressions of imaginative practices to unpack the umbrella term scenario. Drawing on my long-term fieldwork on Israel’s annual Turning Point exercises, I examine actual uses of scenarios and distinguish between two different logics of imaginative practices and the modalities in which the future is governed by them, which I refer to as the scenaristic and the simulative. As I demonstrate, these two modalities can be distinguished from each other in terms of their approaches to future uncertainty, their temporalities and the role of imagination within their enactment. To further conceptually develop the logics of imagination, I draw on Deleuze’s and Bergson’s discussions of the concept of fabulation, and I suggest that scenarios and simulations represent two different logics of future-governing that are based on practices of imagination. 

In this article, we analyze UK global health policy in the light of the 2014 Ebola epidemic. Specifically, we focus on the UK government’s intervention in the epidemic, reflections on the UK’s response in parliamentary committees and government-sponsored forums, and subsequent UK global health policy changes. Post-Ebola, we argue, UK global health policy turned into a pursuit of global health emergency-preparedness through development. This, we further suggest, resulted from what we identify as the specific structure of the UK’s emergency-preparedness configuration that creates a ‘spill-over’ between the immediate event (of emergency) and future preparedness. This configuration transmits problems between different temporalities – allowing immediate, urgent problems to become problems of future uncertainty (and future uncertainties to be enacted as urgent problems). In activating emergencypreparedness, furthermore, self-scrutiny is triggered – prompting the UK to assume responsibility for problems identified as threats regardless of their point of origin, thus internalizing external problems.

The article examines the relationship between humanitarianism, security, and ethics in the case of the provision of medical humanitarian aid by Israel to casualties from the Syrian civil war, between 2013 and 2018. We argue that this humanitarian project differs from the type of humanitarian intervention commonly seen in conflict zones and can be identified as a new form of humanitarian governance. Our case study deals with humanitarian care provided in the country of origin of the medical and security forces involved, rather than in the country of the injured. In this articulation of humanitarianism at home a new nature of life governance and new subjects of security, emerge. We argue that the politics of life shifts and is subordinated to two different ethical frameworks founded on two different logics: that of the human (as in the type of medical treatment seen in traditional humanitarian aid provision, which is often related to short-term immediate treatment) and that of the citizen (the standard of care provided to all official residents of Israel. The conflict between these two moralities, the shifting standard of medical treatment, and the new medical-security space – together, raise a new set of ethical and political questions.

 This article discusses the concepts of borders and boundaries by analyzing the medical treatment provided in Israel to Syrian casualties, in field hospitals along the border zone between Israel and Syria but also in public hospitals elsewhere in the country. At these hospitals, security personnel and IDF soldiers guard the wards where the Syrian patients receive treatment, which rapidly transforms the surroundings into a cooperative medical/ security environment. The Israeli medical staff and the Syrian casualties also develop their own special relationships during the treatment periods. A boundary zone emerges, in which security and medicine, as well as enemies and allies, interact through the provision of medical aid. In this process, security arenas adapt to the humanitarian aid agenda, while civilian medical spheres are readily transformed into security spaces. In the intersection of the two elements, boundaries between the civilian and the military, and between medicine and security, become blurred. Moreover, boundaries between enemies also shift, as Syrians and Israelis begin to view each other as friends - and even as family. Whereas the concepts of bordering or border-making refer to establishing distinctions between spaces or groups, we suggest using the concept of the “boundary zone” to describe the new space that here creates a bridge between two different (medical and security) spheres of expertise and two different peoples.