RP2: Infrastructures of Protection. Planning for Catastrophes to Come
As crises and disasters intensify and multiply, how do mechanisms for dealing with potentially threatening futures change? RP2 studies a set of future-oriented modes of civil protection: it compares and contrasts how European governments and societies imagine, plan for and communicate their engagement with the entangled crises that characterize catastrophic times. In particular, the project examines how governments and societies in Sweden, France, and Germany negotiate and develop civil preparedness policies and practices in response to climate-related hazards and the threat of war, and what role the European Union plays in this process. It proposes infrastructures of protection as a conceptual lens to capture the future-oriented and collective forms of organizing protection for a new era, which empirically include, for example, warning systems, scenario exercises, community relief structures, and forms of cooperation between state agencies and volunteers. Building on and further developing the concept of infrastructures of protection along three dimensions, we investigate how governments and societies envision and plan for the future in their attempts to ensure civil protection; how governmental and societal preparedness is reorganized, and how governments communicate their preparedness strategies. The project approaches its subject from two sides: government-orchestrated measures and citizen-led preparedness strategies in the face of disasters, and it analyses their interfaces, conflicts and entanglements. In examining how new promises of security emerge and materialize in these plans and practices, the project contributes to PROMISE’s core interest in assessing and theorizing changes in the promise of security in catastrophic times.