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International Relations
25(3) 275 –279
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117811415479
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Introduction: Risk, 
Risk Management and 
International Relations
Shahar Hameiri
Murdoch University, Western Australia
Florian P. Kühn
Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg
The field of international relations (IR) has a long history of engagement with the disci-
pline of sociology. In recent times, however, sociology’s influence on IR has undoubt-
edly become more explicit, due to the emergence and popularity of social constructivism 
and critical IR theory.1 In the latest wave of cross-disciplinary migration, sociological 
concepts and theories of risk have gained an increasing foothold in the work of a rela-
tively small but rapidly expanding group of IR scholars. The transition of risk into IR is 
perhaps not entirely surprising, as governments and international organisations have 
over the past two decades made risk management a leading policy paradigm in areas as 
disparate as counter-terrorism, financial regulation and public health. To give but one 
recent example, the 2010 United States Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), unlike its Cold 
War predecessors, is focused less on responding to the strategic threat posed by states 
with large nuclear stockpiles than it is on managing the risk of isolated nuclear terrorist 
attacks.2 Risk management in this context does not mean developing contingency plans 
to deal with the specific threat posed by another nuclear-armed state, as in the Rand 
Corporation’s Cold War modelling of a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.3 
Rather, it involves establishing a wide range of checks and balances, within the US and 
internationally, with the aim of limiting the movement of materials, technologies and 
personnel that could potentially enable terrorist organisations or rogue states to acquire 
nuclear weapons.
Risk is a concept well known to bankers, financiers and insurers. Indeed, these indus-
tries would arguably not have existed in their current form if it were not for the ability to 
make potential future dangers – risks – ‘knowable’ through statistical calculation and 
mathematical modelling. The cost of insurance coverage, for example, tends to increase 
with the assessed risk, while higher risk investments in financial products usually yield 
415479 IREXXX10.1177/0047117811415479Hameiri and KühnInternational Relations
Editorial
276 International Relations 25(3) 
bigger returns, though as the recent global financial crisis acutely demonstrated, financial 
risk management is no exact science. In IR too, there are now high-profile studies that 
apply technical risk assessment and management methods from the world of business to 
international security issues.4
The sociological study of risk is different, however. It is concerned less with refining 
the actual practice of risk assessment and management than it is with examining the ways 
in which such activities shape and are shaped by social and political relations. For exam-
ple, the core of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens’ ‘reflexive modernisation’ thesis, a 
particularly influential contribution, is that increasing levels of economic development, 
industrialisation, and more recently globalisation, have created a new kind of ‘de-
bounded’ risk. De-bounded risks are low probability but potentially catastrophic and are 
not contained by national borders or calculable timeframes. Such risks, therefore, defy 
pre-existing modes of social and private risk management, which rely on statistical anal-
ysis and, if necessary, financial compensation. Indeed, their full consequences may never 
be truly known. But de-bounded risks according to Beck and Giddens are not only the 
unintended side-effects of industrialisation and technological development. This cate-
gory comprises a wide range of issues, including communicable diseases, and even the 
transnational terrorism associated with groups like al-Qaeda.5
Though Beck and Giddens are self-proclaimed ‘critical realists’, meaning they take 
risks to be real and not socially constructed (not to be confused with the usual meaning 
of ‘realism’ in an IR context), crucial to their framework is the idea of reflexivity. They 
argue that as people become aware of the existence of new de-bounded risks, society and 
politics change. Instead of the linear-rational notion of progress associated with earlier 
industrial modernity, new modes of reflexive thinking emerge that aim to continuously 
identify potential risk and intervene in time to avert disastrous consequences. This late-
modern reflexivity undermines many of the established structures and beliefs of indus-
trial modern society. Most importantly, because in Beck and Giddens’ view de-bounded 
risks do not respect national borders, ethnic or class cleavages, these divisions are 
increasingly rendered obsolete. Beck has further argued that in light of new risks, social 
scientific research must break away from its implicit methodological nationalism, which 
treats the nation-state as a natural unit of analysis.6
If accepted, the implications of this argument to the study of IR, with its traditional 
focus on theorising relationships between states, are potentially dramatic and subversive. 
But even if we reject Beck’s thesis, the current centrality of risk management activities 
for the world’s major governments and international organisations demands that we give 
some consideration to the way risk and its management affect government, governance 
and the conduct of global politics more broadly. Yet, as William Clapton argues in his 
contribution which follows this short introduction, surprisingly little has been done so far 
to evaluate the role risk and risk management play in the practice of international poli-
tics. Clapton reviews the issues with which the IR risk literature has primarily engaged – 
globalisation, strategy and counter-terrorism. He argues that while such studies have 
made important contributions towards our understanding of these areas, the development 
of the field as a whole has been hampered by the dominance of an unhelpful ontological 
debate between those, mainly influenced by Beck and Giddens, who view risks as real, 
on the one hand, and those, influenced by the equally significant work of Mary Douglas 
Hameiri and Kühn 277
and Michel Foucault, who view risks as socially constructed, or as technologies of 
government, on the other. There is still a need, says Clapton, for a sustained investigation 
of the conditions that enable or militate against ‘riskisation’ – the process through which 
particular issues come to be seen as risky – as well as the factors shaping its effects on 
state form, inter-state relations and the relationship between states and non-state actors. 
As such, fundamental questions remain as to whether the incorporation of sociological 
concepts and theories of risk in IR advances our understanding of contemporary world 
politics, and if so, in what ways and how should this research agenda proceed.
It is the aim of this special issue of International Relations to address these interre-
lated queries. The contributors, in their respective articles, engage with a similar set of 
questions, but at times arrive at different conclusions. We collectively ask, what are the 
risks, real or perceived, faced by states and societies? How do governments and other 
important actors seek to manage risk, and what impact does this have on state behaviour, 
state form and inter-state relations? How do risk perceptions and risk management strate-
gies emerge and how do they affect national, regional or global governance?
The majority of the articles in this collection draw explicitly on one or more of the 
main sociological approaches to risk – the above-mentionedreflexive modernisation 
thesis; the Foucault-inspired ‘governmentality’ perspective; and Mary Douglas’s cultural 
constructivism, which also has its roots in anthropology – to examine the governance of 
important issues in contemporary world politics. Darryl Jarvis, however, takes a different 
path, drawing attention to the often neglected work of the notable twentieth-century 
economist Frank Knight. Knight’s study of economic risk and uncertainty arguably con-
structed a means for assessing and measuring risk in various facets of social activity. 
Jarvis claims that Knight’s tripartite methodological schema, which has so far not been 
used by IR scholars, is useful to our understanding of contemporary governance, both 
within and between states.
In the following article, Yee-Kuang Heng and Ken McDonagh build on Beck’s ‘world 
risk society’ framework to examine the Obama administration’s shifting counter-terror-
ism strategy. They argue that the ‘war on terror’ is increasingly played out not through 
the use of brute force, but through the development of various bureaucratised risk regula-
tory regimes that turn counter-terrorism into a routine aspect of governance across a wide 
range of issue areas. Delf Rothe draws creatively on the governmentality approach and 
on discourse theory to examine the politics shaping the international governance of what 
is perhaps the most commonly cited ‘new’ global risk – climate change. He argues that 
the paradox of global climate politics, whereby, despite the apparent consensus over the 
danger of climate change, international action remains limited mostly to voluntary and 
market-based measures, is the outcome of discursive struggles in climate politics. The 
growing consensus on dangerous climate change counter-intuitively reinforces a loose 
form of liberal risk management by presenting climate change as a ‘natural’ de-bounded 
risk and blurring its socio-economic causes and effects. Stacey Gutkowski focuses on the 
employment of risk and risk management strategies domestically in Britain’s ‘Prevent’ 
agenda to mitigate the risk of home-grown Islamist extremism. Drawing on Mary 
Douglas and the governmentality approach, she contends that the British example has 
broader implications for the study of risk in IR, by highlighting the way in which cultural 
ambivalence shapes the nuances of risk identification and management. The secular 
278 International Relations 25(3) 
British state’s ambivalence towards religion has made Islam seem simultaneously more 
and less risky – irrational and uncontrollable and fixed and internalised – thus also leading 
to the development of a paradoxical approach to risk management, which resembles 
Foucault’s notion of ‘pastoral governance’. In his article, Florian Kühn argues that the 
intractable sub-state security dilemma, which plagues many so-called failed states in 
which Western interventions have taken place in the post-Cold War era, could potentially 
be alleviated by paying greater attention to the myriad (real or perceived) risks affecting 
the behaviour of local and international actors. Updating Clausewitz’s famous dictum, 
Kühn advocates the importance of knowing your enemy’s risks. Collectively, these con-
tributions make the case that the sociological risk literature has a useful role to play in an 
IR context, shedding new light on social and political phenomena that are not adequately 
captured by existing theories and debates.
The closing contribution by Shahar Hameiri, like Clapton’s opening one, differs in 
that it engages critically with the risk literature in IR as a whole. Hameiri takes tentative 
steps towards developing a framework for explaining why particular risk perceptions 
take root in some contexts and not in others and why they are governed one way or 
another. He argues that contemporary forms of risk management are products and facili-
tators of long-term processes of state transformation, associated with the emergence of 
the regulatory state. Perceptions of de-bounded risk and the associated modes of risk 
management are a means for shifting the governance of particular issues beyond the 
national state’s political arena and institutional spaces towards new regulatory modes of 
governance and into the hands of actors that are typically not politically or popularly 
accountable. Drawing on political economy and critical political geography, he proceeds 
to analyse the nature of struggles over the spatiality of risk in terms of a territorial politics 
contested by regimes within the state.
In summary, this special issue of International Relations – ‘Risk, Risk Management and 
International Relations’ – combines studies that seek to provide an overarching critical 
evaluation of this fledgling body of literature and articles that rely on existing sociological 
perspectives to shed light on important issues in world politics. In so doing, it identifies 
areas where conceptual advances may be advised and possible and provides a roadmap for 
future research. As the contributions make clear, though, the debates in the literature remain 
open-ended and more research is required to both advance the study of risk in particular 
contexts and develop the field’s conceptual and theoretical tools. We hope that this collec-
tion will provide a useful foundation from which to proceed in both endeavours.
Ackowledgements
Research for this essay and the project was supported by Australian Research Council funding 
for a Discovery Project (DP110100425), ‘Securitisation and the Governance of Non-traditional 
Security in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific’, for which the authors are grateful. 
Additional funding was provided by the Asia Research Centre and the Institute for Sustainable 
Societies, Education and Politics at Murdoch University. The guest editors would like to thank 
the editors and reviewers of International Relations for their extensive and useful feedback, as 
well as Kelly Gerard and Jamal Barnes for their invaluable assistance in preparing the manu-
script for submission. 
Hameiri and Kühn 279
Notes
1 George Lawson and Robbie Shilliam, ‘Sociology and International Relations: Legacies and 
Prospects’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 23(1), 2010, pp. 69–86, at p. 70.
2 United States Department of Defense, ‘Nuclear Posture Review’, April 2010. Available at: 
www.defense.gov/npr/docs/2010%20Nuclear%20Posture%20Review%20Report.pdf.
3 See Albert J. Wohlstetter, Fred Hoffman, R.J. Lutz and Henry S. Rowen, Selection and Use of 
Strategic Air Bases (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, R.266, 1954).
4 For example, see Paul Bracken, Ian Bremmer and David Gordon (eds), Managing Strategic 
Surprise: Lessons from Risk Management and Risk Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2008).
5 Ulrich Beck, World at Risk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); Ulrich Beck, ‘The Terrorist 
Threat: World Risk Society Revisited’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19(4), 2002, pp. 39–55; 
Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (Cambridge: Polity 
Press, 1998).
6 Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider, ‘Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A 
Research Agenda’, British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 2006, pp. 1–23.
Shahar Hameiri is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research 
Centre, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Murdoch University, Australia. He is author of 
Regulating Statehood: State Building and the Transformation of the Global Order, as well as sev-
eral articles in journals such as Political Studies, Millennium, The Pacific Review and Third World 
Quarterly.
Florian P. Kühn is a Researcher and Lecturer at Helmut Schmidt University’s Institute for 
International Politics in Hamburg. His doctoral thesis, Security and Development in World 
Society: Liberal Paradigm and Statebuilding in Afghanistan(in German) was published in 2010 
and won the German Middle East Studies Association’s dissertation award. Also in 2010 he 
published ‘Illusion Statebuilding. Why the Western State is so Difficult to Export’ with Berit 
Bliesmemann de Guevara. His journal articles have been published in S+F (Security and Peace), 
Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, WeltTrends, and Das Parlament, among others.