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Review of:

The Risk Society at War: Terror, Technology, and Strategy in the Twenty-First Century by Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen
Cambridge University Press, 2006

Reviewed By: Joshua Rovner
Reviewed in: The Journal of Politics
Date accepted online: 14/01/2008
Published in print: Volume 69, Issue 04, Pages 1210-1230
See all reviews for this journal

Book Reviews

Scholars increasingly use the concept of risk to explain the evolution of domestic and international regulatory policies. Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen believes that risk is also changing how we think about strategy and war.

The Risk Society at War begins by arguing that the literature on strategic studies cannot account for important changes in international politics. According to Rasmussen, the realist scholars who dominate the field are wedded to outmoded concepts of great power politics, and have failed to recognize the significance of nonstate actors. Realists also underestimate the power of international norms and international law as constraints on unilateral state power. For these reasons, contemporary strategic studies inaccurately describe state behavior since the end of the Cold War and offer a misleading guide to state actions in the future. Scholarship on risk offers a possible alternative. Rasmussen argues that a new kind of "risk-rationality" has replaced the meansends rationality that has dominated strategic studies since Clausewitz, and he uses this concept to explore how perceptions of risk affect everything from the revolution in military affairs (RMA) to operational choices in military campaigns.

Two important changes define the relationship between risk and strategy. The first is the rise of globalization, which has produced a web of international organizations that mediate state actions. According to Rasmussen, international norms have made war illegitimate in most cases, meaning that the Clausewitzian notion of war as an instrument of politics is no longer valid. The traditional conception of war has been replaced by the "UN approach," in which war is only acceptable it if has the approval of the international community and meets a number of strict legal criteria. Globalization also has a dark side, however, because the decreasing costs of travel and communication have empowered nonstate actors who exist outside the Western legal framework.

The other important change is the emergence of the "risk society" in the West. Risk societies try to manage future risks instead of solving present problems, and obsess about preventing nightmare scenarios from occurring. In the past, strategists thought about how to use force to achieve clearly defined state interests. The rise of amorphous dangers like proliferation and terrorism has made such linear thinking impossible, however, and societies have adopted a mentality that stresses limiting exposure to risks. One unfortunate result is that states have become vulnerable to "boomerang effects," because preventive actions inevitably lead to unintended consequences. For example, aggressive counterterrorist strategies are counterproductive if they end up increasing support for terrorist groups.

Rasmussen offers a number of provocative claims, but he makes no attempt to test them. The book's main proposition is that Western societies demand strategies to mitigate risks, and that after 9/11 the main risks come from nonstate actors. If this is the case, then risk societies should be more willing to accept preventive military action, just as they are agitating for preventive regulatory policies on carbon emissions to stave off global warming. Western allies are deeply divided over the logic of military prevention, however, and the Bush doctrine has met with increasing opposition. Rasmussen observes near the end of the book that preventive logic "apparently does not translate well from environmental issues to security issues" (p. 194). This is an important observation, but it contradicts the central premise of the book. The risk-society thesis also suggests that Western publics should clamor for aggressive policies that mitigate risks. As he puts it, "inaction may be the best thing considering the boomerang effects, but for a public demanding action that will not be good enough" (p. 200). This does not explain why President Bush and Prime Minister Blair had to work so hard to justify the war in Iraq. Rasmussen's thesis suggests that risk societies should push leaders to take preventive action, not vice versa.

In addition, Rasmussen does not justify his claim that international politics have fundamentally changed since the end of the Cold War. It is not at all clear that the great powers recognize the UN approach to warfare. International disapproval certainly did not stop the United States from invading Iraq, and the power of international law is still limited by the lack of a reliable enforcement mechanism. Moreover, the idea that states have stopped thinking in terms of great power rivalry is demonstrably false. The United States is watching the rise of China very closely, and Russia is increasingly concerned about what it sees as NATO encroachment.

Despite these problems, The Risk Society at War offers a number of intriguing insights about the direction of strategy in the context of risk. Rasmussen convincingly argues that the RMA may give policymakers a false sense of control over international events and will create new problems as states are lulled into the belief that new technologies will lift the fog of war. He also worries that preventive military doctrines are ultimately self-defeating because states do not have the resources to deal with every imaginable risk. Finally, he criticizes the Bush Administration for making decisions with a sense of moral certainty that has kept it from anticipating the consequences of its actions. The irony is that all of these concerns are consistent with realism, which stresses the importance of calibrating means and ends, and warns against chasing phantoms. Revisiting the concept of risk is useful for students of international strategy, but it is not clear that a risk framework is a necessary replacement for existing theories. In fact, Rasmussen's main target may turn out to be an ally.