This book scrutinizes how contemporary practices of security have come to rely on many different translations of security, risk, and danger. Institutions of national security policies are currently undergoing radical conceptual and organisational changes, and this book presents a novel approach for how to study and politically address the new situation. Complex and uncertain threat environments, such as terrorism, climate change, and the global financial crisis, have paved the way for new forms of security governance that have profoundly transformed the ways in which threats are handled today. Crucially, there is a decentralisation of the management of security, which is increasingly handled by a broad set of societal actors that previously were not considered powerful in the conduct of security affairs. This transformation of security knowledge and management changes the meaning of traditional concepts and practices, and calls for investigation into the many meanings of security implied when contemporary societies manage radical dangers, risks, and threats. It is necessary to study both what these meanings are and how they developed from the security practices of the past. Addressing this knowledge gap, the book asks how different ideas about threats, risk, and dangers meet in the current practices of security, broadly understood, and with what political consequences. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, anthropology, risk studies, science and technology studies and International Relations.

本书仔细研究了当代的安全实践是如何依赖于安全、风险和危险的许多不同的翻译的。国家安全政策的机构目前正在经历根本性的概念和组织变化，本书为如何研究和从政治上应对新形势提出了一种新的方法。复杂和不确定的威胁环境，如恐怖主义、气候变化和全球金融危机，为新的安全治理形式铺平了道路，深刻地改变了今天处理威胁的方式。至关重要的是，安全管理的权力下放，越来越多地由广泛的社会行为者处理，而这些社会行为者以前在处理安全事务时并不被认为是强大的。安全知识和管理的这种转变改变了传统概念和实践的意义，并要求对当代社会在管理激进的危险、风险和威胁时隐含的安全的许多意义进行调查。有必要同时研究这些意义是什么，以及它们是如何从过去的安全实践中发展出来的。针对这一知识空白，本书提出了关于威胁、风险和危险的不同想法在当前的安全实践中如何相遇（广义上的理解），以及产生了什么政治后果。本书将引起批判性安全研究、人类学、风险研究、科技研究和国际关系专业学生的兴趣。