Unknown-unknowns framing legitimized preemptive security responses beyond measured risk.

Evidence

US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous 2001 statement about the “unknown unknowns” that had to be reckoned with in the wake of the War on Terror has been watched by millions on YouTube. It has been the subject of documentary films and has sparked numerous debates in media and academia alike. Rumsfeld’s statement is broadly seen as having heralded the twenty-first century’s new era of security politics: a time when risk is no longer the measuring stick for political decisions, which are driven instead by the incalculable and the unknowable, in turn lending legitimacy to preemptive responses to security threats. These developments have been most influentially captured in sociologist Ulrich Beck’s vision of “risk society,” which positions uncertainty as the impetus for growing risk control, making twenty-first-century society dependent on security, while encroaching on individual freedom and exacerbating pre-existing inequality (Beck 2008). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 317

Categorization

• XREF: Directly names the Ulrich Beck risk-society thesis that Komporozos-Athanasiou builds against throughout — reader needs this adversary positioned precisely for the homo speculans argument.