Project Details
Projekt
“Situational Awareness”: Sensing Security in the City
Subject Area
Sociological Theory
Term
from 2019 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 431354515
As contemporary dangers appear to be increasingly unforeseeable and dispersed, “situational awareness” has grown in importance for security, e.g. in EU border policing, efforts against cybercrime, and lately, urban terrorism. Instead of following the rationale of predicting, preventing or pre-empting future harm, situational awareness demands a concerted smartness and sensitivity in the here and now: an ability to read situations so as to re-act promptly and avert the next unfortunate event. Within a broader perspective, the concept’s emergence can be read as a response to the faltering promise of security in liberal democracies. It was, however, only the recent experience of terrorist attacks in European cities that has fostered its prevalence. As a tactic of facing threats in urban settings, where situational awareness appears as the “civilized” version of an established military practice, it can also be seen as a concretisation of the recent trend towards resilience. Despite its undeniable societal relevance, there is no systematic social scientific analysis of situational awareness in the domain of security and of its manifold social, political, and legal implications, especially in cities, which are considered most vulnerable to terrorist attacks. The ultimate aim of the project is to empirically investigate how situational awareness is operationalized in the field of urban security: (1) how does the rise of situational awareness form conceptualizations and practices of security? (2) How does the turn to situational awareness shape the perceptions of vulnerable cities and the use of urban space? (3) And what forms of subjectivity and collectivity does situational awareness project and produce? The project captures the shift towards situational awareness by tracing the transnational and translocal transfer of knowledge and strategic concepts; by empirically examining recently launched police trainings in Germany where Federal and Provincial Police officers prepare to deal with “life threatening situations”; and by analyzing how the design of urban space changes under the predicament of terrorist threats. The proposed project can be seen as a major contribution to the analysis of this essential and yet underestimated aspect of governing security and managing risks in the 21st century.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
