Imagining Numbers: Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security

Abstract

Aviation security is a vital but under-studied component of contemporary security. This article uses the Foucauldian notion of a ` dispositif of security' to understand how policies, practices, and institutions of aviation security are arranged to surveil, police, and control mobile populations. Moving beyond sovereign accounts of law or disciplinary descriptions of incarceration, the analysis of the dispositif demonstrates the ever-expanding areas of life that are colonized by `security' and `risk'. I argue that the general strategy of quantification and the specific tactic of the expert panel both illustrate how the invocation of risk allows for new and expanding security practices, and also masks the depoliticization of the airport and civil aviation.