Luis Lobo-Guerrero - Böcker

Insurance is the world’s largest economic industry, providing a form of security that more than triples global defence expenditure. However, little is known about the form of security insurance provides. This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance. This work seeks to argue that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security central to the understanding of contemporary liberal governance and security. Lobo-Guerrero theorizes insurance as a biopolitical effect that results from the continuous interaction of an ‘entrepreneurial form of power’, and traditional forms of sovereign security. Through rich empirical cases and a unique theorization, the book breaks apart the traditional division between security studies, political economy and political theory. The author explores this theory in relation to specific issues such as the use of life insurance in the molecular age, the use of insurance to securitize against environmental catastrophic risk, specialist products such as kidnap and ransom insurance, as well as the use of insurance to counter maritime piracy in the twenty-first century. Providing an important and original contribution to the study of the biopolitics of security, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of security studies, international relations and international political economy.

Insurance is the world’s largest economic industry, providing a form of security that more than triples global defence expenditure. However, little is know about the form of security insurance provides. This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance. This work seeks to argue that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security central to the understanding of contemporary liberal governance and security. Lobo-Guerrero theorizes insurance as a biopolitical effect that results from the continuous interaction of an ‘entrepreneurial form of power’, and traditional forms of sovereign security. Through rich empirical cases and a unique theorization, the book breaks apart the traditional division between security studies, political economy and political theory. The author explores this theory in relation to specific issues such as the use of life insurance in the molecular age, the use of insurance to securitize against environmental catastrophic risk, specialist products such as kidnap and ransom insurance, as well as the use of insurance to counter maritime piracy in the twenty-first century. Providing an important and original contribution to the study of the biopolitics of security, this work will be of great interest to all scholars of security studies, international relations and international political economy.Insuring War: https://www.routledge.com/products/search?keywords=insuring+warInsuring Life: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Life-Value-Security-and-Risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415716079

Insurance is a central, if until now ignored, instrument of war in the modern period. Ever since the eighteenth century, interaction between governments and insurers in Western countries has materialised in the form of war risk schemes that have contributed to the waging of war and the preservation of peace. The operation of those schemes has given rise to a curious, if not innocent, association between practices of statehood and practices of risk, which are theorised here under the label of ‘insurantial sovereignty’.The book draws on the British experience of using maritime insurance as an instrument of war during the Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, and the early twenty-first century. It asks, what happens, when, under conditions of war, the sovereign adopts insurantial imaginaries and practices into its rationalities of government? In doing so the book makes a novel contribution to the understanding of liberal security and liberal governance which is central to the theory of Political Science and International Relations, the understanding of international political sociology, and international political economy. The book follows Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk as the second of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. Insuring Security: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Security-Biopolitics-security-and-risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415522854Insuring Life: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Life-Value-Security-and-Risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415716079

This book is a contribution to the scholarly engagement with the wider problem of governing through risk and the politics of uncertainty. It takes life insurance as an empirical site from which to ask: what is the kind of governance created through insurance an instance of, and how does it contribute to the transcendence of liberalism? By making a distinction between capable life as object of insurance, and potential life as that which escapes its control, the book conducts a historical epistemological analysis of the problems of valuation, truth production, securitisation, classification, and gendering that constitute life insurance products and practices.Insuring Life offers a critical engagement with the epistemology of life insurance to demonstrate the unnecessary and precarious character of the conditions that make this instrument of liberal governance possible. It concludes that the transcendence of liberalism relies on the technological agency of these instruments and that its challenge begins by redefining the terms under which the potential of life, if invaluable, is to be thought as event. The book follows Insuring War as the third of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. It will be of great use to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students of political economy, critical security studies and political theory, the biopolitics of security and post-structural politics. Insuring War:https://www.routledge.com/products/search?keywords=insuring+warInsuring Security: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Security-Biopolitics-security-and-risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415522854

Insurance is a central, if until now ignored, instrument of war in the modern period. Ever since the eighteenth century, interaction between governments and insurers in Western countries has materialised in the form of war risk schemes that have contributed to the waging of war and the preservation of peace. The operation of those schemes has given rise to a curious, if not innocent, association between practices of statehood and practices of risk, which are theorised here under the label of ‘insurantial sovereignty’.The book draws on the British experience of using maritime insurance as an instrument of war during the Napoleonic Wars, the two World Wars, and the early twenty-first century. It asks, what happens, when, under conditions of war, the sovereign adopts insurantial imaginaries and practices into its rationalities of government? In doing so the book makes a novel contribution to the understanding of liberal security and liberal governance which is central to the theory of Political Science and International Relations, the understanding of international political sociology, and international political economy. The book follows Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk as the second of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world.

This book is a contribution to the scholarly engagement with the wider problem of governing through risk and the politics of uncertainty. It takes life insurance as an empirical site from which to ask: what is the kind of governance created through insurance an instance of, and how does it contribute to the transcendence of liberalism? By making a distinction between capable life as object of insurance, and potential life as that which escapes its control, the book conducts a historical epistemological analysis of the problems of valuation, truth production, securitisation, classification, and gendering that constitute life insurance products and practices.Insuring Life offers a critical engagement with the epistemology of life insurance to demonstrate the unnecessary and precarious character of the conditions that make this instrument of liberal governance possible. It concludes that the transcendence of liberalism relies on the technological agency of these instruments and that its challenge begins by redefining the terms under which the potential of life, if invaluable, is to be thought as event. The book follows Insuring War as the third of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. It will be of great use to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students of political economy, critical security studies and political theory, the biopolitics of security and post-structural politics. Insuring War:https://www.routledge.com/products/search?keywords=insuring+warInsuring Security: https://www.routledge.com/Insuring-Security-Biopolitics-security-and-risk/Lobo-Guerrero/p/book/9780415522854

This volume seeks to collectively explore how maps can be used to understand the making of European empires, how the epistemological practices embedded in them can be approached to understand European imperial space-making, and how maps can be seen as representations of imaginaries of connectivity.Rehearsing mapping’s past and its multifarious relations with European imperial orders is not merely an historical exercise to contribute to a global history of cartography. What binds the several interventions is rather an awareness that looking at a particular moment of the past with composite methodologies and interdisciplinary gazes may harbour potential discoveries on the context-embedded relations between mapping, connectivity, and European empire to which we are not yet attuned. By exploring the imaginaries of the world in the mapping of Western modern empires, the book also links to the burgeoning literature on the history of international relations and empire. The emphasis on empires serves here as an important corrigendum for IR’s state centrism and Eurocentrism and contributes to further erode the myth of Westphalia.

This edited collection addresses the problem of how the creation of novel spaces of governance relates to imaginaries of connectivity in time. While connectivity seems almost ubiquitous today, it has been imagined and practiced in various ways and to varying political effects in different historical and geographical contexts. Often the conception of new connectivities also gives birth to new spaces of governance. The political denomination of spaces – whether maritime, continental, social, or virtual – reflects the situatedness of power. Yet, such crafting of new spaces also expresses particular imaginaries and technologies of connectivity that make governance possible. Whereas the study of international relations has traditionally focused on the role of agency and structure in power relations, the affects, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that intervene in how groups of people connect in given times have not attracted much scholarly attentionOverall, the detailed and original case studies examined in the book range from the 16th century, to the 19th century, to the present, and from Spain, to the Maritime Alps, to Germany, to the Mediterranean, to China, to East Asia. The historical and geographical variety of the cases serves to highlight the diversity of the meaning and function of connectivity in the constitution of novel spaces of governance.

This volume seeks to collectively explore how maps can be used to understand the making of European empires, how the epistemological practices embedded in them can be approached to understand European imperial space-making, and how maps can be seen as representations of imaginaries of connectivity.Rehearsing mapping’s past and its multifarious relations with European imperial orders is not merely an historical exercise to contribute to a global history of cartography. What binds the several interventions is rather an awareness that looking at a particular moment of the past with composite methodologies and interdisciplinary gazes may harbour potential discoveries on the context-embedded relations between mapping, connectivity, and European empire to which we are not yet attuned. By exploring the imaginaries of the world in the mapping of Western modern empires, the book also links to the burgeoning literature on the history of international relations and empire. The emphasis on empires serves here as an important corrigendum for IR’s state centrism and Eurocentrism and contributes to further erode the myth of Westphalia.