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1Vital Interests Summary
Lesson 1
Ansell (2019) The Protective State
Chapter 1
The state protects citizens from many different harms. People depend on government regulation to
ensure the safety of virtually every human activity. This protective role is at the heart of an unspoken
social contract between state and society (citizens give up certain rights and in return they expect
protection). The official meaning of “protect” means “to defend or guard from danger or injury”. Yet
the state does not only protect people from physical harm (infrastructure, data, environment). The
state also hold a “responsibility to protect” on an international level.
The welfare state and protective state are overlapping concepts. However, the welfare state
provides “social protection” against the unexpected events of the labour market. The protection
state seeks protections against discrete harms, accidents, hazards, threats, and risks. The protective
state has become more elaborate and extensive, but its protective role has become more politically
contested. The state’s protective role is in fight with moral ambiguity (the lack of certainty whether
something is right or wrong). To protect, the state may sometimes infringe on civil liberties or rights.
Protection serves a basic source of political legitimation. The increasing importance of protection as a
logic of governing. It offers a lens for understanding a range of trends and developments that fall
between traditional analytical categories such as social welfare, public health, and criminal justice.
Protective state politics features:
1. Debates about prevention (prevention versus reaction)
2. Its focus on risk
3. Its tendency to securitise issues
1. It is often expected that a state not only reacts after a injurious event has occurred, but also that it
can prevent such accidents and disasters from happening in the firs place. This shift towards
preventions represents changing perceptions about the causes of harm. An accident was first seen as
unavoidable but now as preventable. Reaction is not good enough anymore: “In reaction to failed
prevention, more prevention is proposed”.
2. The protective state has expanded its focus on risk and how to respond to it (risk assessment). The
protective state does not simply protect against risk, it also uses risk as a governing technique. The
use of risk management helps to rationalize demands upon the state, and limit the fallout from
failures to protect. There is however criticism that it has reinforced a precautionary approach to risk
leading to overestimating threats. There is also the debate with whom the threat lies.
3. Securitization is extending the security issues beyond military security. The politics of the
protective state tend to widen the scope of securitization (which risks will fall under the security
umbrella). Which security and safety issues will fall under the jurisdiction of the state.
Chapter 2
The state’s protective role was first primarily focused on preventing foreign invasions, maintaining
public order, and to some extent safeguarding public health. Over the years the protective role of the
state was expanded immensely.
, 2
1. First Wave (1890-1910)
Militaries expanded and professionalized, police forces began to specialize in crime control
and a “sanitation revolution” led the state to expand its role in disease prevention. It also
expanded into the protection of labour, often specialised towards women and children.
2. Second Wave (1930s – 1940s)
Furthering the developments of the previous wave
3. Third Wave (1960s – 1970s)
Protective state buildings = law making developments in the protection of the consumer and
the environment.
4. Fourth Wave (1980s – now)
In the 1980s the “industrial society” was changing into a “risk society”. The concerns about
the consequences of risks were magnified. Crises like the AIDS crisis and 9/11 set the most
recent developments of the protective state in motion.
The contemporary protective state is born because of the rising expectations about being protected
and the fear, anxiety, and distrust that comes with personal loss of control over protection (paradox).
On the one hand, the development of science, technology etc led to higher expectations about what
could and should be controlled (risk wise). On the other hand, this development has led us to take
greater risks, creating “manufactured risks”.
The rise of the protective state has to do with the expansion of the “policy state”. It can
institutionalize concern about protecting citizens by creating policies and programs. It can also
increase concern about some risks and reveal new risks through research.
There is also the “medicalization” of issues. The legitimacy and authority of medical science is used to
rationalize problems and their solutions in medical terms. Science both discovers potential harms
and justifies action to prevent them, while also producing harms.
Another source of the protective state has been the “rights revolution”. The expansion of the
concept of rights can lead to new political changes that claim it is now a public problem, so should be
protected. Human rights have changed the political agenda.
The expansion of the protective state may also result partly from a view of the desirability of using
regulatory instruments to deal with complex problems. States have moved away from the concept of
“social citizenship”, which goes hand in hand with the shift from redistributive politics to regulatory
and coercive politics.
Consumer mobilisation is another source of the expanding protective state. This has led to the
responsibility and the burden of consumer-oriented problems to shift towards producers instead of
consumers themselves.
The shifting role of public health has also contributed to the transformation of the protective state. In
the nineteenth century, the state’s role in population health increased across urbanizing and
industrializing countries, and its capacity to intervene to improve sanitation and prevent infectious
diseases. Science and medicine played a central role in supporting and defending this expanded state
role.
Reconfigured by the end of the Cold War, the rise of terrorism, and globalization, a new security
environment has also contributed to the transformation of the protective state. The breakdown of
the bipolar Cold War security logic has led to a more fluid situation unshaped threats and penetrable
borders. Among the consequences of these shifts has been the securitization of a wider range of
issues, and an erosion of the boundary between domestic and international security.
, 3
Lakoff & Coellier (2015) Vital Systems Security
Modern biopolitics aims to ensure the health and wellbeing of national populations. Whereas
classical sovereignty sought to ensure the security of the state itself. Vital systems security arose
with the evolution of the biopolitical government, beginning in the early 20 th century. With
modernisation an industrialisation it became clear to policymakers that our collective life had
become dependent upon interlinked systems (transportation, electricity, water). They became
potential sources of vulnerability.
There are risks of ‘first modernity’ (unemployment, disability) which were distributed over
populations in regular and predictable ways. These could therefore easily be managed. Risks of
‘second modernity’ are impossible to calculate based on historical patterns, but can have
catastrophic consequences. Just like biopolitics, vital systems security aim to foster the health and
welfare of populations. However, populationl security addresses first modernity risks and vital
systems security with second modernity. Vital systems security does not rely on statistical analysis of
past events to generate knowledge about security threats, but rather on the simulation or enactment
of potential future events.
Vital system security arose in the first half of the 20 th century, because of the increasing dependence
of modern society on these systems. With the intensifying of the Cold War and the rise of a nuclear
there, there was a shift of the demands of non-military defence. Therefore there was a rise of
vulnerability reduction and emergency preparedness.
Kaul, Grunberg & Stern (1999) Defining Global Public Goods
Global public goods must meet two criteria. The first (1) is that their benefits have strong qualities of
publicness (there is no rivalry for the consumption of the product, and no one can be excluded from
consuming the product). The second (2) is that the benefits are quasi universal in terms of countries,
people (socio-economic), and generations (intergenerational solidarity) ( = GLOBAL).
, 4
Pure public goods are, as said above, non-rivalrous in consumption and nonexcludable. Examples
are: traffic lights, peace, and dikes. When these characteristics are missing, then something is a
private good. Some goods however possess mixed benefits. These are called impure public goods.
They only partly meet the criteria. When somethings is non-rivalrous but excludable it is called club
goods (nato membership), and when something is nonexcludable but rivalrous it is called common
pool resources (fishing at sea, concert tickets).
A pure global public good is marked by universality- that is, it benefits all countries, people and
generations. An impure global public good would tend towards universality in that it would benefit
more than one group of countries, and would not discriminate against any population segment or set
of generations. A merit good are goods subsidized by the government because their existence or
their consumption is highly valued by the community (e.g. passports).
Final global public goods are outcomes rather than “goods” in the standard sense. They may be
tangible (“aanraakbaar”) (such as the environment, or the common heritage of mankind) or
intangible (such as peace or financial stability). Global public bads are things like financial crisis or
global diseases (covid). Intermediate global public goods, such as international regimes, contribute
towards the provision of final global public goods.
These global good (final and intermediate)s get produced in the absence of a global government with
the use of negotiation and cooperation (or fail to). Global public good have supply problems as their
beneficiary groups are likely to be extremely large. And there are also intergovernmental negotiations
that need to take place, with each nation holding their own morals and self-interest. They act like
private actors. With this also comes the questions of who defines what should be prioritizes
(prioritisation), and who determines which GPG are accessible to which population groups (access).
Externalities are when an individual or firm does not bear all the costs (negative) or benefits
(positive). Something is noted as positive (public good) or negative (public bad) depending on the
consequences for third parties. This also depends on what a society prioritises.
Because public goods are non-rivalrous in consumption and nonexcludable, they typically face supply
problems (market failure). The two main problems affecting this are free riding and the prisoner’s
dilemma. The free rider problem (public good) is a phenomenon in which someone is able to take
advantage of the benefits without burdening himself or free himself of trouble and lay the burden on
others. The prisoners dilemma (public good) describes a situation in which there is a lack of
information leading to a suboptimal outcome, wherein both parties can still improve their results.
This can also happen on a global level: will a country cut back its co2 emission for the greater good,
or not to have an economical benefit towards other countries. Tragedy of the commons (common
pool resources) has the reason of ‘why limit yourself if you are not sure others will?’. Think for
example about recycling.
Lecture
Safety and security are protection from harm (threats or dangers) against acquired values to a state,
nation, group, or individual. A temporary definition of vital interests is that it is what the state
protects. However, protection is a moving target.
(1) Protection is politics: you need to look at how power is used to frame and set the agenda,
since politics is decided by power and power relations.
(2) Protection is layered: history influences how we think about issues, technology helps us
with prevention but also makes us more vulnerable, and globalisation and its increasingly
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