Aradau, Claudia, and Rens van Munster. "The Time/Space of Preparedness: Anticipating the ‘Next Terrorist Attack". Space and Culture, Vol.15, No.2 (2012): 98-109.

Aradau, Claudia, and Rens van Munster. "The Time/Space of Preparedness: Anticipating the ‘Next Terrorist Attack". Space and Culture, Vol.15, No.2 (2012): 98-109.

• Society has become obsessed by preparing for the possible effects of the next terrorist act or major disaster. Since knowing and preparing for a hypothetical future event is impossible, the state has responded to the fact that it cannot control time by increasing securitizing the spaces in which a terrorist act could potentially take place (98-99, 103-104).
• The traditional Western mode of perceiving the future was religious millenarianism, an acceptance that the only known future event was the second coming of Christ and the end of the world. In the 16th Century, this view began to be challenged by a rationalist philosophical tradition that held that future events could be predicted and prepared for; this view blended with emerging modernist beliefs that the progression of time was a narrative of progress (99).
• This rationalist tradition created the contemporary conception of 'risk', an understanding that the known potentialities of the future can be controlled for through actions taken in the present (100).
• The insurance industry represents the expansion of capitalist forces into the future by the creation of capitalist market relations based on probabilities and predictions of future events and actions. Importantly, this creates a financial incentive to ensure stability and the status quo, since now present actors have interests in maintaining contemporary economic relationships into the future because of insurance, loans, and mortgages (100).
• Unlike other forms of risk, terrorist attacks are novel and thus cannot be calculated based on historical experiences, as the next terrorist attack to expected to subvert all expectations and preparations. Instead, preparations have focused on anticipating the worse-case scenarios and creating systems to prevent them from occurring (101).
• The removal of time as a focus of study in terrorist attacks privileges the reaction to events at the cost of understanding violence as a temporal and social event. There is no attempt to explain or understand the lead-up to the terrorist attack or why it has occurred; the only topic of study is a planned reaction (105).