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The Securitization of Catastrophic Events: Trauma, Enactment, and Preparedness


Exercises
Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 2012 37: 227
DOI: 10.1177/0304375412449787

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Catastrophic Events: Trauma, DOI: 10.1177/0304375412449787
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Enactment, and Preparedness
Exercises

Claudia Aradau1 and Rens van Munster2

Abstract
Psychological knowledge has become incorporated into a range of security practices, discourses, and
interventions in catastrophic events, including terrorism. By engaging the existing literature on the
medicalization and psychologization of security, this article reads the enactment knowledge deployed in
preparedness exercises from the perspective of psychodrama and sociodrama rather than that of psy-
choanalysis or psychosocial risk management. Enactment has become an important mode of knowledge
for the governance of terrorism, as preparedness exercises deploy action methods, drama, enactment, and
performance to prepare for unexpected, catastrophic events. Taking seriously the conceptualization of
enactment, as deployed in psychodrama and sociodrama, can also challenge the securitization of cata-
strophic events. The article concludes that enactment, which foregrounds action rather than speech, and
suggests that meaning follows action, can also offer critical insights into securitization theory.

Keywords
enactment, terrorism, securitization, trauma, preparedness, psychology

Introduction
‘‘What would you do in the wake of a global catastrophe? Even if you survived it, could you survive the
aftermath?’’ Thus reads the teaser for The Colony, a popular reality show on Discovery Channel that
invites the viewer ‘‘to bear witness’’ to how a group of carefully selected volunteers with differing skills
‘‘will survive and rebuild in a world without electricity, running water, government or outside commu-
nication.’’1 To add an additional touch of catastrophic reality to the makeup, Season Two hosts the sur-
vivors in a disaster-struck and abandoned neighborhood on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana: ‘‘The Colony’s
simulated environment had been left decimated by Hurricane Katrina, a naturally occurring disaster
zone that was slated to be bulldozed and turned into a public park. Empty buildings, weedy streets and
the backwoods are all the colonists have to work with as they scavenge essentials for survival from their
surroundings while fending off threats such as wild animals and malicious outsiders.’’2 As the

1
King’s College London, Strand, London, United Kingdom
2
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), Strandgade, Copenhagen, Denmark

Corresponding Author:
Claudia Aradau, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
Email: claudia.aradau@kcl.ac.uk

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228 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

participants get on with on-camera surviving, their actions are punctuated by commentary from medical,
psychological, and homeland security experts who remind the viewers of the larger social and psycho-
logical issues at stake in managing, living through, and recovering from catastrophic events.
The deployment of these three types of expertise—medical, psychological, and security—to
make sense of life in The Colony is no coincidence and reflects a wider trend in the governance
of catastrophic events. Psychological knowledge of trauma has become inserted at the heart of war,
conflict, and indeed nearly any major disruptive event, constructing a continuum between security,
emergency planning, and psychological expertise.3 As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman observe
in the introduction to their book Empire of Trauma, ‘‘[i]n the days following the attacks on the
World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, an estimated nine thousand mental
health specialists, including seven hundred psychiatrists, intervened to offer psychological support
to survivors, witnesses and local residents.’’4 In International Relations (IR), the relation between
psychological and security knowledge has so far been analyzed in two ways: trauma and security
are either coterminous or oppositional. While the former approach analyzes the insertion of psy-
chological expertise within the governance of security, the latter stresses the idea of trauma as a
shock or rupture that cannot be grasped and resists all representation.5 According to the latter,
traumatic events are characterized by experiences of bodily vulnerability, which are not just a pri-
vate matter but also a political occasion for the reinvention and rearticulation of social ties and
collective identity.
Against this backdrop of the problem of knowledge in the governance of catastrophic events, this
article foregrounds a different interpretation of trauma that complicates these two approaches. Tak-
ing its point of departure in the notion that trauma constitutes a form of knowledge in the governance
of catastrophic events, it nonetheless suggests that this knowledge need not necessarily be cotermi-
nous with security knowledge and deployed for the purposes of security. Rather, psychological
knowledge itself is heterogeneous and can create frictions and tensions with security knowledge.
To illustrate this argument, in this article we focus on ‘‘enactment’’ as a particular mode of psycho-
logical knowledge in response to catastrophic events which can have traumatic consequences.
Variedly named as psychodrama, sociodrama, enactment, drama therapy, or action methods, we
argue that this approach is not just a form of knowledge that can be deployed to support and further
security knowledge and practice; it can also problematize the securitization of catastrophic events in
the context of current preparedness exercises.
Enactment has not only become an important mode of knowledge deployed in response to cat-
astrophic events such as terrorism or other weather-related disasters. If taken seriously as a mode
of knowledge competing with other modes of psychological knowledge, enactment can offer a
critical vantage point for current security practices. Reading exercises as enactments opens up a
set of questions: how can we understand the relation between trauma and catastrophic events, and
how can we think through the relation between enactment and psy-knowledge on one hand and
preparedness exercises and security knowledge on the other? To answer these questions, we pro-
ceed in three stages. We start by exploring the role of exercises as security measures responding to
catastrophic events. We then interrogate the role that ‘‘trauma’’ plays both as a supplementary lan-
guage and knowledge to govern catastrophic events. In a third step, we examine how enactment
knowledge can both shed light on a series of security interventions and securitization practices and
start to open a space for a critique of these practices. We conclude with a few remarks on the
importance of introducing ‘‘enactment’’ in discussions of security and securitization.

Exercising Security
The governance of catastrophic events, which are unexpected, may come by surprise and cause
large-scale damage to social and economic systems has led to new modalities of governing

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Aradau and van Munster 229

insecurity that go beyond traditional techniques of risk management. In this context, Stephen Collier
has aptly argued that there has been a move away from the archival–statistical knowledge involved
in risk prevention to an enactment knowledge that is produced by ‘‘acting out’’ future threats in order
to understand their societal impact.6 He traces genealogies of enactment back to war games and
simulations, the Dutch flood models in the 1920s, the earthquake insurance loss models in the
1930 and more generally post-WWII civil defense planning.7 Exercises are a privileged modality
of enactment knowledge to prepare for and mitigate the impact of a future, potentially catastrophic
event. If Collier traces the genealogy of exercises to modeling and civil defense planning, Tracy
Davis has pointed out the particular theatrical knowledge that is involved in exercising: ‘‘Rehearsal
was the predominant (and yet historically uncelebrated) technique of exploring the viability of civil
defense plans and policies.’’8 Exercises are rehearsals of the event to come and deploy enactment
and performance knowledge to act out and prepare organizations to respond to surprising and unex-
pected events:9

Exercises allow participants to ‘‘practice’’ the performance of duties, tasks, or operations very similar to
the way they would be performed in a real emergency. An exercise can test or evaluate emergency oper-
ation plans, procedures, facilities—or any combination thereof. The exercise should simulate a realistic
event and allow the company to evaluate how all participants performed.10

Exercises address bodies at the level of (affective) action. Davis distinguishes between rehearsal and
performance in order to challenge the premise that performance encompasses everything and that there
is little ontological difference between exercises and other acts. What made rehearsal and theatrical
knowledge particularly appealing to civil authorities was that ‘‘rehearsal imprinted behaviors upon the
body, and in so doing created cognitive conditioning and a corporeal memory more likely to be produced
in an emergency.’’12 Peter Adey and Ben Anderson define exercises as temporal intervals belonging nei-
ther wholly to the present nor the future but acting on the interval of an emergency by which they ‘‘mean
the space-time after an event has occurred within which response must be employed so as to halt the
turning over of an ‘emergency’ into a widespread catastrophe or disaster.’’13 For instance, a large crisis
management exercise held in Denmark to prepare relevant authorities for the upcoming COP15 focused
on a set of ‘‘realistic worst-case scenarios’’ that could happen during the climate conference, including
activist protests, a terrorist attack, a plane crash at Copenhagen airport, water pollution at the conference
venue, an earthquake in Norway, as well as a large storm in Copenhagen. Claiming a high degree of rea-
lism (although most of the events are unlikely to happen individually, let alone in concert), the exercise
was said to contribute valuably to planning for COP15 and the general ability to deal with complex situa-
tions.11 The message is clear: complex situations can only be grasped if they are enacted.
Decisions about the event, what is at stake, and what should happen next, play an important part
in the ways in which the event unfolds and exercise leaders will often present participants with
follow-up scenarios based on the decisions taken along the way. Preparedness exercises break
down the event, its potential magnitude, uncertainty and unknowability into manageable elements.
They focus on interpersonal relations—for instance in the workplace or within communities—or
on inter-agency arrangements. This conversion of catastrophe into incidents (be those major) to be
managed also has the purpose of fostering resilience. Preparedness converts the possibility of trau-
matic disorders following catastrophic events into a series of affects that can be deployed for the
purposes of resilience.14
The objective of exercises, then, is to experiment with the event in order to create new under-
standings, where the ‘‘emergency becomes a spatial and temporal threshold involving the remaking
of the here and now.’’15 However, rather than a remaking of the here and now through exercising
catastrophic events, exercises are often characterized by a continuity and congruency with everyday
life. Worst-case scenarios used for exercises frequently only function to train and discipline participants

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230 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

for all kinds of other, everyday issues and incidents. From floods and other weather disasters to a poten-
tial Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) emergency, preparedness exercises create
worst-case scenarios in order to foster readiness for anything smaller. Preparing for the future is
based on worst-case scenarios not because of the event itself, but because ‘‘[t]his helps the emer-
gency services and all those who respond to incidents of this nature to prepare for similar events
of smaller scale, which are more likely to occur, as well as for worst case scenario.’’16 As outlined
in a document providing advice for businesses in the UK, Expecting the Unexpected, preparedness
for a terrorist attack is key to any other form of future disruption: ‘‘If your plan enables you to cope
with a worst-case scenario, it will also help you deal more easily with lower-impact incidents.’’17
Exercises often focus on minute details of everyday life and provide familiar signposts in the face
of disruption. For instance, Exercise Filbert, enacting a crowd-related incident at a football match,
identifies a set of seven general recommendations for the future, three of which cover everyday
issues such as the color of clothing and the recording of reports:

The emergency planning team should address the question of the type and colouring of identifi-
able clothing for non-uniformed personnel attending the scene of an incident [ . . . ]
All agencies should ensure that emergencies plans are kept up-to-date, evaluated on a regular
basis and that staff are aware of, and trained for, their roles.
All evidence about the way the disaster was handled and all relevant pans, correspondence and
training records must be preserved. The keeping of logs and reports is of the utmost importance
(see para. 48).18

The conclusions of exercise Enki, which took place in one of the London boroughs in 2005, show
in starker light the role of ordinary details as a crucial element in the maintenance of roles, proce-
dures, and social relations more generally. Based on evaluations by local community and faith rep-
resentatives, the conclusions of the exercise bring out, among others, the import of minute details as
well as interpersonal and community relations.

14.1.2 Identified problems.


14.1.2.1. The gowns that victims were asked to change into (prior to decontamination) would not be suit-
able as they were too short and did not fully cover arms and legs. Head coverings would also be required.
The materials were semi-transparent which would not be acceptable. A thicker, darker material would be
required to be adequate.
14.1.2.2. Tent opening at the end of the decontamination process did not allow for privacy/modesty.
14.3.1.2. Signage of the whole centre was poor and not pictorial.

On the positive side, the evaluation notes that.


14.3.3.1. Catering was suitable for cultural and faith requirements.
14.3.3.2. Rest centre workers were very friendly.19

The guidelines for large-scale Danish exercises stress the need for a guest program that can accom-
modate visitors to the exercise. Among other things, this program should include the practical prob-
lem of guided tours during the exercise, food, and accommodation of visitors, as well as parking
possibilities.20 Exercise Orion, funded by the EU Civil Protection Financial Instrument included
a VIP program as one of its main aims. Although the exercise designers were careful to distinguish
the VIP program from ‘‘exercise tourism,’’ the program entailed a visit to the field exercise site at
Fort Widley in Hampshire and a London-based civil protection conference and evening dinner at the

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Aradau and van Munster 231

House of Lords. All these elements oscillate between the enactment of disruption and that of famil-
iarity and everydayness.21
The making and attuning of resilient subjects to the events of work and ordinary interaction rather
than unexpected and disruptive events is also evident in the temporal expansion of exercise prepara-
tion and planning. In focusing on the time of the civil defense exercise, Davis distinguished the
rehearsal from the event itself. However, exercise planners point out the temporal extension of exer-
cises. In the report about Exercise Enki, the Local Authority Group manager, Roger Brett, noted that
‘‘This is not an exercise that can be run regularly with too short a gap. From inception to completion
it has taken almost 18 months.’’ In another exercise report, it was noted that ‘‘the police planning
team spent some 371 hours preparing Exercise Babel Fulcrum together with colleagues from all par-
ticipating agencies.’’22 A report on exercise planning for the US Congress also noted the temporal
extension of exercises: ‘‘Some Oregon venue participants spent more than two years on TOPOFF 4
from initial planning through the preparation of AARs and implementation of improvement
plans.’’23 Enactments do not last only for the one, two or three days for which exercises are designed,
but expand spatially and temporally to encompass the everydayness of planners, police, nongovern-
mental organizations (NGOs), local authorities, health and fire services, and even volunteers.
The conversion of disruption into everydayness and of traumatic disorders into actionable affects
appears to subsume psychological knowledge about trauma to security knowledge. The next section
explores how this process of equivalence is both made possible and challenged.

Governing Trauma
The naming of events as traumatic invokes the so-called psy-sciences to mediate the relationship
between knowledge and non-knowledge. Although the deployment of psy-knowledge in cata-
strophic events is widespread, the event of a terrorist attack, in particular, has become steeped in
professional psy-knowledge. Following the 9/11 attacks, psychologists have drawn attention to a
host of traumatic effects, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), upon people who experi-
enced the event directly as well as those who experienced it at a distance.24 In 2005, an international
handbook on trauma and terrorism was published with the aim of bringing together the psy-sciences,
security experts, and emergency responders to discuss the psychosocial consequences of terrorism in
children and adults, the centrality of traumatic grief, training programs for mental health profession-
als, and proactive community organization in the face of terrorism.25 Claims by psychological
experts to provide a different way of securing have led Vanessa Pupavac to speak of ‘‘therapeutic
governance,’’ a form of governing that connects psychosocial well-being to security in an attempt
to foster subjects able to cope with risk and insecurity.26 Alison Howell, too, has chronicled how
the psy-disciplines have become present in a range of domains of security politics, particularly
since 9/11. She shows that the psy-disciplines play an increasingly important role in the govern-
ance of victims (individuals in need of care), enemies (pathologized perpetrators in need of psy-
chological intervention), and security providers (soldiers traumatized after deployment).27
Psy-knowledge derives its power from its claim to produce order and security and its promise to
access and tame the unknown where other forms of expertise fall short. In his lectures on the
Abnormal at Collège de France, Michel Foucault argued that psychiatry entered the legal field
exactly by presenting its expertise as a response to the unknowns of crime:

When crime suddenly irrupts, unprepared, implausibly, without motive and without reason, then psy-
chiatry steps forward and says: Even though no one else is able to detect in advance this crime that sud-
denly erupts, psychiatry, as knowledge, as science of mental illness, as knowledge of madness, will be
able to detect precisely this danger that is opaque and imperceptible to everyone else.28

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The naming of events as traumatic opens up the possibility for such events to be reintegrated into
security governance, which confirms and reinforces rather than challenges local, communal, or
national identity. In the Journal of Loss and Trauma, Steger et al. thus argue that, by creating an
‘‘expectation of unpredictable harm [ . . . ], terrorism may impact a nation’s citizens far beyond areas
directly targeted by attacks. A growing body of research suggests that September 11 was a national
trauma in the US.’’29 Equally, one psy-professional observes that ‘‘[e]ven when terrorism is directed
at an individual, it is directed at the community. Its randomness amplifies the whole community’s
fear. As such, terrorism is indeed psychological warfare.’’30 Even if terrorism cannot be stopped by
military or police action, the psy-sciences can help individuals and societies to live with this new
sense of vulnerability: ‘‘Integration of the trauma must take place in all of life’s relevant (ruptured)
systems and cannot be accomplished by the individual alone. Systems can change and recover inde-
pendently of other systems. Rupture repair may be needed in all systems of the survivor, in his or her
community and nation, and in their place in the international community.’’31
Psychologists have also entered exercise enactments and preparations and psychological support has
become an intrinsic part of emergency exercises. As the postexercise report noted for Exercise Filbert, an
exercise based on a crowd-related incident at Leicester City Football Club’s Filbert Street Stadium, ‘‘All
sorts of people will suffer posttraumatic stress reaction to an event like Filbert. People attending the
match, friends and relatives of the deceased and injured, rescue workers, club officials, welfare workers
and various others are all potentially at risk from such reaction. Even people apparently on the fringes of
a disaster can be emotionally affected to a significant degree.’’32 If psychological knowledge to deal with
the effects of unknowable and disruptive events is now integrated in the governance of terrorism and
other catastrophic events, it is important to understand the effects of these modes of knowledge.
Trauma has been subject to much debate in the natural, psychological and human sciences, which all
stress different elements of the relation between mind and body in their understandings of the idea.33
Although its meaning remains contested, the term seems to have first emerged as a pathological term in
the seventeenth century to designate a battle wound or external bodily injury.34 Even though this meaning
continues to inform contemporary usages, since the late nineteenth century, trauma has been increasingly
used in a psychological sense to refer to wounds of the mind rather than those of the body.35 This shift is
sometimes attributed to Freud’s (in many ways flawed) work on sexual trauma, repressed memory, and
hysteria, but by now a large consensus exists that the psychologization of trauma emerged out of
larger debates about the physiology of shock and hysteria, which was defined as the shattering of
a personality due to extreme terror and anxiety.36 In his genealogy of multiple personality disorder,
Ian Hacking has described how psychological knowledge first developed around hypnosis as a way
of accessing and working upon the repressed memories of trauma of female hysterical subjects.37
Later, trauma became increasingly decoupled from female hysteria as its symptoms were thought
to exist also in male subjects, particularly those suffering from ‘‘shell shock’’ during World War
I or what after the Vietnam War has become pathologized as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Psychological knowledge has been divided over the interpretation of trauma and best practices to
deal with those suffering from PTSD. According to Ruth Leys, two paradigms have been domi-
nant.38 The first one, which she refers to as the mimetic paradigm, regards trauma as inherently inter-
nal to the subject. According to this understanding the subject cannot recall or narrate the events that
occurred, which put her at a cognitive distance from knowing what happened. ‘‘The idea is that,
owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated.
As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurtful experience in normal conscious-
ness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by intrusive traumatic memories.’’39 In distinction, the sec-
ond paradigm views trauma not as internal to the subject but as related to and located in the
occurrence of an external event. As Fassin and Rechtman note, trauma has inspired a new language
of the event.40 Critical IR scholars have mainly drawn on this second use of trauma by focusing on
how events such as war, genocide, terrorism, and famine are remembered and narrated as traumas

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Aradau and van Munster 233

for political purposes.41 They generally stress the idea of trauma as a shock or rupture that cannot be
grasped and resists all representation. Hence, any attempt to render trauma understandable or know-
able is doomed to fail: ‘‘Trauma has power over individuals because it is unknowable, it cannot be
put into words. Each experience of trauma is a singularity.’’42 Or as Jenny Edkins puts it, the trauma
of September 11 remains ‘‘something strange and unknowable.’’43
This second perspective generally stresses the transformative impact of traumatic events, which
bring out the bodily vulnerability not just of those directly implicated in these events but also of those
witnessing it from a distance. Cautious not to equate the trauma suffered by survivors and others
directly implicated in catastrophic events, Edkins nevertheless sees trauma as being able to spread dis-
cursively, for example through circulation via television and other media: ‘‘One of the things that gave
the events [9/11] such an impact for many who witnessed them only at a distance was the way in which
the feeling of vulnerability that they brought extended by easy analogy outwards in circles to many
other previously ‘safe’ places.’’44 Bodily vulnerability can be experienced in the loss of the other’s
life, which may have a transformative impact upon the self. Grounding subjectivity in the social vul-
nerability and exposure of corporeal bodies in the public sphere, Judith Butler suggests that mourning
is a political principle through which more cosmopolitan sentiments of belonging can be forged: ‘‘To
grieve, and to make grief itself into a resource for politics is not to be resigned to inaction, but it may be
understood as the slow process by which we develop a point of identification with suffering itself.’’45
Whereas in security politics the other is often encountered as an enemy that is not worth mourning, the
ethical imperative to recognize vulnerability has led IR scholars to inquire into the social and political
conditions by means of which some forms of life appear as more grievable than others. Edkins’ writ-
ings on trauma in particular examine how suffering and traumatic events have entered collective mem-
ory, pointing out that the desire to secure oneself in the face of the other ignores how bodily suffering
can reinvent social ties between self and other.46
Focusing on the traumatic event as an irruption imbued with the experience of bodily loss and
political transformation, IR scholars have generally been inattentive to the ways in which the lan-
guage of trauma also invokes more heterogeneous forms of knowledge. By thinking of trauma as
something unknowable or unrepresentable that reconfigures the boundaries of belonging, it is some-
what ignored that the unknowable is also always an injunction to knowledge.47 For instance, the
understanding of trauma in IR as something unspeakable that ruptures collective identity is itself
a product of a Lacanian psychoanalytical knowledge, which suggests that all psychological and
social structures are inherently unstable due to some ‘‘traumatic kernel’’ at their core. Rather than
resisting knowledge and representation, the unknowability of trauma in this perspective is thus itself
tied to particular therapeutic rationalities and technologies (i.e., the Lacanian objective to traverse
the fantasy or identify with the symptom). The focus on risk calculations and ‘‘therapeutic govern-
ance’’ draws on psychosocial knowledge, while analyses of PTSD and security offer criticisms of
behaviorist and empiricist psychiatric knowledge. Psy-knowledge is, however, more heterogeneous
than Leys’ neat paradigms seem to suggest. One form of psy-knowledge that has not been heeded
in these analyses is that of psychodrama and sociodrama. This form of knowledge is particularly rel-
evant for an understanding of how trauma can be processed in collective settings as it has ‘‘enactment’’
at its center. How does enactment formulate the relation between psy-knowledge and security knowl-
edge? The next section turns to this particular mode of psychological knowledge (enactment), which
focuses on the understanding of traumatic events as collective and proposes particular practices of
dealing (and healing) collective trauma.

The Knowledge of Enactment


By drawing a distinction between the individual and collective processing of traumatic events, psy-
chodrama inserts a different modality of psychological and therapeutic knowledge, one that is

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234 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

directed at collectivities rather than individuals. ‘‘Major traumatic events, such as war, terrorist
bombings, and natural disasters, transcend the realms of individual suffering and enter the universal
and collective sphere,’’ notes Peter Kellerman in his book Sociodrama and Collective Trauma.
‘‘Efforts to support individual trauma survivors and to alleviate community stress are complemen-
tary because major terrorist attacks around the world have taught us that we are all in this together.
There can be no complete healing for anyone as long as the collective sources of trauma remain
unaddressed because, in the long run, collective trauma cannot be healed as isolated events in the
lives of individuals.’’48 Part of the explanation for focusing on collectivities is economic in as far
as proponents of this approach are well aware that individual therapy with trauma victims is an
expensive enterprise and propose group enactment as a more cost-effective intervention.
Nonetheless, psychodrama also builds upon a different understanding of trauma than the one usu-
ally invoked in forms of therapeutic governance. Its source of inspiration is Jacob Levy Moreno, a
Viennese psychologist of Romanian origin, who developed a new approach to healing trauma in
the 1920s. Moreno’s approach to trauma was largely opposed to Freud’s who had considered
trauma intrapersonally in the limited context of the family.49 Initially labeled psychodrama, Mor-
eno’s approach has since developed into a series of methods and perspective that share many of the
analytical tools developed by Moreno: sociodrama, drama therapy, deep action methods, or
enactment.50
Psychodrama, sociodrama, and more generally drama therapy have been widely used to tackle
traumatic events worldwide. If psychodrama focuses in particular on individual therapy, sociodrama
proposes sociotherapy in order to foster cooperative potential and cohesion in a group. Kellerman
notes that sociodrama sessions have been used for major catastrophic events as well as political and
international events such as the rule of the military junta in Argentina and later the Falklands War,
the German election of right-wing extremists in 1989, or the 1999 war in Serbia in which the Serbs
endured 69 days of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing.51 Catastrophic events
such as terrorism are not just seen as traumatic, but also as particularly amenable to sociodramatic
interventions, given the collective dimension of trauma:

Terrorist attacks that target the civilian population have become a daily phenomenon. We regularly wit-
ness cruel bombings in airplanes, trains, embassies, hotels, and buses in Madrid, Istanbul, Bali, Israel,
England, Ireland, and various other places. The effects of such events are not only the direct and imme-
diate death toll and the many injured but also the more widespread terror that in itself is experienced by
the population at large. For example, the attack on the Beslan School in Russia in 2004 brought wide-
spread despair not only to the small community that lost so many of its children and youth but also to
the entire population of Russia, which was severely shaken by the event.52

Both psychodrama and sociodrama draw on the concepts of enactment and catharsis as developed in
performance studies. In this approach, enactment not only uses verbal and nonverbal communication,
but also deploys physical movement and dramatic action. Practitioners define its role as ‘‘to express
unexpressed feelings, gain new insights and understandings, and practice new and more satisfying
behaviours.’’53 As the human mind is ill prepared to deal with surprise, Kellerman argues that ‘‘people
who are inadequately ‘warmed-up’ for change, from a somatic, psychological and social point of view,
will be less likely to adequately cope with a stressful event.’’54 The enactment of trauma is considered
to ‘‘help the protagonist to re-integrate emotionally and to process cognitively (re-cognise) his or her
overwhelming loss and thus to enable the growth of spontaneity that may alleviate the psychological
impact of trauma.’’55 The reprocessing of the traumatic event is supposed to lead to ‘‘action-insight,’’
to a new form of understanding that recovers the normality of the trauma sufferer. Clinical experience,
practitioners often point out, indicates that action methods are often more powerful than paper-and-
pencil tests to understand interpersonal choices and group dynamics.

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Aradau and van Munster 235

The terminology of enactment is widely shared across psychological and psychoanalytical


approaches, although its meaning may vary slightly. For many, re-enactment is a problem that ther-
apy needs to deal with. As trauma severs psyche and soma, cognition and action, the problem for
therapy is that body and mind re-enact traumatic situations even when these are over. Trauma itself
has been defined as a physical and mental short-circuiting.56 This distinction has important theore-
tical and practical implications for psychological knowledge. As a factsheet on Behavioural Re-
enactment puts it succinctly, ‘‘In behavioral re-enactment of the trauma, the self may play the role
of either victim or victimizer.’’57 Much of the psychological literature has therefore paid close atten-
tion to the linkage between trauma and crime—it was the latter part of the connection, that of crime
or the ‘‘victimizer’’ position that is widely discussed in the literature.58 Yet, psycho- and sociodra-
matic perspectives bring out two other significant effects of re-enactment on the psyche. The first is
that acts, actions, and acting are foregrounded. Participants are triggered into action before they
understand the situation, which only becomes clear to them through the actions they undertake.
Thus catharsis and insight are important elements of sociodrama. Catharsis helps participants
acknowledge emotions they may have been unaware of. Insight means that participants come to
view a particular problem in a different way.59 The second follows from this and suggests that
meaning is created and re-created through action and enactment. Thus, manuals of trauma treat-
ment also advise on the use of enactment for the purposes of therapy: ‘‘The enactment of trauma,
which forms exposure to the trauma, is of special importance in the treatment of PTSD [ . . . ]
Indeed, enactment is in-vitro exposure of the trauma during the therapy session.’’60 Used in col-
lective settings, enactment practices foreground action. Using role-play, dramatic staging, and
improvisation, enactment is also seen to offer an adequate group setting for the exploration of col-
lective trauma. As Moreno has formulated the importance of enactment, ‘‘[t]he verbal level is
transcended and included in the level of action. There are several forms of enactment, pretending
to be in a role, re-enactment or acting out a past scene, living out a problem presently pressing,
creating life on the stage or testing oneself for the future.’’61
Although enactments usually take place after the event, this is not necessarily always the case. As
Moreno has already suggested, enactments can be retrospective, present-based, or prospective. It is
through enactment that, according to Moreno, new ways of knowing can be fostered. In prepared-
ness exercises, enactment does not fully capture the idea of performance as a bodily exercise that can
lead to new understandings. It transforms the challenge of surprise by breaking down the event into
manageable and familiar elements, which are positioned within existing social hierarchies and
relations. It also restricts the possibilities of new knowledge by breaking down collectives into
autonomous experts and legally responsible individuals and agencies. Enactment, however, as
deployed by Moreno and psychodramatic/sociodramatic approaches to trauma aimed to enable indi-
vidual and group learning and change. The psychodramatic/sociodramatic knowledge of enactment
may also offer a critical vantage point by drawing attention to the politics of knowledge in securitiz-
ing practices. Particularly, drawing on psychodramatic and sociodramatic approaches, enactments can
shed different light on the politics of security act. Recently, Jef Huysmans has suggested that secur-
itization theory needs to shift from an exclusive attention to speech and the conditions of uttering
to a problematization of the notion of ‘‘acts,’’ which according to him is a useful analytical concept
for bringing back discussions about the political stakes invested in a securitizing move.62 Whereas
Huysmans bases his discussion of security acts on the work of Engin Isin for whom ‘‘rupture’’ is
an act’s central quality,63 a psychodramatic rendering of acts—as enactment—shows that a politics
formulated around the act does not necessarily posit (revolutionary) rupture but also engages in the
contestation of knowledge. ‘‘Action,’’ ‘‘acting out,’’ ‘‘enactment,’’ and ‘‘re-enactment’’ all are impor-
tant stakes in psychological knowledge.
So far, securitization scholars have focused on developing a speech act approach to security by
arguing, in a variety of ways, that security is a performative speech act embedded in a social context

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236 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

within which the speaker and the audience are positioned.64 Although this opens up for the
possibility of studying psychological expertise and the circumstances under which it may be author-
itatively invoked in discourses of security, this literature cannot capture securitization as a process of
enactment. Enacting security follows a distinct logic to discursive processes of securitization, as it
foregrounds action, drama, and performance over speech, language, and performativity. This also
reverses the relationship between meaning and action in as far as enactment suggests that under-
standing follows performance—rather than the other way around. At the same time, the psycholo-
gical knowledge of enactment may also offer a critical vantage by drawing attention to the politics of
knowledge in securitizing practices. If the concept of the act indeed is a useful one for bringing back
discussions about the political stakes invested in a securitizing move, psychodramatic knowledge
can problematize some of the assumptions at work in current preparedness exercises, where enact-
ment functions to confirm preexisting social hierarchies. With the temporal and spatial extension of
preparedness exercises to everyday life, the reconceptualization of security as enactment opens up a
space for critically engaging the governance of catastrophic events.

Conclusion
This article has explored enactment as a specific mode of psychological knowledge deployed to
govern collective traumas beyond individual diagnostics. It has argued that the relation between psy-
chological knowledge and security knowledge is neither coterminous nor completely oppositional.
Rather, it has drawn attention to a different mode of psychological knowledge, which is focused on
enactment. Psychodramatic and sociodramatic approaches to trauma may offer resources, this article
has suggested, for politicizing exercises—an important element of governing catastrophic events—
differently. While enactments seem to offer answers to the problem of surprise, unknowability, and
even catastrophic magnitude, their deployment as modalities of knowledge is limited. Rather than
achieving catharsis, insight, and renewed collective understandings, exercises break down the poten-
tially catastrophic event into manageable segments. Rather than creating an environment where emo-
tions can be vented out, its affective makeup is geared toward the limitation of blame and legal
responsibility. The conceptualization of enactment in psychodramatic and sociodramatic knowledge
also raises interesting questions for theories of securitization. Even where dramaturgical action is crea-
tively invoked in such theories, action is still considered to follow understanding: an actor, who claims
to understand a certain situation, seeks to convince the audience of this understanding in the hope that
action will be taken.65 Although security studies have not further explored how enactment congeals
action and meaning, the idea that understanding follows action, rather than the other way around,
forms a key insight from the literature on the treatment of trauma.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests


The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article.

Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article: The authors have benefitted from a short-term scientific mission funded by the ISCH COST Action IS1003, ‘Inter-
national Law between Constitutionalisation and Fragmentation: the role of law in the post-national constellation’.

Notes
1. See http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/colony/about/colony.html, accessed August 19, 2011.
2. Ibid.
3. Alison Howell, Madness in International Relations (London: Routledge, 2011).

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Aradau and van Munster 237

4. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood,
trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ Press, 2009), 1.
5. On the former approach, see Howell, Madness in International Relations, Vanessa Pupavac, ‘‘Therapeutic
Governance and Psycho-Social Intervention and Trauma Risk Management,’’ Disasters 25, no. 4 (2001);
Claudia Aradau, Rethinking Trafficking in Women. Politics out of Security (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).
On the latter, see e.g. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003); Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory. The Politics of War in Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2007); Karin Fierke, ‘‘Whereof We Can Speak, thereof We Must Not be Silent: Trauma,
Political Solipsism and War,’’ Review of International Studies 30 (2004).
6. Stephen Collier, ‘‘Enacting Catastrophe: Preparedness, Insurance, Budgetary Rationalization,’’ Economy
and Society 37, no. 2 (2008).
7. Ibid., 230–1.
8. Tracy C. Davis, Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007).
9. Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, Politics of Catastrophe. Genealogies of the Unknown (London:
Routledge, 2011); Ben Anderson and Peter Adey, ‘‘Affect and Security: Exercising Emergency in ‘UK
Civil Contingencies’,’’ Environment and Planning D 29 (2011); Peter Adey and Ben Anderson, ‘‘Event
and Anticipation: UK Civil Contingencies and the Space-Times of decision,’’ Environment and Planning
A 43 (2011); Ben Anderson, ‘‘Security and the Future: Anticipating the Event of Terror,’’ Geoforum 41, no.
2 (2010).
10. Emergency Management & Safety Solutions, ‘‘Emergency Exercises,’’ http://www.ems-solutionsinc.com/
emr_exercises.html.
11. Beredskabsstyrelsen, ‘‘National øvelsesvejledning. Krisestyringsøvelser,’’ available at http://www.oevel-
sesforum.dk/Dokumenter/%C3%98velsesvejledning/National%20%C3%B8velsesvejledning,%20krises
tyrings%C3%B8velser.pdf.
12. Ibid., 85.
13. Adey and Anderson, ‘‘Event and Anticipation,’’ 2879.
14. For a broader discussion on the role of affect in UK civil contingencies exercises, see Anderson and Adey,
‘‘Affect and Security.’’
15. Adey and Anderson, ‘‘Anticipating the event,’’ 2892.
16. London Fire Brigade, ‘‘London Community Risk Register,’’ http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/Documents/
LondonCommunityRiskRegister.pdf.
17. National Counter Terrorism Security Office, Expecting the Unexpected (London: NaCTSO, London First
and BCI, 2003), 11.
18. Exercise Filbert, Emergency Planning College Library, York, UK.
19. Exercise Enki, 2005. Emergency Planning College Library, York, UK.
20. Beredskabsstyrelsen, ‘‘National øvelsesvejledning. Krisestyringsøvelser,’’ available at http://www.
oevelsesforum.dk/Dokumenter/%C3%98velsesvejledning/National%20%C3%B8velsesvejledning,%20k-
risestyrings%C3%B8velser.pdf. Beredsskabsstyrelsen, ‘‘National øvelsesvejledning. Fuldskalaøvelser,’’
available at http://www.øvelsesforum.dk/Dokumenter/%C3%98velsesvejledning/National%20%C3%B8-
velsesvejledning,%20fuldskala%C3%B8velser.pdf.
21. Exercise Orion, http://xn–velsesforum-fgb.dk/Dokumenter/Exercise%20Orion%20Report%20FINAL%20(2).
pdf
22. Exercise Babel Fulcrum, 2003, Emergency Planning College Library, York, UK.
23. Eric R. Petersen et al., Homeland Emergency Preparedness and the National Exercise Program: Back-
ground, Policy Implications, and Issues for Congress (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service,
2008).
24. See for example Sandro Galea et al., ‘‘Trends of Probable Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in New York
City after the September 11 Terrorist Attacks,’’ American Journal of Epidemiology 158, no. 6 (2003);

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238 Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37(3)

Alyssa Lee, Mohan Isaac, and Aleksandar Janca, ‘‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Terrorism,’’ Cur-
rent Opinion in Psychiatry 15, no. 6 (2002).
25. Y. Danieli, D. Brom, and J. Sills, The Trauma of Terrorism: Sharing Knowledge and Shared Care, an Inter-
national Handbook (London: Routledge, 2005).
26. Pupavac, ‘‘Therapeutic Governance and Psycho-Social Intervention and Trauma Risk Management’’;
Pupavac, ‘‘Human security and the rise of global therapeutic governance,’’ Conflict, Security and Devel-
opment 5, no. 2 (2005).
27. Howell, Madness in International Relations.
28. Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975, trans. Graham Burchell
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 121.
29. Michael Steger, Patricia Frazier, and Jose Luis Zacchanini, ‘‘Terrorism in Two Cultures: Stress and
Growth Following September 11 and the Madrid Train Bombings,’’ Journal of Loss and Trauma 13,
no. 6 (2008): 511.
30. Danieli, Brom, and Sills, The Trauma of Terrorism: Sharing Knowledge and Shared care, an International
Handbook (New York: Haworth Press).
31. Ibid., 7 emphasis in original.
32. Exercise Filbert, 9.
33. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
34. The Oxford English Dictionary traces this usage back to Stephen Blancard’s 1693 Physical Dictionary.
35. Duncan Bell, ed., Memory, Trauma and World Politics: Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and
Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006) .
36. Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma.
37. Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995).
38. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy.
39. Ibid., 2.
40. Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: an Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, 1.
41. e.g. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics; Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory. The Politics of War in
Germany; Fierke, ‘‘Whereof we can speak, thereof we must not be silent: trauma, political solipsism and
war.’’; Edkins, Critical Approaches to International Security; Bell, Memory, Trauma and World Politics:
Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present.
42. James Brassett, ‘‘Cosmopolitan Sentiments After 9-11? Trauma and the Politics of Vulnerability,’’ Journal
of Critical Globalisation Studies 2 (2010), 22.
43. Jenny Edkins, ‘‘Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11,’’ International Relations 16, no. 2 (2002), 248.
44. Ibid., 244.
45. Judith Butler, ‘‘Violence, mourning, politics,’’ Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4, no. 1, 15.
46. Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics.
47. Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, ‘‘Governing Terrorism through Risk: taking precautions,
(un)knowing the future,’’ European Journal of International Relations 13, no. 1 (2007); Claudia Aradau
and Rens van Munster, Politics of Catastrophe.
48. Peter Felix Kellerman, Sociodrama and Collective Trauma (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2007), 9.
49. Peter Felix Kellerman, Psychodrama with Trauma Survivors: Acting Out Your Pain (London: Jessica
Kingsley Publishers, 2001).
50. See for example, Eva Leveton, Healing Collective Trauma Using Sociodrama and Drama Therapy (Springer,
2010); Kellerman, Sociodrama and Collective Trauma; Jacob Gershoni, Psychodrama in the 21st Century:
Clinical and Educational Applications (Springer, 2003); Kellerman, Psychodrama with Trauma Survivors:
Acting out Your Pain, Marcia Karp, Kate Bradshaw Tauvon, The Handbook of Psychodrama (London:
Routledge, 1998); Phil Jones, Drama as Therapy: Theatre as Living (London: Routledge, 1996).
51. Kellerman, Sociodrama and Collective Trauma.

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Aradau and van Munster 239

52. Ibid.
53. A. Garcia and D. R. Buchanan, ‘‘Psychodrama,’’ Current Approaches in Drama Therapy (2009), 393.
54. Peter Felix Kellerman, ‘‘The Therapeutic Aspects of Psychodrama with Traumatized People,’’ in
Psychodrama With Trauma Survivors: Acting Out Your Pain, ed. Peter Felix Kellerman and M. K. Hudgins
(London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2000), 26.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. http://www.sexhelpworkshops.com/Documents/ARTICLE_TheCompulsionToRepeatTrauma_VanDerKolk.
pdf.
58. see for example Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery. From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror,
2nd ed. (London: Pandora, 1997).
59. Patricia Sternberg and Antonina Garcia, Sociodrama: Who’s in Your Shoes? 2nd ed. (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Publishing, 2000).
60. http://www.g-gej.org/6-1/gestaltptsd.html
61. Jakob Levy Moreno, ‘‘Psychodrama and Group Psychotherapy,’’ Sociometry (1946).
62. Jef Huysmans, ‘‘What’s in an Act? On Security Speech Acts and Little Security Nothings,’’ Security
Dialogue 42, no. 4–5 (2011).
63. Engin F. Isin, ‘‘Theorizing Acts of Citizenship,’’ in Acts of Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin and Greg M.
Nielsen (New York: Zed Books, 2008), 15–43.
64. See Lene Hansen, Security as Practice. Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006); Hol-
ger Stritzel, ‘‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond,’’ European Journal of International
Relations 13, no. 3 (2007); Thierry Balzacq, ‘‘The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and
Context,’’ European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 2 (2005); Matt McDonald, ‘‘Securitization and the
Construction of Security,’’ European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 4 (2008); Juha A. Vuori, ‘‘Illocu-
tionary Logic and Strands of Securitization: Applying the Theory of Securitization to the Study of Non-
Democratic Political Orders,’’ European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 1 (2008).
65. On the use of dramaturgical language, see Mark B. Salter, ‘‘Securitization and Desecuritization: A Drama-
turgical Analysis of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority,’’ Journal of International Relations
and Development 11, no. 4 (2008).

Bios
Claudia Aradau is senior lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies,
King’s College, London. Her research interrogates the effects of security practices for political sub-
jectivity and emancipation. Most recently, her work has focused on the role of anticipatory knowl-
edge in governing catastrophes to come, materialities of (in)security and critical methods in security
studies. She is the author of Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics out of Security (Palgrave,
2008) and co-author, with Rens van Munster, of Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the
Unknown (Routledge, 2011).
Rens van Munster is senior researcher in Defence and Security at the Danish Institute for Interna-
tional Studies. His works concerns the politics of risk and catastrophe and he is currently working on
a project on nuclear weapons and visions of globality. He is the author of Securitizing Migration:
The Politics of Risk in the EU (Palgrave 2009) and Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the
Unknown (with Claudia Aradau, Routledge, 2011). His work has been published in international
journals such as the British Journal of Criminology, European Journal of International Relations,
International Relations and Security Dialogue.

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