Research project
“No one can escape the fact that disasters have become a scourge of humanity,” the sociologists Wolf R. Dombrowsky and Christian Brauner wrote in 1995 in a report on disaster prevention in industrialized societies. In the foreword to the report, former development aid minister Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski and current chairman of the German committee of the UN's International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction emphasized the increased vulnerability of modern industrial societies: “Disaster prevention is not keeping pace with the growing threats.” Disasters can no longer be prevented; they will occur no matter what. What remains is to “arm oneself” for the major disasters that arise.
What the report and foreword articulated was a fundamental change in security culture since the 1990s, which the project traces historically. It focuses on the question of how the modern promise of being able to plan for the future and prevent dangers was replaced by a security policy thinking and action that assumed that one could only prepare for the (inevitable) disasters that would occur, but not prevent them.
In addition to the popularization of the focus on the protection of critical infrastructures, it examines various agencies that were founded during the period under investigation with the aim of preparing societies for impending disasters, the probabilities of which could not be calculated, but the consequences of which could be imaginatively narrated (e.g. in simulation games and exercises). The third step deals with the relationship between the state and its citizens under the guiding star of preparedness. What consequences did this readjustment in the state's promise of protection have for the relationship between the individual and the state? What tasks did this entail for individuals and families? Where was the boundary between rational preparation on the one hand and socio-pathological prepping on the other? This also raises the question of whether the concept of preparedness is suitable to function as an epochal concept for the immediate contemporary history since the 1990s.
