ABSTRACT
The previous chapter focused on how the ‘next terrorist attack’ was problematized through a series of different unknowns and the modes of knowledge and styles of reasoning deployed to render these unknowns actionable. This chapter considers how catastrophe risks are tackled by assurantial knowledge. Because insurance was thought to function as an economic technology, it has been removed from the disciplinary gaze of security studies and left almost entirely outside the purview of studies on counter-terrorism strategy.1 Moreover, at first sight insurance appears inadequate for the task of taming catastrophic events as it contradicts the main tenets of conjectural reasoning discussed in the previous chapter. Where the latter focuses on the clue and individual detail, insurance constitutes the quintessential model of regularitybased knowledge based on probabilistic reasoning and statistical calculation:
Like other sciences, that of Statistics seeks to deduce from well-established facts certain general principles which interest and affect mankind; it uses the same instruments of comparison, calculation, and deduction: but its peculiarity is that it proceeds wholly by the accumulation and comparison of facts, and does not admit of any kind of speculation; it aims, like other sciences, at truth.
