Bureaucracy, Imagination and U.S. Domestic Security Policy

Abstract

This paper examines U.S. domestic security policy in the period immediately after 9/11. Official assessment of the circumstances surrounding 9/11 highlighted a lack of imagination in security policy as the major contributing factor to what had transpired. To address policy lapses attributed to failures of imagination it was recommended that for security purposes the practice of imagination become “bureaucratized”. The paper examines rationales for the concept of bureaucratized imagination and how this concept has infiltrated specific domestic security initiatives. Images were created to formulate and modify the uncertainties surrounding future threats to security. These images were then employed to translate uncertainties into risk-based security initiatives. The paper highlights how these images developed their own particular logic for security policy, becoming increasingly institutionalized in a security paradigm premised upon images of the merely possible.