Our chapter reflects on how commemoration and ‘the past’ have become implicated within national security practices which anticipate and act upon future insecurity. Across public inquiries, coroners’ investigations and memorialisation, there is an in-built assumption that societies (and security practitioners) should be able to learn from disastrous events. For example, public inquiries and coroners’ reportsFootnote 1 produce formal recommendations for change, based on identified failures leading to past events. Concomitantly, commemoration and memorialisation fulfil an educational role—bringing closure to an event by identifying the ‘lessons’ (often values of resilience and heroism) from which future generations can learn. This places the past in direct connection with the anticipated future; the past is processed, narrated, and made readable through inquiries and other practices—before its ‘lessons’ are extrapolated and projected onto the potential future.

This produces a temporal loop between the past and the anticipated future, where memory—directly and indirectly—comes to serve as a component within national security architectures. In academic studies of memory and security, it is rare for this cross-working to be picked up. After all, security is predominantly characterised by the anticipation of threats-to-come, which often estranges its study from the topic of the past. The small existing literature on the entanglement of security and memory covers the canonisation of particular narratives of national history, alongside the delegitimization and even outlawing of competing narratives by the state (Mälksoo, 2015). Here historical memory, as a crucial component of political identity, can be securitised by political actors and even extend into ‘memory wars’ over the ontological security of the state (Belavusau et al., 2021). Meanwhile, memorialisation can also be integrated directly into national security practice, with commemoration being factored into contemporary disaster response policies of states to mitigate the traumatic resonance of events (Heath-Kelly, 2016; Lundborg, 2012).

Our chapter builds and expands upon the latter trajectory of research, where retrospective ‘stock taking’ exercises and commemorative performances are integrated—intriguingly—within anticipatory practices of security. Aradau and van Munster (2012: 98) have pointed out that the imagination of the ‘next’ catastrophe is central to national security efforts. Our contribution here is to show that this imagination of ‘the next’ is simultaneously reliant upon knowledge of past events, their locations, their constitution, and the failures that allowed them to happen.

First, we focus on examples from the UK where commemoration has become a ‘stage’ in disaster recovery. Commemorative church services and memorials are presented in policy guidance as ways to soothe the reverberation and impact of traumatic events. Their use tames the potential for future public disorder and malcontent, it is suggested. In recent visceral examples of this interconnectedness of commemoration and anticipation, the UK Home Office has begun staging ‘spontaneous’ memorial reactions to terrorist attacks, sending its staff (particularly people of colour) to the Westminster Bridge and Manchester attack sites with pre-organised slogans about unity between British Muslim and White British communities. The government deploys covert ‘spontaneous memorialisation’ to act upon the potential for future disorder.

The invocation of the past to secure the future is also vividly apparent in other attempts to learn from disaster events. Inquiries into disasters and terrorist attacks, as well as ‘Prevention of Future Deaths’ reports by coroners, all construe and functionalise overlap between past and future—where recommendations from past events can, it is assumed, improve security performance in detecting, preventing and mitigating the next. We conducted interviews with senior disaster response and planning officials in 2021 who told us about practices of ‘learning’ within these professions, which rely on rigid expectations that past response efforts (particularly mistakes) can inform future responses. Indeed, ‘learning’ is a fundamental component of state processes surrounding unexpected death. However, our respondents reflected (some consistently, some intermittently) that these linear ‘learning efforts’ fail to capture the real nature of ‘emergence/y’. The past refuses to be leveraged neatly as a tool with which to anticipate the future. They told us that extrapolating ‘lessons’ from the Bataclan attack did not mobilise the political will to protect UK venues (despite the prediction of more arena attacks); that learning from previous terrorist attacks in the UK could not prevent responders forgetting triage cards or other key materials; and that repeated findings of inquiries on failed radio inter-operability between emergency services have consistently failed to bring about change.

In this second section of the chapter, we reflect on the failures of linear ‘learning’ between disaster response efforts, integrating Karen Barad’s thought on relationality to understand how the entanglement of humans and non-humans during an emergency event belies any attempt to ‘read’ the future through the past. The professional experience of disaster response and recovery practitioners probes us to reflect on the efforts of government to link commemoration and past events with anticipation—questioning whether it is appropriate to rely on the past when planning for the future, and what modernist ontologies characterise such assumptions.

Memorials and Commemoration as a ‘Stage’ in Resilient Recovery

Memorialisation is sociologically functional: it does things in society. The noted scholar of memorialisation, Kenneth Foote, has shown that—in the US—there exist four types of landscaping response to violent events: sanctification; designation; rectification; and obliteration (Foote, 1998). Memorialisation sits within his category of ‘sanctification’; it takes the ‘lessons learned’ from a violent event and displays them, in a commemorative design, to present and future generations. ‘Designation’ is the response suited to violent events which are culturally understood to have fewer ‘lessons’ for the future, and results in a more modest plaque acknowledging the occurrence of an event upon a site. ‘Rectification’ and ‘obliteration’, however, result from the societal perceptions that nothing can be productively learned from a past event—leading to either the rectification of the surrounding built environment on the site (rectification) or the decision to leave a site completely unmarked and barren, given the horrors of violence committed there (from which no learning can be identified) (obliteration) (Foote, 1998).Footnote 2

Memorialisation, then, is all about communicating a lesson from the past to current (and future) generations. It is the manifestation of an entanglement between the past and an anticipated future. The ‘lessons’ centralised in the architecture of memorials often rely upon heroic depictions of sacrifice, to commemorate the dead of war, in order to refresh and consolidate the bond between subjects and their sovereign; they are profoundly ideological and interpolating sites (Edkins, 2003; Kishore, 2015).

In the twenty-first century, memorialisation and commemoration in Europe were attributed further functions by policymakers. Not only were they to bind the population to their nation through interpolation in a lesson about sacrifice and/or heroism, but the UK and EU began to envisage both—pre-emptively—as strategies to be deployed against future terrorist attacks and plots. In 2005, the Home Office and Cabinet Office created guidance for disaster recovery in the UK (Home Office & Cabinet Office, 2005). This guidance was particularly important because it treated recovery as a ‘stage’ in the emergency, complementing the Civil Contingencies Act of 2004. Emergencies became viewed as a predictable, mitigatable, series of linked phenomena—viewed holistically from their inception to their lingering presence in memory at anniversaries (Heath-Kelly, 2016).

The UK Guidance dealing with commemoration and disaster recovery (Eyre, 2006; Home Office & Cabinet Office, 2005) deals with spontaneous memorialisation, commemoration services and anniversaries of the disaster. It frames the state’s responsibility as one of care, that enables victims and survivors to grieve while providing a respectful structure for events and tributes.

What is fascinating about the incorporation of commemoration and memorialisation into disaster recovery policy is that memorialisation becomes an anticipatory device in this rendering. It is positioned within an anticipatory policy frame, waiting for the next disaster event to strike so that it can be used to quell the effects of trauma. The future trauma from an event is anticipated as a problem. This reveals something very interesting about uncodified approaches to memorialisation. Most countries do not integrate plans for commemoration or memorialisation into policy guidance. While many states and international organisations provide schemes for memorialising specific events (like the Covid 19 pandemic), few have a codified general policy on when (and how) to memorialise. Policies oriented at specific events are, naturally, retrospective. Their associated memorials are imagined through a retrospective lens, looking back at the crisis/disaster. A generalised memorialisation and commemoration strategy, however, is not retrospective. Rather, it looks into the future, anticipating events which might require resolution. In such generalised policy, remembrance and anticipation fuse. This creates a temporal loop around the management of disaster events; anticipation and commemoration lose their usual temporalities and fuse around the mitigation of events.

The period of the twentieth century known as the ‘War on Terror’ focused international security actors and organisations on terrorist threats, particularly lone actors, but also produced innovative uses of memory as a security tool. Commemoration extended beyond the interpellation of citizens into national belonging, and beyond a tool to apply in disaster recovery to mitigate trauma; it became part of the Preventing Violent Extremism repertoire in Europe. How is historical memory used to help societies to identify and deter future extremists?

The Radicalisation Awareness Network is a significant EU network of counter-radicalisation practitioners from member states, who share knowledge and best practices (Melhuish & Heath-Kelly, 2022). It was founded in 2011 but expanded after 2015 to include more ‘working groups’ (formed around social policy areas where local frontline staff and municipality officers might be able to counter-radicalisation). In 2017, the RAN VoT (Victims/Survivors of Terrorism Working Group) emerged, bringing the topic of victims and survivors of terrorism into the EU’s work on counter-radicalisation. Its work is centred upon improving the support available to victims and survivors of terrorism and the potential for affected parties to set up their own support networks (RAN VoT, 2017). Originally, then, the RAN VoT was concerned with supporting victims.

Building upon the work of the RAN VoT, in 2021, the European Commission published a unique study of the value of memorials to Preventing Violent Extremism efforts (which was authored by members of the RAN expert pool). This acknowledged the traditional function of memorials in binding societies together around historical narratives, but supplemented this with a direct contribution to national security (European Commission, 2021). Memorials to victims of terrorism, the paper argues, actively assist efforts to combat polarisation and therefore radicalisation:

Memorials may have at least three purposes: they serve as spaces for the victims, their families and the affected communities to mourn; they serve as spaces addressed to a broader audience, like students and youth, to raise awareness of a historical event; and, as the third function, they can serve to prevent violent extremism when they take on the role of dialogue spaces aiming to disrupt polarisation. (European Commission, 2021: 4)

The paper argues that memorialisation efforts across Member States have rehumanised the victims of terrorism—who are dehumanised in terrorist and extremist rhetoric—and intervened in cases of divided histories and societies to offer a wider variety of narratives about conflict. In intervening in the representation of victims, memorialisation (it is argued) contributes to counter-radicalisation by countering the dehumanisation narratives used by extremist groups.

This is a fascinating articulation of memorialisation and memory which directly links both to an anticipatory, national security function. Here, memorialisation can indirectly play a role in preventing terrorism through countering polarisation. This is a profoundly looping temporality, whereby the representation of the past is utilised (in theory) to secure the future. In this account of memorialisation and security, the past, present, and future are no longer understood as distinct phases on a linear model of time, but radically interconnected. All merge around the articulation of proper governance of the social, so that extremist groups cannot feed upon lingering grievances, exclusions, or injustices in the polity.Footnote 3

This European working paper sketched a relational account of time, where commemoration is directly implicated in the prevention of future terrorism. Incredibly, this linkage has been put to practice in the UK. In 2019, it was revealed that the UK government actively prepares hashtags and ‘spontaneous’ commemoration activities, in advance, for future terrorist attacks (Cobain, 2019). Speaking with insiders on contingency planning teams within government, the journalist Ian Cobain unveiled that—since the administration of Theresa May, which saw rioting in British cities—government has taken interest in pre-planning PR responses to disaster events so that public reactions can be ‘nudged’ away from anger and blame, towards ‘Princess Dianaesque grief’ (Cobain, 2019). This is referred to in Orwellian terms as ‘controlled spontaneity’.

To direct public opinion, contingency planning teams pre-design imagery (such as the ‘heart’ backdrop used on banners and posters commemorating the Manchester and Plymouth attacks) and hashtags—around generic, imagined, future events. When a disaster event occurs, the team needs only to fill in details of the location. After the London Bridge attack in 2017, a team of men arrived in an unmarked van and were admitted behind the police cordon. They began to plaster the walls with images of London as well as hashtags that were circling on social media like #lovewillwin and #turntolove (Cobain, 2019). Cobain also notes that these men did not answer questions from journalists about their identities; nor were the men challenged by the police—who stood by and allowed the flyposting (a minor offence in British law) to continue. When the area re-opened to the public, passers-by found themselves surrounded by apparently spontaneous calls for solidarity, public defiance and unity.

Beyond the use of images on posters, billboards and social media, the Home Office also stages ‘spontaneous’ commemoration events. A day later, a council leader from the affected borough was told by the Home Office: ‘we’re sending you 100 imams’. As promised, 100 imams and community leaders appeared on London Bridge the next day. They read out a condemnation of the attacks and stood together on the Bridge in a supposedly spontaneous demonstration of unity, condemnation, and togetherness (Cobain, 2019). As if this were not enough ‘controlled spontaneity’, a (supposedly self-organised) group of British Muslims called ‘1000 roses’ gathered on London Bridge the following weekend—to distribute a rose to all passers-by (Worley, 2017). One of the organisers, Zakia Bassou, said: ‘After the events of last weekend we are making a symbolic gesture of love for the communities affected by the attack. The whole concept is we are not going to let London Bridge, or any bridge, fall down’ (Worley, 2017). The reporter spoke to recipients of the roses who, visibly emotional, testified that it was lovely to see that ‘it is not everybody in the Muslim community carrying out these attacks’ (Worley, 2017).

Of course, the event organiser was employed by the law enforcement division of the Home Office and this event is categorised as one of many staged ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations after terrorist attacks (Cobain, 2019). Disaster recovery has been integrated within the PR strategy of response agencies and government departments, who anticipate post-attack moments where intervention can steer public opinion. In so doing, they deploy an innovative temporality where they imagine the failure of future efforts to prevent terrorism—and plan their interventions accordingly (see Heath-Kelly, 2015 on other attempts to ‘Secure through the Failure to Secure’). Interestingly, however, the attempt to deploy ‘I *heart* Salisbury’ t-shirts and posters after the Novichok attack of 2018 was rejected by locals who instead emphasised that emergency responders should focus on getting the nerve agent cleaned up. A local informant told Cobain that sites like Manchester have a lot of young people who will engage with the ‘hashtag game’, but that Salisbury has significant numbers of ex-military in the community who are more practically minded (Cobain, 2019).

What is the significance, and ethics, of staging fake-spontaneous events and hashtag campaigns in disaster recovery? These interventions are informed by behavioural science and aim to covertly manage public reactions in desired directions. They are, effectively, psy-ops used upon a domestic population by their own government. This speaks to their significance. They reflect the changing governance of emergencies, such that disasters are no longer understood as exceptional, discrete moments that appear without warning. The use of ‘controlled spontaneity’ speaks to an overlapping, relational temporality of disaster. Even when a disaster is not occurring or thought to be imminent, governments deploy contingency planners to imagine what event could come next—and which responses might control the damage it inflicts, both physical and in the realm of morale, public communication, and media.

Similar to the examples of pre-planned commemoration services in the UK, and the deployment of memorialisation and memory in Preventing Violent Extremism by the RAN VoT group, the past and the future profoundly overlap in these models. Rather than the past comprising a set of discrete events, and the future comprising unimaginable future events, the two are understood as overlapping and influencing one another. Memory informs the imagination of the future (according to what should be planned for, and how); whereas anticipation brings about the pre-preparation of commemoration and response events (which exist in template form, for the future failures to prevent events, with only the location of the disaster needing to be inputted).

Policies of disaster recovery and planning present this overlap as a smooth space, where learning from the past (if not, the past itself) can help us to divert and mitigate unwanted futures. But how do practitioners of emergency response and recovery experience their work, the presentation of an interconnected past and future, and the demands that learning from the past should prevent future deaths? We now move to discuss our interviews with emergency planners and responders on this topic, which powerfully invoked different ontologies of past and future. Some interviewees thought it should be possible to treat the future as liable to repeat the past, and therefore that learning from disaster events could practically avert future disasters. Others, however, applied (implicitly) a more relational understanding of the world where our efforts to measure the past will never successfully help us to secure the future—given that emergencies are not subject to our hubristic demands for understanding, control, and omniscience. Causality, in these accounts, was less linear, and replicated relational understandings of the world linked to quantum physics and its reception within humanities and social science disciplines.

The Linear and Quantum Worlds of Emergency Planners and Responders

The previous section has explored multiple ways in which governments and practitioners embed the past (especially ‘lessons learned’) within their efforts to avoid repeating it. Commemoration, staged displays of social unity, and public inquiries featured heavily here as practices which effectively ‘bent’ linear time, by constructing a loop between remembrance and anticipation. But what does it mean to ‘learn from the past’ in practice? What can practitioners of emergency response and planning tell us about the use of the past in the anticipation of the future events?

When speaking to emergency planners and responders, we became immediately aware that each had different opinions about the extent to which learning from disaster events is possible. Some understood events as discrete, knowable phenomena, which could be measured and learned from. Others diverged significantly from this understanding, leaning more towards an emphasis on the emergency as—by definition—that which emerges unforeseen. In this latter reading, learning from disaster events becomes more problematic—if not impossible. In analysing our conversations with emergency planners and responders, we began to lean towards Barad’s relational ontology (written around the implications of quantum mechanics for social theory) to frame what we were being told.

First and foremost, to learn from the past, one has to be able to measure the past event, to diagnose what happened, and to identify the causal relationship between factors which led to the disaster. As such, learning from the past relies upon our ability to measure. This is more difficult than it sounds because, since the early twentieth century, quantum mechanics has demonstrated significant problems with measurement. In classical physics, by contrast, objects are classified and fixed. They don’t radically change their properties. And established scientific laws explain the interaction between forces which may move, transform or obliterate such fixed objects. Quantum mechanics has problematised all these realities and shown that they do not apply to the subatomic realm (Barad, 2007; Brandimarte, 2022; Overman, 1991). Instead of being fixed, quantum phenomena are fundamentally ambiguous and are represented through the mathematical probabilities that might take on the qualities of waves or particles. This is called wave-particle duality.

Fascinatingly, it is the practice of measurement which intervenes in this potentiality—causing the ‘wave function’ to collapse into particular outcomes. By measuring subatomic reality, we both shape the potentialities of the wave function (through experimental design) and then force them to collapse into a particular outcome (Barad, 2007; Brandimarte, 2022; Wendt, 2015: 235). Measurement does not objectively reflect upon a fixed world but rather is profoundly involved in creating that which it measures, in quantum physics.

As Italo Brandimarte succinctly realises,

The social scientific conception of measurement, heavily indebted to deterministic science, is premised on the importance of fixity and abstract classification. In quantum theory, measurement is instead inherently related to ambiguity … The interaction between the measured object and the measuring apparatus produces an “entanglement,” which blurs the epistemic boundaries between the two and frames them as a single system. (Brandimarte, 2022: 9)

Philosophy has been dramatically affected by the quantum revolution in science. With varying degrees of success, social theorists have appropriated aspects of quantum theory to speak about the world. The most productive reflections on quantum mechanics centralise the problem of measurement and the resulting importance of recognising relational ‘entanglement’ between material, human, and environmental forces. This relationality problematises any linear or classical relationship of causality between them, instead centralising their mutual constitution of each other. For Karen Barad, the philosopher (and theoretical physicist) primarily responsible for bringing quantum insights into social theory, any attempt at observation, measurement, or knowledge production ‘cuts’ into this entangled world—placing some relations within the sphere of attention, but others outside (Barad, 2007). Her relational ontology tries to counterbalance this problem by attending to entanglement as intra-activity as an inexhaustible dynamism which configures and reconfigures space–time-matter (Barad, 2007). In effect, the world is being dynamically and continually constituted through entangled relationships, between matter and ourselves.

Relational ontology is uniquely insightful when discussing emergency recovery, emergency planning and the possibility of learning from the past. We came to relational ontology when trying to understand the divergence between accounts given by three senior practitioners. Our three interviewees have all advised UK government agencies on emergency planning and management, and maintain different levels of engagement with on-the-ground emergency response. From our conversations with them, we estimate that one (or more) have likely been present at each and every major incident occurring in the last twenty years in the UK. Expert #1 maintained a view that learning from disaster events is definitely possible, and that organisational failures of learning are responsible for mistakes in emergency response repeating. This replicates a modernist ontology where time flows in a linear direction and events are fixed moments in time, making learning from the past possible. Expert #2, however, offered a very different testimony—articulating that the world is dynamic and that emergencies are, by definition, unexpected, uncontrollable, occurrences. While there are codes which should inform disaster response, Expert #2 believed that the complex interplay between material factors always brought a significant amount of chance into play—meaning that ‘learning’ from past mistakes will never serve as a prophylactic to prevent future disasters. Expert #2, then, is positioned far closer to a relational ontology where it is not always possible to learn from past events in a meaningful way—as events will always take us by surprise. Finally, Expert #3 echoed many aspects of Expert #2’s testimony. They emphasised the overlapping relationships between terrorist attacks (rather than positioning them as discrete, fixed events to be learned from) and how—even when experts could sense that Manchester would be targeted after the Bataclan massacre—professional knowledge remained insufficient in preventing the attack. Rather, government policy works upon the ‘tombstone imperative’ (they argued), such that an attack must already have happened in order to generate the political will to enact measures which might have stopped it. Experts #2 and #3 both highlighted the complex, quantum temporalities between disaster events—testifying that learning from disaster events is a highly complex process, often precluded by the realities of public administration.

The conventional approach to disaster planning and recovery is familiar to us all. It is epitomised by the public inquiry approach—where a government minister commissions a major investigation to explore the failures which led to a disaster, and which complicated efforts to mitigate it. Importantly, a public inquiry cannot attribute civil or criminal liability (HM Government, 2005: 2.1). Rather its function is associated with ‘preventing recurrence’ through collecting evidence, taking witness testimonies, and analysing what can be done to prevent such an event happening again (Institute for Government, 2018). Here, it is centrally posited that the Newtonian Laws of physics apply; events are objectively measurable, causation is linear, and lessons can be drawn from this fixed moment that can be applied to future moments. As Expert #1 put it:

These are predictable and preventable events. Realise that all these events were predictable and preventable, if not in their timing then their eventuality […] I’m passionate about the evidence base and doing the right thing and knowing that it works. (Expert #1)

This conviction that ‘disaster events are predictable and preventable’ runs up against the continued happening of disasters, of course. How can the continuation of contingency be explained, when one adopts the Newtonian ontology? This was quite simple for Expert #1, who explained that the failure to prevent disasters does not stem from any deficit in our understandings of events and causation; rather, the failure to prevent is associated with the communication and implementation of lessons learned. Inquiries can point to the factors which led to a disaster and exacerbated its impact but, unless these lessons are integrated within revised practices of the emergency services and government agencies, our ‘lessons’ will not be ‘learned’. In Expert #1’s view, the problem is not the diagnosis of causal factors leading to disaster events, but in their ‘learning’ by responder and government agencies:

Learning would be not just identifying a lesson but actively implementing it; sharing it would be good, and lessons are shared but there are issues around how lessons are shared (whether it's implemented into local resilience forums and further down across organisations). So there’s still a question about whether it's implemented. So, there's identifying the learning, there is learning it by sharing it and implementing it, and then reviewing it and testing it and seeing that it’s actually learned. (Expert #1)

Expert #1 consistently applied the Newtonian ontology of learning from past events and understood the repetition of disastrous mistakes as the result of deficient implementation within responder agencies and government departments. In a way, the solution to disasters did not require the rethinking of linear causality, temporality and knowing for Expert #1, rather the expansion of this linear model of learning would solve issues of repetition.

Initially, our interview with Expert #3 began on very similar terrain. For example, they stated:

We do a number of things in emergency planning: we prepare, we respond to the incident, and then we get ready for the next incident based on our learning from the response […] what I think we're finding very, very difficult, quite emotional are the parallels between the Manchester bombings and the London bombings. And what would appear outwardly to be a failure to learn lessons is actually a reluctance to fix difficult things. (Expert #3)

But very soon afterwards, the expert began invoking repetition and overlaps between different disasters—making clear that they saw the ‘parallels’ between the Manchester and London bombings within a cyclical (or at least, non-linear) temporality. Attending the inquiry into the Manchester bombings led them to suddenly re-experience a parallel moment in the July 7th inquest; for example:

I have a very photographic memory for something like the July 7th inquest, so I can remember key days of that. And then you're watching the Manchester Inquiry. There are days in that – there was one day recently where actually both the Manchester inquiry and Grenfell were raising exactly the same issues […] the big thing I did a lot of work on was communications: I'd analyse for the Cabinet Office 30 previous disasters (not terrorist attacks entirely, although July 7th was in there, Lockerbie was in there). So we analyse public inquiry reports and they all have the same phrasing around communications. It's always the radio failures, and literally language failures. And what you would see is the fire brigade and the police try and fix that via new kit. (Expert #3)

The recurrence of radio failures transported Expert #3 between inquiries, creating a spatio-temporal loop between them. They articulated being ‘transported’ between public inquiries, given their overlapping content, emphasising the sudden coming together of two timelines in one room. This is interesting because inquiries are targeted at preventing the recurrence of issues in disaster response and prevention. For thirty disaster investigations to identify radio compatibility issues between emergency responder agencies as an issue, and for it to keep coming up, shows a significant issue with understanding disaster prevention and response as a linear field. Rather, recurrence and ‘haunting’ permeated the field for Expert #3.

Expert #3 also made profound reflections on practitioners knowing Manchester would be next—after the Bataclan attacks:

We had been exercising for Manchester for months. So, we knew it was likely in Manchester, and I was tired of exercising for it. Rather than trying to stop it or trying to understand it, we were just readying to be there. And that became very draining […] The Manchester thing, we knew it was coming, we had a very strong sense it was coming. And we were exercising for some of that, all the time. (Expert #3)

Expert #3 came back to this point several times in our conversation—emphasising that the emergency planning community knew, from attacks prior, that Manchester would be next. Their professional habitus, refined by decades of experience, told them that Manchester would be attacked. This recalls the statement of Expert #1, that all disaster events are predictable in their eventuality—if not their timing. However, it goes far beyond the generality of that statement. Rather than identifying the potential for an attack based on identified vulnerabilities in a structure or system, Expert #3 describes a field-wide intuition that a specific city would be next—provoking a series of planning exercises for responder teams. The knowledge that Manchester would be next was, again, ‘haunting’ the emergency planning teams.

Was this knowledge disregarded? And if so, why? Expert #3 frequently returned to the assertion that disaster learning is very disjointed. Despite the practitioners’ intuition that Manchester would be next, this could not and did not affect government action. Rather, to act on the anticipated disaster, Expert #3 told us that governments rely on the ‘tombstone imperative’—they need the event to happen before they can legislate for its prevention. When we asked Expert #3 if the Protect Duty (the legal responsibilisation of medium to large sized venues for terrorism contingency planning, in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing) had been long in the making, they replied:

I believe it has been (obviously, not their more recent changes), but yes. The consultation, I suspect, was what we would call a tombstone imperative. We were ready to go there, but we needed the incident to make it happen. So, the types of venues that we were starting to worry about in 2015-2016 very much fit with the new consultation around venues. (Expert #3)

This is indicative of a looping temporality in emergency planning, whereby the fact that emergency planning systems were clearly indicating that Manchester was next was not enough to generate practical change. Only rehearsals for the anticipated bombing could be staged. Change could not be enacted without the hard evidence of the bombing actually happening. Only then could action be taken. The previous learning in the system (from terrorist attacks past) was not considered sufficient as an evidence base to make change happen; rather, the ‘next’ attack had to materialise in order that we could learn from it and take action. Anticipation is grounded, it seems, in retrospection as well as expectation then.

Expert #3 invoked the presence of this looping temporality frequently. They also indicted the Home Office’s turn to ‘nudge’ style behavioural management, in these terms. Rather than directly engage the kinds of ideologies that produce terrorist violence, and ‘adopting the surveillance powers needed to act upon them’, Expert #3 opined that a behavioural science technique of ‘nudging’ had become common in disaster management. They referred back to the ‘controlled spontaneity’ of staged commemoration (discussed earlier in the chapter), as well as the applause for health professionals during every Thursday of pandemic lockdowns in the UK, as a natural continuation of the looping temporality of disaster management. Planning exercises skip ahead to ‘recovery’ (controlling the social reaction to disaster) rather than actively trying to avert the disaster itself.

The temporality of this emergency response is not a linear one then, where one fixed, discrete event can be measured objectively and learned from in order to prevent the next. Instead, Expert #3’s testimony spoke to a looping, overlapping space-time where events ceased being distinguishable from each other, where traces of future events lingered in advance of their materialisation, and where the anticipation and retrospection were inevitably bound up in each other.

Finally, Expert #2 gave a compelling and emotional testimony which accentuates many of these quantum strands in the world of disaster planning—however, that was not their intention. Expert #2 cognitively subscribes to the modernist, Newtonian ontology where learning from disaster events should be possible. They spoke very highly of some innovations in disaster response practice, such as JESIP principles (joint-working principles for multi-agency emergency responders), stating that they were so good that ‘even if you threw them out, you’d come back to the JESIP principles’ (Expert #2). However, Expert #2 became increasingly agitated by the failure to learn lessons and implement changes from disaster events. This is when, inadvertently, their testimony came to emphasise the non-linear, relational world of emergency management where—against all efforts to the contrary—learning from previous events does not manifest.

Expert #2’s testimony highlighted the chaos of the emergency. The emergency is, necessarily, unexpected, mutating in scope and scale; complex, sudden and unexpected. When it manifests, it places responders on an emergency footing where—under immense stress—they can make mistakes or forget things. For example, invoking the moment of disaster, Expert #2 asked:

Can you make those connections in your head, that you understand ‘this I'm confronted with, this is the thing I was doing in that course three years ago, Christ this is it!’ Or do you just use your muscle memory? You just use fast-twitch thinking, when you’re faced with something. The night of the Arena, it was all fast. And it fucking worked, because there were a lot of really experienced people there, who are being dragged over the coals now. But their experience allowed them to make critical decisions on the night. I stand by the Kerslake findings. I stand by them really strongly. Because what we didn’t look at was ‘survivability’, and that’s what’s coming in. And to have those medics being hauled over the coals for decisions they made in those hours is really uncomfortable for me. Because I wouldn’t have wanted to be there. And yet I can’t think of a better advanced paramedic to have been going into that city room than [name of paramedic removed] that night. And he forgot his cruciform cards.Footnote 4 Fucking hell, how many times do we forget things? I forget whether I've locked the door or not! He left his car, going towards a major incident, constantly dynamically risk assessing as he walked up the stairs into that City Room. He forgot his cruciform cards, and then he couldn’t go back for them. And that probably had an effect on the way that some of those casualties were treated. But can he be blamed for that? (Expert #2)

Expert #2 was discussing the Kerslake inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing, confronting all expectations of linear learning from past events with the searing reality of a mass casualty incident. They didn’t go so far as to say that the emergency defies learning, as it is implicit within their professional role that the business of learning be centralised and achieved, but the emotional tenor of the discussion did highlight significant distress and dissonance about this. The expert is professionally committed to learning from disaster response, but is simultaneously aware that the moment of the emergency comes unexpected, by definition, and naturally provokes mistakes from responders in a high-stress environment. The emergency will not come in the same form as it did previously.

Additionally, Expert #2 manifested an (unintentional) relational take on emergency planning in their views on the Protect Duty—the responsibilisation of venues for counterterrorism risk assessment and planning, after the Manchester bombing. When asked about the potential impact of Protect on emergency planning, Expert #2 hastily cut into the discussion proclaiming that:

It’ll move the threat. It’ll move the threat to an unprotected area. [Laughs incredulously.] Because that’s how they [terrorists] do it. Because they’re ingenious. And they think about soft targets. So they’ll just find a soft target. (Expert #2)

Unlike the linear Newtonian expectations of learning from events, Expert #2 was sufficiently versed in the reality of disaster planning and response to know that previous events do not determine the next. Rather, an extensive array of material and human factors dynamically interacts in the production of any moment or event. By introducing a legal duty for venues to risk assess their events, Expert #2 deftly articulated that terrorists would simply respond by choosing other targets.

Emphasising the complexity of a relational understanding of events, Expert #2 also undercut the narrative that protective measures (such as the Protect Duty, and the empowerment of security guards and officers to challenge the perpetrator) would have prevented the attack. The ‘learnings’ from the Manchester bombing would not—if transposed in time—have prevented the attack. Rather, Expert #2 opined that people still would have died and been injured, as a result of the perpetrator detonating his device when challenged (Expert #2).

These comments require significant analysis. Here the interviewee is transposing the post-Manchester ‘learning’ onto the pre-Manchester environment, arguing that it would change the impact of the bombing but not prevent it. This is a remarkable simulation of multiple realities, all co-existing; it is a profound articulation of relationality and the possibility of multiple co-existing parallel worlds that quantum mechanics predicts.

Finally, Expert #2 emphasised the looping temporality of disaster learning—which also characterised the testimony of Expert #3. Training in disaster preparedness and response now anticipates failures in emergency response, and the inquiry which will respond to those failings. The MAGIC (multi-agency gold incident command) courses for emergency services commanders now incorporate ‘defensibility’ as a central aspect of emergency response. It trains commanders, in advance of a major incident, to make decisions and then defend them—as if being grilled by an inquiry (into failure):

It’s something that’s done in the MAGIC course, the advocate comes in and challenges people who’re on the MAGIC course. So that created its own little bit of the market. You’ve got these advocates that come in and do their day of shouting at senior officers, which is great because that’s what it’s like. That’s real experience. ‘You made a decision; now, defend it.’ They really put you through it […] And I’m not surprised because that’s what it’s like in court, or an Inquiry, and that’s what we’re seeing. It's bloody hard! So the MAGIC course […] It prepares you for what is going to happen. (Expert #2)

Emergency response training now invokes the post-disaster inquiry—folding the failure of future disaster response into that event’s own dedicated training. Anticipation here incorporates the prospect of its own failure, based on the retrospective knowledge of all previous failures to learn from events.

This emphasises that the past is incorporated within anticipatory security practice. ‘Learning’ proves remarkably challenging at all stages of emergency planning and response. In practice, ‘learning’ is the name given to remarkably complex, relational, temporalities that permeate the anticipation of disasters. Indeed, training sessions for emergency managers now incorporate their own future failure into scenarios—embedding the failure of a future emergency response into its own planning, on the basis of this having happened so many times before. This complexity of time-space reflects more of the quantum ontology (with overlapping entanglements of the past, present and future) than it does Newtonian mechanics.

Conclusion

Throughout this chapter, we have explored efforts to anticipate disaster events in the UK and other countries in Europe. The turn to pre-emptive security agendas during the War on Terror has long been noted by scholars of Critical Security Studies, who have analysed the projections of risk that this involves as well as rights violations in the present. Our contribution here has been to explore how the past, commemoration and memory figure in such pre-emptive agendas.

Primarily, the relationship of the past to pre-emptive security politics occurs through the invocation of temporal stages of disaster (planning, preparedness, response, recovery)—which situate commemoration and memory in the ‘recovery’ stage of disaster mitigation—as well as through efforts to ‘learn’ from past events. ‘Learning’ from disasters (and mistakes made in disaster response) manifests in surprisingly complex ways, which frequently appear to have more in common with relational ontology than traditional linear methods of measurement. For example, our interviewees suggested that policy changes after a disaster cannot be understood as ‘learning’ that contributes to prevention, because they often alter the relational arrangement between structures, forces and people in society—meaning that the next emergency will manifest in once again unpredictable ways. Also, they showed us how emergency planning has entered into a relationship with its own failure—such that it trains responders around the spectacle of their future failure (on the basis of repeated past failures), and that the ‘tombstone imperative’ limits the anticipatory capacity of security professionals (because policy action cannot be taken until that event itself has manifested).

This complex overlapping of temporalities and relational fields led us to analyse our expert interviews through the lens of relational ontology, where the insights from quantum mechanics have entered social theory. Relational ontology helps us to understand why, in the UK, for example, emergency planners work to prepare templates for the next disaster response effort (‘controlled spontaneity’)—which, in-and-of-itself, implies the failure of anticipatory efforts to prevent an event. Pre-emption is bound up with the past, because the past provides the scenarios with which anticipation can imagine futures. The irony, however, is that pre-emption can never imagine its own success. As Expert #2 told us, any effort to close down a range of potential targets just moves terrorists onto other easier targets. This is a practical example of relational ontology, whereby our entanglement with the world produces an inexhaustible dynamism which configures and reconfigures space-time-matter (Barad 2007). Our actions—including measurement—alter the world around us; meaning that our strategies are always outdated schemas, based on a past image of the world.