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The Terrorist Threat Essay

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The paper “The Terrorists Threat World Risk Society Revisited” written by Ulrich Beck, the author analyses how risk has changed overtime and he focuses on the idea of new risk, and that is world risk. Ulrich Beck breaks down this idea of world risk into three different types, spatial, temporal and social. As well, he also names three different types of conflict, he discusses the effects of risk on the center and the periphery and he examines the use of language. In this essay the main focus will be on how the main points of Ulrich Beck can all relate to the three different types of risk otherwise known as the de-bounding of risk. Also, I will look at how the de-bounding of risk has dissolved the idea of nation-states. One of the many …show more content…

By this Beck is saying that since society cannot pinpoint a source of the risk we cannot obtain compensation for our losses. Being able to give someone compensation is based on being able to determine the results, and with the de-bounding of risk we can no longer assume the outcome (Beck 3). An example of an old type of risk would be war and a new type would be environmental. With war we were able to know exactly when the event started, and at the end of the war the society that lost took the blame. The end of the war will most likely be in a matter of time where we will still understand its effects, and war is always contained to certain boundaries. Compensation for damages can be assessed because we understand the consequences of war involve economy loses, death and territorial damage, all of which have a value. On the other hand, environmental risk does not stay within set boundaries, we have no idea how long the consequences will last and it cannot be blamed on a single source. As well, compensation cannot be generated because the effects and the source are unknown. De-bounding of risk is a very dangerous event because we can no longer predict what will happen. Ulrich Beck claims “the speeding up of modernization has produced a gulf between the world of quantifiable risk in which we think and act, and the

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