Encapsulation: Governing actual uncertainty in the coronavirus pandemic.

The coronavirus pandemic has revived scholarly engagement with the concept of biopolitics, with interpretations diagnosing either the widespread adoption of a classic biopolitical regime or the full-blown emergence of totalitarian repression (or both of these simultaneously). Relying on a close analysis of different interventions taken by Israeli authorities in response to the pandemic, this article argues that, rather than classic biopolitical strategies, such governmental interventions are better understood in relation to a problem of actual uncertainty. The case of Israel demonstrates how state apparatuses responded to actual uncertainty with technologies that are linked to different rationalities and how these technologies enabled the creation and management of a new milieu. The article further argues that, in making and intervening upon this milieu, state apparatuses employed a particular normalisation strategy that is tied to a form of power that we term encapsulation.

Corrigendum: Biosecurity Policy in the US: A Critical Assessment.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2014.00110.].

Governing through time: preparing for future threats to health and security.

During preparations for the Second Gulf War, Israel considered universal smallpox vaccination. In doing so, it faced a problem: how to legitimise carrying out a security action against an uncertain future danger (smallpox pandemic), when this action carried specific, known risks (vaccine complications). To solve this problem, the Israeli preparedness system created a new domain through which the security action could reach its goal with minimum risk: first responders (a group of medical personnel and security forces). First-responder vaccination represents a shift in the form of 'securing health' and in the governmental technology applied to this goal, in which past, present, and future occurrences are governed to enable the execution of a security action. Through this practice, risks are not located in the present or in the future but in a 'shared' temporal space and thus can be seen as existing simultaneously. Preparedness for emerging future biological events, then, involves more than questioning how the future is contingent on the present and how the present is contingent on the future's perception; it also recognises the need for a new time positioning that allows operating on both present and future risks simultaneously. Governing these risks, then, means governing through time.