Risk Management Responses to Armed Non-State Actor Risk in Afghanistan

Abstract

The article considers responses by different categories of actor to the threat of armed non-state actors in the international intervention in Afghanistan 2001-2015. Concepts from the sociology of risk, in particular risk-management and the distinction between operational and reputational risk, are related to field research in Afghanistan during the intervention. The ‘risk society’ approach of Beck (2009) is critiqued as relatively inapplicable to a discussion of differences in risks to and responses by different categories of actor. The article identifies some convergences of practice across three categories of intervening actor, civil-developmental, counter-insurgent and counter-terrorist, in particular tendencies to risk-transfer and remote-management that draws together theorisation of civil practice by Duffield (2010) and military practice by Shaw (2002). This is problematised relative to difficulties in managing tensions between operational risks to intervening actors and reputational risks vis-à-vis local actors.