The 21st century has born witness to myriad changes in the way the world is secured from the
many emergencies that continually threaten to disrupt it. This book concentrates on two such
changes. First it takes stock of the ever-increasing development and diversification of data
and digital technologies that security organisations have at their disposal. Secondly it
examines how these digital devices have fostered a new direction in which security agencies
primarily conceive of emergencies as so many risks of the future. Emergency governance has
undergone what might be called an anticipatory turn here with digitally rendered and imagined
scenes of future contingency becoming cause and justification for intervention in the here and
now. Rather than scrutinising this turn at its most spectacular heights in the domains for
instance of warfare or counter-terrorism the book explores the facilitation of risk
governance through digital technologies in a more quotidian incarnation namely by tracing the
steps that the United Kingdom¿s Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) take to govern fire emergencies
whose potential has been identified but have yet to unfold. Delving into the FRS the book maps
out a digital infrastructure that includes various software institutional processes multiple
forms of risk calculation but also human beings relations and consciousness and an array of
material spaces in which these things exist. Accentuated here is how these components assemble
to produce projections of future emergencies on a number of sensorial registers. This
infrastructure is shown in turn to inform and shape a catalogue of refined modes of action
through which interventions on future emergencies are made in the present. Engaging in depth
with this infrastructure the FRS provides an understanding of risk as a lived relation risk
as an organisational ethos whose liveliness is founded upon and reverberates through the
relations existing between those people and things operating in the FRS to make sense of
potential fire emergencies. Using the concept of lived relation as a foundation the book
develops a critical understanding of anticipatory governance by grasping its resonance with
issues emanating in the wider field of security showing how security figures as a set of
practices that rely upon and cultivates affective conditions that enrols the force of elements
like fire into its institutional arrangement that draw on an array of knowledges to exercise
power and in the process that instantiate new forms of subjectivity.
