After twenty years, September 11, 2001 (which we have raised as a symbol that traces a new era) still speaks to us.
We look at that date with the fear due to an event that has left us stunned, speechless. That day, in fact, we all thought: how is it possible to attack the heart of America, the most powerful and (we thought) safest in the world? Yet it was possible.
We want to look at September 11 from the point of view of the metamorphosis of risk, starting from these pages a path of reflection and research on the risk we live and how we face it.
We realize that this is a huge theme, with infinite facets but, on closer inspection, it is the theme-of-themes for those who intend to re-find paths of historical judgment in reality, of understanding (in complex and profound terms) of what happens.
Since then, the world has been dangerously ablaze. In these days we read numerous analyzes on the theme of war on terror, infinite also because terror has embodied the metamorphosis of risk. Everything has been digitized or is being digitized. Where do the risks come from? Here is the problem. Here are some points we would like to develop:
- the risk has become unpredictable, intangible, asymmetrical. And it comes from parts of the world we weren’t used to knowing. Today the risk is from space to Earth and back, cyber has become the watchword: defense and security are reconfigured and concern military activities as much as the structure of our cities;
- crises have intertwined and we could speak of a complexity of crises. Indeed, it is no longer possible to face one crisis at a time, separate from the rest: climate change, mass migration, democratic and political weakness (here understood in the sense of thinking / acting), inequalities, and so on, are inseparable parts of a single planetary mosaic, wrapped as we are in what Edgar Morin calls planetary destiny;
- “where” acquires more and more importance and, with it, geographic thinking. This is coupled with technological innovation, with emerging technologies that look to the “where” of the human as the place of choice: the science of where;
- geographical thinking is not enough if it is not combined with critical and complex thinking. This is the era in which linear thinking shows all its structural limits, as well as the causal approach that does not take into account the unpredictability that govern historical processes and our own lives.
All this is accompanied by the geostrategic information that, every day, we publish in The Science of Where; there we try, always with complex thinking, to show the close link between technological innovation and the evolution of international relations in evolving worlds, our “where”.
