Vulnerable Agents and Sustainable Security

Abstract

This project explores an ethics for securitization. The ethical program benefits from the multi-dimensional significance of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Engineering practices are critical in this ethical project to assess and shape securitization. The ethics also develops the thought of Hannah Arendt and Elke Schwarz in order to focus on persons: both in terms of their vulnerability and their effective activities to shape a common world. Mark Coeckelbergh underlines the imagination’s socio-temporal role in narrating demands, past and future. Through their narration, vulnerable persons sustain their collective movement forward. Professional risk analysis enables persons to dwell even amid a world of uncertainties. Through skilled habits of design, engineering equips persons to build their enframing world. The plans and achievements of engineers create a syntax of systems that enables, amid plurality, discourse. For vulnerable agents and practicing professionals, their collaborative shaping of a world, not the securing of a nation, finds its ethical guide in the SDGs. The economic, social, and governance dimensions of these goals correspond to the dwelling, designing, and discursive practices of persons and societies. For these activities, the SDGs establish a trans-temporal and global context. Securitization requires ethical direction. The SDGs orient engineering practices so that persons in society through their collective activities are enabled to strive to maintain their common good.