Staging and Performing Emergencies: The Role of Exercises in UK Preparedness

Funded by the ESRC

Project team: Dr Ben Anderson (Durham), Dr Peter Adey (Keele) and Professor Stephen Graham (Durham)

In response to a changing set of 21st Century threats and hazards new ways have emerged of anticipating uncertain and complex futures. These include preemption, prevention, and preparedness. The problem that these different ways of anticipating respond to are events - events that are contingent in their potential occurrence and complex in their potential effects. The most high profile of such events are new forms of terror post 9/11 and 7/7, but they also include other threats to the smooth functioning of societies (such as Avian Flu, infrastructure loss, or high impact flooding).

This 24 month research project will focus on one way of anticipating future threats -  exercises in UK preparedness – in order to address wider questions of how such ways of anticipating function. Post the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act, exercises have been essential to the emergence of UK 'preparedness'. Exercises promise to enable the development of the capabilities and resiliences that would allow response and recovery post disruptive events. The research focuses on how exercises perform these and other functions through; observation of the exercises undertaken in one UK region; interviews with practitioners involved in the planning, designing and undertaking of exercises; and archive work on the wider policy context.