Risk moves from theory to real lives

risk as – In its new issue, Wespennest tackles risk across war, sport, theatre, car accidents and love—then points a missing blind spot: financial markets. The magazine’s pages move from Ulrich Beck’s account of “risk society” to contemporary arguments about “uncalculat

The new issue of Wespennest opens with a familiar thrill—risk, in all its forms—war, sport, theatre, car accidents, love. But editor Andrea Roedig is blunt about the gap she can’t ignore: financial markets. For that, she points readers back to the previous issue on bankruptcy.

The magazine insists that any serious talk of risk has to begin. even if it doesn’t end. with Ulrich Beck. In Risk Society (1986). Beck argued that the twentieth century shifted into a new modernity marked by risks that can’t be properly calculated. The effects of pollution, the arms race, and nuclear energy were, in his account, impossible to predict with accuracy. Populations were left in a state of fear and insecurity.

Science, Beck found, didn’t steady people. It did the opposite—administering arbitrary exposure limits and tolerating the poisoning of humankind and the planet.

Forty years later. Emanuel Deutschmann’s claim is sharper: we no longer live in a risk society but in a society of exponentiality. The threats now aren’t incalculable, he argues. There is data on the destruction of planetary ecosystems, and that data suggests exponential growth. It also suggests that, if the world keeps following fossil capitalism, the direction is calculable. What blocks the future from being properly mapped. Deutschmann says. is the refusal of governments to perform those calculations and translate the results into policy.

In other words. rather than incalculable risk. what we face is uncalculated risk—an omission made out of helplessness. but also intentionally. guided by what the author calls ‘the rules of the game in unfettered market-based systems’. The effect is not just uncertainty. It’s the deliberate destruction of predictability that is, Deutschmann says, already within reach.

Manufactured uncertainty isn’t only about climate charts and policy failures. It also shows up where people feel the world slipping—security strategies, war economics, and the lived logic of conflict. Mary Kaldor. a political scientist and disarmament activist whose forthcoming book is entitled Experimental Junctures. speaks with Sarah Waring and Andrea Zederbauer about issues ranging from war economics and commercial warfare to pacifism. neutrality. and the risks of nuclear war.

In the discussion, Beck’s framework returns in a new key. Kaldor describes climate change, terrorism, and new wars as global manufactured uncertainty. At the same time. she says Trump. Putin. and other right-wing leaders are positing imagined risks of the past inside a national framework. Their moves. she argues. worsen situations because they don’t address the transnational. technically manufactured type of risk that people are actually facing. She says they try to control how risk is perceived—pairing external threats with migrants and other ethnicities.

The magazine then pivots from how risk is produced to how people respond when it feels unavoidable. Victor Kössl writes that predictions of the end of the world exist across cultures—and many have ended. historically. through colonialism and capitalist exploitation. What he identifies as unique about this moment is the scientific basis for anticipating climate collapse on a global scale.

In industrialised democracies. Kössl says. many people tacitly accept that what they rely on—temperate climate. reliable food supply. health care. rule of law—is being put at risk for convenience and profit. He identifies three strategies that help them live with that acceptance: the refusers. who believe the threat is exaggerated; the hopeful. who expect technology. the market. or governments to implement solutions in time; and the deniers. who can’t find the time or energy in daily life to face what they know is coming.

Then come those who translate fear into action. Kössl frames leftist survivalism as a response born when political activists and generations of efforts have not been enough to prevent collapse. For them, survival isn’t about hoarding or arming a clan like rightwing preppers. It’s about building structures of collective care and responsibility—acquiring hands-on skills for growing food and building shelter. or creating spaces of refuge for people who can’t do it themselves.

Even the most intimate terrain—the imagination of romance—gets treated as a question of what we can’t calculate. Friederike Gösweiner introduces the existential risk of love through Philippe Petit. the tight-rope walker known for balancing without a safety net between the two World Trade Center towers. Petit’s fear showed up physically: sweaty palms, goosebumps, a racing heart. The issue draws a direct parallel: those same physiological effects also appear when someone falls in love. and it asks why.

Love, Gösweiner argues, especially sexual love, is risky for the self. We look for love to overcome loneliness and a sense of incompleteness. Sex with another person. she writes. lets us temporarily forget separateness and physically manifest union with a beloved in the form of a new human being. Yet the story doesn’t end there. We fall back into loneliness. We face disappointment. Our hearts break. When we search for confirmation of our own value in another person. their behaviour can always devalue us through betrayal. abandonment. or disregard.

Historically, marriage has been described as the most powerful protective strategy against this risk. But the rejection of marriage’s patriarchal oppression and the liberation of sex from procreation has brought a competing model: polyamory. In that framework, the individual’s value doesn’t derive from exclusivity. Sex, as the magazine frames it, doesn’t mean what it does in monogamy. The individual is responsible for their own sense of completeness—which, in practice, often proves elusive.

Gösweiner concludes that the risk of sexual love ‘cannot be held at bay by a concept’. Love remains a balancing act over the abyss, and anyone who loves, the piece says, will be hurt.

What ties these pages together isn’t that risk exists. It’s how risk is handled—who gets to calculate it. who gets to ignore it. and who gets left to build care or absorb harm when the calculations never arrive. When Deutschmann points to ‘the rules of the game in unfettered market-based systems’ and Kaldor describes global manufactured uncertainty. the same question echoes across climate policy. war strategies. and the intimate choreography of attachment. Who benefits when predictability is destroyed?. The issue never answers with slogans. It just lays out the costs, scene by scene, until the missing logic feels personal.

Wespennest risk society Ulrich Beck Emanuel Deutschmann Mary Kaldor Experimental Junctures Victor Kössl leftist survivalism Angela von Rahden Anne Dufourmantelle Günther Anders Philippe Petit existential risk love polyamory Eurozine Andrea Roedig