Amoore’s The Politics of Possibility offers a penetrating account of contemporary security by arguing that sovereign power no longer acts only upon calculable probabilities, but increasingly upon possible futures imagined through data, algorithms and anticipatory risk techniques. Her central proposition is that post-9/11 security does not merely respond to known threats; it governs through the speculative identification of what may emerge, however improbable, uncertain or incomplete. The opening case of the UK’s e-Borders contract with Raytheon crystallises this transformation: the border guard’s decision appears immediate, yet it is mediated by commercial software, biometric systems, travel histories, financial traces and algorithmic risk scores. Amoore therefore displaces any simple distinction between state sovereignty and private expertise, showing how security is produced through a mobile assemblage of governments, defence contractors, consultants, databases and predictive analytics. The case synthesis extends from borders to finance, mobility and surveillance: bodies are fragmented into risk factors, travellers become dividual data profiles, and uncertain futures are folded back into present decisions of detention, exclusion or permission. This is not simply a politics of fear, but a politics of actionable possibility, where imagination, suspicion and calculation acquire governmental authority. Ultimately, Amoore demonstrates that contemporary security’s danger lies in its ethical evasion: by acting on what might happen, it normalises preemption, obscures responsibility and demands a new politics capable of defending the unanticipated against algorithmic capture.
