NATO and the risk society: Modes of alliance representation since 1991

The risk society is a sociological concept describes the state of late or post-modernity in the Western world. The understanding of risk is informed by the writings of Charles Manning, Barry Buzan and Richard Little and Hedley Bull. The idea of risk has generated a security paradigm that has allowed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to legitimate its continued existence in a world without the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, neo-realism viewed NATO as a simply a traditional military alliance, a collection of states that banded together to balance a threatening opponent state or group of states. One of NATO’s core tasks has historically been defence planning. During the Cold War, planning was premised on quantifying, with a rather large degree of empirical certainty, the strengths of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact militaries. This chapter concludes NATO’s position in relation to contemporary risk management.