In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Jean-Paul Brodeur

At the end of 2004, the International Centre for Comparative Criminology (ICCC) was asked by the director of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), Jacques Duchesneau, to organize two one-day seminars on risk management. These seminars were to bring together French- and English-speaking experts in two separate events. CATSA is a Canadian Crown corporation created in 2001, in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States in New York City and Washington, DC. It was part of a $2.2-billion package of air-security initiatives and was officially established through Bill C-49 on 1 April 2002. CATSA's mission is to protect the public by securing critical elements of the air transportation system as assigned by the government of Canada.

The first of the two seminars took place in Paris in January 2005. Its participants included Jean-Pierre Galland, Patrick Laguadec, Frédéric Ocqueteau, Patrick Peretti-Watel, Hubert Seillan, and Michel Wieviorka. With the exception of Ocqueteau and Wieviorka, who respectively specialize in private security and terrorism (among other things), these researchers are French experts on risk management in fields other than criminal justice (e.g., public health, industrial hazards, and the environment). Two CATSA officials, Kevin McGarr and Matthew Murphy, and Jean-Paul Brodeur, the director of the ICCC, joined them. Ana Maria Falconi took notes on the exchanges and later presented a report summarizing their content. The second seminar was held in Montreal in February 2005. Its participants were Richard Ericson, David Lyon, Peter Manning, Pat O'Malley, and Lucia Zedner. The seminar was also attended by Jacques Duchesneau and Tom Hodge of CATSA and by three researchers from the ICCC: Benoît Dupont, Stéphane Leman-Langlois, and Jean-Paul Brodeur. Pasha Peroff took notes on the debates and prepared a report on the proceedings of the seminar. All those partaking in the Montreal seminar shared, to some extent, a background of researching topics related to criminal justice and policing. [End Page 323]

CATSA provided the experts brought together by the ICCC with an outline of the issues it wanted them to address. All the issues revolved around one central question: whether air transport security is better promoted through the use of a rule-based model that applies the same set of procedures in all circumstances or through a risk-assessment and risk-management model that tailors safety measures according to the various kinds of dangers facing air transportation. Each seminar participant examined this question and its ramifications through his or her own different lens, and I will not try to summarize their respective contributions, which are published in this issue. Here I will very briefly discuss (1) common themes filtering out of both seminars that all contributors seem to agree on, (2) themes that were differently emphasized in the Paris and Montreal seminars, and (3) applicable ideas developed by our contributors that could be integrated into an air transportation strategy.

Common themes

There are two themes that recur explicitly or implicitly in all the papers. The first one is that uncertainty theoretically supersedes risk. In order to explicate this statement, I will note that, according to most lexicographers, the word "risk" comes from the Italian word riscio (risiko in German), which means "reef." The word was current during the Renaissance in insurance contracts for sea vessels, which were exposed to the danger of sinking by running against sea reefs. It was borrowed by other languages and given its present meaning during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and thus became part of actuarial terminology. Actuaries being experts in probability, their practice fostered the belief that risk assessment is a calculus for estimating with mathematical certainty the chances that an unhappy event will occur. All the articles in this special issue take exception to this idea, Richard Ericson's formulation – that risk is a statement of uncertainty – encapsulating the general consensus. This reluctance to construe risk assessment as an exact science is strongly expressed by Pat O'Malley's observation that informal guesswork is often uncritically carried over into formalized risk assessment. Peter Manning also stresses that informal and formal systems of risk assessment...

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