Risk, class, crisis, hazards and cosmopolitan solidarity/risk community – conceptual and methodological clarifications

This text was written for a workshop on « Risk and Climate Change: The Shaping of a Cosmopolitan Future », held in Paris on 10-11 December 2012, in the frame of the Chaire of Ulrich Beck entitled « Cosmopolitan Risk Communities » at the Collège d’études mondiales.

This paper discusses four problems. (1) Risk and class: why ‘class’ is too soft a category to capture the explosiveness of social inequality in World Risk Society? (2) Risk and crisis: how do these two concepts relate to each other? (3) Risk and hazards: by hazards I mean material substances that are sources of threat. (4) Risk and cosmopolitan community/solidarity: how do climate risks liberate politics from given rules and enemy images and/or produce new ones?