Large-scale risks have challenged countries of the global world recently, even more than Ulrich Beck might have imagined when writing about the Risk Society in the mid-1980s. The ongoing debate about climate change has intensified, driven by repeating heatwaves, bushfires and floodings of new intensity, length and frequency. The coronavirus crisis has broken down cognitive divisions between the Global South and the Global North, bringing the awareness that new infectious diseases are a global phenomenon in a world of high mobility. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic has faded, Russia's invasion of parts of Ukraine has resulted in a war that challenges long-term security paradigms, while there is still uncertainty about the Chinese desire to incorporate the technological powerhouse of Taiwan. It is not enough that such large-scale risks challenge societies worldwide. What has been called post-truth (McIntyre, 2018) is characterising a public sphere in turmoil, with traditional information sources losing influence and giving space to both bottom-up social media campaigning and mass manipulation through fake news and conspiracy theories, while the public sphere seems fragmented into echo chambers and epistemic bubbles (Nguyen, 2020). As a result, fundamental social institutions are under pressure, and have to prove their capacity to manage large scale crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The rise of calculative technologies and their embeddedness in new institutions such as insurance, risk assessment and management, and epidemiology characterises a society that believes in the rational manageability of the future. But, with ongoing modernisation, the side-effects have brought about increasingly more situations where new risks are resistant to technical and economic calculations because they come with multidimensional and systemic uncertainties. These include complexity, lacking knowledge and contradictory interests and values. Consequently, risk is a double-edged sword or an ambivalent concept that stands for the manageability of harm as well as the uncertain catastrophes that inform the current crises we struggle to manage, since innovation rather than past knowledge is the source for its successful management.

The ability of societies to discover risks, the activities that cause side-effects, which are now coming back to haunt us, and their material reality challenge the ways these kinds of crises have been managed in the past.