Risk is a central concept in modern regulatory studies. In Chapter 2, the general idea of ’risk’ is introduced. The chapter helps readers grasp its scientific and practical relevance for regulation. The chapter also offers an overview of the importance of risk in scholarly work and policy-making. The chapter emphasizes the extensive and diverse nature of risk studies across different academic disciplines including ’technical’ quantitative methods and sociological critique. It explains how risk identification, risk assessment, and risk management are conventionally understood and highlights their shortcomings and complexities. Additionally, it discusses the trend of ’riskification’ – the tendency to frame a growing number of issues in the language of risk.

Facing the challenges of aging populations, new technologies provide a potential solution to meeting the increasing needs associated with demographic changes by increasing productivity in healthcare production. However, decision-makers require evidence of whether the adoption of new technologies improves the efficiency of healthcare resource use. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is a methodology for evaluating new technologies by comparing a new intervention with the current intervention (or mix of different interventions) used for treating the same patient group. This chapter explores the theoretical foundations of CEA and the conditions required for CEA to inform decision-makers about the efficiency of implementing the new intervention are identified. The implications of using CEA as a basis for decision-making in the absence of these theoretical conditions are discussed, and solutions to addressing the efficiency problems under real-world conditions are derived. Where practical considerations limit the ability of decision-makers to apply these solutions, an alternate practical approach, focused on efficiency improvements as opposed to efficiency maximization, is presented.

This is a reprinting of Einstein, Podolsky and Tolman’s 1931 letter to the editor of Physical Review. In this letter, the authors demonstrate that the principles of quantum mechanics give rise to an uncertainty in the description of past events which is analogous to the uncertainty quantum mechanics assigns to the prediction of future events.

This final chapter demonstrates how the catastrophe (CAT) models described in previous chapters can be used as inputs for CAT risk management. CAT model outputs, which can translate into actionable strategies, are risk metrics such as the average annual loss, exceedance probability curves, and values at risk (as defined in Chapter 3). Practical applications include risk transfer via insurance and CAT bonds, as well as risk reduction, consisting of reducing exposure, hazard, or vulnerability. The forecasting of perils (such as tropical cyclones and earthquakes) is explored, as well as strategies of decision-making under uncertainty. The overarching concept of risk governance, which includes risk assessment, management, and communication between various stakeholders, is illustrated with the case study of seismic risk at geothermal plants. This scenario exemplifies how CAT modelling is central in the trade-off between energy security and public safety and how large uncertainties impact risk perceptions and decisions.

Important parts of the Earth’s climate and environment can change in ways that are self-reinforcing, sudden, and irreversible. The risks of such changes are under-researched, under-reported in what is communicated by scientists to governments, and underestimated. In the most authoritative science assessments, the most important policy question of all – whether the climate will be stable at low degrees of warming – is hardly even raised.

A summation of the main arguments of the book.

This chapter examines the sense of uncertainty fostered by postwar geopolitics. It looks at how the political orientations shaped during the interwar period were dislocated from postwar Italo-Egyptian relations and from emergent Mediterranean constellations. The fall of the fascist government in Rome in 1943 and the creation of the Egyptian republic in 1953 made uncertainty a defining condition of life for Italian residents in Egypt after the war. Their experiences no longer resonated with the political aspirations of the post-fascist state, nor did they align with Egypt’s accelerating movement towards national sovereignty. The material and symbolic exchange of two deposed kings – Vittorio Emanuele III in 1946 and Faruk in 1953 – and the establishment of the Italian and Egyptian Republics paved the way for new industrial and economic ties. Political-economic relations tightened around this kinship of exchange, and the Italian state sought to reinforce Egypt’s military government. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, many Italian residents fell into greater duress, coming to understand departure as their only possible future.

The final chapter investigates the nature of the 1918 transition from Empire to Republic. It opens with the lack of street lighting which persisted in the postwar years and symbolized the slow change from war to peace, and from old regime to democracy. The continuity between the two regimes and the continuation of wartime conditions were both visible in urban space. Prague’s unfinished transformation exacerbated the disappointed expectations of reward for war sacrifices and new life in the republic. Social uncertainty prevailed in the postwar city in an atmosphere of diffuse revolutionary spirit. The discourse of revolution, very present at the time, could refer to either the rupture of 1918 or the changes yet to come. Popular interpretations of revolution at the local level shed new light on 1918 as a turning point in twentieth-century Europe beyond its traditional interpretation as either an aftershock of the Bolshevik revolution or a victory of national self-determination.

Feeling marginalized, silenced and excluded, as an individual or as a (sub)group within a collective, can make one feel uncertain about one’s self and identity and about “fitting in.” This feeling of uncertainty can be reduced by group identification – especially with a distinctive group that has a clearly defined, unambiguous, and homogenous social identity. Such groups and identities can sometimes be characterized as extremist. Excluded individuals may exit the larger group to identify with a different and possibly more extreme group, and the larger group may thus become less diverse and more homogeneous and extreme itself. Members of excluded subgroups can bond tightly together as a highly distinctive entity and identify strongly with it, a process that can fragment and polarize the larger group into oppositional or combative factions. In this chapter we draw upon an uncertainty identity theory framework to describe how exclusion can generate self and identity uncertainty, which is resolved by a process of identification that fragments groups and can produce extremist groups and identities.