Editorial: Situational awareness: sensing insecurity and coming catastrophes

This Special Issue proposes situational awareness as a critical lens into studying security in our times along its temporal, affective, material and collective dimensions. It unpacks situational awareness as a governmental and everyday practice of decision-making and maneuvering in highly uncertain settings. And it probes situational awareness as a way of reading our times, for example, as a response to a world slipping into disorder and war, or as an attunement to irreversible climate collapse. If security in a world of multiplying crises and catastrophes becomes increasingly a matter of situational awareness, what does this mean for the perception and concrete practices of security? What ethical and political challenges arise from the consolidation of this new security paradigm? What conceptual and methodological innovations are required to attend to the fleeting and elusive problem space of ‘the situation’? And how might the concept of situational awareness be creatively adapted to rethink and reorient approaches to security research?