Welcome to the final video of this course. In this video, we will reflect on what you have learned on the nature, scope, and perceptions of risk in modern society. In doing so, we will provide you with an overview of what we have addressed in this course. At the beginning of this course, we introduced the history of risk. We saw that risk is a modern concept that emerged due to three key historical developments. These included the introduction of the Hindu-Arabic numbering system in Europe, the invention of probability theory, and the growth of modern bureaucratic states. Together, these developments changed our notion of risk, moving away from the feeling that we had no control over harmful events to realizing that we could understand, assess, and attempt to control such events. Today, this notion is key to our modern societies. This course has further introduced contemporary approaches to risk. Nowadays, we tend to speak of risk as intentional or non-intentional. While intentional risks are mostly studied within the realm of security studies, non-intentional risks are mostly studied within safety science. So, let us again take a look at the distinction between the two. We have seen that security studies aims to understand why risks emerge. This field mostly focuses on risks that are intentionally created by human actors. On a more general level, we have learned that security studies looks at a specific subset of risks, threats to security. These aspects set security studies apart from safety science, which focuses on non-intentional harm and the prevention thereof. This field predominantly looks at risk that result from accidents or natural hazards. Safety science examines how to protect human beings and their assets from harm. It has a number of subdomains, for example relating to airplane and traffic safety, industrial and chemical safety, and public health. In the second week of this course, we took a closer look at the concept of risk management. Risk management is the dominant approach to understanding and dealing with risk in safety science. Increasingly, it has also become a key paradigm for responding to risk outside academia. Large corporations and governments have also turned to risk management as a central approach to mapping, understanding, prioritizing, or responding to risk. In fact, risk management has become omnipresent in our modern society. It is the most important way of studying and dealing with risk. In the same week, we also discussed some of the weaknesses of risk management. Risk management has proven its worth in various domains, such as airplane safety and industrial safety. However, risk management is now using context where it doesn't work quite so well. As we have seen, one weakness of risk management is that not all risks can be measured, calculated, and predicted adequately. This is especially the case when risks are instigated by human actors. These human actors may actively seek weaknesses in systems to exploit. As soon as one weakness is resolved, they may find another weakness to take advantage of. Think of terrorists who constantly change tactics to strike. We concluded that risk management works exceptionally well in context in which the number of risk variables is limited. It does not work well in context that have too many variables, and in which human actors are the main instigators of risk events. In the third week of this course, we have learned about risk perception. Here, we saw that while experts often rely on various statistical and mathematical models to assess risk, people generally rely on more intuitive judgments, called risk perceptions. We have learned that risk perceptions are influenced by a number of factors, including how familiar we are with a particular risk, how much control we have over it, whether we are exposed to the risk on a voluntary or involuntary basis, whether the risk has dreaded or non-dreaded outcomes, and the degree to which the risk benefits us. Using these factors, we then looked at several risks in which risk perception plays a crucial role. In the fourth week, we focused on global challenges involving risk. Here, we have seen that these challenges can be global because of their scale or global because of their reach. We've also seen how the complexity and the impact of global challenges have increased significantly in modern times. Technological developments, for example, have made our lives easier and safer in many ways. However, they've also produced new types of risk. In addition, the interconnectedness of modern systems implies that risks nowadays can have unexpected and dramatic cascading effects. Combined, these factors make many of our global challenges increasingly difficult to tackle. To sum up, as we have seen in this course risk plays an important role in our modern society, today we have developed many approaches and tools to understand, assess, and mitigate risk. At the same time, we should also be aware that risks cannot be eliminated completely. As we have seen, there is no such thing as absolute safety or absolute security. We hope that this course has increased your understanding of risk. Thank you for joining us.
