Laboratories and biological risks

Recent advancements in the life sciences raise safety and security concerns and bring attention to the dilemmas of so-called dual-use research. This perspective is elaborated, for instance, in the World Health Organization (WHO) report, Global guidance framework for the responsible use of the life sciences, which describes it as follows:

One of the areas of such concern is the rise of research with dangerous microorganisms, conducted in specialized high-containment (high-security) laboratories. These laboratories were developed for researching pathogens such as anthrax, Ebola, smallpox, and plague. In the last two decades, these facilities have been built mainly with two goals: to help societies prepare for a new pandemic, and to enhance defence against biological terrorism. The laboratories thus develop new medicines, vaccines, and diagnostics to protect populations against a wide range of biological risks. In order to conduct research on highly virulent bacteria and viruses, these laboratories require specialized scientific and technological equipment, advanced engineering designs for controlled air and water circulation, spatial arrangements that regulate access and separate high-risk areas, strict research protocols, and protective clothing and footwear, among others.Footnote ¹⁹ Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, high-security laboratories were on the rise globally,Footnote ²⁰ and after the pandemic, interest in building them increased even further: new facilities are built across the world, and many of the existing ones are being renewed.Footnote ²¹ In 2023, there were 69 BSL-4 laboratories spread over 27 countries: 51 laboratories in operation, 3 under construction, and 15 planned. Geographically, 26 BSL-4 laboratories are located in Europe, 20 in Asia, and 15 in North America.Footnote ²² Besides, many of these laboratories belong to private or academic institutions and are not under governmental oversight.Footnote ²³

The global spread of high-security laboratories, along with their politicization during the COVID-19 pandemic, has intensified debates about the risks and challenges that laboratories pose.Footnote ²⁴ To address these risks, WHO promotes three complementary pillars: biosafety, laboratory biosecurity, and the oversight of dual-use research.Footnote ²⁵ Recent WHO guidance on laboratory biosecurity, aimed at preventing ‘the theft, misuse, or intended release of biological material’,Footnote ²⁶ calls for strengthening risk assessment, institutional governance, and national oversight.Footnote ²⁷ In doing so, it combines two logics of governance: scientific responsibility, emphasising the self-governance of scientists and research institutions, and state oversight through regulatory frameworks and compliance mechanisms.Footnote ²⁸ While these approaches seek to improve the governance of high-risk biological research, they largely treat laboratories as objects of governance and overlook how these technoscientific systems and the risks they generate are themselves shaped by evolving interactions between security and life sciences.

Biology, technology, and the politics of security

The current politicization of high-security laboratories follows a long tradition of the life sciences being interconnected with security. These interactions have been studied from different perspectives. Research on biological security focuses on how to address biological threats in a changing political and technological environment.Footnote ²⁹ This literature commonly distinguishes between three approaches to biological threats: biological warfare, oriented towards the weaponization of pathogens for military purposes; biological defence, focused on prohibiting bioweapons while developing capabilities to detect and respond to potential attacks; and biological preparedness, which expands the scope of biological risks, including bioterrorism threats from non-state actors and naturally occurring outbreaks.Footnote ³⁰ With roots in arms control research, this literature highlights the contemporary proliferation concerns related to the changing nature of science and technology, especially the rise of potentially dangerous research in the life sciences.Footnote ³¹ While some scholars contextualize the rise of these threat scenarios in broader political and economic rationalities,Footnote ³² most focus on how arms control can adapt to the changing capacities of the life sciencesFootnote ³³ and how the safety and security of dual-use research can be improved.Footnote ³⁴ This scholarship has a strong link to policy-making and tends to describe rather than critically examine the historical conditions that enabled the rise of particular biothreat scenarios.

IR scholars study the topic of health and its governance in the context of global politics.Footnote ³⁵ They have shown, among other things, that the securitization of health and infectious diseases transforms the politics and practices of security at national and international levels, affecting who can produce knowledge on public health issues,Footnote ³⁶ how different objects and technologies influence the politics of knowledge production on health,Footnote ³⁷ and how medical and scientific concepts and frameworks shape the very thinking on security.Footnote ³⁸ Building on this relational understanding of security, this article shifts attention to the historical dimension of these dynamics and to the continuing effects of past technoscientific systems on contemporary approaches to health security.

The historical roots of science–security interactions have been studied by the researchers of biopolitics of security, who draw on the works of Michel FoucaultFootnote ³⁹ and explore the shifts in governmental practices of modern liberal societies driven by reconceptualizing human or species life as a primary object of security.Footnote ⁴⁰ Biology, or the ‘biological’, is used in these works in a different way than by researchers of biological threats, and the focus lies on analysing changing technologies of power used to govern the ‘the very modern understanding of “life” itself’.Footnote ⁴¹ This research scrutinizes a broad scope of governmental technologies and methods, including insuranceFootnote ⁴² and surveillance,Footnote ⁴³ but also the rationalities and practices of biological securityFootnote ⁴⁴ and global health surveillance.Footnote ⁴⁵ Biopolitical studies of security often use genealogy to explore the historical and political conditions that shaped the entanglements of science and security, including, for instance, the effects of molecular sciences on governing biological threatsFootnote ⁴⁶ or the historical construction of risk through sciences like statistics or biology.Footnote ⁴⁷ While this scholarship has been crucial for tracing the historical emergence of political and security rationalities, including the constitution of health and biological processes as objects of governance, it primarily focuses on discursive and epistemological transformations.

Foucault-inspired studies of governmentality, which analyse the exercise of power in modern societies, point out that some forms of governance are conducted by practical mechanisms – technologies of government.Footnote ⁴⁸ These technologies include material arrangements, social practices, devices, and infrastructures that are, according to Dean,Footnote ⁴⁹ strategically deployed to enact political power. IR scholars work with these insights as they pay increasing attention to the material and technological underpinnings of international politics and securityFootnote ⁵⁰ and to forms of governance through technologiesFootnote ⁵¹ and infrastructures.Footnote ⁵² Security scholars point out that a rising number of technologies and material arrangements are considered ‘dangerous and/or protective objects’ in international politics.Footnote ⁵³ This development is a part of a broader ‘technologization’ of contemporary security governance,Footnote ⁵⁴ associated with the rise of anticipatory governance and precautionary approaches to securityFootnote ⁵⁵ and an emphasis on managing uncertain yet potentially high-impact future risks with the help of technology.Footnote ⁵⁶ This inquiry also reoriented methodological approaches within security studies to attend to the agency of nonhuman things, especially with the help of new materialism and science and technology studies (STS).Footnote ⁵⁷

This article complements these approaches by developing a historical perspective on technoscientific systems for dual-use research. It approaches these systems as technologies of government, but rather than examining how they emerge, it focuses on how they persist over time and space in different forms, and how they prefigure subsequent approaches to security. Similar to IR scholarship on security and materiality, the paper views high-containment laboratories as active participants in international politics. However, instead of delving into the questions of agency or studying how particular laboratories enact political rationalities in practice, it traces the historical trajectories of these technoscientific systems. To do so, it first conceptualizes laboratories as sites of global politics.

Laboratories as sites of global politics

Research on the history of science has long demonstrated how science has been mobilized in pursuit of political projects. Across different historical periods, it has served as both a vehicle of modernization and a tool for legitimising particular visions of progress and political order. For instance, imperial expansions of the late 19th- and early 20th-century integrated scientific, technological, and medical practices into colonial strategies and ideologies, while later, both capitalist and socialist visions of modernity imagined societal progress through technoscientific means.Footnote ⁵⁸ Some scientific fields, such as anthropology, emerged directly from European colonial expansion,Footnote ⁵⁹ while others, such as chemistry, microbiology, or cybernetics, became central to modern military programmesFootnote ⁶⁰ and Cold War politics.Footnote ⁶¹

At the same time, STS and postcolonial studies argue that science is itself a site of international politics, where scientific practices, institutions, and infrastructures co-constitute political power and identities.Footnote ⁶² Scientific knowledge has been central to producing global inequalitiesFootnote ⁶³ and legitimising different forms of violence,Footnote ⁶⁴ including in health and medicine.Footnote ⁶⁵ These historical dynamics continue to shape scientific institutions, privilege particular forms of knowledge, and normalise specific visions of progress and forms of violence.Footnote ⁶⁶ This is particularly visible in life sciences. Modern medicine and life sciences co-emerged with colonial governance,Footnote ⁶⁷ while colonies often functioned as ‘laboratories of modernity’, serving as sites for scientific and social experimentation.Footnote ⁶⁸ More broadly, the development of life sciences has been deeply shaped by colonial and postcolonial power relations and by centre-periphery dynamics, with the extraction of data and resources as well as the conduct of scientific experiments often taking place in peripheral regions.Footnote ⁶⁹ These histories continue to shape contemporary global healthFootnote ⁷⁰ and the understanding of infectious diseases as security issues.Footnote ⁷¹

Laboratory studies, a foundational part of STS, focus on the co-constitution of modern society and specific scientific sites, such as laboratories. They show that scientific sites such as laboratories are not isolated, ‘neutral’ spaces, but are deeply embedded in the political landscape and imaginaries of a modern, advanced society. This observation was made already by sociologists of science in the 1970s, who studied the social conditions affecting the construction of scientific knowledge in laboratories. Through ethnographic research, they challenged the prevailing ideas of scientific neutrality and universality of scientific knowledge and argued instead that the processes of knowledge production are highly context-sensitive, dependent on technology, culture, and social conditions.Footnote ⁷² Laboratory studies have inspired IR research mostly through the metaphor of the laboratory as a unique site for experimentation and knowledge production. Through this lens, JacobsenFootnote ⁷³ studies experiments with humanitarian technologies and points to the power embedded in material design, which eventually shapes, in overlooked ways, the conduct of humanitarian assistance. Bueger and GadingerFootnote ⁷⁴ bring attention to social scientific sites of knowledge production and, similar to laboratory ethnographers, argue for studying the practices of scientists, including those in IR.

Yet laboratories, and high-security laboratories in particular, are also sites of global politics and should be studied as such. This is because they are inherent to the assemblage of ‘the international’;Footnote ⁷⁵ their workings are intertwined with arms control treaties, global health and safety guidelines, scientific trends, international research grants, geopolitical rivalries, and international struggles over research excellence and prestige, among others. In brief, international politics also happens in and through laboratories. For instance, as other scholars showed, nuclear weapons research reflects a mix of technological, political, and social factors and institutional pressures,Footnote ⁷⁶ which also translate into the workings of nuclear weapons laboratories.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like nuclear weapons laboratories, high-security biological laboratories are rare technoscientific systems with military roots. Unlike nuclear weapons, however, biological weapons are universally prohibited. In effect, nuclear technologies are more publicly visible and politically contested, requiring forms of cultural embeddingFootnote ⁷⁸ and ritualized practices that sustain nuclear deterrence.Footnote ⁷⁹ In contrast, biological programmes have developed through less visible technopolitical trajectories, with laboratories playing a central role.

To sum up, laboratories are not politically neutral spaces or simply ‘tools’ of politics, but sites through which international politics is enacted. What remains less understood are the historical trajectories through which these sites emerged and continue to shape security politics. The following section develops a framework for such research.

Technopolitical arrangements

To foreground the role of technoscientific systems in security governance, the first analytical dimension traces how these systems are constructed and identifies the security rationalities that have informed their design and use. Drawing on Hecht, who describes technopolitics as ‘the strategic practice of designing or using technology to constitute, embody, or enact political goals’,Footnote ⁸⁹ this dimension highlights the intentionality behind technopolitical arrangements. In this framework, technopolitical arrangements refer to the political rationalities and strategic practices through which scientific knowledge, expertise, and material infrastructures are organized to address specific security concerns, while technoscientific systems describe the resulting configurations of these elements as they become stabilized in institutional and material forms. Specifically, this dimension captures how political rationalities are translated into technopolitical arrangements and materialized in technoscientific systems in response to perceived security threats, and how these arrangements embed particular logics of governing security.

This is directly relevant to the study of high-security laboratories. As highly specialized research facilities, these laboratories have been developed within particular political programmes, reflecting broader visions of the role of science in the modern state. The development of these laboratories and their research agendas have reflected evolving political goals, which have been related, among other things, to public health, biotechnology innovation, and military strategy. A technopolitical analysis of high-security laboratories therefore begins by identifying the security rationalities that have guided the organization of high-risk research and examining how these are translated into technopolitical arrangements and materialized in technoscientific systems. In doing so, it highlights how such systems are embedded within broader social and political practices to produce particular security effects, shaping what threats are anticipated, what forms of research are prioritized, and how laboratories are organized and governed.

Global connections

The second analytical dimension reconstructs the global connections that make technopolitical arrangements possible, while focusing specifically on transnational circulations and power asymmetries. The global perspective adopted here thus does not imply comprehensive geographical coverage, but a relational approach that situates particular developments within broader structures of global politics. Therefore, rather than treating technoscientific systems as products of isolated national trajectories, it examines the transnational circulations of knowledge, expertise, technologies, materials, funding, and institutional models that enable their emergence and transformation. It asks what circulates, under what political conditions, through which networks and relations, and how these circulations distribute scientific capacities, authority, and technoscientific risks across regions. In this way, the framework brings together technopolitics and global history by analysing technoscientific systems as products of both circulation and unequal power relations. Importantly, the forms these circulations and asymmetries take may vary across different technopolitical arrangements and therefore become an object of analysis.

Applied to high-security laboratories, this dimension asks how laboratory expertise, technologies, institutional models, and research practices circulated across imperial, Cold War, and contemporary global networks; which political relations enabled or constrained these movements; and how laboratory capacities, scientific authority, and technoscientific risks became unevenly distributed across regions. Rather than treating laboratories as nationally bounded institutions, this perspective situates them within transnational processes through which both scientific capacities and biological insecurities have been produced.

Prefiguration

The third dimension examines the prefigurative dynamics of technoscientific systems, that is, how these systems carry forward and reconfigure specific approaches to security across time and space. Rather than tracing the roots of specific political rationalities or governmental technologies, it asks how technoscientific systems prefigure subsequent security practices. Inspired by the work of SchatzkiFootnote ⁹⁰ and its recent use in IR,Footnote ⁹¹ prefiguration is understood here as the capacity of material and institutional arrangements to shape potential future paths by making some futures easier, or harder than others. This dimension thus focuses on how technopolitical arrangements structure the possibilities for subsequent security practices by making some futures easier to realize than others. It departs from the insights of scholars of technopolitics and STS about the agency of materiality and technology. As LatourFootnote ⁹² argues, ‘technology is society made durable’: thus, political goals and visions get stabilized not only through epistemic hierarchies and structures but also through material arrangements.Footnote ⁹³ This also means that actors are limited in their capacity to act, since technological systems have unpredictable effects and thus shape the prospects of further action.Footnote ⁹⁴ This is relevant also for international politics, as material and technological arrangements perpetuate past visions of political and global orderFootnote ⁹⁵ and stabilize global power structures.Footnote ⁹⁶

Technoscientific systems such as high-security laboratories also shape subsequent approaches to global health security and biological threats. This is because they reflect and reproduce specific political projects and promises of social order through their socio-material arrangements, including organizational structures, spatial designs, geographical locations, and scientific networks. They also assemble specific forms of expertise, cultivate unique biological organisms, and conduct specialized experiments. A prefigurative perspective therefore asks which elements of these technoscientific systems persist across changing political contexts, which are transformed or displaced, and how these processes shape subsequent understandings and practices of security, expertise, and risk. Applied to high-security laboratories, this includes asking whose security and what kind of security is prefigured through specific technopolitical arrangements, whose expertise becomes authoritative, and how risks are redistributed across actors and regions. In this paper, prefiguration is operationalized through three particular mechanisms that describe how technoscientific systems generated within particular technopolitical arrangements prefigure future security practices: stabilization, transformation, and displacement. Stabilization refers to the ways in which technoscientific systems reproduce particular assumptions about threats, expertise, and appropriate responses, for instance through the standardization of laboratory designs or biosafety regimes. Transformation captures how these systems are reinterpreted and reconfigured for new political contexts, such as when military infrastructures are repurposed for public health preparedness. Displacement highlights how technoscientific systems – and the practices, expertise, and security logics embedded within them – move across institutional, geographical, and political contexts, such as from military to civilian setting or from metropolitan centres to peripheral regions, and how this shapes the distribution of risk and responsibility.

Biological warfare

Scientific research on high-risk pathogens evolved in the context of late colonialism and the building of industrialized nation-states. Even though the deliberate spread of disease in war has a long history, the idea that biological research can be exploited for military purposes may be traced to the 19th century and the birth of microbiology. Especially germ theory, attributing the spread of disease causally to the mere spread of specific microorganisms, shaped medical thinking about diseases in the late 19th century and soon also attracted also the attention of the military.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The idea that disease can be controlled and deliberately mobilized with the help of science became the basis of a new security rationality centred on weaponizing pathogenic organisms. This shift enabled the emergence of a new technopolitical arrangement, situating biological research in military institutions. Early military biological programmes connected experiments with weaponizing disease and the doctrine of total war, aimed at the destruction of civilians, livestock, and crops. In this context, military biological research was part of broader efforts to develop technological tools for deterrence and control over mass populations, blurring the boundary between military and civilian domains in conflict.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Despite the prohibition on ‘the use of bacteriological methods of warfare’, put forward by the Geneva Protocol of 1925, most industrial countries, such as France, the United Kingdom, the United States, or the Soviet Union, were developing offensive and defensive biological research by the beginning of World War II.Footnote ¹⁰² Research on biological agents evolved together with military demands. The military biological experiments prepared a ground for large-scale weapons research during the Cold War and the industrialization of microbiology by great powers preparing for a major military conflict using weapons of mass destruction.

The early biological programmes developed in the context of great power conflicts and colonial expansion. The largest biological programme of this era was developed by Japan during its imperial occupation of Manchuria. In the 1930s, the Japanese army established a puppet state there, designed as a modern social and political experiment,Footnote ¹⁰³ in which the colonial governance structure enabled systematic control and exploitation of the local population. The military and police enforced racial hierarchies in Manchukuo, controlling Chinese insurgents, guerrillas, indigenous Manchurians, Korean labourers, and Russians. These conditions were crucial for the development of biological warfare research. Within these settings, the Japanese army initiated a secret biological programme that relied on testing biological agents primarily through human experiments. The colonial apparatus allowed the programme to operate in secrecy and provided a steady supply of test subjects, including prisoners and those labelled as ‘bandits’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ As a result, thousands of people were subjected to these experiments and several biological attacks were conducted against soldiers and civilians.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As such, the unequal relations of power in the colony enabled, and were further reinforced by, the early military biological experiments. After the war, this programme became involved in the transnational circulation of knowledge and expertise. Key Japanese biowarfare researchers traded their laboratory records and details of bioweapons testing with US military scientists in exchange for immunityFootnote ¹⁰⁶ and a similar arrangement was likely made with the Soviet Union, which also captured several Japanese biowarfare researchers.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ These exchanges enabled the circulation of expertise and experimental knowledge on biowarfare produced under colonial conditions at the periphery into the military expertise of major powers, which were developing their own biological programmes.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Even though the scientific value of the knowledge obtained by Japanese war experiments is questioned,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ the programme and its international cover-up shaped future science–security relations in many ways, normalizing secrecy, knowledge transfer, and unequal risk distribution between centre and periphery in bioweapons research.

The militarization of life sciences in the first half of the 20^th century prefigured subsequent security practices by structuring how biological threats are understood and governed. First, stabilization: this era normalized biological warfare: biology became a legitimate field of military research and weaponizing specific categories of biological agents became a part of modern war-making. This prefigured a security landscape in which biological weapons are perceived as a viable instrument of mass destruction: especially in the early Cold War, major powers envisioned them alongside nuclear weapons for use in a total war. At the same time, military scientific practices developed in this era stabilized a security future in which military biological research is conducted in secrecy and governed by technical authority rather than public debate. Second, displacement: national, wartime, site-specific scientific practices related to researching and weaponizing pathogens were displaced transnationally. The circulation of knowledge and expertise included exchanges between allies and the incorporation of knowledge from former adversaries. These processes enabled the expansion and advancement of military biological research during the Cold War. Finally, transformation: early technopolitical arrangements developed in primitive scientific settings were transformed into more durable, institutionalized technoscientific systems: bioweapons production facilities, testing sites, and military research institutes,Footnote ¹¹⁰ thus laying the foundations for later defence and preparedness programmes.

Biological defence

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the technopolitics of high-risk biological research underwent a major transformation, marked by the emergence of biological defence as a security rationality. The United States unilaterally terminated its offensive biological programme in 1969 and turned the existing offensive biological research into defensive research. This shift was motivated by the rising nuclear superiority, the perceived limited strategic value of biological weapons, and concerns about their unpredictable effects. Domestically, this decision was followed by a massive expansion of public funding into biodefence research, aiming to turn the United States into a leader in immunization against infectious diseases.Footnote ¹¹¹ As part of this turn, the first high-containment laboratory in the world was opened in 1969 at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, reconfiguring a key site for the development of biological weapons into a biodefence research facility. Internationally, this shift contributed to the institutionalization of a new technopolitical arrangement – the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which bans the development, production, and possession of biological and toxin weapons. However, this arrangement was only partially successful. Despite its participation in the BWC, the Soviet Union established a large-scale biowarfare programme, revealed only after the end of the Cold War.Footnote ¹¹² The USSR mastered the industrial production of pathogens, advancing capabilities in genetic engineering and aerobiology. Other states, such as South Africa and Iraq, were also developing biological weapons, although on a smaller scale, driven by strategic and domestic political objectives.Footnote ¹¹³ Together, these developments consolidated a technopolitical arrangement centred on military biological research, established around defence as well as covert offensive projects.

The emergence of high-security laboratories during the Cold War was co-produced not only by great power rivalry but also by asymmetrical centre-periphery relations. This dynamic enabled the circulation of knowledge, labour and technologies needed for such research while also displacing technoscientific risks to peripheries. Whereas the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States shaped their military strategies and priorities, the internal hierarchies within each bloc played a key role in organizing military research, including the development and testing of weapons of mass destruction. For instance, the Soviet biological programme drew heavily on internal centre-periphery relations. Research infrastructures and weapons production facilities were often located in peripheral regions, including contemporary Russia as well as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. Besides, the Soviets trained thousands of scientists, engineers, and technicians in both military and non-military research institutes all over the Warsaw Pact region,Footnote ¹¹⁴ while scientists in the satellite states were rarely granted access to the full scope of the research or its results.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The exploitation of labour in peripheral regions and the externalization of technoscientific risks were not unique to the bioweapons programme, as the USSR mobilized science and technology as tools of imperial governance also in other domains.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Similarly, in the United States, the development of high-containment laboratory infrastructures was shaped by transnational technological circulations. The design of laboratory biocontainment systems in the late 1960s drew on developments in space exploration and tropical disease epidemiology,Footnote ¹¹⁷ both of which were rooted in political projects of imperial expansion concerned with controlling and preventing contamination from perceived ‘Others’.

The biodefence arrangement prefigured the eventual proliferation of high-containment laboratories in several ways. First, stabilization: the biodefence arrangement standardized high-security laboratories as a technoscientific system through shared designs, professional practices, and biosafety regimes, while also expanding this technology to the realm of civilian research. For instance, the WHO’s first edition of the Laboratory Biosafety Manual from 1983 and the establishment of the American Biological Safety Association in 1984 contributed to the codification and professionalization of biosafety, while opening the research on high-risk pathogens to civilian science – in the United States and elsewhere – enabled the dissemination of biosafety knowledge to non-military audiences. Besides, imaginaries of biological threats became anchored in national security strategies, stabilizing high-risk biological research as a security concern. Second, displacement: the practices, technologies, and expertise developed within state programmes, especially the massive Soviet bioweapons programme, outlived their original political context and became redistributed across new actors and security agendas. The threat of biological war faded with the end of the Cold War, but the well-equipped laboratories, pathogen collections, fields of specialized experts, and institutional collaborations remained. The fear of hiring researchers from the post-Soviet space by hostile states or non-state actors, such as religious cults or terrorist groups, contributed to the Western concerns of biological proliferation in the 1990s and 2000s, as expressed for instance by the U.S. Department of Defence:

Third, transformation: in response, security was increasingly redefined as a problem of circulation, focusing on controlling the movement of knowledge, expertise, and materials. The rearticulation of biological threats also reconfigured existing technopolitical arrangements for new security purposes. While, during the late Cold War, biological weapons were of rather minor military and political relevance, from the 1990s, they were reframed as weapons of terrorists and malign non-state actorsFootnote ¹¹⁹ and prompted calls for strengthening biological surveillance and increasing funding for the research and development of improved biological agents.Footnote ¹²⁰ These dynamics intensified after 9/11 when terrorism was securitized on a larger scale, contributing to transforming high-security laboratories into key infrastructures of biological surveillance and preparedness.

Biological preparedness

High-security laboratories have been on the rise since 2001, especially in the West. While only 13 BSL-4 laboratories operated globally in 2000, their number expanded to 69 in 2023.Footnote ¹²¹ This growth reflects a new technopolitical arrangement centred on biological preparedness, combining concerns about bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases. This is a result of several shifts in security rationalities, including the rise of the global war on terror. Biological weapons gained greater prominence on the political agenda after 2001 as part of broader concerns that non-state actors may acquire weapons of mass destruction. These concerns have been further underlined by fears that rapid advances in the life sciences make bioweapons apparently more attractive for terrorists due to the increasing accessibility of biological material, technology and know-how.Footnote ¹²² This US-driven ‘biological turn in the war on terror’ shifted the attention from state programmes and interstate politics of biological disarmament to the individual level, focusing on emergent risks from unknown actors using unpredictable technologies.Footnote ¹²³ Simultaneously, the securitization of infectious diseases contributed to the changing notion of global health risks in an interconnected world,Footnote ¹²⁴ fuelled initially by the outbreak of the SARS pandemic in Asia in 2003 and later by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. In effect, the United States and its allies have massively invested in biodefence research, bringing together the life sciences, biomedicine, and military in a new way.Footnote ¹²⁵ Rather than disappearing with the end of the Cold War, high-security laboratories were reoriented towards these new threats and reconfigured as infrastructures for biosurveillance and biopreparedness, thus integrating military, scientific, and public health functions.

The expansion of high-risk research also needs to be situated within global circulations and asymmetries, especially connecting the technopolitics of the United States and its allies with developments in other regions of the world. High-containment laboratories became embedded in transnational circulations of knowledge, funding, and expertise, shaped by uneven political and regulatory environments. On the one hand, operating a technologically advanced BSL-4 laboratory has become a matter of scientific and national prestige, making laboratories not only a research tool but also a ‘status symbol’.Footnote ¹²⁶ On the other hand, these developments were accompanied by new forms of asymmetry and risk displacement. The investment in laboratory facilities enabled the rise of public and private funding for research on high-risk pathogens, including experiments that enhance the pathogenicity and transmissibility of viruses and bacteria.Footnote ¹²⁷ However, controversy surrounding the experiments with lethal H5N1 flu viruses made the risks of this research visible and led to a moratorium on certain types of scientific work in the United States.Footnote ¹²⁸ While this controversy led to calls for stronger governance of research involving highly pathogenic viruses, it also prepared the ground for outsourcing this research to countries with less strict regulatory frameworks, including US-supported research projects in China focused on emerging infectious diseases.Footnote ¹²⁹

Biological preparedness as a technopolitical arrangement prefigured approaches to security in several ways. First, transformation: high-security laboratories were uncoupled from the Cold War imaginaries of biological defence and reconfigured for biological preparedness. This enabled reframing rather than abandoning the biological threat discourse and reimagining the vision for the military biological complex. A prime example is the development among new Western allies, former satellite states of the Soviet Union, which transformed former military biological laboratories to fit their new foreign and security policies.Footnote ¹³⁰ Second, stabilization: the transformation of laboratories towards biological preparedness contributed to the stabilization of biological emergence as a security discourse. This legitimized forging further material and epistemic connections between public health and national security, including the expansion of high-security laboratories. Finally, displacement: biological preparedness further shaped the distribution of laboratories along several dimensions: spatial, institutional, and regulatory. The spatial displacement involves the global rise of high-containment laboratories, with many countries building their first BSL-4 laboratories. The new involvement of civilian science, public health, and private sectors in running high-security laboratories marks the institutional displacement and a shift from military dominance in this area. This has gone hand in hand with regulatory displacement and the rising popularity of BSL-3 laboratories, which are used to research novel pathogens yet require less oversight than the maximum-containment (BSL-4) facilities.Footnote ¹³¹ The development in the United States reflects this threefold displacement: after 2001, the United States invested approximately USD 1 billion into the construction of 12 BSL-3 (biosafety level three) laboratories and 2 BSL-4 laboratories on academic campuses to strengthen basic and applied research with the most dangerous pathogens.Footnote ¹³² Overall, these processes transformed earlier technopolitical arrangements while stabilising biological preparedness as the dominant security response and redistributing laboratory capacities, authority, and risk across global biological security.

Towards a new era: between pandemic preparedness and (re)militarization of biology

The contemporary laboratory landscape reflects the coexistence and continuing reconfiguration of multiple technopolitical arrangements. Compared to the 1990s and 2000s, when proliferation was primarily understood as the circulation of expertise and biological materials,Footnote ¹³³ contemporary debates focus on the risks associated with the rise of laboratories themselves. High-security laboratories have recently become more visible in public debate, both for the promise they embody (especially in the context of pandemic preparedness) and for the risks and controversies they themselves generate. The current landscape is thus best understood as a contested, diverse field with multiple co-existing technopolitical arrangements.

Transformation is exemplified by facilities that seek to play an active role in an emerging global infrastructure of biological preparedness, such as the Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland.Footnote ¹³⁴ Founded in the 1920s to develop protective equipment against atomic, biological, and chemical hazards, Laboratory Spiez evolved into a key biosecurity hub providing scientific and technical expertise to national authorities as well as international organisations.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Spiez facility was recently rebuilt into the first BioHub, run under the auspices of the WHO, and as such it aims to improve international data sharing on viruses and pathogens.Footnote ¹³⁶ This facility is thus a prime example of how laboratories can institutionalize anticipatory governance and promote international collaboration on biological preparedness. However, such initiatives do not represent the transformation of the whole field and need to be understood in specific institutional and geopolitical contexts.

Stabilization of past technopolitical arrangements is visible for instance at the British research facility at Porton Down. It also works towards pandemic preparedness, but its history of secret military research involving controversial animal experimentsFootnote ¹³⁷ continues to shape public perceptions and complicate trust in its work. In fact, the military facility at Porton Down started an offensive biological programme in the 1930s, which was converted into defensive research in the 1950s and later transformed into public health research and divided into defence and health research sites.Footnote ¹³⁸ The facility is still subject to many conspiracy theories: accusations of developing illegal drugs or experimenting on humans and aliens are debunked even via official government communication.Footnote ¹³⁹

Contemporary controversies also reflect the global circulations of technoscientific systems and the power asymmetries that structure them. Public debates about the potential laboratory origins of the COVID-19 pandemic brought attention to the transnational scientific collaborations, specifically the US funding of research on high-risk pathogens in China.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Even though investigations about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic have not reached any clear consensus,Footnote ¹⁴¹ the speculation about SARS-CoV-2 virus being potentially a product of the Wuhan laboratory was sufficient to attract attention to these facilities and strengthen the imaginary of high-containment laboratories as a source of safety risks.Footnote ¹⁴²

Finally, the expansion of biolabs is also associated with the risk of renewed biological militarization. This is the case with the Russian laboratory Sergiev Posad-6, for instance. In the midst of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia reportedly started secretly rebuilding and expanding this military research facility, which was one of the key sites of bioweapons research during the Cold War.Footnote ¹⁴³ Such a development raises questions about the potential return of a bioweapons arms raceFootnote ¹⁴⁴ and the reactivation of biological warfare arrangement.

These examples demonstrate that technopolitical arrangements do not fade away when political priorities change, but may persist, transform, and be displaced across new contexts. As such, contemporary high-security laboratories are best understood as sites where multiple and sometimes competing technopolitical arrangements – biological warfare, defence, and preparedness – coexist and interact. From this perspective, the change in the functioning of laboratories can be understood as an ongoing reconfiguration of scientific practices, material arrangements, and political rationalities, in which past elements are rearranged while being adapted to new visions of (biological) security. As such, looking at the contemporary laboratory landscape demonstrates the value of prefiguration as an analytical lens: inherited material arrangements, expertise, and institutional forms do not determine the present but shape the possibilities through which biological security can be imagined, organized, and contested.