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The political world, just like the physical world, in many respects may be regulated by weights, number and measure.
Diderot (1751)
Introduction
Certain writers, among them Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, have argued that numbers are 'today's preeminent public language - and those who speak it rule'.1This view outlines, as it were, the leverage of quantification on social, political, and economic realms. Judging by recent scholarly outputs, security, too, is increasingly numbered. This is not, of course, an entirely new trend. While Robert McNamara famously introduced statistical reasoning as a chief element of US security policymaking during the 1960s, the same decade saw on the academic side one of the first explicit connections between numbers and security under the auspices of the Correlates of War Project, which proposed the '1,000 battle-related deaths' threshold as the level of hostilities that differentiates war from other types of conflict.2
New within the purview of security scholarship, however, is the metrical sense growingly accorded to the elaboration and assessment of security policies and the concomitant impact these numbers have on security practices. To date, most of the rare international relations or political science scholarship on numbers has explored two main questions.3First, some have sought to document the modern-liberal roots or context of the proliferation of numbers in international politics. For instance, Sotiria Grek and Risto Rinne have depicted the EU's 'rapid change of policy discourses and practices', moving from constructing a 'European culture to a Europe governed by numbers'.4Second, others have focused on the (political) consequences of the use of numbers. Asking 'What do numbers do in transnational governance?', Hans Krause Hansen and Tony Porter have for example uncovered the significant effects of quantitative reasoning and communication on governance,5highlighting the ways through which numbers constitute the things they measure and redefine the interactions between political groups.
However, the mechanisms underpinning this proliferation and effects remain largely in the background. To be sure, a series of scholars have provided important insights, yet their contributions tend to be limited in scope and remain fragmented. Kelly Greenhill highlights that the enduring impact of numbers derives, if only in part, from the inertia they convey (once adopted, they become hard to dislodge),6