For more than a decade now governments have restructured their policies to accommodate greatly disruptive events. Following this hegemonization of catastrophe in social imaginaries, risk, as a way of representing events to make them governable, is undergoing substantial changes as well. Precaution, as the main risk paradigm, instills society with a strong belief in scientific knowledge as the means to efficiently govern the future. It also favours technology, especially information technology, as the necessary infrastructure for gathering and assessing information on prospective risks. The ensuing development of new scientific methods, calculative techniques, technological devices and knowledge representations, under the precautionary principle, gradually transforms the biopolitical relationship with the state. A transformation often invoked, however, rarely analysed for its repercussions for democratic politics. In this panel, we examine the ways democratic claims can be staged in the new risk apparatus. To do so, we adopt a governmentality perspective in order to account for the interplay of ‘discourses, laws, administrative measures, ... the said as much as the unsaid’ (Agamben, 2009: 2). Our aim is to populate the new political imaginaries with the performatives of scientific methods, calculative devices and technological solutions in order to understand the apparent silence, or even apathy, on behalf of citizens. We content that the way, knowledge representations, risk calculative devices and technological artefacts interplay with political discourses and social imaginaries, leads to a horizon of intelligibility that allows specific types of claims to be raised while silencing others. As such, it promotes the opening of specific areas for contestation on behalf of citizens while leaving others hidden behind technological designs and scientific theories. So, the core question is whether citizens understand what the true stakes are in order to legitimately formulate their claims. To answer this, our study of practices of governance proceeds from two perspectives, as suggested by Tully (2008): ‘from the side of the forms of government that are put into practice and from the side of the practices of freedom of the governed (as active agents) 1 that are put into practice in response’ (Tully, 2008: 22). Our main objective is not simply to trace the conditions of possibility for the new risk apparatus. It is primarily to describe its constituent elements in such ways that their contingent circumstances will be revealed to citizens to enable them to govern themselves differently (Tully, 2008). The panel contributes to the IPA community by exploring the role of science and technology in the constitution of the risk apparatus. This is more than an issue of expertise and how scientific knowledge reaches various publics in current democratic societies. It is mainly about the performative strength of scientific language and technological devices and its role into the constitution of a horizon of intelligibility that gradually shuts down several paths for resistance. This approach also departs from standard STS accounts. Our objective is not just about challenging dominant knowledge representations and exposing shortcomings in technological designs. Ours, it is primarily an effort to explore the growing imbrication of scientific knowledge, calculative devices and technological artefacts into citizen practices while reflecting on the possibilities for deepening democracy nowadays. We would like to invite papers addressing these issues. We specifically encourage submissions exploring the entanglement of science and technology in democratic politics with an emphasis on citizenship practices and their entanglement with scientific representations and technological artefacts in the precautionary risk paradigm.