Domestic and transnational political strategies of counter-terrorism have increasingly adopted pre-emptive and anticipatory objectives, imagining a future against which the present can be governed, responsibilised and secured. This imagined future grounds political action in the present. However, this paper argues that we need to supplement the study of anticipatory technologies with the mirror images of such techniques. The imagination of the past is also used to ground security politics. This paper interrogates projects of redeveloping and reclaiming sites of terrorist attack. It is drawn from a multi-case study but uses research from the tenth anniversary commemorations of the Bali bombing to speak about Australian and international approaches to events which expose the fallacy of security. The paper posits that such commemorations display a politics of securing through the failure to secure, where images of the shortcomings of security are domesticated: these memories are reinscribed as providing evidence of resilient citizens and the resilient nation. Through official and non-governmental projects, images and spaces of destruction are tailored to fit the temporality woven between the present and the anticipated future; they are amplified and silenced in ways which reinstate the symbolic order of the nation and its temporality. Projects which work on the space and memory of past terrorist attacks help to ground the imagination of the nation and its political project in a narrative about the past, just as anticipatory technologies imagine a future against which the present can be governed. This paper addresses the temporalities implicit within such reaction and anticipation.
