This article explores risk assessment, analysis and management as strategic responses to the threat of animal disease outbreaks. Such strategies, and the techniques, technologies and practices they give rise to, are conceptualised here as thoroughly bio‐political strategies which induce particular disciplinary effects. These effects are critically explored along three key analytical dimensions: space, place and mobility. This analysis is carried out through a deconstructive reading of both the discourses and practices associated with risk assessment, analysis and management. Whilst the deployment of these strategies acts to classify, categorise, control, order, render visible, distribute (or fix) in space, a heterogeneous array of agents (human and non‐human) and objects, as the article argues, these strategies do not merely delimit or inhibit. Rather, their deployment effects a proliferation of opportunities for resistance, negotiation, transgression and misappropriation, not to mention technical failure. Such strategies are therefore characterised as much by congenital failure and indeterminacy as by efficacy and completion.