Critical Approaches to International Security [2 ed.] 9781509501670, 9780745670539

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction
Politics and security
Further reading
Notes
PART I CONTEXT
1 Definitions and Redefinitions
Realism and the Cold War
The methodological debate
Return to the military definition?
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
Notes
2 The Proliferation of Concepts
Essentially contested concepts
An ethnocentric concept
Proliferation of concepts
Conclusion
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
Notes
PART II METHODOLOGY
3 Change
Human nature and social construction
Structures and agents
Immanent critique
Resistance
Conclusion
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
Notes
4 Identity
Aspects of identity
Identity and discourse analysis
Identity and the ‘clash of civilizations’
Conclusion
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
Notes
PART III PRACTICE
5 Danger
The representation of danger
The politics of danger
The production of insecurity
What is at stake?
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
Notes
6 Fear and Trauma
The securitization of fear
The medicalization of trauma
The politicization of fear and trauma
Conclusion
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
Notes
7 Human Insecurity
Human security
Development and security
The critical response
Conclusion
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
8 Emancipation
Emancipation
Dialogue
Care
Further reading
Classroom exercise
Questions
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement

Citation preview

Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Preface Introduction Politics and security Further reading Notes PART I CONTEXT 1 Definitions and Redefinitions Realism and the Cold War The methodological debate Return to the military definition? Further reading Classroom exercise Questions Notes 2 The Proliferation of Concepts Essentially contested concepts An ethnocentric concept Proliferation of concepts Conclusion Further reading

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Classroom exercise Questions Notes PART II METHODOLOGY 3 Change Human nature and social construction Structures and agents Immanent critique Resistance Conclusion Further reading Classroom exercise Questions Notes 4 Identity Aspects of identity Identity and discourse analysis Identity and the ‘clash of civilizations’ Conclusion Further reading Classroom exercise Questions Notes PART III PRACTICE 5 Danger

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The representation of danger The politics of danger The production of insecurity What is at stake? Further reading Classroom exercise Questions Notes 6 Fear and Trauma The securitization of fear The medicalization of trauma The politicization of fear and trauma Conclusion Further reading Classroom exercise Questions Notes 7 Human Insecurity Human security Development and security The critical response Conclusion Further reading Classroom exercise Questions 8 Emancipation

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Emancipation Dialogue Care Further reading Classroom exercise Questions Notes References Index End User License Agreement

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Critical Approaches to International Security Second Edition

K. M. FIERKE

polity

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Copyright © K.M. Fierke 2015 The right of K.M. Fierke to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First edition published in 2007 by Polity Press This edition published in 2015 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0167-0 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fierke, K. M. (Karin M.) Critical approaches to international security/Karin Fierke. -- Second edition. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-7456-7053-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) --

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ISBN 0-7456-7053-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7456-7054-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-7456-7054-7 (pbk.) 1. Security, International. I. Title. JZ5588.F54 2015 355’.033--dc23 2014022499 The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

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Preface A huge amount has been published on topics related to Critical Security Studies since 2007 when the first edition of Critical Approaches to International Security appeared. It has been a challenge, although a rewarding one, to read, assimilate and find some kind of synthesis of this literature in and of itself and in relation to the argument of the first edition. My own position towards the content of the book has changed in the process. While the central task of the first edition was to map the broad contours of a field, the second has been far more concerned with mapping a change in these contours. My own work, while critical, does not fit neatly within any one genre of theory explored in the book, given my primary interest in meaning in use and changes in meaning rather than theory per se. As a result, I have avoided positioning myself in relation to the central questions at the heart of current debates, and not least that of whether security should be rethought or abandoned altogether, or whether liberal governance should be less top down, taking more local views into account or is, in itself, fundamentally problematic. While I have tried to be true to these debates as reflected in the literature, my own positioning is somewhere in between, that is, while the normative and institutional structures of 9

security or liberal governance are infused with power and privilege, and often end up reproducing the problems they set out address, considerable effort has gone into constructing these normative and institutional structures over the last century and they have opened a space for a more global engagement that is not purely military. There is, however, a critical imperative, at this historical juncture, to nudge existing global structures and forums toward a critical rethinking and a more global conversation over the meaning of security or protection from harm in a changing global space. In order to facilitate this kind of conversation in the classroom, an exercise has been added at the end of each chapter, which I hope will help students to think through the implications, policy or otherwise, of the book and the different perspectives represented within it. Critical security studies, like critical theory more broadly, has often been accused of being overly abstract and detached from the very praxis that it claims is inseparable from theory. One of the most frequent comments on the first edition was its accessibility to those who do not have extensive background in the larger philosophical traditions to which the themes explored here connect. A second comment has been the usefulness of the book for teaching purposes, which is another

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reason for adding some exercises. I have taught a module on this topic for over a decade, first to upper level honours students at Queen’s University Belfast and then at the University of St. Andrews. Throughout this period, I have relied on a particular method of teaching. The method was developed shortly after arriving in Northern Ireland to teach at Queen’s, a year after the Good Friday Agreement and at a time when the ‘Troubles’ were still fresh in the memory of young students in Politics. I was warned that other lecturers were struggling to get students to prepare and to participate in tutorials, which I suspect related in part to the politics of the time. I wanted to address the problem before being confronted with it directly and thus developed a method that would tie module assessment to tutorial preparation and participation. It proved to be so successful that I tried it in a new and very different teaching environment, with equal success. The core of the method is a journal that requires students to read and, prior to arriving at class, write 500 words about this reading, both demonstrating some knowledge of the arguments and reflecting on the tutorial topic. The weekly journal exercise meant that nearly everyone had done some reading and thought about the material before coming to class. As a result, the level of discussion was consistently high. Immediately after the tutorial, students were asked to write a further 250 words in

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which they engaged reflexively with their own experience during the tutorial exercise, not merely describing what happened but how the tutorial interaction or exercise shaped their thinking, the types of insights they had, etc. In over a decade of teaching with this method, my most frequent comment in evaluations has been about the high quality of the tutorial discussions and, from external examiners, the higher than average quality of the work that followed. Coming prepared meant students were able to engage in meaningful discussion; writing after the tutorial allowed them to take their knowledge further; working consistently on a week-to-week basis, and accumulating a log of authors’ arguments, as well as their own reflections, meant that by the time they reached the final assignment, whether it was an exam or a final paper, they were operating on all four cylinders and at a more advanced level. This method of organization assured a strong academic experience, but it also created the space to use the tutorial for purposes of connecting the academic ideas with the practice or policy implications, thereby highlighting the theory/praxis relationship that is so central to critical theory. Different techniques have been used for these exercises, from the visual analysis of pictures, to the discourse analysis of speeches to engaging in policy analysis in relation to concrete political problems. The claim, articulated by Robert Cox, that ‘theory is

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always for someone and for some purpose’, suggests that when one moves to the realm of policy, critical security studies is likely to have a greater appeal to and resonance for critical social movements or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who seek change, although, Cox’s argument aside, this is not necessarily the case. If critique is understood to be a reflexive positioning towards one’s own taken-for-granted assumptions and context, both of which tend to change over time, then it is conceivable that people working within government agencies or the military would benefit from the adoption of more critical tools. Indeed, during my years at St. Andrews, I have taught students who either intended to pursue government careers in various countries or were on leave from existing jobs in government agencies or the military and who often embraced these critical skills with enthusiasm. I have learned a great deal from the tutorial discussions and would like to express a collective thanks to the students at both universities who have participated in the Critical Approaches to International Security module over the years. I would also like to thank the University of St. Andrews for providing financial assistance to employ a research assistant, whose help in preparing the second edition was invaluable, and to Nick Rengger, the then Head of the School of

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International Relations, for supporting this request. The highest praise and thanks go to Clara Eroukhmanoff, who did an exceptional job in constructing a large database of arguments from the literature, as well as making sense of the cottage industry that has come to surround securitization studies, and revising the index. Given my extra-ordinary duties as research director for the School of International Relations in the run-up to the 2013 Research Excellence Framework, it would have been impossible to complete the project without her help or without even greater delays. Many thanks also to Roland Bleiker and Nick Wheeler for comments on the significant changes to Chapter 6 on Fear and Trauma, and to the reviewers of the whole text for their very helpful feedback. I would also like to thank David Mutimer for inviting me to participate on the editorial board of the new journal, Critical Studies on Security, and Anthony Burke and Claudia Aradau for inviting me to take part in a workshop in Birmingham and an ISA roundtable, respectively, all of which have engaged with the debates explored in this book.

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Introduction In the decade before the end of the Cold War the concept of security was politicized. Its previous narrow definition, relating to the threat or use of force by states, gave way to a broadening of the term to cover new referent objects and threats. Out of this context, the emergence of critical security studies (CSS) signalled a further deepening of the debate, raising questions about the relationship between the traditional theories and methods of security studies and the security practices of states, on the one hand, and highlighting the politics of security, on the other. CSS was named at a conference at York University in 1994, although critical approaches to questions of security pre-date that event (Peoples and Vaugh-Williams 2010: 9). The last two decades have seen a variety of twists and turns, both in the academic debates and in global politics, from the end of the Cold War, the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, the War on Terror and invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise of China as a major power, the financial crisis in 2008, the Arab Spring in 2011, and the bloody wars in Libya and Syria that followed. Against this backdrop, the central place of change in CSS has arguably contributed to the increasing popularity of its theories and methods, as reflected in the appearance of a new journal, 15

Critical Studies on Security, in 2013. The narrow definition of security, and its focus on military threats to the state, is no longer unquestioned (Peoples and Vaugh-Williams 2010: 2). Some have, however, expressed concern that as critical theory becomes ‘mainstream’ or common sense in parts of the academic world, it has also reached an ‘impasse’ (Brincat et al. 2011), and that it will lose it critical edge (Nunes 2012: 345). How one evaluates this claim may in part depend on how one defines ‘critical’. Like any other genre, CSS belongs to a larger intellectual map, while at the same time representing a ‘journey without maps’ (Wyn Jones 1996), in a security landscape that is continuously changing. It can be distinguished from the larger subfield of security studies within International Relations (IR) by the adoption of a critical approach. However, in so far as all intellectual inquiry is in some sense ‘critical’, one might assume that any approach to security would be as well. The meaning of critical has itself been at the core of evolving debates over the last twenty years. The distinction made by Robert Cox (1981)1 between problem-solving and critical theories was an important beginning of this debate. He argued that problem-solving theories take the world as it is, and attempt to find solutions to problems within it; critical

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theory, by contrast, raises questions about the historical location of both the theorist and his or her theory. As he famously stated, ‘Theory is always for some one and for some purpose’ (Cox 1981: 128). A further distinction can be made between Critical Theory (with a capital C), growing out of Marxist traditions of social theory, represented, for instance, by the Frankfurt School and Gramsci (see Ken Booth 1991, 2005; Richard Wyn Jones 1999), and more broadly critical approaches that have challenged the narrow meta-theoretical assumptions of traditional security studies. The critical collection that grew out of the York conference (Krause and Williams 1997) fit into the latter category and identified two further aspects of the debate. The first was the ‘expansionist’ agenda, which, with the end of the Cold War, sought to replace the emphasis on the state and the threat or use of force with a broader array of referent objects and sources of insecurity. The second was more of a deepening, as represented by the critical, post-structural, constructivist and feminist challenges that had shaken the larger field of international theory in the context of the ‘Third Debate’ in the 1980s and 1990s. As Krause and Williams (1997) note, most contributions to the debate on security raise two related concerns: what is security and how should it be studied?

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As CSS has evolved and changed, along with its growing popularity, the question of what it means to be critical has been answered in a variety of ways. Many critical texts have been organized around different theoretical traditions or ‘Schools’ (see, for instance, Peoples and Vaughn-Williams 2010; Sheperd 2013). By contrast, this book is organized around a range of concepts that have been central to debates within CSS. These debates have developed and been transformed since the publication of the first edition. The initial focus of CSS was on the narrow military definition of security. In the intervening period new concerns, many of which reflect critically on practices of global liberal governance, have come to occupy centre stage, thereby shifting the terms of debate. For instance, some of the earlier claims of CSS have seeped into more mainstream policy discourse relating to human security, and have since provided positive impetus to practices of international intervention, which have subsequently become a target of critique for a new generation of critical scholars. CSS has itself become an object of critique for its abstract theoretical focus, and for its failure to engage with or critique contemporary structures and discourses of power (McCormack 2010: 40); at the same time, there has been an increasing emphasis on the development of critical methods for undertaking empirical analysis, such as the collection by Salter and Mutlu 18

(2013). Nunes (2012: 348–9) further points to the growing imbalance in a debate that has been increasingly dominated by more deconstructive approaches, which see security as inherently connected to exclusion, totalization and even violence, on the one hand, and those who take a more reconstructive and normative stance towards questions of what security should be, on the other. The possibility of change has been at the heart of critical theory (Hutchings 2007: 72). As such, one would neither expect the meaning of ‘critical’ to remain constant, nor that critique would focus on a single order such as the Cold War, the era of realist security studies. Critique should be constant and ongoing. As Rengger and Thirkell-White (2007: 11) state: ‘The critical theorists’ concern has always been first and foremost with the situation of the here and now and how it came about; only then might we find possibilities of change immanent within it.’ From this perspective, we should not be surprised that, for instance, the potential for individual human rights and a cosmopolitan conception of humanity, celebrated by emancipatory theorists in the immediate post-Cold War context, would have since become a focus of critical reflection by scholars concerned about the spread of global liberal governance in the twenty-first century. This second edition, while examining the earlier evolution of CSS, has mapped

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further changes in the debates, introducing new concepts and highlighting their interface with more recent empirical problems. The first few chapters in particular have retained many of the earlier references, in order to capture the flavour of debates as they have unfolded, while trying to incorporate as much new literature as is possible given space constraints. I have tried, as in the first edition, to highlight the conceptual, methodological and substantive contributions of a wide range of critical approaches. I have not, in the process, exhausted the conceptual possibilities, nor have I engaged with the work of as many scholars as I would have liked. The literature on this subject is vast, and the arguments are often complex, drawing on a range of traditions of critical social theory or philosophy, including, among others, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Wittgenstein, Schmitt, Bourdieu, Foucault, Agamben, Derrida, Levinas and Latour. It would be difficult to do justice to these philosophical underpinnings as well as the arguments of diverse IR scholars, not to mention the further proliferation of literature since the first edition. I have done my best to distil some of the central themes in as simple and accessible a fashion as possible, given this literature is known for being obtuse, while analysing the significance of the debates between them, and their relevance for understanding changing security practices.

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In examining the dynamics by which security and insecurity are produced, the book necessarily draws on the various categories of critical international theory mentioned above. However, its organization is not led by them. I have, to the extent possible, tried to avoid the use of labels such as Critical (with a capital C),2 constructivist, critical constructivist and post-structuralist and have instead focused on debates over the meaning, dynamics and application of concepts, debates that have often taken place across these categories. This approach may seem unsettling, in so far as the labels are often an indicator of specific types of argument and therefore a useful organizing device for disciplinary debates (Hansen 2006: 5). However, labels all too often become weapons in disciplinary mud-slinging matches, which can close down discussion and inquiry before a close reading of specific arguments or consideration of what is at stake. The intent is to construct and facilitate a dialogue between different approaches. Around the time that the first edition was published, a group of European scholars, referred to as the CASE collective, began a discussion of how to break down the divisions between different ‘schools’ (e.g., Welsh, Paris, Copenhagen) of critical security studies, to the end of establishing a broad research programme. This effort, while laudable, was 21

called to account for its exclusions (Mutimer 2009), ranging from its focus on Europe (Behnke 2007; Salter 2007) to the exclusion of post-colonial and development studies (Salter 2007) as well as feminist scholarship (Sylvester 2007). Consistent with the conceptual focus of this book, the intention is less to establish a research programme than to highlight the extent to which gender and, given the imperial legacy, other divisions of the world continue to inform many contemporary practices of security. The emphasis on inclusivity, however imperfect, is highlighted by questions in the final chapter regarding the potential for a more global dialogue regarding the meaning of security. The second rationale for a conceptual focus is to highlight a shift away from questions about the most appropriate referent object of security, and which threats should have priority, to a question of how, having adopted a critical approach, the world becomes a different place, whose study must be undertaken with different tools of analysis. Rather than assuming the existence of an objective world and seeking to uncover laws within it, the goal is to explore processes of contestation and change, the processes by which identities and dangers are produced, the construction of human suffering, insecurity and hierarchy, and, last but not least, the potential for emancipation, both from the

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blinders imposed by static conceptions of security and from the practices they reproduce. The critical approaches explored here engage with contemporary problems and issues, and in this respect are not divorced from the empirical world, as earlier critics of CSS often claimed. They further reveal the extent to which all inquiry into security is normative. This reflects an emphasis less on the ‘ought’ as opposed to the ‘is’ than an argument that the world is always built on ‘oughts’, and is always in the process of being remade. What is made is a product, not merely of material power, but of the assumptions we bring to everyday interactions. States, democracies, international institutions, power politics, humanitarian interventions, or economic sanctions only exist by virtue of the social, ideological, cultural or political structures by which they are given meaning and imbued with legitimacy and power. In this respect, the frequent distinction between material and ideational power rests on a fallacy. It fails to recognize that all power, material or otherwise, is constituted on the basis of legitimacy and meaning. To approach the study of security from a critical angle is implicitly a methodological pursuit that problematizes the process of ‘knowing’ and its consequences for ‘being’, although there exist different schools of

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thought regarding the relationship between these two.

Politics and security The core theme of this book is the inescapable relationship between politics and security. There are four broad positions along a spectrum that have shaped this debate. The first is the assumption, implicit in more conventional approaches to security, that the possibility of politics is confined to the inside of states, which is distinguished from the mere relations, often war-like, that characterize interactions between states. In this genre, security is often presented as a property that states either possess or do not possess, often expressed in quantifiable dimensions of material power. In this construction, politics and security occupy two distinct realms. A second position views politics as a more open-ended process of contestation over, among others, the meaning of security. This is the point of departure for arguments that war itself is an extension of processes of political contestation, both defined by rules and where the meaning of the politics–security relationship or of ‘the political’ itself is often fought over. In this respect, war or peace, and a range of related practices, may be constitutive of the political identity of states and other actors. This position is, in and of itself, neutral

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as to the location of security and the political, or the relationship between them. It is, in the first instance, critical of a methodological position that assumes the fixity of objects to be secured. From this position, the central task is one of analysing the construction of the politics–security relationship in particular historical contexts. All of the critical positions in this book occupy, to some degree, this position. They emphasize the social construction or performance of security and the political, but can be distinguished by the way they define critical or the focus of their critical intervention. There are two broad strands of thinking that go a step beyond the methodological critique. One focuses on the process by which security practices eliminate the contestation of politics. From this perspective, discourses of security are a part of a disciplining power that constitutes a separation between security and the political, which severely constrains and limits the space of political contestation. The second focuses on the possibility of emancipation from technologies of power/knowledge and the opening of spaces for alternative voices and possibilities. As already suggested, these various positions do not fit neatly into the categories of theory mentioned above. The debates have been characterized by numerous disciplinary border crossings and nuances.

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Security as a property The purpose of the first section of the book is to establish the larger context from which CSS emerged, and to demonstrate the centrality of questions of meaning and methodology. Traditional approaches tend to assume that security is a property of objects in the world: that is, a priori subjects or objects, such as the state, are or are not secure, have or do not have security. The provision of security is a response, or an action to manage or eliminate insecurity. As security concepts began to proliferate, particularly with the end of the Cold War, questions were raised about the subject or object to be secured and the nature of the threats they faced. The language of referent objects suggests that not only states but individuals or the global environment can be threatened. Chapter 1 argues that definitions of security are always political and contextually bound. The narrow military definition of security, as the threat and use of force, is a product of a particular historical and political practice. But even within the context of the Cold War, the meaning changed over time. Shifts in the language and theorization of security were a response to changes in the political world. In the two decades since the Cold War ended, the contestation and politics surrounding the meaning of security have been part of a larger

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process of broadening and transformation, with many twists and turns. Chapter 2 starts with the notion that security is an ‘essentially contested concept’. The naming of security as an ‘essentially contested concept’ further highlights the political nature of attempts to define or redefine security. The chapter then takes a different cut into the Cold War context. Traditional security studies was criticized for being ethnocentric, reflecting primarily American concerns within the Cold War. The chapter moves beyond this narrow focus to explore briefly the distinct security concerns faced by Europe, Asia and the Third World during that period and since. In addition, the proliferation of security concepts since the end of the Cold War is considered. During the post-Cold War period, the range of security threats broadened to include, for instance, the environment, migration, poverty and human rights.

Security as social construction The ‘expansionist’ debate politicized the concept of security, pointing towards multiple possible meanings. The multiple meanings often referred to a broader array of referent objects, such as the environment or human rights, drawing more political attention and thus resources to them. In this respect, those who sought to broaden the concept highlighted the benefits of applying the security label to 27

new problems. Scholars, particularly of the Copenhagen School, have pointed to a danger inherent in the application of security to areas that have not traditionally fallen under its rubric. It is difficult to dissociate the meaning of security from a past where its use and meaning have been closely linked to the threat and use of force by the state. Applying the label to new threats, relating for instance to the environment or migration, may locate agency in states rather than in actors in those specific fields, and risks the militarization of issues that require a political solution. There is an inherent tension between this emphasis on the ‘sedimentation of meaning’ and the idea that security is ‘essentially contested’. This difference between the ‘expansionists’ and the Copenhagen School raises a question about the meaning of the political as it relates to security. The former are interested in a wider application of the security concept in order to draw attention to a range of issues that have been ignored because of the emphasis on military security. They argue that poverty and environmental degradation are in fact more threatening to more people at this period in time. In this view, use of the word security contributes to the politicization of an issue. By contrast, the Copenhagen School analyses how some threats are elevated above others and securitized, or named as existential threats. How are threats, possibly in and of

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themselves minimal, elevated to the status of an existential crisis such that other threats are pushed potentially into the shadows? For instance, after 11 September 2001, terrorism was elevated to the status of existential threat, blocking out questions about other security threats, such as those relating to the environment. The second section of the book explores this question along with different approaches to the construction and performance of security. The discussion thus pushes beyond the notion that security is a property of objects in the world, to examine security as a social construction or a performance in practice. This section also highlights some methodological questions about how to undertake critical analysis. Each chapter begins with a concept, which is then discussed in relation to an empirical context or contexts, highlighting how various critical approaches have addressed the problem. Chapter 3 explores the problem of change. International relations theory has traditionally sought to identify recurring patterns at the international level, and was thus not equipped to make sense of changes such as the end of the Cold War or those brought about by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September 2001. An approach to international relations as a social construction facilitates the analysis of change. The chapter begins with a

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discussion of social construction and develops a framework for analysing change in three parts. First, it explores the relationship between structures and agents, fleshing out this argument through the analysis of two transitions, that is, from conflict to dialogue with the end of the Cold War, and from peace to war in the Balkans. The second section examines a concept of immanent critique as a point of departure for understanding the agency of intellectuals in exposing the contradictions of a historical context, which is illustrated through a brief immanent critique of the War on Terror. The third examines the potential for agency through resistance, focusing in particular on the Arab Spring. Chapter 4 explores a concept of identity as a point of departure for exploring different methods of critical analysis related to the performance of security. Identity was not an issue for conventional security studies, given assumptions that all states are essentially similar and motivated by power and interest in a competitive environment of anarchy. Debates over the nature of identity among critical scholars have pointed to the importance of the relationship between actors, or alterity, which may take multiple forms, and to the performance of subjectivity. Methods of critical analysis, including discourse analysis, are explored and demonstrated through an analysis of identity constructions related to the West

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and Islam, focusing in particular on the period since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Security and insecurity The third section of the book raises a question about what is at stake in analysing security critically. Critical scholars have asked what it means to be secure in an insecure world (Burke 2002: 1). The question relates to an argument that perhaps too much emphasis is placed, in theory and in political practice, on removing insecurity from political life, as if this were possible. If only the cancer of communism could be removed, or the swamp of terrorism drained, we might all then enjoy a secure existence. The desire for perfect security, to be rid once and for all of the threats to our existence, some critical scholars argue, is illusory. It is illusory in so far as every subject is incomplete and thus insecurity is inherent in the nature of the world (Edkins 2003a: 366). The search for a perfect security is not merely illusory, but becomes part and parcel of the problem, that is, it contributes to the production of insecurity and the construction of threats. Cox’s distinction between problem-solving and critical theory, mentioned earlier, is useful for clarifying what is at stake. Problem-solving theory seeks to fix the world in place, to accept it as it is and make necessary repairs. In the process, patterns of domination and war are reified and naturalized. Security as

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problem-solving presents the illusion that everything can be fixed while failing to recognize that the construction itself is flawed. In the process of repair, the unexamined assumptions upon which historical practices rest, contribute to the reproduction of war, and, with it, human trauma, insecurity and hierarchies of power. Critical approaches seek to remove the blinders, reveal the taken-for-granted assumptions, and open a larger space for imagining different worlds. The question is whether we are overly mesmerized by the pursuit of security in what is fundamentally an insecure world. This question points less to the construction of threats than to the relationship between naming a threat and our response to it. Some critical scholars express a concern that extending the concept of security to arenas that have not previously been understood in these terms may contribute to their militarization. Those who go further, to argue that the term ‘security’ should be eliminated, focus on its expression within a technology of knowledge/power that produces insecurity, often contributing to repressive and exclusionary practices associated with militarization and ‘securitization’ (Aradau 2004; Neocleous 2008). In this light, one can question whether we need to use the word security, or ask what is gained in using it, in relation to problems such as

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climate change or poverty, or even military practice. To what extent does use of the word security contribute to emancipation from these problems or lead us towards military solutions? While some critical analysts seek emancipation from the everyday militarization of security practices, others are critical of the concept because of its links to liberal and Marxist meta-narratives and a belief in progress. Any political formulation, including the emancipatory, they argue, risks reification and can become a new structure of domination, as is evident from the communist experiments in the former Soviet bloc. The best way to resist this reification is constant critique that pushes at the boundaries of existing assumptions. The potential for emancipation has been at the heart of debates between more deconstructive and reconstructive approaches to security. The deconstructive approaches make it difficult to see CSS as a resource for practical politics (Nunes 2012: 350); the normative concerns of the reconstructive approaches are said to create the potential for new technologies of knowledge/power that may be no less repressive than those they replace. Most critical scholars probably come to the study of security with a desire to improve the lot of those who suffer from military violence, human rights abuse or environmental destruction. The question is how to do this. International responses to violence or suffering

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tend to assume a responsibility to ‘fix’ problems. If genocide occurs, states have a responsibility to act. If famine occurs, the international community should intervene with aid. These responses focus on the moment of crisis and constitute the possibility of agency by the international community vis-à-vis powerless victims. What is often ignored is a question about the relationship between historical structures of power/knowledge, on the one hand, and contemporary practices, which not only reproduce these hierarchies of power, but also contribute to the reproduction of war and insecurity. The critical task is to analyse the assumptions that underpin historically and culturally situated practices in order to make way for greater agency, not least for those ‘victims’ who occupy the bottom rungs of the ladder. Part III shifts attention to the processes by which war and insecurity are performed and reproduced, by engaging in a critique of contemporary structures and exploring the possibility of alternatives. Chapter 5 shifts to an analysis of how danger is produced, highlighting in particular a concept of securitization. For the Copenhagen School, with whom this concept is most often associated, threats are constructed; they are not purely objective, as assumed by realists. The argument of the Copenhagen School is fleshed out in relation to the articulation of the ‘War on

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Terror’ by former US President Bush. Other critical scholars go beyond the idea of ‘securitization’ as a speech act of politicians to explore the more generalized production of fear in response to the proliferation of security ‘risks’, focusing less on the suspension of ‘normal’ politics than on the everyday institutional practices of security, on the one hand, or governance within a permanent ‘state of exception’, on the other. These ideas are explored in relation to the expansion of surveillance and the securitization of migration over the last decade. Chapter 6 explores how fear and trauma shape practices of international security, revealing the extent to which suffering is a by-product of the mobilization of danger, explored in Chapter 5. It begins with a discussion of emotion as a socio-political phenomenon, then moves to an examination of the securitization of fear in the discourse of political leaders. This is followed by a look at how modern institutions and technologies have medicalized trauma, as it relates to the traumatic experience of both soldiers and civilians in war. The chapter ends with a question about what it would mean to politicize fear and trauma. Chapter 7 takes these ideas a step further, exploring questions of human insecurity from a somewhat different angle. The earlier critique

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of CSS, regarding the focus on the state and military security, gave rise to a concept of human security. Human security came to be recognized as a problem that in many cases outweighed state insecurity, given the disproportionate number of civilians to soldiers killed in the ‘new wars’ of the 1990s, the proliferation of ‘failed states’, incapable of providing for their populations, and environmental deterioration, which threatens to rob societies of their means of sustainable development. The emergence, in the 1990s, of human security as a concept for addressing the insecurity of individuals in war-torn societies corresponded with a merging of security and development discourses and arguments about the need to transform conflict-ridden societies into liberal democracies. This chapter explores the tension between the liberal assumptions underpinning the concept of human security and its critical potential, on the one hand, and, on the other, the role of these assumptions in reproducing insecurity, as highlighted in the critical literature on the security–development nexus. The various concepts explored in the book are understood as critical tools for the analysis of a changing world, tools that make it possible to expose the silences and exclusions, and highlight the insecurity of those marginalized by practices of state or global security. The methodological emphasis shifts attention to

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living reflexively in a rapidly changing world, which applies in particular to the reflexivity of the critical scholar or researcher regarding his or her own practice, an ethical requirement that has been articulated most clearly by feminist scholars (Ackerly and True 2008). In a world that is undergoing dramatic change, theory cannot mirror a static reality and must therefore be a source of reflection and critique for those who engage with it. In this respect, Cox’s claim that theory is always for someone and for some purpose is self-evident. The political is personal in a world in which we are all confronted with the possibility of climate change, changing configurations of power, and historical and contemporary legacies of human abuse and violence. An analogy is particularly useful for illustrating what is at stake in the shift from more traditional models of security to critical forms of analysis. The analogy also links to the global shift from a more Western-centric world to multiple poles of power. It rests on a contrast between the logic of Western medicine and that of Chinese medicine. I use the medical analogy to illustrate a family resemblance between two logics of diagnosis in medicine, on the one hand, and two logics of security, on the other. The two different forms of medicine not only rely on different descriptive languages, but also

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different logical structures underlying their methodologies that guide thought processes and the diagnosis of problems. Kaptchuk (2000 [1985]) distinguishes Western biomedicine, which is primarily concerned with isolating disease categories or agents of disease, with the hope of zeroing in on, isolating and then changing, controlling or destroying an ontologically circumscribed entity. The Western physician starts with a symptom, looks for an underlying cause, thereby treating a well-defined, self-contained phenomenon, based on an analytical logic. The Chinese physician by contrast is concerned with the whole physiological and psychological individual and the larger context of their life, which connects the symptom to other general characteristics that are woven together to define a ‘pattern of disharmony’, which describes a situation of ‘imbalance’ in the body. He or she does not ask what X is causing Y but rather what the relationship is between X and Y. The focus thus shifts to relationships within a whole configuration, which reveals patterns that provide the framework for treatment and restoring balance and harmony. Taoist philosophy provides the underpinnings according to which parts are only understood in relationship to the whole, based on the dialectical relationship between Yin and Yang, which refers to feminine and masculine tendencies that mutually create or transform each other through the possibilities of 38

opposition and change contained within them. In this model, fixed essences are considered abstractions and there are no absolutes. This analogy in a nutshell reveals a family resemblance to the contrasting logics of security studies and critical security studies.3 Security studies has sought to be a science, which focuses on the identification of causes of security (threats) to the end of isolating, zeroing in and changing, controlling or destroying (with missiles or drones) the agents of threat (for instance, terrorists and rogue states). Critical security studies, by contrast, situates the problem of security in a larger historical context (the whole), identifying sources of disharmony (insecurity and conflict) and dialectical patterns (contradictions) and relationships (identity and difference, often gendered), analysing how these mutually construct and ultimately transform one another. Changes, rather than fixed essences, are the central focus, in contrast to the traditional security model. The abstract body of the state, as the agent of targeting, is replaced by the sentient contextualized subject of security. The desired outcome is healing and the restoration of harmony (emancipation from suffering) rather than destruction and elimination of enemies. In both cases, the two alternatives have tended to be constructed in a hierarchical relationship given the assumed superiority of Western medicine or traditional security studies. 39

As Kaptchuk points out, what Foucault says about technologies could apply to either tradition of medicine, although the latter presumes a more critical orientation. In so far as CSS situates the critical analyst within a historical context, while providing the tools for distancing and analysis from this position, it is fundamentally a self-reflexive process, of both recognizing one’s embeddedness and the taken-for-granted assumptions that come with this. Within the larger debates of CSS there has recently been a growing awareness that thinking on this subject has been ethnocentric, whether grounded in deconstructive or reconstructive approaches. In a globalizing context, engagement with scholars and practitioners situated in other global locations should be central to any attempt to rethink the concept of security, including the challenge to taken-for-granted assumptions, the exploration of alternative worlds of practice, or questions of whether in fact the concept should be eliminated, as suggested by some. Much as Chinese medicine has become international over the last few decades, with many practitioners of, for instance, acupuncture or Qigong in the West, and many in the West choosing this form of healing, contemporary practitioners in China often adopt a combination of Chinese and Western medical practices, to suit the problem. We might expect that a more global conversation over the meaning of security would result in more 40

hybrid and inclusive practices and forms of analysis. The concept of emancipation, as well as the obstacles to and potentials for a more global dialogue are the subject of the final chapter. The desire for security arises from a common vulnerability shared by all human life. This recognition provides a point of departure for rethinking what it means to be secure.

Further reading Brincat, Shannon, Laura Lima and Joao Nunes (2011) Critical Theory in International Relations and Security Studies: Interviews and Reflections. London: Routledge. Cox, Robert W. (1981) ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium, 10, 2, 126–55. Krause, Keith and Michael Williams (1997) Critical Security Studies. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Mutimer, David (2009) ‘My Critique is Bigger than Yours: Confronting: Constituting Exclusions in Critical Security Studies’, Studies in Social Justice, 3, 1, 9–22. Peoples, Columba and Nick Vaughn-Williams (2010) Critical Security Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Sheperd, Laura (2013) Critical Approaches to Security. London: Routledge.

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Notes 1. According to Brincat (2012: 230), Cox was not directly influenced by Horkheimer but his distinction mirrors the contrast between ‘Traditional’ and ‘Critical’ theory that is identified with the latter. 2. A distinction is often made between, on the one hand, Critical Theory with capital letters, which refers to theories growing out of a Marxist tradition, such as that of the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, and, on the other hand, critical theories, which include a broad range of post-structuralist, feminist and critical constructivist approaches or theories. 3. Lily Ling’s (2013) book, The Tao of International Relations, which speaks more directly to the implications of Taoist thought at the international level, will be discussed in the final chapter.

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PART I Context

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CHAPTER 1 Definitions and Redefinitions In the early 1990s, in a review of the field, Stephen Walt (1991: 212) defined security studies as the ‘study of the threat, use and control of military force’. Other scholars have argued that the traditional focus of security studies, and international relations more broadly, is the threat, use and management of military force (Schultz et al. 1993: 2), the causes of war and alliances, and also policy-oriented research on military and other threats (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 6). These definitions prioritize the military means of acquiring security by and for the state, and the relation between statecraft and military force (Crawford 1991: 286), over the political definition of threats and objectives. The emphasis on force is compatible with assumptions that international ‘relations’ is a qualitatively different sphere of experience than domestic politics. International relations is defined by war. Politics stop at the water’s edge (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989: 39; Walker 1993, 1995). Approached from another angle, the military and political aspects of security cannot be so easily separated. At its most basic, security is about being and feeling safe from harm or

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danger (Mische 1989: 391; Terriff et al. 1999: 1; Booth 2005: 13, 21). This is evident in some of the everyday or metaphorical uses of the term. A ‘security blanket’ provides a feeling of protection for a child. A ‘security umbrella’ provides protection by keeping threats away. The narrow definition of security emphasizes the means of threatening, or the use of force by a state. The end of protection is not mentioned and, while assumed, exists invisibly in the background. The question of how or who one protects is fundamentally a political one. The relationship can be situated within alternative understandings and spatial configurations, and can be the subject of contestation (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989: 12; Huysmans et al. 2006). It is often assumed that security inside the state presupposes a threat from outside the state, yet there is no necessary relationship between the threat or use of force and the end of safety or protection. On the contrary, as Edward Kolodziej (1992: 422) points out, the emphasis on first-image international threats to the state ‘rules out by omission those security threats posed by states to groups and individuals.’ The state may be at one and the same time the protector of its population and a source of threat to it. In this respect, the concept of security may raise a question about the relationship between receiving protection and

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the liberty of those who are protected. During the War on Terror, which enabled the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security, the fine balance between security and liberty was a subject of public debate. Questions about this balance were at the core of Thomas Hobbes’s classic Leviathan. In his thought experiment, which revolves around a war-like state of nature, survival has priority over liberty and requires relinquishing a degree of freedom in exchange for protection. In this process, the problem of insecurity is transferred to the relationship between states, subsuming questions of individual security to that of the state. Other formulations pose the relationship between security and liberty in a different way. Democratic peace theory (Doyle 1983; Levy 1988; Russett 1993, 2005; Brown et al. 1996; Ray 1998), which builds on the thought of Immanuel Kant, presents liberty within the state as a precondition for security between states.1 The relative freedom of populations, and a habit of democratically resolving disputes, flows over into the relationship between democracies and is an essential ingredient of peaceful relations or the absence of war between them. In so far as questions of security arise, paradoxically, from human freedom (Kolodziej 1992: 424), there is a political element at its core. The relationship may represent a trade-off

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(Ullman 1983: 130–3), as in the Hobbesian conception, or the two may be mutually constitutive, as in the Kantian. But, ultimately, the designation of threats cannot be separated from the values that are at risk or, more specifically, what people value and care about (Kolodziej 1992: 434). To say that survival is the only value of importance oversimplifies the matter. Survival, for a human community, is not equivalent to the physical survival of the individual. A community is defined by the values or shared understandings that shape its common existence, which may differ from one community to another. When leaders refer to protecting a ‘way of life’, it is not merely death that is feared, but a loss of autonomy in defining the values that underpin this life (Burgess 2011). The relationship between political ends and military means has also been important in strategic thought. In his famous book On War, Clausewitz (1976) argued that war is the continuation of political activity by other means. He emphasized the subordination of military means to political ends and claimed that if thinking about war is separated from political life, ‘we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense.’ Clausewitz’s assertion that war is the continuation of politics by other means was the point of departure for investigations into the strategic implications of nuclear weapons (Freedman 1998: 49). Thomas

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Schelling (1960, 1966) emphasized the centrality of bargaining processes which make conflict and cooperation inseparable (Baldwin 1995: 137). Both of these strategists raise a question about the relationship between the political end and the military means by which security is achieved. This discussion of politics and security raises two issues. First, it points to a political relationship at the core of security, that is, between a protector and the protected. Second, it highlights the political dimension of defining threats, including the relationship between the type or source of a threat and the best means to address it. From the acknowledgement that security is, in several respects, political flows a further acknowledgement that its meaning can change as it becomes a subject of contestation. The meaning of security can be situated on a spectrum, depending on the extent to which political or military aspects dominate. The narrow definition of security as the threat or use of force by states exists at the military end of the spectrum. However, when placed in historical context, it becomes clear that this militarized definition, far from being timeless, represents a relatively brief period, in which political questions about the nature of security were subsumed by strategic or technical questions relating to nuclear weapons. As will

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be elaborated in the next chapter, this definition dominated not only a narrow historical context but a specific geographic one as well. With the end of the Cold War, a debate emerged regarding the need to broaden the narrow definition. After 11 September 2001 the narrow definition appeared once again to occupy centre stage, although, as Peoples and Vaughn-Williams (2010: 2) point out, this narrow definition is no longer accepted without question. The purpose of this chapter is to situate the narrow definition of security in an evolving historical context and to argue that the meaning and study of security is always political, that is, always defined within a political context and subject to normative debate and change. The first section will explore the narrow definition, the realist assumptions that underpin it, and its place within the evolution of security studies during the Cold War. The second section will revisit this evolution from the perspective of the post-Cold War methodological debates from which critical security studies emerged. The final section will make yet another cut into the development of security studies, locating it within a larger historical transition from the narrow focus on states and force to a broader field of practices. The politics of security, in this broader field, involves a range of state and non-state actors and a variety of security responses. As Nye and Lynn-Jones (1988: 26)

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state, the tendency to conflate security studies with strategic studies ‘unduly narrows the scope of the field and cuts it off from its political, economic and historical context.’ This chapter and the next are an attempt to resituate the concept of security in several layers of context. It highlights one of the central themes of CSS which is that the critical scholar stands within a historical, political and cultural context, which is the point of departure for critique.

Realism and the Cold War Security studies has never been as limited in scope as presumed by the narrow definition. While it has been dominated by realist thinking, a range of names have constituted the field – war studies, conflict resolution, national security studies, strategic studies, defence studies, peace research, and international security studies – each of which has a different connotation and has been used to identify and classify particular problems (Crawford 1991: 285). There are cultural differences in the use of terms as well. Nye and Lynn-Jones (1988: 8), writing in the American context during the Cold War, used the term ‘international security studies’, while others in the American context made a distinction between national and international security studies. British scholars such as Buzan (1991 [1983]) or Smith (1999) highlighted the transition from strategic studies to 50

international security. The difficulty of pinning down the precise boundaries of ‘security’ studies only reinforces the argument that the narrow definition, far from reflecting a universal definition, is merely one piece in a more complex puzzle. In what follows, I highlight the more caricatured view of security studies associated with realism and neo-realism. Kenneth Waltz (1979: 186), one of the most prominent neo-realists, stated that ‘Since Thucydides in Greece and Kautilya in India, the use of force and the possibility of controlling it have been the preoccupation of international political studies.’ While security studies is a recent academic pursuit, its core concept relates to a long history of war and strategic questions about the use of force. The writings of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli or Clausewitz are often a point of reference for contemporary security analysts who seek to generalize about the pursuit of power and the relationship between statecraft and the use of force (Crawford 1991: 288). Security studies builds on or, it is claimed, descends from a body of timeless wisdom. During this long history, the relationship between politics and military force has, more often than not, been central to the security equation. In the narrow definition, the politics of security focuses principally on a question of

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how states think about the use of force. The primary concern is, on the one hand, the conditions that make the use of force likely and, on the other, an analysis of state policies regarding the preparation for, prevention of, or engagement in war. Critics have pointed to a dual problem with this emphasis (Kolodziej 1992). First, it makes the academic study of security too dependent on questions of contemporary policy. Second, it ignores broader political questions about security, above or below the state. The narrowness of the definition was in large part a function of the realist assumptions that underpin it. Security studies emerged as an academic subfield of international relations after World War II, along with the desire to make the latter into a science. After the experience of Hitler’s expansion throughout Europe, realism took centre stage as a framework for explaining international politics. The two developments were compatible, although not equivalent, in so far as science seeks generalization across time and realism builds on a timeless wisdom about state behaviour. However, in the process of adapting this timeless wisdom to the requirements of science, rich and historically embedded analyses, from Thucydides to Hobbes, were cast in sound-bite form and reduced to a simplified set of assumptions defining security dilemmas (Kolodziej 1992: 431).

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As Ken Booth (2005: 5) points out, realism’s pull ‘has remained powerful for all those students of international relations keen to speak to government officials, the armed forces and the media. Realism remains the intellectual password into the corridors of power.’ Every student of international relations or security is familiar with its assumptions. The first assumption is a pessimistic view of human nature. Human beings are selfish power-seekers and, as a result, conflict cannot be eliminated, only managed. Hans Morgenthau (1978) defined international politics, like all politics, as a ‘struggle for power’. The second is a focus on states as the main actors at the international level and an understanding of the international system as an anarchy, structured around states. Because there is no global government to provide security, no power to hold states ‘in awe’, states are constantly vulnerable to harm from other states. The absence of the security provided by law and institutions means that states have to help themselves, that is, they have to provide for their own security. Ultimately states can only rely on their own efforts to remain safe. As any state may resort to force, all states must be prepared to use force (Terriff et al. 1999: 32). Therefore, the military capability of a state is crucial to the outcome of international conflicts. The security dilemma arises out of a situation where each state’s attempt to help itself

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presents a potential threat to, and erosion of, the security of other states who face the same problem. The result may be a spiral of insecurity leading to war. Balance of power provides a semblance of order within anarchy, since states, faced with a growing threat from a neighbour, will naturally join together to counter the power of a dominant player. In the best case, balance of power will prevent any kind of conflict from breaking out. In the worst case, war may be necessary to preserve the system and the sovereignty of states within it. This central concept of realism reveals a problem that forms the core of this book’s argument, that is, the pursuit of security is part and parcel of the production of insecurity. The chapters that follow explore this argument in several dimensions and with greater nuance – and to a different conclusion than the realist argument.

Contexts of the Cold War Critical security studies emerged out of a critique of Cold War security studies and its focus on states and military security. Looking back, we may be inclined to see the Cold War as a homogeneous and stable period of international relations. Depending on how one casts its beginning or ending, it lasted approximately forty-five years. It revolved around two superpowers and two subordinate alliances. New technologies, such as nuclear

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weapons and ballistic missiles, transformed the nature of warfare and raised new strategic questions. Given the enormous power of these weapons, security studies emphasized military force as an instrument of statecraft. The field, both political and academic, focused on issues relating to nuclear deterrence and arms control. Neither the central concepts nor the historical evolution were so straightforward, however. While it was initially bound to concepts of strategy and national security, the more frequent use of the term international security, by the mid-1970s, when a major journal of that name was formed, heralded a broadening of the concept. In fact, both the priorities and the popularity of security studies during the Cold War waxed and waned. The questions asked by security analysts, and the methodologies by which these were addressed, were by no means static. In what follows I look at several periods in the evolution of security studies.2 The emphasis in this section is on the historical and political context as it relates to the evolution of the subfield. The next section will focus more explicitly on methodological debates. The post-World War II period, from 1945 to 1955, saw the onset of the Cold War, which was defined by an antagonistic relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union and questions about how nuclear weapons might be put to strategic use. What is interesting about

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this period, in light of the earlier discussion, is the visible emphasis on the relationship between security and freedom. During this period, the United States’ NSC 68 (1950), a national security strategy document that detailed a foreign policy shift towards active containment and military preparedness, defined security as the ‘preservation of the US as a free nation with fundamental institutions and values intact’. Security was not first and foremost about a military relationship but rather about a political one. Security was a derivative of other values, such as economic welfare, economic stability and individual freedom (Baldwin 1995: 122). National security was a goal that could be pursued by both military and non-military means. Considerable attention was devoted to the relationship between national security and domestic politics, such as the economy, civil liberties and democratic political processes (see, for instance, Brodie 1949; Dunn 1949; Lasswell 1950; Wolfers 1952). As the United States developed its nuclear arsenal, and the Soviet Union emerged as a nuclear power, these political questions were superseded by more strategic ones. The period from 1955 to 1965 is often referred to as the ‘Golden Age’ of security studies. The Doctrine of Massive Retaliation, developed during the US Eisenhower administration, was the first attempt to define a strategic use of nuclear

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weapons. The doctrine was both motivated by and gave impetus to further questions regarding how this new weapon might be used. This period also gave rise to questions about the possible contribution of arms control, as distinct from disarmament, to the stability of the nuclear balance (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 9). The Golden Age was dominated by nuclear weaponry and related concerns, such as arms control and limited war (Baldwin 1995: 123). The central question that preoccupied strategists during this period was how it would be possible for states to use weapons of mass destruction as instruments of policy, given the risk of nuclear exchange (Walt 1991: 214). While the previous period highlighted the meaning and importance of security relative to other goals, the focus shifted to questions of how to use a particular set of weapons (Baldwin 1995: 123). Because the costs of a nuclear war would be so high, there was little strategic value to be found in the actual use of nuclear weapons. The question was how to gain bargaining value from the threat to use them, or how to extract political benefit from a nuclear arsenal without triggering a nuclear war (Freedman 1998: 50). The Korean War represented the militarization of the East–West conflict and created a political climate in the United States that supported the development of security studies. During this period US defence spending tripled (Betts 1997:

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13). NATO became the centrepiece of US foreign policy. Realist theory and nuclear strategy came to dominate the field of international relations, displacing the earlier emphasis on international law and organizations. The strategists, located primarily in the Rand Corporation, which was a US think-tank created by the Air Force, were not, as in the past, primarily military strategists (Smith 1966; Kaplan 1983). They were civilian political scientists, mathematicians, physicists and economists. Nuclear war was not only beyond their experience as civilians; it was, by its very nature, beyond experience. Pre-nuclear strategic thought was only of partial relevance to nuclear weapons. Other than the detonation of the US atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was no historical data to draw on. As a result, the work of the strategists was inherently more theoretical than empirical (Betts 1997: 14). They spent much of their time dreaming up doomsday scenarios of potential nuclear war. With the emergence of détente in the 1970s, and the lessening of tensions between East and West, interest in security studies declined, despite the continuing increase in the US and Soviet nuclear arsenals (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 10). The dramatic effects of the 1973 oil embargo reinforced the idea that threats come not only from military sources but from non-military ones as well (Keohane and Nye

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1976; Baldwin 1995: 124). Other issues, for instance, relating to economic interdependence, Third World poverty or the environment, began to capture public attention. The Vietnam War was highly politicized, but in a way that detracted interest from this subfield of international relations. First, the nuclear strategies devised during the Golden Age provided little insight into a hot war involving American troops and insurgents (Baldwin 1995: 124). As Colin Gray (1982b) stated, the nuclear strategists knew very little about ‘peasant nationalism in Southeast Asia or the mechanics of a counterrevolutionary war’. Students were more likely to be concerned with questions of counter-insurgency than nuclear deterrence (Betts 1997: 14). Second, security studies was associated with the policies of the American establishment. In a situation where the unpopular Vietnam War was generating widespread protests, students were dissuaded from following this course of study. The context changed once again by 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the revolutions in Nicaragua and Iran. All of these reinforced a sceptical view of Soviet intentions in US minds. These events created an impression that the United States had been naïve in believing that détente had constrained the Soviets, and that they had now been caught off guard. The US failure to ratify the SALT II Treaty and the Carter administration’s

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unveiling of a ‘countervailing strategy’ also gave rise to a renewed debate over deterrence theory. The debate was characterized by deep divisions between believers in a war-fighting posture, as a necessary component of deterrence strategy, and those who argued that an assured destruction capacity was sufficient (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 15). Groups such as the US Committee for the Present Danger began to mobilize for a new military build-up, which further contributed to a breakdown of détente and paved the way for the election of Ronald Reagan, whose policies fanned what has been referred to as the ‘second Cold War’. The revival of the nuclear arms race corresponded with renewed interest and a ‘renaissance’ in security studies, preoccupied by the use of military means to meet military threats (Baldwin 1995: 125). Research was based on formal scientific assumptions and focused, in the American context, primarily on operational and technical questions (Betts 1997: 19). Reagan’s rhetoric about limited nuclear war and demonstration shots over Europe revived fears of nuclear war. This spawned a political debate over the meaning of security, particularly in Europe. While NATO argued that nuclear weapons had blessed Europe with an unprecedented period of peace, peace movements mobilized around arguments that the increasing likelihood of nuclear war made

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these weapons a source of insecurity rather than security (Fierke 1998).

Box 1.1 Politicizing Cold War security E. P. Thompson (1982: 9) ‘[The new peace] movements … may have commenced in fear, but they are now movements of hope. They are not only contesting particular missiles cruise and SS20. They are engaged also in the recreation of internationalism, by hundreds of different exchanges between peace activists. They are moving forward from missiles to contesting the bloc system itself from which antagonism the rival militarisms arise. They are setting themselves an astonishing objective: to break down … in the next ten years, the Cold War itself Ronald Reagan (1985) ‘The United States seeks to escape the prison of mutual terror by research and testing that could, in time, enable us to neutralize the threat of these ballistic missiles and, ultimately, render them obsolete … Surely, the world will sleep more secure when these missiles have been rendered useless, militarily and politically.’ Mikhail Gorbachev (1987a: 12) There is a real opportunity to free our common

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European home from a large portion of the nuclear burden in a short time. This would be a real and major step toward completely freeing Europe of nuclear arms… New thinking means an ability to listen to the voice of the European and world public, to understand the concerns and interests of other peoples, and not to separate one’s own security from the security of neighbors in our interconnected world.’ Reagan’s early policies, in the name of nuclear deterrence, were the inspiration for this fear. However, against the background of these debates, in 1983 he introduced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or ‘Star Wars’, followed, in subsequent years, by arguments that SDI would replace deterrence and make the ‘world sleep more secure’. After Soviet premier Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he also entered into the debate, arguing the need for New Thinking, to conceive of security in political terms, and to emphasize the importance of common security. Against this background, the two superpowers began to engage in a peace competition that led to face-to-face talks in Reykjavik and discussions, for the first time during the Cold War, of disarmament and not merely arms control. In 1989, ‘velvet’ revolutions shook Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union watched 62

as the communist regimes were dissolved, not by force but by popular demand. The Cold War was declared over with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, well before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Almost no one, and least of all the practitioners of security studies, saw the end of the Cold War coming.3 They were shocked both by the rapid course of events and by the fact that these changes did not fit with the realist assumptions of security studies. Neither disarmament, nor velvet revolutions, nor a state relinquishing its sovereignty could be explained within a framework that emphasized the threat and use of force by states. The sudden lack of a security problem, in addition to the apparent declining utility of military force, stimulated reflection and critical evaluation within the academy on the meaning of security. This brief reflection on the evolution of Cold War security studies reveals two aspects of the politics of security during this time. First, changes in the meaning of security were given impetus by political events in the world. Second, the meaning of security, or the definition of security priorities, changed continuously during the Cold War. During the early Cold War, much more attention was placed on the politics of what precisely was being secured, that is, a free society and democracy. By the late 1980s, these questions were being raised again. These debates in part 63

revealed the extent to which, against the backdrop of an arms race lasting several decades, we had lost sight of the political questions. The weapons had become ends in themselves. The changes were often defined in political discourse and through political debate. The narrow definition of security applied most directly to two brief periods of the Cold War, that is, the Golden Age and the Renaissance, when scholars were preoccupied with the logic of nuclear weapons and deterrence.

The methodological debate The last section revealed that the development of security studies, in fits and starts, was largely spurred on by developments in the political world. The experience of World War II gave momentum to a separate subfield of security studies, and realism provided the framework for its underlying assumptions. The development of nuclear weapons posed questions of how this new technology might be put to effective use. The Vietnam War, and the emergence of other non-military threats in the 1970s, contributed to the waning popularity of the subfield. The political events in 1979 and the emergence of the second Cold War brought to the fore new questions about the strategic use of nuclear weapons. These also corresponded with a politicization of security, which contributed to the eventual demise of the Cold War (Fierke 1998, 2001). Contrary to the 64

common perception that the Cold War was a reflection of a timeless notion of security, focused on the threat and use of force by states, this sketch reveals a shifting field driven primarily by changing events in the political world. The effort to make security studies into a science, building on a unitary method drawn from the natural sciences, was no more static than the political context from which it emerged. Taking a second cut into the evolution of the subfield, we see a shift from Cold War efforts to remove politics from the study of security to the increasing politicization of methodology, which, as the Cold War was ending, highlighted the fundamentally political nature of security.

The demise of the political In the post-World War II period realism emerged as the dominant framework for understanding international relations. E.H. Carr’s (1981 [1939]) devastating critique of the relationship between the dominance of idealism and the emergence of Hitler in the decades after World War I paved the way for realism to enter centre stage as the basis for a science of international relations. European émigrés to the United States, and not least Hans Morgenthau, crystallized realist ideas into a theoretical framework, but one that focused as much on the domestic sources of power and 65

security as on the international. A pessimistic view of human nature, and assumptions about the prevalence of the pursuit of power, underpinned more classical approaches to realism and contributed to the larger context in which the problems of the Cold War and nuclear weapons were defined. As stated in the last section, security studies was preoccupied in its early days with questions relating to threat definition and the potential utility of nuclear weapons. This stage saw the articulation of many of the concepts we associate with modern nuclear strategy, but not in a particularly sophisticated way (Crawford 1991: 289). There was, nonetheless, still a political intent behind the strategy in so far as the primary concern was how to derive political benefits from the threat of nuclear war. During the Golden Age, concepts were more clearly developed, but in an ahistorical way by scholars associated with the US Rand Corporation, such as Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter and Henry Kissinger, among others. Deterrence theory was a product of this period, and Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict (1960) was its most enduring contribution (Freedman 1998: 62). As already suggested, given that most relevant information was classified and there was no empirical data on nuclear warfare, scholars relied heavily on deductive methods such as game theory (Walt

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1991: 215). The nuclear strategists were optimistic that a single powerful theory of strategy could be developed that would explain the behaviour of opponents and guide policy-making (Kolodziej in Croft and Terriff 2000: 22). From the microeconomic theory of markets, they borrowed the assumption of egoistic, value-maximizing actors. Nuclear deterrence was presented as a rational process of decision-making by which the state, assumed to be a unitary actor, was able to project credible threats that would ensure that the costs of any warlike behaviour by an opponent would exceed the expected gains. Even those scholars who define security studies in terms of military force have noted that there was, during the Golden Age, an overemphasis on the military aspects of national security at the expense of historical, psychological, cultural, organizational and political contexts (Baldwin 1995: 123; Smoke 1975; Walt 1991). As Walt (1991: 215) notes, the early literature employed ‘a rather narrow definition of politics, ignoring nonmilitary sources of international tension and focusing on military balances.’ A British contemporary, Hedley Bull (1968: 600), argued at the time that ‘the technical rigor and precision of much strategic analysis has been achieved at the cost of losing touch with political variety and change.’ The hope was for a unified theory. By the mid-1960s optimism was, however, already on the wane and was further

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diminished by the failed application of strategic theory in Vietnam. The failure can in part be attributed to a lack of attention to the political, historical and cultural context of Vietnam, given expectations that the Vietnamese adversary would conform to academic models (Kolodziej in Croft and Terriff 2000: 23). During the ‘Renaissance’ in the 1970s and 1980s, national security studies was replaced by the new international security studies (Baldwin 1995: 125). As Freedman (1998: 52–3) notes: On a larger scale, a shift from ‘strategic’ to ‘security’ studies and from ‘national’ to ‘international’ studies had been underway for some time. There were good reasons for this transition. Questions of force must always be put in a wider context, if only to make sense of the particular causes of conflict. Even in the realist tradition, force must always be considered as an instrument of foreign policy alongside other political and economic instruments. This shift, however, also reflected the revival of the idealist tradition and notions of multilateral cooperation, thereby serving to delegitimize force as a primary tool of statecraft. While strategic issues are part of international security studies, the label ‘strategic studies’ emphasizes the choice between alternative

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strategies of the state (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 7) and overlaps with national security studies. ‘International security studies’ highlights the international scope of contemporary security problems (Buzan 1991 [1983]). Arguably this shift, along with that from strategic to security studies, was characteristic of the paradoxical nature of this period. Renaissance strategists were preoccupied by questions of force structure, planning and other technical problems related to nuclear and conventional weapons (Crawford 1991: 289). Stephen Meyer (1990) argues that it was only in the late 1970s that security studies became focused almost solely on technical issues, including what weapons systems to choose, how intercontinental ballistic missiles should be based, etc. In this respect, the Renaissance represented the disappearance of the political aspects of security. Unlike the Golden Age theorists, who were firmly anchored in the policy world, most work on security during the Renaissance was carried out within the academy (Walt 1991: 219). The demise of the political was also manifest in the prominence of neo-realism, which supplanted realism as the dominant theory underpinning security studies during this period. For neo-realists the world was defined by the single game of anarchy. Earlier realisms created space for historical contingency and the

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political or the intersubjective. Neo-realists, such as Waltz (1979), criticized these earlier realisms for being reductionist, that is, for reducing the problem of insecurity to the level of the individual or the state instead of the system. In the search for elegance and parsimony, neo-realism removed any traces of the human, the political and the cultural from international relations. States became ‘billiard balls’ which possessed only the capability to act rationally to preserve their interest in survival within a structure of relations that was largely inescapable and constrained their moves. If neo-realism explored the logic of anarchy in a larger sense, rational choice analysts, and particularly game theorists, explored the logics of distinct games within anarchy. As stated earlier, the empirical basis and application of both was often weak. Nonetheless, both had resonance within the relatively stable context of the late Cold War. While the preoccupation with force structures, neo-realism and social science represented a distancing from the political, this was also arguably the point of departure for its reintroduction. The extreme manifestation generates both contradictions and oppositions, as described in the last section. In the academy, the move from national to international security was the beginning of a broadening of the concept. In applying a stricter model of social science, scholars reconsidered the work of the

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Golden Age theorists, and their concepts were elaborated with empirical evidence where necessary (Gray 1982a: 15–22). While the substance of the problems addressed did not change considerably from the Golden Age, Walt (1991: 217) claims that the Renaissance brought history, psychology and organizational theory to bear on topics such as deterrence theory and nuclear weapons policy.

The return of the political The Renaissance reflected a nostalgia for the Golden Age of security studies. Yet, if one reads between the lines of accounts of these periods, the nostalgia quickly disappears. On the one hand, the Golden Age was largely ahistorical and theoretically underdeveloped in its approaches (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 12–13; Walt 1991: 214–15), while the Renaissance involved becoming more historical and more theoretical. On the other hand, many believe that the last significant theoretical innovation in security studies was the deterrence and arms control theories of the late 1950s and the 1960s (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 12–13), thus during the Golden Age. Both eras were noted for their ethnocentricity, a topic that will be explored in more depth in the next chapter. Most of the key concepts were defined by American scholars and were concerned with American (or Western) problems of nuclear strategy during

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the Cold War (Booth 1978; Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 14; Crawford 1991: 285; Kolodziej 1992: 434). The criticism that deterrence theory was too abstract, static and apolitical emerged at the height of the Cold War, along with a renewed interest in the historical, psychological and organizational factors that contribute to security. However, these earlier attempts did not question in any fundamental way the quest to make security studies into a science. Instead, they focused on the formulation of more diverse theories and explanations. The period leading up to the end of the Cold War gave rise to a more fundamental attack on the scientific pretensions of the field, which was related to a larger Third Debate between positivists and post-positivists in international relations theory (Lapid 1989). One early expression of the emerging debate was the distinction, discussed in the introduction, between problem-solving and critical theory (Cox 1981), which questioned the politics of power underpinning dominant theories. About the same time, Barry Buzan (1991 [1983]) introduced the idea that security is an ‘essentially contested concept’, which will be explored in the next chapter. Somewhat later, post-structuralists, such as R.B.J. Walker (1993, 1995; in Der Derian and Shapiro 1989) and Richard Ashley (1984, 1988, in Der Derian

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and Shapiro 1989), exposed the absence of the political in international theory, the scientific pretensions of neo-realism and the disciplining effect of discourses of sovereignty. Constructivists, such as Nicholas Onuf (1989), Friedrich Kratochwil (1989) and Alexander Wendt (1992, 1999), questioned the static view of anarchy, arguing that the world of international politics is not given but always in the process of being made. Analysts of gender, such as Cynthia Enloe (1989, 1993), Ann Tickner (1993, 1996) and Spike Peterson (1992), uncovered the gendered assumptions embedded in the theories, concepts and practices of international security. The application of security to a range of new and different threats, and the analysis of how threats are constructed, gave rise to a burgeoning literature on critical security studies. Despite their own questionable pedigree, traditional security analysts responded to their constructivist and post-structuralist critics with an air of condescension regarding the superiority of their research programmes. Critical analysts of security were accused of lacking either empirical pretensions or ability (Keohane 1988: 392; Mearsheimer 1990; Walt 1991: 223). Yet security studies had been plagued by this problem from the beginning. As Nye and Lynn-Jones (1988: 13) pointed out: ‘In the fortunate absence of empirical data on

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nuclear exchanges, the field [of security studies] encourages non-empirical analyses.’ Given the dramatic changes in international politics, the questions raised by critical security studies, and the attempts to develop new approaches and answers, were arguably more in tune with a changing world than their counterparts in the mainstream. As Krause and Williams (1997) document, critical security studies gave rise to a large number of studies within a fairly short period of time. The main problem was that these scholars did not define ‘empirical’ in a way that fit with the research programme of the mainstream and they were therefore not taken seriously. The difference regards a question of how we might know the world we are analysing. While rationalists treat the identities of actors – as individual maximizers – as given, constructivists posit that identities and interests are constructed in historically specific circumstances. Where the one assumes a static game, if only for analytic purposes, the other opens up a space for analysing how identities and interests change in the transition from one game to another. The shift to an understanding of security as a social and political construction expands the potential for formulating questions relating specifically to processes of change, including how enemies transform their relationship into one of friendship, how threats are defined and how the use of force is constructed. These questions are more

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empirically relevant to the changing contexts of international security than a general theory that assumes the sameness of security across time.

Return to the military definition? The first section revealed the political question at the core of definitions of security. The second section argued that the evolution of security studies was given impetus by changes in the political world and highlighted changes in the meaning of security, articulated in political discourse and arising out of political debate. The third section linked these changes to methodological debates about how security should be studied. These debates were marked by a transition from the attempt to make security studies into a science, based on assumptions of a single objective world of anarchy, to the post-positivist Third Debate, which questioned these assumptions and revealed the politics inherent in attempts to define security. This final section, in conclusion, situates these evolutions within a longer time-span, preceding World War II and extending through the post-9/11 period. The point of departure is a question about the significance of further changes in the meaning of security since the attacks on the US World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001. On the surface, the War on Terror seems

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to have contributed to a shift back to an emphasis on security as the threat and use of force by states. However, placed in a larger framework, it can also be understood as part of a transition from a world of interstate security to one where multiple risks, threats and responses are being defined in a more complex world, involving both state and non-state actors, against the backdrop of globalization. While the one assumes the centrality of states and the invisibility of actors within states, or transcending state borders, the other contains several transitions, marked by discrete events, which provide a pretext for reframing the meaning of security. The evolution of security studies, as defined above, took place during the Cold War. There was continuity to this period in so far as the dominant, although not the exclusive, concern of security studies was the threat to use nuclear weapons. Despite the strategic differences posed by nuclear weapons, scholars often conflated the problems they confronted with age-old questions of strategy and a timeless wisdom regarding the answers. If the Cold War is taken as a separate historical context, and placed alongside what preceded and followed it, it becomes clear that the politics of security, and thus the meaning of security, has undergone a constant transformation.

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States and security With the breakdown of the classical European balance of power system and the horrific experience of World War I, efforts were made to outlaw war and to base international relations on liberal ideas of collective security, international law and international institutions, such as the League of Nations. One of the seminal works of this period, Quincy Wright’s A Study of War (1965 [1942]), which was the culmination of a major research project beginning in 1926, presented war as a problem to be solved, or a disease to be cured, rather than as an instrument of statecraft. The study of military force as an instrument of statecraft for the purpose of promoting national security tended to be neglected, which distinguished this period from that after 1940 (Baldwin 1995: 120). The League of Nations was to be the primary vehicle for collective security, that is, the idea that all states should have a permanent interest in coming to the aid of any state that is invaded. The Kellogg–Briand Pact, which outlawed war except in self-defence, had widespread support throughout the 1930s and, at the time, seemed irrevocable. Interest in strategy and military affairs was, before World War II, the business of the professional military, and scholarship on related issues was confined to military and diplomatic history (Walt 1991: 213). The horrific costs of World

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War I had left a consensus that war was ‘too important to be left to the generals’. With the onset of World War II, national security became a central concern of international relations scholars of widely different persuasions (Fox 1989: 237–8). As already discussed, liberal ideas were discredited after the experience of Hitler and World War II, and realism was consolidated as the dominant theoretical framework for understanding security. Collective security was embedded in the United Nations and NATO, but the dominant concern that motivated security studies was one of the strategic use of nuclear weapons, and particularly nuclear deterrence. During this period, security studies emerged as a field revolving largely around realist theory, a definition of security focusing on the threat and use of force by states, and the intention of making this study into a science. In both the post-World War I and post-World War II periods, states were the main actors of international relations and security was a question of the threat or use of force by states, even within the post-World War I context, where emphasis was placed on its avoidance. In the earlier period, the use of force was to be primarily for purposes of collective security or the self-defence of an individual state, given the formal ban on aggressive war. While collective security and self-defence were incorporated

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into the Charter and institutions of the United Nations after World War II, the dominant logic of security during the Cold War was one defined by the threat of force within a relationship of nuclear deterrence. Liberal theory provided the framework for the former and realist theory the framework for the latter. This juxtaposition raises a question about the scientific conception of international relations as a recurring pattern, highlighting the role of reflection and interpretation by actors embedded within each historical context. When the post-Cold War period is added to the picture, the problem and the potential contradiction of this search for patterns are revealed. As one fold in a universal pattern, the end of the Cold War is merely a hiatus between the Cold War and 9/11, and the latter represents a return to a concept of security as the use of force. However, understood in terms of the politics of security, the end of the Cold War ushered in the beginning of a change and a broadening of the context of security to include the relationship between state and non-state actors.

State and non-state In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War there was much discussion of the declining utility of military force (Allison and Treverton 1992; Gaddis 1992; Hogan 1992). While this has not necessarily been the case, the context in which the threat and use of military force are

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defined has changed. During the Cold War, the threat to use nuclear weapons was understood as an important element of avoiding any kind of war, although proxy wars were fought in the Third World. With the end of the Cold War the shift from deterrence to coercive diplomacy or humanitarian intervention meant the greater likelihood of actually using force. Force was directed primarily at ethnic groups or other non-state actors, or used in situations where there was a clear asymmetry of power, for instance, between multilateral organizations or the ‘last remaining’ superpower and small states, such as Serbia or Iraq. In the War on Terror, force has also been used against non-state actors, that is, ‘terrorists’ and the ‘rogue states’ who were said to harbour them. Both the end of the Cold War and 9/11 came as a surprise to academic security studies because of the continuing emphasis, among mainstream scholars, on assumptions about the centrality of states. While it is tempting to see the War on Terror as a move ‘back to the future’, the South Asian tsunami in December 2004 raised new questions about the central place given to terrorism in security discourse. Likewise, the Live 8 concerts, in the run-up to the G8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July 2005, highlighted the security threat posed by the ravage of poverty in Africa, in particular. While

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many have argued that the destruction of the environment or poverty present a much greater threat than terrorism, the sense of urgency generated by the attacks on 11 September 2001 in the United States, or on 7 July 2005 in Britain, pushed the former into the background. However, the assumptions of the War on Terror, and not least the language of war, were increasingly called into question, particularly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq undermined the legal basis of the war. The failure of intelligence, the abuses of international law, and the exposure of human rights abuses from Abu Ghraib to Guantánamo, not to mention the increasing number of deaths in Iraq, led to a decline in political support for the occupation. As both climate change and poverty have been politicized, they have come more into focus as security issues. As these issues increasingly compete with terrorism for central place, the political nature of security is harder to ignore. The scale of poverty in terms of daily human deaths, compared to the number of people who die at the hands of terrorists, is large. In 2005, at the height of the War on Terror, 14,600 people worldwide died in terrorist attacks (National Counterterrorism Center 2006). By contrast, nearly one-third of all deaths annually, approximately 18 million, are poverty related (Tujan et al. 2004). The most vulnerable

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are often the victims of hunger. Annually, six million children die while 161 million suffer from chronic malnutrition (Millennium: 2012: 2). Some 2.4 billion people lived on less than US$2 a day in 2010 (World Bank 2013) and 1.1 billion – one in five – on less than 1 dollar (Millennium 2012: 1).4 The contrast was also stark against the backdrop of the South Asian tsunami in 2004, which, almost instantly, killed over 200,000 people. In the weeks and months following, and adding the deaths from disease, the total increased to approximately 375,000 (Asia Regional Integration Center 2005). After the disaster, commentators began to ask whether the security status accorded to terrorism since 11 September 2001 was justified, given the gravity of threats relating to the environment. The natural disasters since have only highlighted these questions. Typhoon Haiyan, known as Yolanda in the Philippines, was the worst storm on record and the deadliest natural disaster in the country’s history. With winds of up to 270 km/hr, Haiyan completely flattened parts of low-lying islands in the Philippines. While the death toll, which was over 5,000 (BBC 2013), was far less than the 2004 tsunami, the storm affected 14.9 million people, including the 4.13 million who were displaced (Philippines 2013).

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Despite this reality, world military expenditures reached $1.6 trillion in 2010. The US military budget accounted for 43 per cent of the total, six times that of its nearest rival, China (SIPRI 2011). The five permanent members of the Security Council were responsible for 88 per cent of the world’s reported conventional arms exports. According to a large UN study of global wealth distribution, the world’s richest individuals make up 1 per cent of the population but own 40 per cent of the world’s wealth (Randerson 2006). Five hundred people own more wealth than the poorest 416 million, and each year 10.7 million children don’t live to see their fifth birthday (Elliott 2005: 17). The War on Terror elevated threats to primarily Western citizens above the reality of daily starvation by children in other parts of the world. This tension was only highlighted by the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005 against the backdrop of the G8 Summit. The attacks once again diverted attention away from issues of poverty and climate change to the insecurity generated by terrorism. From this perspective, the War on Terror, which appeared to be a return to a military definition of security, represented a set of blinders, inherited from the past, that kept us from seeing clearly and responding to the threats that represent daily dangers to much of the world.

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The military emphasis of security studies has not gone away. However, the realist framework is less useful for addressing many changes over the last several decades. First, realism is a theory about the threat and use of force between states and has less to say about global relationships between states and non-state actors such as terrorists. Second, in so far as states continue to be central players, the events on 11 September 2001 contributed to unprecedented cooperation between states, and not least the US, Russia and China. Third, while the use of force has been an important element of the War on Terror, and not least the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the efforts to transform states into democracies has contributed to the expansion and deepening of international institutions of liberal governance. In addition, economic globalization, and rules defined by global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, has spawned practices that may evade the control of states, such as the trafficking of human beings, the black market in arms, and a growing number of global refugees. The international context has changed dramatically since the emergence of Critical Security Studies. The initial focus of critique on realist assumptions of international security has over the last decade begun to take a back seat to the practices of liberal governance, which are said to be dependent on more diffuse forms of

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power, such as practices of widespread surveillance. The changing context includes the rise of ‘non-Western’ powers such as Russia, China and India, and the potential for a renewed emphasis on the realist practices of inter-state relations. However, the re-emergence of a more multipolar world, the increasing role of global media technologies and a proliferation of voices, particularly from the post-colonial world and diasporas, which challenge static notions of national identity, point to the potential for a more dramatic rethinking of the practices of international security. In this environment, critical scholars of international security, like their traditional counterparts, have also, as suggested in the introduction, been said to be ethnocentric, in so far as they are located primarily in Western Europe and rely on Western European theoretical traditions. The accusation signals a further opening for a more global conversation over the meaning of security and the knowledge-practices that govern our understanding of what it means to be secure in a rapidly changing world.

Further reading Burgess, J. Peter (2011) The Ethical Subject of Security: Geopolitical Reason and the Threat Against Europe. London: Routledge.

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Buzan, Barry and Lene Hansen (2009) The Evolution of International Security Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gaddis, John Lewis (1992) The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations. New York: Oxford University Press. Kolodziej, Edward (1992) ‘Renaissance in Security Studies? Caveat Lector!’, International Studies Quarterly, 36, 4, 421–38. Smith, Steve (1999) ‘The Increasing Insecurity of Security Studies: Conceptualizing Security in the Last Twenty Years’, Contemporary Security Policy, 20, 3, 72–101.

Classroom exercise Break into groups of two or three and look at the questions below. Spend ten or fifteen minutes brainstorming a variety of answers to these questions. Once you have done this, come back together as a class and share your ideas together. Writing the various possible answers on a white board provides an overview for thinking about the bigger issues at stake.

Questions What is the narrow definition of security? What changes in international politics raised questions about this definition? 86

How serious is the challenge presented by these changes? Elaborate. Do the War on Terror or the re-emergence of a multipolar world reinforce the narrow definition or present a further challenge?

Notes 1. For a critical perspective on this literature, see Barkawi and Laffey (2001). 2. The three ‘waves’ of security studies, suggested by Colin Gray (1982a: 15–22), have been the point of departure for many analyses. His waves included post-World War II, Golden Age and Reconsideration of the Golden Age. 3. Hugh Gusterson (in Weldes et al. 1999: 323) explored the literature on US–Soviet relations in the journal International Security in the three years before 1989, focusing in particular on themes related to the nuclear arms race and the implications of Gorbachev’s reforms. He argues that the journal constructed a discursive world that assumed the indefinite continuation of the Cold War. Within this discursive world it was impossible to recognize those signs of an impending end, which have since, in retrospect, been acknowledged.

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4. As noted by the World Bank (2013), this is actually a decrease from the poverty rate in 1990, due to attainment of the first Millennium Development Goal target. The 1990 extreme poverty rate – $1.25 a day in 2005 prices – was halved in 2010, according to new preliminary estimates. According to these estimates, 21 per cent of people in the developing world lived at or below $1.25 a day. That’s down from 43 per cent in 1990 and 52 per cent in 1981. It means that 1.22 billion people lived on less than $1.25 a day in 2010, compared with 1.91 billion in 1990, and 1.94 billion in 1981. Notwithstanding this achievement, even if the current rate of progress were to be maintained, some 1 billion people would still live in extreme poverty in 2015.

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CHAPTER 2 The Proliferation of Concepts The politicization of security, as the Cold War was ending, raised three issues. First, the narrow definition of security was ethnocentric, that is, it reflected primarily American concerns within the context of the Cold War. Other security concerns, more specific to Europe and the Third World, were not taken into account in this dominant discourse. Second, while the narrow concept focused on the state, questions were increasingly raised about the referent object of security, that is, what or who is to be secured. This opened the door to viewing individuals, other kinds of groups, or the globe as potential objects of security. Third, with the apparent declining utility of force with the end of the Cold War, critics pointed to new security threats and risks emerging with processes of globalization. These threats transcended state borders and required a different kind of security response. The purpose of this chapter is to examine different angles of the ‘expansionist’ argument about the need to rethink the meaning of security. The first section examines the idea that security is an ‘essentially contested concept’ (ECC), which further highlights the

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inherently political nature of attempts to define or redefine it. The next section will take the discussion in chapter 1 a step further. Not only was the narrow definition of security characteristic of specific periods within the Cold War; it was also specific to a geographic context. While the Cold War provided the overarching framework within which security was defined, different understandings of security played a more important role in other parts of the world. The third section then explores the proliferation of threats and referent objects in the period since, touching on a range of security threats, many of which will be the subject of more in-depth discussion, from a different angle, in later chapters.

Essentially contested concepts In an analysis of twenty years of security studies, Steve Smith (1999: 96) claimed that ‘security is a genuinely contested concept’. The phrase ‘essentially contested concept’ (ECC) was coined by W.B. Gallie and introduced to international relations by Barry Buzan (1991 [1983]). An ECC is a concept that generates debates that cannot be resolved by reference to empirical evidence because the concept contains a clear ideological or moral element and defies precise, generally accepted definition. Many political concepts fit this category,

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from politics itself, to democracy or security. Each of these words is part of our daily discourse, and in any exchange participants may understand one another, while disagreeing over the application of the term. While security analysts share a broad concept of security, one might deny that the term could apply to a military environment involving human destruction, while another might affirm its relationship to the threat and use of force. For instance, the political debates about security in the 1980s, highlighted in the last chapter, pitted the NATO alliance, which argued that nuclear deterrence had ‘blessed’ Europe with an unprecedented period of peace and security, against peace movements, which argued that the increasing speed and destructive power of nuclear weapons was increasing the likelihood of nuclear war and thus undermined security. William Connolly (1993) associates an ECC with three criteria. First, the concept is appraisive or describes a valued achievement. Security, like democracy, is an end with positive value, contrasted with its opposite, for instance, insecurity, which is a negative value to be avoided. Second, it refers to a practice that is internally complex and involves reference to several dimensions. Connolly (1993: 14) states, ‘to make a concept, like politics, intelligible we have to display its complex connections with a host of other concepts to which it is related.’ Clarifying a concept requires an elaboration of

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the broader conceptual system in which it is located. In this respect it defies operationalization or requires making all of the concepts that help to define it operational as well. Third, a concept is essentially contested if the agreed and contested rules of application are fairly open, making it possible for users to interpret the shared rules in different ways as new and unforeseen events arise. Because of these characteristics, an ECC may involve endless disputes about the proper use of a term. Contestation often is not merely about the concepts of politics; the disputes are a part of politics itself. To get someone to accept one’s account of an ECC is to involve him or her in a judgement and to encourage political activity in line with this commitment (Connolly 1993: 30). The politics of an ECC revolves around debates that seek to convince others of a particular judgement, which may have political consequences. From this perspective, critical theorists and feminists might argue that the narrow definition, focused on the threat and use of force, represents a political position or a legitimization of a particular state of affairs. Feminists have looked at the relationship between security and power, and consequent assumptions of control, domination and surveillance that are associated with security. They have asked who and what precisely is being secured by the provision of security as conventionally defined (Enloe 1989, 1993).

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Resources devoted to military preparations are resources that are not available for other needs, such as social services and welfare, which are also relevant to security (Tickner 1993). Further, the protection of political community equates difference with a threat from outside and thus reifies the need for protection from violent others. In this respect, security practices serve to reproduce insecurity. Simon Dalby (in Krause and Williams 1997: 9) asks whether the concept can be rethought in terms that don’t necessarily equate difference with threat. Given the close association between protection and military means, is it possible to extend the definition of security to other realms without militarizing threats that otherwise would receive a political response (Krause and Williams 1997: 5)? These critical questions suggest the importance of making security a site of political contestation.

An ethnocentric concept The first chapter argued that security is always political, defined in historical context and redefined as contexts change. A universal definition was contrasted with a historically specific one. But context itself can be bounded in different ways. The Cold War was a historical context, which in its broad outlines can be distinguished from the period before or after its demise by the emphasis on nuclear weapons

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and deterrence. It is possible to make several other cuts into the context of the Cold War. The last chapter illustrated two further cuts. On the one hand, the logic we associate with Cold War security was not constant, even within this period, but continually transformed in response to political events. On the other hand, the Cold War can be embedded in a longer historical pattern constituting the primacy of forceful interactions between states, as distinct from the shift since its end to the relationship between state and non-state actors. The methodological point is not one about the need for a more rigorous effort to identify universal patterns, but rather the need for greater sensitivity to the complexity and fluidity of the international political landscape. Methods are needed that acknowledge both the difficulty of capturing ‘what is’ at any point in historical time and the political significance of attempting to do so. While this methodological problem is explored throughout the book in different ways, this section highlights the geographical dimensions of defining security within the Cold War and since. While the Cold War, it is argued, provided an overarching framework, which influenced definitions of security worldwide, the narrow definition of security has been criticized for being ethnocentric in so far as it reflects the concerns of Western nation-states generally and, more specifically, American concerns during the Cold War (Booth 1978; Nye

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and Lynn-Jones 1988: 14; Acharya in Krause and Williams 1997: 300). In reflecting on the overlapping field of strategic studies, Colin Gray (1982b: 194) highlighted: ‘The United States is only one culture, and for a field of inquiry as critical to the human future as strategic studies to be rooted in so narrow and unique a set of predispositions can only impoverish its capacity to accommodate the true diversity of strategic styles that exists worldwide.’ The discussion of the last chapter focused on how security was defined in the US context of the Cold War. Nuclear deterrence and strategy were the central preoccupations of security studies during this period. Realist theory, with its emphasis on the sovereign state, provided the underlying theoretical framework for making sense of narrow military questions. The specific security cultures of other parts of the world were not accounted for in this dominant discourse.

European integration Even in Europe, which was the major focus of US nuclear policy, other security concerns were of great importance. The Marshall Plan,1 the US policy of offering economic and technical assistance for the reconstruction of Europe following World War II, was in part motivated by a desire to shore up Western economies and to minimize the appeal of the communist alternative. The European Economic 95

Community was in large part inspired after World War II by a desire to ameliorate the conditions that had historically given rise to war between European nation-states. Greater economic interdependence, it was argued, would minimize the likelihood of war. In this respect, economic means were an important vehicle for achieving the political end of security. The 1973 oil embargo made it evident how sensitive European economies were to changes elsewhere and further encouraged the development of economic interdependence and shared European institutions. Interdependence theory (Keohane and Nye 1976), which builds on the experience of post-World War II Europe, emphasized the declining utility of military force among European states and increasing cooperation across state ministries. Realists might recognize the importance of increased cooperation in the European context, but would see this as a derivative of military security. The greater interdependence of Europe during the Cold War was made possible by the US nuclear guarantee. It was only because of American dominance after World War II that international institutions were established. Cooperation within the European context was possible because the security needs of separate states were taken care of. Europeans didn’t have to be preoccupied with the prospect of a Soviet invasion precisely because they were assured the protection of the United States.

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Additionally, US dominance kept the different European powers in line, thereby minimizing the likelihood of conflicts between them. The realist argument has lost much of its power since the end of the Cold War. If European cooperation was made possible by European dependence on the American nuclear guarantee, then one would expect the integration project to fragment once the guarantee was no longer needed. Instead, the European Union has expanded to include new states in Central and Eastern Europe and now has 28 members. An alternative explanation for the continuation of European institutions, despite the declining importance of the US nuclear guarantee, is that these institutions, which initially depended on US protection, have developed a life of their own. Leaders have learned how to cooperate. Their shared understanding that cooperation is preferable to military force has become deeply ingrained in the rules and practices of various institutions. In addition to the widening of the European Union, there were also moves to deepen the relationship, as signalled, for instance, by the introduction of the euro as a single European currency, the drafting of a European constitution and the development of an independent European defence and security identity. Nonetheless, any notion of the European Union as a federal structure that

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projects military sovereignty with the unity of a nation-state remains far from reality and controversial. This was demonstrated by the opposition within previously stalwart states of the Union, such as France and the Netherlands, to the ratification of a European constitution, not to mention past failures to mobilize a specifically European military force. In practice, the European experiment has led neither to a unified sovereign entity nor to anarchy, but rather to a form of shared sovereignty between European states, dependent on the development of norms and institutions of cooperation. In this respect, security within Europe is at odds with the realist assumption of isolated states whose security, in a condition of anarchy, is purely dependent on self-help.

Third World fragmentation During the Cold War, Western Europeans had a somewhat different perspective than Americans, but their security concerns were closely intertwined and grew out of a similar experience and traditions of warfare. The narrow definition of security focuses on the threat and use of force by states. The nation-state is a Western European phenomenon that has been transported to other parts of the world, where it developed under totally different conditions. The sovereignty of parts of Eastern Europe emerged only after World War I, with the crumbling of the

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Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The sovereignty of former colonies in what was, during the Cold War, referred to as the Third World, is even more recent, dating from the decades following World War II. Critical theorists in the Marxist tradition, and dependency theorists in particular, have long argued that the development of Northern nation-states has been dependent on the underdevelopment of the South (Wallerstein 1974; Cardoso and Faletto 1979). Arguments of this kind highlight a history of imperialism during which Western states established control over regions outside of Europe and organized production to meet the needs of Europeans. It is only since the decolonization process began, after World War II and during the Cold War, that these areas have formed into states. The weak state structures arising with decolonization have been one of the major sources of conflict, and thus insecurity, for states in the Third World. During the Cold War, conflicts in the Third World were often subsumed by the superpower conflict, becoming proxy wars in which different sides received military and/or financial support from the United States and Soviet Union. The concept of ‘Third World’ is itself a by-product of the Cold War. Originally coined by the French economist Alfred Sauvy in the

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1950s to refer to the underdeveloped world, the term gained widespread popularity during the Cold War as a means to distinguish those states that were aligned with neither West nor East (One World 2005). It presumes a First and Second World defined, respectively, by the capitalist West and its communist competitor. The concept reflects two distinct political realities during this period. On the one hand, it connotes a violent place, where conflicts were often subsumed by the logic of the Cold War. On the other hand, it was a space from which leaders played the superpowers off against one another to their own benefit or, alternatively, organized an independent political voice within the non-aligned movement. The security concerns that emerged out of a situation of hot conflict and historical underdevelopment were much different from those of the Cold War West (Thomas 1987; Ayoob 1984, 1989, 1991). If Western security was primarily about deterrence or war prevention more broadly, the Third World was shaken by problems of resource scarcity, overpopulation, underdevelopment and environmental degradation. This was exacerbated by the lack of material, human or institutional capacity to deal with such extreme conditions. Creating viable political structures in a situation plagued by problems of this kind was not a straightforward task.

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The dynamics of the Cold War buttressed the often corrupt leadership of states emerging out of colonialism, given it provided a pretext for external support in the form of military and development aid. But this dynamic created more the appearance than the reality of viable states. With the end of the Cold War this appearance became a mirage with the increasing incidence of failed or collapsed states. As Clapham (in Milliken 2003: 33) notes, state collapse was not a recognized problem within security studies before the end of the Cold War. He makes a clear distinction between failed states, which are unable to perform key state functions, and collapsed states, characterized by crumbling institutions (Clapham in Milliken 2003: 26). Collapsed states remain relatively rare. States that had, since decolonization, been weak began to fail in large numbers with the end of the Cold War. The withdrawal of automatic support from the superpowers revealed the weakness of non-material forms of security relating to identity and ideology, as well as the institutions that constitute plausible states. The increasing porosity of borders in Europe is an expression of greater cooperation between nation-states, as well as the strength and wealth that accompanies formal integration. By contrast, in the Third World, the greater porosity of borders is an expression of the weakness of state structures and a source of

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ongoing conflict. Weak states have historically been more vulnerable to foreign intervention. During the Cold War, the two superpowers fought out their battle by proxy, as they funded different sides in Third World struggles. In the post-Cold War period, critical scholars argued that humanitarian intervention is little more than a form of recycled imperialism (Chomsky 1999), which allowed access to parts of the world that had previously been closed off. In the post 9/11 period many began to raise questions about the relationship between terrorism and a history of exploitation and poverty. Because of the arbitrary fashion in which state borders were defined with decolonization, many wars have involved conflicts over national identity that easily spill over to other states and become a source of regional instability. Insecurity in the absence of a strong state becomes a problem of individuals or groups. Thus, to define security in terms of the threat or use of force by states makes little sense. As Barkawi (in Barkawi and Laffey 2001: 4) notes, the political entities and military forces that wage war in the periphery haven’t necessarily corresponded to the categories of juridical sovereignty. Insecurity is also a function of ongoing exploitation by foreign powers.

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Asian cooperation The discussion above highlighted distinct security concerns of the US, Western Europe and the Third World during the Cold War. Rather than a single global logic of security, as suggested by realists and neo-realists, we see the contours of three distinct worlds, first, second and third, which were part of a global and hierarchical order. The language of worlds highlights multiplicity rather than singularity (Tickner and Wæver 2009). The language of ‘worlding’ suggests a much more dynamic and active process of constructing different worlds, or the idea that human action relies potentially on a range of different knowledge-practices. During the Cold War violent conflict was played out primarily in the Third World. Southeast Asia provided an exception to this rule. Here the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), contrary to all expectations, did not after 1967 fight a war against each other. Liberal democratic peace theory would explain the absence of war in terms of shared liberal democratic values. A further explanation might be the evolution of economic interdependence, as happened between European states. However, the ASEAN members are not bound by a common cultural heritage, religion or history (Gilson in Burke and McDonald 2007), nor do they share liberal democratic values. They also lacked any

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significant degree of intra-regional economic interdependence. Acharya (in Adler and Barnett 1998: 208–11) points to four factors that played an important role in the development of ASEAN’s collective identity. First, ASEAN provided a framework that encouraged the socialization of elites and facilitated problem-solving. Second, it developed norms and ground rules of inter-state relations, including mutual respect for sovereignty, the right of every state to be free of external interference, non-interference in the affairs of one another, settlement of disputes by peaceful means, and the renunciation of the threat or use of force.2 On the basis of these norms, ASEAN organized an international campaign to isolate Vietnam, following its invasion and occupation of Cambodia, and led a diplomatic effort to find a settlement of the Cambodian conflict that would undo the Vietnamese occupation. Third, the community developed symbols and a particular approach to conflict reduction, often referred to as the ‘ASEAN Way’, which had two main aspects. On the one hand, the community avoided formal mechanisms and procedures of conflict resolution, which were viewed with distrust and as representing an admission that an adversarial relationship exists. Instead, focus was placed on developing a culture that would facilitate conflict prevention and management, 104

and the development of a ‘we’ feeling within the grouping. On the other hand, the ‘ASEAN Way’ built on a principle of consensus with origins in traditional Indonesian village culture, based in particular on notions of musjawarah (consultations) and mufakat (consensus). These also were distinguished from an adversarial notion of negotiation by an emphasis on goodwill between friends and brothers. Questions about the possible influence of culture on foreign policy are also relevant for specific countries in Asia. China, along with India, is emerging as a major power. Based on realist assumptions, China’s increasing power should present a threat to its neighbours. Some have attributed the relatively benign rise of China, to this point in time, to the influence of Confucian and Mencian ideas,3 which place non-violence and accommodation before violent defence or offence in ranking strategic choices. This is reflected in strategic language that emphasizes ‘benevolent’, ‘righteous’ and ‘virtuous’ government as the foundation of security and presents military force as ‘inauspicious’, to be used only under ‘unavoidable circumstances’, and seeking the submission of enemies without resort to force (Johnstone in Katzenstein 1996: 219). Yan’s (2011) work on China’s strategic thinking draws on ancient Chinese philosophers such as Guanzi, Laozi, Confucius, Xunzi and Mencius, 105

and, on this basis, contrasts the hegemonic style that has characterized US global leadership, with the potential for a new world order based on a more humane authority. He adopts Xunzi’s ideas about political morality to discuss the virtues of political leadership as the basis for a state’s political power. While Yan does not propose an alternative theory of International Relations, as advocated by those who seek to establish a ‘Chinese school’ of International Relations (Qin 2007, 2009), he does refer to this emphasis on the morality of political leadership as ‘political realist’, albeit with a different meaning than in Western scholarship (Lian 2013). The role of ancient Chinese thought as an actual or potential influence on Chinese conceptions of IR theory has become a subject of dialogue within academic circles in recent years (Callahan 2008; Zhang 2011). Since Nixon’s opening to China in 1972, US–Chinese relations have oscillated back and forth between strategic partnership and competition. At the end of the Cold War, and with the human rights violations at Tiananmen Square, many in the United States predicted that China would become America’s new enemy to replace the Soviet Union (Prestowitz 2003: 253). Following several oscillations in the meantime, China, after the attacks on 11 September 2001, quickly voiced sympathy for the United States and offered cooperation, after

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which relations warmed considerably. China is surrounded by US troops and fleets all over the Pacific, which is an indication to the Chinese that America sees it as a threat; however, they have in the past insisted that they are not an expansionist power, never have been, and pose no threat to the United States other than economic competition (Prestowitz 2003: 254). Some would argue that the ‘rise’ of China is contestable. On the one hand, it is less that China is rising than returning to its historical place in the world (Wang 2004), given that, in the fourteenth century, China was the world’s largest economy (Maddison 2006). Situating ‘rising China’ in a longer historical perspective places its emerging power in a different framework. The tendency within the US is to see the rise of China in either zero-sum loss or a positive sum plus for America (Ma 2013) or to see the future in terms of either conflict or cooperation. Shepperd (2013) provides a more nuanced view, asking how the United States and China in three different contexts of escalating tensions, which could easily have spilled over into a larger conflict, managed to de-escalate and establish a new equilibrium. In her argument the ability to negotiate the emotional dynamics of conflict was crucial. For example, in the context of the 2001 Spy Plane incident, the Chinese demanded an apology from the United States; the latter was only

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willing to express regret. However, the Chinese translated the American statement as an apology to a domestic audience. This minor mistranslation became central to transforming the environment within which the interaction was understood, and an equilibrium restored. Only time will tell whether the apparently benign attitude of China, on many issues, is a reflection of a culturally specific strand of strategic thinking or whether the rising power will begin to demonstrate more aggressive behaviour as its power increases. Some critical scholars (see Burke and McDonald 2007) have challenged the realist claim that China is inevitably a security threat in need of containment, highlighting the absence of attention to the motivations or perceptions of the Chinese political leadership. Whether it is increasingly treated as an enemy, and how it interprets and responds to further US actions, may influence the unfolding of the relationship. The latter will also be influenced by the long-term effect of increasing US economic dependence on China. At the turn of the millennium, Clyde Prestowitz (2003: 256) stated that ‘Beijing officials hope that by the time Osama bin Laden is out of the way, the United States will not be able to afford to see China as an enemy.’ At the beginning of a new decade, with Osama bin Laden out of the way, the US turned

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towards Asia. What has been referred to as the ‘pivot’ was first articulated by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in November 2011 in an article in Foreign Policy. The pivot was to shift American obligations towards Asia to offset the growing power of China. During a visit to the Philippines during the same month, she referred to the ‘West Philippine Sea’, which is the terminology of Manila, in contrast to the South China Sea, which is China’s name for the same body of water, over which it has dominion. This signalled to some that the pivot would involve a more robust and assertive defence of US allies, such as Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam. China in response denounced the ‘pivot’ as a Cold War effort at containment (China’s World 2013). The key question is whether these two major powers will continue to negotiate their way out of conflict situations or will mutually construct the other as an ‘enemy.’

Proliferation of concepts The last section revealed that, even within the Cold War, security had different meanings for different historically and geographically situated actors. The narrow definition of security, and the realist assumptions that underpin it, focus on the state as the referent object of security. The security of individuals is then subsumed by the state. This is a Hobbesian logic, where the individual in the 109

‘state of nature’ relinquishes some of their freedom in exchange for protection. The commonwealth, once formed, becomes the object of security in a new state of nature composed of states. Even during the Cold War, security was situated within several different clusters of concepts in different regions of the world. It involved in one case an exclusive focus on the threatening relationship between self-interested states; in another, the more cooperative relationship between states embedded in a security community; and in yet another, a focus on individuals confronted with the insecurity of survival in a world where the state had failed or, too vulnerable to outside influences from the outset, has never had an opportunity to develop properly. The end of the Cold War gave impetus to a rethinking of the realist focus on state security, following a political contest over the meaning of security between state and non-state actors. The post-Cold War emphasis on humanitarian intervention reinforced, and was reinforced by, arguments that the state can form a threat to the individuals it is intended to protect. Ideas captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that is, that individuals have rights regardless of their status as citizens, or the Genocide Convention, which outlaws intentional acts to eliminate entire groups, came to occupy a more equal place in discourse with that of international peace and stability.

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These ideas were not new, but were magnified and elevated to an international concern following Hitler’s attempt to eliminate the European Jews during World War II. They were, however, put on the back burner during the Cold War contest between East and West. The concept and practice of humanitarian intervention directly poses the tension between the security of individuals and states. Brad Roberts (1990: 65–6) points to two traditions for thinking about the connection between human rights and international security. In the one, state interest is the cornerstone of security, and there is no tangible connection between the human rights practices of one state and the security of another. State security rests on respect for the principles of sovereignty and non-interference. The second, stemming back to the founding of the American republic in the late eighteenth century, begins with an ethic that ‘a people living in freedom has a moral obligation to encourage the spread of liberty.’ A world order based on shared liberty, in this view, contributes to international peace. The notion of universal human rights rests on the assumption that the way a state treats its citizens is a legitimate international concern. This logic provides a justification for humanitarian intervention or the spread of democracy. The discourse of human rights is explicit in making the individual the referent

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object of security, although in the case of genocide it is an ethnic group that becomes the referent object. Within the debate over referent objects, the privileged place of the state has been contested, based on claims that the individual is the ‘irreducible base unit’ (Buzan 1991 [1983]: 35). Prior to the state, there is a concern about the security of the individual. While recognizing that individual security is prior, Buzan’s (1991 [1983]) classic work, People, States and Fear argued that the state should still be the referent object for the analysis of international security, for three reasons. First, the state is the main actor vis-à-vis subjects, states and international security. Second, the state is the primary agent for alleviating insecurity. Third, the state is the dominant actor in the international system. Buzan broadened the security agenda to include five sectors, that is, the political, economic, societal and ecological, in addition to the traditional emphasis on military security. However, in each of these the state remained the central actor, standing at the interface between the substate level and international system. Buzan has since been criticized for his continuing focus on the state (Booth 1991; Smith 1991; Wyn Jones 1996). Booth (1991), for instance, argued that the individual should be the primary focus. States should not be the

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primary referent for security for three reasons. First, they are ‘unreliable’, given ‘some states are in the business of security (internal and external) and some are not.’ Second, even those that do produce security emphasize the means rather than the ends. Third, the diversity of states makes it difficult to formulate a comprehensive theory of security. Debates have revolved around a question of whether the individual or the state should be the referent object of security. But this either/or choice is oversimplified. Threats of global warming do not target individuals or groups. The referent object is the globe. Not only the state but international bodies, whether governmental or nongovernmental, play a role in addressing this security threat. Individuals who are threatened as migrants in a context of ethnic conflict are not targeted because of their identity as individuals, in most cases, but as members of a group. Threats of either kind are likely to take place in an environment where the state lacks the legitimacy or institutional resources to provide a response. This raises a question about how threats are defined and how this constitutes the referent object of security.

Security clusters The debate over broadening the concept of security has focused on identifying the appropriate referent object of security or the 113

gravest threat. Conventional security studies focused on the state and the threat of military force from other states. The ‘expansionists’ asked why other referent objects and the threat to them are by definition left out of the equation, particularly if, in the current world, they present an even greater threat to human existence. Defenders of the narrow definition are concerned about opening a can of worms in which everything becomes a potential referent object or security threat, given the resulting loss of conceptual rigour this would bring (Walt 1991: 213). Both imply a spectrum of objective threats, from which we can identify the most severe and attach the label security to it. Both imply the need for a definition of security. In what follows, I suggest approaching the problem from a different angle, which sets the stage for the following chapters and particularly the discussion of discourse analysis in chapter 4. Rather than seeking to determine whether individuals or the state are the ultimate referent object, it is useful to think in terms of security clusters. A cluster suggests a more porous relational field, where a subject or object does not stand alone, but is surrounded by other subjects or objects which contribute to its contextual meaning. The core of security, the protection from harm, assumes a field of relationships, including a threatener, the threatened, the protector or means of protection, and the protected. The threat or use of force is a one-way relationship, between a 114

threatener and the threatened. The threatener targets the potential recipient of force. The question is how the cluster of relationships surrounding security changes when applied to other emerging threats. The threat of environmental degradation came into public consciousness in the 1970s. Interest waned and then resurfaced with the end of the Cold War. The South Asian tsunami in December 2004, followed by Hurricane Katrina (2005) in United States, and the devastating typhoons in Japan (2011) and the Philippines (2013), revealed that the environment can be a source of threat, capable of far more destruction in a short time than terrorism. Before that time, many would have argued that ultimately the threat posed by global warming and environmental change should have priority, since little else matters if the globe can no longer sustain human life. However, the environment has not had the same sense of urgency attached to it as terrorism, although this may be changing. In any case, the cluster of relationships constituting the global environmental equation is more complex than that of the narrow definition of security or a single referent object. The environment, in the form of climate change, desertification, deforestation, etc., most directly poses a threat. However, this threat cannot be separated from a whole range of

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human practices and policies – or the absence of the latter – for instance, regarding industrial, auto or airline emissions that have over time contributed to environmental change. In this respect, the assumption of a clear one-way relationship between a threat and the threatened does not work. In her path-breaking article, Jessica Tuchman Matthews (1989: 162) stated: The assumptions and institutions that have governed international relations in the postwar era are a poor fit with [the] new realities [resource, environmental and demographic issues]. Environmental strains that transcend national borders are already beginning to break down the sacred boundaries of national sovereignty. It is not only the one-way relationship between threat and the threatened that is questionable, in this context, but also the assumption that a single cause can be identified. For instance, it is often assumed that environmental scarcity or degradation can be a source of political instability and conflict. The argument is often made, in the popular press and scholarly writings, that political instability, arising from conflicts over resource use, and indirect problems generated by subsequent waves of refugees and migrants, will cause a spillover effect to affluent Northern states which will then be obligated to provide a security response (Dalby 2002: 44). Critics have questioned the 116

logic of these arguments, stating that, while a source of concern, the conceptualization of cause and effect is inadequate (Wood 1994; Suhrke 1997) and that multiple interpretations of the problem are possible. Problems of scarcity are a factor in some conflicts but may play any number of roles. Forced migration, as a result of environmental scarcity, may give rise to identity conflict between refugees and local residents, revolving around the allocation of resources. Elites may seize control of environmental resources in response to relative scarcities, resulting in a marginalization of poor populations (Homer-Dixon 1996: 45–8). Environmental degradation, and subsequent scarcity, can also be a consequence – rather than a cause – of the conduct of or preparation for war (Terriff et al. 1999: 118). These examples point to a range of intervening variables between the environment and conflict which may be more important determinants of likely conflict (Levy 1995). To isolate a clear one-way relationship in a situation of this kind introduces a degree of distortion in both the analysis and the conclusions about the most appropriate form of action in response.

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Box 2.1 Environmental security as ECC Climate change is speeding up will be worse than expected is a greater threat than terrorism is affecting the entire planet is a matter of survival of humanity as a whole is the greatest threat facing civilization is the yammering of fearmongers is not a man-made phenomenon is an anti-capitalist agenda is a frontfor paranoia about immigration has been subject to widespread misrepresentation and politicization will not have a catastrophic effect A perusal of newspaper articles on climate change demonstrates the contested nature of this field of security, suggesting that ‘environmental security’ is an essentially contested concept. Those who point to the environment as a security problem do not, however, look to a military solution. Emphasis

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is instead placed on the collective nature of the response, the need for democratic intervention, the implementation of treaties or agreements expressing shared principles, such as the Kyoto protocol, the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions, to invest in public transport and to protect the Arctic. The contestation over climate change can be viewed as a debate about the meaning of security in so far as it revolves around what we value and where threats to those values come from. This is a political debate, driven by numerous interests, which would be curtailed by serious economic change for environmental ends, and which points to a further element of the security cluster surrounding the environment. Security requires not merely an institutional response but potentially a change in economic practice and the structure of the economy, including those everyday acts, such as driving a car or travelling in aeroplanes, which have been constitutive of a ‘way of life’. While George W. Bush and Tony Blair argued that terrorists threaten a ‘way of life’ – and thus must be rooted out – environmental security requires a change in this way of life towards practices more compatible with a sustainable planet. The cluster thus makes a further connection to models of economic development, which assume that undeveloped economies, when fully developed, will look like Western economies, assumptions which

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highlight a question of whether the planet can sustain the environmental effects of worldwide accessibility to cars, refrigerators and aeroplanes. If the end of security is protection from harm, then security practice necessarily focuses not on the environment itself, which has no volition and whose processes will at a certain point be irreversible; instead, it must look to assumptions and practices that exacerbate the problem, as well as seeking to develop institutional processes for forging agreement about the need for action. To act as if environmental change is not a problem and human activity can continue as it has over the past few decades is to court a disaster of our own making. A failure of attention will contribute to the constitution of the threat. Situating the environment in a cluster of concepts related to security carries the risk of militarizing the response to environmental change (Dalby in Krause and Williams 1997; Wæver 1995). Because we associate security more with a particular negative means, that is, the threat and use of force by states, than with the end of positive protection from harm, the association of environmental destruction with security could logically – or, to be more accurate, unreflexively – lead to a militarization of the problem. The key question becomes

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whether naming environmental destruction as a security threat corresponds with a continued focus on the military activities of states or whether this encourages a more global approach that emphasizes policy changes directed towards creating a more sustainable environment. This does imply a further question about ‘security for whom’, but highlights the web of relations surrounding the naming of a threat rather than the isolation of a referent object.

Migration Migration as a security threat is also situated in a different cluster of concepts. In this case, the threat and the threatener can be defined from several different angles. Is the primary concern the threat posed to migrants as individuals, for instance by their home governments or recipient governments, or those who profit from the trafficking of people? Or, alternatively, do migrants pose a threat to states or societies that are threatened by the influx of different cultures or by the economic costs of absorbing homeless refugees? When defined in terms of security, migration is not purely an economic issue but one that may be impelled, encouraged or prevented by the policies of states or the international community, the international economy or by war. The shift from economy to security involves a change in focus from the individual 121

migrant to the larger social, political and economic context within which individuals act (Wiener 1992–3: 95). The two distinct frameworks raise different questions and offer different explanations, relying on different conceptual tools. As Huysmans (1998b: 232) notes, ‘if a society moves from an economic approach to a security approach towards migration, the relation between indigenous people and migrants changes to migrants becoming seen as enemies of society instead of as a labor force.’ International population movements are often impelled, encouraged or prevented by governments or political forces for a variety of reasons (Wiener 1992–3: 96). Expelling individuals from a state may be a means of achieving cultural homogeneity through ethnic cleansing; it may be a way of dealing with dissidents or putting pressure on a neighbouring state. In this case, the sending state may define certain individuals as threats who need to be removed. For the receiving state, immigrants may be perceived as a threat or may bring conflicts or the fear of terrorism into their borders. As already stated, they may present a threat to cultural identity as well as a social and economic burden. Once liberal cultures, such as the Netherlands and Denmark, have, since 9/11, been divided by questions of immigration. As with the environment, there is a danger that placing

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migration under the banner of security will encourage militarization of the problem, for instance, a crackdown on illegal immigrants or attempts to expel potential terrorists. But the biggest quandary in this case is whether the referent object, that is, the threatened party, is the sending or receiving state or the individual migrants themselves. Each embeds security in a different cluster of concepts. The failure of the international community to welcome Jews fleeing Nazi Germany was recognized as a source of shame, which encouraged new regimes for refugees after World War II. The massive flow of refugees, particularly from the Eastern bloc since the end of the Cold War and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, has overwhelmed these institutional mechanisms and led to a renewed desire to stem the flow of refugees. There has also been a change in the characterization of these refugees, from the ‘heroic’ opponents of Eastern bloc human rights violations during the Cold War, to the refugee as a ‘traumatized victim’ in its aftermath (Pupavac 2008). After 11 September 2001, migration was increasingly securitized, as will be discussed in chapter 5. The fact that the individuals who carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were foreign nationals living in the United States and trained in flight schools there has led to an increased scrutiny of those

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crossing US borders and the deployment of various forms of biometric identification. Like migration, transnational crime is a potential security issue that raises questions about the relationship between state and non-state actors. In fact, migration and transnational crime are often linked in security discourse, although this linkage is often of questionable accuracy (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002). Transnational crime transcends the borders of one or more states, for instance in the form of illegal trafficking in weapons, drugs or human beings. It has been exacerbated by processes of globalization that have given rise to the growing permeability of borders and a large number of international financial networks. Crime at this level may threaten vulnerable individuals, who either may become victims of people trafficking, in the form of prostitution, or are indirectly vulnerable on account of the greater availability of drugs or weapons. To the state, these networks are a source of violence by non-state actors that erode the legitimacy of the state or its monopoly on the means of violence (Terriff et al. 1999: 148). The Medellin drug cartel, for example, waged a war against the Colombian government, which had a seriously destabilizing impact. Activities of drug or weapons networks may also become closely associated with the activities of paramilitary groups who are in conflict with the state. In so far as these actors operate outside the normal

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rules of international behaviour, they also threaten the infrastructure of laws and rules that have shaped and restrained global interactions between states (Terriff et al. 1999: 154). In so far as states are tempted to redirect their military forces to policing transnational crime, these activities represent not only a militarization of the problem, but a further erosion of the distinction between domestic and international. This exploration of ‘security clusters’ surrounding the environment and migration reveals the difficulty of isolating a single referent object or identifying a single causal relationship. Attempting to isolate the latter risks not only oversimplification, but a distortion of a threat that involves multiple dimensions and, in the political world, may be framed by multiple interpretations. It further risks reproducing particular public narratives in so far as critical questions about the assumptions underpinning these narratives are ignored. The idea of a security cluster moves away from an attempt to isolate referent objects and variables towards an analysis of the multiple relationships that constitute different types of threat. The significance of the latter will be further developed in chapters 4 and 5.

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Conclusion This chapter has made three moves, building on the argument of the last chapter that security is always political. First, the idea that security is an ‘essentially contested concept’ was explored. Once again, this highlights the extent to which attempts to define security and related disputes are a part of politics itself, with consequences for how action is defined. Second, the claim that the narrow definition of security was ethnocentric, focusing in particular on the security concerns of the United States during the Cold War, was balanced by an analysis of some of the security concerns that have occupied other regions of the world, both during the Cold War and since its end. Third, the ‘expansionist’ debate broadened the discussion of potential referent objects to include individuals, groups other than the state, and the globe. This chapter argued the need for an alternative approach, based on the analysis of ‘security clusters’. The shift from referent objects/threats to security clusters changes the angle from which the analysis of security is approached. Rather than isolating objects in a one-way causal relationship, threats are placed in the context of political relationships, demonstrating the multiple linkages to other security issues. The ‘expansionist’ debate asked a question about what ultimately poses the greatest threat

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and who or what should be the focus of security efforts. A notion of security clusters requires a different approach to a changing global landscape. Rather than constructing a hierarchy of threats, it requires a rethinking and a mapping of the relationships that constitute various threats to human life.

Further reading Booth, Ken (1978) Strategy Ethnocentrism. London: Croom Helm.

and

Burke, Anthony and Matt McDonald, eds (2007) Regionalism and Security in East Asia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Buzan, Barry (1991 [1983]) People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Connolly, William (1993) The Terms of Political Discourse, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Dalby, Simon (2002) Environmental Security. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Classroom exercise Look at some recent newspaper articles relating to different aspects of security (environmental, financial, military, refugees, food, etc.). The following are examples: 127

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ 9224240/ Why-food-security-is-not-just-a-problem-for-the-Third-World.h http://www.timesofisrael.com/ netanyahu-iran-not-settlements-the-real-security-threat/; http://abcnews.go.com/International/ john-kerry-calls-climate-change-weapon-mass-destruction/ story?id=22542524; http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/ 13/islamists-mali-threat-europe Break into groups of two or three. Each group should then choose an article. Analyse the article bearing in mind the questions below:

Questions What is the security issue, if any, described in this piece? Who is the referent object (subject or object to be secured)? What is the threat? What would it mean to be secure in this context? Why should this threat have priority over other threats? After ten to fifteen minutes, come back together as a class. As you discuss the questions, write out the key components on a white board, as well as any larger issues that arise from the 128

exercise, including the question about which of the various threats should have priority.

Notes 1.

The Marshall Plan (1947): http://www.marshallfoundation.org

see

2. As Julie Gilson (in Burke and McDonald 2007) points out, a number of East Asian states tend to place more emphasis on norms such as non-interference; however, ASEAN does provide an institutional framework for linking human rights norms, thereby creating a potential pressure point for change. 3. Mencius (?390–?305 BC) was an influential interpreter of the thought of Confucius (551–479 BC), a philosopher of ancient China. Confucianism stresses that external security rests on a ruler’s ability to provide for the material and moral needs of his people through virtuous personal conduct and enlightened policies. The result is a contented people and enemies who are willing to partake in the ruler’s magnanimity. Mencius pushed Confucian ideas further, arguing that a virtuous ruler had no need to use military force because he could not have enemies (Johnstone in Katzenstein 1996: 218n).

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PART II Methodology

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CHAPTER 3 Change Critical security studies goes beyond the debate over narrowing or broadening the concept of security to highlight a problem posed by the end of the Cold War, that is, how to analyse processes of change at the international level. Problem-solving theories don’t address this issue, given the assumption of a ‘real’ world ‘out there’, characterized by patterns across time and space. The intention is to fix problems within the world as it is, a stance which critical theorists argue reinforces the powers that be. For instance, Edward Kolodziej (1992: 431), in the aftermath of the Cold War, argued that ‘the realist framework exempts the theorist from responsibility for explaining – or even expecting – systemic change … What was really a passing snapshot of the Cold War was portrayed as an explanation for the global security system.’ Problem-solving theory emphasizes continuity rather than change. This chapter explores the idea that the international world is socially constructed, a claim that facilitates the analysis of change. It begins with a discussion of the relationship between human nature and social construction. As Buzan et al. (1998: 34–5) note,

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‘Critical security studies mostly has the intent of showing that change is possible because things are socially constituted.’ The chapter then proceeds to the analysis of three distinct ways to conceptualize change. The first elaborates on the relationship between structures and agents, through an analysis of the transition from nuclear standoff to dialogue, in the context of the ending of the Cold War, and the transition from relative stability to violent conflict in the former Yugoslavia. The second shifts to the concept of Immanent Critique within Critical theory, as a point of departure for understanding the agency of intellectuals in analysing the contradictions of a historical context and its emancipatory potential. The concept is illustrated through a brief immanent critique of the War on Terror. The third section then examines the potential for agency through the resistance of the marginalized and powerless themselves, in an exploration of the Arab Spring and other contexts involving political self-sacrifice. The empirical examples are representative of various transitions since the emergence of Critical Security Studies. The scope of these examples reinforces the centrality of change and the transformation of international security relations over time.

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Human nature and social construction Social constructivism begins with an assumption that the world is not an objective phenomenon to be discovered through empirical observation. As suggested by the title of Nicholas Onuf’s path-breaking book World of Our Making (1989), the world is not given, but is continually made and remade as human actors bring meaning to their interactions with others. Shared meanings and intersubjective structures can be as important in shaping international outcomes as material interests. Different critical approaches share this assumption of a constructed world or worlds, although they are not necessarily in agreement about what this means. The idea that international relations is a social construction can be thought about in quite simple terms. To construct something is an act which brings into being a subject or object that otherwise would not exist. For instance, a material substance, such as wood, exists in nature, but it can be formed into any number of objects, for instance, the beam in a house, a rifle, a musical instrument or a totem pole. Although these represent material objects in and of themselves, they do not exist in nature but have come about through acts of human creation. Once constructed, each of these objects has a particular meaning and use within 133

a context. They are social constructs in so far as their shape and form are imbued with social and cultural values, norms and assumptions rather than being the product of purely individual thought or meaning. Similarly, explicitly social phenomena, such as states or alliances or international institutions, that is, the collective subjects of international relations, may build on the basic material of human nature, but they take specific historical, cultural and political forms that are a product of human interaction in a social world. War can be thought of as a social construction. Realists assume that war is pervasive. They argue that, at best, its worst effects can be managed but not eliminated. In the absence of an authority to adjudicate in cases of dispute, a competitive human nature will give rise to conflict. The idea that war is a social construction relaxes these assumptions. War is a recurring phenomenon. However, not all history is a history of war. Throughout history, actors have taken steps to limit, shape or transform the nature of war. War, in this respect, is a social artefact, constructed by humans for specifically human ends, but potentially in conflict with other human ends (Fierke 2005: 2). War is distinguished from violence more generally by its dependence on socially recognized rules. Indeed, as Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff (2000: 3) note, ‘the idea that the conduct of armed hostilities is

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governed by rules appears to be found in almost all societies without geographical limitation.’ War is a rule-based activity and therefore structured by social criteria and not merely material ones. War has also been a gendered activity in so far as it has historically involved men more than women. As one critic stated: The vast majority of the world’s soldiers are men. So are most of the police, most of the prison warders, and almost all of the generals, admirals, bureaucrats and politicians who control the apparatus of coercion and collective violence. Most murderers are men. Almost all bandits, armed robbers, and muggers are men; all rapists, most domestic bashers; and most people involved in street brawls, riots and the like … The same story, then, appears for both organized and unorganized violence [and] there is surprisingly widespread belief that this is all ‘natural.’ Human males are genetically programmed to be hunters and killers. (Connell 1995: 125) This reality suggests that it is less human nature than male nature that is competitive. Joshua Goldstein (2001) articulates an interesting puzzle in this regard. He argues that biology provides diverse gender potentials, which different cultures limit, select and channel. Gender roles vary considerably across culture,

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and war is similarly very diverse across context. The puzzle is that gender diversity disappears in war. The connection between war and gender is more stable across time than either gender roles outside of war or the form and frequency of war itself. Goldstein begins with an observation that killing in war doesn’t come naturally to men. There are cultures that have gone without war for long stretches of time, and men are not born warriors. However, the potential for war has become universal. In order to overcome the soldier’s reluctance to fight, cultures develop gender roles that equate ‘manhood’ with toughness under fire. The pervasiveness of war influences gender norms of child-rearing. Women are no less capable of war than men but they have been systematically excluded. They have participated in warfare in different cultures but, aside from the mythical Amazons, there have been no exclusively female armies. Given these factors, the gendering of war can be attributed to a combination: first, the small biological differences in average size and strength of men and women and, second, the cultural moulding of tough, brave men who feminize enemies by dominating them. Many feminists argue that the propensity to male violence is a result of socialization rather than essence. For instance, men entering the military are not ready-made soldiers. As Barbara Ehrenreich (1997: 10) points out, ‘The difference between an ordinary man or boy and

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a reliable killer, as any drill sergeant could attest, is profound. A transformation is required.’ Violence and the ability to kill, like many other behaviours, are learned. Sandra Whitworth (2004: 15) examines the extensive military rituals aimed at breaking down new recruits to the army and slowly rebuilding them as soldiers. These involve strategies of humiliation and degradation, from the verbal assaults of drill sergeants to unofficial initiation rituals or ‘hazing’. The process of socialization begins long before boot camp, with the message conveyed in movies, books, military recruitment campaigns, television programmes and children’s games. The initiation process inculcates the myth of manhood through basic training, creating courage and endurance, physical and psychological strength, obedience, discipline, etc. (Whitworth 2004: 160). In the process any emotions associated with the feminine, for instance, fear, sadness, uncertainty, guilt, remorse and grief, are drummed out of the soldier. The soldier learns to ‘deny all that is “feminine” and soft in himself’ (Goldstein 2001: 266). Becoming a ‘killing machine’ requires shutting down those capacities that might make one squeamish about orders to commit acts that in another life one had been taught to view as repugnant (Whitworth 2004: 80–2). Dehumanizing the enemy, no less than dehumanizing the self –

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that is, emptying the self of emotion – is necessary for carrying out acts of violence against enemies. In the construction of the soldier, the diverse emotions that comprise human nature are moulded in very specific ways. The gendering of masculine soldiers goes hand in hand with the feminine gendering of enemies. Soldiers bring the tools of physical warfare to the task of breaking the will of the other side. According to Goldstein (2001), the attempt to dominate and feminize the enemy may be part and parcel of this process. The point of gender analysis, as distinct from the study of women, is that masculine and feminine have less to do with biology than with a type of relationship. Masculinity cannot be generalized to men per se, but it can be equated with power-holding and the subordination of the feminine. Masculinity is about the ability to control and make decisions, to act rationally and control emotions, to exhibit physical courage and muscular prowess (Lentin 1997). The main relationship in war is between men, competing in the effort to dominate and feminize the other. But this relationship is further played out in relation to populations, particularly in contemporary wars. For instance, in the act of genocide, the power holder intentionally tortures, attacks and brutalizes a group. The powerless, whether

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biological men or women, adults or children, are gendered as ‘feminine’ identities that the policy asserts must not be allowed to exist. During the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina the category ‘feminine’ was employed to include virtually everyone – men and women alike (Sofos 1996: 67). As Hague (in Lentin 1997: 54) notes, ‘by humiliating non-Serb persons through a systematic program of raping women and girls, and by raping women, girls, men and boys as torture in prison camps, Bosnian Serb forces bolstered their own masculine national identity and, through the extreme humiliation of rape, eroded the identities of non-Serbs.’ To humiliate is to feminize (Dawson 1994). Women, in addition to enemy soldiers and populations, occupy a feminized space in international relations. While most realists or diplomatic historians focus on male soldiers, diplomats and decision-makers, Cynthia Enloe (1989) reveals the layers of ‘invisible’ women who hold the international system together. Diplomats’ wives, prostitutes who service military bases, nurses who care for wounded soldiers, female administrators who do the detailed paperwork, are all indispensable to the practice of war. In this respect, governments depend on private relations to conduct foreign affairs. Women have occupied a safe domestic realm (Dowler in Lentin 1997) or, in Enloe’s argument, engage in a range of invisible activities that are necessary to the smooth

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operation of a militarized system. They are socialized into a range of roles that contribute to the reproduction of war and their own position at the bottom of a hierarchy, either within the military, as secretaries and nurses, or in connected spaces outside, as wives and prostitutes. Later chapters explore other dimensions of the social construction of war. The previous section focused on the role of gender in this process, arguing that human beings, whether male or female, are not aggressive in essence, although this is one human potential, among others. The differences between men and women are not first and foremost biological. They are moulded through a process of socialization which can vary from one culture to another. Gender not only defines the possibilities of biological men and women; the categories of masculine and feminine shape a broad range of social and cultural experience. War is one of these experiences and, as suggested by Goldstein, plays an important role in reproducing gendered hierarchies between men and women. If it is assumed that ‘men’ are aggressive by nature, then it is impossible to think about any possibility other than managing that aggression. However, if human aggression is understood to be one of many human possibilities, a possibility that relies on a heavy

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degree of socialization and the moulding of human emotions, then it becomes possible to think about change. This section has focused on the construction of the individual soldier, while situating him in a militarized system. The next section moves to a more systemic level to ask how, given the condition of anarchy, change would be possible.

Structures and agents The previous section examined war as a social construction. While acknowledging war’s pervasiveness, an analysis of this kind opens a door for thinking about change. The next section takes this line of inquiry further, exploring the question of how, given a pervasive structure of war, change might be possible. This is not an argument about the potential to eliminate war, but rather an examination of specific processes of transition out of conflict to dialogue, and, in reverse, from peace to violence. I will demonstrate how in each case a changing intersubjective structure created a space of opportunity for leaders to mobilize alternatives. The end of the Cold War and the peace processes in Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Africa are all cases where actors, at least temporarily, moved out of conflict. In each, former enemies, presumed to understand no language but that of force, were transformed

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into partners with whom one could do business. Processes at both levels came as a shock to academics and policy-makers alike. In the 1980s, most scholars of security or Soviet studies assumed the Cold War would be an enduring feature of the international landscape and few saw the end coming. Many people living in hot conflict zones, such as Northern Ireland or the Middle East, found it difficult to imagine that the fighting could end. Often these changes are explained in terms of a transformation of interests. The realist conventional wisdom about the end of the Cold War is that Reagan spent the Soviet Union into submission (Kegley 1994: 13), thereby transforming the latter’s interest in continuing conflict. The end of the Cold War was itself said to change the strategic interests of Britain in Northern Ireland, thus paving the way for a larger US role in the peace process there (Cox 1997; Wilson 1997; Cox et al. 2000). The focus on interests fails to address a prior puzzle: how did actors, constrained by a structure of conflict, become agents of change? The United States and the Soviet Union had developed a pattern of interaction spanning several decades. Mutual threat with nuclear weapons was a central feature of this interaction. Waltz (1979), correctly, argues that in a situation of this kind both actors were constrained by the same competitive logic, regardless of their culture or domestic organization. He explains why the

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United States, a democratic culture, and the Soviet Union, an authoritarian one, would, in their interactions, behave in similar ways. Competition within anarchy structured their relationship and left little if any room for agency. Agency is about the potential for the individual or state to influence their environment, as well as to be influenced by it. For agency to be a factor, there must be a greater role for intersubjective structures, that is, structures shaped not only by material power but by social meaning and interaction. Alexander Wendt’s famous article ‘Anarchy is What States Make of It’ (1992) captures this idea. It is not that states in anarchy can, on a whim, change their circumstances. Rather, relationships evolve over time. They are not characterized, across the board, by enmity and egoism. The United States and Britain have evolved as friends, while other states are enemies. Many states within the European Union are former enemies who have learned to cooperate. Relationships are a product of a historical process and interactions over time. Wendt (1992: 404–5) illustrates this in his example of Alter and Ego, two space aliens who meet for the first time, and who, through a series of gestures, determine whether the other is hostile or friendly. Each exercises an element of choice, and thus agency, in how this relationship develops. Choice is not, however, unlimited.

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Alter and Ego coexist in a social relationship, and their choices are partially dependent on the response of the other. In this respect, the space for choice is mutually constituted. Wendt further develops these ideas by looking at Soviet President Gorbachev’s change of behaviour, and specifically his gestures of friendship towards a hostile United States in the mid-1980s. He explores the process by which Gorbachev rethought his rational interest in conflict with the United States and began to change. What neither Waltz nor Wendt can explain is how an individual leader such as Gorbachev could introduce major changes, from initiatives for unilateral disarmament to a commitment to replacing balance of power politics with an emphasis on international norms. These changes flew in the face of the constraining logic of the Cold War. Earlier Soviet leaders, such as Khrushchev, had tried to introduce reforms, only to be booted from office. While this was eventually Gorbachev’s fate, it came after sweeping changes that exceeded his own vision. While Waltz’s model is overly structural, Wendt’s example gives too much agency to Gorbachev as an individual. A game metaphor provides another way to rethink the relationship between individual rationality and an intersubjective structure of meaning. Like war, a game is a structure of

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rules. The rules must be shared. They are not the property of individuals. A game is also a relational context within which – with the exception of solitaire – different players interact. Confronted with the knowledge of multiple possible games – from Monopoly to cribbage to poker to chess – it makes no sense to ask whether a move is rational until we identify the game itself or the structure of rules within which a move has this meaning, is undertaken with this object, and is rational or irrational given a position within a game in process (Fierke and Jorgensen 2001: 123–4). In short, within the structure of a game, a priori meanings circumscribe the rationality of specific moves; rationality is embedded in a context. From this perspective, the agent–structure problem looks somewhat different. It is less, per se, a problem of how Gorbachev, for instance, acted as an agent within the logic of the Cold War. It is a question of how he could begin to ‘act as if’ a different game, based on different rules, was in place. Neo-realists assume that states were constrained by the materialist logic of the Cold War. Wendt argues that structure is social and states can exercise agency in changing from enemies to friends. One way to unravel the agent– structure puzzle is to approach the logic of the Cold War as a game, that is, as first and foremost an intersubjective structure that rested on shared assumptions about the nature

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of the actors and the legitimacy and necessity of particular actions. A second step is to assume that the redefinition of a game is unlikely to begin with those most constrained by it, that is, the superpowers, but from ‘outside’. In this argument, actors outside the Cold War establishments in both blocs, that is, peace movements in Western Europe and human rights initiatives in the East, began to ‘act as if’ a new game was in place. The power of ‘acting as if’ resides in a double move, that is, in politicizing the rules of the dominant game, by flaunting them, and, at the same time, acting within the framework of a more marginal game that already has meaning within a political context (Fierke 1999: 413). This created a space of opportunity for leaders such as Gorbachev and Reagan to ‘change games’, from one of enemies in a divided Europe to partners in disarmament in a Europe whole and free (Fierke 1998).

Acting as if the Cold War were over In the late 1970s and early 1980s, KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow), the predecessor of Solidarity in Poland, and the Dutch peace movement engaged, independently of one another, in a reflexive analysis of the past. Each came to a similar conclusion regarding a different aspect of the Cold War, that is, past efforts at reform had failed because they began with actors inside

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the establishment who were, in the end, too easily deposed or coopted. They concluded that change had to begin outside the establishment, within civil society, thereby changing the interest of elites in bringing about new policies. In the years that followed, the identity of the central actors within the Cold War, and the Cold War itself, were politicized, thereby opening a space for leaders to introduce alternatives. The role of these non-state actors is often discounted because of the absence of a direct causal relationship, given that Polish Solidarity was put down by martial law and NATO proceeded with the deployment of cruise and Pershing II missiles, despite widespread public opposition. However, approaching the analysis with constructivist tools, it is possible to observe the transformation of language games of security as a gradual process over time. As the legitimacy of Cold War security structures was undermined, a different language seeped into the public imagination and was adapted to the interests of political leaders, who then introduced a change in practice. That these language games transgressed the boundaries of a divided Europe was crucial to the redefinitions that occurred. For instance, US President Reagan’s loose rhetoric of nuclear war and demonstration shots over Europe, which was couched in the

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logic of nuclear deterrence, fanned public concern about the possibility of nuclear war, and swelled the ranks of the peace movements in Western Europe and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign in the United States. Following his surprise introduction of SDI in 1983, Reagan, in his justification of the initiative, at one and the same time adopted the peace movement’s assault on deterrence and introduced the possibility that the Soviet Union could be a partner in peace, casting aside the language of ‘evil empire’. Gorbachev, a few years later, more directly adopted the language games of the European peace movements in formulating his ‘New Thinking’, stating the need to destroy the guillotine of nuclear deterrence, to bring an end to balance-of-power thinking, and to define security in explicitly political terms (Gorbachev 1987b). At the same time, he introduced economic reforms at home. This happened against the background of a process, under way for many years in both blocs, of politicizing the meaning of security. Given the earlier discussion of agency on the part of leaders, two points of this analysis are crucial. First, citizens’ initiatives manoeuvred within the already existing language of states. A relational grammar of nuclear (alliance) ‘families’, which provide security with nuclear weapons, was undermined by peace movements, which claimed that, far from providing security, the nuclear arms race was

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engendering insecurity and that ‘emancipation’ from the practices of these families was needed. In the Eastern bloc, Solidarity countered the state-level communist discourse of security, exposing the willingness of a workers’ state to brutally repress a movement for a free trade union. Both also drew on international agreements, such as the Helsinki Final Act, to hold up a critical mirror to the promises made by states. Second, the superpowers were dependent on prior changes in public discourse for articulating a change of games that populations could easily embrace. Gorbachev wove together the strands of these various arguments in introducing his New Thinking, and by the mid-1980s the two superpowers were engaged in a peace competition, which paved the way for disarmament talks, velvet revolutions and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The citizens’ initiatives, and later the superpowers, acted within a new game that established the identity of Europe as whole and free and citizens in both blocs as part of this Europe, in contrast to the construction of two divided alliance families. Dialogue across the division, between Western peace movements and human rights initiatives in the East, was a practice by which the citizens’ initiatives ‘acted as if’ they lived in a Europe whole and free. Rather than threatening with missiles, the central act of states within the Cold War, the

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movements engaged each other with words and discussion, as participants in a dialogue of citizens. This involved crossing the division of Europe to speak with counterparts in the East, an act that often led to an overreaction by Eastern authorities. The structure that constrained the superpowers was intersubjective and supported material practices of threatening with nuclear weapons. A rational move on the part of Gorbachev or Reagan towards a different kind of relationship was made possible by the challenge to the legitimacy of the Cold War. This challenge came from actors who were less constrained by its logic, and who ‘acted as if’ a different reality were possible. In the years following the end of the Cold War, practices of dialogue against the background of other divisions, in places such as Northern Ireland and the Middle East, similarly sought to redefine the parameters of long-term conflict. Each particular ending introduced a new sequel as participants, whose interests potentially suffered as a result of change, re-entered the competition with more vociferous resistance. Some would argue that the Cold War has not ended, in so far as the material and economic interests tied to weapons of mass destruction, far from completing the process of disarmament, have gained new momentum within a larger framework of global proliferation. In this respect, there are no

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concrete endings, only further rearticulations and ongoing political struggle.

Acting as if violent conflict were inevitable The conclusion of the previous section suggests agents are always in a sense ‘acting as if’. This is obscured in the realist framework by the argument that in anarchy there is only one game that counts. According to critical theorists (Cox 1981), this claim on ‘reality’ reinforces the status quo. Critical theory, by contrast, reveals the specific interests upheld by the dominant construction. The logic of ‘acting as if’ seems obvious in a case of transition from a competitive system to dialogue. The following reverses the equation, to look at the transition from peace to violent conflict. In the early 1990s, following the dramatic end of the Cold War, observers were shocked by the outbreak of violence in Yugoslavia, which had been Eastern Europe’s showcase of multiculturalism and tolerance. Two types of explanation for this phenomenon have come from more conventional analysts of security. The first is the realist argument that focuses on ‘ancient hatreds’. With the death of Tito, the lid was blown off the cauldron of ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia. According to Posen (1993), the anarchy that developed in the absence of Tito was an ideal context for the emergence of a

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‘security dilemma’, as traditionally conceived by realists. Without an authoritarian leader to hold the various nationalities in check, conflict and violence was – consistent with a Hobbesian logic – inevitable. More critical analysts have questioned the idea that nationalities in the former Yugoslavia sprang from the ground fully formed, pointing to the fact that all of the groups shared an identity as ‘southern Slavs’, which is the English translation of ‘Yugoslavia’. Further, there was also a high degree of intermarriage between groups, particularly in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. The question is how, from a nation of ‘Yugoslavs’, mutually exclusive ethnic categories came into being, paving the way for practices of ethnic cleansing. A second type of explanation grows out of the rational choice tradition and focuses on self-interested behaviour with socially harmful consequences. Rational choice theorists argue that social actors will use ethnicity to organize group political action if it is expected that individual benefits will outweigh the costs (Fearon and Laitin 1996). In this line of argument, individual leaders may channel, or even create, ethnic fear and anger in order to advance a self-serving political agenda (Gagnon 1994–5: 132). As with the end of the Cold War, a constructivist analysis raises a question about the conditions under which leaders could rationally move towards alternatives. It further shifts emphasis to the social dimensions of

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structure and to the role of actors outside that structure. Under what conditions could a leader such as Milošević, who had been an unknown communist bureaucrat, mobilize ethnic violence? To what extent was this violence inevitable as opposed to constructed within a particular social world? In the late 1970s global economic recession coincided with a number of other changes, such as an end to Yugoslavia’s massive global lending in 1979, followed by the death of Tito in 1980 and the beginning of a serious economic depression, which forced the government to introduce harsh austerity measures. Unemployment increased and inflation rose at a rate of 50 per cent. Political unrest was to follow. The end of the Cold War also brought an end to Yugoslavia’s special standing vis-à-vis the West, and the United States in particular. This background of political uncertainty and economic malaise generated questions about the future of the federal state and the status of its republics. In the rationalist argument, this changing environment prompted Serb leaders to employ a ‘purposeful and rational strategy’ (Gagnon 1994–5: 140) to maintain their power. While partially correct, this account fails to address either the mutual constitution of fear by leaders representing different ethnic groups or the transformation of the positive inter-ethnic relations of the earlier period into killing and massacre (Arfi 1998:

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181–2). Why specifically did the changes take the form of bloody ethnic-based conflict? Here again, the ‘change of games’ arguably began outside the structures of formal power. In her analysis of Kosovo, Julie Mertus (1999) details how, long before the emergence of Milošević as a nationalist leader, the Albanian Kosovars began to be constructed as enemies, largely on the basis of myth. The Serb media depicted Albanians as ‘terrorists’. This contributed to feelings in the Serbian community that they were victims (Mertus 1999: xi). Their identity as victims freed them from moral considerations in becoming perpetrators (Mertus 1999: 1). The depiction of several ‘truths’, between 1981 and 1990, was instrumental in reshaping the political and social world of Kosovo, Serbia and Yugoslavia as a whole. For instance, the 1981 student demonstrations, which sought republic status for Kosovo, were portrayed as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ attack against Yugoslavia, giving rise to the first criticisms of Tito’s legacy and reshaping the debate over centralization and decentralization in Yugoslavia. The 1985 Martinović case began with allegations that two Albanian men had attacked a Serb, forcing a bottle into his rectum. The story was interpreted by the Serb and Yugoslav press as an attack by Albanian nationalist separatists, and opened the floodgates of nationalistic propaganda. The

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Paracin ‘massacre’ in 1987 began with an Albanian soldier of the Yugoslav army who opened fire in his army barracks, killing four soldiers, only one of whom was a Serb. The attack was immediately reported as an attack against the entire country, after which angry Serbs took revenge against Albanians (Mertus 1999: 145). The massacre turned Kosovo into a Yugoslav problem and led to the military build-up of Kosovo, as well as providing material for Milošević’s campaign. Long before Milošević met with a group of angry Serbs in Kosovo, long before he made a dramatic change from communist bureaucrat to nationalist leader, the iron filings of identity were realigning among the populaces of Kosovo. Milošević’s hijacking of the nationalist cause in 1987 was fundamentally dependent on the prior existence of these sentiments in the Serb population, even while he became the agent of their propagation. In this respect, it is not only the relationship between different groups that was mutually constituted, but also that between the population and its leaders. Mertus demonstrates how a particular language moulded the relationship between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs. Arfi(1998) examines a simultaneous and basically equivalent process of mutual identity constitution between the Serbs and Croats in Croatia. In that context, one can say that both parties began to ‘act as if’ they

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lived in separate ethnic states, which made conflict between them inevitable, given the existence of minorities throughout the republic. However, in Bosnia or Kosovo, this equivalence is less obvious. Throughout the 1990s, the Kosovars were organized in a non-violent campaign to ‘act as if’ they lived in a sovereign Kosovo, and in Bosnia the government, and the Bosnian constitution, maintained a consistent appeal to multiculturalism and democracy. David Campbell (1998b: 88–91) illustrates that, in the case of Bosnia, use of the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic conflict’, taken for granted in most academic accounts, was part of the construction process and related to the Serb narrative of the conflict as a civil war, or to international narratives that the conflict arose from ‘ancient hatreds’ between primordial ethnic identities. The term ethnicity gave meaning to the participants as discrete collective selves engaged in violent conflict. The Balkans has a tragic legacy of division and violence on which to mobilize. The term Balkanization is synonymous with division and conflict. Nonetheless, the Bosnian government, as Campbell points out, employed a narrative of inclusivity, in contrast to the Serb narrative of exclusivity. Arguably, a different process of engagement, and not least on the part of the international community, could have encouraged this narrative of inclusivity, holding

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out the carrot of eventual membership of the European Union, as in other parts of Central and Eastern Europe, or, as in the case of Czechoslovakia, a velvet divorce. Instead, in Bosnia, the European negotiators worked out various possible agreements that reinforced ethnic divisions rather than transcending them. In Kosovo, the international community did not take the non-violent movement seriously, and failed to get involved there until the emergence of the violent Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The point is that any map of this situation cannot merely trace the rational acts of individual leaders. Nor can it focus on the single moment when identity comes into being. It must rather examine the ongoing process and the cumulative acts that constitute a particular outcome. This process of construction cannot, almost by definition, rest on a single architect’s design or blueprint. It is more akin to the group that collectively creates a drama. Each participant enacts a performance that is followed by one from another, and so on, with continual twists and turns and no certainty about the final shape of the story. There is no ending other than that decided in the process of telling, which may in fact signal the beginning of a new sequel.

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Immanent critique The Agent-Structure relationship is central to the constructivist analysis of change. A second approach grows out of more Marxist traditions of Critical Theory. In his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Marx (1976: 5) claimed that the point is to change the world, not merely to interpret it. Descendants of this tradition in the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer, developed a technique called Immanent Critique (Wyn Jones 1999: 36) which highlights the role of the critical theorist as an agent who identifies the contradictions within a given historical context and thus the potential for change within it. As a component of Critical Theory, the assumptions of immanent critique contrast with those of problem-solving theory. In assuming that the present order reflects a timeless pattern, problem-solving theory not only assumes a universal reference point; it also legitimizes the existing order and reproduces the pattern. The scientist, it is assumed, can stand outside of time, and is thus objective, but this assumption blinds him or her to the connection between the ideas represented in theory and historically specific power interests. By contrast, the critical theorist stands within time, yet creates a critical distance from his or her historical context, in order to explore its origins, development, institutions and potential for change (Booth 2005: 11). When applied to international 158

relations, the one-dimensional and universal picture of abstract states is thus transformed into a three-dimensional world containing not only the powerful, but others as well. Three further elements of immanent critique provide background to the analysis that follows. First, immanent critique relies on a clear link between theory and practice. Richard Wyn Jones (1999: 6, 56) argues that ‘critical theory stands or falls by its ability to illuminate the possibilities for emancipatory transformation.’ Second, if problem-solving theory reinforces the powers that be, Critical Theory and immanent critique make suffering humanity the prism through which problems are viewed. This means focusing on the men, women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity. If all theory is theory for someone, then Critical Theory, or critical security studies, is for the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless, and its purpose is their emancipation (Wyn Jones 1999: 159). Third, one of the themes of Critical Theory is the relationship between the social role of theory and the theorist. Edward Said (1994: 84) suggests that critical intellectuals ‘are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.’ Consistent with a Gramscian argument, intellectuals are the agents of immanent critique, who engage

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specialist information and expertise to the end of challenging prevailing hegemonic discourses (Wyn Jones 1999: 160). The intellectuals in the Netherlands and Poland, mentioned earlier, engaged in a form of immanent critique, in identifying the contradictions of the Cold War and the potential for change within it. A further example of the role of intellectuals, vis-à-vis the War on Terror, is Steve Smith’s (2004) presidential address to the International Studies Association. In this address Smith argued that the discipline of international relations was implicated in the violence that occurred on 11 September 2001 in so far as its key assumptions allow us to think only about state security, while excluding the very real daily lived violence of millions in the form of Aids, poverty, dislocation, etc. It is this exclusion, and the blindness to widespread human suffering, he argued, that explains why a significant portion of the world’s population celebrated the attacks and why the West, and particularly the United States, became so unpopular and even hated. Smith (2004: 510) states: The problem is that the discipline of International Relations has defined its core concerns in such a way as to exclude the most marked forms of violence in world politics, in favor of a relatively small subset which ultimately relies on the prior move of separating out the outside from the

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inside of the state, separating economics and politics, separating the public from the private … One can add that the discipline’s definition of violence looks very closely linked to the concerns of the white, rich male world of the power elite. Smith associates the discipline of international relations with problem-solving theories that reflect the concerns of an elite. Critical Theory, by contrast, highlights those who occupy the bottom of the hierarchy, making suffering humanity rather than state interest the point of departure. All of the critical approaches examined in this book represent the work of intellectuals who share an emphasis on questioning the assumptions about security that underpin a changing historical context. One critical lesson of this book is the ease with which we become trapped by our own assumptions, by the very language we use to talk about security. The failure of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 is a powerful illustration of the point. Intelligence communities on both sides of the Atlantic assumed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This language game became a form of ‘group think’ (Janis 1982) that justified the invasion. The following examines several assumptions that underpinned the War on Terror that provide a point of departure for identifying the contradictions in this historical

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context and undertaking an immanent critique. These contradictions raise a number of issues that are explored in more depth in the following chapters, relating, for instance, to identity, securitization, fear and trauma and emancipation. Assumption 1: Terrorism represents an existential threat to security and requires a military response Declaring a war is an act that brings a war into being. Following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush (2001a) used the phrase ‘war on terror’, which contributed to the constitution of a world defined by war, rather than, for instance, crime or even dialogue. Use of the word ‘war’, as with the word ‘security’, suggests that the danger is an existential one which threatens the very existence of a community. Because the threat is existential, emergency measures are required. Because the threat is existential, the suspension of normal politics is justified. The War on Terror, in this framework, elevated terrorism to the number one threat. As Condoleezza Rice (2002) stated, ‘there is no longer any doubt that today America faces an existential threat to our security – a threat as great as any faced during the Civil War, World War II and the Cold War.’ War is not normal politics and sometimes requires extraordinary measures. However, there are several reasons

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to be sceptical of the logic of war as applied to terrorism after 11 September 2001.1 The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were a dreadful tragedy arising out of an abominable act. The question is whether there were alternative frameworks for giving meaning to and responding to this attack. The framework of ‘war’, arguably, increased the threat and contributed to the construction and deepening of conflict. In attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Al-Qaida communicated with violence. As George Soros has argued, the Bush administration walked into a trap by responding in a way that accepted the terms of the relationship set down by bin Laden (Cook 2004b). The language of war inscribes the ‘other’ as an enemy with whom one cannot negotiate. In this respect it constructs clear lines of identity defined in difference, a subject to be discussed in the next chapter. The language came from both sides. Osama bin Laden declared a jihad on all Americans. President George W. Bush (2001d) clearly stated that ‘You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ Assumption 2: We have to be continually fearful of another terrorist attack Against the backdrop of 11 September, the Bush administration mobilized a politics of fear.2 It was a replay of the past, or more specifically

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another terrorist attack, that was feared. While many argued that the invasion of Afghanistan was a justified response to 9/11, given the direct link between the Taliban and Al-Qaida (Elshtain 2003), far more surprising was the ability of the administration to convince a majority of the American population that there was a link between Al-Qaida and Iraq, despite the absence of evidence. This ability was made possible by the politics of fear and the meaning woven around 11 September and the events that followed. But it was not only the politics of fear in the United States that drove the conflict. Al-Qaida justified the attacks on America in terms of the suffering of Iraqis and Palestinians resulting from decades of US foreign policy. US acts in the War on Terror only increased the sense of humiliation and resentment felt throughout the Middle East (Fattah and Fierke 2009). While the United States claimed to have liberated Iraq, its actions lent themselves to a much different interpretation by Iraqis. The pictures of Iraqi prisoners sexually humiliated by female American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison contributed to a perception that the Iraqi invasion was about the destruction of Islam rather than liberation. If the loss of 3,000 lives on 9/11 was a trauma to the United States, how much more traumatic was the loss of 114,000 Iraqis, approximately 38 times that number, since the invasion in 2003, based on the figures

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of the Iraq Body Count (2013), figures which, it is estimated, will increase by 15,000 as a result of the release of the Iraq War Logs by Wikileaks. This contrasts with the 4,802 US and Coalition military killed in Iraq during the same period. Exact numbers are less important than the meaning attributed to these deaths by the Iraqis. Judith Butler (2004) asks ‘what effect … the killing of an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians, including tens of thousands of children, and the subsequent starvation of Muslim populations … has on Muslim views of the United States?’ (Butler 2004: 12). She asks whether a Muslim life is as valuable as a First World life. ‘Is our capacity to mourn in global dimensions foreclosed precisely by the failure to conceive of Muslim and Arab lives as lives?’ (Butler 2004: 12). The widespread deaths, in the name of liberation, were most likely experienced not only as a betrayal but also as a source of deep anger, and an inspiration for new recruits. Assumption 3: This is a contemporary battle between good and evil The irony of the War on Terror is that the two main targets, bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, were at an earlier point in time clients of the United States, in the context of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the Iran–Iraq War, respectively. Thus, clients who were good enough to talk to when on the right side became evil. In this

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respect, the policies and alignments of one era can set the stage for the problems of another. Michael Ignatieff (2003: 8–9) wrote that one unacknowledged cause of the attacks on 11 September was the coincidence of global prosperity in the West with the disintegration of states that achieved independence from the colonial empires of Europe, especially the Arab states. America, or American policy, was hated in these ‘failing’ states because of its ties to regimes that had failed their people and repressed nationalist aspirations. Al-Qaida built on this tension. It succeeded in convincing large numbers of discontented people that it spoke on behalf of their humiliation.3 However, while claiming to represent their grievances, the group hijacked them in an attempt to legitimize violence.4 It seems there are two conclusions to be drawn from this shadow of a past. First, it is too simple to define the problem in terms of clear-cut good and evil. Terrorism thrives on poverty, the failure to address historical grievances, human insecurity and gross contemporary global inequalities. While serious, the magnitude of the terrorist threat is put in perspective when compared with other poverty-related threats. As stated in chapter 1, 14,600 people died in terrorist attacks in 2005, at the height of the War on Terror. Compare this with the 18 million people – one-third of all deaths – who

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die of poverty-related causes each year, or the 29,000 children under five who die every day – 21 each minute – from primarily preventable causes (UNICEF 2013). Assumption 4: America needs to remake the Middle East in its own image The Bush administration accepted the argument that democracies don’t fight one another (Leffler 2003: 1055). Their objective was to remake the states of the Middle East as liberal democracies. If democracy is the objective, the practice of the War on Terror has been arguably counterproductive. Democratic peace theory makes a connection between internal democratic practice and external practice vis-à-vis other democracies. In this sense, respect for human rights and the rule of law at home spills over into dealings at the international level (Brown et al. 1996; Ray 1998; Russett 1993, 2005). Here the problem is evident. While the administration claimed an intention to spread a respect for human rights and the rule of law abroad, within the War on Terror, it ignored international opinion, international law and human rights when convenient to do so. The question is whether democratic practice can be produced by violence, whether, as in the case of Fallujah, destroying a city is the best way to prepare for elections (Measor and Muller 2005; Russett 2005). As Benjamin

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Barber (2004: 213) states: ‘An America wishing to secure itself from terror by forging a world of free nations needs to be at least as interested in smart citizens as it is in smart bombs. America’s first instinct in spending dollars abroad has been to train soldiers rather than to train citizens. It costs far more to do the former even though doing the latter pays off far better for democracy.’ Neta Crawford (2004) further argues that, if the United States truly believes in democracy and self-determination, it should not ignore the agency of others as free and equal participants in the achievement of their aspiration. It shouldn’t try to remake the world, because the surest way to create resistance is to tell others how to run their own affairs. The US Declaration of Independence is a litany of the ways imperialism breeds resentment. Democratic practice requires a degree of stability and order, and sometimes the use of force is necessary to achieve this. There has been a tendency, at least in the West, to be more trusting of the United States in this role than might be the case with other hegemons. There is, however, an inevitable tension between building institutions for local people and the potential, in the process, of robbing them of their decision-making capacity or autonomy (Ignatieff 2003: 114). While much of America’s international prestige in the twentieth century was derived from its efforts to promote self-determination and to take the side

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of freedom against empire, it has too easily in practice slid into the role of an imperial power promoting its own interests. Vietnam showed that overwhelming military power is no match when faced with a people who have nothing to lose. A similar claim could be made in regard to terrorism. Assumption 5: More intelligence will guarantee security A further irony of the post-9/11 period is that events marked by a failure of intelligence, from the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon to Iraq, have given impetus to a greater reliance on intelligence gathering. The destruction of the World Trade Center both stimulated and gave legitimacy to the acceleration of existing trends, which move towards disciplinary forms of surveillance and blur the already fuzzy boundaries between crime, terrorism and contemporary warfare (Ball and Webster 2003). David Lyon (2003: 18) argues that not everything changed on 11 September 2001, but one of the most important things that did was the willingness of populations to accept the use of certain practices – and not least detention without trial – and certain kinds of technology, such as wire-tapping or internet surveillance, that were previously proscribed. Along these lines, a range of devices, including video surveillance with facial recognition, biometrics,

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smart ID cards and so on, were proposed and have been phased in to upgrade security in the name of preventing future attacks. On the one hand, the attacks on 9/11 brought to the surface a number of surveillance trends that had been quietly developing for a decade. In this respect, their emergence did not represent a change. On the other hand, the attacks presented an opportunity for already existing ideas, policies and technologies to find application in the national security apparatus. For several decades, data protection officials, privacy watchdogs and civil rights groups worked to mitigate the worst effects of surveillance. Since the terrorist attacks on the United States and in other parts of the world, more exclusionary and intrusive surveillance practices have been legitimized in the name of global security. As Philip Heymann (2004: 138) points out, there is a fine line between building intelligence in order to prevent future attacks, on the one hand, and, on the other, the construction of an intelligence state, where intelligence agencies can define the threats they address, are not limited in gathering private information, have no burden of establishing the reliability of their information beyond reasonable doubt, and can engage in illegal activities secretly, without political accountability, and turn these to political purposes or be allowed to drift in that direction.

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Since 9/11, discussions of security have built on post-World War II notions that it is possible to guarantee protection by technical and military means. Guaranteeing security becomes a priority during times of crisis and serves to justify the suspension of normal practice. Surveillance and surveillance technologies are a key means of achieving this maximum security. The problem, as David Lyon (2003: 15), among others, points out, is that guaranteed security is simply not obtainable. It may further come at the expense of civil liberties, as has been the case since the advent of the War on Terror. After 9/11 President Bush offered the choice in terms of a trade-off between security and liberty. The ideal of guaranteed security was used to justify the intensification of surveillance, but at the cost of losing some of those freedoms that are constitutive of the democratic way of life to be secured.

Contradictions ‘Immanent critique’ is a practice by which critical analysts expose the contradictions in a historical context, thereby opening a space for resistance and change. This begins with an examination of the dominant assumptions by which the central security problem of an era have been defined. It further questions whether the emphasis on technology and militarization is the best means to solve the problem and whether the costs in human suffering and

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democracy, particularly over the long term, are simply too high. The military logic exacerbated the problem rather than solving it, deepening divisions and violence within Western societies and across the globe. The contradictions in this case are obvious. First, the architects of the War on Terror articulated the end of remaking the countries of the Middle East into liberal democracies; the practice of the war involved the violation of human rights, disregard for international law, and a failure to listen to voices, even of traditional allies, who challenged, in particular, the invasion of Iraq. Second, events that exposed the failure of intelligence, and not least the attacks on 11 September and the invasion of Iraq, contributed to the legitimization of more far-reaching intelligence. These surveillance measures and the suspension of many established civil liberties, in the context of a war which was said to be of infinite duration, are in conflict with the end for which the war was fought, that is, the preservation of ‘a way of life’ defined by openness and freedom. While the Obama administration no longer uses the language of the War on Terror, the surveillance practices have continued unabated. The massive leak of National Security Agency documents by Edward Snowden in 2013 – the largest unauthorized publication of national security secrets in US history – revealed the extent to which the United States was spying on its own citizens. The cost of exposing this 172

information to public scrutiny has been high for Snowden who has been charged with espionage, stripped of his US passport and forced into exile. A more consistent policy against terrorism would address historical injustices that have contributed to the rise of terrorism, rely on a clear framework of respect for human rights, human dignity and the law, and encourage dialogue and diplomacy across the divisions of international society, rather than acts that widen these divisions. In sum, it would move away from an exclusive emphasis on a military response to more emphasis on the politics of terrorism. Immanent critique holds up a critical mirror to the relationship between the US objective of spreading democracy and its military practice. It raises questions about the sensitive line between necessary actions to prevent further terrorist attacks and acts that serve to exacerbate the problem.

Resistance The constructivist literature on the agent–structure debate moves beyond the focus of structural theories of state interactions to think about how agents might transform structures. The focus within Critical Theory on immanent critique highlights the role of the critical analyst in identifying contradictions within a historical context, in the hope of

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opening spaces for emancipatory change. A third approach raises a question about the potential for resistance by those who suffer from repressive structures, thereby shifting emphasis from the agency of the analyst to the agency of those who are marginalized or disempowered. Rossdale (2010) argues that both critical security studies (CSS) and critical IR theory lack a conceptual approach to agency because non-traditional agents such as social movements are not usually seen as dominant ontologies of agency. Resistance takes place in response to structures that not only constrain but define categories of people as outside the boundaries of politics. Judith Butler (1993) argues that performances of subjectivity simultaneously define the non-subject who is different, other and potentially dangerous. In her later work (2004), as mentioned in the previous section, she contrasts the liberal subject of the West, who is to be protected or, in the case of death, mourned, with the countless Arab and Muslim deaths in Iraq who were not grieved. In the context of the analysis of the War on Terror above, Butler’s argument might lead one to ask how, given assumptions about the need to protect Western life at all costs, it would be possible for non-Western victims of the War on Terror to resist?

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Resistance can take a variety of forms, from small everyday acts of non-cooperation, which are more or less hidden, as discussed by James Scott (1985), to public protest, violent resistance or the spectacle of self-sacrifice. Here it is important to note the ease with which a group of extremists can be conflated with populations who might otherwise distance themselves from the violence of the former. This conflation often occurs even when the two are distinguished clearly in public discourse. President Bush initially, following the attacks on 11 September 2001, used the language of a crusade, which presumes a clash of civilizations. He then backtracked and articulated an opposition between terrorists anywhere, and the states that support them, versus civilized nations. There was a clear reason for doing so: a war defined in religious terms would potentially tear apart Western societies, given the significant Muslim population in some states, and make it difficult to construct a global coalition against terrorism. While both President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair attempted to avoid drawing clear lines between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in cultural terms, the use of force and the language of war inevitably drew these lines. The more deliberate conflation of terrorists with rogue regimes opened the way to the use of force against states, such as Afghanistan or Iraq, with large Arab and Muslim populations. As former and now deceased British Secretary of State Robin 175

Cook (2004a) noted following the invasion of Iraq in 2003, ‘Most of the current resentment of the [Iraqi] occupation is provoked by the heavy-handed military tactics of US forces and their implicit assumption that every Iraqi is a potential enemy.’ Several critical scholars have noted the central power of the sovereign in drawing lines that distinguish empowered individuals with political rights from those who are excluded (Zevnik 2009: 84; Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005). This exercise of power results in a hierarchical construct that distinguishes those who are political beings, on the one hand, and, on the other, those who, to use the terminology of Giorgio Agamben, occupy a place of ‘bare life’ where they are powerless and excluded, and no longer defined in terms of their human attributes. The relationship between the sovereign and ‘bare life’ is one of violence where those affected become the ‘technologised subject of administration, governance and discipline, and political life disappears’ (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005: 8). Edkins and Pin-Fat (2005: 12) argue that ‘challenges to sovereign power take place when there is a demand for a return to properly political power relations.’ While sovereign power is a relationship of violence, through which resistance is severely curtailed, resistance involves forms of opposition that reinstate a political relationship. In this respect, in the

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most extreme situation of structural oppression, resistance is possible. Relations of power require resistance as ‘they would not count as relations of power were resistance not present’ (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005: 4). When Barak Obama came to office in 2008, he, in his inaugural address, extended the hand of dialogue to those who were willing to ‘unclench their fists’, which was followed by his speech in Cairo. During the latter he attempted to reframe the relationship between the United States and the Arab and Muslim world as one of multiple and overlapping identities. While the Obama administration distanced itself from the language of the ‘War on Terror’, it has continued with far more of its policies than originally promised and, given the excessive use of drone strikes, has arguably exacerbated anger towards the United States. What did change dramatically in the following years is that peoples in the Middle East who had for so long been caracatured by the media in orientalist terms as terrorists, or ‘suicide terrorists’, occupied the streets to demand their human rights and dignity and to reclaim the political. Vivienne Jabri (2013: 6), in her study of post-colonial subjectivity, explores this process of reclaiming the political. Her concept of resistance relies on Hannah Arendt’s engagement with the American Revolution and

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the ‘declaration of independence’ and the ‘moment of founding’ in relation to postcolonial political community, the ‘international’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’. The problem, she argues, is that the postcolonial world has not been considered capable of agency in shaping the international but has been a passive recipient of its rules and normative structures (Jabri 2013: 9). She develops a definition of resistance that focuses on the claim to the political, a transition from subjectivity to political agency. Jabri asks a question about where agency lies in the drawing and redrawing of the limits of political community. While this agency usually lies on the side of power, she seeks to refocus on resistance as a process of claiming the right to politics. In this light she asks whether liberal cosmopolitanism is simultaneously a target of resistance and a vehicle through which resistance against tyrannical rule takes place. While often claimed as an emancipatory political project, liberal cosmopolitanism, she argues, is complicit in the reproduction of structures of domination that reproduce violence, poverty and inequality, given the primacy of the global market and the diminishing capacity of the state to regulate processes of production. Jabri draws on the Arab Spring, among others, as an example of a security apparatus coming face to face with the postcolonial subject’s claim to the right to politics. To claim the political from the position of other is an act of resistance that necessarily 178

draws the boundary between political subject and non-political other into question. While the agency of resistance can take a variety of forms, acts that result potentially in the bodily death of the resistor most dramatically reveal what is at stake in claiming the political. In this respect, as Williams (2011: 456) argues, resistance begins with embracing fear as an inevitable part of life. It is only in abandoning the fear of harm to the body that those constrained by an all encompassing power can take the crucial step of resistance. The sight of tortured and dying bodies was central to the dynamics of this process of abandoning fear. In the 2011 Egyptian revolutions images of police-led and state-sponsored torture gave rise to acts of resistance. Foucault’s notion of postsecularity, Mavelli (2012: 1074) argues, ‘helps us grasp how the power of resistance of the tortured body made public was mobilised by situated actors – themselves the product of the power/ knowledge regimes of secularism.’ Acts of self-sacrifice may also contribute to the abandonment of fear. For instance, the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia inspired others to imitate his act or gave rise to a call for dignity that rippled across populations and state borders, as people abandoned their fear and brought governments to their knees within a short span of time.

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As Fierke (2013) argues, self-sacrifice, whether in the form of self-immolation, hunger strikes, or non-violent martyrdom, is an ‘act of speech’ through which the injured or dying body communicates a larger experience of social suffering. The dying body in this case ‘speaks to’ an audience on behalf of a population, who through the repressive practices of government and/or foreign intervention or occupation, has been silenced. Multiple audiences, domestic and international, when faced with a question of how to give meaning to the act, enter into conversation over whether it was a suicide, committed by a criminal or terrorist – an argument that depoliticizes – or a martyr, who witnesses to injustice and speaks to a community’s claim to the political. How this issue is resolved, that is, whether the agent is remembered as a terrorist or hailed as a martyr, is a function of how divided the audience is, which relates in part to the extent to which the infliction of harm is attributed to the agent or authorities, and whether innocent victims are involved. The act of resistance seeks to bring about change, transforming a situation where citizens are silenced, and lacking in political subjectivity, to one of political agency and the ability to speak and engage over questions regarding the conditions in which they live. Vikki Bell (2005: 247–8), whose focus is suicide terrorism, argues that in this type of context the witness is dislocated and is forced to ask

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questions for which there are no correct answers because there is no possibility for transcendence (2005: 247). She claims that ‘the violent scene interrupts “our” becoming, reminding us simultaneously of our own finite lives’ (2005: 248). The act of bodily destruction prompts a search for meaning, which transforms it into a larger conversation. The act raises questions about the relationship between the body and our common humanity and the inhumanity by which the death occurred (Bell 2005: 249). A key question is whether various performances of political self-sacrifice differ in the way that they communicate thus influencing the conclusions of audiences and the potential political impact. To what extent does the death of the individual contribute to the instantiation of new forms of political community, where those who had previously been second class citizens are empowered to speak and engage in dialogue over the conditions in which they live? Lee (2009) argues that the act of bodily destruction qualifies as an ‘act of citizenship’, or, in other words, a ‘leap of faith in the midst of living-death’ characterized by the impossibility of life in the living world. As a political act of citizenship, the act stirs an emotional upheaval in the soul which ruptures the habitual and predictable. Acts of resistance emerge from marginalized communities who seek to claim the political, to speak in a situation where they have been

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silenced. This effort to speak and be heard is even more complex in the case of resistance by women, given the additional silencing that is attached to feminine gendering. Eschle and Maiguashca (2007: 285) argue that the politics of resistance have been under-developed, both theoretically and empirically, and that a feminist approach to the study of resistance produces a lucrative perspective and opens up a new dialogue within critical IR (2007: 285). Their research on anti-globalization resistance highlights the extent to which activists are motivated by a range of emotional, cognitive and spiritual impulses that are largely neglected in critical IR theory (2007: 294). Caron Gentry’s (2009) analysis of the ‘twisted’ maternalism of Palestinian female suicide bombers reveals the extent to which emotions, which, as Eschle and Maiguashca note, are generally ignored, can also contribute to the marginalization of women’s political agency. Female suicide terrorism seems a contradiction: in so far as women are considered capable of political agency at all, their role tends to be essentialized in terms of women who as mothers promote peace and non-violent politics, or as a representation of the nation. In this respect, the political role of women is defined by their socio-biological role as mothers, a theme that is compatible with the traditional differentiation of men on the ‘battle front’ and women at the ‘home front’ (Gentry

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2009: 240). In the context of suicide terrorism, this type of separation leads to a differentiation between men who become martyrs for political reasons, as contrasted with women who do so for maternal reasons, for instance because they are marginalized, divorced, ridiculed, isolated or influenced by the death and humiliation of a male relative (Victor 2003: 28, 199). The media further reinforces the notion that females act for emotional reasons in contrast to the more political or ideological goals of men, thereby ignoring any political impetus for the women’s actions. Indeed, as Gentry (2009: 246) states, ‘no matter how much a Palestinian woman may claim political motivation, this claim is not acknowledged.’ However, if one listens to the voices of female Palestinian martyrs, there is no basis for this claim that they are exclusively motivated by maternalism. The dominant script, however, dismisses women’s violence, denies their agency and subordinates the women themselves, based on this twisted materialism, where even women with bloodstained hands are viewed only as mothers. In this respect, Butler’s claim that the construction of the political subject involves the simultaneous construction of the non-political, flows over into the politics of gender in resistance. Gender reveals the core of the problem, in so far as acts of resistance, it is hoped, will open up a conversation regarding the dominant assumptions attached to ‘others’,

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including who can and cannot be a political agent.

Conclusion This chapter began with a claim that the potential for change is central to the Critical Security Studies project and that the analysis of change is facilitated by assumptions that the international system is a social construction. It then went on to examine three concepts. The exploration of Agents and Structures raised a question of how within the context of a dominant structure, agency would be possible. Immanent critique was presented as a technique by which critical analysts can be agents in identifying contradictions within a historical context and its emancipatory potential. A concept of resistance highlights the potential for those occupying a position of ‘bare life’ to reclaim the political and become agents in reconstituting political community. The three concepts provided a framework for analysing a changing international context, beginning around the time that CSS came into being, with the end of the Cold War, progressing through the construction of the Balkan Wars, an analysis of the contradictions inherent in the War on Terror and the resistance of the Arab Spring. The transformation of the political world within which CSS has evolved reinforces both the potential for change, which is at the heart of CSS, as well as the reality of human 184

agency in bringing change about. Realists may have been inclined to see the emergence of the War on Terror as a reaffirmation of a timeless reality of states mobilizing for war, but this was an uneasy fit given the central role of non-state actors in this struggle. The transformation of the international context from the end of the Cold War to the War on Terror to the Arab Spring instead reveals a range of non-state actors, using non-violent as well as violent means to resist the dominant structures of the international system.

Further reading Fierke, K.M. (1998) Changing Games, Changing Strategies: Critical Investigations in Security. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goldstein, Joshua (2001) War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jabri, Vivienne (2013) The Post-Colonial Subject: Claiming Politics/Governing Others in Late Modernity. London: Routledge. Wyn Jones, Richard (1999) Security, Strategy and Critical Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

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Classroom exercise Divide yourselves up into groups of two or three. Each group should then take an object. Some objects you could use include a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, a dollar bill, a map of nineteenth-century Europe, a gun (I would substitute a picture in this case!) and a Scottish flag (again, a picture will do). Look at the following questions in your group:

Questions What is the object? In what ways is the object a social construction? (Try to go beyond the obvious.) To what kinds of institutions, if any, is this social construction connected? To what extent does thinking about the object as a social construction facilitate thinking about change? After ten to fifteen minutes, come back together as a class, write out the key components of each answer on a white board as they are discussed, and connect these to larger issues that arise from the exercise. For more advanced students, who already understand the basic idea of social construction, think about the significance of

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and distinction between agency–structure, immanent critique and resistance.

Notes 1. Not least because twelve important global conventions for the suppression of terrorism, and a number of regional conventions, treat terrorism as a criminal offence to be dealt with by national courts of law. September 11 raised a question, about which there is disagreement in international law, regarding whether states may respond with force if they are subjected to a terrorist attack originating within the borders of another state. For an analysis of this issue, see Ulfstein (2003). 2. For a discussion of the politics of fear, see Barber (2004); Robin (2004), and chapter 6 in this volume. 3. Jessica Stern (2003) found in her interviews with terrorists that humiliation and a sense of grievance are for many a powerful motivation. See Fattah and Fierke (2009) for an analysis of the politics of humiliation and political violence in the Middle East. 4. This was recognized in the unclassified National Strategy for Combating Terrorism (2003: 1), published by the White House in February 2003, which states that terrorists

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use underlying conditions, such as poverty, corruption and religious conflict, to ‘justify their actions and expand their support.’

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CHAPTER 4 Identity The previous chapter called into question the notion of a timeless competitive structure of anarchy and examined the idea that change is socially constructed, as well as the role of agency in this process. This chapter will examine more explicitly the idea that security rests on a relationship based on identity and difference. International relations theory has often treated states as having a singular identity as self-interested utility maximizers, and as fundamentally disconnected or alienated. The relationship between states has been characterized primarily by war, or diplomatic discourse to avoid war. Chapter 3 argued the need to emphasize process, or how change emerges out of interactions. Chapter 4 asks a question about who actors become through this process of interaction or how this relationality shapes identity and difference. The following is structured around three sections. The first examines the theoretical discussion of identity in the critical literature on international security. The second will explore discourse analysis as a method for tracing the transformation of identities. The third section

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will analyse several aspects of the construction of identity since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, based in particular on the notion of a ‘clash’ between Islamic and Western identity.

Aspects of identity The role of identity in international politics has been a subject of debate. The term is used in a variety of ways and relates to a cluster of other categories, including discourse, power, interests, institutions, psychology and method (see Mershon Center 2004). According to Goff and Dunn (2004), identity has four dimensions: alterity, fluidity, constructedness and multiplicity. It is impossible to capture all sides of this complex debate in such a short space. In what follows I point to some of the key issues that have framed the discussion of identity. As already suggested, identity presumes multiplicity. Any one individual may be a parent and/or a child, a boss or an employee, a Catholic or a Hindu, an architect or a professor, and each of these will be more or less relevant in different types of context. The same is true of states. The United Kingdom’s identity has multiple expressions, as a democracy, as a member of Europe, in the special relationship to the United States, as the leader of the Commonwealth, as an overarching entity composed of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, or as a former imperial

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power. Each of these different identities may be related to different sets of practices; they may also be in conflict with each other. For instance, the United Kingdom’s identity as a member of the European Union is sometimes defined in conflict with either its identity as a sovereign state or its special relationship to the United States. Given the multiplicity of UK identities, to fix on a single aspect, such as its sovereignty, is to block out the richness and multiplicity. Agreements and disagreements within the literature on critical security studies have revolved around several aspects of identity. The first point, upon which critical analysts generally agree, is that identity exists in a relationship, an idea that is often captured in the concept alterity. Identity is a social category that expresses not only the meaning any one actor attributes to the self; self-definitions are also related to definitions the self gives to others and others to the self. Categories are thus intersubjective and defining of a particular community of identity and practice; they are not purely in the minds of individuals. Parent and child may relate to biological categories, but they are defined in relation to one another, and this relationship may look different across social worlds – for instance, in worlds dominated by extended families, nuclear families, single-parent families, etc. Gender likewise refers to a relationship between masculine and feminine, often imposed on

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biological males and females, which may differ across cultures, encompassing different degrees of equality and hierarchy. The gender identities of males and females in twenty-first century America are different than those in traditional Islamic societies, a difference that was politicized in the context of the war in Afghanistan. Historically, Catholic and Protestant have been defined in relation to each other, but in most contemporary contexts this difference is no longer a source of contention. However, in Northern Ireland, religious identity was politicized and constitutive of political conflict during ‘the Troubles’. Murals, painted kerb stones, flags, and the colours orange and green were all markers of identity. Yet, even in a situation of this kind, the Catholic/Protestant distinction coexisted and overlapped with other markers of identity, such as Republican or Nationalist and Unionist or Loyalist. In the north of Ireland, the identity of a Catholic Republican has been distinct from that of a Catholic Nationalist, although they shared an interest in a united Ireland. The main point is that identities are defined in a relationship and this relationship is contextually specific. However, even within context, identities are not fixed, but may overlap with other identities.

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Identity and difference The discussion of identity as a relationship suggests that it is to some degree constituted in difference. As William Connolly (1991: 64) argues, identity, whether of an individual, a state or some other social group, is always ‘established in relation to a series of differences that have become socially recognized. These differences are essential to its being. If they did not coexist as differences, it would not exist in its distinctness and solidity.’ Critical scholars inspired by Foucault and Derrida have highlighted several dimensions of the identity–difference relationship. The first is the role of identity and difference in constituting ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’ of states (Ashley 1987; Walker 1993; Campbell 1998a; Neumann 1999). Notions of order, progress, democracy and ethics have been presumed to be only possible ‘inside’ the state, while the ‘outside’ is a realm characterized by anarchy, war and the primacy of power. David Campbell (1998a) takes this logic a step further to demonstrate how US identity has been dependent on the production of danger from evil others outside. Alterity and difference are central to the processes by which individuals, groups or states build a sense of identity in the contrast between themselves and others (Neumann 1999).

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Another theme is the role of difference in constructing hierarchy and the legitimacy of intervention. Tvetzan Todorov (1984: 151–67) examined the first encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas, noting how in this case difference was equated with inferiority and similarity with equality. Roxanne Lynn Doty (1996) explored practices of representation by Northern elites that constituted the ‘imperial encounter’. She analysed the role of binary oppositions, characterized by reason/rationality, passion/ emotion, parent/child and good/evil, and the construction of regions such as the ‘South’ or the ‘Third World’, or more narrowly Kenya or the Philippines, in relation to the ‘North’, the United States or Britain. Hierarchical representations have in the past legitimized intervention in these regions. Gender is also a site where identity is constructed in hierarchical difference. Gender discourse provides a system of meanings and a way of thinking that shapes how men and women experience, understand and represent themselves, which also shapes many other aspects of human life and culture (Cohn in Cooke and Woollacott 1993: 228–9). This discourse rests on dichotomies that construct mutually exclusive oppositions, including mind to body, culture to nature, thought to feeling, logic to intuition, objectivity to subjectivity, etc. Carol Cohn (Cooke and Woollacott 1993)

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analysed the language of defence intellectuals and the extent to which ideas, concerns, interests, information, feelings and meanings that were marked as feminine were devalued and remained unspoken. An abstract, sanitized language made it impossible to take account of the desperate human reality of death and destruction, as well as anything emotional, concrete, particular or having to do with the vulnerability of human lives. A discourse of abstraction and euphemism shaped and limited the possible outcomes of discussions revolving around nuclear weapons. Whether deconstructing the ‘othering’ of enemies or subordinates, all of these scholars emphasize the power inherent in constructions of knowledge based on difference. Most of them build on the Foucauldian idea that discourse not only contains linguistic expressions, to be judged in terms of the accuracy of representation, but also generates modes of power and exclusion. As Michael Shapiro (in Der Derian and Shapiro 1989: 75) comments: ‘In deploying identities for actors and producing the overall meaning frame within which they operate, [discourses] constitute and reproduce prevailing systems of power and authority in general and direct the actions flowing from these systems to the particular.’ The purpose of critical analysis, in this school of thought, is to deconstruct the

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binary oppositions upon which power and exclusionary processes rest.

Identity and interests While realists view interests as material and objective phenomena, social constructivists tend to argue that interests flow from identity and are thus not first and foremost material properties. For instance, the interest of a student in taking notes is directly related to their identity as a student, in so far as note-taking contributes to the maximization of their interest in passing a course. An interest in profit is directly related to identity as a capitalist and an assumptive world where the generation of profit is central. An interest in freedom and openness belongs to a world of liberal democracies where these practices are tied to legitimacy. In this respect, identity belongs to a field of practices, within which objective goals and thus interests are constituted. While there is a relationship between identity and interests, neither is as stable as suggested above and both may be transformed through interaction. Bill McSweeney (1999: 73) argued that identity is not a fact of society, but a process of negotiation among people and interest groups. The process is recursive and the problem of resolving disputes about identity is, at root, derived from a moral judgement. As he states: 196

‘We are who we choose to be’ overstates our freedom in the matter but it makes the point forcefully that collective identity is a choice made by people, not a property of society that transcends their agency…. Collective identity is not out there, waiting to be discovered. What is ‘out there’ is identity discourse on the part of political leaders, intellectuals and countless others, who engage in the process of constructing, negotiating, manipulating or affirming a response to the demand – at times urgent, mostly absent – for a collective image. (McSweeney 1999: 76–7) McSweeney emphasizes the failure of identity theorists to take interests seriously, and sometimes suggests that the latter are prior to identity. But the notion that leaders and others are always ‘jostling’ with the two reinforces that identity and interests cannot be separated and dealt with as a causal relationship, in one direction or another. Actors make moral choices within a particular world, in which identities, far from being monolithic, exist and overlap in multiple forms. Some element of their identity or interests may be called into question or transformed by the actions of others or a larger world-transforming event. For instance, to reduce the end of the Cold War to the causal role of either Gorbachev or Reagan is to isolate a single actor from a

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larger social context where their identity and interests were influenced by others and were themselves subject to change. Alternatively, while the American interest in invading Iraq preceded the attacks of 11 September 2001, the change in identity, or the consolidation of identity rendered by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, made the invasion in 2003 possible. The attacks provided a pretext for the Bush administration to weave together a narrative that linked, in public discourse, Iraq with Al-Qaida, even though the evidence for such a link was negligible. A causal relationship requires the isolation of independent and dependent variables. A constitutive discourse analysis, by contrast, requires that we ‘look and see’ the matrix of identities and interests and the process by which they are gradually transformed through historical interactions. These interactions do not by definition magnify the difference between identities; they may also attempt to renegotiate a different type of relationship between self and other. This assumes, as Ned Lebow (2012: 39) states, that ‘identities are inseparable from the narratives that invent, instantiate and sustain … the stories we tell and hear from others are the vehicle human beings use to render the world and our role in it more comprehensible.’

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Identity and discourse analysis Conventional social scientific approaches treat entities as discrete and isolated. For instance, content analysis, a social scientific approach to the analysis of language, focuses on the quantification of categories in a text or across texts (Hardy et al., and Lowe, in Herrera and Braumoeller 2004: 19–21, 25–7). Thus, a category of identity such as, for instance, sovereignty might be examined in terms of the frequency of its occurrence compared with a different category of identity, as a democracy, for instance. Discourse or narrative analyses are alternative approaches to the analysis of language which are more useful for seeing the relational aspects of identity, or how identities have meaning vis-à-vis one another. Identities are not isolated. They are constituted within a ‘world’ populated by other identities, particular kinds of objects and particular forms of action. The purpose of discourse analysis is to construct a map of a particular world or the transition between worlds. By drawing out the structure of relationships, objects and actions, the everyday assumptions that constitute a world are ‘made strange’, such that the analyst can observe its working from more of a distance. In undertaking a study of this kind, the analyst is not observing ‘the’ world, as it exists objectively, but rather looking at how ‘a’ world works in practice, including the power

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relationships and hierarchies that hold it together, the forms of legitimacy by which this power is maintained, or the challenges by which a particular constellation of identity and action is undermined and potentially transformed. Identities often seem to be stable features of a world.1 During a process of change, the fluidity of identity is much more obvious. The analysis of this fluidity can be approached from a number of angles. One angle highlights the multiple discourses for giving meaning to identities in a context undergoing change. For instance, in the aftermath of the Cold War, against the backdrop of conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and particularly Bosnia, Western observers placed the identities of the antagonists in several different frameworks of meaning. In one discourse, the different ethnic groups arose from ‘ancient hatreds’, and each group was understood to be equally culpable for the conflict. This contributed to a conclusion that international efforts should focus on stabilizing the situation and preventing its spread. In another, Serbs were aggressors, like Hitler, who were engaged in ethnic cleansing and had to be stopped before their power was consolidated, a discourse that facilitated conclusions about the necessity of humanitarian intervention. The way in which outside actors gave meaning to the different identities in Bosnia shaped their understanding 200

of the conflict and conclusions about the type of action to be taken (Fierke 1996; Hansen 2006). A second angle focuses on the distinct contours of different worlds across time. The subjects, objects and practices that constituted the world of sixteenth-century witchhunts or eighteenth-century slave-trading and that make up twenty-first-century terrorism are historically and culturally specific. Discourse analysis may be used to map the transition between worlds. Neta Crawford (2002), for instance, adopts a form of argument analysis to map the transition from a world in which slavery was legitimate to one in which it became an illegitimate practice. If the end is to map a process of world-changing, then it stands to reason that the method cannot begin with the coding of categories chosen by the analyst, which then provides a template for searching texts. It is through the searching of texts plural that one discovers patterns by which the central identities and entailments of one world are transformed in the transition to another. A third angle explores how meanings, shaped in one historical encounter, may carry over into future interactions, to be transformed within a new discourse. For instance, the concept of a safe haven, previously situated in a discourse of protecting refugees and civilians in war, was transported, in the context of the War on Terror, into a discourse of terrorism. The 1949

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Geneva Convention concerning the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War was the first attempt to define the guiding principles of a safe haven policy (Aprim 2006: 3). The concept further developed within a discourse related to refugees and their protection, but was later linked to the ‘right to remain’ rather than the more traditional ‘right to flee’. Given the increasing reluctance of countries to receive refugees on a large scale, the momentum shifted in the 1990s towards protecting individuals in their homeland (Aprim 2006: 5). A safe haven, in this discourse, is a designated area for the protection of threatened and vulnerable people. In the decade following the end of the Cold War, several safe havens were created for this purpose, for instance for the Iraqi Kurds, in Bosnia and in Rwanda. Despite changes in this discourse over time, the core of the safe haven has been the protection of vulnerable people. By contrast, the National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism (NMSP) published by the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (2006), placed the safe haven in a discourse of terrorism. The safe haven is described as ‘one of the most important resources to extremists’ (Chairman of the JCS 2006: 15). The NMSP further states: Safe havens provide the enemy with relative freedom to plan, organize, train, rest, and conduct operations. Safe havens 202

can be physical or non-physical. Terrorists benefit from physical safe havens when states grant them access to territory or when they gain access to ungoverned, ill-governed, or under-governed space within states that lack effective control over their own territory…. Non-physical safe havens for terrorists can exist within cyber, financial, and legal systems. These ‘virtual’ safe havens allow enemy networks to enjoy relative freedom from disruption, as in physical sanctuaries, since states often make them available or are unable to deny their use. (Chairman of the JCS 2006: 15) This is not the first time that the term ‘safe haven’ has been used in relation to a nefarious activity. Its use is also common in relation to money-laundering and fraud, for instance. In fact, the NMSP makes a connection between terrorists and other illicit groups, such as insurgents, drug lords and smugglers. Having said this, there is also an overlap between the use of safe haven in this context and the protection discourses of the 1990s, particularly when considered in relation to the securitization of immigration and refugee policy since 11 September 2001, as will be discussed in chapter 5. Both discourses are embedded in a world of ‘failed states’. What changes is the identity of the subject, from that of a ‘victim’ to be protected to a ‘terrorist’ who is a source of danger. The discourse surrounding ‘safe havens’

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has been transformed in the translation from one historical context into another.

Discourse and method The extent to which discourse analysis should be viewed as a ‘method’ has been a subject of debate. As Jennifer Milliken (in Fierke and Jorgensen 2001: 136) points out, some discourse analysts within IR avoid questions of rigour and systematic method given the association with positivism and an objective world ‘out there’. Others have argued that it is imperative for discourse analysts to be clear in stating their assumptions and presenting their methods (Milliken in Fierke and Jorgensen 2001; Hansen 2006). The fact that discourse analysis rests on a more constitutive model of analysis, as distinct from a causal one, does not make it less rigorous by definition (Hansen 2006: 28). As Hansen (2006: 28) argues, while rationalists assume that a causal epistemology is a superior means to generate knowledge, this approach cannot ‘establish its privilege through reference to any objective truth’ given its own criterion for truth relies on a historically situated discourse of knowledge rather than any transdiscursive universal objectivity. The break with causality, as represented by post-structuralism, does not thus represent a flaw in its research design but an ontological and epistemological choice, which highlights the constitution of identity

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and

its

significance

for

formulating

debating foreign policy (Hansen 2006: 5).

and

2

Another frequent criticism is that discourse analysts are dealing ‘merely’ with language rather than a material and empirical reality. While empiricism tends to be conflated with positivism within International Relations, the two are quite distinct. As Andrew Neal (in Salter and Mutlu 2013: 43) states: Empiricism simply concerns the collection of data, information or empirical material of some kind. Contrary to some disciplinary assumptions, there is nothing inherently numerical, statistical or correlative about this. Discourses are data, documents are data, practices are data. The term empiricism derives from a branch of philosophy concerned with the reliability of the information we receive through our senses and the difficult possibility of deriving truth from that…. In contrast to empiricism, positivism is the positive creation of laws, models, concepts and most importantly theories for the explanation and sometimes the testing of data. The literature on critical security studies has become increasingly sophisticated in its reflection on the relationship between language and materiality. Earlier studies focused on deconstructing the categories upon which 205

international relations theory and practice rest, or the role of speech acts in constructing threats, which is a subject of the next chapter. The latter gave rise to critique and a further conceptualization of the relationship between language and the body (Hansen 2000a). While Foucault and Butler have had a tremendous influence on the conceptualization of the relationship between language and body, Claudia Aradau (2010), drawing on the work of Karen Barad, shows how ‘things’ or materiality also emerge out of material-discursive practices and the importance of materiality for understanding the protection of critical infrastructure. Critical security studies emerged from a critique of the realist emphasis on material power, among others, which was coupled with arguments about the importance of language in a field where it had been largely taken for granted and ignored. The ‘materialist turn’ in CSS represents a return to materiality, although based on much different epistemological and ontological assumptions than realism. It highlights the relationship between practices of making meaning and the agency of the body or material objects in the world. Empiricism, as it is understood within more mainstream approaches, rests on an assumption that the analyst is a neutral observer of a world that exists independent of the meaning we bring to it. One can, however,

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question how often we ‘observe’ international practice. Research at this level is fundamentally dependent on texts of various kinds, from speeches, to institutional statements, to media reports. Even observation of images of distant events on the television news or on the internet is usually accompanied by an interpretive framework. The bombardment of images of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 carried a very specific meaning that would be lost if shown out of context to someone unaware of the political context, who might, for instance, think they were watching a fictional image of an explosion in a film. The central question thus becomes one of how we understand this ‘empirical data’ and the language which surrounds it or by which things, subjects or events are constituted. The analyst in this case is not assumed to be an objective observer but is necessarily reflexive about his or her own positioning in relation to the subject matter. Pierre Bourdieu’s work on double reflexivity has provided a framework for understanding the positioning of the researcher and their interpretation of the world, constituting a ‘double rupture’, creating distance between the object of research and the researcher, and involving a basic scepticism which is at the heart of a reflexive sociology (Madsen 2011: 262; see also Leander 2009; Bigo 2011). Ackerly and True (2008) argue that

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situating the researcher is about being reflexive regarding one’s own position in the field of research and thus being responsible and accountable for the knowledge claims one makes. Their concern with reflexivity is part of adopting a feminist research ethic, which is in itself an ethical practice (Ackerly and True 2008: 694) that does not require scholars to be feminist theorists. This ethics further includes an attentiveness to the power of epistemology, boundaries and relationships. The epistemology is about destabilizing privileged epistemologies in particular, in order to make researchers aware of and deconstruct the dynamics of power that underpin them. The focus on boundaries is a commitment to pay attention to the power to marginalize and forms of exclusion and inclusion that transform those boundaries, rendering some individuals invisible (Ackerly and True 2008: 696). Attentiveness to relationships is fundamentally an anti-essentialist commitment concerned with interconnected relationships, which shows how people’s actions and lives are related and depend on others. Annick Wibben (2011) presents a case for opening up security studies in a way that would allow for feminist narratives to be recognized and taken seriously as security narratives. That discourse analysis is relativistic, interpretive and a bit woolly minded compared to the rigour and formal methods of, for

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instance, content analysis, is an assumption that is often shared by advocates and critics alike. In fact, the relationship is arguably the opposite. First, content analysis focuses on the isolation and quantification of words, yet a single word can have any range of meanings when placed in different contexts. A journal referee once pointed out that the word ‘romance’ in Russian has a whole range of different meanings than it does in English. This would present a problem for content analysis, where words are isolated and counted. Given the different possible meanings attached to romance, the quantification of use of the term, divorced from specific context, would lead to a distortion in the data. However, when the word ‘romance’ is connected to a cluster of other categories, such as ‘unrequited love’, a relationship between a strong masculine identity and a weak feminine one, the cluster of words in and of itself establishes the context. These metaphors did in fact structure the meaning of the relationship between NATO and Russia, presented in Russian newspapers, following the collapse of the Soviet Union (Fierke 1999). The analyst may exercise some interpretation in focusing in on this particular cluster of meanings as opposed to another, but the words themselves belong to a grammar of categories which we would recognize as being associated with intimate relationships, drawn on in this example to give meaning to the post-Cold War hierarchical relationship 209

between NATO and Russia. In this respect, metaphor can play an important role in structuring discourses of power (Fierke 1998). Second, the appearance and frequency of a particular discourse is not down to pure interpretation. Patterns emerge across texts and are discovered by the analyst. The danger of going to any particular set of texts with a range of predetermined categories for purposes of coding, as with content analysis, is that the world of analysis is limited from the start by the choices, and thus arguably the interpretation, of the analyst. Individuals do interpret single texts in a variety of ways, and debates over the significance of this have a long history in political theory, focusing not least on the relationship between context, text and authorial intention. My point is to problematize the distinction between objective quantification and subjective interpretation. The dominant discourses or patterns by which identities, objects and practices are configured, or altered, are identified in a shared language that recurs across texts. In analysing these patterns, the analyst is describing not a world ‘out there’, independent of human meaning, but rather how the social meanings themselves constitute the parameters of a particular world.

Identity in practice In concluding this section, it is useful to raise a few broader questions regarding the 210

relationship between identity, discourse and practice. The first is how, in any particular context, meanings get put together and how people come to identify them as meaningful. The concepts of articulation and interpellation provide one framework for answering this question (Althusser 1971; Laclau 1977; Hall 1985; Weldes 1993, 1996). Jutta Weldes (1996: 284) discusses articulation as the ‘process by which meaning is produced out of extant cultural raw materials or linguistic resources’. Chains of connotations are established between different linguistic elements by which meaning is created and temporarily fixed. There is no necessary connection between elements of meaning or their arrangement. There is no logical or necessary connection between Hindu and India, for instance. As Muppidi (in Weldes et al. 1999: 125) points out, Indian identity can be linked or articulated to a variety of subject positions, for example, Muslim, Christian Tamil or Jew. These can all be socially produced in a non-conflictual relationship to India; they can also be articulated in an antagonistic manner. How these are combined and socially produced and reproduced is a consequence of political struggles over the legitimacy of different representations. One way of ensuring legitimacy is to naturalize and conventionalize a particular association as ‘reality’ and therefore a part of the assumed world of a culture. However, it is not straightforward that, once proposed, an articulation will be accepted by a 211

population without question. The concept of ‘interpellation’ provides a useful complement to ‘articulation’. Interpellation refers to the process by which people, when ‘hailed’ by discourses, recognize themselves in that hailing (Althusser 1971: 174). Interpellation assumes that different representations of the world incorporate patterns of identity and ways of functioning in the world, which are located within different power relations and which make different interests possible. Concrete individuals come to identify with these subject positions and the representations in which they appear. As subjects identify with them, the power relations and interests entailed in discourse are naturalized and these representations seem to reflect the world as it really is. The second question is the extent to which there is a subject who acts in the articulation, or putting together, of discourses or the extent to which we are constrained by received assumptions about our world. Judith Butler (1993: 4–12) points to two different approaches to discourse associated with constructivism, broadly defined. In the one, discourse is treated as overly constraining, thereby eliminating any human agency. In the other, the human agent is treated as capable of wilfully engaging in construction without constraint. In the first case, structure, far from being a purely material

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phenomenon, is provided by those discourses that have so defined our assumptive universe that it is close to impossible to imagine an alternative. During the Cold War, assumptions about the nature of nuclear weapons and the evil nature of the Soviet Union made it very difficult to imagine an end to the conflict, and particularly in the way it happened, that is, without war. By contrast, agency, as problematized by Butler, suggests that individual leaders, in particular, are relatively unconstrained in manufacturing a reality in line with their interests. Drawing on John Austin’s speech act theory, she elaborates the distinction between construction and performance. In place of construction, Butler (1993: 9) returns to a notion of matter, not as a site or surface to be imposed on but as a ‘process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity and surface that we call matter’. Performativity focuses on the discursive practices that enact or produce that which it names (Austin 1962). For instance, saying ‘I do’ in the context of a wedding ceremony is a discursive practice that transforms two separate individuals into a married couple. The agency of performativity is contrary to any notion of a voluntarist subject who exists apart from the regulatory norms he or she opposes. Rather than a voluntarist subject, we see that the subject who resists these norms is him- or herself enabled, if not produced, by them. 213

Campbell (1998a: 224) elaborates the significance of this problem. He argues against the position that leaders deliberately and consciously construct a ‘reality’. The main problem, from Campbell’s perspective, is the implicit acceptance by some constructivists (see Wendt 1992, 1999; Katzenstein 1996), also found in conventional social science, that there is a prior subject who decides. Campbell (1998a) shows how the interpretation of danger by the state constitutes the very identity that the state is claiming to protect through its foreign policy. In this respect, identity is created through its own effects. Derrida’s (1987: 18) example of signing the Declaration of Independence highlights the paradox. The declaration invokes the authority of the American people. But the American people did not exist prior to the declaration, in so far as the document gave birth to free and independent subjects who were possible signatories. In this respect, the signature on a piece of paper invented the signatory. The founding moment that brings the law, a constitution or a state into being involves an interpretive and performative force. As he states: It is probable, as it might be said, that such a coup de force always marks the founding of a nation, state or nation-state. In the event of such a founding of institution, the properly performative act must produce (proclaim) what in the form of a constative

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act it merely claims, declares, assures it is describing. The simulacrum or fiction then consists in bringing to daylight, in giving birth to, that which one claims to reflect so as to take note of it, as though it were a matter of recording what will have been there, the unity of a nation, the founding of a state, while one is in the act of producing that event. The event can take a number of forms, as an interpretive act, a violent performance or a symbolic enactment. In this particular case, a group of people defined themselves as distinct from Britain, which involved a violent performance of war and the symbolic enactment of signing the declaration. The performative moment was defined by the forging of identity in difference from what had been constituted as British empire. Performativity begins with the notion that ‘there is no power, construed as a subject, that acts, but only … a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability. This is less an “act,” singular and deliberate [such as creation or definition by state officials], than a nexus of power and discourse that repeats and mimes the discursive gestures of power’ (Butler 1993: 225). In what follows, the individual subject, who acts in the putting together of discourses, is less the focus than is the fluidity and multiplicity of discourses and how these are

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brought to bear in the constitution of meaning, drawing on already existing cultural codes, transforming them in the process, and thereby constructing the possibility of power. The focus on performance and enactment have given rise to specific methods for the study of the everyday. Aradau and Huysmans (2014: 598) argue that methods should be understood as performative rather than representations, and as more than just techniques for extracting information about ‘reality’. The methods are themselves within ‘worlds’ and play a role in shaping these worlds. Methods are performative in so far as they are practices through which ‘truthful’ worlds are enacted. In this respect, methods are political rather than value neutral. They are devices that enact social and political worlds and acts that can also disrupt social and political worlds. To say they are devices suggests that they ‘have effects, they make differences; they enact realities; and they can help to bring into being what they also discover’ (Law and Urry 2004: 393). As they interfere with the world they seek to study they potentially transform that world, or may disrupt particular scripted, ordered enactments of worlds. The use of methods to connect and assemble particular worlds, can also simultaneously rupture these worlds.

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Identity and the ‘clash of civilizations’ While tensions between the West and Islam have a long history, they did not until recently assume a central place in definitions of international identity. In the aftermath of 9/11, the ‘clash of civilizations’ has provided one point of reference for interpreting the meaning of everyday events (Huntington 1995; Said 2001; Acharya 2002; Pipes 2002), and key participants in the debate as well as members of the media have evoked a discourse of civilizational identity. One of the clearest expressions of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis was Osama bin Laden’s language of jihad against the United States and the West (O’Hagan in Goff and Dunn 2004: 31). This ‘holy war’ was premised on criticism of the US occupation of sacred sites of Islam, including the stationing of US troops in the holy lands of Saudi Arabia, the destruction perpetrated on the Iraqi people during the Gulf War (1990–1) and the subsequent sanctions, and support for Israel in its occupation of Jerusalem and its harsh policies towards Palestinians, as well as the Muslim blood spilt in Bosnia, Chechnya and Sudan (O’Hagan in Goff and Dunn 2004). Successive events, from the invasion itself to the exposure of humiliating photos of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers, to the controversy over the publication of cartoons

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of the Prophet Muhammad, initially by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten and later by European newspapers, have contributed to further polarization and the construction of conflict between Western and Islamic identity. In what follows, I examine the construction of five episodes in the years since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, focusing in particular on the construction of identity: the decision to allow Turkey to begin negotiations to join the European Union, the photos from Abu Ghraib, the attacks on 7 July 2005 in London, the cartoon controversy in the winter of 2006, and the media storm surrounding a TIME magazine depiction of the war in Afghanistan in 2010. The discourse analysis has two objectives. The first and primary objective is to explore a critical method of discourse analysis, that is, to look at several aspects of this type of analysis as discussed in the previous section. The second is to look at how identity was constructed in each of these episodes. In so far as this analysis rests on a sampling of texts, it should be understood as a point of departure for thinking about the dimensions of a more in-depth analysis of this kind rather than the definitive word on any of them. Secondary examples from other authors are also part of the analysis. The following exhausts neither the range of possible approaches to discourse analysis nor the possibilities of the particular context it explores.

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Who is the subject? One way to analyse the constitution of identities is to break down the categories in a text or texts to examine the relationship between subjects, verbs or adjectives and their relationship to other subjects and objects. This approach highlights the types of identity populating a world, that is, who they are (e.g., European versus non-European, or citizens versus terrorists) and the properties associated with them (e.g., civilized, violent, authoritarian, democratic), the types of acts they engage in, and who or what they engage with. Take, for instance, the following predicates attached to Turkish identity in a text regarding the country’s accession to the European Union (‘Campaign’ 2005; see also ‘Q&A’ 2005): Turkey is culturally, economically and socially far away from Europe is NOT a European country has literacy rates far below European standards has an average annual income far below the EU average has been violating human rights for centuries has never stopped torturing the Kurdish minority does not share European values.

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This construction is common among those who oppose Turkey’s accession to the EU, particularly within European public opinion (‘EU Opens …’ 2005). This particular document is a public petition opposing Turkish membership. Other texts which construct Turkey as non-European rely on a distinction between Europe as Christian or the EU as a Christian club versus Turkey as an Islamic country (‘Q&A’ 2005; Rainsford 2005). They further refer to past conflict between the Ottoman and Hapsburg empires, with allusions to ‘barbarians at the gate’, as expressed, for instance, by reference to Austrian concessions in the talks as ‘the Ottoman siege of Vienna’ (Rainsford 2005; ‘Turkey Press …’ 2005). The dominant political discourse, which constituted the legitimacy of the decision to proceed with accession talks, relied on a different constellation of identity, in which Turkey ‘has always been’ a European country (Sanberk 2000; see also Straw in ‘In Quotes’ 2005). Turkey has always been involved in the life of Europe has a multiple cultural heritage has, in some ways, a multiple identity is a land enriched by multiple heritage regards itself as part and parcel of Europe

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has a multi-party democracy is genuinely part of Europe’s common culture and heritage. It is not only that these texts present diametrically opposed views of Turkish identity vis-à-vis Europe. They also each imply a different European identity. In the first case, the text defines what Turkey lacks, that is, high literacy rates, high incomes and respect for human rights. In designating that Turkey does not share European culture or values, it is implied that European culture and values include education, financial stability and respect for human rights. The second text emphasizes what Turkey has, that is, multiplicity in various forms, which is the core of Europe’s common culture and heritage. The former emphasizes universal standards that define what it means to be European while the latter highlights that Europe is first and foremost characterized by its multiplicity, thereby implying the coexistence of different standards, religions, etc. In both cases, the location of Turkey’s identity vis-à-vis Europe is the point of departure for making a case against or for beginning accession talks with Turkey to join the EU. The first discourse, which depends on a stark contrast of difference with Turkey, while associated with reluctant states such as Austria, is located primarily in European public opinion,

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the majority of which, at the time, opposed Turkish accession. European states and decision-makers, by contrast, agreed to begin accession talks, although not all with equal enthusiasm. Turkish accession is presented as ‘the most potent recipe’ against the ‘war of civilizations’ and the beginning of talks as the date of ‘compromise between civilizations’ (‘Turkey Press …’ 2005). It is argued that Turkish membership would enhance the prospects for dialogue, as well as forging a ‘bond between the West and Muslim world’, thereby helping Turkey to spread stability to volatile regions beyond its borders (‘Q&A’ 2005; also Sanberk 1999). This form of predicate analysis reveals the extent to which different constructions of Turkey, in relation to Europe, provided the basis for justifying a decision to support or oppose its future membership. The question of which representation of Turkey is more ‘true’ is less at issue than the role of two contesting frameworks for understanding Turkey’s future relationship to the EU, and the policy implications of either.

The subject of dialogue One theme of discourse analysis is the extent to which all texts make references, explicitly or implicitly, to previous ones. Julia Kristeva’s (1980) concept of intertextuality highlights that texts don’t stand alone, but are situated within

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and against other texts, upon which they draw in constructing identities and policies, in which they appropriate as well as revise the past, and in which they establish authority by reading and citing others (Hansen 2006: 55). In this respect, official foreign policy texts don’t stand alone from wider societal discourses but are located within a larger textual web, and one which may go beyond policy texts, to journalism, academic writing, popular non-fiction and even fiction. The following is based on a compilation of public opinion found on the BBC website, which included over 120 comments from a cross-section of the UK population, as well as a smattering from abroad (‘British Bombers’ 2005), and a number of commentaries by opinion leaders in Britain (Christian 2005; Chakrabarti 2005). I highlight the categories of identity that recurred most frequently across texts, suggesting that they formed the contours of a dominant discourse. The opinions focused on the meaning of attacks by a handful of British-born Muslims on three Tube stations and a bus in London on 7 July 2005, which brought destruction to the capital of the United Kingdom, the closest ally of the United States in the invasion of Iraq. The extent to which the bombers were motivated by the invasion of Iraq was itself part of the public debate. My purpose here is to look at how British and Muslim identity were constructed within Britain in the

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aftermath of the attacks. The significance of this construction will be highlighted by a further contrast with the construction of identity in the cartoon controversy six months later. In public discourse, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks an explicit effort was made to avoid casting this catastrophe in terms of a ‘clash of civilizations’. The British nationality of the bombers was highlighted, with both shock and dismay. There was an attempt to distance the attackers from Muslim identity, referring to the acts as ‘criminal’, indiscriminate and incompatible with Islam. As Frueh (in Goff and Dunn 2004: 72) notes, a discourse of crime and victims makes race or ethnicity irrelevant. In Britain, following the attacks, the expression of unity against a crime diminished rather than highlighted ethnic divisions. In addition, the attackers were depicted as emotionally unstable, misguided and brainwashed, a language that again created distance from any notion of agency by Islamic radicals. The larger message was that the attackers were British, although criminal and disaffected, but not real Muslims. While the bombers sought to divide Londoners, ordinary British citizens of all faiths were defiant in resisting division, as noticed in the frequent reference to ‘will not be divided’, ‘will stand together’, ‘will unite against terror’ and

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‘fight to keep Britain whole’. Despite this construction of a fearless multicultural Britain, the texts reveal an underlying distinction between citizens (non-Muslim) who are not afraid and ordinary Muslims, who, after the bombings, were afraid. The latter were troubled by the barbaric acts, committed in the name of Islam, and increasingly became the victims of racially motivated attacks. Against this background, Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that British hospitality had been abused and people should know the ‘rules of the game are changing’ (‘Blair Vows …’ 2005). In proposing a ‘change in the rules’, he focused in particular on ‘fostering hatred’ as grounds for the deportation of foreign nationals (in Simon 2005). The designation of the attackers as ‘criminals’ was followed by a promise to criminalize the ‘condoning, glorifying or justification’ of terrorism. The prime minister stated that the British people had displayed tolerance in the response to the bombings, but this was in danger of being stretched (in Simon 2005). The proposed measures themselves threatened to stretch the British tradition of tolerance and human rights, particularly in regard to free speech.

Subjects of difference Another theme discussed in the section on discourse analysis was the way that meanings 225

from one context can be transported into another, in which they undergo a transformation. This highlights the point that identity construction is a process that unfolds over time. British public discourse after 7 July 2005 avoided the construction of a ‘clash of civilizations’ by identifying the bombers as extremists, who are not Muslim, in contrast to British society, which is multicultural. By contrast, the cartoon controversy in the winter of 2006 fanned the flames of division, although in Britain an effort was again made to avoid this outcome. The Muhammad cartoons controversy began after twelve editorial cartoons were published in the Jyllands-Posten, a Danish newspaper, on 30 September 2005. Most of the cartoons depicted the Islamic prophet Muhammad. In the view of the newspaper, the cartoons were intended to contribute to a debate about self-censorship against criticizing Islam. Muslim groups in Denmark complained, and the issue eventually led to protests around the world, including violent demonstrations and riots in some Muslim countries. In Denmark the dominant discourse within the controversy presented Danish identity as modern, belonging to a progessive state, as well as pursuing peaceful initiatives abroad, a discourse which had roots going back to the increased immigration of the 1980s (Agius 2013: 244). This identity was engaged in ‘cultural struggle’, a concept

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introduced by the Conservative Culture Minister Brian Mikkelsen, against the ‘medieval Muslim culture’ that could only be cured or ‘vaccinated’ by a cultural shielding (Agius 2013: 247). ‘Danishness’ was constructed in stark opposition to ‘Muslim values’ through binary oppositions such as private/public and rational/irrational. This identity was, however, contested by some of the Danish press and Danish writers, who highlighted difference within Denmark and difference within the ‘Muslim identity’, comprised of many nations and regions (Agius 2013: 250). The controversy in Britain was cast in somewhat different terms. The following analysis was drawn from a sampling of texts representing a range of opinion in Britain, from the right-wing British National Party, to the moderate Muslim Council of Britain, to opinion-makers from diverse backgrounds. In this controversy, freedom of speech, a right with deep roots in Western culture, was central, as it was in Denmark. The divisions were more clearly defined than in earlier episodes in terms of a clash between religion and secularism. At the core of the debate was a question about the status of the ‘clash of civilizations’, that is, whether it was already in existence or in the process of being manufactured (Altikriti 2006; BNP 2006a, 2006b; ‘Insults and Injuries’ 2006; Khair 2006; Ramadan 2006), and whether in fact the clash was between the West and Islam

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or between the forces of extremism and moderation (Ramadan 2006). The central question was whether this divide could still be bridged by means of dialogue or would lead to further polarization and violence. The cartoons depicted Muhammad in graven image, which is not allowed in Islamic teaching, and which was interpreted as an attempt to ridicule or satirize the Prophet in a manner that was crude and expressed contempt for Muslims. The Western newspapers that printed the cartoons defended their action in terms of freedom of speech. In Britain, newspapers exercised self-restraint in refusing to reprint the cartoons. At the core of the controversy was a debate about the limits of free speech, and whether the newspapers should have been more sensitive to the meaning of this image for Muslims; whether publishing the cartoons was a deliberate effort to vilify Muhammad, presenting him as a man of violence; whether free speech was an unalterable principle, which could not be sacrificed; or whether the reaction of Muslims represented a double standard, given the tendency of Muslim leaders and newspapers to vilify Jews. The double standard went both ways, in so far as the cartoons of Muhammad were published in European countries where vilification of Jews would be avoided or even illegal because of the historical sensitivities involved.

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The demonstrations that followed, in Britain, as elsewhere, were violent in words and for many in deeds as well. On the one hand, Muslims were demanding an apology. On the other hand, pictures of Muslim demonstrators shouting obscenities and threatening more terrorist attacks filled the papers and television news. In contrast to the post-7 July discourse, which relied on a distinction between British citizens and criminals, the central pole of identity conflict that emerged out of the cartoon controversy, in addition to that between religion and secularism, was between Muslims who express themselves with violence and extremism (BNP 2006a, 2006c, 2006d; Khair 2006; ‘Insults and Injuries’ 2006; Ramadan 2006; Alam 2006) versus moderate Muslims who express their views peacefully and with dignity (Akkas 2005; Altikriti 2006; MCB 2006a). The public debate about the cartoons had two dimensions. The first regarded the limits of free speech and the extent to which the press should take religious sensitivities into account. The second regarded the legitimate means of free expression within the Muslim community. All Muslims were said to be offended and deeply hurt by the cartoons (Akkas 2005; MCB 2006a, 2006b; Altikriti 2006; Ramadan 2006). The question was whether they expressed their opinion peacefully, with restraint and dignity, or with violence. Extremists were, at one and

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the same time, denouncing free speech as a principle and expressing their opinion with violence. Ordinary Muslims, on the other hand, were engaging in vigorous debate, and exercising their right to protest peacefully. The distinction between extremism and moderation frames the discourse surrounding the attacks on 7 July 2005 as well as the cartoon controversy. However, in the first the contrast is embedded in a distinction between Britishness and criminality. Muslim identity is incorporated within the former and dissociated from the latter. In the second, the division between moderates and extremists is located within Muslim identity, against the backdrop of a ‘clash of civilizations’, which pits Western secular values against the sensitivities of Islam. There are overlaps between the discourses and that of the larger War on Terror. For instance, the US National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism (Chairman of the JCS 2006: 12) states that ‘The Global War on Terrorism is a way to preserve ordinary peoples’ ability to live as they choose, and to protect tolerance and moderation of free and open societies. It is not a religious or cultural clash between Islam and the West.’ In addition to distancing itself from a religious or cultural clash between East and West, the document is framed in terms of a distinction between extremism and moderation. President Bush (2001e) refers to ‘civilization’s fight’, of all those who believe in progress,

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pluralism, tolerance and freedom, but is explicit that this is not a religious clash. The problem, as the cartoon controversy revealed, is the ease with which one mark of that ‘civilization’, that is, free speech, became bound up in a clash not only with Islamic fundamentalists, that is, the extremists, but with the broader Islamic community as well, even while it revealed divisions within that community.

Visualization and bodily performance While most discourse analysis focuses on the written or spoken language, meaning can also be conveyed in non-verbal forms (Fairclough 2001: 122). Lene Hansen’s (2011) work on the Muhammad cartoon crisis highlights the visual dynamics of the cartoons. The constant replay of video footage of the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 communicated the experience to the larger American public. Similarly, the photos of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib being humiliated, often by female American soldiers, conveyed meaning to the outside world, while sending shock waves throughout. The photos revealed, on the one hand, the brute reality of human torture. On the other hand, they represent a form of discourse, in which the bodies of the victims and the perpetrators were inscribed with powerful overlapping meanings, related to gender, race and empire. Intellectuals from

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various backgrounds have explored meanings conveyed by the photos.

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In his analysis of the Abu Ghraib photos, Allen Feldman (2004) argues that the Iraqi detainees were subject to a gender inversion. The prisoners were feminized through the presentation and vulnerability of their bodily orifices by and for the custodians. At the same time, the American abusers were (re) masculinized by their acts. Much as in a Christmas pantomime, the subjects of these pictures were often positioned in opposite gender roles. The famous photo of Lynndie England has become a symbol of Abu Ghraib. Although female, she occupies a dominant role and is the perpetrator of humiliation against a male Iraqi prisoner. She stands in army gear, next to a blindfolded and naked Iraqi prisoner, whom she controls with a dog leash. In addition to the inverse gendering in the image, Mai Ghoussoub (2004) points out that dragging a man like one drags an abused dog is the ultimate humiliation for an Arab man, as dogs are a synonym for dirt (najes) in Islamic tradition. Further, many Arabs feel that the Middle East as a whole is on a leash that runs straight to the Pentagon (Pirouz 2004). While Bush stated that Iraq was anything but an exercise in imperialism, since America doesn’t ‘do’ empire, the pictures tell another story. Rather than being insignificant aberrations,

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these photos unmask the dehumanization and degradation at the heart of the Iraqi project. In the most raw and exposed form the photos echo the attitudes of past imperial powers, such as Britain, France and Japan. Rouzbeh Pirouz (2004) makes a connection between the pornographic meaning of the photo and the most prominent Western export to Iraq since the invasion in 2003, that is, pornography, which is an expression of its cultural imperialism. On the one hand, the photos are an exposé of sex, Western style. However, in Abu Ghraib this was not a consensual act or the act of voyeurs, but was perpetrated on victims. The pornographic nature of the abuse appears to confirm the portrayal of a decadent West that has been nurtured and propagated by radical Islamists. The photos present the conflict between the West’s value system and that of the Muslim masses while at the same time making a mockery of the Western ideal of individual rights and freedoms protected by the rule of law. Another photo shows a man dressed in a black robe and pointed hood, balancing on a box, with electrodes hanging from his arms. The photo evokes an association with the lynching of African-Americans in the American South. A further inversion merges two images: the white hood of the Ku Klux Klan becomes the black

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hood worn by the victim. The victim teeters on a box, which, at the site of a lynching, would, if kicked away, result in strangulation. Sherene Razack (2005) highlights the resemblance between the smiling faces of the soldiers in the Abu Ghraib photos and those of middle-class whites in the American South who positioned themselves next to lynchings. Ordinary Americans had their photos taken beside lynched bodies, smiled for the camera, and sent postcards of the event in which they circled their own faces and described the ‘barbecue’. Austin (2004: 727–8) argues the lynchings weren’t simply about killing African-Americans. That they occurred in an excessive and public way ‘made clear to everyone the proper social order of things’. The photos in Abu Ghraib, argues Razack, carry a similar meaning of American power and dominance. The final image of empire is the prison itself, which had been a potent symbol of the evil of the Ba’athist regime that ruled Iraq for thirty-five years. John Packer (2004) raises a question about why the United States chose to use Abu Ghraib as a prison when they might have allowed it to stand as a symbol of the evils from which the Iraqis had been liberated, or burned it to the ground as a symbol of a fresh start. Instead, they chose to use the notorious jail not merely as a house of detention, but for

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torture, humiliation and abuse. The choice directly contradicts President Bush’s repeated justification for the war, when no weapons of mass destruction were found, that at least now ‘Iraq is free of rape rooms and torture chambers’ (Kazmi 2004). Whether intentional or due to the poor management of images, the use of the prison, combined with the photos of abuse, conveys a meaning that the occupiers have taken over the brutal practices of Saddam’s regime. Sheperd (2008) places the Abu Ghraib photos in the larger context of 9/11, conceptualizing visual representations as discursive practices that enabled the practices of the ‘war on terror’ while demonstrating how central these visual interpretations were to claims of legitimacy. She argues that all images are inherently ambiguous and ‘that practices of representation are the sites at which it is possible to locate power in a given discursive terrain’ (2008: 215). She interprets three different visual representations of the torture committed at Abu Ghraib. In the first, the images leaked to the press are presented as responsible for inflicting additional stress to the troops, who should not be exposed to more trauma (2008: 219). The second set of images represented a narrative of exceptionalism, such that the Coalition soldiers committing torture acted outside of the approved authority; subsequently their action is a reflection of individual, rather than collective

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deviance. The last narrative lets the chain of command off the hook by suggesting that the cultural context – the War on Terror – is guilty of producing practices of this kind. Sheperd (2008: 222) nevertheless wishes to refute all these constructions, arguing that we are all involved in producing the meaning of a particular representation and therefore ‘the global public is also represented in the images, as a necessary presence required to render the images meaningful, at the same time as such an audience is required to be both receptor and interpreter.’ Schlag and Heck (2013: 892) theorize ‘the image as an iconic act understood as an act of showing and seeing’, which they illustrated through an image on the front cover of TIME magazine in the summer of 2010 of a mutilated female body in Afghanistan. They argue that to treat images as iconic performatives is to look not only at what they show but how they show what they show (2013: 895), claiming that ‘an iconological approach enables us to see how images symbolically perform how we see what we see’ (2013: 895). An iconological methodology, like a discursive approach, re-contextualizes symbolic meaning in historical and social context. Whilst TIME magazine’s managing director asserted that the photo was only a reflection of ‘what is actually happening on the ground’, the authors argue that the image legitimized the US war, as

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evidenced by the title: ‘What happens if we leave Afghanistan’ (2013: 901). In this respect, it is the combination of image and text that produce meaning for the audience. The act of showing and seeing constitutes the female body as a threatened referent object whose protection remains ‘our’ responsibility (2013: 901). The authors distinguish the image on the cover of TIME from a photo of the same woman taken by Jodi Bieber. While Bieber’s photo deconstructs the victimization of women, TIME magazine reduces the meaning of the image to that of the victimized female body. The visual invocation of a responsibility to protect the endangered female body transforms the iconic act into a securitizing move (2013: 905). As a contribution to the ‘visual turn’, the authors conclude that an iconological methodology enables scholars to understand the securitizing power of images.

Conclusion Several aspects of identity have been analysed in this chapter. Identity is a relational concept which is usually defined in some form of difference, although not necessarily a difference with ‘dangerous others’. The latter is often constitutive of conflict, and clear ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’, or hierarchy in some form. Identities also constitute interests. The two do not exist in a one-way causal relationship, but are mutually constituted through the ‘jostling’ of politics. In 237

the second section, discourse analysis was presented as a method for mapping the relationship between identities. In contrast to conventional social scientific methods, discourse analysis makes it possible to capture the cluster of relationships within which identities have meaning and to trace changes in them over time. Several aspects of discourse analysis were examined in relation to the ‘clash of civilizations’ involving Western and Islamic identity. Disputes over Turkish identity vis-à-vis Europe were examined in the context of discussions of Turkish accession to the EU. The idea of intertextuality was explored in relation to British discourse in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the London Underground and a bus on 7 July 2005, revealing the construction of a distinction between British citizens and criminals within, while avoiding a focus on ethnicity or the ‘clash of civilizations’. A transformation of this discourse was analysed in relation to the cartoon controversy, as it played itself out in Britain six months later, revealing conflict around the Western rule of free speech, and a division within Muslim identity between those extremists who express themselves with violence and mainstream Muslims who express themselves peacefully. While the earlier discourse avoided any reference to the ‘clash of civilizations’, this clash was constitutive of the cartoon controversy and pointed to a further polarization of the political 238

landscape. The visual production of meaning, which inscribed discourses on bodies, was examined in relation to photos from Abu Ghraib. The notion that a photo, such as that on the cover of TIME, can constitute a ‘securitizing move’, points towards the subject of the next chapter on the production of danger.

Further reading Aradau, Claudia and Jef Huysmans (2014) ‘Critical Methods in International Relations: The Politics of Techniques, Devices and Acts’, European Journal of International Relations, doi: 20, 3, 596–619. Hansen, Lene (2006) Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War. London: Routledge. Salter, Mark and Can E. Mutlu (2013) Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction. London: Routledge. Wibben, Annick T.R. (2011) Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach. London: Routledge.

Classroom exercise Divide yourselves up into groups of two or three and choose from a selection of newspaper articles. The exercise will be most interesting if different texts relating to a particular topic or

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context are chosen. See, for instance, the following samples:

http://www.morningjournal.com/ general-news/20121117/ an-editorial-hamas-shows-true-identity-with-rocket-attacks-onhttp://www.mpac-ng.org/campaignslinks/ 553-the-martyrs-of-the-flotilla-attack.html; http://www.jpost.com/Israel/ IDF-Global-Jihad-links-on-flotilla; http://socialistworker.org/2012/11/20/ gazas-right-to-resist Consider the following questions:

Questions Who are the main identities in the article? What attributes are attached to each identity? (List the verbs and adjectives attached to the main subjects, e.g. British citizens are happy, drive cars, protest government policy; terrorists are evil, engage in indiscriminate violence, are not British.) To what extent are these identities defined by difference and, if so, is it a hierarchical difference? Does this construction of identity contribute to, reinforce or ameliorate the conditions for conflict? Why?

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After ten to fifteen minutes, come back together as a group, write out the key components of each answer on a white board as they are discussed and make a connection to larger issues that arise from the exercise.

Notes 1. Charlotte Epstein (2010: 328, 330) has criticized some constructivist accounts, such as those of Alexander Wendt (1999), for treating the ‘state as a person’ which assumes a cohesive and essentialized self by use of an analogy to a biological body and a pre-social self. She shifts away from the concept of a cohesive self to an emphasis on the subject, which requires a further shift to an emphasis on language, agency and identity, and a focus on discursive analysis. 2. Alexander Wendt (1998) has argued that causal and constitutive approaches are important to the natural as well as the social sciences, so a focus on constitution is not by definition unscientific. Stefano Guzzini (2011: 336) makes the case for a more post-positivist approach to causality, which rests on a conceptualization of causal mechanisms through discourse analysis rather than generic natural laws.

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PART III Practice

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CHAPTER 5 Danger When approached from the perspective of identity, the referent objects of security, as discussed in chapter 2, are no longer static but produced through a dynamic process. The question then changes from one of who or what the referent object of security is, to how security identities are constituted. The first asks whether the referent objects of security should be states, individuals, nationalist groups or even the globe. This question presumes reference to some kind of objective truth in the world as a basis for prioritizing threats and asks who or what poses a legitimate security threat. The second examines the process by which security identities come into being in different contexts, or when and how problems come to be dealt with by society under the rubric of security. One point of disagreement in these debates is whether identity depends on difference and antagonism. The peace processes of the 1990s relied on a hope that conflicting parties could transform their relationship from one of enemies to one of partners in peace. However, a change of this kind can result in a loss of identity for populations who have for decades

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understood themselves, and constructed their practice, in a relationship of mutual antagonism. This chapter does not attempt to resolve the question of whether identity ultimately requires ‘dangerous others’. It does, however, examine the dynamics by which danger is produced and, along with it, dangerous others. The central point is to demonstrate that threats are made in an active process rather than discovered in a static environment. It is to show the way in which not only subjects, but also objects and practices, are brought into being. The previous chapter examined the who or what behind this dynamism. Are identities brought into being by the deliberate acts of policy-makers, thus highlighting agency, or are the identities of the policy-makers themselves fundamentally dependent on pre-existing discourses? This chapter asks a complementary question about the production of danger. The first two chapters examined how the meaning of security has changed, in both theory and practice. This chapter raises a question about the desirability of expanding the concept. The Copenhagen School, which is one focus of this chapter, argues that we cannot so easily escape a history of meaning and use in which security is associated with states and military power (Wæver 1995). Their central concern is to analyse this use and to examine security as a

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speech act, which is fundamental to the constitution of threats. Other schools of critical thinking go a step further to examine a more institutional and structural process by which insecurity is reproduced. Anthony Burke (2002: 20) captures a dilemma at the heart of the latter: that ‘security is bound into a dependent relation with “insecurity”, it can never escape it: it must continue to produce images of “insecurity” in order to retain its meaning.’ The Copenhagen School presents the exception as a deviation from ‘normal’ deliberative and democratic politics, which are suspended in the face of a threat; by contrast, some critical scholars implicate liberal governance in the production of a long-term or permanent ‘state of exception’, or focus on the non-exceptional everyday practices of security bureaucrats. These ideas are fleshed out in relation to expanding practices of surveillance and the securitization of migration, particularly since the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

The representation of danger The last two chapters examined the idea that the referent objects of security, that is, security identities, are constructed through a process of interaction. The central question to be addressed here is how, given the range of

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threats or risks that exist in the world, from the destruction of the environment to nuclear weapons to terrorism to human rights, some threats come to have priority over others and become the focus of discourses of security. Indeed, the question can be asked more broadly in terms of how any specific object or phenomenon comes to be constituted as one type or another. The terrain of international relations is populated not only with subjects, who have identities, but with objects or situations of one kind or another, from ‘threats’ (Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998), to ‘crises’ (Weldes 1996, 1999), to ‘problems’ (Dalby 2002), to ‘risks’ (Beck 2003). These ascriptions of meaning are not always self-evident, and have consequences for both the constitution of particular contexts and policy responses. For instance, Jutta Weldes (1996) problematizes the conventional depiction of the Cuban missile crisis as a ‘crisis’ involving one set of identities and assumptions as opposed to another. She argues that it was not inevitable that the interaction be read as a crisis. It was a crisis because the Soviets challenged the very identity of the United States as leader of the free world. While the Soviets and Cubans also used this label, they referred to it as the Caribbean or October crisis, respectively, and each attached a different time frame and meaning to events. ‘Crisis’ was one possible representation of this interaction, and the one by which it was

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constituted. It was not, however, the only possible meaning available. The basic problem is one of meaning. As Alexander Wendt states, ‘people act toward objects, including other actors, on the basis of the meanings that the objects have for them’ (Wendt 1992: 396–7). Weldes et al. (1999: 13) take this point further, to argue that meanings are fundamentally cultural and made possible by the discourses or codes of intelligibility that provide the categories through which the world is understood. Critics of constructivism, they argue, often confuse the issue by assuming that social construction is equivalent to fabrication, that is, if threats are constructed they don’t really exist. Yet, to call a threat a social construction is not, for instance, to deny that nuclear weapons exist and that they can maim and kill millions. The question is rather one of ‘how one gets from here to such widely shared propositions as these: that the US is threatened by Russian, but not British, nuclear weapons; that Third World states are more likely to use their nuclear weapons than Western countries; that Iraq’s nuclear potential is more threatening than the US nuclear arsenal; and the US is safer with nuclear weapons than without them’ (Weldes et al. 1999: 12). The focus is the process by which objects embedded in one set of relationships are given meaning as threatening while in another they are understood to be benign.

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Conventional approaches to security start with an objective threat, external to the agents of security. They assume that threats exist independent of the routines, procedures, discourses and knowledge brought to bear by security agencies (Huysmans et al. 2006: 44). The central policy question raised by these approaches is either one of misperception (Wolfers 1962; Jervis 1976) or of which threats are to have policy priority (Booth 1991; Wyn Jones 1999). More critical approaches emphasize that threats are a product of a politics of representation. Far from being a purely external phenomenon, to which security agencies merely react, a potential threat is transformed into a security question through the active intervention of security agencies. Measurements of the scope and seriousness of threats are shaped by social, cultural and political processes that produce some phenomena as ‘security’ threats while largely ignoring others. In the process of reification, a human-made object or situation comes to be understood as a factual given that exists externally and independently of the agencies that produced it. The definition of specific threats brings with it a further spatial ordering, which inscribes the boundaries between the threatener and the subject to be protected. Traditional understandings of security focus on the duty of the state to protect its citizens and national

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territory from unwanted interference. This preoccupation has been the source of the sovereign state’s legitimate monopoly on the use of violence. However, the emergence of refugees and stateless persons, at least since the nineteenth century, has raised an issue that cannot be accounted for in this conceptualization of security, that is, who provides protection for those who are not protected by states (Arendt 1966: 267–302; Marrus 1985; Soguk 1999)? The more recent emergence of private security firms, and the increasing role of humanitarian interventions, have also transformed the field in which the protector–protected relationship is defined. As Huysmans et al. (2006: 2) note, protection rests on three questions: (1) who can legitimately claim a need for protection, (2) against which danger, and (3) who is to do the protecting? These questions inform and structure political battles regarding danger, legitimacy and protection, which are particularly salient in regard to protecting refugees. The central critical question is to account for the political agency of those who make and enact alternative security claims. It is not that weapons or threats of one kind or another have been made up but rather that the meaning attached to them, and the subsequent practice, has been moulded in discourse. In this way, the actors and insecurities taken for granted by conventional security studies are

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called into question, thereby denaturalizing the state and its insecurities, demonstrating how both are culturally produced (Weldes et al. 1999: 10). Rather than being external to the object that is presented as a threat, insecurity is implicated in, and an effect of, the process of establishing and re-establishing the object’s identity. Culture is the field of potentially contested codes and representations in which battles over meaning are fought (Weldes et al. 1999: 2).

The securitization of threats Critical scholars of security focus on the background assumptions and discourses belonging to a culture from which threats are defined. Their intent is to denaturalize what has come to be assumed in order to open a space for alternatives. The Copenhagen School has distinguished itself from the broader category of critical security studies, which it identifies with critical theorists and post-structuralists. While the latter try to show that change is possible because things are socially constructed, the Copenhagen School emphasizes that social constructions often become sedimented in relatively stable practices. Thus the task is not only to criticize this sedimentation but also to understand how the dynamics of security work and thus to change them. As Buzan et al. (1998: 35) state:

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The analyst in critical security studies takes on a larger burden than the analyst in our approach; he or she can brush away existing security constructions disclosed as arbitrary and point to some other issues that are more important security problems. Our approach links itself more closely to existing actors, tries to understand their modus operandi, and assumes that future management of security will have to include handling these actors … Although our philosophical position is in some sense more radically constructivist in holding security to always be a political construction and not something the analyst can describe as it ‘really’ is, in our purposes we are closer to traditional security studies, which at its best attempted to grasp security constellations and thereby steer them into benign interactions. This stands in contrast to the ‘critical’ purposes of CSS, which points toward a more wholesale refutation of current power wielders. The Copenhagen School brings greater nuance to the constructivist argument that security is not an objective condition but an outcome of a specific kind of social process, susceptible to criticism and change. Arguments of this kind usually grow out of a critique of the realist focus on security as primarily an issue of states. Wæver (1995) embraces the latter but for a different reason. Security, he argues, is a

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concept with a history and connotations that can’t be escaped. The core of this concept is defence of the state. There are two ways to bring about a change in this state of affairs. The one, characteristic of critical security studies, is to stand outside this definition and offer a critique, to denaturalize existing discourses of security and to open up spaces for alternative definitions. The other is to take the realist concept seriously and to examine its dynamics. Broadening the concept of security raises an unanswerable question of where to stop, that is, security potentially relates to everything that is politically good and everything that is potentially threatened. The alternative is to examine how security is used, that is, to examine it as a field of practices, including how it typically works. From this perspective, security is typically about survival and about an existential threat to a particular object. The existence of an existential threat legitimizes the use of extraordinary measures. It opens the way for the state to justify the taking of special powers to handle the threat. The problem of security arises from an emergency condition, which establishes the right to use whatever means are necessary to block a threatening development. In and of itself, there is nothing in this depiction of security that is contrary to the realist picture, which focuses on the state;

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rather it represents how security typically works for states. The concept of securitization highlights the dynamics by which some threats as opposed to others come to be understood under the rubric of security and the significance of this naming as an act of construction. In this respect, security is a speech act. As introduced in chapter 3, the speech act, which was elaborated by John Austin (1975 [1962]), begins with the idea that saying something is doing something. Saying ‘I do’ in the context of a wedding is not mere language or description, it is an act that brings a marriage into being. Promising or threatening aren’t labels that refer to objects in the world, but rather acts that involve an exchange in relation to others which, to be meaningful, must rest on certain shared understandings and some degree of credibility. A promise loses its meaning as a promise if it is too frequently used in a manner that is contrary to its shared meaning as a commitment of some kind. Likewise, the credibility of a threat will cease in the absence of a consistent pattern of following through on threats. In this respect, because the shared understanding attached to security is one of existential threat, uttering the word security is an act that constitutes a threat as existential. While security is most often used in relation to the state and a military response, Buzan et al. (1998) recognize a variety of sectors, including

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society, the environment, politics, the economy and religion (Laustsen and Wæver 2000). What constitutes a threat across sectors will be different, but in each case the threat is defined as existential. Bankruptcy is an existential threat in the economic sector in so far as it threatens the survival of a company. Environmentalists often argue that climate change represents the ultimate existential threat, since no other threats can have meaning in the absence of a sustainable planet.

The War on Terror Environmental change, while ultimately more devastating, has, until recently, lacked the urgency of military threats, such as the one presented by terrorism since 9/11. This highlights the intersubjective nature of securitization. It is not merely the utterance of the speech act but its reception by an audience that is important. As Buzan et al. (1998: 25) state, ‘presenting something as an existential threat does not by itself create securitization – this is a securitizing move, but the issue is securitized only if and when the audience accepts it as such.’ As argued in chapter 3, leaders do not act in a vacuum; rather their utterances are made possible by existing societal discourses, even while leaders play an important role in crystallizing these discourses. In the case of the War on Terror, it was less pre-existing discourse than the catastrophic

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experience of 9/11 that created the context for US President Bush’s securitizing move to find acceptance among the population. In this respect, while the speech act can be viewed as a decisionist and wilful act by the securitizer (or statesman), as will be discussed shortly, and the securitizing move as intentional, a successful securitization requires more than the speech act alone (see Gad and Petersen 2011: 318; Huysmans et al. 2006; and Williams 2003). State leaders have traditionally been accorded legitimacy in articulating the nature of threats to the state, but acceptance of the threat cannot be taken for granted. The attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September 2001 made the American public receptive to President Bush’s articulation of the ‘War on Terror’ in a way that they would not have been before that date. In addition to favourable contextual conditions, there is a linguistic element to the securitizing speech act, that is, the communication of a threat with words. The speeches of US President George W. Bush on 11 September, and in the week following, articulated an existential threat and gradually introduced his American audience to a change of rules. While in initial speeches a restriction of freedom was said to be equivalent to allowing the enemy to win, this was later replaced by the need to balance questions of civil rights with the reality of being at war.

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On 11 September, Bush (2001a) stated that the United States, and ‘freedom’, had come under attack, that these attacks were ‘a deliberate act of war’, that Americans, a great people, ‘have been moved to defend a great nation’ and would stand together with friends and allies to win ‘the war on terrorism’. On 15 September, in a radio address to the nation, the president announced that ‘a comprehensive assault on terrorism’ was underway, and claimed this was ‘a conflict without battlefields or beachheads’, that would involve ‘a series of decisive actions against terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them’ (Bush 2001b). Bush further asked for the patience of the American people, stating that ‘the conflict will not be short’. By 16 September, there was a hint that this new war would in fact have an effect on the freedom of Americans. A reporter asked what the attorney general’s request for enhanced law-enforcement authority for surveillance would mean for the rights of Americans. President Bush (2001c) did not address the question himself, and instead deferred to the attorney general, who, he said, reflected the logic he himself had presented, that is, ‘that we’re facing a new kind of enemy, somebody so barbaric that they would fly airplanes into buildings full of innocent people.’ A few days earlier it was claimed that freedom would not be restricted. Now, after several days of stating and restating the logic of war, the potential trade-off between civil rights and security was 256

introduced. In a speech a few days later, on 20 September, Bush (2001d) emphasized the uniqueness of the situation, and the objective, which goes beyond a conflict that ‘will not be short’ to an infinite campaign: ‘Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.’ It was not only that an act of war had been committed against the United States, but that it was a truly unique one, which required, in response, eliminating every terrorist in the world. In so far as the object of security linked to claims of universality, one could view the War on Terror as a ‘macro-securitization’ (Buzan and Weaver 2009). In a speech in November, shortly after the passage of the Patriot Act, George Bush (2001e) further pointed out that it is unique because it is not only a war fought ‘over there but also here at home’, and went on to discuss the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens with a range of security measures, including the creation of a new Office of Homeland Security, the passage of a new anti-terrorism law which gives law-enforcement officers the necessary power to track terrorists, and a new terrorism task force to tighten up on immigration. He once again stated the trade-off: ‘We are a welcoming country, we will always value freedom – yet we will not allow those who plot against our

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country to abuse our freedoms and our protection’ (Bush 2001e). The claim for a ‘threat within’ allows ‘internal policing’ which blurs the division between inside and outside since ‘security, once the realm of the outside, is sought within’ (Bigo 2005, 2011; Bigo and Tsoukala 2008). The problem, given the war is fought at home, is how to isolate those who are abusing these freedoms from ordinary citizens. The USA Patriot Act, a large and complex law, was passed through Congress with little oversight or debate on 26 October 2001. The USA Patriot Act (officially the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) dramatically expanded the ability of states and the federal government to conduct surveillance of American citizens. The Act was not limited to terrorism but could include any individuals convicted of ‘any crime of violence’. It allowed foreign and domestic intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, reduced government accountability, and authorized the use of ‘sneak and peek’ search warrants in connection with any federal crime (EFF 2006). In this example, the American president was speaking to the American public in response to an attack on the mainland. A further contextual and social element of securitization regards the nature of the speaker,

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their authority and legitimacy (Buzan et al. 1998: 32–3). The president, as commander-in-chief, has a special authority, which adds to the legitimacy of his speech act of war and further acts that followed from this. An American president has more legitimacy and authority to make a securitizing move than, for instance, a mayor or average citizen; nonetheless, this speech act must be negotiated with an audience which ultimately consents to a change in the rules. Against the background of 9/11, President Bush had the legitimacy and authority to push the Patriot Act through Congress and to mount the invasion of Afghanistan with little opposition or public protest. However, subsequent events have revealed the extent to which his securitizing moves do not stand alone but must be negotiated with an audience, which either accepts or rejects them. In the lead up to the Iraq invasion, and during the 2004 presidential election, a divided American society, and the world, more actively questioned the legitimacy of these moves, particularly in relation to the occupation of Iraq. In late March 2006, a Newsweek survey revealed that 65 per cent of the American public disapproved of Bush’s policy on Iraq (‘Bush Focuses …’ 2006). Donnelly (2013) examines a series of actions and interactions by the Bush administration over time, demonstrating how its language and action were both enabled and constrained by a

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larger security environment. Following 9/11, the Bush administration successfully securitized Iraq by identifying Saddam Hussein with Al Qaida and claiming he had the potential to develop and employ weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The absence of any such weapons following the invasion, as well as the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, severely constrained the administration’s room for further manoeuvre.

Securitization and its critics Since the emergence of securitization theory, the Copenhagen School has developed a large number of critics. The debate is extensive, and has been covered in much more depth by others. While the following sections explore alternative conceptions of securitization, here the intent is to explore a few arguments regarding the limits of the Copenhagen School’s approach, including, among others, the absence of attention to audience, process and normativity. Many scholars (Balzacq 2005; Stritzel 2007; Dunn Cavelty 2008: 26; McDonald 2008: 573; Salter 2008) have highlighted the extent to which the role of the audience in the Copenhagen School is underdeveloped. The concept of audience is crucial given that the success or failure of securitization hinges on the extent to which the securitizing actor is able to convince others. While audience has a significant role in the

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theory, it is less than clear what audience acceptance means or entails and how either the audience itself or its acceptance might be identified in practice (Leonard and Kaunert in Balzacq 2010: 58–9). Balzacq (2005: 175) states that ‘although the Copenhagen School points out that a “significant audience” must concur with the securitizing actor who speaks Security – for a referent object – the threatening event – to be securitized, the nature and status of the audience remains unaccounted for.’ Wæver (2011) has responded to this criticism, claiming that securitization theory is Arendtian in the sense that the concept of politics embedded within the theory is represented as always productive and as a process happening amongst people, and hence the importance of the audience, rather than as something being ‘captured’ exceptionally by someone powerful. This relates to a second criticism regarding the focus of the Copenhagen School on the single speech act, as distinct from a process. Stritzel (2011) examines the translation of the speech act into security thereby highlighting security as a process. The concept of ‘translation’ includes a notion of passage, from one place to another, such that the concept may move geographically and spatially, and allows an encounter with a new context that has the potential to reproduce already existing discourse or ‘initiates fundamental change and

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transformation in the recipient/target context’ (Stritzel 2011), which means that the process is indefinite. Stritzel illustrates the concept of translation by showing how practices of security are dependent upon a certain period/locale, that is, security measures are not the same in Japan and in the US, just as security measures were different during the Cold War or under G.W. Bush in the US. He concludes that a focus on the process of translation creates space for a multiplicity of actors, audiences and meaning. Guzzini (2011: 336), who argues that securitization relies on a causal mechanism with explanatory power, also contends that it is about a process in which: (de)securitization can only be understood against the background of existing foreign policy discourses, their embedded collective memory of past lessons, defining metaphors and the significant ‘circles of recognition’ for the collective identities of a country, and whose success depends on, but cannot be reduced to, the distribution of authority and the different forms of capital in the relevant field. Causal mechanisms are identified through discourse analysis, rather than generic natural laws. The analysis makes it possible to understand why certain moves can be expected in a given national security discourse, when and why they will find a receptive audience, and indeed why certain action-complexes are then 262

likely to follow. The result is an explanation, although not in a positivist form (Guzzini 2011: 338), which deepens the potential to do empirical research on securitization. A third debate revolves around the question of whether security, and securitization, is necessarily negative, and whether it contains other positive normative potentials. Roe (2012) argues that war and hostility are not necessarily the outcome of securitization. Drawing on a Boothian reading of human security, he presents securitization as normatively positive by embracing the potential for human equality. In contrast to the negative view of security, in which securitization produces categories of enemy others, ‘emancipatory communities are constituted by the recognition of individuals as possessing multiple identities that cut across existing social and political divides. In this sense, Others are also selves in a variety of ways’ (Roe 2012: 260). Roe (2012: 261) concludes that recognizing the value of human equality makes it possible to re-engage with the normativity of securitization. Far from escaping security, it can be reclaimed as a site of ‘contestations over the possibilities for inclusion/exclusion’. Floyd (2011) aspires to develop a normative theory of securitization for the purpose of evaluating whether securitization is morally justifiable. She develops three criteria, similar to those of just war theory (2011: 428), for the purpose of

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determining the moral rightness of securitization: there must be an objective existential threat; the referent object of security must be morally legitimate; and the security response must be appropriate to the threat in question. Floyd (2011: 437) argues that her model ‘invites both traditionalists (because of the inclusion of objective existential threats) and those at the moderate end of CSS (the Welsh School) back to the table, making securitization theory attractive to a wider audience.’

The politics of danger While securitization frames issues as above politics, it can be placed on a spectrum (Wæver 1995). At one end of the spectrum, one finds issues that are generally considered to be private, such as the family or the economy, that is, issues that are non-political, or not considered appropriate for public debate and decision. In the middle are those issues that are politicized, or a part of normal politics, such as welfare or education, which are subjects of public policy and resource allocation. At the other end of the spectrum are those issues that have been securitized, that is, that have been identified as existential threats that require an emergency response and a suspension of normal politics. According to Wæver (1995: 51), by retaining the characteristics of security – urgency (legitimate use of extraordinary means) 264

– the field can be extended to other sectors (military, political, environmental, economic and societal). By talking about referent objects (what is threatened), existential threats (what is presented as threatening to the referent object) and securitizing actors (actors who perform the ‘speech act’), the Copenhagen School broadens the field of security. Any particular issue can move along this spectrum. For instance, before 11 September 2001, terrorism was a category of criminal activity, and remains so for many international actors. However, after 11 September terrorism became an existential threat to the United States. The threat was existential in so far as the survival of Americans and American identity was seen to be at stake, and thus the threat had absolute priority. Use of the word security and the language of war constituted an emergency condition, where elites claimed the right to use whatever means necessary to block the threat, including a policy of pre-emption against states who harbour terrorists. In so doing, they break free of the rules that would normally constrain their actions. After 11 September, increasing surveillance and powers of arrest were justified in the name of security. In the argument of the Copenhagen School, securitization is different than ‘normal’ politics. The politicization of an issue brings it into the open and makes it a matter of public choice and something to be decided upon, that is, a part of

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the normal politics of public deliberation in a democracy. The securitization of an issue, by contrast, removes it from the political haggling of normal politics and justifies its prioritization over other issues, as well as decisive action by leaders. This may work to silence opposition, as leaders exploit threats for domestic purposes and act without democratic control or constraint. In this respect, security is a negative term that points to the removal of an issue from the realm of discursive politics (Browning and McDonald 2011). The Copenhagen School contrasts securitization and politicization, while recognizing both as intersubjective processes (Buzan et al. 1998: 30). Several other scholars have highlighted the political dimensions of securitization. They have done so by identifying an affinity between the Copenhagen School’s concept of securitization and Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political (Schmitt 1996), which also influenced the thinking of postwar realists such as Hans Morgenthau (Williams 2003). Michael Williams (2003: 514) argues that an awareness of this Schmittian lineage is essential for understanding the political and ethical stance of the Copenhagen School. He highlights two aspects of Schmitt’s thinking that are echoed in the concept of securitization. The first is the point that the nature of the political isn’t to be identified in the issues themselves, but rather in the way actors relate to them. Issues become

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political as a result of the particularly intense relationship actors feel towards them (Williams 2003: 516). As this intensification reaches full form, it constitutes an absolute divide between friend and enemy in relation to a given issue. The intense relationship to the issue, rather than any intrinsic structure, determines whether it is political. Likewise, for the Copenhagen School, the focus is on the process by which threats are securitized. As Williams states, ‘any issue is capable of securitization if it can be intensified to the point where it is presented and accepted as an “existential threat” ’ (Williams 2003). The second point is that Schmitt’s concept of the political, which is defined by the relationship between friend and enemy, relies on a decisionist theory of sovereignty. Sovereignty is the act of decision, that is, the ability to decide when a threat to the prevailing political order has reached a point where it constitutes an ‘emergency’, thereby requiring the suspension of the normal rules and procedures to the end of preserving political order (Williams 2003: 516). All rule-bound orders, for instance, as legal systems, are ultimately dependent on the capacity for a decision that itself stands outside the given structure of rules. The potential for mortal conflict between friends and enemies constitutes a threat to the normal order, while necessitating decisions that suspend the normal

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order. The underlying solidarity, which buttresses the capacity for effective decision-making, requires a sense of enmity, or that which is ‘not us’ (Williams 2003: 517). Likewise, the Copenhagen School’s concept of securitization marks a decision that involves a breaking free of rules and a suspension of normal politics. This is the point of departure for the mobilization of political groupings that feel so intensely about a given issue that they are willing to act to secure the threatened object. The Copenhagen School illustrates how the securitizing speech act creates the conditions for the reification of identity in a monolithic form, thereby minimizing its negotiability and flexibility. Naming an existential threat is the prior condition for invoking a logic of friends and enemies and with it a politics of exclusion. It is this that distinguishes the merely politicized identity issue, which remains open to processes of negotiation, flexibility and multiplicity, from the one that is securitized. As Williams (2003: 519) states: A successful securitization of identity involves precisely the capacity to decide on the limits of a given identity, to oppose it to what it is not, to cast this as a relationship of threat and even enmity and to have this decision and declaration accepted by a relevant group … That a society has a multiplicity of identities is neither here nor

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there: A situation in which identity is being securitized is one in which this reality is being denied and seeking to be transformed. Drawing on a Schmittian understanding of the politics of enmity, decision, and emergency, securitization becomes an extreme form of politicization (Williams 2003: 515). Consequently, ‘[i]n theory, any public issue can be located on the spectrum ranging from nonpoliticised … through politicised … to securitised (meaning the issue is presented as an existential threat, requiring emergency measures)’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 23). It is precisely this Schmittian understanding that many scholars have called into question. Two broad categories of literature have emerged in response, one that is critical of the absence of attention to everyday practices and one that expands the concept of exception to a more permanent state. Given the immense literature on the subject in recent years, the following is an attempt to build a dialogue between the different strands of this literature. The first strand highlights the risk thesis as articulated by the Paris School of securitization which argues that the Copenhagen School overlooks everyday practices. The Paris School’s rearticulation of security raises questions of how everything from foreign exceptional wars to ‘managing risks’ is governed through rational calculation and technologies of surveillance.

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The second section introduces Foucauldian notions of biopolitics and the management of life in liberal governance, as well as Agamben’s concept of bare life as it relates to the creation of more permanent spaces of exception such as refugee camps.

Everyday risks Many scholars now emphasize that security is best analysed in terms of the banal and mundane security practices that are taken everyday by ‘security experts’ (Bigo in Bigo and Tsoukala 2008) and their decisions, which are de-politicized and sometimes trivial, rather than exceptionally political in a Schmittian sense. Indeed, according to Didier Bigo (2002: 73): Securitisation is not usefully characterised as a discursive practice creating ‘exceptionali-zation’, even though it may find its origins in this practice. Authors like Buzan have little sense of the routines, the day-to-day practices, of the bureaucracies that are necessary to understand how discourses work in practice. Securitisation works through everyday technologies, through the effects of power that are continuous through institutional competition within the professional security field in which the most trivial interests are at stake.

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In this context, security measures are neither exceptional nor extraordinary, but banal, mundane and bureaucratic. They are based on Weberian routines of rationalization (de-politicization) and the management of individuals through the use of technology and surveillance rather than arising from the decisionist political moment (Bigo and Tsoukala 2008: 5). Building on the linguistic turn, the Copenhagen School presented a discursive and linguistic approach to securitization that focused on the speech act of security. By contrast, Bigo, whose work is influenced by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, argues that ‘security’ can be best understood through an investigation of the day-to-day praxis of the security apparatus. The dispositif de securité is an apparatus shaped by the relationship between diverse but connected elements, such as the machine (the technique), the procedures, the statements, the regulations, the environment and the symbolic and relational modes that shape individual and social behaviours. In a game of delegation, cooperation and exchange, the state is not the only actor involved in ‘doing’ security and its powers are therefore weakened by the existence of ‘security experts’ (Ceyhan 2006: 12). A claim that there has been a complete transfer of power from the sovereign to security agencies or to the private realm would be debatable (Abrahamsen and Williams 2009; Petersen and Tjalve 2013); one can nonetheless contrast the 271

situation at the birth of the nation-state, where the sovereign had a monopoly on citizen protection, with the increasingly diffuse power involved in ‘doing’ security in the twenty-first century. According to Debrix and Barder (2009: 403), the Hobbesian state of nature, as a state of war, legitimized the power of the Leviathan (the ‘mortal God’) as the maintainer of order and security. In the twentieth century Schmitt reinforced this view, arguing that the sovereign was and should be able to mobilize a state of exception during times of conflict. But the exceptionalism of securitization theory, as articulated by the Copenhagen School, is less applicable to contemporary forms of power which concentrate on the security apparatus rather than the head of state. The speech acts of a head of state, such as Bush or Obama, do not fully capture the discourse surrounding the ‘War on Terror’.

Risk and uncertainty Building on Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992), scholars have noted a shift towards countering global ‘risks’, which require the rationalization and routinization of practices, and subsequent de-politicization rather than politicization or exceptional measures. The new literature on risk highlights the need to tame uncertainty, rather than war on ‘real’ enemies. According to Aradau et al. (2008: 148), ‘[r]isk refers to the probability of an undesirable event happening

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in the future. As an attempt to tame uncertainty and contingency, our general understanding of risk builds on the premise that they can be classified, quantified and to some extent predicted.’ Risk society is driven by fear. The security apparatus attempts to govern an omnipresent ‘unease’ that is reinforced by catastrophic scenarios, which are played over and over by security experts. Indeed, according to Crandall and Armitage (2005: 20), the imagination of an ‘omnipresent enemy who could be anywhere, strike at anytime and who in fact could be ‘among us’, fosters a ‘productive economy of fear’. The security landscape following 9/11 was dominated by a logic of premeditation. De Goede (2008: 158) notes that the role of news media increasingly consists of ‘not reporting what has already happened, but of premeditating what may happen next.’ A terrorist threat that is imminent and potentially catastrophic makes it necessary to devise numerous disaster scenarios while improving emergency services to ensure that society is prepared for attacks. Risk regimes, belonging to various sectors, from terrorism to climate change, and including measures to fight these risks, thus become a part of social life. For instance, the construction of climate change as a global risk reinforces a risk-regime framework (Rothe 2011). According to Heng and McDonagh (2011: 315), while actual risk

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regulation regimes (RRR) can be limited, these mechanisms are now so much a part of our contemporary social life that they ‘have diluted the dramatic, violent “war” aspects of the war on terror and shaped it into more of a “routine” risk management exercise providing a template for the future management of terrorism.’ Petersen (2011) argues that ‘old’ debates on risk have become a part of security studies because both share an emphasis on catastrophic threats (such as terrorism and the environment). Drawing on Beck, she contends that these threats ‘question the possibility of calculation and the means-ends rationality considered central to the concept of risk for centuries’ (2011: 694).1 Risk-regimes plan for worst-case and catastrophic scenarios, and emphasize pre-emptive security measures that highlight the need for individuals to be aware of ‘suspicious’ or ‘risky’ behaviours. Technologies of surveillance sort individuals socially, based on categories of riskiness. Heng and McDonagh (2011: 323-324) note a change in the discursive practices of the Obama administration. In March 2009, the Pentagon asked speechwriters to re-articulate the ‘War on Terror’ as ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’. This downgrading, from the existential to the more mundane aspects of security, created the possibility for multilateral cooperation in the risk-based governance of terrorism (Heng and McDonagh 2011: 324). Through the discourse 274

of risk, some minorities have been positioned as dangerous ‘risk identities.’ In effect, as Mythen and Walklate (2008) observe, surveillance and ‘fishing expeditions’ in risk communities have immensely increased in the UK and in the US and this has only served to isolate already marginalized communities. The emphasis on risk has transformed questions of ‘what is?’ to ‘what if?’ The problem is that ‘[o] nce one assumes a projective “What if?” position, presumption of innocence metamorphoses into presumption of guilt’ (Mythen and Alklate 2008: 234).

Surveillance and governmentality The logic of risk begins with ‘real’ risks out there, the need to know where these risks are coming from and to be aware of individuals who are ‘risky.’ The risk framework is thus pre-emptive. It highlights the objective of arresting individuals before they can commit criminal acts, if the intelligence gathered on these individuals is sufficient to classify them as ‘dangerous’. In this respect, surveillance studies and the risk society thesis are empirically and methodologically close to one another. Surveillance studies focuses on the everyday practices of intelligence collection by security institutions and is thus contrary to the Schmittian exceptionality assumed by the Copenhagen School (Lyon 2006). The primary concern is to critically examine expressions of

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the governmentality of unease and uncertainty. Surveillance studies have been heavily influenced by the work of Michel Foucault and the panopticon, a prison structure originally invented by Jeremy Bentham in the nineteenth century. Foucault (1975) discussed the panopticon as a paradigm of modern self-discipline under the gaze of authority. The design was applicable to prisons, schools and factories, where a small number of inspectors, situated at central points but invisible to the inspected, could watch the moves of everyone in the compound. As Ball and Webster state: ‘The design was deliberate in its ambition to have the subjects watched, the watchers capable of seeing everything always, and the subjects unaware when the watchers might be watching’ (2003: 6). Because the subject never knew for certain whether they were being watched, they had to assume at all times that they were, and monitor their actions; that is, the subject always acted as if they were under observation. According to Lyon (1994), when surveillance is accompanied by technologies such as computerized tills and video cameras, we have entered an era of panopticon without walls. Bigo (2002) has argued that, rather than a global panopticon, where everyone is watched, we see the emergence of a ‘ban-opticon’, where profiling technologies determine who is to be placed under surveillance, questioning,

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detention or removal and who is to be free of such interventions. This global ‘ban-opticon’ has contributed to the securitization not only of terrorism but of citizenship and migration. The resulting ‘culture of suspicion’ has a dampening effect on resistance and enlists citizens as participants in the state’s quest for perfect security, thereby circumscribing the political space of debate and/or resistance, and transforming citizens into informants, warriors, suspects and/or enemy combatants (Muller 2005). Bauman’s concept of ‘liquid surveillance’ goes further in highlighting the extent to which each of us is responsible for being vigilant and reporting suspicious behaviours (Lyon 2010: 332). In liquid modernity, ‘the ascendancy of instrumental-rational criteria makes violence efficient and cost-effective … and dissociates it from moral evaluation of ends’ (Lyon 2010: 333). Unchecked rationality is thus elevated above ethics. Bigo and Guittet (2011) make a similar argument about the climate of suspicion surrounding the British counterinsurgency strategy against IRA bombings. The logic of suspicion, to the end of ‘reducing uncertainty’, operates through rational calculation, which relies less on ethno-racist categorizations than in colonial times. The political economy of suspicion facilitates the idea that violence is ever present, and that anarchy and the collapse

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of order would result in the absence of measures to counter it. Institutions of power thus have a duty to anticipate catastrophic events, and in the name of utilitarianism, arrest individuals who pose a potential danger. Although innocent individuals are on occasion placed in the wrong category, this is a small price to pay for the greater good (2011: 487). The imbalance between the power of technologies of surveillance and the power of individuals to counter such governance is, however, problematic. Believing that they have nothing to hide, individuals often don’t see the problems associated with this form of governance as it does not concern them Surveillance is justified on the basis of claims that surveillance tactics are necessary to feel safe. As such they rest on uncertainty, which requires the active participation of citizens in reproducing the dominant discourse of fear, and represent a form of diffuse and de-centred power. As Mythen and Walklate (2008: 229) argue, ‘power relations are reproduced not by force but by activated individuals consenting to discourses that encourage patterns of self-regulation.’ The Paris School and the risk literature shift attention away from the decisionist moment of the sovereign towards the everyday practices of security institutions and the participation of citizens. Emphasis lies less with a response to concrete threats than an on-going insecurity and the need to act before

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threats materialize. This raises a question of how ‘others’ are identified, which is particularly salient to debates on migration.

The production of insecurity Migrants have been represented as a danger to the welfare state and the socio-cultural stability of Europe. The securitization of migration has generated a large literature in itself (Huysmans 1995; Bigo 2001a, 2001b, 2002; Nyers 2003), focusing in particular on the link to the Europeanization of migration policy (Huysmans 2000). The liberalization of free movement and its extension to nationals of EU member states through the Schengen Accords, the Amsterdam Treaty and the construction of EU citizenship led to the restriction of third-country nationals or citizens from states outside the EU. The creation of ‘fortress Europe’ with the move to harmonize migration policy across the EU further securitized migration. At face value, a critical focus on the securitization of migration seems counter-intuitive. Securitization is about the process by which the state – or society – is consolidated vis-à-vis an enemy other. Yet, the two levels of securitization were interlinked in the War on Terror. Since 9/11 migration has taken on new dimensions as a source of internal danger and a threat to societal identity. Thus,

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the securitization of terrorism after 11 September 2001 consolidated American identity, providing the basis for both the projection of power and the suspension of normal politics. Rather than focusing analysis on the constitution of the state, or enemy states, many critical scholars examine the constitution of the migrant as an enemy, who in securitized discourses is associated with a range of dangerous practices, such as organized crime, drug trafficking, Islamic radicalism or terrorism (Bigo 2002; Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002). While these links are not necessarily accurate, they contribute to the construction of threat (Ceyhan and Tsoukala 2002). Migration involves a border crossing. In so far as a migrant is one who both belongs and does not belong, the concept blurs the boundaries between inside and outside (Huysmans in Kelstrup and Williams 2000). However, beyond face value, the concept is inextricably bound up in the construction of the state and the identity of the citizen within it. As Nyers (2003: 1069) argues, the ability to decide who does or does not belong is an expression of the sovereign power of the state. In this respect, the securitization of migration since the end of the Cold War, and particularly since 11 September 2001, has been part and parcel of state securitization, in which security has been elevated over freedom and liberty (Bigo 2001b: 123).

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In the United States, awareness that attackers had been living and trained within its borders contributed to the heightened surveillance of movements within and across borders (Schlesinger in Tirman 2004: 159–60). The suspension of normal politics facilitated an erosion of civil liberties. The introduction of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 2 in the Patriot Act explicitly declared the need to combat terrorism through immigration policy (White House 2001). In the UK, following the attacks on three London Underground stations and a bus on 7 July 2005, and the foiled attack on 21 July, Prime Minister Blair introduced a range of security measures which, among others, included the possibility of deporting foreign nationals. The new grounds for deportation and exclusion included fostering hatred, advocating violence to further a person’s beliefs, or justifying or validating such violence (‘Blair Vows …’ 2005). The Home Secretary at the time, Charles Clarke (2005), stated, ‘Individuals who seek to create fear, distrust and division in order to stir up terrorist activity will not be tolerated.’ From the perspective of the Copenhagen School, and in conventional discourse, this suspension of normal politics happens at the expense of liberal democratic principles. Acts that securitize potentially stand in opposition to constitutionally defined practices that have

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enshrined human rights (Huysmans 1998a: 579). However, from the perspective of some critical scholars, the securitization of migration is a manifestation of liberal governance, which is constituted on an oppositional relationship between citizen and migrant (Muller 2005). Securitization is a form of life, a ‘world’ or complex field within which institutionalized insecurity becomes possible. In the conceptualization of the Paris School, securitization is an everyday and continuous institutional practice rather than the exceptional speech act of elites. Instead of a clearly delineated space, constituted by distinctions between state and dangerous other, or internal and external, we see a myriad of transversal connections between ‘criminal’ others and transnational security officials within which previously separate police and military operations begin to blur, as do distinctions between policing and war (Bigo in Kelstrup and Williams 2000: 171). Internal and external security begin to merge, following a period where the two worlds of police and military had little in common. This shifts the focus from speech acts to the mundane forms of securitization and a focus on practices. The everyday practices constitute the securitization. Competition over the authority to define the threat, the prominence of the intelligence services, and the need to ‘anticipate’ worst-case scenarios, are all generated by the everyday practice of the ‘security apparatus’. There are 282

multiple powers ‘doing’ security and there is competition between the various security agencies. The competition is sometimes trivial and bureaucratic. In Britain, following the events on 7 July 2005, a distinction between British and Muslim identity became increasingly evident, despite initial attempts to respond to the attacks by transcending divisions and by increasing dialogue with the Muslim community. As discussed in the previous chapter, proponents of this dialogue emphasized the diversity of Islam within Britain and the criminal nature of the attackers. Despite this, the number of race-related attacks increased exponentially, along with the categorization of potential terrorist suspects in racial terms. In the two weeks following the London attacks, there were more than 1,000 race- and faith-related incidents reported to police across the country (‘Attack on London’ 2005; see also Wainwright 2005). While the categories of British and Muslim are not by definition in opposition, in that a person can be both British and Muslim, the distinction between the two increased, particularly after the fateful shooting of the Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes. The incident revealed the ease with which certain characteristics (slightly darker skin colour) could, when placed in a particular context (that is, the residence of terror suspects), combine in the

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inaccurate categorization of a person as Muslim and terrorist and, thereby, as a legitimate target of a shoot-to-kill policy.

Security as governance The example of de Menezes points to the possibility of a field within which the boundary between citizen and migrant is easily blurred, such that, far from a clear distinction between secure citizens and insecure migrants, or insecure citizens and threatening migrants, a generalized environment of fear emerges. The traditional debate over republican versus cosmopolitan notions of citizenship, where citizenship is a function of political agency, it is argued, has been replaced by the constitution of the citizen as an active participant in the reproduction of sovereign power. Citizens are adopted into ‘the cause’ of this power, acting as potential informants, intelligence gatherers, suspects or combatants, rather than critics of government policy (Eisen 2004). Muller (2005: 75) explains the failure of US citizens to resist the passing of the Patriot Act, and their role in facilitating and adhering to Homeland legislation, in terms of the binary framing of the War on Terror, where one could only be ‘for or against’ the Bush policy. This framing has the effect of demonizing citizens who resist. In this respect, a continuous ‘state of exception’ is perpetuated by anxiety and fear and becomes part of the reproduction of sovereign power, or

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the ‘performance of nationhood’ (Shapiro 2004). Rather than identifying the threat, and subsequent fear, with a sovereign power, securitization is the constitution of ‘bare life’ and the ‘governmentality of unease’. Foucault (1976) argued that in modernity the legal authority of the state represents a form of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the transformation of state power from the power of death to the management of populations and power over life. If the duty of government is one of promoting life, power lies in the ability to differentiate between what must live and what must die. Here the issue of citizenship is important, since, as Doty (2011: 603), states ‘for the citizen to live, the undocumented must be permitted to die. Those lacking citizenship are potentially ‘bare life’. She explores the idea of biopower at work in the ‘prevention through deterrence’ policy in the US border with Mexico. The policy produces a regime in which migrants are deprived of their humanity and killed without punishment. As Doty (2011: 605) states, deterrence policy led to a new intensity in US border policies which: became much more than a symbolic game in the sense that crossing the border without authorization now became an extremely dangerous proposition in which death lurked in every new migrant crossing route, through formidable mountain ranges and along desolate, heat-scorched 285

desert lands. In terms of the operations of power, the significance of this new border strategy lies in a subtle shift from the dominance of sovereign juridical power to biopower. I say ‘subtle’ because I do not mean to suggest that juridical power and biopower are opposed to one another. Clearly, they work together in this case, and it is a matter of emphasis … Juridical power intensified the US border enforcement regime. However, biopower is clearly evident as the newly intensified enforcement regime produced a radical exposure for migrants which stripped them of their humanity and permitted their killing without punishment. Migrants at the border often die without judiciary punishment, in silence and invisible. In contrast to more traditional forms of power, biopower aims to control and manage populations. Global liberal governance is preoccupied with the welfare of populations and its promotion through the deployment of biopolitical techniques of power. Dillon and Reid (2001) argue we should see both traditional and modern forms of power at work today, but the way in which government manages populations has changed. While more traditional forms of power relied on legislation and the use of force, ‘biopolitical governance

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seeks to govern without government’ (Dillon and Reid 2001: 47). Governmentality promotes life by managing populations, in contrast to the traditional idea of sovereign power, which was dependent on institutionalizing laws and threatening death. Dillon and Reid contend that security needs to be re-problematized because the idea of ‘dangerousness’ has shifted from individuals breaking laws, to an emphasis on the potential for dangerous behaviour. The security apparatus no longer asks what is dangerous but takes pre-emptive action against what could be dangerous. ‘Thus bodies-in-formation tend to become to the logics of becoming-dangerous’ and ‘populations and networks is a necessary concomitant of the problematic of becoming- dangerous’ (Dillon and Reid 2001: 57). This reduces the citizen to what Giorgio Agamben (1998) refers to as ‘bare life’. The citizen of ‘normal politics’, derived, for instance, from Aristotle’s conception, engages in political debate and decision-making. By contrast, in Foucault’s argument, sovereign power revolves around the governance of populations and biological life rather than political life. The subject of politics is no longer the potential agency of the citizen, but the management of life itself. In this respect, the founding political image of the West has shifted from ‘Athens to Auschwitz’ (Agamben 2004: 169).

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For Agamben, with the emergence of the modern state, the distinction between zoe – the biological life – and bios – the political life – blurs. The management of ‘private life’ also becomes the rationale of government and thus central to politics. Drawing on Schmitt, Agamben posits that the ‘sovereign’ is not defined by the ability to claim authority over a territory, but is ‘he who decides the exception’ (Schmitt 2005 [1922]: 5). The sovereign is the sole power permitted to mobilize exceptionality and can make exception a permanent state. Owens (2009: 571) extends Agamben’s argument about the concentration camp to refugee camps where the suspension of human rights becomes normal rather than rare as ‘they are said to reveal the fundamental structure of the rule of law and the real character of juridical and political order.’ In these spaces of exception, individuals are reduced to ‘bare life’. In emergency conditions, the sovereign can kill without honouring human death (i.e., torture, killing without punishment). In the camps, refugees are ‘humans as animals in nature without political freedom’ (Owens 2009: 568). The processes put in place by sovereign power specify what life is to count as politically qualified. The exclusion of bare life makes bare life a part of the logic or practices of sovereignty, and can thus be said to be included in sovereign power and produced by it (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005: 7). Bare life thus ‘becomes the technologised subject of 288

administration, governance and discipline, and political life disappears’ (Edkins and Pin-Fat 2005: 8). In contrast to the risk society thesis, Agamben extends the thesis of sovereign exceptionality, arguing that individuals can be reduced to bare life in more permanent spaces of exception. Auschwitz is a symbol of depoliticization, where survival is elevated over questions about the nature and continuation of a specific form of political life. The suspension of normal politics, as discussed by the Copenhagen School, becomes, in this view, a permanent ‘state of exception’ (Agamben 2005). In the state of exception the sovereign becomes both the law and outside the law, in so far as it has the power to suspend the law, imposing extra-judicial exceptional powers or a permanent state of emergency, which becomes an important technology of governmental control. The state of emergency need not always be openly declared in a technical sense, yet statutory amendments and changes in the background speak directly to the permanence of the state of exception. The suspension of conventional legislative and judicial powers and the concentration of power in the hands of the core executive constitute the state of exception. Biopolitics makes life into a function, and reduces life to its bare biological essentials. The politics of security becomes a technology. One

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such technology is biometric identification. Biometrics refers to the automatic verification of individual identity on the basis of their physical/behavioural characteristics, including finger-printing, facial and iris scanning, signature recognition, etc. Conventional biometrics reinforce a view of the body as a solid, stable entity which can be measured in definable and quantifiable parts, while more esoteric forms take into account the actual physiology of the body, for instance in the form of DNA, the pattern of facial heat caused by blood flow under the skin, gait or foot dynamics. In this vision the body becomes a password (Measor and Muller 2005: 11). Against the backdrop of the War on Terror, government elites hailed biometric technologies as a tool for confronting new security challenges. Since 9/11, forms of biometric identification have been deemed critical to increased security. Dillon (2003: 537) refers to these processes of digitalization and molecularization as a form of ‘virtual security’, in which everything has the potential to become dangerous. As he states: Nothing is integrally safe and everything is integrally dangerous in this composite of (dis)order. There can be no single or simple state of emergency, no secure differentiation of self from other or friend from enemy, every self is an emergent self, every assemblage an emergent assemblage, 290

each integrally reliant upon relations of informational exchange with other selves and assemblages … Commanding the process of becoming becomes the logic of security. In a digital and informational age, and with the advent of the War on Terror, everything and everywhere becomes potentially dangerous as nothing consists of fixed properties, independent of the information systems in which they are produced and reproduced. Dillon and Reid (2001: 42) argue that biopower is in the ‘process of moving from the carceral to the molecular via the digital’. Reversing Clausewitz’s old adage, they identify biopolitics as the pursuit of war by other means. The liberal way of war is preoccupied with knowledge networks, complexity and the operation of organizational and social technologies, which populations are required to possess if they want to survive within an environment defined by global capital and governance (Dillon and Reid 2001: 45). While traditional liberals pursued an ideal of world government to replace the war-like ‘state of nature’ between states, global liberal governance is concerned primarily with the administration of life and the management of populations through the deployment of biopolitical techniques of power.

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While the earlier model revolved around the command of the sovereign subject and the distinction between enemies and friends, that is, on oversimplification and rationalization, this new world is characterized by complexity, the need for orchestration, and a non-linear dynamics expressed in changing networks of connectivity within self-governing assemblages. This represents a form of ‘governmentality’, in the Foucauldian sense in so far as it ‘operates on populations and seeks to promote life by commanding detailed knowledge of it’ (Dillon and Reid 2001: 47). The biopolitical discourse of global liberal governance (without government) is also concerned with the discursive economies of power/knowledge through which people in their individual and collective behaviour are analysed and subject to self-regulatory freedoms and methods of control.

The securitization of matter The expansionist debate in the 1990s raised questions about the exclusive focus of security studies on questions of material power and the threat and use of force by the state. The discussion of the body and surveillance above suggests a return to materiality but in a different way. The shift of emphasis away from the speech act by the Paris School and those building on Foucault and Agamben was a shift towards material practice. The importance of

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materiality has been more explicitly addressed in feminist and gender analyses. Rather than a materiality divorced from human meaning, materiality and language are in this conception co-constitutive. Lene Hansen (2000a), a critic of the Copenhagen School from within, was one of the first to argue that the focus on language had obscured important aspects of materiality. She argued that in their exclusive emphasis on the speech act, the Copenhagen School was remarkably silent about gender, and forms of securitization relating to the body. Illustrating the problem through the story of the Little Mermaid, Hansen argued that the Copenhagen School’s reliance on the speech act, and thus the assumption that speech is possible, precludes those who do not speak from being considered worthy subjects of consideration or protection. ‘Security as silence’ occurs when insecurity cannot be voiced and when articulating something as a security problem may be impossible or may even aggravate the threat being faced. Gendered security problems often involve an intimate inter-linkage between the subject’s gendered identity and other aspects of the subject’s identity, for example, national or religious. In relation to honour killings in Pakistan, Hansen argues that gender insecurity is not only a concern about social redistribution but poses fundamental questions of survival.

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The focus of the Copenhagen School on speech is problematic in situations where the possibilities of speaking security are constrained and the conditions for becoming a referent object are such that gender is most often excluded from qualifying (Hansen 2000a: 300). The speech act of the Copenhagen School assumes a pre-given subject who speaks, and thus does not account for how the speaking subject is constituted. Judith Butler (1993), by contrast, argues that the speech ‘interpellates’ the subject, showing how the subject who is constituted in relation to an Other becomes a subject capable of addressing an other. In this respect, the subject is neither a pre-existing sovereign agent who uses language instrumentally nor merely an affect whose agency grows out of complicity with existing operations of power. Highlighting the constitution of the subject opens the door to addressing the politics of security. As Hansen (2000a: 303) states, ‘if “security” is no longer considered a speech act taking place between given subjects – usually the state and “its” citizens – but a practice which constructs subjects at both “ends” of the speech act (the speaker and those spoken to), we open our theory to a consideration of the discursive and bodily practices involved in the formation of subjects.’ Foucault and Butler’s work has had a tremendous influence on the conceptualization

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of the relationship between language and body, as discussed at several points throughout this book, and not least the earlier discussion of Foucault in this chapter. Claudia Aradau (2010), who draws on the materialist feminism of Karen Barad, adds a further twist to this materialist turn. Aradau argues that ‘things’ are neither empty receptacles of discourse nor do they have ‘essential’ characteristics that set them apart from humans, but are themselves agential and emerge in relation to material-discursive practices. Aradau’s reconceptualization helps to show how distinctions between nature and the social or objects and subjects are not pre-given, but are materially and discursively produced. According to Barad (1998: 1008) ‘materialization is not only a matter of how discourse comes to matter but how matter comes to matter.’ While both Foucault and Butler prioritize language as shaping the material body, Aradau argues that materiality and language are instead co-constitutive. Matter is neither a passive surface that is acted upon through discourse nor an end product of discourse but an active factor in material-discursive processes, which requires that we problematize the distinction between human and non-human. Neither matter nor meaning can be reduced to the other or explained in terms of the other as they are mutually articulated

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(Barad 2007: 152). If matter is an open-ended practice and the historical effect of iterative materializations, the central question becomes one of which specific material practices matter and how they come to matter. Matter is generative and agentive in bringing new worlds into being, not only in bringing new things into the world. In reflecting on the different materializations of, for instance, concrete, asphalt, metal, oil, water, Aradau argues that ‘agency’ is not only human and institutional but the agency of grids, nodes, tubes, soil, foundations and construction materials (Aradau 2010: 12). All of these intra-act with forms of knowledge, with humans and with institutional practices to create particular materializations of ‘(critical) infrastructure’ to be protected.

What is at stake? The various conceptualizations of securitization, that is, the Copenhagen School, the Paris School, or those who draw on Foucault, Agamben or Barad, present the consequences of securitization for any notion of the political. The Copenhagen School distinguishes securitization from politicization, but contains an implicit politics, building on the thought of Carl Schmitt, which requires a clear line of division between self and dangerous others. For the more critical schools of thought, securitization is to be found less in the speech 296

acts of elites than the everyday practices of security institutions, or the suspension of politics in an ongoing ‘state of exception’, which is constructed on liberal distinctions between citizen and migrant while at the same time blurring these distinctions. Citizenship becomes bound up in the production of sovereign power, rather than resisting it. At the same time, everyone and every place become a potential source of insecurity. Identity becomes less a matter of political agency, or allegiance, than a bodily imprint, molecularized or digitalized in biometric forms of identification. Sovereign power is immanent, that is, everywhere, rather than corresponding to tightly inscribed boundaries and distinctions. Both risk society and biopolitics operate through technologies of surveillance and the administration of life which are based on pre-emptive and precautionary principles. Dillon links the literature on risk and on biopolitics as he redefines the new framework of security as biopolitical power in which the referent object is life itself and is secured through the dispositif de securité, an assortment of security technologies. In the recent literature on risk, new techniques to secure life now entail simulation, prediction, premeditation, prevention and pre-emption (Grusin 2004; Aradau and Van Munster 2007; De Goede 2008).

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The point of departure of the risk literature is very different from the argument of Agamben. Agamben privileges sovereign power and decision whilst the risk society thesis and the Paris School of securitization prioritize everyday practices which are banal and non-exceptional. Bigo and Guittet (2011) have been particularly vocal in arguing against the emergency thesis in securitization theory and in Agamben’s work. They contend that an exclusive focus on the exceptional ignores what really happens within the security apparatus and does not translate what ‘security’ is today. Agamben also concentrates on the sovereign, while the Paris School wants to study the ‘security experts/professionals’ – the diffuse powers at work in ‘protecting’ citizens. The responsibility to protect lies with security professionals and is not the sole responsibility of the head of state. However, biopolitics and the risk thesis share a common concern with the focus on promoting ‘life’ (the good life – the one worth living, a liberal one) as opposed to ‘death’ (sanctioning death). The focus on bodily materiality, a concern raised by feminists in a somewhat different way, has been extended to a discussion of the agency of material structures and the processes by which they are securitized. This chapter has highlighted several levels at which securitization takes place, in the speech acts of elites, the everyday practices of institutions, in the everyday life of individuals and at the level of critical infrastructure. The 298

next chapter returns to these themes, but then shifts to a focus on the production and reproduction of fear and trauma at the level of states, soldiers and citizens.

Further reading Aradau, Claudia (2010) ‘Security that Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection’, Security Dialogue, 41, 5, 491–514. Balzacq, Thierry, ed. (2010) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve. London: Routledge. Bigo, Didier (2005) ‘Global (In)security: the Field of the Professionals of Unease Management and the Ban-Opticon’, in Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon, eds., Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory & Translation, Vol. 4, Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework of Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Dillon, Michael and Julian Reid (2001) ‘Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War’, Millennium, 30, 1, 41–66. Hansen, Lene (2000a) ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of

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Gender in the Copenhagen School’, Millennium, 29, 285–306.

Classroom exercise Identify a number of historical speeches by political leaders. For example, Roosevelt’s declaration of World War II (available at: http://www.archives.gov/historical-docs); a 9/11 speech by George Bush (follow the link from here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/ speeches); Tony Blair’s speech at Stranmillis College, Belfast (follow the link from here: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/peace/docs/ tb15699.htm); or the first few pages of Obama’s Cairo Speech (http://www.whitehouse.gov/ the_press_office/ Remarks-by-the-President-at-Cairo-University-6-04-09). Break into groups of two or three. Each group should select one of the speeches and consider the questions below.

Questions Find any references to security threats in the speech you have been given. What is the significance of referring to this as a speech act? What is the context and who is/are the potential audience/s of this speech act?

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Is this a securitizing or desecuritizing move? Why? What are the implications? After ten to fifteen minutes, come back together as a group, write out the key components of each answer on a white board as they are discussed as well as connecting to larger issues that arise from the exercise.

Notes 1. Petersen divides the influence of risk studies on security into three schools of thought. The first school focuses on political risk analysis and the mapping of risks associated with foreign operations. The second group of scholars, lead by Rasmussen and Coker, analyse how risk management practices of calculation operate and dominate in the state defence sector. The third, “critical risk studies” (Aradau et. al 2008), is defined by a commitment to the study of the transformation from traditionally conceived forms of security like war and violence to modern forms of risk governance and technologies (Petersen 2011: 694). The taken-for-granted assumptions that underlie the risk framework are the focus of the latter. As in critical security studies more broadly, risks, like threats, are not viewed as objective phenomena ‘out there’, but specified through social institutions and technologies.

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CHAPTER 6 Fear and Trauma The previous chapter analysed the production of danger in international politics, beginning with a question of how threats are prioritized and moving to an exploration of the securitization of threats in the speech acts of elites, the practices of bureaucracies and institutions, and the everyday life of individuals. This chapter highlights the other side of the equation, that is, the human fear and bodily suffering that is part and parcel of the politics of danger. Fear is not the only emotion experienced in this context. Indeed, as Brown and Penttinen (2013: 124) note, laughter, joy and humour are important components of the human experience of war, providing individual release, resilience and even a form of resistance to official discourse. Other more negative emotions, such as anger, humiliation, revenge or betrayal may also have an important role in human interactions related to security. And indeed multiple emotions may simultaneously be at work in any one context. For instance, the soldier who is faced with a decision to kill the ‘enemy’ may feel a combination of fear, anger and guilt.

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Fear is, however, a primal response to danger, and the point of departure for a flight, freeze or fight response. As the French sociologist Raymond Aron wrote in the late 1960s, ‘It is primal and so to speak a subpolitical emotion’ (quoted in Robin 2004: 9). Like joy, anger, humiliation or betrayal, fear may be bound up in a relationship to others, but can also be a response to a direct experience of danger or threat of bodily harm. Fear is at the core of international security yet it has received little conceptual attention until recently. In her seminal article on emotion, Crawford (2000: 120–3) argued that neorealist and neo-liberal approaches to international politics accept that fear and hate are the ‘engines’ that drive state behaviour. Booth and Wheeler (2008) have demonstrated the relationship between emotions of fear and the ‘security dilemma’, or the existential condition of uncertainty that arises from the misperception of the other’s intentions, which is also one of the central concepts of realism. As they (2008: 62) state, ‘It is fear in the context of unresolvable uncertainty that makes the choices governments face in the security realm … so challenging.’ Fear is pervasive in a context of war yet, like other emotions, has been largely ignored by a field of study that has made war and security its central focus. That a discipline striving for scientific status would avoid questions of

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emotion is perhaps not surprising. Emotions, like values, are assumed to be soft and messy and detract from the hard rationality of science. The avoidance may also relate to the difficult ethical questions that accompany war. In a study of Iraq and Afghanistan, Maja Zehfuss (2010) demonstrates how military categories, relating to precision bombing and collateral damage and the assumptions attached to them, obscure important ethical questions regarding death in war. She argues that a choice to bomb, even with precision weapons, is to ‘always already choose to kill “innocents”’ (2010: 557). The avoidance may further relate to the very practice of war. One of the biggest challenges for the soldier is to undertake the job of killing others as a disciplined activity, with self-control and emotional detachment and indifference regarding the consequences of the act (Johnson 2007: 656). An abstract language and, in contemporary times, high-tech weaponry help to distance the analyst/practitioner from the emotional and human consequences of war. The targets, by contrast, cannot so easily escape the confrontation with fear and suffering. Fear is a part of human life. Fear in the face of grave danger can also be traumatic. Animals in the wild, such as the tiger, literally ‘shake’ off their trauma following an attack (Levine 1997), a practice that informed the oldest forms of human medicine as well (Keeney 2007). In

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modernity, humans have lost this capacity to shake off a horrific experience of fear (Levine 1997). Given the separation between mind and body, so characteristic of both science and modern life, traumatic fear has been characterized as a mental disorder. Since the Vietnam War, trauma has been medicalized as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Contemporary psychologists, however, increasingly argue that trauma is neither a disease nor a disorder but an injury or disease caused by fright, helplessness and loss (Levine 2010), in which deep fear becomes lodged in the cells of the body. This is closer to the original meaning of trauma as an injury or wound to the body, often arising from battle. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how fear and trauma shape practices of international security. The first section examines the securitization of fear in the discourse of political leaders and its consequences. The second section analyses the various ways that modern institutions and technologies have medicalized trauma. The third section raises questions about alternative frameworks for politicizing fear and trauma. Fear and trauma are evident in three different layers of social experience, including the political discourse of leaders, the institutions and technologies by which fear and trauma are managed, and the potential for politicizing and

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transforming approached.

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The securitization of fear While traditional security studies emphasized materiality, it has been more squeamish about the suffering of bodies in war, and even less has been said about the role of emotion. Within international relations theory, the relationship between individual and state has been fairly straightforward. Looking outward to the international, the protection of the body politic is assumed to be the prior condition for the protection of individual bodies. The social contract, as discussed by Hobbes, allows individuals to step out of a continuous ‘war of all against all’. Once the social contract is formed, the security dilemma is elevated to the level of state interaction. The security dilemma has been conceptualized as a problem of perception, emerging from the inability to know the real intentions of others, and thus how to interpret their behaviour in a condition of anarchy. The uncertainty generated by this lack of information has led states to act on the basis of worst-case scenarios, arming in response to any perceived threat and often, as a result, generating a spiral of arming by both sides. Booth and Wheeler (2008: 63) introduce the role of fear in the security dilemma, arguing that it is ‘the dog that did not bark’. This reference to Conan Doyle’s 306

detective story, ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’, highlights the point that sometimes silence barks loudly and a non-reaction says all that needs to be said. Fear has been implicit in discussions of the security dilemma within Security Studies but rarely articulated directly. At the political level leaders often don’t rely on the language of emotion, whether to avoid appearing irrational or unmasculine (Booth and Wheeler 2008: 64). Lowenthal and Heiman (2008), like Booth and Wheeler (2008), emphasize the absence of emotion in the rational discourse of leaders. The former argue that there is evidence that Israel was motivated by a desire for revenge during the Second Lebanon war in 2006, but the official discourse reflected ‘a material and utilitarian logic [while] … revenge remained implicit’ (2008: 702). A former Israeli cabinet member explained this discrepancy by stating that ‘Israeli leaders probably engage in auto-suggestive processes that allow them to claim that their acts are not led by emotions … from the fear of being criticized for such primitive motivations’ (2008: 708). In this account the emotional motives for policy-making are separate from the articulation of threat. As a result, fear is often not articulated as fear but, as Robin (2004: 27–8) notes, ‘wrapped in layers of intellectual assumption’ … which may have been ‘woven centuries ago, that fashion our perceptions of

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and responses to it.’ Booth and Wheeler (2008: 65) claim that it is the assignment of enemy status, and the politics of identity, which define what or who the other is – rather than actual behaviour – that leads to ascription of malevolent intent on the part of the other. The Israeli example highlights the potential for a discourse of danger, articulated in rational terms and avoiding emotive language, to nonetheless feed on and reproduce fear within populations. The security dilemma highlights the uncertainty aroused by the actions of others in a condition of anarchy. Fear is part of this uncertainty. The question of what it would mean for a collective body, such as a state, to experience emotion, has been an important topic in the emerging literature on emotion. Scholars such as Alexander Wendt (2004) have argued that we can treat states as if they are persons, who among other qualities, possess emotions. Hall (2011) has explored the strategic role of anger in diplomatic interactions between states. Sasley (2011: 453) identifies three ways to discuss how emotions inform state behaviour, including treating the state as a single actor or as a person; focusing on individual state leaders as representatives of the state, which has more in common with foreign policy analysis (Hudson 2006); or to treat the state as a group and follow the internal process by which the cognitive and emotion practices of group

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members, such as state decision makers, express the emotions of the group and determine how the state will act. In this framework the aggregation of individual feeling is at one and the same time a group feeling, i.e., the ‘group becomes part of the individual, who then reacts not as that individual but as a member of the group, and individual members of the group converge on the same emotions so that we can speak of a “single” protypical emotion’ (Sasley 2011: 454). While Sasley highlights more cognitive and psychological processes, authors such as Crawford or Mercer (in Bleiker and Hutchison 2014) take a further step away from the emphasis on cognition to the social underpinnings of emotion, referring respectively to its institutionalization or cultural embeddedness. Robin’s (2004: 27–8) reference to ‘layers of assumption’ and memory suggest a particular way to cut into a more social or cultural approach to emotion. The connection between individual and social emotions is well travelled ground, although the issue has by no means been resolved (see Bleiker and Hutchison 2014). While the psycho-somatic1 experience of emotion is individual, the trigger for these emotions in a political context relies, arguably, on socially shaped assumptions, which constitute who the other is and what is meaningful, valued and would be experienced as loss to the self, whether defined in individual or collective 309

terms. These meaning structures are acquired through socialization – one is not born with them. They are reproduced through shared memories, which, when articulated, visualized or experienced in the public realm, whether by leaders or the media, can trigger emotions at the individual level. This requires some qualification. The fear of the individual in the face of danger is not, in some circumstances, qualitatively different than that of an animal who is confronted with a physical attack. Faced with an unknown party wielding a stick or a gun, the mind and body quickly go into fight, freeze or flight mode. However, humans can also feel fear in response to the verbal communication of threat by another, in the absence of an immediate threat of bodily harm. This is the core of coercive diplomacy where the hope is to persuade someone to stop doing something or to avoid doing something without having to use physical force. Communicating a threat includes a promise that some form of harm will follow in the future if the target does not comply. Threatening with words and the negotiation of an outcome depend on meaning constructs that are not solely the property of individuals, ranging from the meaning of the speech act, the identity of the threatener and the credibility of his or her threat, the definition of the values at stake, to more cultural assumptions about how this type of interaction is

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played out, and the specification of options. The physiological response of the individual may be no less intense than in the case of a direct threat but the response is first and foremost to a set of socially meaningful assumptions or past experience rather than immediate physical violence. An emphasis on socially shared assumptions opens the door to understanding the social foundations of emotion, without reducing them to the sum of fearful individuals, and without the need for a clear distinction between individuals and groups. An alternative to conceptualizing emotion or memory as the property of individuals or groups – for instance, the state as a person – is to think about how emotion is performed through narrative. Brent Steele’s (2008) discussion of ontological security provides a somewhat different take on the security dilemma, arguing that it is less physical survival that is at stake than maintaining a consistent concept of self through narratives that give life to routinized foreign policy actions, in the face of crises to this routinized identity. Memory, narrative and action are the crucial links by which states alert individuals within that action is necessary and to motivate and energize action (2008: 17). Andrew Ross (2014: 4) demonstrates how emotions are generated through political interaction, which may be magnified by the resonance of events with the past, and diffused through communication

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technologies, circulating across geographical and cultural contexts, sometimes having unexpected effects on political processes. If the somatic experience of fear within individuals is triggered by meaningful social narratives, the emotion then becomes a performance which shapes the surface and boundaries of bodies, defining for instance, who should and should not be the subject of mourning. Judith Butler (2004: xviii) argues that grief is often circumscribed, in so far as it draws boundaries around who should and should not be seen and heard, and who is recognized as having a ‘life’ and who is not. From this perspective neither the emotions nor the memories from which they arise are static phenomena but rather part of an ongoing process of giving meaning to the past and present through time (Olick and Levy 1997). Emotions move out from the body shaping the very surface of bodies (Ahmed 2004). The emotional narrative can in this way be transferred to new locations or situate memory within different and even competing narratives (Rothberg 2009). Memory is a performance and this production always takes place within a social world, and already existing discursive universe, which necessarily shapes, limits and renders possible particular formulations as legitimate, to the exclusion of others. Cultural forms and institutions, such as the media, play an important role in mediating these memories

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(Stier 2003). These narratives tell us who the other is, and whether and why we should be afraid. American elites have often stated that foreign leaders, such as Slobodan Milošević or Saddam Hussein, are ‘like Hitler’, and thus require a firm response.2 The argument may be presented within a rational narrative, but understanding and ‘feeling’ this threat as existential relies on a historical memory of who Hitler was and why he posed a threat, that is, he tried to dominate Europe, he rounded up Jews and others, threw them into concentration camps and gassed them. Even an otherwise rational reference to an ‘other’ as ‘like Hitler’ may trigger a series of associations and a sense of immanent threat and fear, regardless of whether one has had any direct experience with Hitler, or Milošević or Hussein, for that matter. The narrative communicates both the allied victory over Hitler, which was lead by the United States, but also the type of harm that someone ‘like’ Hitler could, if not averted, inflict on a population. The narrative includes elements of forgetting, and not least the US camps for Japanese nationals or the failure of the United States to open its arms to more refugees from Nazi Germany during World War II. The narrative reinforces the goodness of the United States as a liberator as well as the consequences of a lapse of vigilance towards new threats. In this respect, it combines the 313

exceptionalism of the United States with the exceptionalism of the Holocaust. At the same time, it functions in different ways in other contexts. In Israel, memory of the Holocaust was, following the Eichmann trials, mobilized in the consolidation of the state. For the Palestinians, the Holocaust narrative has cast a shadow on memories of Al Nakba, or the catastrophic expulsion of Palestinians from their land following the establishment of Israel (Fierke 2014). None of these threats arise from direct physical harm, at least from Hitler. Americans or Europeans, individually or collectively, know to feel threatened and when to feel fear on the basis of social values and structures which are embedded in social memory. Memory magnifies the fear. We are inclined to think of fear or trauma as the real experience of individuals and its appearance in political language as mere rhetoric. The claim that emotion is a social category is counter-intuitive – and many would say it is simply wrong – given an assumption that emotion is one of the most individual of experiences. But many psychologists and philosophers agree that emotions have both a social and ethical function (Schweder and Haidt 2000; Haidt 2001; Johnson 2007). Further, the distinct ways in which emotion is expressed or experienced across culture suggests that emotion, and its appropriate expression, are shaped as much by context and socialization as

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neurology. The stimulus for the affective response, particularly in a political context, is socially and culturally defined, relating for instance to nationalism or past memories of war that have become part of the cultural memory of a people. The following three points highlight distinct elements of this process. The first regards the construction of meaning in narrative, in which emotional categories provide the context for a particular response. For instance, Germany experienced its defeat in World War I as ‘utterly traumatic’ (Channel 4 2002; see also Bartov 2000; Burleigh 2000; Fierke 2004). The unwillingness to accept defeat contributed to an interpretation of the loss as a ‘betrayal’ by the German government, among others. The narrative of betrayal was complemented by that of the ‘humiliating’ conditions of the Versailles Treaty and subsequent isolation from the international community. It was in this context that Hitler constructed his power, promising to avenge the loss of life in World War I and to make Germany great again. Out of an unusually fragmented postwar political environment, the Nazis shaped a coherent German identity, repressing difference within, and building the capability to project power outwards, which then gave rise to World War II. A second point regards the relationship between memory, identity categories and

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emotion, or how assumptions about who the other is are embedded in language and magnified through an association with past memory. Conflict in the Balkans, as discussed in chapter 3, was constituted in narratives of trauma which referred to experiences at least 50 years, and as far back as 600 years, earlier. Narratives of the recurrence of past trauma magnified the sense of fear. Serbs in Croatia referred to their rivals as ‘Ustasa’, an allusion to the brutal Nazi puppet regime during World War II (Glenny 1992, 1999). When Milošević told a crowd of angry Serbs in Kosovo that they ‘would never be beaten again’, he was making an indirect reference to their defeat by the Ottomans in 1389, among others. Discourses of anger, based on this past humiliation, were the foundation upon which he built a new power base as leader, even while acting to mobilize it further. Stories of atrocity by victims in the former Yugoslavia often revealed an uncertainty about whether events had occurred during World War II or during earlier wars (Weine 1999: 161). As in the other examples, the environment came to be shaped by a politics of fear, marked in particular by a hyper-vigilance that the past was about to recur. Narrative memories of past trauma assisted in the consolidation of collective identity, which was the basis for a projection of power and a regional war.

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A third point is how the mobilization of fear in social narrative can trigger a somatic response in individuals. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, symptoms of PTSD reverberated across the United States, affecting large numbers of people who did not witness the attacks directly (Elias 2002; Hoven et al. 2003; SAMHSA 2003). One can hypothesize several possible reasons for this experience of fear and trauma by American observers. The first regards the widespread media coverage of the attacks and the continuous repetitions of the explosions on television,3 combined with the political discourse of the Bush administration. President Bush (2001a) acknowledged those ‘whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security have been threatened’, and gave meaning to the experience as an ‘act of war’ that had to be avenged. Second, the attacks were truly shocking. They came out of the blue, and the use of conventional aeroplanes, taken hostage by suicide bombers, to crash into buildings was without precedent. As Crawford (2013: 122) notes, immediately after the attacks the American public was fearful and this fear persisted for years. Fifty-eight per cent of Americans who were polled said that they were ‘somewhat’ or ‘very worried’ that they would be victims of another attack on 11 September 2001 (Huddy et al.

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2002: 422). A few days later, ninety per cent claimed to be experiencing low level symptoms of stress and forty-four per cent were experiencing five ‘substantial stress’ symptoms (Schuster et al. 2001). A month later, thirty-seven per cent reported feeling nervous or edgy because of the attacks (Huddy et al. 2002: 438). In the month following the attack, Crawford claims, fear was institutionalized as US domestic and foreign policy reoriented towards the terrorist threat. The result was a consolidation of that identity, a dramatic increase in the American military budget and the projection of global power as a part of the War on Terror. Justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was constructed on a very tenuous link between Saddam and the terrorist network responsible for 11 September. While the cases illustrate three distinct points, they also reveal a pattern. An experience of societal catastrophe, given meaning in narratives of others who are to be feared, made it possible to weave a coherent collective identity in political discourse which paved the way for a projection of military force. As Edkins (2002) argues, the securitization of trauma is only one of several possible responses to a catastrophic event. There is a tendency, however, for leaders to try to domesticate the fear by fitting it within a familiar narrative, particularly of attack and retaliation, which has the effect of closing down the political

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discussion regarding the meaning of what has taken place. Political leaders may give meaning to the collective experience of suffering in terms of fear and trauma, which is part of a securitizing move that intensifies the identification of the larger population with the actual suffering of a smaller number. The specific attack thereby becomes an existential threat to the community as a whole. The securitization of fear is one way to give meaning to a catastrophic event. Arguably, there is no necessary relationship between a social cataclysm and any particular articulation of its meaning in discourse. For instance, the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 – or prior episodes going back to the Gulf War – had many potential meanings, each of which shapes the politics of war in quite distinct ways. The language of having ‘liberated’ Iraq obliterates any complicity of Western forces in the suffering of Iraqis: any trauma was, in this narrative, a function of decades of living under a brutal dictator. However, the brutalization of Iraqi civilians and the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib is conducive to a redefinition of the liberation as a ‘trauma’. American soldiers, including female soldiers, engaged in acts of sexual and other humiliation with Iraqi prisoners. These acts, which violated many taboos of Islam, were then widely publicized. In addition to the obvious element of humiliation, these events magnified

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an implicit betrayal: the ‘liberator’ appeared increasingly to be a brutal occupier. Leaders may give meaning to widespread social suffering in terms of reprisal or the need to avenge the loss of the dead. For instance, President Bush argued that vengeance was needed after 11 September so that the victims of the attack would not have died in vain (Zehfuss 2003: 525). In the process the experience was elevated to that of an existential threat, which justified a suspension of normal politics. The catastrophic nature of the trauma makes it possible for leaders to convince the population of the need for extraordinary measures.

The medicalization of trauma The previous section examined how emotional narratives shape the boundaries of the body politic. This section examines how more institutionalized notions of trauma shape the human body. Fear and trauma enter into political discourse in a variety of ways, with varying forms of institutionalization, from the standard operating procedures of bureaucracies, to practices of surveillance, as well as the experience of individuals. This institutionalization, and the social categories upon which it rests, tends to have deeper meaning in a time place, as suggested in the previous section. The political narrative is not

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mere language but rests on assumptions about the body, including its relation to the mind, practices that flow from this, and further social distinctions within a moral universe. A taken-for-granted language and social values underpin the social institutions by which trauma has been understood and treated. An analysis of these practices provides a window into how emotions, and in particular the extreme negative emotions associated with trauma, become not only individualized, but localized in the mind. Social concepts can be situated in different conceptual fields, which transform the moral universe in which related behaviours are located. For instance, Theodore Sarbin (1990: 300) argues that mental illness was originally a metaphor derived from bodily illness. Use of the ‘illness’ metaphor reflected an important change in the construction of reality. One of the first was by Teresa of Avila (Teresa of Jesus 1946 [1573]) in the sixteenth century in the context of the Inquisition, who used an illness metaphor to shift responsibility for the social control of norm violators away from religious authorities to the practitioners of Renaissance medicine. The norm violators were nuns who were experiencing ‘visions’. In a calculated act to save the nuns from the Inquisitors, Teresa declared that the unwanted conduct, that is, the reporting of visions, should be treated as if it were a symptom of illness. In this shift, the

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nuns were relieved of moral responsibility for ‘abnormal’ acts. There are many examples since of medical diagnoses that have relieved those accused of ‘abnormal’ acts of moral responsibility. A plea of insanity in the context of a murder trial, if accepted, results in a different verdict than if the defendant had been considered to be sane, and thus an agent. Foucault (1975: 19–20) traced the development of the distinction between madness and crime in the nineteenth century. With the emergence of this distinction, early in the century, it became ‘impossible to declare someone … both guilty and mad; once the diagnosis of madness had been accepted it could not be included in the judgment; it interrupted the procedure and loosened the hold of the law on the author of the act.’ In the further evolution of this distinction, with the reforms of 1832, sentencing according to the ‘degree’ of illness was introduced, which gave rise to the practice of calling on psychiatric expertise to assess the ‘normality’ of the offender and the potential for normalization. Foucault’s study reveals how the changing boundary between madness and criminality shaped related practices and institutions. The labelling of certain types of human action as abnormal and aberrant, whether criminal or psychological, involves a value judgement

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regarding what is desirable and undesirable behaviour (Sarbin 1990: 324), which has political implications. These judgements have usually been made by persons who possess more power and authority than the person whose behaviour is being judged. They are made against a background of beliefs and customs that constitute a particular culture’s moral code. In this respect, the generation of policies and prescriptions for labelling and dealing with unwanted conduct is a moral enterprise (Sarbin 1990: 325). In so far as the labelling of unwanted conduct as an ‘illness’ removes moral responsibility, it also removes agency. While fear is a more generic human experience, the moral transformation constituted by the naming of trauma shares some similarities with the discourse of mental illness, but is also quite different. Like mental illness, psychological trauma arose from a bodily metaphor. Before the nineteenth century the word referred to a physical wound, primarily from battle. It was psychologized during that century with the development of a science of mind and memory, which, as Ian Hacking (1998) argues, wrested the human soul from religion and drew boundaries around the human memory that had not previously existed. He points to a much longer history of collective memory that precedes the individual assumptions of psychology, and, here again, it is worth

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mentioning, older human practices that understood fear, including traumatic fear, to be a bodily experience. Trauma, like mental illness, was only in the twentieth century constructed as a concept of individual mind. The symptoms of trauma, as codified by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, include hypervigilance, the intrusion of the past in memory and emotional numbing. All of these constitute the individual as fundamentally isolated and correspond with the collapse of community (Summerfield 1998: 9–37) and those meanings that had structured everyday life (Lifton 1988; Janoff-Bulman 1992), as well as a loss of feelings of being protected (Edkins 2003b). Trauma is also different from mental illness in so far as the environment of the victim is more directly implicated as the source of shock and thus of potential responsibility and compensation. In addition to Freud’s work on female hysteria, which was said to originate with child abuse, the concept was a response to the emergence of the railway accident and ‘railway spine’ and, later, shell shock in World War I, and was tied to the legal pursuit of compensation or pension (Shephard 2002: 16). Most tort law on accident and liability was developed in connection with the railroads (Witt 2004). The codification of PTSD in the 1980s followed a political struggle led by

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psychiatric workers and activists on behalf of the large number of Vietnam War veterans who suffered from the undiagnosed psychological effects of war-related trauma (Young 1995: 5; Herman 1997). Psychological trauma emerged out of and is a by-product of a historical context characterized by rapid industrialization and total war. As Allen Young (1995: 5) notes, PTSD, the official diagnostic category for psychological trauma, is a historical construct that has been ‘glued together by the practices, technologies and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated and represented and by the various interests, institutions and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources.’ This genealogy has been defined by a medicalization of the problem. The coining of trauma related to an understanding of the toxic effect of fear and violence on the individual mind. It denotes both a loss of agency and a relationship to a destructive social world, even while constituting the individual as isolated.

Soldiers War is both an expression of a social and moral order, which often revolves around a conflict between two abstract notions of future order (Scarry 1985), and a departure from the everyday moral order of human life. On the one hand, war is defined by shared expectations and values, embodied in formal regulations, 325

hierarchies of authority, written orders, incentives and punishments (Shay 2003: 6), not to mention the rules of war codified in international law. In addition to this, any particular culture will have its archetypal narratives of heroism and of practices to be repeated or avoided. Accepted practice of worthy or shameful behaviour constitutes the moral order of war. On the other hand, there are several respects in which war may result in a betrayal of moral order. A sense of betrayal may develop in interactions between enemy soldiers, where normal perceptions of safety and consistency are destroyed by the continuous fear of attack, which, as Shay notes, strikes ‘not only at the body but also at the most basic functions of the soldier’s mind, attacking his perceptions by concealment; his cognitions by camouflage and deception; his intentions by surprise, anticipation and ambush’ (Shay 2003: 34). Governments may betray through reliance on lies and euphemisms, or by putting soldiers’ lives on the line in a war lacking in moral or legal legitimacy, as was the case in Vietnam or Iraq. War may further result in a betrayal of the very moral order constituted within the military, which ‘holds the life and safety of the soldier’ (Shay 2003: 15), for instance, when a commander places his own interests before the lives of those under his command. The individual may also betray his or her own moral order. For instance, a soldier may be traumatized by his or her acts of brutality in the 326

fog of war. At the source of combat trauma, argues Shay, is a betrayal of ‘what’s right’ (Shay 2003: 6). The contrast between traditional warfare, which was defined by rules that embodied some notion of ‘what’s right’, and the war in Vietnam, which gave rise to unusually high rates of PTSD, highlights the social dimension of both. One difference between the two was the degree to which soldiers were conditioned to kill. Numerous scholars have argued that killing does not come naturally to soldiers, but is a result of socialization and conditioning (Grossman 1995; Ehrenreich 1997: 10; Goldstein 2001). In a study of World War II, Swank and Marchand (1946) found that only 2 per cent of the soldiers were predisposed to being ‘aggressive psychopaths’ who did not experience the normal resistance to killing or the trauma associated with extended periods of conflict. Dave Grossman (1995: 250) also highlights the resistance of soldiers to killing, noting that, in World War II, 75–80 per cent of riflemen did not fire their weapons at an exposed enemy, even to save their lives and the lives of friends. That the non-firing rate decreased to 5 per cent in Vietnam, he argues, relates to the social conditioning of soldiers in that context. While psychiatric casualties in war have been growing since World War I, Grossman (1995)

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argues that the experience of soldiers in Vietnam was qualitatively different and the increased incidence of trauma was a function of this difference: unlike past wars, in which soldiers were a part of a unit, soldiers in Vietnam began and ended their one year of duty alone and rarely bonded with the unit or maintained contact with members after the war (see also Hallock 1998). They were fighting an insurgency, and often found themselves involved in indiscriminate violence which included women and children. Upon their return home they received little social support, and were ostracized for having done the wrong thing. In contrast to an emphasis on victory made possible by sacrifice, soldiers in Vietnam questioned the value of their sacrifice against the background of defeat and socially inspired shame. While, as already noted, the majority of soldiers in past wars were reluctant to kill, soldiers in Vietnam were conditioned, through Pavlovian behavioural methods, to kill on command. Trauma existed in both contexts, but in Vietnam it was much more widespread, including up to 15 per cent of all soldiers. In Grossman’s account, it was less a difference in the character of individual soldiers in Vietnam, aside from the younger age of draftees, and thus their greater susceptibility to manipulation, than a difference in the institutions and practices that moulded the experience of the soldier. Iraq and Afghanistan, like Vietnam, gave rise to a disproportionate number of 328

soldiers with PTSD, with approximately 20 per cent of returning US soldiers suffering from the condition (Veterans and PTSD 2012–2013). In Britain, the large numbers led to widespread accusations that the military did not provide adequate follow-up services. In 2012, more British soldiers died as a result of suicide than deaths in battle (Panorama 2013). The meaning, practices and institutions constructed around the traumatic experience of soldiers have changed over time, raising, in different degrees, questions about war as a moral practice. During World War I, shell shock was viewed largely as a disorder of the individual soldier. It was assumed that some individuals, because of their physical make-up or past experience, were more predisposed to trauma than others (Shephard 2002: 75). Treatments varied from country to country. The English tended to release patients to civilian life, regardless of whether their symptoms were resolved (Shephard 2002) in contrast to the more harsh French practice of ‘unmasking simulation’ or alleviating symptoms so that the soldier could return to the trenches as soon as possible (Shephard 2002: 102). Following the codification of PTSD in the 1980s, an increasing number of soldiers who suffer from the condition as a result of battle made claims to the US and British governments in particular. This represented a shift towards recognition

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that responsibility for trauma lies less with the individual than with the context of war. As Howell (2012: 215) notes, ‘the invention of PTSD and its application to veterans … position them not as perpetrators in wartime, but as victims.’ While British and Canadian deserters in the context of World War I were court-martialled or shot, there has since been a greater likelihood that they would be diagnosed as suffering from PTSD. In this respect the codification of PTSD transformed the framework for understanding an unwanted behaviour from one of criminalization to medicalization, removing liability from the individual to the collective responsible for the shock, for instance, a government. More recently, as Howell (2012) notes, there has been a shift towards an emphasis on prevention and instilling resilience during military training so that soldiers don’t later develop PTSD in the aftermath of war. Resilience programmes teach soldiers ‘positive psychology’ and how to ‘stop catastrophizing’. The problem, argues Howell (2012: 222), is that this approach places responsibility for developing (or not developing) PTSD with the soldier, thus shifting the onus back to the individual. If one develops PTSD, it is a sign that they were not sufficiently resilient and couldn’t ‘think positively’ during catastrophic events. Howell argues that the resilience model is socially and economically useful for the

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military. A diagnosis of PTSD results in disability and compensation claims, which became a major financial cost in the context of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the US, in the absence of a comprehensive civilian national health service, the costs of benefits and long-term care for veterans has been estimated at $600 billion to $1 trillion dollars (Bilmes 2011).

Civilian victims Just as the institutions for treating the trauma of soldiers in war have changed over time, so have practices relating to civilians. Nunes (2014) examines the politics of colonial medicine, demonstrating how it provided a system of knowledge by which Western nations made sense of the colonial space, which joined together scientific, racial and moral ideas. The experience of diseases such as smallpox, plague, cholera and malaria, and their association with indigenous populations, reinforced pre-existing suspicions and prejudices, while fostering a sense of the innate racial and physical superiorities of Europeans (Arnold 1988: 8). Medicine framed the need for the protection of the Western self in a ‘hostile’ environment where the colonized, as a potential source of contamination, presented a major health threat, which then shaped how health was managed and power was mobilized in the colony, including practices of intervention. The

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colonized body, according to Nunes (2014: 105), ‘including its strength, ability to work, propensity to fall ill, its movements, functions and excretions – became the centre of a medical system of knowledge-production and intervention.’ The body became a surface that was malleable to being shaped by power, which served the interests of dominant groups, often to the detriment of the majority of the population. He argues that the colonial medical experience continues to be of relevance to contemporary global power structures as well as practices of exclusion and harm. It shapes a colonial mentality in which non-white populations are viewed as an undifferentiated mass, which is still present in some international health interventions and practices of ‘therapeutic governance’, including those related to trauma. In the 1990s an increasing number of authors argued that widespread unresolved trauma in war would potentially fan the flames of future war (Volkan 1997; Minow 1998, 2002). Arguments of this kind contributed to policies of psycho-social intervention by the international community in conflict zones. The hope was to assist populations in processing the traumatic experience in order to place it in the past so that it would not be repeated in the future. A further argument in support of this type of intervention was that mental health issues may impede people’s ability to be

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economically productive, and will thus impede national development (Howell 2012: 217). The movement towards high precision weapons and aerial bombardment were also thought to constitute a more humane form of warfare (Coker 2001). All of these developments corresponded with the expansion of humanitarian activities following the end of the Cold War and the attempt to spread liberal democracy across the world, a subject that will be examined in more depth in the next chapter. War therapists were among the first to question the assumptions underlying Western models of trauma therapy (see, for instance, Bracken and Petty 1998), including whether meaning is generated within individual minds, whether Western conceptions of mind are applicable to other cultures, and the limits of focusing on individual rehabilitation in a context of war. The psycho-social interventions also arguably contributed to the medicalization of security. According to Elbe (2012: 321), the medicalization of security has three dimensions. First, the securitization of health transforms our understanding of security and insecurity in world politics. Second, the emergence of health security is changing who ‘does’ security. Lastly, the rise of health security is changing how security is practised, not least by introducing pharmaceutical interventions as policy instruments. Our minds and bodies subsequently become new battlefields of

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security policy. The trend toward the medicalization of security has been particularly evident in relation to ‘complex political emergencies’, where the diagnosis of entire populations with PTSD has not been unusual. One study published in The Lancet in 2000 diagnosed 99 per cent of Sierra Leonians as suffering from PTSD (as reported in Howell 2012: 217). Pupavac (2002) argues that the trend towards universalizing trauma has legitimated indefinite international governance, thus representing a form of cultural imperialism by the West. Therapeutic governance rests on an assumption that populations are incapable of self-government, ‘the community itself is pathologized as dysfunctional and politically delegitimized’ (2002: 493). However, stressful experiences are not in and of themselves synonymous with PTSD and stress can be a positive impetus in the reconstruction process. According to Pupavac (2002: 503), the therapeutic paradigm rests on a story of victims and perpetrators which reduces the human subject to a de-politicized and vulnerable child in need of revenge. In effect, ‘[t]he trauma/violence model is not only problematic as an explanation for social violence and war, but the approach delegitimizes the recipient population as political actors’ (2002: 503). The naming of events as traumatic contributes to new forms of security governance, when they might instead

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invoke more heterogeneous forms of knowledge (Aradau and Van Munster 2012: 232). The tendency to diagnose entire populations as traumatized has recently been drawn into question from two distinct directions, following on the earlier criticisms of war therapists. The first is the resurgence of biomedical models of trauma. The second is the increasing popularity of models of resilience which privilege prevention in the face of trauma (Howell 2012: 214). From the perspective of biomedical models, the focus on traumatic stress diverts attention away from those who have severe mental illness in post-conflict and disaster settings. This shift towards ‘severe mental disorders’ was complemented by a second approach which emphasized self-governance, self-reliance and building local capacities. According to Howell (2012: 219) resilience models acknowledge that trauma has been over-medicalized, which represents a recognition that not every individual develops PTSD following catastrophic events and that perhaps other concerns, such as work, schooling and family reunification are more pressing for aid recipients (2012: 219). Resilience has not only become a model for post-conflict societies but post-9/11 has also become a buzzword for understanding the need to mediate the demands of an endless security war in an age of anxiety. Neocleous (2012: 191)

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argues that resilience is so prominent amongst security institutions that there is now a commercial rhetoric of ‘organizational resilience’ for corporations, through institutions created to ‘manage organizational anxiety’. The political category of resilience builds on an anxious political psyche, which is engaged in an endless war, forever preparing for the next attack. These discourses of war have generated categories of ‘survivor’ and ‘trauma-victim’ (Neocleous 2012: 194). By re-presenting trauma through a narrative of victimhood, psychiatry has played a crucial role in helping the state to conceal the very trauma that it produces, affectively closing down alternative possibilities. The narrative presumes ‘we can be traumatised, we can prepare to be traumatised, we can be trained to be resilient against the trauma to come, and we can obtain some therapy to help us cope in advance. But we must not be challenged to respond politically’ (Neocleous 2012: 196). Resilience practices shift the emphasis from external threats towards the internal coping and adaptive capacities of individuals and their communities. This represents a new mode of governance which highlights the politics of individual choice and rational choice-making to the end of creating self-regulating or ‘empowered’ citizens (Chandler 2013: 212–13). Hacking (1998: 239) argues that many psychological or sociological concepts come

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about through acts of redescription, followed by a ‘semantic contagion’ in which they become part of reality. For instance, the variety of activities covered by the term ‘child abuse’ has radically expanded over the last three decades, such that behaviours that previously went unnoticed have become abuses. A new or modified mode of classification can change the context within which acts or agents are understood. Inventing or moulding a new approach to behaviour generates new ways of being and new choices. In this respect, a concept of trauma in its different forms represents a social construction rather than a ‘discovery’. The medicalized approach to trauma, paradoxically, constructs the individual mind in isolation and as the victim of catastrophic shock, while implicating the social environment that gives rise to it. The ‘semantic contagion’ of PTSD has been ambiguous in so far as it has focused on an individual disorder, while largely ignoring critical questions about the practice of war. As a medicalized discourse, trauma depoliticizes war, making it difficult to ask political and ethical questions about the practice.

The politicization of fear and trauma Several themes have been developed in the preceding sections. First, the articulation of

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threat by political leaders often carries an emotional resonance, building on memories of the past, which contributes to the securitization of fear and trauma. Fear, while experienced by individuals, is triggered by social and political categories of identity. Second, trauma in war has been medicalized and developed through a range of institutions, which are not static but have changed over time. These institutions rely on distinctions between the body and mind, as well as between soldier and civilian. Both the individual and the political constructions highlight isolation and separation from a larger community, albeit at different levels. While the ‘trauma’ of a community can lead to a consolidation of identity, it simultaneously may harden the boundary separating that community from ‘others’ outside. In this respect, the traumatic experience constitutes a particular type of identity, that is, one that is aware of disconnection from others and, subsequently, fearful and hypervigilant for new threats. The third approach is more reflexive in giving meaning to a traumatic event, recognizing the extent to which catastrophes potentially shatter meaning and feelings of safety, and highlighting the political nature of the process of reconstructing both meaning and the social world. In this construction of fear and trauma, there is an inextricable link between the physical, spiritual and moral properties of the experience. In acknowledging the destructive nature of fear itself – and not 338

merely the destructive nature of a specific other – questions about its moral limits and purpose are necessarily raised. Trauma is the moment of painful awareness that the infrastructures of life, which provide the foundation for feelings of security or protection, rest purely on social construction. Jenny Edkins (2002), building on the work of Agamben, associates this awareness with an experience of ‘bare life’. Her concern is that we are too inclined to latch on to a particular narrative, to domesticate that which by its very nature cannot be captured in words. Securitization elevates a problem outside of normal politics, grounding its meaning in a discourse of danger and revenge. The state, in securitizing the problem, reinforces its own ability to provide security and protection (Zehfuss 2003). This discourse depoliticizes by closing down questions about the meaning of the experience. In so far as this corresponds with a restriction on civil liberties, it restricts the space within which alternative identities and responses might be discussed. As Zehfuss states, the discourse becomes ‘an obstacle to critical debate, not only about … specific events, but about fundamental questions of politics, about who we are and about how to address our inevitable vulnerability and our responsibility toward others’ (Zehfuss 2003: 526).

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Dialogic processes of reconstructing meaning are more conducive to a politicization and the renarration of trauma. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), for instance, encouraged individuals to break their silence and speak of their suffering under Apartheid. In this respect, the process sought to overcome the isolation that often defines the traumatic experience and, through the face-to-face interaction between victims and perpetrators, to break the hold of a past experience of war in order to reconstruct a different kind of common future. This was reinforced by the underlying African concept of Ubuntu, which means humanness and an inclusive sense of community that values everyone. With Ubuntu, the healing of the individuals and society are inseparable. In the act of speaking publicly of their suffering, the individual experience was situated in a larger social and political context, as part of a process of collective healing and reconciliation. To speak publicly of suffering involves a recognition that human beings do not stand apart from the world, as isolated creatures looking in, but are rather always already a part of a conceptual community. Far from existing beyond speech, as is often assumed, pain, no less than any other experience, is part of our grammar for acting in the world. To speak of pain is to reach out to others for acknowledgement (Das 1997: 70). In this

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respect, speaking of pain is a political act which asks for, but does not necessarily receive, acknowledgement. Acknowledgement or denial of pain and social suffering have been at the centre of political conflicts from the Middle East to Northern Ireland. Denial is often at the heart of conflict (Cohen 2001); acknowledgement is at the heart of therapy (Herman 1997). The TRC was based on an assumption that telling the truth is in and of itself healing. The following example from Northern Ireland suggests the difficulty of capturing the truth of even a single act of violence and suffering when marked by the secrecy of war. The hope of the TRC was that the construction of a shared societal narrative, which disclosed the truth of Apartheid, would make it possible to avoid reproducing a past of war. The experience of speaking, being listened to and validated with official acknowledgement itself provided an important point of departure for integrating the experience of atrocity into a particular kind of narrative at the individual and societal level. The idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been far more problematic in Northern Ireland than it was in South Africa. While numerous groups exist to assist victims of trauma resulting from ‘the Troubles’, public discussions of a more structured process have tended to raise concerns about the costs, given

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the expense of the Bloody Sunday inquiry, and to devolve into disputes over who has suffered more, as each side focuses on the harm done by the other. Amnesty International (2013), among others, have criticized Northern Ireland’s politicians for failing to deal with the legacy of the past. David Cameron’s (2010) acknowledgement of the complicity of British soldiers in the events of Bloody Sunday was an exception. A further exception was a special programme on BBC2 (6 March 2006), in which South African Archbishop Tutu brought together individual killers and bereaved from ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. In one of the meetings, Michael Stone, a former loyalist paramilitary, convicted on six counts of murder in 1989, was brought to the table with the wife and brother of one of his victims, Dermott Hackett. The family insisted that Hackett had no involvement in terrorism and thus was wrongfully targeted. Stone maintained that Hackett was an IRA member and thus a ‘legitimate’ target. Several features of their interaction are interesting in light of the argument of this chapter. Stone articulated an awareness of his own conditioning as a paramilitary and the distance he had created between himself and the humanity of his victims, including the fact that they had families whose innocent lives would be destroyed by his actions. He further acknowledged the extent to which he himself had lived a lie. His own family

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didn’t know of his paramilitary activities. He dressed each morning as if going off to work as a builder and, after a day that often involved killing, would re-dress as a builder, covering his clothing in dust to leave the appearance of a day’s labour. The fact that his own family had no clue of his own involvement in terrorism was used to substantiate his claim that Dermott Hackett could have been an IRA man without the knowledge of his family. Given the secretive nature of terrorism, there is an obvious problem in identifying ‘truth’. Mrs Hackett told her story, recounting how Stone’s act of killing had destroyed her life. She also asked him for the truth of what had happened. In this interaction her obvious pain was complemented by Stone’s obvious discomfort. He admitted his responsibility for the act, as someone who was involved in the targeting of Hackett, but denied he had pulled the trigger himself. The family did not receive closure in the sense of arriving at a confession on his part or a clarification of their questions. Mrs Hackett’s attempt to shake Stone’s hand ended before contact, as she left the room in tears. The emotional outcome of this face-to-face meeting for the family was not revealed. It may be that they were retraumatized by the experience, as was the case for many South Africans who participated in the truth and reconciliation process. Although there were no visible signs of emotion

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on the part of Stone, the observer could not help concluding, despite his lack of confession, that he was brought face to face with the human consequences of his acts, in relation to both the Hacketts and his own family. He acknowledged that he was part of a social environment that he entered into without reflection at a very early age. Given a lifetime of seeking revenge, he acknowledged that the Hacketts were far more human than he, for their quiet willingness to sit with him at the table. The ultimate effect of this experience on the parties involved cannot be known. But the process itself provided an opportunity for both sides to be more reflexive about their acts and their experiences, and to begin to examine the actions of the other from a different angle, where they were not simply beasts, but victims of a political war. The interaction provided some insight into the dynamics by which the hate of others, and the intent to kill, is unreflexively reproduced. It also points towards the possibility of an ethics and politics of responsibility to the other, founded on the face-to-face relationship, which recognizes a fundamental and inescapable interdependence in our relations with others (Levinas and Kearney 1986; Levinas 1989). Past trauma often becomes a part of the grammar, the social memory and practices of a culture, particularly a culture that has been defined by the experience of war. Rather than seeing the present in its own unique terms, the

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picture of past memory distorts. The illness, argues Wittgenstein (1958: §109), manifests itself first and foremost in a faulty relationship with our language. Political language, almost by definition, is bewitching in so far as it seeks to persuade or even manipulate. An intractable picture of the other and a language of fear often perpetuates conflict. Wittgenstein (1958: §§133, 255) argued that the problems of philosophy can be addressed with different therapies, as if we were dealing with an illness. The change that is sought is primarily one of looking at the world from a new angle. It is not a change in belief but one of understanding and greater insight into why we act as we do. His use of a therapy metaphor suggests that change is about healing, about moving towards a more normal state of affairs, although not returning to normal functioning. The change is not in eliminating a pathological behaviour but in what counts as normal functioning (Edwards 1982: 136). Therapy is directed primarily to the bewitching element of our language and to those assumptions that hold us captive (Wittgenstein 1958: §§109, 153). Wittgenstein advocates an alternative method of ‘perspicuous representation’ by which we break the authority of the grammatical picture as literal representation, and begin to see connections and new ways of looking at things that have escaped us in the past.4 345

One such grammatical picture is the medicalized understanding of trauma, which rests on a clear separation between mind and body. The picture is destabilized once the development of PTSD is placed within a larger context, which reveals the political uses of fear and the changing institutions that have shaped its management. The movement from treating PTSD, which locates the problem in the individual mind, to resilience training, which is more holistic in its approach, represents a further move away from the literal representation. In so far as Western biomedicine, and by extension the medicalization of trauma and security, rests on a mind–body distinction, the shift towards resilience presents a potential challenge to this distinction. Several scholars have been critical of this move because it shifts the locus of responsibility back to the individual, conveniently cutting the cost to the state for the damage to soldiers in war, or representing yet another form of depoliticization. But there are two respects in which this shift might, from a critical perspective, have politicizing potential. First, if, as Pupavac argues, trauma discourse has the effect of disempowering communities through the imposition of Western models, then a model that is more empowering of individuals begins potentially to address this criticism. Second, resilience training, as used in the treatment of US soldiers, draws on techniques from other medical traditions, from 346

massage to Reiki, yoga, and Qigong (Miles 2008), all of which rely on a different understanding of the mind–body relationship, in which they cannot be separated. Within this alternative paradigm, the body contains intelligence and consciousness, as well as the potential for self-healing. This approach destabilizes the mind–body split that is characteristic of the biomedical model, as well as opening a space for taking seriously other traditions of healing, including the more localized. Brigg and Bleiker (2011), who politicize therapeutic governance, note the continuing influence of a colonial framework on approaches to conflict management, which have often presupposed coercion and the use of force as key instruments for the powerful to promote their interests. While these practices may bring an end to the surface conflict, they often ignore more structural forces that are the consequence of several hundred years of imposing Western interests and worldviews on indigenous populations through violence. The subsequent depoliticization of the historical and cultural dimensions of conflict risks reproducing the very dynamics that conflict resolution seeks to overcome. Practices of therapeutic governance have likewise imposed particular knowledge structures on societies which may be inconsistent with more local traditions. Brigg and Bleiker argue that cultural difference is

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often at the heart of contemporary conflict, from global terrorism to local community conflicts, and that difference tends to be viewed as an inevitable threat that fuels conflict. It could instead be embraced as a potential source of insight and a valuable resource for helping to manage conflict. To do so would involve recognizing the ‘need to enrich both prevailing Western theories and practices of conflict resolution and their often-ignored local counterparts through mutual encounter and exchange. Doing so requires a genuine effort to be open towards different cultural practices and ways of knowing and being’ (Brigg and Bleiker 2011: 2). Organizations that deal with children affected by war, such as UNICEF or Save the Children, have begun to raise questions about the appropriateness and effectiveness of Western models for treating PTSD in relation to children in Africa (Green and Honwana 1999). First, in many of these cases, the context isn’t post-trauma but an ongoing situation of violence, as well as poverty, hunger and displacement. Second, techniques that treat the individual in isolation ignore more social meanings related to ancestral and malevolent spiritual forces, and their role in the healing process. In Mozambique and Angola more traditional healers and families have been quite successful in treating war-related problems, based on indigenous understandings, both of

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how war affects individuals and on shared beliefs of how spiritual forces intervene in such processes. Traditional healing consists primarily of purification or cleansing rituals, attended by family members and the broader community, during which a child is purged and purified of the contamination of war and death, as well as sin, guilt and avenging spirits of those killed by a child soldier. These ceremonies are full of ritual and symbolism that are specific to the ethnolinguistic groups. They also bring the child back into the community rather than treating him or her in isolation. In any case, it was less help in healing the children that was wanted than help in finding missing family members or in establishing a stable social environment including schools, jobs, etc. War therapists in other regions have also argued that it may be less psychological help that is needed than some kind of justice and a sustainable and secure environment (Bracken and Petty 1998). Greater perspicuity regarding the assumptions and the institutions that reproduce fear, and the exploration of more contextualized knowledge-practices of healing, seem essential to a critical engagement with the securitization of everyday life, whether from the position of soldier, citizen or migrant. Catastrophes, whether natural or human made, happen. People, as individuals and groups, experience fear, often with good reason, in emotional and

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bodily terms. The key question is the extent to which the political discourse or bodily reaction distorts, constructing a hypervigilance and overreaction that clouds perception. Within the biomedical model, the jump from an individualized and medicalized notion of trauma to a more socio-political articulation is highly problematic, as trauma is localized in the individual mind. If instead, the political uses of fear and trauma are understood to be embedded in the stories we tell about ourselves and others, stories ‘wrapped in layers of intellectual assumptions’ (Robin 2004), then desecuritization, much like mindfulness, would involve stepping back from these narratives, and any sense that they are in and of themselves ‘real’, in order to assess the danger from a more balanced and holistic position, thereby creating the capacity to act rather than react, and expanding the potential for greater trust.

Conclusion The institutions and practices surrounding trauma have medicalized the condition, focusing on a disorder in the individual mind. These institutions, which emerged along with rapid industrialization and total war, have also implicated the social context, developing mechanisms for individuals to seek legal compensation. However, they have not raised serious questions about the practice of war 350

itself. This analysis has gone a step further, arguing that trauma is a social construction that has taken contextually specific forms. An emphasis on the social dimensions of fear and trauma makes it possible to investigate further its role in the construction of war between collectivities and the security dilemma, as the catastrophic experience of a population is securitized and channelled into acts of revenge by political leaders. At both levels, fear and trauma are in large part constituted out of the meaning given to a catastrophic experience. This meaning may construct the individual or state as isolated, in search of vengeance, thereby reproducing an experience of violence or war. Meaning may alternatively constitute a community that seeks to reconstruct relationships and a reflexive narrative of the past, which makes it possible to move towards a different kind of future. The latter is at the heart of the therapeutic experiments of the post-Cold War world, and particularly the South African Truth and Reconciliation process, which reintroduced victims and perpetrators in a face-to-face interaction. Social therapy in war necessarily politicizes the practice of war itself, drawing attention to the human suffering that is its consequence. It contains the potential for developing more positive notions of security, which build on neglected systems of healing that, far from treating individuals or states in isolation, embed them in a social and moral order. It further shifts attention away from 351

intervention to the end of eliminating danger and establishing control, to a focus on empowerment and meaning within a community.

Further reading Booth, Ken and Nicholas J. Wheeler (2008) The Security Dilemma: Fear, Cooperation and Trust in World Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Howell, Alison (2012) ‘The Demise of PTSD: From Governing through Trauma to Governing Resilience’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 37, 3, 214–26. Nunes, Joao (2014) Security, Emancipation and the Politics of Health: A New Theoretical Perspective. London: Routledge. Ross, Andrew A.G. (2014) Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Classroom exercise Find several images that depict a fearful or traumatic experience or situation, for example, a snarling lion, a soldier being bombarded in the trenches of World War I, refugees fleeing a war, or the Holocaust. Divide yourselves up into groups of two or three. Each group should then select a picture. In your group, think about the

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picture and brainstorm answers to the following questions.

Questions What is the difference between fear, as an emotion, and trauma? What makes the experience or events represented in your photo potentially ‘traumatic’? How might this experience contribute to the production of insecurity? What would it mean to politicize (or denaturalize) fear and trauma in this case? After ten to fifteen minutes, come back together and use your individual group conclusions as the basis for a larger discussion.

Notes 1. While this term is usually associated with something purely in someone’s head, suggesting fabrication, it has been reappropriated to discuss emotions arising from a closely networked mind–body relationship. See, for instance, Pert (1997). 2. Novick (1999) asked why the Holocaust was consolidated in American memory in the 1960s, twenty years after the event, and in the context of the United States, far from the

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scene of the crime. It was not that the emotions of a relatively small portion of recent emigrees who had directly experienced the Holocaust cumulatively transformed national culture and American policy. Rather narratives of the Holocaust, and its exceptionality, began to appear at the time, and became part of the socialization of a generation who were coming of age, where the majority were neither Jewish nor anywhere near Hitler’s concentration camps. That the ongoing fear or trauma of actual survivors was on an entirely different scale should not be minimized. The point is rather to question how a narrative of distant suffering would come to have such a powerful emotional hold on a population and a context, such that a whole series of crises have in the decades since been given meaning through the memory of Hitler and ‘never again’. 3. Among the estimated 10.5 per cent (75,000) of students suffering from symptoms of PTSD six months after 9/11, including children who were not directly affected by the event, the prevalence was higher among children who spent more time learning about the attacks from TV than those who spent less time (Hoven et al. 2002).

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4. For a discussion of Wittgenstein’s use of perspicuous presentation, see Clack (1999: 53–74) and Edwards (1982: 142–3).

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CHAPTER 7 Human Insecurity The previous chapter examined the fear and trauma that arise from the politics of danger, and the role of memory in reproducing war. One further shadow of the past that continues to influence global security is the gross inequalities that are the legacy of imperialism which have been exacerbated by processes of globalization. In the 1990s, ‘failed states’ multiplied. Bloody intra-state conflict did as well. The Cold War concept of military security, focusing on conflict between states, was of minimal use for understanding this phenomenon. Two developments in the mid-1990s provided an alternative point of departure. The first was a concept of human security, articulated in the 1994 UN Human Development Report (UNDP 1994). Human security shifts attention away from states to individuals, emphasizing human rights, safety from violence and sustainable development. The second was a rethinking of the relationship between security and development, previously two separate areas of analysis. This rethinking gave rise to the conclusion that under-development is dangerous in so far as it correlates with violent conflict and that achieving human security requires the

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transformation of entire societies into liberal democracies. These developments have reinforced the idea that the international community has a responsibility to spread democracy to other areas of the world. This chapter will explore these themes and the complex questions they raise. The first section will explore the concept of human security. The second will examine the convergence of development and security discourses in the 1990s, and what has since come to be referred to as the security–development nexus. The third section undertakes a critical analysis, while asking a larger question about the extent to which discourses of human security and liberal governance have played a role in reproducing insecurity.

Human security Human security builds on an idea, which had been gaining momentum since the end of World War II, that people’s rights are at least as important as those of states. The idea had particular relevance in a context where, following the end of the Cold War, the majority of casualties in war were civilian, where more than 30 million people had been displaced from their homes, where large numbers of child soldiers had been recruited or forced into violent

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conflict, and where rape became a standard practice of warfare. The human security agenda was an attempt to respond to a new global reality of failed states. As McRae (in McRae and Hubert 2001: 15) notes: When states fail, civilians suffer foremost. Because the international system that grew up in the twentieth century was designed to protect states and state sovereignty and to enhance security between states, the international system is struggling to protect civilians within states. The tools are not there, though some are now being developed in the face of staggering challenges. The concept of human security emerged from the fusion of several concepts (Hampson 2001: 152). The first, which was introduced by the Brundtland Commission in 1987, was sustainable development. The commission’s report argued that environmental protection was a necessary condition for the long-term survival of humanity and, subsequently, of any long-term development strategy (World Commission on the Environment and Development 1987). The second, introduced by the first human development report of the United Nations Development Programme in 1990, was human development. The report stated that ‘people must be at the centre of all development [and] … that while growth in national production (GDP) is absolutely 358

necessary to meet all essential human objectives, what is important is to study how this growth translates – or fails to translate – into human development’ (UNDP 1990: iii). In the fifth Human Development Report in 1994, human development was merged with a significantly broadened security agenda to produce human security (Hampson 2001: 153). The core concern underpinning the human security concept is the inextricable interrelationship between freedom from want and freedom from fear. In this holistic understanding the vulnerability of individuals poses a threat to – and thus the safety of individuals is key to – global security (Hampson 2004: 350). The UNDP (1994: ch. 2, 25–33) identified seven dimensions of human security: Economic security, which rests on an assured basic income or some publicly financed safety net. Food security and the need for all people at all times to have both physical and economic access to food. Health security which requires access to effective health care systems. Environmental security and the need for human beings to have a healthy physical environment. Personal security from physical violence. 359

Community security through membership in groups that can provide a reassuring set of values. Political security or the right to live in a society that honours basic human rights. One focus of the early human security agenda, championed by Princess Diana, was a treaty that banned landmines. Landmines often remain scattered around a landscape after war and become a source of violence to people, and particularly women and children as they go about their daily business. Other issues on the agenda have included protecting civilians in armed conflict; reforming sanction regimes to mitigate some of the more negative effects on civilians – as in Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of children died as a result of economic sanctions; the rights of women, for instance, in Afghanistan, where women were severely oppressed by the Taliban regime; humanitarian intervention to protect against future Rwandas or Srebrenicas or to prevent ethnic cleansing; and the demobilization and rehabilitation of combatants, and particularly child soldiers. The International Criminal Court, which has opened up the possibility of punishing war crimes and crimes against humanity, has also been an important item on the human security agenda. Middle-range powers, such as Canada and Norway, played a key role in the development of

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the early policy agenda, linking it in the 1990s to human rights, international law, equitable socio-economic development and the promotion of a humanitarian agenda. While holding the UN Security Council presidency in February 1999, Canada put human security on the agenda and initiated a larger discussion of the effects of violent conflict on civilians. The initiative was part of a general Canadian strategy in the 1990s, motivated by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, to make humanitarian issues into ‘high politics’. The hope was that the UN might function more proactively to prevent humanitarian crises, establish mechanisms for more rapid intervention, and strengthen socio-economic structures in an effort to prevent conflict and rebuild societies after war. The Commission on Human Security (2003: 4), created at the request of the Japanese government, and co-chaired by Sadako Ogata, former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, presented a report in 2003 to Kofi Annan, who was then Secretary-General of the UN, which defined human security as: protecting fundamental freedoms – freedoms that are the essence of life. It means protecting people from critical [severe] and pervasive [widespread] threats and situations. It means using processes that build on peoples’ strengths and aspirations. It means creating political,

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social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity. The concept has since had an important role in academic debates and policy making, contributing to the increasing importance of economic, environmental, health, food and other forms of security in the discussions of scholars, government officials, representatives of non-governmental organizations, international financial institutions and inter-governmental organizations (Thomas in McGrew and Poku 2007).

A critical concept? Human security emphasizes meeting basic material needs as well as preserving human dignity, which includes meaningful participation in a community. Caroline Thomas (2000: xi) argues that in this respect the concept creates distance from the neo-liberal conception of the individual as competitive and possessive. Although states are not the focus, they are not unimportant. They should play a crucial role in creating and maintaining structures of authority and responsibility that contribute to human security. However, in a globalizing world, states often don’t possess the means to deliver the goods. They can’t always implement international obligations because they lack 362

control within their borders and have inadequate institutional capacity and resources. The breakdown of order is often accompanied not only by conflict, but also by economic and social collapse, which can lead to famine and mass migration. In these circumstances, traumatic insecurity is the daily lot of civilians. This is exacerbated by the proliferation of non-state actors, such as international arms dealers, non-state paramilitaries, international crime and terrorism. A central underlying assumption of the human security paradigm is that sustainable economic development requires a minimal level of security. Human security begins with a recognition that the greatest contemporary security problems relate to human displacement, to the inability of many ‘failed states’ to protect their populations, and to the violation by states of the human rights of their citizens. As Hoogensen and Rottem (2004: 158) note, it is precisely because ‘state security has often been inadequate that discussions of reorienting the referent have arisen in the first place.’ Human security is a critical concept in so far as it raises questions about the focus of realist security studies on the state as a provider of military security. While Thomas distances human security from a liberal model, and claims it has been used by those seeking to transform global structures, as well as states, the critical literature has engaged primarily in a

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critique of its liberal underpinnings, as a later section will demonstrate. The key conceptual problem has been how to define a term that potentially includes everything. Scholars have complained about the existence of over thirty definitions of human security (Alkire 2004: 359). The lack of clear boundaries has, nonetheless, been useful for political actors who seek to organize as broad a coalition as possible behind the concept, and for anthropologists who seek to uncover how it is used in different contexts (Winslow and Eriksen 2004: 361). Scholars of human security have, on the one hand, sought a more precise category in order to improve its analytic strength (Thomas and Tow 2002; Newman 2004), and, on the other, have been troubled by the difficulty of fixing the definition of human security (Paris 2004: 370), arguing that the concept is so broad, potentially including any threat to human safety, that it becomes meaningless (Buzan 2004: 369–70; MacFarlane and Fong Khong 2006: 237, 247). In a critical analysis of the politics of this debate over definitions, Kyle Grayson (2004) asked who, what and where is marginalized when ‘experts’ provide a precise/scientific definition that is of practical use. He argues that the focus of attention should be the power–knowledge nexus that the concept constitutes. As Newman (2010: 88) notes, critical scholars of security have distanced themselves from the human security concept for a number of

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reasons, but not least the concern that while human security calls for a critique of the structures and norms that produce human insecurity, the ontological starting point of most scholarship and its policy orientation reinforce these structures and norms. The fear, according to Shani (2007: 7) is that human security ‘may be sufficiently malleable to allow itself to be used to legitimize greater state control over society in the name of protection’. Given its role in policy circles, and within discourses of humanitarian intervention, the concept has become wrapped in controversy, in both the academic and policy worlds. The central question regards its status as artefact of Western hegemony and liberal governance (Mgbeoji 2006). Answering this question requires a closer look at the theoretical underpinnings of the concept in the security and development literature.

Development and security One of the first theoretical attempts to conceptualize the relationship between security and development was Caroline Thomas’s In Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations (1987), which was a call to conceptualize security in broad terms to include food security, secure trading systems, monetary security and health security, emphasizing in particular how the organization of international capitalism affected the options 365

available to people and states. Focusing on the people of the developing world as the referent object, Thomas sought to address the needs of the poor and excluded, rather than their states. Her argument was thus an important forerunner to the human security discussion that followed in subsequent years (Spear and Williams 2012: 19–20). The human security concept was conceived in the coupling of development and security discourses, which reflect the combined concern about freedom from want and fear. Development and security used to be largely separate areas of study and practice. Development studies addressed questions of global inequality and poverty. Security studies focused on conflict and war. This section will further develop this tension by exploring the broader context of the conceptual convergence of development and security discourses, and the significance of this convergence in more depth. Development, as conventionally used, refers to the process of transition from a subsistence to a modern industrial economy. This process has been understood to be elite driven and reliant on modern science and technology. Development studies and practice rested on an assumption that societies in the South could replicate the social and economic changes experienced by the North since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This model assumed the possibility of unlimited economic growth,

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and that it would be possible to sustain a global economy where everyone had living standards comparable to Europeans or North Americans. The liberal development model can be contrasted with one of the oldest traditions of critical thinking in international relations. The critical Marxist literature on development is premised on the idea that globalization is not a new phenomenon. The underdevelopment of the South went hand in hand with the development of the North in a capitalist world economy. Critics of European imperialism in the early part of the twentieth century, and not least Lenin (1988 [1939]), argued that capitalism was fuelled by the need to expand in search of profit. Imperialism was a manifestation of this global expansion in pursuit of wealth. In the period following decolonization, these arguments were adapted to explain less formal structures of control. Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974) World Systems Theory provided a framework for understanding the relationship between the development of the industrial core, the underdevelopment of a periphery, which provided raw materials, and a semi-periphery, which produced luxury goods and provided a buffer against revolutionary transformation. Dependency theorists further examined how links between elites in North and South reproduced a relationship of Southern

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dependency and underdevelopment (Cardoso and Faletto 1979). From the 1950s to the 1970s, a critical discourse of development became popular in areas of the periphery that had been historically exploited. This critical framework, like the theory, placed the backwardness of the economies of the former colonies in a larger global context, in which the formal imperial relationship had, since decolonization, been replaced by less formal processes of exploitation. For instance, Northern companies purchased raw materials and labour power in the South below their true cost. Cheap labour and cheap Southern raw materials were transformed into manufactured goods in the North. This exploitative relationship was simply a new expression of the hierarchy that had constituted the capitalist world economy for centuries. It wasn’t that the South was undeveloped, but rather that it had been deliberately underdeveloped within a global relationship. Poverty was a direct consequence of how wealth was produced. This provided a global structural argument about the cause of poverty and legitimized practices on the part of Southern governments to intervene in the economy in order to lead the development process. At the time, many Third World states joined together in calling for a New International Economic Order, or a reorganization of the global economy so that

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they would no disadvantaged.

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This discourse of underdevelopment has largely disappeared since the 1980s, and particularly since the end of the Cold War. In its place, a neo-liberal agenda, which promotes the free market, the universal legitimacy of private economic power and individual choice within the marketplace, has emerged. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the majority of governments have adopted these norms. They have promoted globalization through the liberalization of trade, investment and finance, which in many cases has required the reform of national economies. Privatization and deregulation have been required as a condition of loan packages. The debt crisis that shook Latin America and Africa in the 1980s provided an opportunity for the IMF and World Bank to institutionalize structural adjustment programmes as a strategy for managing debt. In the 1990s, attention shifted to the economies in transition and then to East Asia. The transition from government intervention in the economy to a free market was most dramatic in the former socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe, which were dramatically opened up to the global economy after the fall of communism.

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Liberal policies, imposed by international institutions, have often had a detrimental effect on the populations of these societies, bringing greater hardship that has undermined the consolidation of democracy. The United States, the European Union and Japan have preached the gospel of free trade while subsidizing their own agricultural sectors, which has compounded rural poverty and joblessness in the global South while threatening food security. Local agriculture can’t compete with cheaper imports, on the one hand, while people who lack employment in rural areas don’t have the means to buy food. As Thomas (in McGrew and Poku 2007: 128) argued, human security is thus not merely an analytical tool but also a ‘political project’ that seeks a global governance that is more responsible to the interests of ‘the majority of humanity’. At the start of the twenty-first century, endemic and deep poverty affected over a billion people, and the gap between the rich minority of the world’s population (located mostly, but not exclusively, in North America, Western Europe and Japan) and most of the rest of the world was steadily widening. In contrast to economic assumptions that globalization is delivering economic growth for all, free market liberalization since the 1980s accelerated the widening of this gap. The combination of a widening rich–poor gap and an increasingly knowledgeable poor has contributed to a

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‘revolution of unfulfilled expectations’ and fuelled revolt from the margins, not least in the form of terrorist or paramilitary activity (Rogers 2000). By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, food riots were taking place across the global South in response to the steeply rising price of basic foodstuffs, which squeezed the expanding number of urban and rural poor. In this context, the FAO (2013) estimated that roughly 12.5 per cent of humanity (868 million people) were hungry or malnourished, and especially women; the majority of whom are in India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia. The economic problem has been exacerbated by climate change in developing countries. According to Oxfam (Vidal and Carrington 2013: 9), the 2012 drought in Russia cut the grain harvest by nearly 25 per cent. The devastating 2010 flood in Pakistan destroyed over 570,000 hectares of crops, which affected more than 20 million people. Over 13 million people in East Africa were affected by the 2011 drought, which led to famine in Somalia.

Security Accelerating globalization, on the basis of liberal economic principles, was one post-Cold War development. Another was the outbreak of ‘new wars’, such as those in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda, which posed

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a significantly different kind of security problem than the Cold War. First of all, these were hot wars, primarily outside of Europe, as distinct from the nuclear stand-off between the superpowers. It is not that hot wars were new, but rather that they tended, during the Cold War, to be subsumed by the larger superpower conflict. With the end of the Cold War, the new wars become a focus of international concern in themselves (Kaldor 1999). The conflicts related in some cases to the failure of states to consolidate their authority over an area, which may have been exacerbated by the loss of superpower funding as the Cold War ended. ‘Failed states’ and conflict proliferated in the 1990s. While the framework of international security assumes the centrality of diplomacy, states and state security, the new wars involved a wide range of actors, state and non-state, both as protagonists and as interveners, who were as likely to be defined by some form of supra-state or intra-state identity. The victims in these conflicts have been disproportionately citizens, rather than the representatives of recognizable state armies, and the protagonists likewise often lacked any identification with a state. Processes of militarization were not closely monitored by the state, but have formed out of official and non-official global networks of the arms trade, drug trafficking, etc. The global downsizing of armies following the end of the Cold War

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created a large pool of private mercenaries and an expanding role for them, and for the privatization of security, under the auspices of corporate actors or Western states (Musah in Milliken 2003: 166–9). The problem of ‘failed states’ raised questions at the international level regarding how to respond, particularly in the face of genocide or war crimes. In the first half of the 1990s, the international community diverted significant resources to humanitarian intervention in different conflict areas. This represented a shift away from the Cold War emphasis on deterrence between the superpowers to intervention by multilateral organizations in hot wars that were more locally defined. Peace support missions often brought a combination of civilian NGOs and international peacekeepers, who were involved in the distribution of aid to victims of war, in helping to keep transport lines open for aid, or assisting in the management of refugees. The missions sometimes involved a more explicit military component and military intervention. These operations gave international organizations, both non-governmental and governmental, unprecedented access to regions of the globe that had been far less accessible during the Cold War (Duffield 2001: 31). By the end of the 1990s the humanitarian phase of liberal intervention began to give way to the

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UN integrated mission and the attempt to integrate aid and politics in pursuit of Western foreign policy goals (Eide et al. 2005). The War on Terror provided a further shift, which destroyed the earlier approach to humanitarian access, as many non-state warring parties and opposition groups were transformed into ‘terrorists’, which presented many NGOs with the choice of severing relations with existing partners or being threatened with sanctions (Christian Aid 2004). In the context of the War on Terror, the National Security Strategy of the United States (2002) concluded that ‘we are threatened less by conquering states than failing ones’. These failed states, it was argued, could ‘become a haven for terrorism’. The latter is interesting in light of the State Department’s acknowledgement in 2006 that Iraq was at risk of becoming a safe haven for terrorists, three years after the US invasion (MacAskill 2006). A Bush administration document on transformational diplomacy (Wong 2006) called for a more ‘reactive response to crisis’ and a ‘strategic shift’ in thought processes, which involves a ‘mandate to improve coordination, planning, and implementation for reconstruction and stabilization assistance for countries and regions that are at risk of conflict, are in a conflict situation or making the difficult transition from it.’ In this context, the debate over humanitarian intervention shifted from questions regarding

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the ‘right to intervene’, and the potential conflict between sovereignty and human rights, towards the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P). The latter, which grew out of a proposal from the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), rests on an interpretation of sovereignty that assumes the responsibility of a given state to protect its citizens. This perspective incorporated a concept of ‘human security’ over more narrow definitions of national security. While the ICISS recognized the potential difficulty of getting states to embrace the responsibility to protect, it saw the challenge as a necessary one: Nothing has done more harm to our shared ideal that we are all equal in worth and dignity and that the earth is our common home, than the inability of the community of states to prevent genocide, massacre and ethnic cleansing. If we believe that all human beings are equally entitled to be protected from acts that shock the conscience of us all, then we must match rhetoric with reality, principle with practice. We cannot be content with reports and declarations. We must be prepared to act. (ICISS 2001) By 2005, a shift towards broader acceptance of this concept was visible on the part of the international community. The UN summit in September 2005 reached an agreement by leaders that ‘each individual state has the 375

responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ (MacAskill 2005). Despite blocking attempts by Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, India, Russia, Cuba, Iran and Syria, a majority of states, including many in Africa, the EU and Japan, backed this Canadian initiative, which was viewed as a significant advance in international humanitarian law and a break with the UN’s tradition of non-intervention (‘To Protect and Defend’ 2005). Perhaps ironically, the shift of focus with the R2P, towards security concerns and the coercive powers of Western states, has marginalized human security, with its greater focus on the economic and social needs of populations (Orford 2011). In an influential article in International Affairs, Martin and Owen (2010: 211) claimed that human security ‘has all but vanished’ from high-level UN reports, and security discourse is now dominated by the R2P, with its emphasis on military intervention and the conditional nature of sovereignty. In the convergence of development and security discourses, critical arguments about development have been replaced by liberal ones. The marriage reinforced a liberal agenda of transforming entire societies into liberal democracies based on an argument that underdevelopment is dangerous and a source of conflict. Following the interventions in

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Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), the United States became increasingly engaged with the security– development nexus, not only at the level of the government, but with think-tanks, lobbies, NGOs and public interest groups in the attempt to grapple with policy challenges related to different aspects of security and development, a trend that has only increased since the election of the Obama administration in 2008 (Spear and Williams 2012: 22). The World Bank (Collier et al. 2003; World Bank 2011) and the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC, 2003) have also increasingly paid attention to the link between the two areas in response to the rising cost of violent conflict, while the European Union also places the security–development relationship at the heart of its foreign and security policies. The European Security Strategy (Council of the EU 2003) states that ‘security is the first condition for development’.

The critical response The liberal model that underpins the development–security nexus has generated a range of critical responses that are the subject of this section. The analysis that follows highlights the methodological critique, the need to situate problems of development–security in a global historical context, the role of the knowledge–power praxis, the critique of

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problem-solving technologies, paradigm of resilience.

and

the

The methodological critique The liberal model locates the problem of human insecurity in the failure of individual states to proceed along the pathway to successful statehood. Critical analysts have raised questions about the methodological assumptions that underlie this approach. In the liberal model, democracy is an ideal type, towards which all states should want to progress. Failure and success are measured against this ideal type. The failure of certain states establishes the problem of human insecurity as arising from the lack of stateness and prescribes a response, that is, reconstructing the state as a liberal democracy. This is sound reasoning but rests on the faulty assumption that there is an ideal form of democracy to which all states could or should aspire. As Williams (2001: 529) argues, we don’t immediately recognize a democracy when we see one. Democracies can be composed of different political institutions (e.g., parliamentary or republican), different economic systems (social democracy vs. market capitalism) and different cultural values (France and the United States). Kurki (2010) further notes that democracy is a deeply contested concept. Complex debates regarding the meaning and plausibility of

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different models of democracy have a long history. In the context of post-Cold War democracy promotion, the contestability of democracy has received very little attention, given a focus on fine-tuning the practices and policies by which liberal democracy would be encouraged. The liberal model of democracy promotion fails to historicize processes of state-making or to recognize local and global processes that have contributed to the construction of different types of state. Milliken and Krause (Milliken 2003: 6) highlight the wide variety of institutional forms of representative rule that have emerged, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fact that many of these institutional forms remained incomplete or contested in many Western states until the latter part of the twentieth century. The modern state has always been a work in progress that relies on two implicit benchmarks. One benchmark is ‘stateness’, against which any given state should be measured as having succeeded or failed, which is the institutional dimension of state collapse. The other is the normal and practical implications of such failure, or the functional dimension of state failure. Full-blown collapse remains relatively rare, while state maintenance (in a weakened or decayed capacity) remains the norm. After Westphalia, the sovereign state was a legal phenomenon that fitted in only a loose way with the political reality. The political

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reality required gaining and keeping de facto control. From the outset, the modern state was an ideal of sovereign territoriality to which rulers aspired, but which they seldom achieved. Milliken and Krause (Milliken 2003: 7) conclude that the ‘relationship between state and nation, and between national identity and representative rule, are dynamic products of political struggle, which have rarely been successfully imposed from outside or above’. Attempts to pin down the essential nature of the state only end up reifying or idealizing it, stripping what is, after all, a human (social and political) construct of its historicity. The pursuit of statehood has rested on ingrained assumptions about appropriate forms of political organization and order, also adopted by scholars and policy-makers in the post-colonial world. The idea that legitimate nations, providing guarantees of wealth and security, could be constructed within a few decades of formal independence, was, argue Milliken and Krause, naïve. It required taking the state out of its historical context and treating it as an institutional form owing little or nothing to the historical forces that created it. Many states emerging from decolonization didn’t qualify for statehood by the criteria of international law in use at the time, that is, ‘the existence of effective government with a centralized administration and legislative organs’ (Brownlie

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1979: 4). They were granted independence but were, in fact, what Jackson (1990: 177) refers to as ‘quasi-states’. Once it is recognized that these states never really were states, the question becomes not why they fail, but how or why they persist at all (Milliken 2003: 11). Once state failure and collapse are situated as possible outcomes of the process of state formation (and decay), it becomes possible to rehistoricize the state system and to break out of the constraints imposed by the idealized notion of state, presenting a more dynamic vision of state and sovereignty. This vision rests on an acknowledgement that the forces that produce strong, legitimate states in one context may generate weak and collapsed states in another, marked by different local and historical conditions. In this respect, the assumption of idealized liberal states, to which all must strive, becomes a factor in the construction and reproduction of failed states. Pinar Bilgin and Adam Morton (2002) analyse contemporary representations of post-colonial states that frequently revolve around elements of deficiency or failure. They argue that the political development literature, particularly in the United States, as exemplified by scholars such as Lucian Pye and Sydney Verba (1965), relied on a model of the state that presumed its ability to maintain political order, thereby distinguishing ‘successful’ post-colonial states, which did have effective control over societal

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forces, from ‘weak’ states that were unable to pacify recalcitrant societal forces. State strength and success is thus, in this literature, a function of the ability to manipulate coercive resources (Bilgin and Morton 2002: 63). More contemporary analyses of failed states have gauged degrees of ‘stateness’ along a continuum based on these criteria, creating a taxonomy of ‘failed states’, ranging from ‘anarchic states’, such as Somalia and Liberia; to phantom or mirage states, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo; anaemic states, such as Haiti; captured states, such as Rwanda; and absent states, such as Mozambique (Gros 1996). A similar logic is evident in the literature on democratization, where a universal model, predicated on a separation between the political and economic spheres, is formalized and institutionalized, resulting in a depoliticization of the economic sphere which removes it from political control (Bilgin and Morton 2002: 64). This is reflected in aid and neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes by institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, who are engaged in ‘democracy promotion’. The shift from the modernization and development theories of the 1950s and 1960s to the democratization theories of the 1980s and 1990s is one of emphasis, from the state as the centre of social control to ‘advocating and supporting the construction of conformist civil societies as supposedly autonomous spaces of

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individual freedom and association’ (Bilgin and Morton 2002: 65). What is missing from these logics, Bilgin and Morton argue, is any question about the processes by which these states become ‘weak’ while others become strong. They never ask the question who has failed the ‘failed state’? The question is important because the representations imply that the failure is down to the intrinsic characteristics of these states, without reflecting on the colonial background or their peripheral position in a global political economy. In this respect, claims about ‘failed states’ do not reflect on the power–knowledge relationship (Bilgin and Morton 2002: 66).

The global historical context The outbreak of new wars corresponded with an increasing emphasis in the academic literature and in political discourse on the idea that liberal democracies don’t fight with one another. This idea has been said to be the closest thing to a ‘law’ in the study of international relations. In 1995, The Economist noted that the belief that democratic states don’t go to war with one another has become a commonplace of Western policy. Like the liberal discourses of modernization, democratic peace theory rests on an assumption that the experience of Western states, in this case the development of peaceful relations between them, can be reproduced in other parts of the

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world. As in the liberal discourse of modernization, emphasis is placed on the internal composition of the state rather than the larger global context. The internal development of democracy is the precondition for common norms and peaceful relations with other democratic states. Subsequently, when internal politics are non-democratic, or when relations exist between democratic and non-democratic states, inter-state relations will continue to be governed by anarchy. Scholars such as Barkawi and Laffey (1999) have placed the liberal peace in a more global framework and historicized its claims. They situate the emergence of ‘zones of peace’ and ‘zones of war’ within global processes of social change. Globalization, in this type of argument, is not a recent phenomenon. Rather relations between contemporary zones of peace and war are inseparable from a history of Western imperialism and the internationalization of capital. Democracy became one of the major organizing principles of core states during the creation of a global system of empires, which was forged and maintained by colonial wars. During the process of colonization, and subsequent decolonization, states in both core and periphery were mutually constituted. The emergence in former colonies of modern forms of political and social organization, such as the territorial state – and its subsequent failure – has to be understood in terms of these historical

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processes within a global environment. Empires and imperial states have repeatedly deployed force against states and populations in the periphery in service of the project of extending European rule and institutions to the rest of the world. The liberal model obscures the destructive historical relationship between imperial states and colonies and its impact on contemporary conflict. The Eurocentric discourse of the liberal peace reproduces an assumption that agency resides only with Western powers, who are represented as a force for good in the world (Barkawi and Laffey 2006). As Anne Orford (2003) argues, narratives of humanitarian intervention often constitute the need to protect people in ‘failed states’, and rely on earlier colonial narratives about the benevolence of international governance over an uncivilized people who are unable to govern themselves. These images of widespread suffering give rise to demands that the international community ‘do something’, and the choice is presented in terms of either intervention or genocide, that is, either action or inaction. However, as Orford argues, inactivity is not the alternative to intervention in so far as the international community is already profoundly engaged in shaping the structure of political, social, economic and cultural life in many

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states, through the activities of, among others, international economic institutions. The emphasis on the use of force to respond to security and humanitarian crises diverts attention away from questions about the extent to which policies of international institutions themselves, or the longer history of imperialism, have contributed to the conditions that gave rise to the crisis. Further intervention in the name of humanitarianism all too often provides an alibi for the continued involvement of those interested in exploiting and controlling the resources and people of target states, frequently replicating the colonial practices of an earlier period. There is a tendency to locate ideas of global progress, ethical superiority and emancipation with the West, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to ‘other’ or distant practices of genocide from the West (Barkawi and Laffey 2006), rather than examining the complicity of historical Western practice in developing areas in constructing contemporary interactions. By contrast, Mamdani (2001) examines how earlier categories that were imposed during the colonial period set a particular politics in motion that helped to explain genocide in Rwanda in 1994. As genocide has not shaken every past colony, he argues the need to historicize the process of state construction in order to isolate how this particular outcome became possible in Rwanda. Not all states

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follow the same path towards the ideal, as suggested in the development literature, and, likewise, not all failed states follow the same path to failure. The thrust of Mamdani’s argument is that Western legal categories, set down in distinct phases of the ‘civilizing project’, established the conceptual world in which genocide in Rwanda became possible. Direct rule during the colonial period established a single legal order which naturalized political difference by mapping it onto a ‘civilizational ladder’ (Mamdani 2001: 25). This ladder was composed of a civilized minority of Europeans and a majority that was yet to be civilized, which enfranchised and empowered the former as citizens while disenfranchising the yet to be civilized majority. The unintended consequence of this categorization of colonizer and colonized was a crisis in so far as it created the conditions for the excluded to organize resistance along racial lines, thereby submerging their differences. This set the stage for a new policy of indirect rule that would dismantle and fragment racial categories, and thus the majority, into several political minorities. The result was a three-tiered structure of civilized (settlers, Europeans), to be civilized (racially defined, non-indigenous) and uncivilized (indigenous, ethnically defined). The race/ethnicity distinction highlighted the political differences

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between the indigenous.

non-indigenous

and

the

Unlike elsewhere in Africa, the Hutus were made into a single mass, rather than fragmented into multiple ethnically diverse identities. The Hutu mass was ruled by the Tutsi (Hamites), who were constructed as racially different and superior. Thus, the Belgian colonial state in Rwanda produced bipolar racial identities rather than plural ethnic identities among the colonized. It was only in Rwanda and Burundi that Tutsi were fixed as a race in relation to the colonial state (Mamdani 2001: 35). Later developments reinforced rather than transcended this polarizing logic, and later reversed the power relationship, such that the Tutsis became the victims of the Hutu masses. Mamdani’s point is to problematize the genocide by identifying the historical construction of Tutsi and Hutu as political identities, and the relationship to a global context of power. These identities were enforced by the state, and were transformed along with state institutions into bipolar identities, based on race, which served to freeze the categories and the privilege, or lack of privilege, attached to them. This distinguished Rwanda from other states in the region, which were organized on a model of cultural pluralism and multiple ethnicities. Contemporary

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practices of genocide, in these critical arguments, cannot be separated from a larger global historical context of knowledge, practice and power.

The knowledge–praxis nexus Problem-solving theories take the world as it is and seek repairs within it. They assume Western definitions while failing to recognize or acknowledge the complicity of historical structures of power, dominated by Western states, in producing (and defining) ‘problems’. Barkawi and Laffey examine these processes in global terms. Milliken and Krause emphasize the local particularity of these processes. Both cases point to a lack of clarity regarding the language employed and a failure to recognize the relationship between the use of categories and the practices that emerge as a result. The conceptualization of famine is a case in point. Famine is most often conceived as a natural disaster, resulting from food shortages, agricultural failure, drought or overpopulation. Questions of agency most often relate to the mobilization of aid on the part of the international community or the failure of this mobilization, that is, how ‘successful’ states or the international community can come to the aid of starving individuals in ‘failed’ states. Amartya Sen (1981), the 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics, first revealed the political dimensions of famine, arguing that it arises 389

from a problem of distribution rather than scarcity. Jenny Edkins (2000, 2006) problematizes the conceptualization of famine as a natural disaster for which no one is to blame, and asks a question about ‘who might be responsible for a famine, rather than what caused it’. An important precedent for this alternative approach is the 31 March 2005 UN Security Council resolution (1593) which referred ‘the situation prevailing in the Darfur region’ of Sudan to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, which is the first time that those responsible for a famine have been faced with the prospect of being held accountable and being brought to justice. What is usually passed off as a natural disaster had, in this case, become an indictment for a crime against humanity. Acts that suggested widespread attacks against civilians included ‘extensive destruction and displacement [that] resulted in a loss of livelihood and means of survival for countless women, men and children’ (International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur 2005: 3). Once mass starvation is placed in the category of a crime, Edkins (2006) argues, the vocabulary changes, from one of causes and solutions to one of responsibility, criminal liability, perpetrators, bystanders, victims and

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survivors. Crimes don’t just happen – they are committed. Further, once mass starvation is considered a crime, the consequence is that those responsible should be prosecuted (Edkins 2006). The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2002) includes mass starvation under three headings: as a war crime, when used as a weapon of war; as a crime against humanity, if used in the deliberate extermination of a civilian population by the deprivation of food; and as genocide, if carried out with the intention of destroying in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Edkins’s intent in placing mass starvation in the category of a crime is to politicize a process that has been technologized. The conventional Malthusian depiction of famine as a shortage of food, and a failure with a scientific cause, detaches it from a set of historically specific and locally based economic and political processes (Edkins 2000: 53). Famine as a natural disaster produces victims who need welfare provision or aid, rather than agents with a political voice. These victims then become subject to administrative mechanisms of food distribution and aid (Edkins 2000: 54). This process depoliticizes famine and constitutes it as a site for intervention and control. The technical problem of shortages is to be prevented through reliance on expert knowledge and expensive and profitable technological solutions. In this

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respect, the starving subject is produced as a subject of knowledge, which is part of a regime of truth produced by the institutions and practices of development studies. Her analysis demonstrates how these techniques of discipline fail to produce their apparent aim, that is, development. They do, however, succeed in reproducing a vulnerable group, dependent on help and assistance, rather than constituting agents in search of justice or political representation. Edkins argues that in the development literature famine is presented as a failure or a breakdown in a system that requires repair. Rather than attending to the politics of mass starvation, responses begin with the search for a ‘cause’ and, subsequently, seek a technical ‘fix’ for the problem. Edkins maintains that nothing ‘causes’ famine; rather people commit the crime of mass starvation. Starvation is no more ‘natural’ than suffocation; it is no more a shortage of food than the latter is a shortage of air (Edkins 2006). Mass starvation is the result of a ‘series of small acts’, some of them deliberate and some carried out with the intention of producing famines. This raises a question about responsibility and who benefits. Edkins politicizes mass starvation, showing that it is often a product of human intentionality, through a series of small acts, rather than a natural disaster. This introduces an element of

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human responsibility and agency construction of human insecurity.

in

the

Discourses surrounding famine represent a technology of power, which in application frames the phenomenon under consideration, constructing a distinction between experts and victims. A similar technology is evident in the problem-solving model of the liberal peace, which, it has been argued, tends to reinforce the concerns and power of Western elites at the expense of those who are in need. Academic attention has shifted in recent years from a primary focus on elements of problem-solving, or the technical and mechanical aspects of peacekeeping, to the fundamental objectives that underpin action and the interaction of the international community with local societies (Talentino 2011: 506). One of the central criticisms has been the lack of engagement with, and understanding of, local actors and cultures (Bowden et al. 2009; Dayton and Kriesberg 2009; Richmond 2010). MacGinty and Richmond (2013) highlight the extent to which decisions regarding specific conflicts are made by key state representatives and international policy makers in New York, London or Washington, with minimal representation from the conflict zones themselves. In so far as the global system has always depended on some form of more local agency and participation, which has historically been complicit in colonial practice, McGinty

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and Richmond seek to unravel the relationships of power that sustain a liberal peace, and the potential for more local emancipatory processes, given the increasing challenges faced by the North in imposing its will in the aftermath of Iraq and Afghanistan. They present the emergence of a ‘local turn’ and ask whether, given the increasing diffusion of power, hybrid forms of peacebuilding, statebuilding and development might become more supportive of local populations rather than defining of them. Grissam’s (2010) critical analysis of statebuilding in Afghanistan reinforces this type of argument. He argues that the discourse of conventional approaches to statebuilding evolved in a very specific context, where economic, military and political power have been predominantly in the hands of the US and its European and East Asian allies, who naturally frame statebuilding in terms of replicating aspects of Western systems in developing societies. The discourse has created realities on the ground in the form of statebuilding operations by the UN, regional organizations and state coalitions, as well as distinct communities of practitioners in international organizations, government agencies, non-governmental agencies and, increasingly, the corporate sector. The discourse of both policy makers and practitioners, he argues, reflects key neo-liberal

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assumptions, including the end of reforming more national political systems into Western-style liberal democratic regimes. The practice normally operates in a ‘top-down’ and ‘centre-outward’ direction, thus starting with the top of the bureaucracy and moving downward, as well as beginning in the capital city and moving outward over time. Grissam’s reflexive critique of this approach highlights three points. The first, which has already been mentioned, is that the Western state is not a transhistorical phenomenon that can be replicated across societies. The second is that the attempt to construct technocratic institutions, which reflect Western norms, results in institutions that lack a basis in the society these institutions set out to govern. The third is that this conventional approach applies an engineering perspective to a highly complex and contingent phenomenon, which leads to disappointment and disengagement when the reality doesn’t match the clean causal logic underlying the plans. In the case of Afghanistan, the attempt to impose a highly centralized and bureaucratized government on a society with a long-standing tradition of decentralized political structures, norms and patronage, as well as a shortage of educated candidates for technocratic jobs, was unlikely to give rise to the type of success desired by international state-builders, but rather ‘produced an empty husk of an Afghan government that is disconnected from broad 395

swathes of the population and ill-suited to projecting state presence outside Kabul’ (Grissam 2010: 506). As William Malley (2009: 506) states: To a significant degree, actors in the wider world approaching a transition such as Afghanistan’s carry with them expectations that the state-building process will lead to state structures with which they can comfortably interact. This tends to privilege the position of bureaucracies based in a capital city staffed by English-speaking officials familiar with the ‘international community’, at the expense of investment in structures of local government working hand-in-hand with locally legitimate political actors and governance structures. In the long run, this can lead to serious frustration, and even a crisis of legitimacy. For all the rhetoric about intervening on behalf of the people of Afghanistan, Kosovo or Iraq, there have been no mechanisms for the people of these countries to exercise control over the interveners. The people of Afghanistan had no say or control over the method, length or any part of their ‘liberation’. Action taken on behalf of citizens robs them of agency or political subjectivity. It is not a political relationship but rather one of representation and control, characterized by a divorce between the exercise

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of power, on the one hand, and accountability, on the other. Another element of knowledge-practice, evident in Afghanistan and Iraq, was the gendered targeting of people for either violence or nation-building. This gendering was most evident and incendiary in the encounter between counterinsurgent foot soldiers and locals, where, according to Laleh Khalili (2011: 1471) ‘sexuality is weaponised and gender is most starkly cross-hatched with class and race’. The purpose of counterinsurgency, in Khalili’s argument, is winning the hearts and minds of civilians. Counterinsurgency can be distinguished from the more hyper-masculine higher-fire-power form of warfare, in so far as civilian (feminine) is the opposite of combatant (masculine) in mainstream discourses about war. Civilians are acknowledged in doctrine and practice as the central objects of counterinsurgency military operations. As she states, counterinsurgency doctrine and practice ‘directly bring those bodies and spaces previously coded as “private” or “feminine” – women, non-combatant men, and the spaces of the “home” – into the battlefield; transform cities and homes and persons into highly gendered segments of the “physical and human terrain”; and utilise detailed knowledge about the quotidian (both perceived and coded as feminine) as “ethnographic intelligence”.’ The idea that

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gender produces a ‘masculinist’ logic of protection is a mainstay of feminist scholarship. Counterinsurgency, Khalili (2011: 1479) argues, transformed ‘womenandchildren’ into either actors who are understood to be complicit with combatants, or hostages and symbolic message-bearers for the work of counterinsurgency. Spaces that in other circumstances would not be coded as feminine but considered women’s domain, such as homes, hospitals and schools, are often invaded by counterinsurgents. Counterinsurgency transforms these spaces without necessarily destroying them – although destruction is often inevitable – thereby coopting everyday spaces into the landscape of war (2011: 1478). In Iraq, in 2004, for instance, a large number of cities were surrounded by barbed wire, under constant monitoring or both, and house invasions were often the norm, making women the direct targets of violence. Women were taken as hostages to compel the men to surrender, their homes were destroyed and they were targeted for the purposes of sending a message to others. Men were targeted in different ways within these cordoned cities. Men between the ages of 15 or 16 and 50, the primary targets of the intensive, aggressive and invasive surveillance, were subjected to retinal scans, thumb prints, identity cards and registers of residence, all of which were used to monitor the populations. The targeting of men functions to effeminize them through symbolic 398

and practical emasculation, including undressing them at checkpoints and in prisons and the use of language that was intended to dishonour men, which arose out of an orientalist understanding of what is considered honourable or shameful in ‘Muslim culture’ (2011: 1480).

Resilience Critiques of the knowledge–praxis nexus have highlighted the imposition of decisions and practices on local cultures. The resilience paradigm, as introduced in the last chapter, might be seen as a reflexive attempt to address the problem by shifting attention to empowering local agents. In his 2010 report to the General Assembly on ‘Human Security’, the UN secretary general distinguished human security from questions of using force, which had come under the rubric of the R2P. In this contrast, human security is used to refer to fostering government and local capacities and strengthening the resilience of both to emerging challenges; the R2P, by contrast, focuses on protecting populations from specific cases of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity (UN 2010: paras. 23–4). Chandler (2012) challenges this discursive construction, showing how human security and the R2P worked together in the case of the bombing of Libya and the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s

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regime in 2011. This context was not framed in terms of the conflict between human rights and sovereignty, as in the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, such as Kosovo, for instance; instead, the intervention rested on claims that the bombing facilitated the agency of the Libyan people in the process of securing themselves. In this respect, the intervention focused on the empowerment and responsibility of agency at the local societal level, rather than asserting the right of external sovereign agency. The resilient subject, whether individual or collective, is no longer conceived as a passive victim, as in the 1990s discourse of humanitarian intervention, but as an active agent, capable of achieving self-transformation. The question is whether this dispersion and decentralization of power represents the potential emancipation of more local agents, as discussed by McGinty and Richmond, in which case military intervention can be an act that facilitates or empowers vulnerable subjects on the ground (Chandler 2012), or is an attempt to evade Western responsibility for others, rather than take it on (Chandler 2010: 132), or is yet another expression of global liberal governance. Duffield’s argument about resilience leans towards the less optimistic view. He examines human security as part of a Foucauldian strategy of biopolitics, whereby a strategic complex of global actors and governing agencies, through a newly formed

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public–private relationship, shape and control civil populations. Duffield argues that the nature of power and authority has changed radically. This new power, expressed in the globalized structures of liberal peace, differs from old imperial structures. Rather than the brute imposition of power, or the direct control of territory, we see partnership and participation, which implies a mutual acceptance of shared normative understandings. Inclusion in global structures means buying into the norms that underpin these structures. This development is a response to the demise of political alternatives in the South, since the end of the Cold War, and the demise of the socialist project. On the part of the West, it is an attempt to stem refugee flows and to transform entire societies, replacing indigenous values and modes of organization with liberal ones. Duffield argues that the disappearance of critical analyses of development and underdevelopment is part of a move from an inclusionary to an exclusionary economic and political logic. Arguments about underdevelopment described a capitalist world economy driven by expansion and inclusion, that is, southern economies were included as providers of cheap labour and raw materials. The logic of exclusion rests on efforts to restrict immigration from the South, a hardening of the international refugee regime (UNHCR 1995)

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and, thus, encouraging populations from war zones to remain within conflict areas and avoid crossing international borders. The result of these trends, among others, is the increasing isolation and exclusion of the South from the dominant networks of the global information economy (Duffield 2001: 5). While the securitization or risk literatures highlight exclusionary practices that transform immigrants to the West into dangerous others, in Duffield’s (2012) work, the zones of peace and war, as discussed in the literature on liberal peace, are increasingly separated by a wall that keeps those in war zones away from the West. This constructs a dialectical tension between the claims to promote democracy in conflict zones and the increasing barriers constructed to protect Western democracies from ‘barbarians at the gate’. This new situation presents problems not only for negotiating access to humanitarian crises but has meant that aid workers have been subjected to greater harassment, extortion and information taxation by local actors (Egeland and Stoddard 2011: 17–18). This has corresponded with the increasing ‘bunkerization’ of international aid workers and greater distance from those they are trying to protect, given the increased perception that the aid industry faces an increasingly hostile and difficult operating environment (Duffied 2012).

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Policies of sustainable development, he argues, also rely on a division of human life into uninsured and insured life. Those in the West are ‘insured’, given the existence of welfare systems and a modern division of labour. Third world populations, who must survive in the absence of insurance, have to be taught to be self-reliant, and thus resilient, since they will remain uninsured (McCormack 2010: 128). Self-reliance in practice means the reduction of millions to a cruel and inhuman life, barely surviving at the level of subsistence. Technologies of security, sustainable development and human security are about constructing self-managing and self-reliant subjectivities outside the West, who can survive in circumstances of underdevelopment, where they will not be a source of security problems for the developed world (McCormack 2010: 129). The neo-liberal project is about controlling and managing uninsured populations globally. In relation to this biopolitical division, Duffield (2010: 66–7) argues that ‘humanitarian assistance functions as an international insurance of last resort for the world’s non-insured and erstwhile self-reliant peoples. Humanitarian assistance is mobilized when self-reliance breaks down and former colonial states, having never developed a comprehensive welfare system, prove unable and unwilling to cope.’

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Conclusion This chapter has examined the concept of human security as a response to the increasing problem of human insecurity in war. Human security is critical in so far as it raises questions about the conventional emphasis of security studies on the state. However, the liberal assumptions underlying the concept, and the development and security discourses from which it emerged, require critical scrutinization. The argument was developed through an examination of the conceptual apparatus surrounding human security, including that of ‘failed states’. The brief narratives of famine and genocide, Afghanistan and the liberal peace, demonstrated the role of assumed categories in constructing insecurity and in shaping the definition of problems to be solved. Formulating ‘problems’ in a scientific language of cause and seeking technical solutions serve to naturalize processes that have their origin in political struggles and/or human intention. A more critical approach to the concept of human security requires an exploration of the conceptual worlds that have given rise to various forms of insecurity. This requires problematizing the liberal assumptions underlying the concept, in order to prise open a more critical space for asking questions about the meaning of political community and the

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processes by which human security might more effectively be constructed.

Further reading Barkawi, Tarak and Mark Laffey, eds (2001) Democracy, Liberalism and War: Rethinking the Democratic Peace Debates. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Chandler, David (2006) From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention. London: Pluto. Duffield, Mark (2001) Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security. London: Zed Books. Newman, Edward (2010) ‘Critical Human Security Studies’, Review of International Studies, 36, 77–94. Spear, Joanna and Paul D. Williams, eds. (2012), Security and Development in Global Politics: A Critical Comparison. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Thomas, Caroline (2000) Global Governance, Development and Human Security. London: Pluto Press.

Classroom exercise You are the head of state (you can decide if you would like it to be a particular state) and have

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to make a decision about whether to support a humanitarian effort, endorsed by a UN Security Council Resolution, and several Arab states, to stop attacks on rebel forces by a long-entrenched and dictatorial leader in the Middle East. The rebel forces seek to remove him from power and build a democracy. Break yourselves up into groups of two or three. If appropriate, half of the groups could choose Libya as their case study and the other half might choose Syria. Look at the questions below and use them as the basis for undertaking an analysis of what you should do.

Questions What is human security? What measures would you take in this situation to bring about human security? What are the potential benefits of this approach? What are the potential dangers of this approach? Come back together as a class and discuss the various considerations as they relate to Libya and Syria.

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CHAPTER 8 Emancipation This book has analysed several themes from the critical literature on international security. The first section set the stage by examining the context from which security studies, and later critical security studies, emerged. Chapter 1 argued that definitions of security, and even the narrow definition, are always political. Chapter 2 revealed a broader array of potential security concerns, specific to different geographical areas, and identified a range of referent objects and threats which are related to the politicization of security since the end of the Cold War. The second section of the book examined concepts related to critical methodology. Chapter 3 explored the conceptualization of change, starting with the idea that war is a social construction and then moving on to the agent–structure relationship, practices of immanent critique and the potential for resistance. Chapter 4 looked at discourse analysis as a method for studying how identities are formed and transformed in historical and cultural context. The third section explored these insights in relation to the production and reproduction of danger, fear and trauma, and human insecurity. Chapter 5 examined the processes by which some threats

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are elevated above others as they are securitized, thereby producing danger. Chapter 6 looked to the other side of the equation and the production of fear and trauma as a consequence of war. Chapter 7 examined a concept of human security and its relationship to practices of liberal governance. Where does this leave us? Having approached ‘security’ from a critical angle, what are we to conclude? Some have suggested abandoning the concept of security (Neocleus 2008), while others wish to drop the word ‘critical’, given CSS is no longer informed by the emancipatory impulses of the 1990s (Hynek and Chandler 2013: 46) or because it has become mainstream (Brincat et al. 2011). The debate is in a much different place than eight years ago, when the first edition of this book was published. The centre of gravity has shifted away from a critique of traditional military definitions of security to a critique of the practices of global liberal governance. The latter critique implicates critical scholars who at an earlier stage saw an emancipatory potential in practices of humanitarian intervention. Traditional security studies was, in the earlier debate, accused of being ethnocentric; critical scholars now also face similar claims. Change happens and is often generated by the contradictions of a historical context. In this respect the core concepts of CSS are of relevance,

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even while arguments made in one set of historical circumstances become the object of critique in another. The purpose of this final chapter is to ask a question about what we should conclude from this exercise. In what follows, I examine three questions. First, does the concept of emancipation provide an answer to the insecurity of security or is it part of the problem? Second, to what extent have practices of security under global liberal governance imposed boundaries that severely constrain who can speak or what we mean and do when we speak security? Alternatively, have these practices, given their global reach, also opened a space for a broader dialogue over the meaning of security? Third, do we want to get rid of the concept of security altogether and, if so, how do we then conceptualize protection from harm, which remains an important human value?

Emancipation The potential for ‘emancipation’ has been a central theme of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt School tradition as well as much feminist scholarship. In everyday language, emancipation is associated with struggles for freedom from domination, such as the emancipation of American slaves or the emancipation of women. The word is derived from the Latin emancipare, meaning the action

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of setting free from slavery or tutelage (Wyn Jones in Booth 2005: 216). The theoretical roots of emancipation are found in Marxist theory. In his early work, Max Horkheimer (1972 [1937]), who coined the distinction between Traditional and Critical Theory, was concerned primarily with human emancipation from suffering that arises from the power of nature and weakness of society (Brincat 2012: 220). The foundation of solidarity, in his argument, was the fact that humans are ‘finite beings whose community consists of fear of death and suffering’ and who can sympathize with each others’ ‘struggle to improve and lengthen the life of all’ (Horkheimer as quoted in Stirk 1992: 178). The purpose of Critical Theory was to critique prevailing conditions and expose the contradictions that ‘entangled’ humanity through its ideas and concepts, thereby helping people to recognize how their free development was curtailed by the existing constraints of modern life (Horkheimer 2000: 14, 17). Later, Horkheimer, along with Theodor Adorno (1979 [1947]), rethought the problem of emancipation as they struggled to make sense of the barbarism of the Holocaust in Germany. They argued that the very process by which humanity had gained control over nature had given rise to domination and oppression rather than emancipation. While many assumed that horrors such as Auschwitz represented a

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deviation from the Enlightenment hope that modernity was progressing towards a better future, Adorno and Horkheimer turned this argument on its head. Rather than a deviation, Auschwitz was a product of Enlightenment thinking. It represented the deification of instrumental reason, which made possible the progression towards ever more destructive technology as well as the systematic dehumanization and destruction of entire populations. Instrumental reason, which was essential to nature’s domination, had, as its status increased, marginalized other more human forms of rationality. The Dialectic of Enlightenment signalled the end of an emancipatory vision, in so far as the critical tool of immanent critique, championed earlier by Horkheimer, was lost. Instrumental rationality had come to pervade even the more progressive approaches to social science, thereby contributing to the manipulation rather than emancipation of society (Brincat 2012: 232). Several decades later, Habermas (1984, 1987) attempted to breathe new life into the concept, focusing on the realm of interaction and community. As it is language that distinguishes humans from animals or nature (Habermas 1986: 314), it is the capacity for speech, he argued, that contains the potential for emancipation. What was needed was emancipation from those institutions and practices that stand in the way of unconstrained

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communication. Habermas, like his predecessors, encountered criticism for being too abstract and for lacking a concrete vision of an emancipated society (Wyn Jones in Booth 2005: 224). His thought has, however, influenced attempts to construct a ‘global civil society’ (Hynek and Chandler 2013: 50). The key point of this brief discussion is to highlight the extent to which evolution in the meaning of emancipation within the Frankfurt School has been shaped by a changing historical context. The development of the emancipation concept has been driven by a dialectical tension, between, respectively, nature and its domination, rationality and its deification, and language and its potential to constrain. This raises a question about the significance of the concept for contemporary security relations. The idea that emancipation and security are compatible concepts, or ‘two sides of the same coin’,1 has been a defining feature of CSS (Peoples 2011: 1116). Ken Booth (1991) highlights two elements of the relationship between security and emancipation. First, he defines security as the absence of threats. Second, he presents emancipation as freeing people from the physical and human constraints that stop them from carrying out what they freely choose to do. War and the threat of war are constraints, as are poverty, poor education and oppression.

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Booth’s concept of emancipation has been at the centre of debate within CSS. It has been criticized for its universalism, for instance by McDonald (2009: 121) who expresses concern ‘about the dangers of forcing others to be free, denying the legitimacy of difference, and imposing values that are ultimately Western in philosophical origin.’ Aradau (2004) argues that it is not the concept itself that is problematic but the way it has been defined and used within CSS; when emancipation is equated with security, it becomes difficult to envisage social change outside the logic of security. She states further that the ‘circular definition of emancipation as security deprives the former of its truly transformative potential’ (Aradau 2004: 398). Others have highlighted the focus on an essentialized individuality (Sjoberg 2011), idealism (Jahn 1998; Eriksson 1999), reliance on an abstract moral framework that ignores contemporary security (McCormack 2010), as well as seeking to impose Western values (Ayoob in Krause and Williams 1997; Barkawi and Laffey 2006) and reinforcing practices of Western military interventionism (Chandler 2006). Critical advocates of liberal intervention, such as Habermas, who argued that the Kosovo intervention was an emancipatory action, have, it is argued, become theoretical cheerleaders for a new form of imperial power, with human rights as its instrument (Douzinas 2007: 179; Duffield 2007; Jabri 2007). As such, the 413

concept of emancipation is ethnocentric. However, as Pinar Bilgin (in Brincat et al. 2011) argues, the idea that some values ‘originate’ in a particular culture is itself based on an essentialized view. In so far as charges of ethnocentrism tend to construct emancipation as the theoretical wing of liberal internationalism, Richard Devetak (2007: 152) warns of the need to draw a clear line between emancipatory approaches and the latter: ‘While so many controversial wars are waged under the banner of liberal ideals associated with Kant, the Enlightenment and cosmopolitanism, critical international theory will need to ensure that its arguments are not co-opted by or aligned with such war-mongering. It will need to distinguish its position all the more clearly from liberal imperialism.’ In responding to his critics, Booth (1999: 41–2) defined what emancipation is not. It is not a universal timeless concept. It cannot be gained at the expense of others. Emancipation is not synonymous with Westernization. More positively, security as emancipation sets out to engage with ‘real people in real places’ (Wyn Jones 1996: 214); it begins with actual insecurity as a ‘life- determining condition’ (Booth 2007: 101). As such, the meaning of security stems from the experience of insecurity by flesh and blood people rather than any universal a priori definition of what it means to be secure (Nunes 2012: 351). This is

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accompanied by a commitment to political change and a transformation of practices or structures that contribute to the reproduction of security. What Booth (2007: 6) refers to as ‘emancipatory realism’ grounds security as emancipation in real conditions of insecurity while simultaneously hoping to transform these conditions. Immanent critique is an important analytical method and political strategy of emancipatory realism, which engages with the core commitments of particular discourses, ideologies or institutional arrangements on their own terms. In the process of critique, possibilities for radical change are located within a particular existing order (McDonald 2012: 60). Booth’s language of ‘freeing from’ raises a question of who the agent of emancipation is, that is, whether the constrained themselves become agents or whether they require a liberator. The concept of immanent critique implies that the critical theorist would be an agent, given she stands alongside the poor and the marginalized and identifies contradictions within a historical context, thereby opening a space for change. In so far as critical security studies has, like more traditional security studies, been accused of being ethnocentric, agency of this kind suggests the potential for new forms of hierarchy, however well intentioned. Barkawi and Laffey (2006: 350) argue that the agents of emancipation are

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invariably from the West, whether in the form of Western-dominated international institutions, a Western-led global civil society, or the ‘ethical foreign policies’ of leading Western powers. Even when the concrete agents of emancipation are not themselves Westerners, they are conceived as the bearers of Western ideas. This does not mean that emancipation needs to be avoided per se. Rather, like any other phenomenon in international politics, critical attention to its underlying assumptions is required. The theoretical debates revolve around a question of whether emancipation is a concept of the Enlightenment, which brings with it all kinds of baggage, such as a belief in progress, an emphasis on the individual, and a moral framework derived from abstract reason. The theoretical issue flows over into a practical problem that emancipation suggests some kind of rescue from outside, and rescue from parties who may in some way be historically complicit in constructing the sources of constraint, much as missionaries were complicit in earlier practices of imperialism. In so far as emancipation is about freeing from, it evokes an image of the body in chains, a body that is unable to speak for itself and be heard. The central question is one of the extent to which the enslaved are capable of removing their own chains, through resistance, or whether they

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require the help emancipated.

of

others

to

become

There are situations where the power disparity is so great that emancipation would not be possible without some form of intervention by those who are not themselves constrained. In this respect, we can make a distinction, for instance, between the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), which, during the Civil War, freed American slaves, on the one hand, and, on the other, the US Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s as a form of resistance by African Americans who technically had been freed a century earlier, yet remained enslaved by Southern laws that defined them as second-class citizens. In the later stage, liberal constitutional principles at the national level were an important precondition for resistance against more localized laws of segregation, that is, they provided a point of reference for arguing that all Americans were created free and equal. At the same time, one could argue that the liberal order played a role in constituting the inequality. If, as has been argued (Butler 2004; Saurette 2005), the liberal self rests on notions of the good, moral and desirable, it also relies on a contrast with its opposite, that which is bad, immoral and undesirable. In so far as the former qualities have been associated historically with being white European and male, they presume categories of people that do

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not meet these criteria. While the goal posts have shifted over the last century, and women and people of colour can now be liberal subjects, the tension or even contradiction is most palpable in the presidency of Barack Obama. US President Obama occupies a space between the liberal emancipatory potentials of race in the twenty-first century and discriminatory practices with a long history, which continue to have resonance. While Americans inherit a narrative of living in the greatest nation on earth, and can point positively to the Civil Rights movement as an example of the capacity for reflexivity and change, the US remains a nation that is divided by the cultural politics of race, which since 9/11 has often been directed at Arab and Muslim others. Emancipation begins with critique and is primarily about the act of freeing, whether from the assumptions that blind us to alternatives or from structures of power that constrain human potential. Arguably all critical approaches seek emancipation in some form. Wyn Jones (in Booth 2005: 216) suggests that some concept of emancipation is a necessary element of any form of analysis that attempts to problematize and criticize the status quo. Hayward Alker (in Booth 2005: 200) discusses the need to include multiple Western and non-Western perspectives on freedom without ‘giving up the distinctive and attractive appeal to human

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improvement and emancipatory development that is so central to the ethical/global concerns of the critical security studies project’. Even Jacques Derrida (1996: 82) has expressed a commitment to the ‘great classical discourse of emancipation’ while avoiding inscription of the discourse into ‘a teleology, a metaphysics, an eschatology’. He goes so far as to state that there ‘is no ethicopolitical decision or gesture without … a “yes” to emancipation.’ As Peoples (2011: 1117) argues, the problem may be less emancipation itself than the way CSS has used the concept, which either has not been sufficiently grounded in the thought of the Frankfurt School, or relies primarily on the early thought of Horkheimer to the exclusion of other critical thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse, who, he claims, provides a better framework for understanding emancipatory transformation. Emancipation is a process rather than an end point, a direction rather than a destination. Immanent critique is one step in this process and the point of departure for identifying the emancipatory potential of a context. Rather than ‘we’ in the West emancipating those who suffer elsewhere, a reflexive process of immanent critique begins with freeing ourselves from the assumptions of, among others, a militarized understanding of security. Detraz (2012: 18) argues that reflexive scholarship is also needed to examine emancipation through the lens of gender, which

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would highlight the various ways in which the constraints Booth refers to are gendered. Choice is constrained by gender in so far as our actions are guided by gender, which limits the ability of women and men to choose what to do or how to be. Choice is constrained by the widespread gender inequality that persists across most societies. It is further important to recognize the complex ways that obstacles to emancipation in society overlap with categories of race, class, ethnicity and sexuality, and how marginalization and the silences that accompany marginalization present unique challenges for emancipation For instance, feminists and analysts of gender have long argued that the roles of protector and protected are gendered, whether we are talking about a relationship between individual men and women or global relations of various kinds. Hierarchies, said to benefit the weaker party, may actually legitimize and thereby reproduce the power of the stronger. That women and children are the greatest victims of violence in a militarized world is supported by statistics. Besides representing over half the population, they suffer disproportionately from wealth that has been directed to the military at the expense of human needs. Based on figures from 2010, 1.22 billion people worldwide live below the international poverty line (World Bank 2013), 700 million of whom are women; 771 million

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are illiterate, approximately two-thirds of whom are women (UNESCO 2012). One out of every eight people, most of whom are women and children, are chronically hungry. In 2010 an estimated 7.6 million children – 20,000 a day – died from hunger, and 17 million are born underweight due to the mother’s malnutrition before and during pregnancy (Dosomething 2013). Women are the most likely victims of rape, which is often a tool of warfare. More than 250,000 women were raped in the Rwandan conflict (Bandarage 1997: 286) and 20,000 in Bosnia (Hansen 2000b). The trafficking of human beings, primarily women and children, for purposes of enforced prostitution, is a side effect of war (Cockburn and Zarkov 2002: 61). Migration, as a result of war and/or poverty, has increasingly been feminized, such that women are estimated to make up at least half of the world’s migrant population, while specific migratory flows, for instance, from the Philippines and Somalia, have been composed primarily of women (Freedman and Poku 2003: 8). Seventy-five per cent of contemporary victims in war are civilian, and most of them women and children, compared to only 5 per cent in World War I. In these circumstances, ‘talking of war as if it is something mainly to do with men is nonsense’ (Pettman 1996: 89). If women are the central victims of the international system as it is currently organized, there is little sense in defending that

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system on the basis of arguments that it provides protection to those who cannot defend themselves. Such arguments are implicitly gendered. As Cockburn (1998: 43) states, ‘When men are sent to war to protect hearth and home, one of the things they will be told they die for is to keep their womenfolk safe from defilement by enemy men.’ The language of war, which separates the ‘front’ from the ‘home front’, has relied on the protection of the latter for its justification, and has thereby been constitutive of war (Cooke and Woollacott 1993: ix). The gendered construction of war separates men and women into ‘Just Warriors’ who protect and ‘Beautiful Souls’ who are protected (Elshtain 1987). The reality is very different. Feminists have sought emancipation from the assumption that security is best provided by military means. Cynthia Enloe (1993: 3) argues that militarization relies on distinct notions about masculinity, which are continually reproduced and legitimized by women as well as men. Like ideology, militarism is a package of ideas and values which define what is good, right and proper and what is bad, wrong and improper. This package includes the assumption that armed force is the best way to resolve conflict, that human nature is prone to war, that having enemies is a natural condition, that the most effective action is hierarchical, that in times of crisis those who are feminine

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require protection, and that the man who refuses to participate in violent action can hardly be said to have the status of man (Enloe in Cockburn and Zarkov 2002: 23). In this respect, the end of a particular war, for instance, the Cold War or the nationalist struggle in the Balkans, is not synonymous with the end of militarization. Militarism constitutes and permeates everyday practices, as well as identities and notions about security. It is a deeper process that can take decades to undo. The dependence of militarization on categories of masculine and feminine suggests that an end to militarization necessarily requires ‘changing the ways in which femininity and masculinity infuse daily life’ (Enloe 1993: 245). Emancipation begins at home, not least with a reflexive process regarding our own assumptions and actions.

Dialogue Debates over the concept of emancipation suggest that the institutions of global liberal governance, which at an earlier point contained emancipatory potential, are now seen by some to be a source of constraint and insecurity. The focus has shifted from the military security of states per se to practices of global liberal governance. These global structures are often understood to be underpinned by Western technologies of knowledge and practice and thus characterized by ‘West-centrism’ (Buzan 423

and Hansen 2009). However, as global structures, these institutions involve more global participation, and, with the rise of states such as India, China and Brazil, are likely to become less ‘Western’. Could the hierarchical ordering of West over rest, and the presumption of superiority contained within it, be replaced by a more open dialogue over questions of harm and the meaning of protection in the global space? The financial collapse of 2008, the disproportionate concentration of global wealth in the hands of a few, the failure to address the appalling humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, the increasing array of environmental disasters, from the Boxing Day tsunami in Asia in 2004 to Hurricane Katrina in the US in 2006, to the tsunami in Japan in 2011 or Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013, as well as the threat of global pandemics, point to the need for a fundamental rethinking. If earlier realists claimed a timeless pattern of security politics, going back to Thucydides, Machiavelli or Hobbes, these contemporary problems are of a much different kind, and of a much different magnitude, given the potential threat not only to particular states, but life on the planet as a whole. Some critical theorists have questioned the division of the world into ‘West’ and ‘non-West’, seeking to unsettle the assumptions upon which

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this hierarchy rests (Hutchings 2011). Assumptions reside in language and are therefore often overly familiar and difficult to recognize precisely because we reproduce them in everyday speech. As forms of taken-for-granted knowledge about the world, assumptions tend to remain intact until confronted with difference. Dialogue is one way to engage with others regarding difference, although the concept of dialogue most frequently invoked by critical theorists, informed by the Discourse Ethics of Jurgen Habermas, has been criticized on grounds similar to those of emancipation. Andrew Linklater (1998), who has applied Discourse Ethics to the international level, argued that a more global dialogue and conversation would pave a path to more universal agreement and thus a more universal culture. Universal norms, it was argued, would emerge out of a process of discourse and argument between concrete and situated actors in which all should be motivated by a willingness to be persuaded by the ‘unforced force of the better argument’ (Linklater 1996). Universal consent, in this framework, requires openness and reflexivity between agents who are willing to engage in conversation involving reciprocal critique and in which there is no certainty of who will learn from whom. This approach to cosmopolitanism attempts to strike a balance between universalism and particularism (Schapcott 2001: 83). 425

Cosmopolitan community requires that all individuals have an opportunity for equal participation in a conversation that will determine their own lives. The goal is to expand the values of the polis to the international realm, and thereby escape a core problem of international relations: the sovereign polis, where politics resides within the boundaries of the state, sets the stage for practices of exclusion of those outside, who are often ‘Othered’ within a hierarchical relationship determined by power. As Linklater (2005: 141) suggests, debates regarding dialogic politics, informed by Habermas, have revolved around whether the commitment to ethical universalism has an emancipatory potential or threatens to assimilate non-liberal forms of life within Western cultural frameworks that are exclusionary. Some critical scholars have problematized the Habermasian goal of universal consent. While also seeking dialogue that crosses lines of difference, they have resisted the idea of any kind of universal agreement, arguing that this represents a form of totalization, with repressive potential. It is difference itself that should be celebrated. Freedom is about speaking, listening and being heard, and not being excluded from communication and conversation (Ashley and Walker 1990: 395). An ethical relationship between self and other requires contestation

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and negotiation. All ethics arise from a relationship to otherness, which entails a permanent critique of totalization and a struggle on behalf of difference rather than an attempt to eliminate it. In practice, processes of dialogue have been defined less by the search for universal agreement than the attempt to move beyond a stark identity– difference relationship, often the foundation of conflict, towards some form of common identity and language that would make talk – as distinct from fighting – possible. The end of the Cold War and the various peace processes that followed, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland or South Africa, are examples of the use of dialogue to find sufficient common ground to move forward towards a different future. Contemporary obstacles to international dialogue may arise from assumptions of stark difference. Stark difference often rests on a hierarchy of power, underpinned by taken-for-granted notions of what is thinkable and who can speak. Dialogue assumes an equal ability to speak and be heard, but many conflicts arise because those at the bottom of hierarchy are unable to speak and be heard. It is often those who are weak and insecure who are least able to speak security (Hansen 2000a). A televised Save the Children ad showed a bare-boned starving African child staring into the camera. The commentator stated that the child was unable speak due to

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the hunger. It is not only starving children who are unable speak. Political prisoners the world over, whether literally in prison or imprisoned by second-class citizenship, have suffered violence for trying to speak freedom (Bloomstein 2013). Nelson Mandela, whose death in December 2013 was mourned across the world, was for 27 years silenced in prison and only able to speak and be heard as anything other than a ‘terrorist’ after his release. The rage of being silenced and unequal often erupts in violence. Even when a non-violent path is chosen, the ‘terrorist’ label may be applied to those who continue to speak rather than accept being spoken to (Fierke 2014). Practices of gift-giving or humanitarian aid, often at the moment of crisis, may reinforce hierarchical dependence if the recipients are not invited to the table as political subjects who speak to their own life conditions. The altruism and humanitarianism of international gift-giving often become a form of ‘whitewashed’ political persuasion, precisely because of the contrast with the negative side of international power politics (Aaltola 1999: 385). There are two issues at stake here. On the one hand, as suggested by Linklater (2005: 143), there is an appeal to human dignity and the moral premise that all human actors should be involved in decisions that affect them, including those related to their protection from injury. On the other hand, there is the practical problem

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that the global structure benefits a small portion of humanity at the expense of the rest. This hierarchy of global power is also reflected in theory. According to Shani (2008), while opening a space for non-Western voices, critical international relations theory still speaks for and to the non-West. Dialogue between mainstream and critical IR, for instance, has relied on a Eurocentric perspective and theoretical traditions (Hutchings 2011: 640). Even post-colonial theory reproduces the very hegemony it critiques, which begs the question of whether it is possible to ‘move beyond the West’ (Shani 2008: 723; Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). As Hutchings (2011) points out, the West/ non-West binary must necessarily be abandoned if scholars wish to develop a new politics of dialogue. The ‘West’ has never been a neutral term but is tied to a particular history and particular modes of dialogue, an association usually based on a presumed philosophical superiority or the historical progressiveness of contemporary Europe. Existing forms of dialogue, relying on the Socratic or Habermasian tradition, imply homogeneity in the characteristics of participants, and these tend to be Western characteristics (Hutchings 2011: 642–4).

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Spaces of contestation Several tensions lie at the heart of a dialogue that transcends the categories of West and non-West. First, the ideal speech situation, or any speech situation for that matter, presumes a language by which participants can meaningfully communicate with one another. Subsequently those languages that have spread as a result of colonial expansion or global dominance – and not least English – become necessarily the vehicles of a more global dialogue. A hegemonic language is thus a condition for dialogue and emancipation from a set of hegemonic practices. The contradiction is an unavoidable point of departure in which dialogue becomes the vehicle by which, through a confrontation with difference, we are potentially freed from a set of categories that divide the world into West and non-West, categories that presume the superiority of the former, who talk to and for the latter. Sabaratnam (2011: 782) develops the idea of decolonizing strategies to ‘articulate different subject-positions from which this “speaking across” or “dialogue” can take place.’ Decolonizing strategies deconstruct existing hierarchical subject–object relations and the central place of the West as the most important entity in world history, opening up a space to engage with plural pasts, presents and futures that have or are happening elsewhere. While

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connected necessarily to modernity, these alternatives have been excluded (2011: 787–8). As Barkawi and Laffey (2006: 346) state, ‘once vision is shifted from the fixation on the politics and policies of great powers to the ebb and flow of the social relations through which great powers – their societies, economies, cultures and armed forces – are constituted, re-produced and transformed, the imperial and the non-European world more generally take on equivalent importance.’ They provide a framework for thinking about the mutual constitution of strong and weak and the diverse ways in which they are ‘bound up together’ and in which the resistance of the weak profoundly shapes events and outcomes. Even the ‘historical absence’ of non-Western insecurity and approaches from security studies, Bilgin (2010) argues, can be understood as a ‘constitutive practice’ of both the discipline and the subjects and objects of security in different parts of the world. The claim that global relations are bound up together has been reinforced by the work of John Hobson (2004), who argues that many of the accomplishments that we tend to identify with the West actually originated elsewhere. He challenges the ethnocentric bias of mainstream accounts of the rise of the West, countering the assumption that Europeans, since the time of Ancient Greece, have been the pioneers of their own development, while the East has been

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merely a passive bystander in progressive world history. Hobson demonstrates that the major developmental turning points in Europe were informed by two processes. The first was the assimilation of Eastern ideas, technologies and institutions, which were spread from the more advanced East between 500 and 1800, when the global economy was Eastern-led. The second was the construction of European identity in the fifteenth century that led to imperialism, which was the vehicle for appropriating Eastern land, labour and markets. Analysis of world politics from the perspective of the marginalized subject is one way to uncover alternative knowledge structures, which may have something to say about the problems of global politics. According to Tickner (2011: 616) this involves prioritizing the study of silences and marginalized people’s experiences to understand their social world. It is not merely a matter of adding new voices from the global South but of rethinking the ontological premises of Western International Relations theory and, by extension, security (Shani 2008: 723). New forms of dialogue might involve an engagement with alternative traditions and theories, such as feminism and Buddhism, and ‘conversations between multiple, fractured self-identities, which acknowledge the imperfect and provisional

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nature of the insights that they generate’ (Hutchings 2011: 647). A second tension regards the extent to which critics are mistaken in assuming that the universal is the particular Western. Human rights, for instance, are often said to be a Western construct, yet many other societies have a concept of human rights which shares a family resemblance with the ‘universal’ category. For instance, Mohammad Kamali (2002: xv), a Professor of Law at the International Islamic University, Malaysia, argues: [w]hen human rights are seen as a manifestation of respect for human dignity, human rights are likely to have a more authentic basis across cultural traditions. As one commentator noted, ‘nothing could be more important than to underscore and defend the dignity of the human person.’ To take dignity as the goal and purpose of human rights would be to enrich the caliber and substance of these rights. It is perhaps less the case that human rights are questionable because they are a Western construct, as argued by some critics, than the need for a more global dialogue about the meaning of human rights or dignity in different cultures to identify the common meanings they share. What binds us or separates us as a human community may go much deeper than

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abstract concepts of international law. Emotions, from fear, anger, joy or distress, rely on a similar repertoire of facial expressions, which ensures that they remain intelligible across groups that would otherwise be separated by language and culture (Ekman 2003). While difference cannot be denied, there are also family resemblances across cultures. As Linklater (2006: 334) points out, many world religions prohibit different forms of harm. The principle of ahimsa, or non-harming, common to Buddhism and Hinduism, emphasizes the vulnerability of all sentient beings to pain and suffering, and a responsibility to avoid adding to human suffering. Confucianism, likewise, forbids harm to others and highlights a positive obligation of benevolence, as expressed in the duty of ren or humanness (Yao 2000: 213–14). Critical scholars often fail to acknowledge that non-Western cultures may have achieved ethical and universalist norms that resonate with Western ones, but are not modelled on the West (Shani 2008: 727). Post-Western critical IR, argues Shani (2008: 731), needs therefore to take cultural difference seriously if it seeks to ‘emancipate’ marginalized voices. Alternative knowledge/practices have often been discounted or actively suppressed because they do not fit with classical Western conceptions. The assumption of Western superiority has precluded direct engagement,

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although this may be changing. The question of how rising powers, such as China and India, will approach international security, and whether scholars outside ‘the West’ should adopt extant IR theory, originating primarily from the United States, or bring a more national or regional lens to the problems of international relations, has been a subject of academic debate (see, for instance, Tickner and Wæver 2009; Acharya 2011; Yan 2011). While Acharya (2011: 624) warns that national or regional schools could create barriers to pluralization and crossnational/regional discourse, he points to the importance of broadening our concept of what ‘science’ is and to explore other systems of thought, such as Buddhism, to understand their relevance to how we conceptualize IR, thereby acknowledging its global heritage. Decades ago, Roland Bleiker (1993) made a comparison of Realist and Taoist or Confucian ideas about the international system and war. One of his points, which has also been highlighted by critical scholars, is the tendency for International Theory, and not least realism, to be constructed on the basis of antagonistic bipolar opposites, such as rational/ non-rational, good/evil, just/unjust, war/peace or chaos/order (1993: 406). These binaries generally reflect a relationship of superiority, dominance or normative preference of one over the other. By contrast, Taoism deliberately

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avoids the construction of dualist thinking, treating opposites as complementary and mutually dependent. In this respect, peace is inseparable from its opposite war, as yin is inseparable from yang. In this ‘immanental philosophy’, much like the structuration of Anthony Giddens, actors and events are always interdependent and structures mediate the thoughts and behaviour of agents, while the will of agents influences structure. Structures are not given and unchangeable. The rejection of dualism also implies the absence of a distinction between reality and unreality, object and subject and right and wrong. Liberation (or emancipation) is a result of undoing and overcoming dualistic pairings and breaking free from prejudices and delusions, as well as semantically conditioned thought patterns. Others have argued that international anarchy should be replaced with Tianxia (All under Heaven), which Zhao (2005), a prominent Chinese philosopher, has presented as a solution to the world’s problems.2 Zhao argues that Westphalian states have failed to resolve the world’s problems precisely because of the competition between states and their national interests, while Tianxia would allow for a truly global view of the world, which might be achieved by ‘thinking through the world in an “all-inclusive” way, rather than thinking about the world from an

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inferior national or individual perspective’ (Callaghan 2008: 751). William Callahan (2008) is critical of Tianxia because of its relation to ‘otherness’ and the goal of transforming ‘the many into one’, and thereby homogenizing and totalizing populations. He concludes that ‘Tianxia is not a post-hegemonic ideal, so much as a proposal for a new hegemony’ (2008: 758). The question is whether this possibility arises from the concept per se or the dynamics of the contemporary international system. In an analysis of power transition theory from a feminist perspective, Laura Sjoberg (2010: 83–97) argues that the current structure of the international system provides incentives to seek supremacy rather than parity, which is reinforced by patriarchal assumptions and the cultural salience of masculinity in both the US and China, which gives rise to a competitive relationship. From this perspective, the proscriptions of more traditional power transition theories are likely to reinforce and possibly construct a competitive relationship, within which efforts by either side to build trust or empathy would be perceived as weakness. Sjoberg (2010: 96) suggests the importance of a conscious effort by the US and China to deconstruct the gendered nature of their competition and to reconstruct a more empathetic relationship based on dialogue, which necessarily rests on a rejection of the

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central claim of Power Transition Theory, that ‘hegemonic domination is empirically and normatively valuable’. A feminist perspective draws attention to the security of people on the margins, the ‘more than four billion other people who neither compete nor dominate’, and raises questions about how different social experiences produce different knowledges, which might enhance a theory of international security as well as the potential for a more empathetic approach. The question is less one of either/or than what might be gained from a more global conversation over different ontologies of global life, and how these might influence a rethinking of contemporary problems which elude the prescriptions of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes or Waltz, or, for that matter, Fukuyama. The point is not to romanticize alternative traditions but rather to ask whether a cross-cultural engagement over the meaning of security would express a more diverse human face which might expand our perspective on significant global problems. One of the central questions of international politics, as magnified by the recent crisis in Syria, is how to provide care and protection to citizens who are subjected to harm by their own government. The standard means of addressing this problem has been humanitarian intervention, which has more recently been reinforced through the principle of the R2P. In the case of Syria, the

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difficulty of providing care with military force was exacerbated by divisions within the UN Security Council, as well as domestically where European and American publics, with fresh memories of Iraq and Afghanistan, were unwilling to accept further military action. Referring back to the metaphor explored in the introduction, military invention, like Western medicine, requires the isolation of causes of insecurity (threats) to the end of zeroing in and changing, controlling or destroying (with missiles or drones) the agents of threat (e.g., terrorists and rogue states). The questionable track record of contemporary forms of intervention reinforces the need to rethink the problem from another angle. Similar questions can be raised about a variety of international regimes of care. Psycho-social interventions to the end of trauma management during or following war have been criticized by practitioners in the field, among others, for potentially contributing to the experience of trauma, by treating individuals in isolation or by disempowering communities through the imposition of Western models, at the expense of more indigenous practices of healing. While the World Health Organization acknowledges the importance of alternative traditions of medicine, the mobilization in response to global pandemics has relied primarily on Western models that are an expression of an interlinked global hierarchy in which risk is unevenly

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distributed, with inequalities in the disease burden arising from the imbalance of wealth and power (Aaltola 2012: 1). Or consider how approaches to global justice have centred on the International Criminal Court, which focuses on isolating individual perpetrators of crime, to the end of punishing them. This form of retributive justice can be contrasted with more indigenous forms of justice that seek the restoration of human relationships. The various examples point not only to an epistemological problem of how we know or about the foundations of knowledge, but has ontological, practical and ethical implications. The ontological problem regards the dominance of a tradition that assumes individual autonomy, a rights model of justice, linear notions of time, and a problem-solving framework which contrasts with more holistic ontologies that have historically or at present play a role in many other cultures. The issue is not one of replacing one dominant framework with another but rather whether we might expand the space for rethinking problems of international security through a serious engagement with different systems of thought that have previously been discounted but may have something valuable to offer. The practical problem regards an international environment that has for the last several hundred years been dominated by Western

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models, but now, with the emergence of non-Western powers such as India and China, faces potential conflict which may in part be attributed to alternative cultural assumptions, as well as historical memories of intervention. Embracing this difference as a path towards the future, as part of a dialogue regarding alternative futures, may open up potentials that would otherwise be lost. Recognizing and taking account of alternative epistemologies also has ethical implications. Utilitarian and cosmopolitan approaches to ethics, which have informed debates about globalization, treat human beings as autonomous, independent and equal moral agents who through abstract reasoning develop a set of rules for society that allow them to pursue their own interests. Feminists within IR have been at the forefront of efforts to conceptualize an alternative ethic of care which seeks ‘to maintain and repair ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web’ (Fisher and Tronto 1990: 40), which is concerned with how ‘caring is enabled, sustained and protected’ (Hutchings 2000: 119) and can apply to institutions, societies and even global levels of thinking’ (Tronto 1993: 145).

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Care Ann Tickner (2011: 615) argues that feminist scholarship may be instructive for transforming IR debates into a pluralist and more global approach in which ‘knowledge from below has the potential to extend the boundaries and even transform the discipline in ways that are beneficial to everyone.’ In taking feminist scholarship seriously, we might, consistent with the discussion in the last section, ask a question about how to maintain the tension between yin and yang, feminine and masculine, thereby discarding the hierarchical dualism upon which much practice rests. One manifestation of this tension regards, on the one hand, security as protection from harm, and a feminist ethic of care, on the other. The critical and feminist literature on security has argued that many acts, which are said to be motivated or justified by the need to provide protection, in practice gender subjects as weak and child-like, thereby disempowering them, and reinforcing the power of a dominant protector. The absence of either protection or care in the case of Syria highlights what is at stake in this distinction. The early CSS literature was critical of state-level practices based primarily on self-interest and concerned primarily with military power, if often justified in terms of providing protection. Some scholars at the time highlighted the emancipatory potential of

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international institutions of liberal governance in conflict zones, to provide aid or to stand in between conflicting parties, acts which were less about protection per se than care for those who were suffering or providing a buffer against further violence. These practices have since been subject to critique, as discussed in the previous chapter, in so far as they are said to disempower local populations and represent a continuation of earlier imperial practices. The situation in Syria fits neither of these critiques. The ‘international community’ has been frozen in the face of, at the time of this writing, more than 150,000 deaths (Evans 2014) and a significantly larger number of displaced people. The Syrians have asked why the world has abandoned them. A realist answer would be that it was not in the interest of other states to intervene. Given divisions within the Security Council and opposition from, not least Russia, any overt intervention threatened to spiral into a wider regional, if not global war, in which many more would die. From this position, doing nothing, and sticking heads in the sand, seemed, in purely utilitarian terms, to be the better option. Following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the US did not, in any case, have the stomach to take a leadership role and, even if they did, they risked backing al Qaida-linked rebels, who had become part of the fragmented resistance, and thus supporting their enemy in the War on

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Terror. Once again the Security Council was in stalemate, caught between the US and Russia, formerly the core of the Soviet Union, and everyone was deterred from acting for fear of unleashing the evil genie of a larger war that would potentially create an international security threat. But Syria was not the Cold War. It was a very hot one, with people dying daily, not only from battle but from starvation. The liberal answer to the question of why the world abandoned Syria is that the politics once again got in the way. Raising the money to provide food and shelter was less of a problem than gaining access to those people who were trapped within Syria, who aid agencies could not reach, or mobilizing the political will on the part of Western countries to accept more refugees from Syria. In either case, the world abandoned Syria because rescue was not in anyone’s interest given the costs involved. Military protection was out of the question, due to the politics. While there was a will to provide care, access was a problem. We can place Syria in the context of themes explored in the book to see what, if any, answers they provide. The narrow definition of security as the use or threat of use by states played a role, but was expressed at the international level by a lack of national interest in using force, for fear of the consequences, and at the domestic level by a tyrant who, in the interest of retaining power, massacred his own people. The civil war

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emerged out of resistance in the context of the Arab Spring, a process of change that toppled governments with ties to the West with dramatic speed. In Libya and Syria, by contrast, the conflict turned violent on both sides, leading to ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the former case but not in the latter. Questions of identity had a central place in the conflict, with the Syrian government accusing even the non-violent opposition of being ‘terrorist’, a claim that acquired greater stickiness as the opposition turned to violence, and fractured, not least because of the foreign jihadi streaming into Syria. The Assad government securitized the ‘terrorists’, which provided a veneer of justification for killing its own people, including children, and those who required medical help. That the context was pervaded by fear and trauma is without question. From outside, the dramatic statistics of death and displacement provided emotional distance from the unimaginable suffering of any one child who may have lost one or both parents and was abandoned with no shelter and very little food. What is the emancipatory potential of such a context? What are the contradictions immanent in this situation of brutal suffering that might unlock its potential? At the time of this writing, the only thing in sight appeared to be more death, and more starving children. One hopes, at the very least, that this suffering, like the lengthy

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imprisonment of Nelson Mandela, will in the end be redemptive and transformative, in the sense that sacrifice is redemptive. Only when faced with suffering or death that is unmistakenly ‘bad’, because murderous, unjust, tragic and willed, do we stop to ask serious questions about the ‘good’ life and what this means in a changing world where many of the structures that have in the past provided solutions and hope often seem to reproduce the problem. The death of over 10,000 children, as well as three million displaced within Syria and 1.2 million child refugees, including more than 8,000 who fled to Syria’s borders without parents (Chuck 2014), as the world stood by and did nothing, is nothing but bad. An immanent critique might identify the contradictions of this context in the tension between the inability to protect by military means or to provide care through an institutional response. Carol Gilligan (1982), who originally theorized a feminist ethic of care, began with a distinction between more masculine and universalized notions of justice, duty and obligation, which are the focus of more traditional approaches to ethics, on the one hand, and a more feminine contextualized notion of care, on the other. Feminist formulations of this concept have emphasized attention to the needs of the particular individual as well as the importance of human

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relationships.3 Hutchings (2000: 116) points to the tension between ethical judgements that are grounded in the actual conditions of relations, and those derived from ‘rationally derived values or rules which are in principle accessible to anyone and therefore capable of underpinning universally compelling obligations.’ Much of the ethic of care literature focuses on relationships at the personal level,4 which is a form of care that was desperately needed by the abandoned children of Syria. But relationships in a conflict zone or at the global level are also different in kind. Care often involves attentiveness to the suffering of distant others, rather than a personal relationship. It may be difficult to think about care at this level as entirely distinct from more abstract criteria for identifying when care is needed. The problem is that abstract principles often, in application, reinforce existing power relations, which may in practice block out the suffering of the powerless. For instance, norms against chemical weapons were invoked following the use of chemical weapons in Syria, which, with a degree of success, led to Russian cooperation and Syrian agreement to get rid of its chemical weapons. While this focus on the abstract principle was in itself laudable, it seemed almost heartless given that even this action was only undertaken after several years of death and suffering in this conflict, and then only focusing

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on the use of a particular weapon in the killing. While leaving an impression that something had been achieved, the action seemed to push the on-going suffering of the Syrians out of the political limelight and into the shadows. Moral situations are often complicated by an imbalance of power. An initial step for a feminist ethic of care is to acknowledge that existing boundaries of moral and political life often omit the concerns and activities of the relatively powerless, thereby functioning to maintain the position of the powerful (Tronto 1993: 20). Caring, by contrast, should start from the standpoint of the one needing care or attention and requires that we meet the other morally, adopting their perspective, and looking at the world in these terms (Tronto, 1993: 19). In this respect, a notion of care is not only a moral concept but, as Tronto (1993: 21) notes, a political one as well, one which helps us to ‘rethink humans as interdependent people’, and as a ‘strategic concept to involve the relatively disenfranchised in the political world.’ Care, in a context of power, may generate dependence rather than autonomy. Care, like security, is a relationship between those in need of protection or care and a protector or caregiver. This is reinforced, in the feminist literature, by the concern that care should ‘meet the needs of those dependent on us’ (Held

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2004: 145). At the international level, a more gendered notion of care risks producing a binary opposition between ‘security’ as a masculine practice of providing protection, usually by military means,5 and a more feminist notion of caring and nurturing based on relationships to the particular other. This tension is palpable in Syria, where harm towards the other,6 defined in terms of ‘security’, has led to the targeting of hospitals and doctors because they were trying to provide care to members of the opposition. In some contexts of conflict, any attempt to develop a care ethic could easily reproduce a dependent relationship, given the power disparity. In the Syrian context, the security relationship has made practices of care virtually impossible.

Security endings and beginnings The Syrian conflict presents a stark opposition between security practices and care. Inside, practices of care were the target of security operations. Outside, intervention with military force proved to be politically impossible. This leads to a final question of whether to abandon the concept of security and, if so, how to address concerns about the protection of human life. The debate has been framed in largely either/or terms, that is, as either progress through emancipation and dialogue towards a better conceptualization of security or claims that the concept of security, and its 449

associated meta-narrative of emancipation, is dangerous (Neocleous 2008) and should be abandoned. Browning and McDonald (2011: 242) argue that this characterization of the politics of security as either benign or dangerous constructs a binary which oversimplifies and fails to recognize the temporal and spatial specificity of security logics or that ‘security does different things at different times and in different places’. The evolution of critical security debates, as mapped in the preceding chapters, reinforces the claim that the security landscape is continually changing and cannot be captured in a single fixed logic of security. Browning and McDonald (2011: 237) occupy a space between this either/or choice. On the one hand, they argue that articulations of security in terms of progress often end up endorsing a loosely liberal conception of the positive potential for dialogue, as well as the realization of basic needs and protection from harm, which are at best limited in providing an ethical framework for understanding the complexities of contemporary world politics. On the other hand, the post-structuralist critique of security as negative and exclusionary, is parasitic on an understanding of security that is synonymous with a timeless and abstract dominant discourse of security, which is wedded to the nation-state. What is needed is a more nuanced and contextual engagement with the dynamics

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and practices of security as they relate to a range of social, historical and political contexts. At the core of a critical security studies project, they argue, is a claim that theoretically derived knowledge, far from being objective and neutral, rests on normative choices with political implications (Browning and McDonald 2011: 238). A central task of critical approaches is thus to identify and challenge problem-solving theories and their role in knowledge production (Reus-Smit 2008: 256). This leads to a dual concern. The first is a question of what security does politically, in terms of how the language of security gives rise to particular policy responses or legitimates particular actors or forms of political community, that is, how security constitutes social reality. The second is a question of the ethics of security, which shifts attention to those who benefit or lose in relation to particular formulations and practices of security as well as normative questions about what ‘might constitute an ethically defensible security understanding or practice’ (Browning and McDonald 2011: 238–9). An emphasis on the temporal and spatial specificity of security logics fits with the shifts in security discourse over the twenty or so years covered by this book. The expansionist debate in the 1990s raised questions about the exclusive focus of security studies on questions of material power and the threat and use of

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force by the state. Questions were raised about the extension of security to threats such as the environment or migration, and poverty, or, given the ethnocentrism of the concept, the importance of other security threats to different populations in the world. The subsequent shift toward critical security studies and the social construction of security led to claims of idealism at the expense of attention to material power, although arguably the point was more often one of the inseparability of power from social meaning constructs. A further shift has brought materiality back in. As discussed in chapter 5, materiality and language are in this conception co-constitutive rather than separate. The co-constitution of matter and meaning is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the context of climate change, an area where the potential for a more global dialogue necessarily intersects with and is co-constitutive of a dialogue with nature. In the twenty-first century questions of how humans engage with one another are ‘entangled’ with how they engage with the material world, which also exhibits agency. Far from a return to the past, this materiality is of a fundamentally different kind, not least because of potential consequences of a shrinking of the earth’s mass for sovereign boundaries. As Maximilian Mayer (2012: 173) states: The rise in regional temperature [in the Arctic] is as much as twice the global

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average, rendering the very landscape a matter of concern. The sea ice over the North Pole might vanish completely within the next thirty years, shortening the sea-lanes between Europe and Asia by up to 4,000 nautical miles. The ongoing retraction destabilizes the existing sovereign practices such as border, navigation, defence, and extractive policies. Mayer (2012) draws on a metaphor of chaotic climate change to refer to a paradigm shift in our perceptions. In this shift, climate change has been transformed from a gradually intensifying, long-term challenge, into a more encompassing non-linear danger that threatens national security. Like Aradau (see chapter 5), his concern is not only with how people attach meaning to things but how things attach meaning to people. He examines how, in the case of the Arctic, rapid physical, ecological and territorial changes have evolved into a range of overlapping assemblages of multiple meanings and practices, translating them into threats to sovereignty and economic interests. As these stabilize in a notion of chaotic climate change, change is no longer understood to be linear and reversible but associated with ‘tipping points’ that are abrupt, large and potentially irreversible (Mayer 2012: 174). These assemblages rest on risk-oriented scenarios combined with calls to strengthen national

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resilience, which rely on the ability to cope with chaotic climate change rather than removing clearly defined immediate or existential threats (2012: 175). The shift towards chaotic climate change has served to reinforce the state as the ultimate reference point, as well as traditional, narrow security objectives over human security concerns, leading national governments to reassert their strategic and economic goals, while rendering emission reduction efforts more difficult and overlooking environmental degradation, civil wars and the ‘deliberate’ destruction of indigenous livelihoods caused by resource extraction (2012: 178). The state remains the ultimate point of reference. As Anthony Burke (2013: 14) notes, patterns of analysis and policy more generally remain focused on a narrow concept of the existence, identity and being of the nation-state, which is out of sync with the key security challenges faced by the world, from environmental threats and climate change to forced migration and refugees, the trade in small arms, transnationalized asymmetric conflicts, terrorism, the endemic human insecurity of women in conflict zones, or deep and widespread poverty, to name just a few. Globally, he argues, this amounts to a complex and interconnected array of moral and strategic concerns that no state or security organization can afford to neglect. While matter and meaning are co-constitutive, the articulation of

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threats as a national security problem, as argued by Mayer or Burke, suggests that the human agent in this dialogue is not ‘listening’, but remains stuck in a familiar mantra of security that is inappropriate to the contemporary temporal and spatial context. The challenge to problem-solving theory arises from the application of an old model of national security in a global context that is fundamentally changed. The potential for chaotic climate change is perhaps the most severe indicator of this transformation. The two questions raised by Browning and McDonald clarify what is at stake. First, what is security doing politically in this case? Security is doing what security tends to do, which is to ‘securitize’ on the basis of national interest. Who benefits and who potentially loses? Policy responses, legitimate action or forms of political community will cease to matter, may no longer be possible, beyond a catastrophic ‘tipping point’. The complete destruction of the Philippines with Typhoon Haiyan, the tidal waves crippling England, the unprecedented freeze in the United States and the heat in Australia in January 2014, provided a glimpse of life in an increasingly chaotic global climate. Global desecuritization, or the creation of normal politics, suggests, in this case, a global conversation regarding security with a more human face, listening not only to the rich

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variety of traditions of protection from harm and healing that have characterized the human experience, but also listening to what the environment is saying. In this respect, CSS comes full circle to a question of emancipation from problems, as originally formulated by Horkheimer, that arise from the power of nature and the weakness of society. We can choose to continue as we are, failing to listen, or seek to find new ways to address the vulnerability of interdependence with others in a changing global environment. Moving out of the mind-set of national interest towards a more holistic view of human life and the human environment may be crucial to survival in this temporal and spatial context, as well as addressing the current imbalance of investment in military technology, on the one hand, and attention to the protection and care of the web of life, on the other. This raises a question of who decides and what a more holistic view of human life and environment might mean in practice. In the traditional model, states decide and because they have no sovereign above them, must be first and foremost concerned with their own survival. The outcome is often a security dilemma and conflict. The global liberal order builds on the foundations of a state-centric system. In the current context of globalization, the continuing emphasis on national interest propels us down a path of potential global

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destruction. The international community, or particular states within it, was paralysed in relation to the humanitarian disaster in Syria and Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Threats of global pandemics, which are exacerbated by global movements of people, or environmental and climate change, which may be soon – if they are not already – irreversible, require a form of collective action that the community of states has not been able to muster. The other issue highlighted by the discussion above is that this order has been Western-centric, both in the locus of decision making and the underlying assumptions about the world upon which decisions have rested. An alternative vision of order based on the Confucian concept of Tianxia (All under Heaven) has been proposed by some. The problem with either notion of ‘order’, suggests Lily Ling (2013), is that it presumes the imposition of a hegemonic form which blocks out diversity. By contrast, emancipation: comes from two, simultaneous processes: 1) an internal interrogation of one’s anger, fears, or prejudices that shackle us; or 2) an external engagement of discourse and disputation, care and mindfulness, with all forms of life, including Nature. (Ling 2013: ch. 8) While the choice between two orders is a question of who will dominate and whose rules

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will structure global governance, Ling proposes a different way of being, an ‘interbeing’7 in which multiple worlds intersect, overlap, communicate and learn from one another. Within the historical Westphalian model this would be considered a recipe for conflict and an invitation for the strong to seek domination. Against the backdrop of globalization, in which we are all intertwined, Ling’s account may actually provide a more accurate depiction of a situation where, on the one hand, states are embedded in regional and global institutions while, on the other hand, the movement of peoples across borders and diasporic communities bring different cultural ways of being into contact, such that no one model clearly dominates. The example mentioned in the first chapter of Eastern practices of healing that have become increasingly popular in the West, and the use of a combination of Western and Eastern medical techniques in China, is a good example. The question then is less one of who will dominate, but rather what form this interbeing takes and whether it is possible to develop different skills of listening and speaking. This returns us to the question of the relationship between theory and practice, which has been so central to CSS. Some have raised a question of whether CSS has become mainstream and lost its edge, which suggests it was a genre that will eventually be undermined 458

by its own popularity. CSS, like emancipation or dialogue, involves processes that are on-going and continuously reflexive in relation to the taken-for-granted assumptions of a given historical context and looks towards the possibility of a more humane path forward.

Further reading Booth, Ken (2007) Theory of World Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutchings, Kimberly (2011) ‘Dialogue between Whom? The Role of the West/Non-West Distinction in Promoting Global Dialogue in IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39, 3, 639–47. Ling, L.H.M. (2013) The Dao of World Politics: Toward a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations. London: Routledge. Neocleous, Mark (2008) Critique of Security. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sjoberg, Laura, ed. (2010) Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Tickner, Arlene and Ole Wæver (2009) International Relations Scholarship around the World: Worlding Beyond the West. London: Routledge.

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Classroom exercise Each student should choose a position in global space (that could be the leader of a particular country, a representative of a particular NGO or INGO, or a regional organization such as ASEAN or NATO, a Buddhist monk in Tibet, a member of the Occupation movement, the planet Earth, or any other creative location of relevance to the future of security). Students should prepare for the tutorial by reading and thinking about the kinds of concerns about security or protection from harm they would have from their chosen position in global space and what they might contribute to a dialogue about security or protection from harm, and potential emancipation. Think about the following questions:

Questions What is the meaning of security or protection from harm given your position in global space? How effectively are these concerns being addressed and by whom? What, from your position, might it mean to be emancipated and how would this happen?

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What advice would you give to leaders or other countries regarding steps towards a more humane and sustainable world? During the class, conduct a role play of the dialogue. The questions might be used to structure preparation and the dialogue itself.

Notes 1. Booth (2007: 115) later modified this relationship to refer to security as the means and emancipation as the end. 2. Zhao first introduced his Tianxia system in a paper delivered at the international conference “International Conference on Universal Knowledge and Language” in Goa, India, on 22 November 2005. 3. While Gilligan’s work rested on a distinction between male and female approaches to morality, more recent feminist reworkings of the concept have created distance from the notion of ‘women’s morality’, and have instead developed a care ethic that includes the values traditionally associated with women (Tronto 1993). 4. For this reason, my focus is on the literature that addresses the possibility of a global ethic of care.

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5. In a feminist reflection on ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, Tronto (in Whisnant and DesAutels 2010) refers to the language of the responsibility to protect as a deeply gendered discourse. 6. Thanh-Dam Truong (2009: 6) argues, by contrast, that the two domains are related. 7. The concept was coined by the Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh.

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Index 7 July 2005 1973 oil embargo 2001 spy plane incident

A Abu Ghraib Acharya, Amitav Ackerly and True acting ‘as if’ Adorno, Theodor Adorno and Horkheimer Afghanistan Africa Agamben, Giorgio agency agent–structure problem Aguis, Christine ahimsa Alker, Hayward Al Nakba

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Al-Qaida Alter and Ego alterity Amnesty International anarchy ‘ancient hatreds’ Arab Spring Aradau, Claudia Aradau and Huysmans Arendt, Hannah Arfi, Badredine arms control Aron, Raymond articulation ASEAN Ashley, Richard audience Auschwitz Austin, Andrew Austin, John

B balance of power

542

Balkanization Ball and Webster Balzacq, Thierry ban-opticon Barad, Karen Barber, Benjamin ‘bare life’ Barkawi, Tarak Barkawi and Laffey Beck, Ulrich Bell, Vikki betrayal Bigo, Didier Bigo and Guittet Bilgin, Pinar Bilgin and Morton bin Laden, Osama biometrics biopolitics biopower Blair, Tony Bleiker, Roland body, the

543

colonized Booth, Ken Booth and Wheeler Bosnia Bouazizi, Mohamed Bourdieu, Pierre Brigg and Bleiker Brincat, Shannon Brincat and Nunes Britain Brown and Penttinen Browning and McDonald Brundtland Commission Buddhism ‘bunkerization’ Burgess, J. Peter Burke, Anthony Burke and MacDonald Bush, George W. Butler, Judith Buzan, Barry Buzan et al.

544

C Callahan, William Cameron, David Campbell, David Canada care ethic of feminist ethic of regime of Carr, E.H. cartoon controversy CASE collective Chandler, David change chemical weapons child soldiers China ‘rise’ of Chinese medicine Chinese School of International Relations citizens citizenship civil society 545

Clapham, Christopher Clarke, Charles ‘clash of civilizations’ Clausewitz, Carl von climate change Cockburn, Cynthia Cohn, Carol Cold War end of Confucianism Confucius Connolly, William construction social constructivism content analysis contestation context contradictions Cook, Robin Copenhagen School cosmopolitanism liberal

546

counterinsurgency Cox, Robert Crandall and Armitage Crawford, Neta critical theories see also theory Cuban Missile Crisis culture of suspicion

D Dalby, Simon danger Debrix and Barder debt crisis decolonization decolonizing strategies DeGoede, Marieke democratization Denmark Derrida, Jacques desecuritization Detraz, Nicole

547

development and security liberal model of Marxist approach to studies sustainable Devetak, Richard dialogue difference Dillon, Michael Dillon and Reid diplomacy coercive transformational discourse analysis dominant ethics political dispositif de securité Donnelly, Faye Doty, Roxanne Lynn Duffield, Mark

548

E Edkins, Jenny Ehrenreich, Barbara Elbe, Stephen emancipation emancipatory realism emotion(s) absence of social foundation of psycho-somatic experience of empirical empiricism enactment England, Lynndie Enlightenment Enloe, Cynthia environment environmental degradation environmental scarcity epistemology Epstein, Charlotte Eschle, Catherine essentially contested concept(s) 549

ethics ethnic cleansing ethnicity ethnocentric Europe European Economic Community European integration European Union exceptionalism ‘expansionist’ agenda/debate

F famine fear securitization of fear and trauma Feldman, Allen female body feminine feminism feminist research ethic Fierke, K.M. First World

550

Floyd, Rita Foucault, Michel Frankfurt school free market liberalization Freedman, Lawrence free speech Frueh, Jamie

G Gaddis, John Lewis gender genocide Genocide Convention Gentry, Caron Ghoussoub, Mai Gibson, Julie gift-giving Gilligan, Carol global conversation globalization Goff and Dunn Goldstein, Joshua Gorbachev, Mikhail

551

governance global liberal therapeutic governmentality of unease Gramsci, Antonio Gray, Colin Grayson, Kyle Grissam, Adam Grossman, Dave Guantánamo Bay Guanzi Guelff, Richard Guterson, Hugh Guzzini, Stefano

H Habermas, Jürgen Hackett, Dermott Hacking, Ian Hall, Todd Hansen, Lene Heng and McDonagh

552

Heymann, Philip hierarchy Hitler Hobson, John Holocaust memory of homeland security Hoogensen and Rottem Horkheimer, Max Howell, Alison human dignity initiatives insecurity nature rights security universal humiliation Huntington, Samuel Hurricane Katrina Hutchings, Kim Huysmans, Jef

553

I iconological identity and difference and discourse analysis and interests Ignatieff, Michael immanent critique imperialism insecurity instrumental reason intelligence, failure of interests International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) International Criminal Court interpellation intersubjective, category intersubjective structure intertextuality intervention humanitarian psycho-social

554

Iraq Body Count invasion of (2003) 308, Israel

J Jabri, Vivienne Jackson, Robert Japan jihad Jones, Richard Wyn

K Kamali, Mohammad Kaptchuk, Ted J. Khalili, Laleh Kolodziej, Edward Korean War Kosovo Kratochwil, Friedrich Krause and Williams Kristeva, Julia Kurki, Milja

555

L language, political Laozi Latour, Bruno League of Nations Lebow, Ned Lee, Charles Leviathan liberal democracy/(ies) liberal governance liberal peace liberation Libya Ling, Lily Linklater, Andrew ‘local turn’ logic of exclusion logic of premeditation Lowenthal and Heiman lynching(s) Lyon, David

556

M McDonald, Matt MacGinty and Richmond McRae, Rob McSweeney, Bill Marcuse, Herbert Malley, William Mamdani, Mahmood Mandela, Nelson Martin and Owen Marx, Karl masculinity mass starvation materiality bodily materialist turn maternalism matter Mavelli, Luca Mayer, Maximilian Medellin drug cartel memory Mencius 557

de Menezes, Jean Charles Mertus, Julie metaphor game therapy method(s) methodological critique methodology Meyer, Stephen migrant(s) migration militarism Milliken, Jennifer Milliken and Krause Milošević, Slobodan modernization Morganthau, Hans Muhammad Muller, Ben Muppidi, Himadeep Muslims Mutimer, David Mythen and Walklate

558

N narrative(s) National Military Strategic Plan for the War on Terrorism National Security Strategy NATO Neal, Andrew Neocleous, Mark neo-liberal agenda New International Economic Order ‘New Thinking’ Newman, Edward Northern Ireland Novick, Peter nuclear deterrence nuclear strategy nuclear war nuclear weapons Nunes, Joao Nye and Lynn-Jones Nyers, Peter

559

O Obama, Barak administration Onuf, Nicholas ‘order’ Orford, Anne Owens, Patricia Oxfam

P Packer, John pain Pakistan panopticon Paris School peace movements Peoples, Columba Peoples and Vaughn-Williams performance bodily of subjectivity performative act performativity

560

perspicuity Petersen, Karen Peterson, Spike Philippines Pirouz, Rouzbeh Poland political, the demise of return of Posen, Barry post-positivism post-structuralism Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) postsecularity poverty power/knowledge practice(s) everyday resilience pre-emptive action Prestowitz, Clyde problem-solving theory protection

561

from harm PTSD, see Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Pupavac, Vanessa Pye, Lucian

R race Rand Corporation rationalists Razack, Sherine Reagan, Ronald realism, see theory referent object reflexivity self-process refugees relationship(s) causal Rengger and Thirkell-White resilience resistance Responsibility to Protect (R2P) revenge

562

Rice, Condoleeza risk(s) everyday regimes society studies and uncertainty Roberts, Adam Roberts, Brad Robin, Corey Roe, Paul Ross, Andrew Rossdale, Chris Russia Rwanda

S Sabaratnam, Meera safe haven Said, Edward Salter, Mark Salter and Mutlu Sarbin, Theodore

563

Sasley, Brent Save the Children Schelling, Thomas Schlag and Heck Schmitt, Carl science Scott, James Second World securitization of fear macrosecuritizing move security clusters collective community concept of dilemma environmental ethics of as governance human and the individual

564

international meaning of medicalization of narrow definition negative view of ontological political and military aspect of politicization of politics of as practice as process as property as silence as social construction state virtual Security Council security-development nexus security studies critical Golden Age of international renaissance of

565

sedimentation of meaning self-reliance self-sacrifice Sen, Amartya September 11th 2001 Shani, Giogio Shapiro, Michael Shay, Jonathan Sheperd, Laura Shepperd, Taryn Sjoberg, Laura Smith, Steve Snowden, Edward social construction soldiers child PTSD see also Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Solidarity Soros, George South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) South Asian tsunami

566

sovereign power sovereignty decisionist theory of shared Soviet Union Spear and Williams speech, act of speech act securitizing state(s) collapsed failed liberal nation-states post-colonial quasi-states weak state of exception Steele, Brent Stern, Jessica Stone, Michael Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)

567

Stritzel, Holger Sudan suffering collective human social surveillance liquid studies + governmentality survival Swank and Marchand Syria

T Taoism Teresa of Avila terrorism discourse of female suicide securitization of suicide terrorists

568

theory critical critical international relations democratic peace dependency deterrence interdependence international relations liberal neo-realist post-colonial problem-solving rational choice realist speech act Western international relations theory and practice therapy ‘Third debate’ Third World Thomas, Caroline Thompson, E.P. threat(s)

569

environmental existential securitization of Tianxia Tickner, Ann Tito Todorov, Tvetzan traditional healing ‘translation’ transnational crime trauma biomedical models of medicalization of Tronto, Joan Truth and Reconciliation Commission Turkey Turkish identity Typhoon Haiyan

U Ubuntu UN Development Programme UN integrated mission

570

underdevelopment UNICEF United Kingdom United States Universal Declaration of Human Rights US Declaration of Independence Committee for the Present Danger Patriot Act

V values Verba, Sydney victims civilians Vietnam visualization see also bodily performance vulnerability

W Wæver, Ole Walker, R.B.J. Wallerstein, Immanuel Walt, Stephen 571

Waltz, Kenneth war(s) global liberal language of ‘new’ practice of as social construction ‘War on Terror’ Weldes, Jutta Wendt, Alexander ‘West’ and ‘non-West’ Western hegemony Western imperialism Western medicine Westphalian model Whitworth, Sandra Wibben, Annick Williams, Michael Wittgenstein, Ludwig women ‘world(s)’ World Health Organization World War I

572

World War II Wright, Quincy Wyn Jones, Richard

X Xunzi

Y Yan, X. Yugoslavia

Z Zehfuss, Maja Zhao, Tingyang

573

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