Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War and Violence in the 21st Century

Abstract

Anticipating the strategic confluence between liberal ways of war and liberal ways of development, the ideas of Michel Foucault have increasingly resonated in the field of security studies. Foregrounding in particular the biopolitical imperative at the heart of liberal governance, critical attention has been given to the manner in which life itself becomes the principle referent object for security practices. In mapping out these key debates, this article will nuance our understanding of Foucault’s relevance by explaining: how liberal security governance today operates within a globally inclusive imaginary to the defection of all meaningful Newtonian distinctions; how liberal biopolitics displaces the bare life of the sovereign encounter with the bare activity of species survival; how principally tasking security practitioners with sorting and adjudicating between different forms of species life reveals a distinct biopolitical aporia, in the sense that making life live demands the elimination of that which poses an internal cultural threat to its will to rule; how the rationalization of violence through doing what is necessary out of species necessity implies that humanity’s most purposeful expression appears through the battles that are waged upon life, for life, on a planetary scale; how the liberal encounter has created conditions akin to a global state of civil war that offers a marked conceptual departure from traditional sovereign paradigms; and why the onto-theological dimensions that give moral sanction to liberal biopolitical rule now demand the most serious critical attention.

Divisive ‘Commonality’: state and insecurity in the Democratic Republic of Congo

“…4 Evans notes that in the 1990s the perspective emerged of the 'possibility to govern all illiberal life on the basis that the species as a whole would be less endangered'. 5 This is reflected in the neoliberal institutionalist security framework, which draws on the notion of interdependence that gained popularity in the 1970s. It bears similarities to the notion of 'common security' in shifting discussions on security from a zero-sum to a positive-sum game, 6 and is consistent with the claim of commonality of interests.…”

Representaciones sociales y contextos de investigación con perspectiva de género

“…Cuando grupos subalternos se rebelan contra el statu quo, al cuestionar la discriminación y violencia estructural, física, cultural y de género dentro de las familias y la sociedad, entonces aparecen los aparatos ideológicos del Estado para reprimir. Estas rs discriminatorias que se han gestado a lo largo de la historia reestablecen el equilibrio precario del poder autoritario para controlar, someter, pagar suelos menores y asignar roles tradicionales a mujeres, jóvenes, expulsar a adultos mayores, etcétera, o sea, generan una guerra civil permanente en el seno de la sociedad posmoderna (Evans, 2010).…”

From ‘liberal war’ to ‘liberal militarism’: United States security policy as the promotion of military modernity

“…The 'liberal way of war' goes beyond mere violence or the institutions of the military, as liberal states not only engage in a crusade through militarized interventions abroad, but they also extend the power relations of liberal societies globally (Dillon and Reid 2009;Evans 2010;Jabri 2006). The 'liberal way of war' is about using war as a technique of international biopower or governmentality, a means to pacifying and constituting the liberal subject (Dillon and Reid 2009;Evans 2010;Gregory 2011;Kienscherf 2011;Shaw 2013a). Both sets of arguments point to the contradiction at the heart of supposedly peaceful liberal logics of governance: that of using war as a means to make a 'liberal' peace.…”

“…Much critical work in security studies has seen the liberal wars of the 'War on Terror' as an extension of US imperialism, a way of creating new spaces of neoliberal accumulation (Neocleous 2014), or as part of a general extension of neoliberal governmentality and biopolitics (Dillon and Reid 2009;Evans 2010). While this work has brought many insights, it has lacked a longer historical perspective on the institutionalization of liberal war, as well as an over-attention to the violent practices of war at the expense of its links to broader social structures.…”