Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence

Abstract

This paper argues that western security practices are as biopolitical as they are geopolitical. Explaining that biopolitical security practices revolve around “life” as species existence, the paper explores how biopoliticized security practices secure by instantiating a general economy of the contingent throughout all the processes of reproductive circulation that impinge upon species existence. For this reason, “Governing Terror” does not merely reference the massive global security effort that is now devoted to governing terror. It observes how western security practices are themselves now also governed by a widespread fear of terror. It locates that fear in the way that western biopolitics has long adopted “the contingent” as its principle of formation. Here, “the real” is understood and experienced differently, as a general economy of emergence: “life” understood as constant nonlinear adaptation and change. The paper concludes that the state of emergency, which governs western politics of security at the beginning of the twenty‐first century is not that of Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben. The state of emergency which governs western security politics is the emergency of emergent life itself.

Mobile Life: Biosecurity Practices and Insect Globalization

“…As the threat of the uncontrollable vitality is extended to life in general, critics claim, global catastrophe is being used by the relevant authorities to justify new levels of surveillance, together with interventionist measures designed to be rolled out anywhere on the planet, without hesitation, using whatever means are deemed necessary (Dillon, 2007: p. 16). In this way, geographer Bruce Braun concludes, `Biosecurity weds biopolitics with geopolitics ' (2007: p.23, see also Dillon, 2007: p.10-11, Hinchliffe and Bingham 2008a: p. 1548). …”

“…The handling of public health crises such as HIV/AIDS, avian influenza, SARS, foot and mouth disease, and the anthrax scare are being taken as indicative that hazards associated with biological life are taking shape as some of the preeminent `security' 13 issues of our era (Collier et al, 2004;Dillon, 2007;Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008a;2008b;Fidler and Gostin, 2008).…”

“…Social theorists have suggested that rising unease about the vulnerability of individual and social bodies is linked to the ascendance of new techniques for manipulating `life itself': procedures which bring formerly discrete biological beings into unprecedented proximity. Such `developments' are not only experienced as having potentially harmful consequences, it is argued, they also promote ways of thinking about life in general which underscore its inherent potentiality to transform itself -to become other than it is (Cooper, 2006;Dillon, 2007). At the same time, a raft of uncertainties ranging from terrorism to climate change and economic instability are serving to highlight another set of dangerous `porosities': those new forms of spatio-temporal intimacy that arise out intensifying globalization.…”

Resilience and (in)security: Practices, subjects, temporalities

“…These practices thrive on security threats with complex emergent qualities that infuse the security environment with uncertainty (Aradau and van Munster, 2012;Dillon, 2007;Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008;Dillon and Reid, 2009). Furthermore, resilience speak to two 'turns' in critical security scholarship: the complexity turn, which signifies an appropriation of insights and methods from complexity theory in social theory (Urry, 2005), and the material turn, which explores how power is constructed and exercised by and through material objects (Aradau, 2010;Connolly, 2013).…”

Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare in the War on Terror

“…30 As he points out elsewhere, you "cannot secure anything unless you know what it is", and therefore securitization demands that "people, territory, and things are transformed into epistemic objects". 31 And in planning the milieu of US ground forces overseas, JAGs translate regional AORs into legally-enabled grids upon which US military operations take place. This is part of the production of what Matt Hannah terms "mappable landscapes of expectation"; 32 and to this end, the aleatory is anticipated by planning for the 'evental' in the promissory language of securitization.…”