Post-Interventionary Societies: An Introduction

Racism in Foucauldian Security Studies: Biopolitics, Liberal War, and the Whitewashing of Colonial and Racial Violence

“…Instead, liberalism is predicated on the model of war, and relations of war suffuse even its domestic and seemingly benign operations (Jabri 2006;Reid 2010). Building on Foucault's concept of biopolitics, FSS sees the ambitions of liberal war as going beyond the merely territorial (Bell 2011;Bell and Evans 2010;Dillon and Reid 2009;Evans 2011;Howell 2014Howell , 2015Jabri 2006Jabri , 2007a, aiming to transform and improve spaces and populations cast as developmentally backwards (Holmqvist 2016). Contemporary liberal war is therefore a vital force claiming to serve "humanity as species being" (Jabri 2007a, 187).…”

Securitizing instability: the US military and full spectrum operations

“…Lisa Bhungalia (2012) has shown how USAID, established under the shadow of the Cold War in 1961, can in many ways be viewed as an "early articulation of the shift towards a 'population-centric' approach to counterinsurgency", and this interventionary tactic has been firmly fused into US military strategy in its long war on terror. The blending of security and development concerns is not new, of course, either in the US military or more broadly (cf Bell and Evans, 2010;Duffield, 2001;Essex, 2013). But apart from the rhetorical power of mapping and legitimating a broader field of interventionism long into our 'uncertain future', does the US even have the capacity to conduct the kind of 'full spectrum' military-led stability operations it has increasingly advocated?…”

“…That said, however, in the wider geopolitical and geoeconomic milieu of contemporary US interventionism, the US military sees a combination of both offensive and stability operations as key to the success of what it calls 'full spectrum operations' (US Department of the Army, 2009). In this context, stability operations are part of a broad discursive rationale for an ambitious US global forward presence that promises not only neoliberal correction for some of the world's most volatile yet economically pivotal spaces, but correction too for the forms of illiberal 'underdevelopment' seen as a threat to the 'Western way of life' (Bell and Evans, 2010;Dillon and Reid, 2009;Duffield, 2007).…”

“…The blending of security and development concerns is not new, of course, in either the US military or more broadly (cf Bell and Evans, 2010;Duffield, 2001;Essex, 2013). But apart from the rhetorical power of mapping and legitimating a broader field of interventionism long into our 'uncertain future', does the US even have the capacity to conduct the kind of 'full-spectrum' military-led stability operations it has increasingly advocated?…”

“…That said however, in the wider geopolitical and geoeconomic milieu of contemporary US interventionism, the US military sees a combination of both offensive and stability operations as key to the success of what it calls 'full spectrum operations' (US Department of the Army, 2009). In this context, stability operations are part of a broad discursive rationale for an ambitious US global forward presence that promises not only neoliberal correction for some of the world's most volatile yet economically pivotal spaces, but correction too for the forms of illiberal 'underdevelopment' seen as a threat to the 'Western way of life' (Bell and Evans, 2010;Dillon and Reid, 2009;Duffield, 2007 2 The notional legal spectrum: stability operations in the war/law/space nexus US global ambition is projected and facilitated by its military's global forward presence, and this must be enabled by a purposeful legal architecture sanctioning land, sea and air access, troop movement and conduct, rules of engagement and so on (Morrissey, 2011b). This is part of the 'geopolitics and biopolitics' combination that Michael Dillon (2007) Blomley, 1989), and below I interrogate the US military's current 'operational law' to situate how stability operations fit within.…”