The Normative Unconscious Of Nations: A critical geopolitical and psychoanalytic perspectives on the United Nations Security Council's counterterrorism strategy

Abstract

This paper argues that the United Nations (UN) Security Council counterterrorism policies have largely failed because they did not address many of the conditions that make certain parts of the world a fertile ground for the emergence of terrorism, including the historical antecedents that lead to violence; the lingering and pervasive influence and hegemony of UN Security Council Members; the UN Security Council members' self‐serving and morally inconsistent exercise of their power of veto or in condemning violent acts perpetrated by Member States; and the double standard in the implementation of its policies (Barnett & Finnemore, 1999; Farer, 2002; Glennon, 2003). Utilizing a critical geopolitical perspective, as well as the conceptualizations of the “normative unconscious” (Layton, 2002, 2006) and the “absent referent” (Adams, 1990) of and Benjamin's framework of witnessing and the “moral third” (Benjamin, 2018). The paper further argues that much of what is taken as the status quo in United Nations Security Council counterterrorism policies is derived from ideological principles that were ultimately created in the service of the state apparatuses (and their signature exploitative practices) that governments unconsciously feel compelled to sustain. By making explicit these proclivities, and exposing terrorists as the absent referent of the United Nations Security Council's discussions, the paper offers a psychoanalytic framework to explain the logic behind such counterterrorism policies. Further, following Benjamin, the paper suggests that by moving away from Eurocentric, zero‐sum, and colonial logic, there may be a way to organically recognize populations that are aggrieved by these state apparatuses in a way that could obviate the use of political violence and, inter alia, terrorism.