Security Unbound

Enacting Democratic Limits

Jef Huysmans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317813071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions.

We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship.

Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

1 Security unbound and democracy

Security is unbound. Language and images of insecurity are everywhere. Migration, global warming, bugs in the house, paedophiles, civil wars, crime statistics, collapsing economies, weapon proliferation, Mexican flu, genocide, terrorism, riots, salmonella, water pollution, energy insecurity; and, the list can go on and on. Our lives and times seem to be defined by multiplications of dangers, threats, risks, uncertainties, anxieties. To account for this some speak of the rise of cultures of fear; others of the dominance of risk management and pre-emptive government; some focus on widening conceptions of insecurity, others on the making of neurotic citizens; some highlight the commodification of security, others the mobilisation of existential threats for political and professional legitimacy. If the multiple languages, images, technologies and institutions of insecurity are indeed defining of our times, what does that mean? What is at stake when security unbinds?

The many insecurities are not equivalent, do not co-exist in one site, and do not systematically reinforce one another. Neither do they come together in a global threat or a more loosely defined global assemblage of dangers. They are dispersed, different, and sometimes connected, sometimes not. Constructing a theory that synthesises them around a global threat, a grand cultural or civilisational change, or a hegemonic order will give the impression of a homogeneity that does not really exist. It will misrecognise the contemporary liquidity of security as solidifying (Bauman, 2000), as if there is a fixed landscape in which dangers are organised in hierarchies ranking them in terms of importance and in light of global developments such as a changing geopolitical order with rising and falling great powers or an expanding socioeconomic and governmental order, often named ‘neoliberal’.

This book starts from the understanding that security is unbound, that insecurities are rendered as multiple and, through often banal, non-intense dispersing. Its defining question is: what is politically at stake in the scattering of insecurity and how can security studies contribute to understanding the political significance of the multiple circulations of multiple insecurities?

Insecurity and democracy

Although I seek to open a political stake in the contemporary world, I will not start in today’s world. I want to return to two essays written by Franz Leopold Neumann, within about a year before he died in a car crash in 1954: ‘The concept of political freedom’ (Neumann, 1996 [1953]) and ‘Angst und Politik’ (Neumann, 1954). Franz Neumann was a member of the early Frankfurt School—a strand in critical theory developed at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt am Main (founded in 1923). As so many of its members, he was intellectually and politically engaged with the crisis politics of the Weimar Republic, the rise of fascism and the formation of National Socialism in Germany in the 1920s and 30s. After the National Socialists came to power he sought refuge in London and in 1936 moved to New York.

Both essays were written on the back of extensive studies of the rise and politics of National Socialism (Neumann, 1967 [1944]). Yet they also reflect a context of increased politics of fear in the US after the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949, Mao gained control over China and the US got involved in the war in Korea. During that period the repression of communist sympathisers, and anyone thought to be one, seriously intensified in the US.

In 1953 he concluded his essay ‘The concept of political freedom’ with the following observation:

[Democracy’s] essence consists in the execution of large-scale social change maximizing the freedom of man. Only in this way can democracy be integrated; its integrating element is a moral one, whether it be freedom or justice…. But there is opposed to this a second integrating principle of a political system: fear of an enemy… If the concept ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ do constitute the ‘energetic principle’ of politics, a democratic political system is impossible, whether the fear is produced from within or without.

(Neumann, 1996: 222–23)

Neumann’s conclusion invites us to answer the question ‘What is politically at stake in security practice?’ with ‘democracy’. This is very familiar ground for those who have now been exposed for over a decade to debates on the violation of fundamental rights and democratic processes in the wake of the terrorist violence in the US on 11 September 2001 and the pervasion of counter-terrorist policies in everyday life. As it has been familiar for those who experienced emergency powers instituted to deal with economic crises and violent repression of political opposition, or who lived through various other moments where the politics of fear and foregrounding enemies suppressed democratic principles and processes.

Yet Neumann does a little more than simply saying that democracy and politics of fear do not go well together because the latter invites secrecy or emergency laws while democracy demands transparency and due process. He invites us to read security as a practice of making ‘enemy’ and ‘fear’ the integrative, energetic principle of politics displacing the democratic principles of freedom and justice. In this interpretation, security practice does not simply nibble at the edges of democracy but is inherently anti-democratic because of the conception of politics and society that it inscribes in the world through its actions. Enacting relations to others and one’s environment as always dangerous, fearful and inimical translates into a politics that limits and hollows out democratic organisations based on principles of freedom and justice. Later in this book I will expand the concept of security from its focus on fear and enemies to issues of risk and uncertainty, but for now let us stay with Neumann.

Taking up Neumann’s invitation, security can thus be understood as a political force. It is not simply a policy responding to threats and dangers. Neither is it a public good or value. It is a practice with a political content. Security is a practice not of responding to enemies and fear but of creating them. It enacts our world as if it is a dangerous world, a world saturated by insecurities. It invests fear and enmity in relations between humans and polities rather than simply defending or protecting political units and people from enemies and fears. For Neumann the reference to enemy and fear had quite specific resonances with National Socialist mobilisations of fear as a political instrument to further destabilise the political system in interwar Germany and to demonise and persecute communist movements, progressive political parties and racially identified groups. It also resonated with the mobilisation of fear under McCarthyism and more generally US Cold War politics. In evoking enemies and instituting the defence of society as political priority, security practice sustains fearful and vulnerable self-identification and organises relations to others not in terms of justice or reciprocity, for example, but in terms of an existential struggle for survival in which enemies and friends need to be clearly separated.

The idea that security practice organises relations in terms of insecurity is not linked to a particular historical context only. It is somehow immanent to what security practice is: security is about securing against insecurities. There is no way of doing security without foregrounding insecurities. No enemy, no need to have an army. Remember the debates about the peace dividend in the 1990s. With the Soviet Union disintegrated and the bipolar power struggle between communism and capitalism, East and West, gone, defence budgets were cut, many countries abolished compulsory military service, etc. Remember also the speedy change from celebrating people breaking down the Iron Curtain, to warnings about the dangers of too many people crossing the now more open border. Claims of the possibility that people would massively migrate from east to west as a danger for Western European societal stability sustained calls for limiting and managing the potential free movement of people by configuring freedom into danger. A similar securitising took place in the midst of the Arab Spring in 2011. Support for challenges to autocratic and dictatorial regimes went hand in hand with, at some point, quite dramatic warnings about the negative consequences of too many people seeking refuge in Western Europe. When security policy and institutions enact a situation, they change the framing and legitimate repertoires of action by reiterating the existence of insecurities and by seeking to govern political and social relations as potentially inimical, dangerous or risky. In that sense, security practice always securitises; it necessarily inscribes insecurities in the world.

Neumann’s analysis of fear also introduces an understanding of security as a practice with a political content. Neumann does not simply speak about spreading fear and enmity as such but rather about how it risks to shift the ‘integrating’ or ‘energetic’ principle of politics and the political system to one that makes democracy impossible; one that displaces justice, freedom, equality, fraternity with enemy and fear; fear and enemies are politically mobilised to play a key role in political contests and processes of legitimisation. Again one of his specific historical references was the Nazi deployment of violent militia, political iterations of external threats, and demonising political opposition as internal enemies as a strategy to eliminate political opposition and institute an authoritarian state.

What I want to take from this is that security is a political practice that is defined through its tensions with the democratic organisation of political life. Democracy is a political stake in security practice, not simply because of fundamental rights being violated in the name of security but because security practice inherently organises social and political relations around enemies, risks, fear, anxiety. When insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. For Neumann, this means in particular that foregrounding enemies and fear displaces practices of mediating differences and conflicts through principles of justice and freedom. Neumann’s political lesson is that when we observe a pervasiveness of insecurity in people’s lives and of politics governing and mobilising these insecurities, we should ask if insecurity is becoming the energetic principle of politics. If so, for anyone invested in democratic politics alarm bells should go off. Analytically Neumann’s insights invite us to organise security studies around a double sensitivity: one to moments of insecurities pervading social and political life, and the other to security being a practice that inherently enacts the limits of democracy. Translating this double sensitivity into a study of insecurity is what I call developing ‘a political reading of security practice’ and is the main purpose of this book.

This book is thus an introduction to security that foregrounds political dimensions of security practice. Instead of mapping new security problems or presenting different approaches or theories of security, the book introduces security as a practice that interferes in politics. More specifically, the book starts from the observation that, as an immanent part of seeking to secure something, security practice enacts limits of democratic politics. This inherent tension between democratic politics and security practice defines the political content of security. It invites a political reading of security rather than a security reading of politics. I will develop this idea of a political reading of security more extensively in the next chapter. But first let us fast forward from the 1930s and 50s to 2002.

Unbinding security

In the heat of debates following the (12 October 2002) bombing in Bali, Indonesia, and the political reactions to it, British historian and commentator Timothy Garton Ash wrote:

There is an atmosphere emerging here, an atmosphere of menace which the media help to transport and magnify. And don’t we know it already from a hundred bad movies? The hard question now is whether the conduct of the ‘war against terrorism’, in this atmosphere of menace, might not end up being as much a threat to our own freedoms as terrorism itself.

(Ash, 2002)

Ash’s is one of many warnings about negative consequences of political and security reactions to what is now known as 9/11 and the subsequent bombings in Bali, Madrid, London and other global cities. Warnings about democracy being threatened by the political and security policies that claim to protect democracy against its enemies have been central to the political and judicial contestation of counter-terrorism policies. For example, the Center for Constitutional Rights in the US contested the moves towards a stronger executive-centred government in US responses to 9/11:

Since that time [11 September 2001], the Bush administration, the United States Justice Department and the United States Congress have enacted a series of Executive Orders, regulations, and laws that have seriously undermined civil liberties, the check and balances that are essential to the structure of our democratic government, and indeed, democracy itself.

(Center for Constitutional Rights, 2002)

Hearing democratic alarm bells is not unusual in contestations of intense moments of insecurity. Yet Ash’s way of phrasing echoes Neumann’s in a different way. Instead of focusing on civil liberties and checks and balances being undermined in counter-terrorism regulations and legislations, he refers to an atmosphere. An atmosphere is something much vaguer, more diffuse, but also socially and culturally more pervasive than specific legislations. Referring to the media and popular culture as vehicles of the emerging ‘atmosphere of menace’ expresses a worry about this atmosphere being breathed across society. It also situates reactions to terrorism in longer term cultural accustoming of people to catastrophic scenarios, and stark distinctions between good and evil.

In his analysis of fear and politics, Neumann argued that fear becoming an integrating political principle was not simply the result of strategic political use of violence, intimidation and unifying people around fear of the enemy. It hooked into wider societal pervasions of anxiety. He did not point towards popular culture and the media in the first instance but to the economic depression and, more generally, the inherent insecurity that organising economic life through free market competition in which fortunes can be created but also quickly lost inscribes into society and individuals (Neumann, 1954: 34–37). For both Neumann and Ash, the alarm bell is indeed about democracy but they also draw attention to how social, economic and cultural processes, rather than strictly legislative and political decisions, work insecurities into an energising force that challenges freedom.

Especially after having read Neumann’s work on the politics of fear and the rise of National Socialism, I feel strongly that this is a warning we should take seriously. Yet hooking the diffusion of insecurities into ‘the war against terrorism’, although understandable, relevant and done by many, has serious limits. In the wake of several waves of politicising terrorism, it is tempting to make the war against terrorism the key process, the central change that caused the wider societal dispersal of insecurity and the intensified presence of a politics of fear. Focusing on terrorism one easily misses that ‘the atmosphere of menace’, or what I prefer to call ‘the unbinding of security’, does not depend on a wave of terrorist actions and their politicisation. It involves a much wider and diversified set of processes that work the limits of democracy in various ways.

To name a few that spring immediately to mind: global warming and images of environmental catastrophes, transversal flows of deadly viruses, popular cultures diffusing intense violence, human trafficking, the rise of vigilante, the dispersal of CCTV, the commodification of security, the politicisation of migration as endangering legal order, educating children of the dangers of meeting strangers. Securitising is multiple, fragmented, often disconnected, but it spreads insecurity into a wide range of social relations, and organises in its various modulations policies and practices of governance. In this book, I will look in particular at surveillance combined with risk governance as a technological mode of connecting insecurities and governing social and political relations by means of suspicion.

Not all these processes coalesce around an enemy, fear of a particular event, or an objectified menace, and they certainly do not come together around one particular inimical development—like a particular catastrophe or an army ready to invade. Environmental change is security-wise linked to overpopulation, rising sea levels and unruly migration. These links are mostly not treated as building up to one massive threat but are enacted in a more fragmented way.

Individually, as well as taken together, the dispersing of insecurities steadily eats away at the limits of security practice; it stretches the boundaries of what can be called insecurity, including when, where and how security institutions are mobilised. One of the key characteristics of contemporary profuse securitising is that it sustains a governmental process of making security limitless. I use the concept ‘security unbound’ to express this development. What I mean by it is thus not simply that many insecurities circulate through our lives simultaneously and in succession. The more important issue is that the principles, cultures, practices and categorical distinctions that limit where and when security practices, perceptions and affects ‘operate’ are challenged too. These challenges can take many forms. They include, among others: violating fundamental rights and due process in criminal justice practice; indiscriminate security controls at borders; gating neighbourhoods; blurring distinctions between economic migration, refuge and crime; rendering the line between humanitarian aid and military intervention increasingly ambivalent; counter-insurgency waterin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Security unbound and democracy
• 2 Political reading of security
• 3 Insecurity as exception
• 4 Diffusing insecurities
• 5 Assembling suspicion
• 6 Surveillance, democracy, privacy
• 7 Security technology and democratic limits
• 8 Insecurity, democracy, political
• Bibliography
• Index