Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence

War Against the Other

Anthony Burke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134174263
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In a world plagued by war and terror, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence sounds a warning: not only are global patterns of insecurity, violence and conflict getting ever more destructive and out of hand, but the ways we understand and respond to them will only prolong the crisis. When security is grounded in exclusion and alienation, ethics licenses killing and war, and freedom is a mask for imperial violence, how should we act?

Anthony Burke offers a groundbreaking analysis of the historical roots of sovereignty and security, his critique of just war theory, and important new essays on strategy, the concept of freedom and US exceptionalism. He pursues critical engagements with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Emmanuel Levinas, Carl Von Clausewitz, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Walzer, Michel Foucault and William Connolly. Combining a diversity of critical thought with analyses of the War on Terror, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Vietnam War, the Indonesian crisis, globalization and the new drive for empire, Burke refuses easy answers, or to abandon hope.

This innovative study will be of interest to students and researchers of politics and international relations, security studies, social and cultural theory and philosophy.

Part I

Security

1 Aporias of security

From the Leviathan to the security state

Maybe the [task] nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to . . . get rid of the political ‘double-bind,’ which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures . . . the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualisation which is linked to the state.

Michel Foucault¹

What does it mean to be secure?

Surely we know. We know that security is one of the most fundamental human needs: an irrefutable guarantee of safety and well-being, economic assurance and possibility, sociability and order; of a life lived freely without fear or hardship. That security is a universal good available to all, and a solemn pledge between citizens and their political leaders, to whom their people’s security is ‘the first duty’, the overriding goal of domestic and international policy-making. As such it has been able to trace a powerful path between subject and world, state and citizen, to promise simultaneously a solution to the inchoate fears and insecurities of everyday life and the enormous spatial, cultural, economic and geopolitical complexities of government. In short, security remains one of modernity’s most stubborn and enduring dreams.

However, I believe that, more than ever, we do need to ask what it is to be secure. Surely we no longer know what security is – in that platonic sense. Surely more than a decade after the end of the Cold War, after the Clinton Doctrine and the destruction of the Twin Towers, after humanitarian and policy disasters in Indo-China, Africa, East Timor, the Middle East and Central America, and after a growing body of humanist and critical scholarship has questioned security’s unity, discursive structure and political implications, security no longer possesses a credible wholeness?² This chapter begins with the premise that security’s claims to universality and wholeness founder on a destructive series of aporias, which derive first from the growing sense that security no longer has a stable referent object, nor names a common set of needs, means or ways of being, and second, from the moral relativism which lies at the centre of dominant (realist) discourses of security which pretend to universality but insist that ‘our’ security always rests on the insecurity and suffering of an-Other.

While this chapter argues strongly that security has no essential ontological integrity, it also argues that if the power and sweep of security are to be understood and challenged, its claims to universality must be taken seriously. Such claims underpin and animate sweeping forms of power, subjectivity, force and economic circulation, and cannot be dismissed out of hand. Nor, in the hands of some humanist writers – who have sought to conceive human and gender security in radical counterpoint to realist images of national and international security – are such claims always pernicious. They have a valuable moral and political force that undermines, perhaps unwittingly, the logocentric presuppositions of the realist discourses they question. Yet a common assumption that security can be ontologically completed and secured does present a hurdle for the kind of ‘ontopolitical’ critique that we really need.³

The answer is not to seek to close out these aporias; they call to us and their existence presents an important political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it conform to a new humanist ideal – however laudable – we need to challenge security as a claim to truth, to set its ‘meaning’ aside. Instead, we should focus on security as a pervasive and complex system of political, social and economic power, which reaches from the most private spaces of being to the vast flows and conflicts of geopolitics and global economic circulation. It is to see security as an interlocking system of knowledges, representations, practices and institutional forms that imagine, direct and act upon bodies, spaces and flows in certain ways – to see security not as an essential value but as a political technology. This is to move from essence to genealogy: a genealogy which aims, in William Connolly’s words, to ‘open us up to the play of possibility in the present . . . [to] ‘incite critical responses to unnecessary violences and injuries surreptitiously imposed upon life by the insistence that prevailing forms are natural, rational, universal or necessary’.⁴

This chapter explores the aporias of security, and then begins the work of its genealogy. A genealogy of security’s conceptual and discursive roots that aims to uncover, at its crucial points of formation, the order of knowledge lying beneath security’s drama of struggle, technology, violence and metaphor – in the hope that this order of knowledge can in turn be challenged, altered and rethought. It is to ask: is there something beyond or ‘outside’ security? What might its possibilities and dangers be?

Two kinds of aporia

In both its realist and humanist guises, security takes the form and promise of a metaphysical discourse: an overarching political goal and practice that guarantees existence itself, which makes the possibility of the world possible. US President Bill Clinton prefaced the 1997 National Security Strategy by saying that ‘protecting the security of our nation – our people, our territory and our way of life – is my foremost mission and constitutional duty’. Dr Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia has argued that ‘national security is inseparable from political stability, economic success and social harmony’. In 1995 former Australian Labor leader Paul Keating argued that ‘a prime minister’s duty, his first duty, is to the security of his country’, while his successor Kim Beazley declared the party’s central values as ‘security and opportunity’, and elevated security to an overarching goal that linked, along a seamless continuum, the personal security of individuals and families with the security of the nation itself.⁵ In Indonesia, security was a fundamental societal discourse during the entire tenure of the Suharto New Order, and has only taken on greater urgency in the turmoil which accompanied his retreat from power. In Indonesia’s doctrinal continuum between national and regional ‘resilience’, security links the unity and prosperity of the nation to ideal systems of regional and international order.⁶

Indeed the political theorist R. N. Berki argues that security is the ultimate and overriding human value, the basic condition for life and freedom,⁷ and the critical scholar Michael Dillon recognises the same drive: ‘security impress[es] itself upon political thought as a self-evident condition for the very existence of life – both individual and social’.⁸ R. B. J. Walker likewise argues that modern accounts of security define ‘the conditions under which we have been constructed as subjects subject to subjection. They tell us who we must be’.⁹

Even a position admirably antithetical to that of Berki and other realists, as set out by J. Ann Tickner in her book Gender in International Relations, accepts that ‘the achievement of security has always been central to the normative concerns of international relations scholars’. Her work seeks to realise a ‘truly comprehensive security’ that adds the removal of ‘gender relations of domination and subordination’ to ‘the elimination of physical, structural and ecological violence’.¹⁰ Similarly Walker’s earlier book One World, Many Worlds argued for ‘a clearer sense of what it means to have security for all people rather than the national security that now renders everyone increasingly insecure’.¹¹ Whatever the important differences between Tickner, the early Walker and the still hegemonic claims of realism, there remained a common assumption that security is universal.

However, these differences should not be quickly effaced. While the common metaphysical assumption presents a problem, the critiques of Tickner, Walker and others have been of enormous political value, and implicitly contested both their own and realist assumptions that security was universal. This occurred in two ways. First, in arguments for human security there was a radical shift in the nature of the subject to be protected: from the highly abstract imaginary of the nation-state to the immediate, corporeal distress of the human; a human which, in that distress, activates a call for difference that simultaneously undermines the illusory unity of a body-politic that would subsume all differences beneath a common imagination of home.

Second, the force of such critiques shattered Realism’s claim to be a founding and comprehensive account of security: scattering its objects, methods, and normative aims into an often contradictory and antithetical dispersal. What was revealed here was not a universality but a field of conflict – as much social as conceptual. This creates some serious problems for a more radical and inclusive language of security, however important its desire for justice. This was recognised later by Walker, who argued in 1997 that ‘demands for broader accounts of security risk inducing epistemological overload’.¹² Indeed Simon Dalby argues that security, as a concept, may no longer be viable. He thinks that radical reformulations suggest that: ‘the political structures of modernity, patriarchy and capitalism are the sources [rather than the vulnerable objects] of insecurity . . . [are] so different as to call into question whether the term itself can be stretched to accommodate such reinterpretations. Inescapably, it puts into question the utility of the term in political discourse after the Cold War.’¹³

Thus humanist critiques of security uncover an aporia within the concept of security. An aporia is an event that prevents a metaphysical discourse from fulfilling its promised unity: not a contradiction which can be brought into the dialectic, smoothed over and resolved into the unity of the concept, but an untotalisable problem at the heart of the concept, disrupting its trajectory, emptying out its fullness, opening out its closure. Jacques Derrida writes of aporia being an ‘impasse’, a path that cannot be travelled; an ‘interminable experience’ that, however, ‘must remain if one wants to think, to make come or to let come any event of decision or responsibility’.¹⁴

As an event, Derrida sees the aporia as something like a stranger crossing the threshold of a foreign land: yet the aporetic stranger ‘does not simply cross a given threshold’ but ‘affects the very experience of the threshold . . . to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language . . .’.¹⁵ With this in mind, we can begin to imagine how a critical discourse (the ‘stranger’ in the security state) can challenge and open up the self-evidence of security, its self- and boundary-drawing nature, its imbrication with borders, sovereignty, identity and violence. Hence it is important to open up and focus on aporias: they bring possibility, the hope of breaking down the hegemony and assumptions of powerful political concepts, to think and create new social, ethical and economic relationships outside their oppressive structures of political and epistemological order – in short, they help us to think new paths. Aporias mark not merely the failure of concepts but a new potential to experience and imagine the impossible. This is where the critical and life-affirming potential of genealogy can come into play.

My particular concern with humanist discourses of security is that, whatever their critical value, they leave in place (and possibly strengthen) a key structural feature of the elite strategy they oppose: its claim to embody truth and to fix the contours of the real. In particular, the ontology of security/threat or security/insecurity – which forms the basic condition of the real for mainstream discourses of international policy – remains powerfully in place, and security’s broader function as a defining condition of human experience and modern political life remains invisible and unexamined. This is to abjure a powerful critical approach that is able to question the very categories in which our thinking, our experience and actions remain confined.

This chapter remains focused on the aporias that lie at the heart of security, rather than pushing into the spaces that potentially lie beyond. This is another project, one whose contours are already becoming clearer and which I address in detail in Chapters 2 and 3.¹⁶ What this chapter builds is a genealogical account of security’s origins and cultural power, its ability to provide what Walker calls a ‘constitutive account of the political’ – as he says, ‘claims about common security, collective security, or world security do little more than fudge the contradictions written into the heart of modern politics: we can only become humans, or anything else, after we have given up our humanity, or any other attachments, to the greater good of citizenship’.¹⁷ Before we can rewrite security we have to properly understand how security has written us – how it has shaped and limited our very possibility, the possibilities for our selves, our relationships and our available images of political, social and economic order. This, as Walker intriguingly hints, is also to explore the aporetic distance that modernity establishes between our ‘humanity’ and a secure identity defined and limited by the state. In short, security needs to be placed alongside a range of other economic, political, technological, philosophic and scientific developments as one of the central constitutive events of our modernity, and it remains one of its essential underpinnings.

Security derives its enormous cultural power from its place at the centre of modern political thought: of a thought which, after first establishing the founding myths of modern political society, has further sought to think the juridical basis and function of the state, its enabling relation to a broader cultural and economic modernity, and to the imagination of ‘progressive’ forms of modern political and economic subjectivity. Just as Foucault sought, through the idea of governmentality, to trace the emergence of simultaneously totalising and individualising forms of state power, I would argue that security occupies a key enabling position at their junction. The remainder of this chapter elucidates security’s ‘constitutive account of the political’ through a critical reading of Hobbes, Locke, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and Hegel, using Foucault’s writings on governmental reason as a loose template.

It is in this constitutive account of the political that we find the second aporia of security, which is opened up as an impasse within its basic conceptual structure. Sadly, this is a moral impasse that also possesses a malign functionality. This aporia occurs because despite their presumption to universality, realist structures of security have always argued that the security of the self (the individual, the nation or the ‘way of life’) must be purchased at the expense of another. This was starkly laid out by Berki, who wrote in his book Security and Society that:

Seeking after security for oneself and being a cause of insecurity for others are not just closely related; they are the same thing, with no chance of either logical or existential separation . . . when the chips are down, and to a certain degree, they are always down . . . it is my life, my freedom, my security versus the rest of the human race.¹⁸

Ur-theorist of realism Hans Morgenthau, surprisingly enough, expressed some qualms about such an image of security, despite having done so much to entrench national security at the apex of modern policy making. With the advent of the nuclear age, he argued, no state could purchase its security at the expense of another; now diplomacy must seek to make all nations equally secure.¹⁹

However, this insight was lost on a generation of later theorists and policymakers, for whom security would inevitably imply the sacrifice of the Other. Consider George Kennan’s argument, in 1948, that the United States would have to ‘to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to retain our position of [economic] disparity without positive detriment to our national security . . . We should cease to talk about vague – and for the Far East – unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratisation’.²⁰ One of Australia’s most senior and influential policymakers of the post-Vietnam era, Richard Woolcott, underlined the continuing power of this view when he argued in 1995 that ‘sentimental notions’ of self-determination for East Timor and Bougainville were a threat to Australia’s national security (a security that for two decades had been premised on close relations and military co-operation with the murderous Suharto regime).²¹ This highlights an urgent need to examine the images of Self and Other that animate (in)secure identities, and to expose the violence and repression that is so ofte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Security, freedom and death
• Part I: Security
• Part II: Ethics
• Part III: Violence
• Notes