Spaces of Security and Insecurity

Geographies of the War on Terror

Alan Ingram, Klaus Dodds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317051695
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences physiques
• Subtopic: Géographie

Drawing on critical geopolitics and related strands of social theory, this book combines new case studies with theoretical and methodological reflections on the geographical analysis of security and insecurity. It brings together a mixture of early career and more established scholars and interprets security and the war on terror across a number of domains, including: international law, religion, migration, development, diaspora, art, nature and social movements. At a time when powerful projects of globalization and security continue to extend their reach over an increasingly wide circle of people and places, the book demonstrates the relevance of critical geographical imaginations to an interrogation of the present.

Chapter 1
Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror

Alan Ingram and Klaus Dodds

Introduction

It is perhaps telling that the American television show, 24, featuring the counter-terror operative Jack Bauer, is a big hit with defenders of the Bush administration’s tactics since 11 September 2001. US Secretary for Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, defended the show’s controversial coverage of the use of torture as representing ‘real-life’ situations, and visited the set when it was shooting in Washington DC1 But the influence of the show has not been limited to the higher echelons of the Bush administration. Jack Bauer ‘had many friends at Guantánamo’, according to one US military lawyer who was stationed at the detention facility there: ‘He gave people lots of ideas’.2 Support also stretched to certain US lawmakers. When participants in a televised debate among potential Republican presidential candidates were asked to outline their position on torture during a period of presumed terrorist threat, Representative Tom Tancredo stated, ‘I’m looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you’.3 The office of the show’s creator, Joel Surnow (himself well connected in conservative circles), is decorated by a US flag given to him by an army regiment during a visit to Baghdad. ‘The military loves our show’, he stated, ‘People in the administration love the series too … it’s a patriotic show. They should love it’.4

If James Bond was the iconic hero of the Cold War era, Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) occupies a central (and deeply problematic) spot in the popular US imagination of the war of terror. Over a number of series, Bauer’s improbable exploits and willingness to use extreme measures are shown to be reasonable, given the exceptional threats that are said to be facing America and the wider world. Yet while the show sometimes toys with ambiguity, it generally upholds a binary world view and a conventional mapping of homeland security culture. But the real enemy in 24 is less the terrorist than those who might call the veracity of this world view and security culture into question. Bauer’s critics within the show may often be well-meaning, but they are always shown to be misguided. They are always proven by events to have chosen the wrong paradigm for dealing with variants on the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario, so favoured by defenders of torture. The show is less a reflection of US homeland security culture than a constitutive part of it.

Though ‘homeland security’ is the key referent in such discourses, as in earlier phases of geopolitical transformation, the globe itself has also re-emerged as the level at which the most important processes are assumed to operate and upon which security is presumed to rest. However, while there are many continuities with earlier colonial and Cold War eras, the conditions of contemporary globalization are enabling visions and strategies of security to become ever more expansive. One indication of this came in 2005 when Michael Chertoff spoke of an aspiration to create a ‘world wide security envelope’. He asked, in the managerial argot adopted by certain kinds of security professionals,

How do we move beyond simply partnering on an individual, episodic basis to building a true partnership that will operate in a mission-oriented focus where we will work together with our allies overseas to accomplish a mission that will secure the entire world?5

In Chertoff’s vision, those inside the envelope would be treated with ‘a high degree of confidence and trust’; however, this would be predicated upon ‘the kind of in-depth analysis and the kind of in-depth vetting that is necessary to make sure those who seek to harm us do not slip through the cracks’.6 Such visions, founded upon simplistic binaries of the kind often peddled by politicians and culture-makers alike, are likely to have profound geographical effects. This, then, is a maximalist vision of security that indicates how counter-terrorist operations in response to the attacks on the US of 11 September 2001 are linked into a much wider project: the goal of securing not just specific homelands but liberal globalization itself. This project is couched in terms of a simple imaginative geography, but it conceals a world of complexity. Numerous spaces of control have been created in many different places, connected by networks of communication, influence and coercion that confound orthodox maps of world politics. These go beyond mere foreign interventions in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to produce complex topographies and topologies that are reframing the meaning of territory and sovereignty.7 This book addresses the urgent task of documenting and interpreting these complex geographies and the ways in which people have contested them. It suggests that geographical imaginations are essential to any critique of the war on terror and emerging landscapes of security, and to the construction of alternatives.

Rather than reduce the complexity inherent in real geographies to simplistic periodizations and spatializations, it is also necessary to recognize the geopolitical present is constituted by multiple temporalities and multiple spatialities that exceed the states and security apparatuses, even as they are shaped by them.8 In this context, attempts to identify moments or episodes as key or foundational can easily become partial or ethnocentric in ways that much recent geographical work has sought to unsettle. However, the ‘war on terror’ proclaimed by George W. Bush in 2001 has undoubtedly been an important catalyst of geographical transformation.

While the war on terror is not the main story for the majority of the world’s people, the attempt to make it so represents an extraordinary attempt at geopolitical re-scripting and geographical remaking, the consequences and implications of which continue to reverberate. At the same time, it is necessary to be mindful of the fact that the term ‘war on terror’ does not denote a stable and coherent referent object, but is caught up in complex discursive struggles for legitimacy. One sign of this is the coincidence between British state actors moving away from the phrase itself, preferring instead to focus on supposedly more neutral ideas of criminality and radicalization, and its appearance as the premise for a satirical board game.9 The term is also apt to reappear in other contexts as an ostensibly neutral descriptor, for example in the justification for increasing US military involvement in Africa, suggesting a certain durability and utility for some actors.10 Thus, while most of the insecurities faced by most of the people in the world cannot and should not be connected to terrorism or counter-terrorism, this volume aims to trace ways in which the dominant visions of security associated with the war on terror have been woven into a variety of geographies and have in turn been called into question.

One key reference point for such an enterprise is the project of critical geopolitics. The idea of geopolitics as an active process by which the geographical complexity and richness of the world gets reduced to schematic spatial templates (such as East versus West or developed versus developing or international community versus ‘axis of evil’) has been around for two decades.11 Critical geopolitics has not only explored how these templates are embedded within foreign policy and security discourses but also how they reverberate through popular culture and particular media such as film, newspapers, cartoons and television.12 This basic insight has served as inspiration for the development of a large and growing body of scholarship that seeks to interrogate the spatialities associated with states and the inter-state system. This has contested reductive geopolitical visions and proposed a variety of techniques to re-conceptualize (and thereby perhaps remake) political geographies in less violent ways.

The ways in which critical geopolitics has addressed issues like these has shifted over time. Though they cannot be summarized in detail or with justice here, it is worth outlining some of the main orientations. First, there has been a recognition that struggles over space and power are not to be analysed only in terms of formal theories or processes of international relations; consideration is also required to examine the ways in which geopolitics circulates between formal theorizing, practical statecraft and popular domains. Second, recent developments, informed by renewed feminist critiques, have sought to bring attention to the material, embodied and emotional geographies around geopolitics in order to unsettle further the hierarchies and binaries upon which the practices of geopolitics are predicated.13 Third, the empirical reach of critical geopolitics now takes in everything including the spatial patterning of violence; maps, speeches, policy documents and media reports; film (e.g. The Kingdom 2007), cartoons (e.g. those of Steve Bell), radio (e.g. Voice of America), video games (e.g. America’s Army) and pop songs (e.g. Angry American). It is also engaging much more fully with the ways in which people experience, respond and contest geopolitics and security cultures.

This broad project has emerged and evolved in affiliation with other currents in geography, the social sciences and humanities. In particular, there have been close relationships with parts of international relations and critical security studies.14 But there have also been engagements with cultural studies and with social geography, with urban geography, and with the literature on imaginative geographies, with which critical geopolitics shares many intellectual roots.15 While there have been tensions and debates between different parts of this intellectual landscape, the call to regard domains often considered separately (such as ‘international relations’ and ‘everyday life’) as ‘part of the same assemblage’ seems to be an increasingly important theme for work in the field.16 Identifying connections and renewing ethical and political concern for the ways in which people contest, transcend or remake current dividing lines (reminiscent of calls by geographers more than a century ago) is another.17

The contributions to the book engage with this constellation of concerns in different ways. They draw on a range of theoretical inspirations (including imaginative geographies and Foucauldian governmentality as well as critical geopolitics), methodological approaches (including discourse analysis, interviewing, online research and ethnography) and empirical materials (ranging from policy documents to art works). While all of the contributions are consistent with the idea that geopolitics and security are better considered as forms of situated knowledge rather than abstract truths about the world, we recognize too that this book in general reflects its production from within the UK by authors who, while their life histories may trace diverse geographies, are mostly (though not exclusively) based there.18

To place the focus of our critique on security and the war on terror, is not to deny that threats exist. However, we believe that it is important to bring practices of security much more fully into view and to examine their implications. One reason for this is that many security practices tend to protect the richer and more powerful and to target the already-excluded. Another concern is that the rush to secure existing forms of social relations risks leaving the deep causes of violence and human vulnerability largely untouched. So security practices themselves must be subject to critical scrutiny as part of a wider study of socio-spatial dynamics. To focus exclusively on ‘threats’ and to screen out ‘security’ as a constitutive factor in the political geographies now unfolding (as some would prefer) is to render analysis partial and to play into the hands of the many actors who have consciously performed security discourse in order to promote their own interests and diminish their own accountability.19

Connecting Themes

While each of the chapters in the book represents a distinctive contribution, there are a number of connecting themes that link them together.

One major theme concerns the spatial vocabulary of international relations.20 Terms such as ‘homeland’, ‘international community’, ‘failed state’, ‘terrorist network’ and ‘rogue state’ direct the gaze towards a particular version of the present as already-given and unproblematic. However, it is necessary to historicize our understanding of the geographies that they help to constitute. The war on terror and other security projects are unfolding not across some kind of geopolitical tabula rasa but across landscapes that bear the marks of pre-existing and multiple struggles over enduring colonial, Cold War and other geopolitical orders.

In particular, the brunt of the spatial reordering associated with the war on terror has been borne by people in and from the global South, especially countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and neighbouring countries such as Pakistan.21 There has been renewed concern among western security policymakers with ‘ungoverned’ spaces (for example in Pakistan’s tribal regions, or around the Sahara), in some ways recapitulating concerns from the 1990s about the spaces of criminal and drug economies.22 And cities (often divided according to a series of binary types corresponding to north/south) have increasingly become the target of geopolitical strategies.23 Underdevelopment has been linked to anxieties about zones of instability, failed cities and failed states, as western governments worry that such regions might ‘export’ security threats, or that regions where strategic resources are located might be taken out of the global economy.24 International development is thus called to perform functions that are bio-political as well as geopolitical: to fortify fragile states and stabilize civilian populations in global danger zones; stem refugee and migrant flows from them; and protect core states’ welfare systems from undesirables.25 Security now resides alongside competent neoliberal ec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Plates
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface: Placing the War on Terror
• 1 Spaces of Security and Insecurity: Geographies of the War on Terror
• PART 1 Constructing the War on Terror
• PART 2 Governing Through Security
• PART 3 Alternative Imaginations
• Index