n otes on c ontributors
Kjell Anderson is a criminologist and jurist specializing in the study of mass violence and mass atrocities. He has conducted human rights and conflict-related research and projects in many countries, including Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Burundi. With a Ph.D. and LL.M. in International Human Rights Law, Anderson is a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, as well as a lecturer at Leiden University, and the coordinator of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention and Second Vice President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Carl Boggs teaches social sciences at National University in Los Angeles, after having taught at Washington University in St. Louis; U.C., Irvine; UCLA; USC; and Antioch University. He is the author of numerous books in the fields of social and political theory, European politics, American politics, US foreign and military policy, and film studies. His latest book is Drugs, Power, and Politics: Narco Wars, Big Pharma, and the Subversion of Democracy (Paradigm, 2015) and Origins of the Warfare State: World War II and the Transformation of American Politics (Routledge, 2016). He is the book review editor for Theory and Society, and has received the Charles A. McCoy Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association.
Jean-Marc Coicaud is Professor of Law and Global Affairs at Rutgers University. In addition, he is a Global Ethics Fellow with the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. Prior to being at Rutgers, he worked with the United Nations, first as a speechwriter for UN Secretary-General Dr. Boutros BoutrosGhali, then as a senior official with the United Nations University, in Tokyo and New York. He has published 15 books and over 80 scholarly articles and book
chapters in the fields of political theory, comparative politics, international relations, and international law. His latest book, co-edited with Yohan Ariffin and Vesselin Popovski, Emotions in International Politics: Beyond Mainstream International Relations, was published in 2016 with Cambridge University Press. In the fall of 2015, Coicaud was elected a Fellow of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea).
Lawrence Davidson is Emeritus Professor of History at West Chester University. His specialization is in the history of American relations with the Middle East. He is the author of America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University Press of Florida, 2001); Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 2003); Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing American National Interest (University of Kentucky Press, 2009); Concise History of the Middle East (coauthor with Arthur Goldschmidt, tenth edition, Westview Press, 2012); and Cultural Genocide (Rutgers University Press, 2012). He has also written numerous articles on US perceptions of and policies toward the Middle East. Over the past 20 years, Professor Davidson has taken on the role of public intellectual and has sought to heighten public awareness of the nature and consequences of US policies in the Middle East.
Dalia Fahmy is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Long Island University. She has published several articles focusing on Islamist in politics, democratization, and most recently on the effects of Islamophobia on US foreign policy. Dr. Fahmy’s current research examines the intellectual and political development of modern Islamist movements. She has been interviewed by various media outlets including CNBC, MSNBC, and the Huffington Post and appears regularly on Al Jazeera.
Adam Henschke is a Research Fellow at the National Security College, Australian National University. He received his Ph.D. through the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics from Charles Sturt University at the end of 2013. He has published in areas that include information theory, ethics of technology, and military ethics. He coedited The Routledge Handbook of Ethics and War (Routledge, 2013) and Binary Bullets: The Ethics of Cyberwarfare (Oxford University Press, 2016) and is writing a book on ethics and surveillance (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Peter Hough is an Associate Professor in International Politics and Programme Leader of the MA International Relations at Middlesex University. He graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has worked at Middlesex since 1998. Hough’s chief areas of research interest are human security, global environmental politics, and the politics of the Arctic. Amongst his most prominent recent publications are the following books: Understanding Global Security (Routledge, Third Edition, 2013); The Arctic in International Politics:
Coming in From the Cold (Routledge, 2013); and Environmental Security: An Introduction (Routledge, 2014).
Alexandria J. Innes is a Lecturer of International Relations at the University of East Anglia. She has published on the politics of asylum in Europe and the security aspects of migration toward Europe, including work in Security Dialogue, International Relations, Global Society, and Journal of Contemporary European Studies. Her research is informed by feminism and post-colonialism in IR, using ethnographic methods to foreground experiential knowledge in international relations, and she is particularly interested in the lived experience of migration. Innes is the author of Migration, Citizenship and the Challenge for Security: An Ethnographic Approach (Palgrave, 2015).
Douglas Irvin-Erickson is Fellow of Peacemaking Practice and Director of the Genocide Prevention Program at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, where he teaches courses on genocide and conflict analysis and resolution. He is the author of chapters and articles on genocide and political theory, and the forthcoming book Raphael Lemkin and Genocide (University of Pennsylvania Press). He has worked on genocide prevention, reconciliation, and international justice projects across Southeast Asia and Central Africa.
Katherine Worboys Izsak is the Undergraduate and Graduate Director of Terrorism Studies and the Education Director for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland. Izsak is responsible for founding one of the nation’s first academic programs in Terrorism Studies at the University of Maryland, where she directs and teaches in the Global Terrorism Minor and Graduate Certificate in Terrorism Analysis. She holds a Ph.D. in History, with a secondary field in Anthropology, from the University of Michigan, and a B.A. from Duke University.
Edwin Daniel Jacob is a Doctoral Candidate of Global Affairs at Rutgers University. He serves as the New Media Coordinator at the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. An interdisciplinary background in political theory, international relations, and history informs his focus on American homeland security and foreign policy. Jacob has published various works in both popular and scholastic forms, including book reviews with New Political Science, Critical Studies on Terrorism, and Critical Sociology; book chapters with Open Court Publishing, Palgrave Macmillan, and Wiley-Blackwell; and several online scholarly magazines. His research on intervention, drones, and critical security studies has been presented at conferences, invited talks, and guest lectures.
James E. Jennings Ph.D., is Founder and President of Conscience International and Executive Director of US Academics for Peace.
Michael McKoy is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Wheaton College. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. His primary research focuses on how international actors cause and respond to revolutions abroad. He has published in journals including the American Journal of Political Science and Journal of Conflict Resolution.
Ashutosh Misra is an India Engagement Fellow at the T.C. Beirne School of Law at The University of Queensland, Australia. He holds a Ph.D. in International Studies and has authored several books on Pakistan. He specializes in Asian security affairs and appears frequently in the media to offer comments. He is currently working on several research and capacity building projects in the security, governance, and public policy space in association with key law enforcement agencies in India and the Indo-Pacific region.
Richard E. Rubenstein is University Professor at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. He is the author of eight books on violent politics and conflict resolution and specializes in studying how to analyze and resolve structural conflicts.
Louise Stanton is Associate Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Political Science at New Jersey City University. She holds a Ph.D. in Global Affairs, with concentrations in political science and law, as well as a J.D. Stanton’s research interests focus on the impact of global conditions upon domestic security institutions, specifically US police, National Guard, and military relations. She is co-chair of the International Relations section of the Northeast Political Science Association (2015-16). Prior to entering the academy, Stanton practiced law in the private sector, served in various policy-making capacities in New Jersey state government, and was a lobbyist.
Rasmus Ugilt is a Ph.D. in Philosophy. He is currently lecturing at the Department of Pedagogical Philosophy at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published several books and articles in English: The Metaphysics of Terror (Bloomsbury, 2012); Giorgio Agamben: Political Philosophy (HEB, 2014); “The Problem of Emergency in the American Supreme Court” (with Emily Hartz), Law and Critique (2011); “Evil as an Aesthetic Concept,” Academic Quarter (2012); and “Uncanny Repetitions: Abu Ghraib in Afterthought” (with Carsten Bagge Laustsenbio), Journal for Cultural Research (2012).
Amentahru Wahlrab is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science and History at the University of Texas at Tyler. His published works include original chapters in The Sage Handbook of Globalization (Sage, 2014), Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati (Lexington Press, 2014), Issues in African Political Economies (Carolina Academic Press, 2017), the book What is Global Studies? Theory and Practice with Manfred B. Steger, (Routledge, 2017), the edited volume U.S. Approaches to the Arab Uprisings:
International Relations and Democracy Promotion with Michael J. McNeal (I.B. Tauris, 2017), and academic journal articles in Critique and Perspectives on Global Development and Technology.
Jaap H. de Wilde is Professor of International Relations and Security Studies and the Centre for IR Research at the University of Groningen. He is the governor of Globalisation Studies Groningen, which he cofounded in 2010. Since 2013, he is chairman of the Dutch Foundation for Peace Research.
INTRODUCTION
Security Matters: Reflections on the Power of Prudence
Edwin Daniel Jacob
s ecurity And e rrors
Security studies finds itself at an impasse. More often than not, academicians, think tankers, and policy makers rely on past threats to frame and address emerging security concerns. This is to say nothing of the “talking heads” whose policy prescriptions routinely appeal to “common sense.” There is nothing new, of course, in this lack of foresight. Failure to anticipate the outbreak of the Arab Spring by political scientists, Middle Eastern scholars, and historians of the modern Middle East was presaged by the collapse of the Soviet Union, some 20 odd years ago, which came as a shock to the denizens of the academy, including Richard Pipes, Chair of Harvard’s Soviet Studies Program. This epistemological gridlock is not confined to the classroom. Failure of imagination and an inability to “connect the dots” marked the immediate critiques against the intelligence community in preventing 9/11.
It should come as no surprise then that meaningful responses to counter ISIS, to use the most pressing international security concern of the day, have been sorely wanting in most quarters. Using unilateral and multilateral force to deal with ISIS has oscillated across the board. Urgency has only been added, of course, since the terrorist group’s
E.D. Jacob Division of Global Affairs, Rutgers University, Somerset, NJ, USA
inspired minions hit “us” in France, Brussels, and Germany—and closer to home in San Bernardino and Orlando. Noticeably absent, however, in most policy discussions on the matter is an appreciation for how ISIS is constituted in the first place. Invoking Article Five of the NATO Charter (i.e., collective defense, wherein an attack upon one member state requires the rest to act on its behalf), imposing no-fly zones in Syria, and raising a regional Muslim fighting force to “fight their own battle” equally undervalue the historical, political, and religious foundations of the Middle East in general and ISIS in particular. Indeed, these categories fall by the wayside; it is as if one category can be reduced to any of the others—since these responses are grounded in anachronistic approaches to fighting a transnationally based mass movement. This breakdown underscores security failures in broad, if not dramatic, terms. This mass disorientation of security studies that follows is, accordingly, a product of its own making.
A quarter of a century has passed since the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Yet our notions of security remain mired in Cold War thinking whose realist ethos—as shaped by the bipolar conflict of global society following World War II—is predicated on holding the nation state’s power, interests, and survival as the guiding unit of analysis in international relations. Using traditional notions of security to fight the global “war on terror” has produced confusion and miscalculation. Just consider that the two longest wars in American history were launched in what soon became obvious as a transnational threat to American hegemony in the aftermath of 9/11. Confronting new dangers to the individual, the state, and the international order calls for developing new categories that speak to the influence of globalization, international institutions, and transnational threats. Failed security policies originate in ideological mismanagement. Theodor Adorno, one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, once noted that the “wrong life cannot be lived rightly.”1 Likewise, wrong ends cannot have right means. US foreign policy has always been driven by an imperialist impulse. Veiled as they may be in virtuous principles, the results of these “noble lies” seem to remain the same. Worse yet, those pushing these policies often buy into the principles, loosely speaking, that underscore their means—contravening Machiavelli’s dictum of recognizing the split between essences and appearances. Failure to account for this split has produced some of the most misguided foreign policy decisions of the last century.
Buying into one’s own ideology is always a risky gamble. All sides appeal to universal ends that are, in fact, grounded in particular interests. Using catch-alls, like human rights, for instance, illustrates this point well. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, human rights (when spoken of at all during the Cold War) were used as a rhetorical reinforcement of the virtues of liberal democracy over the Soviet Marxism of the “evil empire.” Following the Cold War, however, human rights have taken on new life, moving from word to deed as tackling human rights abuses has become an increasingly used justification to provide humanitarian relief to wayward states. Human rights have also been used as veils for imperialist aims of the so-called first world powers. Protecting Iraqis from human rights abuses was, after all, one of the many rationales used for the military invasion of Iraq. Interventions to ameliorate human rights abuses frustrated the matter: the practice furthered the very thing they (supposedly) sought to remedy in theory. Deposing Saddam from power, in the end, cost over half a million Iraqis their lives.2
There is nothing new in this evasion of imperialist ends under seemingly self-sacrificing precepts. Presidential doctrines from James Monroe and Teddy Roosevelt to Cold War counterparts under seven administrations, from Truman to Reagan, speak equally true to an undergirding expansionism of a republic cum empire in three administrations that have stewarded America from the Cold War to the global “war on terror” in Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama. In short, contemporary American foreign policy, marked by what I have called “selective interventionism” elsewhere, did not come out of a vacuum.3 Nor has it arisen out of a Cold War logic following the first “shots” of the Cold War, in the unprecedented and, as of yet, unrepeated droppings of nuclear bombs on the island of Japan by Truman. Rather, extending the American empire has deep roots that were planted in the early days of her republic, against Washington’s warning of staying out of foreign entanglements in his prophetic farewell address to the nation. To be sure, there have been ebbs and flows in extending America’s sphere of influence beyond her shores. But calls for isolationism—from World Wars I and II to the Cold War and the past and current prosecution of the “war on terror”—do not negate the fact that America has been involved in one war or another for almost every year she has been in existence. Indeed, in all of America’s 227 years, she has only seen peace for 21 years.4
s ecurity , t rAdition Ally u nderstood
In international relations, security is traditionally framed in terms of the state. But not all states are treated equally. Particular attention is paid to the most powerful states in the international system, those that have the requisite power (measured in terms of their military and economy) to effect the international system as a whole. American national security has been informed by a mixture of political realism and liberalism for the better part of a century. These state-centric approaches to international relations see the survival of the nation state and the stability of the international order as the driving force of interstate affairs, namely, the interactions between “superpowers.” Developing prudent security policies under these anachronistic frameworks are built to fail (always surprisingly!) because these tenets do not translate to our increasingly interconnected world whose threats transcend the tidy confines of the state.
Reagan’s bear—the symbol of the Soviet Union his reelection team of 1984 used to great effect—is no longer in the woods. It would appear this existential enemy, or “other,” is everywhere. Although communism was a transnational, ideological threat to the West, it was concentrated in state centers of power, particularly the USSR and, to a far lesser extent at the time, China. Modern political terrorism is another matter. Its practice is exemplified in the propaganda of the deed wherein the ends become inextricable from their means. Put another way, violence directed against noncombatants and property, unbounded by a target selection based on military necessity, sheds light on the degree to which terrorist attacks succeed in their ability to instill fear in audiences far from the targets’ national locale. Moreover, the absence of an attack causes the most fervent of emotions: it is the sheer anticipation of a terrorist act that instills fear in the lives of millions.5
Old categories like détente and bipolarity no longer carry water in a world that witnessed the “end of history.” But old habits die hard. Recall then-Major Dean Eckmann’s reaction on the morning of 9/11: “I reverted to the Russian threat. … I’m thinking cruise missile threat from the sea. You know, you look down and see the Pentagon burning, and I thought the bastards snuck one by us.”6 Eckmann’s candid response to the 9/11 Commission was quite telling: if an Air Force officer retreats to a decade-old threat when facing a new one, what does this say of the policy makers, intelligence institutions, and decision makers at the highest levels of political power? Indeed, failing to prevent 9/11 not only highlighted
the oft-repeated “lack of imagination,” it also illustrated the intractability well-ensconced bureaucracies have in adapting to new situations.
9/11—and the global “war on terror” it ushered in—created a situation wherein war lost its foundation: a temporal event with a zero hour. There is, however, continuity underlying this seeming historical rupture. The al-Qaeda-led terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were, in Chalmers Johnson’s terminology, “blowback.” Though this term has since entered common parlance as an equivalent of the “chickens coming home to roost,” Johnson’s conception was different in one important respect. For Johnson, blowback was not only reprisal attacks for a particular government’s foreign policy decisions but also for actions that were conducted clandestinely. Blowback produces cognitive dissonance: the possession of contradictory beliefs. Underlying this situation is the opportunity it provides victim states to take on otherwise unsalable policies in times of peace. Since that Tuesday morning, war has become a permanent fixture in the psyche of millions. Rhetoric like “we can’t afford to play defense” and “‘we’ have to be right all the time—‘they’ only have to be right once” typifies the attitudinal shift in living in an increasingly bureaucratized security state and the new normal such routinization produces. Protecting national security from transnational threats has not only changed the contours of foreign policy, it has also radically transformed security in the homeland. New tools of securitization, such as drones, mass surveillance, and the like, have entered the lexicon. Few, if any, undergraduate students have memories of a pre-9/11 America, making the “9/11 generation” all the more susceptible for being on a constant war-footing without appreciating the ways in which post-9/11 security need not have followed their route. American security policy has been increasingly totalized. Divisions between domestic security on the one hand and foreign policy on the other dissolve under the guise of upholding national interests. This is certainly not an entirely new phenomenon. During World War II, for example, detention camps were established to hold Americans of Axis lineage, particularly Japanese-Americans. The most notable case was President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which directed the Secretary of War (the precursor of Defense Secretary) to establish military zones within the homeland.7 These zones paved the way for Japanese-American internment camps on coastal regions of the US. Past may be prologue, but in the interim, there is also the perennial matter of limiting freedom in an attempt to ensure security. Modern securitization has entailed a wholesale
infringement of civil rights (by way of collecting metadata) in the hopes— either real or imagined—of stopping the next 9/11.
Preventing further terrorist attacks on the homeland, it was thought, entailed fighting a war on two fronts: hypersecuritization of the homeland and an unabashed offensive “crusade” to export American ideals overseas. An obvious domestic response to 9/11 has been enhancing border security to mitigate flows of illegal immigration. Fevered pitches to seal the southern border with Mexico in the name of fighting terrorism fail to take into account the fact that every known terrorist that entered the USA came in through Canada.
Similarly perplexing is the guise of using pre-emptive war—a pillar of the “Bush Doctrine”—to stop potential threats before they have the capacity to do the US harm. Iraq proved the irrationality of this reasoning that can, obviously, never be judged in advance. This tautological logic that equates defense and offense (i.e., “the best defense is a good offense”), however, did not start with 9/11 and the march to war in Iraq. Calls for an assertion of American power—and the lucrative contracts that followed—across the newly transfigured international order came as quickly as the Berlin Wall fell.
Power is far more complex than the ability of one to command the will of another. If power is defined as such, the Athenians, in Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, certainly failed to exercise power over the Melians, who chose suicide over capitulation. But power was surely at play there. Though the Athenians did not get what they ultimately wanted, there can be no doubt that the Melians would not have met their fate had the Athenians not intervened. Power, properly understood, is an end unto itself. This is key to understanding the imperial logic that drove American foreign policy following her ascendency to unchecked global power, generally, and Bush 43’s launching of the global “war on terror,” specifically.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Charles Krauthammer argued that America’s status as the world’s lone superpower made her an ideal candidate to address metastasizing threats such as the seeming rise of “weapon states,” “small aggressive states armed with weapons of mass destruction [WMDs] and possessing the means to deliver them.”8 Engaging in foreign adventurism is, following this logic, a necessary evil. Krauthammer’s zeal to exercise unilateral power in what he called the “unipolar moment” speaks to the imperialist ambitions he and his fellow
neoconservative travelers would call for long before—and long after—the Iraq fiasco. From Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Syria, there has yet to be a foreign affair in which armchair generals—on both sides of the American political aisle—have not seen as an opportunity to flex America’s military muscle as a first response. What’s the point of having a superb military, to paraphrase then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright, if we can’t use it?
President Bush’s prosecution of the “war on terror” can be crystallized in unilateralism and preemption. Exporting Western-style democracy abroad was seen as—and, worse, believed to be—essential to stopping al-Qaeda and its cohorts. Rather than countering a transnational threat with a multilateral approach, America used unilateral militarism as a vehicle to deal with supposed state sponsors of terrorism.9 In Bush’s “war on terror,” the lines were clearly drawn. There was the enemy and there was “us.” It follows quite clearly that there could be no room for compromise, negotiation, or middle ground with the “enemy.” Binary thinking of this Manichean sort is always grounded in quasi-apocalyptic terms of eternal good and evil.
Fellow neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle delineated between hard-liner and soft-liner responses to the terrorist threat following the attacks of September 11. They argued, at the time, that although the hard-liners “won most policy battles since September 11, the softliners have won nearly complete control of the way those battles are reported.”10 In other words, soft-liners, who are multilateral in nature, are able to define their hard-liner opponents as acting inappropriately to the terrorist threat by using it for ideological purposes. Obviously, Frum and Perle dismiss this, claiming it is “the soft-liners who are driven by ideology, who ignore or deny inconvenient facts and advocate unworkable solutions.”11
Rahm Emmanuel, then-Chief of Staff for President-elect Obama, once noted “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. … [I]t’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”12 This is self-evident on its face, but it does raise a serious question: What if the “things” we do to address a particular crisis create conditions that, in themselves, exacerbate the situation? Immigration is a prime example. Although it is commonly assumed that controlling the flow of illegal immigration through increased security is aiding America in the “war on terror,” the opposite is the case. Immigration policy was severely hardened in the wake of 9/11—new departments were formed (e.g., Immigration
and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security) and a slew of policies were added to the books. These measures proved countermanding and actually exacerbated the radicalization process that, in turn, led back to increased securitization of the type they sought to remedy.13
s ecurity r econsidered
Security policy is informed by the threats it faces. Articulating the primary threats facing America in the “war on terror” have, however, been complicated by traditional approaches to what security is. For the traditionalist, security is measured in terms of how potential threats affect or may affect the state. Unlike previous threats to America, though, today’s main security risks do not come from nation states. Climate change, for example, is a global phenomenon that calls state-centered precepts of security into question. Security has also been widened to include threats that go beyond the traditional scope of security studies, namely, the immediate or perceived threat to physical life by violent state and nonstate actors alike. Facing these threats requires a reorientation of how security is conceived and practiced in synchronistic terms.
Security, in the most immediate sense of the term, is the process of mitigating threats facing the individual. Securing the life and, by extension, overall well-being of the individual has been a hallmark of not only the western political thought but also of Abrahamic and Eastern religions alike. Plato’s prescription for rule by a philosopher king, no less than Aristotle’s insight that political stability is the pre-condition for philosophical speculation, pre-figured the medieval political thought on security that was grounded in theological foundations. Both St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, for example, schematized the ways in which a “just” war could be launched and conducted. In each instance, the referent of security—the individual—pre-supposed the existence of a supra-individual figure or institution that would provide security to the masses. In modern terms, each pre-supposed the notion of the modern state. Hegel thought of philosophy as a reflective enterprise wherein the “owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.”14 That Hobbes’ magnum opus, Leviathan, would be published three years after the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) established the modern notion of sovereignty only solidifies Hegel’s point. Hobbes well understood the efficacy that only the sovereign state could provide in taking mankind out of its pre-political “state of nature” where man finds security wanting. All political considerations of right are subordinated by personal security.
Security, as a pre-condition of the political, rests upon Hobbes’ identification of the inexorable link between sovereignty and security. Yet sovereignty and security, primordial conditions though they may be, continue to be evolving concepts. Indeed, sovereignty has come under increased conditionality. Once thought of as a self-evident category in the aftermath of the bloody religious wars of the seventeenth century, sovereignty has expanded and contracted in equal measure. Multinational corporations and international organizations illuminate the extent to which sovereignty is far more pliable via internationalism and globalization. Capital interconnection on the global scale, brought about by the Bretton Woods system that followed the end of World War II, necessitated institutional arrangements on the global level. More recently, regional political and economic arrangements such as the EU have formed as a response to collective security concerns. Nationalism, though, has surely not been replaced, as exemplified by Britain’s exit (“Brexit”) from the EU.
No longer is sovereignty recognized as individually self-contained territorial units that respect one another—absent, of course, the invasion of one upon another. Sovereignty has become conditional and placed under increased scrutiny of “first-world” powers. Responsibility to Protect (R2P) arose as a policy response to failed and failing states in the post-Cold War era. It calls prima facie sovereignty into question by maintaining that sovereignty is attendant on the sovereign to keep its people secure. Failure to do so, according to R2P, invalidates a sovereign state’s protection against invasion by outside state actors, namely, an international institution using collective security to address the matter.
Though conditioning sovereignty by way of relegating humanitarian intervention on the part on international institutions, from NATO to the UN, in the name of upholding their Cold War mandates of decreasing the chances for the outbreak of another world war is a noble precept, it does raise the specter of R2P being abused by the strongest members of the UN—namely, the UN Security Council and its five permanent members— against its weakest, most unrepresented members.
Security has also undergone major introspection. If security started at the individual level, before moving to the state and international level, it would seem we have returned to the primacy of security resting at the individual level in an age of globalization. Individual insecurity, as the product of other individuals or groups thereof, is mitigated by the state, which Weber defined as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”15
International security, on the other hand, has no such arbitrating figure. Unlike the hierarchical state system, the international order operates in an anarchical realm, akin to Hobbes’ “state of nature.” It is in this condition that states vie with one another over resources to enhance their ability to survive in a game with no umpire. A natural product of this situation is the security dilemma. States, unsure of their neighbors’ intentions, arm themselves to the teeth, which, in turn, drives other states to do the same. Short of a oneworld sovereign, states have little choice but to accept the rules of this game. Chief among these rules is the maxim: look out for number one. But what of threats that transcend national units and their interactions with one another? Global security addresses threats that know no territorial bounds. Threats like climate change, infectious diseases, and natural disasters fall under the purview of global security. These threats, unlike national and international threats, do not pick sides. Their effects can be felt anywhere and everywhere. Responses to these threats, consequently, require coordinated efforts from multilateral partnerships. Rather than framing security in terms of the individual citizen (national security) or states (international security), the referent for global security begins with the individual, irrespective of his or her place in the world. This bracketing of locality is what gives security, in this deepened sense, a cosmopolitan character. It is no accident that every postCold War critique of security is framed in terms of the universal rather than the particular. Bridging the gulf between the theory and practice of contemporary security is, of course, frustrated by the lingering structural elements that arose from the international order established after World War II.
A number of alternative approaches to security emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union, as the end of the bipolar Cold War portended a reorientation of how international security should be conceived and acted upon in a newly forming world order. Human security is perhaps the most famous counter approach to traditional forms of security. A human security paradigm shifts the emphasis from national (and, by extension, international) security to individual security. It is a policy-oriented school of thought that redefines threats by universalizing security among humanitarian lines. Threats, then, take on an intersubjective character. A threat to someone else is a threat to all. Human security is a response to other schools of security thought (such as realism) that see security as zero-sum. Human security sees mitigating threats as positive-sum: security becomes mutually beneficial. Investing in foreign aid, for example, enhances security because if the aid is invested in education, the propensity for jihadi radicalization is decreased.
Rather than looking at that which threatens us at one point or another, human security focuses on the threats that currently cause harm to a particular group of individuals. “Freedom from fear” and “freedom from want” are the key components of the human security paradigm. Threats, under a human security paradigm, are extensive. But they can be categorized along the following lines of individual security: food, health, environment, community, and political representation. Providing security against these threat factors works to the benefit of those affected as well as the developed countries that provide the necessary aid to combat these threats. This provides a mutually beneficial system between those providing security and those receiving it.
c oncluding r em Arks
Security commands profound power in transforming national, international, and global political orders the world over. Historical misjudgments provide fuel for ill-informed reactions that give rise to unintended disorder, violence, and suffering on unimaginable scales. To put it another way, using the past in ahistorical, static terms invariably translates into political paralysis. This was most assuredly highlighted by the confusion and, in equal measure, opportunism that befell America in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
Linking al-Qaeda (a transnational terrorist group) to the wayward sovereign state of Iraq—the proverbial bugaboo of neo-cons since Saddam stopped playing ball with the West after reaching a stalemate with Iran in their near-decade-long war in which America backed Saddam’s Iraq over the Ayatollahs’ Iran—was but the first step in the tango arranged to install American hegemony in the Middle East. Failure to impose democracy at the barrel of a gun in Iraq, of course, put a (momentary) halt to Americanizing the Middle East. Worse yet, the attitude that underpins policy failures of this sort continues to inform how the vast majority of academics and political practitioners presently conceive security.
Framing ISIS as an existential threat not only overexaggerates the group’s present capacity to inflict harm on a scale that would rival state structures tout court, it also contributes to discursive misunderstandings that frustrate prudent security policy formation. Lest past be prologue, a reappraisal of security—what it means, how to address it, and how to remain theoretically vigilant in the face of ever evolving security concerns in what might be called a praxis of security—is clearly in order.
Security has undergone numerous evaluations, refinements, and shifts in both theory and practice as the category itself has evolved into domains that were previously unimaginable areas of securitization. The dynamism of the category, no less than its status as a first-order subject of the political, makes security an area worthy of much scrutiny, far more than can be interrogated in any one volume. Yet, it is our goal here to investigate a range of issues that will surely continue to frustrate both the theorist and the practitioner of security for the foreseeable future.
This collection, in the main, helps bridge the elusive gap between theory and practice in dealing with the pressing issue of “security” broadly conceived. Composed of original essays by a cosmopolitan mix of leading academics and practitioners from around the world, this reader offers a critical examination of the philosophy and practice of security. It should prove relevant to readers both inside and outside the academy and cuts across any number of disciplinary boundaries. Its controversial character, moreover, should only make it all the more necessary and appealing to the readers—be they students, scholars, or practitioners of security, in its multiplicity of features.
Part I, “Explaining Security,” provides an entry point by interrogating the assumptions security rests upon and how and why they are frustrated when put into practice. In “Security and Ideology,” Rasmus Ugilt critiques the self-evidentiary character of security, namely, its reducibility to a state’s reason for existence. He illuminates the role that ideology plays in framing security concerns. This, he finds, is a detriment to security, as ideology produces an epistemological shock between security in the abstract and security in the concrete. Lawrence Davidson’s “Who Really Defines National Security?” challenges the prevailing notion that national security is formed by the popular opinion of a given democratic state or, for that matter, by its elected representatives. Using the Zionist lobby as an example, he finds that a powerful cadre of special interest groups controls foreign policy— the extension of national security—by infusing large amounts of campaign cash into the political process. Jaap de Wilde, in “Anachronistic Research in International Relations and Security Studies,” looks at the ways obsolescent thinking in the social sciences carries over and complicates matters of security. Historical analogies, though necessary, are especially troublesome in this field. He thus puts forth a cautionary call for balance when it
comes to the use of anachronisms in planning out contemporary security policies that will have effects far into the future. Carl Boggs gives a historical account of how America’s pre-eminent weapon was developed in “The American Nuclear Warfare State.” His investigation takes aim at the US hypocrisy with regard to the bomb, especially when it comes to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Ultimately, America’s Cold War quest for nuclear primacy in a bipolar world shows no signs of slowing down, hindering meaningful prospects for global order free of nukes.
Part II, “Facing and Fighting Threats,” takes aim at the chasm between the means and ends of security. Louise Stanton, in “A New Frontier in US National Security Policymaking: State and Local Governments,” investigates the evolution of America’s Posse Comitatus Act, which informs the state and federal roles of the police and military. Transnational terrorism, as well as natural disasters, complicates the principal divide between the domestic and foreign fighting forces. Recent amendments to the Act reflect this and show the circumstances wherein the US military can act in domestic security affairs to maintain homeland security. James E. Jennings, in “Imperial Hubris and the Security of the Middle East, 1979–2016,” sets out to explain the failure of America’s foreign policy in the Middle East. He does so by interrogating the underlying goals of her foreign policy in the region, namely, asserting hegemony by purely martial means. These means not only failed to bring about this regional hegemony, they also increased security risks in the Middle East. Jennings thus calls for a reorientation in America’s foreign policy in the Middle East with primacy placed on soft power and civic engagement. Moreover, when security threats in the region do call for a military response, he suggests one based on broad regional alliances rather than unilateral force of the past. Edwin Daniel Jacob links sovereignty with security in the appropriately titled “Sovereignty and Security.” He finds that the two categories reinforce one another to the extent that the absence of one affects the strength of the other. This has import in judging foreign policy in the Middle East after the Arab Spring, particularly Iraq and Syria, following ISIS’ march through those regions. In “Protection from Whom? Tensions, Contradictions, and Potential in the Responsibility to Protect,” Douglas Irvin-Erickson critically examines the current state of the theory and practice of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Atrocity Prevention movements. In the past ten years, career tracks in R2P and Atrocity Prevention have flourished in many governments, universities, think tanks, and human rights NGOs. As the two closely related fields professionalize—
with growing ranks of dedicated officials, scholars, and activists specializing in the prevention of genocide, crimes against humanity, and grave violations of human rights—the question of what it means to practice R2P and Atrocity Prevention remains opaque.
Part III, “Cosmopolitan Visions,” broadens our inquiry into the other side of security, namely, those who suffer as a result of ill-guided policy decisions. Amentahru Wahlrab, in “Fostering Global Security,” argues that nonviolence can produce global security. He looks at how certain post-9/11 security approaches by the US were couched in promoting democracy without violence, namely in the 2002 and 2006 US National Security Strategies. Calling for a critical theory of nonviolence to establish the practice of securitization informs his prescriptions for developing global security. Kjell Anderson’s “Mainstreaming Atrocities” shows how the individual and group radicalization process undergirded the genocidal practice of the Nazi state and currently informs ISIS’ terrorist deeds. Key to this radicalization is a transvaluation of existing norms. In both cases Anderson finds these normative shifts pre-figuring both of his case studies. Dalia Fahmy, in “Democracy and Stability?” argues that US aid continues to flow to the most brutal of Middle Eastern regimes following the failure of the Arab Spring to produce democratic reform across the region. She examines the relationship between the US and Egypt to show how America’s security strategy has shifted. Maintaining stability has replaced America’s mission to spread democracy.
Part IV, “Emergent Threats,” widens the discussion of security by examining new subjects of security. Alexandria Innes’ “Human Mobility and Security” addresses the salient issue of migration as it relates to security. Rather than being a peripheral security issue, migration impacts far more than the individuals in question. Security, in this light, comes at the costly expense of others. Peter Hough, in “Ecological Security,” sketches environmental threats to security. Ecological security transcends boundaries and calls traditional security assumptions into question. As a result, traditional security scholars see securitizing ecological concerns as nonsensical while ecologists are wary of treating the environment as a ground for securitization, fearing a militarist response. Ashutosh Misra’s “Legality of the Modern Modes of Warfare: The Case of Drones” confronts one of the most controversial tactics of American foreign policy. He accesses drone warfare on judicial grounds to determine the means by which this evolving mode of warfare comports or disregards established international law. This contentious form of warfare becomes all the more pressing considering
its potential for a wider use by developing states. Adam Henschke tackles what is sure to be among the most pressing security concerns of our time in “Duties to Defend: Ethical Challenges of Cyber Defense.” Henschke uses Just War Theory to determine how cyber wars can be launched in good faith. Like traditional wars, cyber wars will be legitimated by the means and contexts under which they are prosecuted.
Part V, “New Horizons,” seeks to provide answers to addressing security in the twenty-first century. Richard Rubenstein’s “Human Security, State Security, and the Problem of False Complementarity” explores the notion that human security and state security are mutually beneficial enterprises. He finds this complementarity problematic since human security is, by its very nature, a nationally crosscutting security paradigm that does not particularly take state security into account. Consequently, Rubenstein calls for a larger reorientation of the referent of security: from the nation (state security) and the individual (human security) to human emancipation from insecurity. This, according to Rubenstein, is bound to fail if emphasis is placed upon one reform above another. A more holistic revolution in security conception and practice is accordingly proffered. Jean-Marc Coicaud, in “Victim Mentality and Violence,” illustrates how victim mentalities, in both the individual and group, contribute to insecurity. He calls for increased emphasis being placed on victims receiving justice so they do not adopt a victim mentality that can turn them into perpetrators themselves. Underpinning Coicaud’s argument is a process of reciprocity and recognition between victim and persecutor—the self and “other”—after the fact. It is only this form of reconciliation that can mitigate further insecurity following violent historical events. Katherine Worboys Iszak’s “Rethinking Security Education” considers the ways in which security should be framed and taught in the twenty-first-century classroom. Increased multiculturalism necessitates a shift in how security is presented. Conflict prevention and peace building thus ground her pedagogic approach to security. Michael McKoy’s “Neoconservatism: A Death Prematurely Foretold?” asks whether it is too soon to write off neoconservatism as a guiding foreign policy after the failed presidency of George W. Bush. Neoconservative logic—as an amalgam of elements within realism and liberalism, though surely not acknowledged as such— continues to drive American foreign policy. McKoy calls for a middle path: a restrained realism—a well-equipped defense force, maintaining trade with allies, and limiting military engagements—would better guide security concerns attached to America’s foreign policy choices.
n otes
1. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 39.
2. Eline Gordts, “Iraq Death Toll Reaches 500,000 Since Start Of US-Led Invasion, New Study Says,” Huffington Post, October 15, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/iraqdeath-toll_n_4102855.html
3. Edwin Daniel Jacob, “The Ethics of (Selective) Intervention: Why Libya and Not Syria?” (paper presented at Global Ethics Conference, Newark, New Jersey, October 24, 2013).
4. “America Has Been At War 93% of the Time—222 Out of 239 Years—Since 1776,” Washington’s Blog, February 20, 2015, http:// www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/02/america-war-93-time-222239-years-since-1776.html.
5. Rasmus Ugilt, The Metaphysics of Terror: The Incoherent System of Contemporary Politics (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2012).
6. The 9/11 Commission Report (New York: Norton, 2004), 45.
7. See Our Documents.Gov, “Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942),” http://www.ourdocuments. gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=74, for a complete text of Executive Order 9066.
8. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70 (1990): 23.
9. See, for example, Project for the New American Century, “Statement of Principles,” in The Iraq Papers, ed.’s John Ehrenberg, et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19–20.
10. David Frum and Richard Perle, “Beware the Soft-Line Ideologues,” American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (January, 2004), 1.
11. Ibid.
12. Jonathan Weisman, “Wider US Interventions Would Yield Winners, Losers as Industries Realign,” Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2008, http://online.wsj.com/articles/ SB122714374260443023.
13. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” Policy Review 113(2002): 19.
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