Larrinaga and Doucet - Global Governmentality - Biopower

de Larrinaga and Doucet, ISA Annual Conference 2007

Global Governmentality, Biopower, Sovereign Powerand the Human Security Discourse

Miguel de LarrinagaTel: (613) 562-5800 ext 2732Email: [email protected] of Political StudiesUniversity of Ottawa75 Laurier Ave. EastP.O. Box 450, Station AK1N 6N5

Marc G. DoucetEmail: [email protected] of Political ScienceSaint Mary’s UniversityHalifax, Nova ScotiaB3H 3C3

Preliminary draft _ Do not cite without permission - Comments most welcome

Paper presented at the 2007 International Studies Association Annual ConventionChicago, Illinois (February 28th - March 3rd)

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Introduction During the 1990s, the concept of human security circulating among academics,

governments, policy institutes, non-governmental organizations, inter-governmental bodies, and the media became increasingly influential in narrating the changing patterns of world order and prescribing action within them. Meant to figure the shifting source and meaning of threats, human security coincided with the broader labor of redefining traditional notions of national security that had begun in the 1970s but intensified with the collapse of the Cold War. Although the discursive economy of human security tended to be divided between strong notions (emphasizing threats such as famine, hunger, disease, and economic crises) and narrow readings (focusing on violence, state failure, civil war, crimes against humanity, genocide, etc…), the common thread that tied the discourse together was the emphasis on shifting the referent from the state to the individual and, thus, bringing security down to the lives of human beings. Whether one examines narrow concepts of human security such as provided by the Human Security Report authored by the Human Security Centre, or broader readings such as found in the UN Human Development Reports, human security was about making human lives that suffer from causes of insecurity more safe. In doing so, the discursive economy of human security sought not only to unravel the notion of security from statism and the inter-state system, it also attempted to couple security with the concerns of international humanitarianism and human development. Thus, for its advocates, the concept of human security was understood as a progressive move away from the traditional state-sponsored notion of security, which was often secured through the massive loss of human life, towards a more human centered conception of security, which would be deployed as a means of safeguarding life.

The responses to world order marked by the events of 9-11 seem to have created two positions with regards to the present and future of the human security discourse. On the one hand, there are those who would argue that 9-11 sounded the death-knell of the human security discourse. The military actions and the counter-insurgency campaigns waged in various parts of the globe which sign the ‘global war on terror’ would suggest a violent and brutal return to the discourse of traditional state centric security and the concomitant collapse of the vaunted “New World Order” foretold in the early 1990s from which the human security discourse emerged. From un-sanctioned, pre-emptive military actions against harboring states and rogue states and targeted military operations to support the “war on terror,” to extra-legal detention centers, state-sponsored assassinations, “extraordinary rendition”, deportation without due process, suspension of habeas corpus and indefinite detention, the contemporary moment certainly does not seem to leave much space for governance with a “human face.” Echoed in this position are the earlier Realist and Marxist informed critiques which held that the human security discourse was either a naïve attempt to circumvent the enduring truths of international order or an international legal justification for the renewed doctrine of intervention in the post-colonial world.

On the other hand, for others, while the policies and actions unleashed by the “global war on terror” certainly appear to mark a setback in the form of world order that is necessary for the continued implementation of human security, 9-11 served as a stark reminder of the kinds of socio-economic conditions that the broader human security discourse was meant to remedy. Within this context, even traditional national security threats have been, at times, framed through the human security discourse in order to galvanize international action. The post 9-11 world, from this standpoint, is an

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opportunity to pursue with renewed vigor and urgency the broadening and deepening of human security practices. Advocates of the human security discourse would point to the continued institutionalization of the human security discourse within the United Nations as evidence that the unilateral measures of the United States do not obviate the need for and have not mitigated the continued articulation of policies and practices aimed at the development of a more humane form of global governance.

Contrary to both these assumptions, this paper will draw from the concepts of global governmentality and biopower in order to illustrate how the discourse of human security can be read as working to set the discursive terrain for the form of world order enacted by the current global war on terror. Using the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben this paper will explore how the human security discourse lends itself to the dual exercise of sovereign power and biopower from the vantage point of the globe. While the new global right to kill can be seen as an exercise of sovereignty from the global realm, the human security discourse can be seen as informing a deterritorialized form of biopolitical power that has as its target making human life live. Seen from this vantage point, the human security discourse informs the current biopolitical networks of world order and works in conjunction with- rather than against- the global exercise of sovereignty made evident by the war on terror.

In the first instance, this paper will explore the key concepts which we use to inform our interpretation of human security. More specifically, our aim is to examine what, at first light, may appear as two competing modalities of power – i.e. sovereign power and biopower – which contemporary IR theorists have mobilized to read the current evolving patterns of world order under the moniker of “Empire.”1 In the second instance, we will turn to the concept of security with regards to the conditions of possibility for the development of the human security discourse in the post-Cold War world. This will set the stage for our examination of human security. Here, our objective is threefold: a) interpret the concept of human security through the two modalities of power noted above; b) conversely, to use the human security discourse as a vantage point from which to read the way in which these technologies of power can be seen as interwoven in order to; c) sketch how the human security discourse allows us to identify the points of rupture and continuity within Empire between the pre- and post-9-11 moment.

Biopower and Sovereign power

The mid-1990s, saw the emergence of a growing body of literature that attempted to theorize global governance through Foucaultian understandings of governmentality and biopower. Part of the concerns of this literature was to examine the new cartography of the technologies of biopower becoming increasingly evident at a global level in the wake of the “New World Order” emerging out of the dissolution of the old. Within this interregnum, amidst a profound questioning about the present and future of sovereignty, certain authors began to reflect upon the uneasy relationship between biopower and sovereignty, governmentality and juridical power.2 The growing frequency of the usage of the concept of Empire from the margins to the mainstream coupled with the event and

1 “Empire” is capitalized here in the same way as “Pax Americana” or “Cold War” are typically capitalized to mark the periodization of the history of world order.2 See Michael Dillon, “Sovereignty and Governmentality: From the Problematics of the ‘New World Order’ to the Ethical Problematic of the World Order.” Alternatives 20 (1995): 323-368

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aftermath of 9-11 have led scholars in IR to attempt to more directly draw the links between these two forms of power.3 This exercise has been clearly marked by the use of what can be seen as the most explicit theorization of the relationship between these two forms of power found in the work of political theorist Giorgio Agamben. Beginning with the concept of biopower, what follows seeks to elaborate upon these connections with the aim of setting out a frame of reference from which to interpret the concept of human security.

Biopower, as Foucault has summarized, is about the “subjugation of bodies and…control of populations.”4 In his work on the history sexuality, Foucault found biopower moving towards the centre stage of society when it was applied along with explicit repressive actions against sexuality in the Victorian age. From there, biopower disseminates through society as an effective tool in power relations to normalize social acts and conducts of population. In contrast to disciplinary power which centered on the body of the individual, biopower ‘massifies’ power by having as its object the general mass of the population.5 But as with disciplinary power, biopower continues to function at the capillary or micro-political level of the individual, and at the same time involves technologies of power which target the individual from the vantage point of the mass of the population. Under this scenario, the power of the state and other authorities becomes diffused and increasingly reaches into the depth of the social by invading a widening array of social fields as a way of realizing its goal of managing and governing the life of the population.

In addition to having the mass of the population as their target, the strategies and tactics of biopower differ from other technologies of power insofar as they are meant to improve life: mental and physical well-being, its longevity, its environment, its

3 Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Wendy Larner and William Walters (eds), Global Governmentality (New York: Routledge, 2004); Michael Dean and Paul Henman, ‘Governing Society Today: Editors’ Introduction’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 5 (2004): 483-494; Jenny Edkins, Véronique Pin-Fat, and Michael J. Shapiro (eds), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics, (New York: Routledge, 2004); Véronique Pin-Fat and Maria Stern, ‘The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch: Biopolitics, Gender, and the ‘Feminization’ of the U.S. Military’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30, no.1 (2005): 25-53; Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 1 (2005): 1-24; Laura Zanotti, ‘Governmentalizing the Post-Cold War International Regime: The UN Debate on Democratization and Good Governance, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30, no. 4 (2005): 4161-487; Simon Dalby, ‘Political Space: Autonomy, Liberalism, and Empire’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 30, no. 4 (2005): 415-441; David Campbell, ‘The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle’, American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): 943-972; Julian Reid, ‘War, Liberalism, and Modernity: The Biopolitical Provocations of ‘Empire’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2004): 63-79; Nancy Fraser, ‘From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization’, Constellations 10, no. 2 (2003): 160-171; Michael Merlingen, ‘Governmentality: Towards a Foucauldian Framework for the Study of IGOs’, Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of Nordic International Studies Association 38, no. 4 (2003): 361-384; Mark Duffield and Nicholas Waddell, Human Security and Global Danger: Exploring a Governmental Assemblage [www.bond.org.uk/pubs/gsd/duffield.pdf] (accessed December 21, 2006); Mark Duffield and Nicholas Waddell, ‘Securing Humans in a Dangerous World’, International Politics 43, no. 1 (2006): 1-23; Mark Duffield, Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror (Danish Institute for International Studies, Working Paper 2004/23).

4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p.93. 5 Michel Foucault, Society must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976 trans. by David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p.243.

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productivity, its efficiency, etc. In this sense, biopower, unlike other technologies of power, creates the health and welfare of the population as a properly political problem insofar as it becomes the administrative purview of authorities under the aegis of the state. It is in having the life of the population as it target that Foucault identifies the main distinction between biopower and sovereign power. In Society must be Defended, Foucault illustrates how biopower is ultimately about “the power to make live” whereas sovereign power must enact “the right to kill”.6 Foucault writes:

Beneath that great absolute power, beneath the dramatic and somber absolute power that was the power of sovereignty, and which consisted in the power to take life, we now have the emergence, with this technology of biopower, of this technology of power over “the” population as such, over men insofar as they are living beings. It is continuous, scientific, and it is the power to make live. Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.7

Here, Foucault’s understanding of sovereign power approximates an understanding of the old sovereign right invested in the king’s body and later in the state. It is similar to the right that Carl Schmitt articulated in his decisionist understanding of the political as predicated on the friend/ enemy dichotomy (the enemy being the human that can be killed), and which is found in Weber’s definition of the state as the claimant of the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Sovereignty is seen as the principle and practice which reserves in the last instance the right to use deadly force in the enforcement of its order, both within and beyond its borders. Thus, we have the duality of biopower as an expansive capillary power which targets an increasing number of social fields in order manage the well being and life of the population; and of sovereign power which must divide in order to claim its right to kill. One is inclusive and productive; the other is divisive and stagnant. The temptation, as some have noted, is to date the first as modern and the second as archaic.8 But even though Foucault’s own writings at times support such a periodisation as the previous quotation suggests, he also illustrated how sovereign power remains, and indeed, circulates within biopower.9

In order for sovereign power to cohabitate with biopower, Foucault argued that a “caesuras within the biological continuum” had to be introduced.10 The break, according to Foucault, could be provided by bringing racism into the realm of biopower. Racism would allow biopower to discriminate between those segments of the population, and the human species more generally, that would be subject to technologies of health and well-being, and those which would not.11 In doing so, racism can be seen as introducing into biopower the principle of sovereignty insofar as it allows for a distinction to made between a within and a without, or between an inclusion and an exclusion. In a sense, 6 Ibid., pp. 240-247.7 Ibid., 2478 Dean and Henman, ‘Governing Society Today’, p.487.9 See Judith Butler, Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence (London:Verso, 2004), pp.50-100.10 Foucault, Society must be Defended, p.255.11 As Mark Kelly notes, Foucault’s usage of the concept must be seen as extending beyond segregating along the lines of ethnicity or physical appearances. Instead, it is to be seen as a generalized practice which may operate along multiple points of segregation that, in addition to ethnicity, may follow the lines of culture, class, age, or sexual orientation. Mark Kelly, ‘Racism, Nationalism and Biopolitics: Foucault’s Society must be Defended, 2003’, Contretemps 4 (September 2004), p.62.

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racism allows biopower to appropriate and deploy within the population the boundary drawing labor of sovereign power. However, in bringing sovereign power into the realm of biopower, racism also tends to unmoor sovereign power from its old friend/enemy distinction as embodied in the juridico-institutional model of territorial sovereignty. As sovereign power becomes biological, Foucault argued that the war like relationship of the friend/ enemy distinction as the ordering principle of state sovereignty that we find in Schmitt’s work would be replaced by a biological relationship. In this scenario, the figure of the enemy no longer appears as an opponent or rival but has a tendency to become framed as a threat to the biological life of the population. Foucault notes:

[…] racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type relationship. […] And the reason this mechanism can come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the population and for the population. […] Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of the State.12

From Foucault’s perspective, the caesura introduced by racism allows the death function of sovereign power to operate within the welfare function of biopower. Biopower incorporates sovereign power as a technology of power which is capable of drawing the necessary lines between populations that will be made to live, and those that form a generalized threat and will be allowed to die or, in more extreme cases, be killed. Once sovereign power enters into a biological relationship, the category of the enemy tends to lose any political standing. Rather, the category is assimilated to a generalized threat which is seen as threatening the health and well being of the population not unlike other threats such as disease, overpopulation, economic crises, or terrorism. Both technologies of power can cohabitate despite what may appear as contradictory logics between making life live and taking life. They may even be seen as collusive allowing one to set the necessary limit for the other.

Modifying Foucault’s reading, Agamben’s recent work has gone even further in rejecting any suggestion of a periodisation or separation between the two technologies of power and argues that in fact sovereign power constitutes, and is constituted by, biological life from the very beginning. This suggests a reversal of the relationship between sovereign power and biopower, which may help shed further light on the particular configuration of power set by Empire and brought dramatically to the surface in the post 9-11 moment. Whereas for Foucault, biopower replaces sovereign power as the dominant modality of power from the twentieth century onwards, for Agamben “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power”.13

Agamben articulates his understanding of sovereign power through the figure of homo sacer, or sacred man. For Agamben, homo sacer embodies a life that can be killed without the act of killing either constituting a homicide, or a sacrifice following socially recognized rituals or ceremonies.14 It is life that is meant to be politically unqualified and

12 Foucault, Society must be Defended, pp.255-56.13 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press), p.6 (emphasis in the original).14 On the unavailability of sacrifice within the context of the current war in Iraq, see the excellent piece by Pin-Fat and Stern, ‘The Scripting of Private Jessica Lynch’.

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stripped of any political standing. It is life that the Greeks called zo or bare life as distinct from bio, or qualified life.15 For Agamben, the most extreme form of reducing life to its biological minimum is the modern death camp. Life lived in death camps is life stripped entirely of any political standing and subject to being killed at the whim of authorities and without ceremony.16 Agamben draws our attention to the death camp because he wants to plumb the depths of the biological dimension of sovereign power in its most extreme with a view of unearthing what has remained the hidden relationship between the principle of sovereignty and the life lived as biological minimum, i.e. homo sacer.

But as some have suggested, we can draw from Agamben’s reading without necessarily subscribing to its starker dimensions. The lives lived in zones may appear in graded forms of bare life.17 Refugee camps, export processing zones, shanty towns, or extra-legal detention centers such as Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay model camps to the extent that they tend to reduce the lives that they contain to bare or politically unqualified life. As such, they need not necessarily kill the lives they house in order to constitute sovereign power as a form of power which renders life bare. Although the lives that are lived in the zones can be killed or allowed to die, what constitutes sovereign power is the zoning of life reduced to its biological minimum rather than the killing of life as such.18

The zoning which takes place under sovereign power is also seen as significant because it is located physically within the territorial jurisdiction of the state. It therefore marks an excluded, but included space within the topography of sovereign power and potentially opens this topography to an expansion of bare life to more segments of the population. This brings two additional layers to Agamben’s reading of sovereign and biopower which supplement Foucault’s work and which become useful in understanding how Empire may mark a new configuration of sovereign power at the global level.

15 As Agamben notes, the Greeks had two distinct terms to express what is understood today by the word

life “zo , which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group.” Agamben, Homo Sacer, p.1.16 As Edkins and Pin-Fat argue, this creates a type of relationship based solely on violence in which relations of power are generally unavailable. As the authors outline drawing from Foucault, for relations of power to be available, the possibility of resistance must also be available, and this possibility is generally absent from the gross violence that constitutes the camps. Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’, pp.9-11.17 See for instance, Jef Huysmans, ‘Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy’, Contemporary Political Theory 3, no. 3 (2004): 321-341; Guillermina Seri, ‘On the “Triple Frontier” and the “Borderization” of Argentina: A Tale of Zones, in Sovereign Lives: 79-100; and Edkins and Pin-Fat, ‘Through the Wire’: 1-24. Hardt also makes a similar point in noting the differences and similarities between his work with Negri and Agamben’s understanding of sovereignty. See Thomas L. Dumm, ‘Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas L. Dumm, in Empire’s New Clothes, pp. 166-67.18 Indeed, the act of killing as Agamben makes clear is without ceremony, and therefore without symbolic value from the point of view of sovereign power. As we have seen in the case of Camp Delta, sovereign power has gone to great lengths in order to keep the detainees alive while at the same time seeking to strip them of any political standing, either within the domestic American legal and judicial system or within the established regime of international humanitarian law. Furthermore, the fact that the detainees have retained a minimum of international humanitarian assistance delivered by the Red Cross coupled with the fact that domestic American courts have curtailed some of the government’s activities as they relate to detainees should perhaps alert us to what William Connolly identifies as the “complexities” of sovereignty which work against Agamben’s strict reading. See William E. Connolly, ‘The Complexities of Sovereignty’, in Sovereign Lives, pp.23-40. It should also draw our attention to the different shadings of zones of exception as suggested by Huysmans. See Huysmans, ‘Minding Exceptions’.

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First, contrary to the old friend/ enemy distinction in which the life that can be killed is located beyond the territorial limits of the sovereign state, Agamben highlights how sovereign power is constituted by a form of internalization of bare life. Although camps appear as zones which are distinct and exceptional places beyond normal society and its laws, Agamben’s reading of the relationship between sovereign and biopower forces us to consider them in terms of an excluded but included place; or rather, a space included by the very fact of its exclusion. For Agamben, it is this inclusive exclusion which renders possible the modern configuration of sovereign power. Zones in which life is subjected to a biological minimum are therefore not foreign places meant solely for “non-citizens”.

Second, in tying sovereign power to the life lived in zones Agamben retains the old paradox of sovereignty as a form of power which is at once inside and outside the law. The lives lived in zones are barred from the law that governs normal society but at the same time are subject to acts that acquire the force of law.19 As such, Agamben continues to see sovereignty in Schmittean terms as a form of power which has the ability to suspend the law, while maintaining the force that law would normally assume.20 The suspension of the law comes in sovereignty’s ability to proclaim a ‘state of exception’. A state of exception is a situation in which normal law does not apply and can take the form of emergencies, insurrections, martial law, or war, but in which the force that law is meant to provide and sanction remains and is enacted by sovereign power.21 However, contrary to Schmitt, the state of exception is not merely of a juridical nature. Rather, given Agamben’s understanding of zones elaborated above, the ability of sovereignty to proclaim a state of exception is an ability to determine forms of life or to qualify life. He writes:

If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty is not an exclusively political concept, an exclusively juridical category, a power external to law (Schmitt), or the supreme rule of the juridical order (Hans Kelsen): it is the originary structure in which law refers to life and includes it in itself by suspending it.22

Bringing us back to the relationship between sovereign power and biopower, the ability of sovereignty to suspend the law is also the ability to keep in suspension certain lives. Camps are not only zones in which the laws of the land are suspended or inapplicable, they also constitute certain forms of life that are rendered as bare. As Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, succinctly put it, in rendering life in this form, sovereign power seeks to “summon[…] a form of life amenable to its sway.”23

19 As Agamben states, “the state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without law.”, Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. By Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p.39.20 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p.15. Schmitt’s famous dictum that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” interprets sovereignty as being both without and within the legal order: without the law in having the power to decide to suspend the existing legal order in self-defined exceptional circumstances, yet remaining within the law as he to whom the juridical order grants the power to suspend its own validity. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985), p.5.21 Agamben, State of Exception.22 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p.28.23 Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”, Alternatives 25, no.1 (2000), p.128.

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How does this discussion of power translate into an analysis of world order as potentially distinct from previous configurations? There is a growing body of literature that finds increasing evidence of the deterritorialization of sovereign power and biopower.24 This evidence points to the fact that both modalities of power are less confined to the nation-state than might have been the case in the past. It also indicates that sovereign power and biopower are not limited to flowing through the inter-state system as the primary matrix of world order. Other networks of power – MNCs, IGOs, NGOs, media, etc. – have emerged as well. But this does not mean that we are witnessing a mutation of power into limitless networks with no ends or boundaries. Rather, with every deterritorialization comes a reterritorialization that limits the networks of sovereign and biopower. It is through an understanding of such networks that authors have traced the elements of globality in the deployment of these forms of power.

In regards to biopower, what has been brought to light in recent analyses are outlines of emerging patterns of ‘global governmentality’. Exploring the features of new models of flexibilization for instance, Nancy Fraser maintains that the old fordist apparatus of governmentality is, in certain areas, giving way to “a new type of regulatory structure, a multi-layered system of globalized governmentality whose full contours have yet to be determined.”25 In varying degrees of intensity and extensiveness, regulatory mechanisms in fields such as labor standards, policing, security, border management, disease control, banking regulation, environmental regulation, and counterterrorism become networked through transnationalized channels.26 Feeding these new transnationalized governmentalities is an increasingly vast realm of expert knowledge on globalization and its multifaceted processes. As Wendy Larner and William Walters illustrate, “the ceaseless work of conferences, books speeches, commissions, measurements, the founding of research centers” inform, and help form, the power/ knowledge networks that give “presence and durability” to transnational governmentalities.27 These governmentalities are capillarized globally in part through such organizations as the United Nations and its vast system, which not only works to develop the knowledge that governs the conduct of populations in various parts of the world, but also seeks to set the standards, measures, and mechanisms which render the evaluation of conduct on a whole host of social, political, economic, and cultural areas.28

Alongside these patterns of globalized governmentalities which mark patterns of biopower we also find more recent evidence of the deterritorialization of the form of sovereign power that can be apprehended through our reading of Foucault and Agamben elaborated above. This becomes particularly salient in understanding the post 9-11 moment. The manner in which Western governments, for instance, have been able to label terrorism as a specifically global threat to world order can be understood through such an understanding of sovereign power. Seen from this vantage point, the “global war on terror” and its attendant manifestations in the form of coordinated military operations, counter-insurgency, police, and border measures and intelligence practices in the name of exceptionality lend themselves to a particular global cartography. This mapping is one that summons, in the borderlands of global order, subjects that are amenable to the sway of a global sovereign power. It is the lives of these subjects rendered as bare, in

24 See footnote 3.25 Fraser, ‘From Discipline to Flexibilization?’, pp.165-66.26 Ibid., p. 165.27 Larner and Walters, ‘Globalization as Governmentality’, p.499.28 Zanotti, ‘Governmentalizing the Post-Cold War International Regime’. See also Merlingen, ‘Governmentality’.

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exceptional spaces, which create the conditions of possibility for interventions mounted from the vantage point of global sovereign rule. In rendering bare the lives subject to its interventions, global sovereign power operates on the same terrain with the biopower that circulates in the technologies and practices of global governmentalities. In other words, both sovereign power and the complex assemblage of global governmentalities operate in the realm of the biopolitical – i.e. they require lives that are rendered bare. As will be examined later in this paper it is through the human security discourse that we can formulate an understanding of the intimate connections and distinctions between technologies of sovereign power and biopower as they are deployed globally.

Within the above context, Empire then becomes for us a way of apprehending forms of power and their complex interrelationships that have this element of globality.29

In this sense, Empire is “a ‘network power’” that “includes as its primary elements or nodes, the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers.”30 Although the apparatuses of powerful states certainly hold privileged positions within the network, these labor along side other states and networks of power in order to maintain and extend Empire.31

Tracing global governmentalities: from national to human securityOne way of tracing the developments of the concept of human security while

taking into account the above discussion of Empire, is to situate it in relation to the mutations of the security discourse since the end of the Second World War. Although human security develops as an alternative to the “traditional” discourse of security understood in strict military terms and with the state as its corresponding referent, this “traditional” notion is, in itself, a relatively recent formulation, a product of the waning days of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. As illustrated by Mark Neocleous in his account of the use of the term, its initial use by one of its advocates Navy Secretary James Forrestal in 1945, made clear the use of security “consistently and continuously rather than ‘defense’.”32 Neocleous goes on to recount how “[t]he idea appeared so new that one Senator commented ‘I like your words ‘national security’’.”33 The initial use of the term “national security” can thus be understood in the context of a new global order which saw the US engagement in the war in two theatres of operation, the invention of nuclear weapons and a the deployment of a war machine of global reach.

In conjunction with the appearance of realism as the dominant form of postwar knowledge regarding international relations, the concept of national security is primarily concerned with power beyond the immediate concerns of territorial defense. In other words, “national security” can be seen here as marking a shift from a problématique of understanding the inter-state in terms of the defense of a territory from external attack, to one in which the frame of reference becomes the management of inter-state power at a 29 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.xii.30 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004): p. xii. 31 In this sense, what we take from Hardt and Negri, is the complex assemblage of power that has some element of globality and of deterritorialization and reterritorialization while eschewing the more extreme understanding of Empire as “a decentered and deterritorialized apparatus of rule” as well as its teleological dimensions that “progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers.” Hardt and Negri, Empire, p.xii.32 James Forrestal quoted in Mark Neocleous, “Against Security,” Radical Philosophy, no.100 (March/April 2000), p.8.33 Ibid.

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global level. What is crucial to bring to the fore in relation to this shift and the deployment of the security discourse is that it occurs precisely at the point when the state becomes unable to provide it. The massive use of airpower as a strategy of total war witnessed through, inter alia, the V2 attacks on London, the firebombing of Dresden, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – reveal dramatically the increasing impossibility of providing security to those living in the state’s care. We can no longer speak of defense in any meaningful way once these vulnerabilities become apparent. Contrary to conventional accounts which posit defense and security as virtually synonymous and see this difference in merely semantic terms, this reading provides an insight into the importance of this transformation for the way in which we envisage world order under the sign of Empire.

From the above, what is brought to light is the manner in which the advent of the concept of national security signals, not only the global management of inter-state power, but a management which is ultimately based upon the impossibility of what it sets out to provide. Ultimately, the discourse of national security here can be seen as coinciding with an attempt to regulate power through specific political rationalities - associated with nuclear strategy and its attendant discipline of “strategic studies” - with the stated aim of reducing the contingency and risk intimately bound up with its own operation. In this sense, security is understood here in the way in which Foucault had developed it as a series of political rationalities and technologies with the aim of regulating circulation in order to manage contingency. With the obsolescence of walled cities in the face of economic development in the 18th century, Foucault argued that the “insecurity” of cities in relation to the influx of “all forms of transient populations, beggars, vagrants, delinquents, criminals, thieves, assassins” was to be met by technologies of security with the object of “organizing circulation, to eliminate its dangers, to apportion good from bad circulation, to maximize the good circulation while minimizing the bad.”34 One of the key dynamics at play in Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between security and circulation is, therefore, that security’s object remains beyond its grasp, that the deployment of the technologies of security is done with an awareness of the impossibility of eliminating insecurity altogether. In other words, it is a project which, as Foucault notes, is oriented towards a future that is “not exactly controlled or controllable, not exactly, measured or measurable” and good management means “to account for what can happen.”35

Within this context, the concept of “national security” signals that the defense of the state, not unlike the obsolescence of walled cities, is no longer possible with the advent of total war and its concomitant instruments of warfare. The moment of national security can thus be seen as coinciding with a transformation in the understanding of power and (dis)order - i.e. one that takes the globe as its frame of reference to deploy the rationalities and technologies of security meant to deal with the circulation of threats. This moment sets the groundwork for making the security discourse and its subsequent conceptual transformations a central element in the development of a global liberal order which is increasingly dependent upon circulation as its generative logic. Following Foucault’s understanding of the links between security and the advent of liberal form as a form of govermentality, it is here that we can discern how the post-war order, from its outset, is conceptually open to an extension of rationalities and practices which “seek[…]

34 Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population, Cours au collège de France (1977-1978) (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2004), p.20. Our translation.35 Ibid., p.21. Our translation.

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to move from a liberal art of government to a liberal planetary nomos or world order.”36

As Agamben’s reading of Foucault makes evident:

While disciplinary power isolates and closes off territories, measures of security lead to an opening and globalisation; while the law wants to prevent and prescribe, security wants to intervene in ongoing processes to direct them. In a word, discipline wants to produce order, while security wants to guide disorder. Since measures of security can only function within a context of freedom of traffic, trade, and individual initiative, Foucault can show that the development of security coincides with the development of liberal ideology.37

When sketching the trajectory of the security discourse over the course of the postwar period, the key elements of the conceptual transformation described above – i.e. from a logic of defense to a circulatory logic of security that increasingly has as its map the globe as its referent for threats that ultimately remain irremediable – are mirrored in the way in which security is broadened and deepened from its “traditional” military and state-centric understanding. Calls for an alternative to a military understanding of “national security” had been present since the 1970s and continued into the 1980s, primarily through academics and institutions seeking to apprehend the national security implications of phenomena such as economic crises, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and the spread of infectious diseases.38 To these, were added a number of high profile international commissions, and their published reports which also sought to redefine security in ways that would be able to account for the global and trans-border nature of “new” threats.39 These early attempts at calling for a redefinition of security, as well as many of the flood of such calls that have marked the post-Cold War world, were deployed in order to bring these problems onto States’ agendas and, thus, to increase the relative importance of their status by labelling them as “security issues.”40 If this growing panoply of issues are understood in terms of threats and vulnerabilities and, thus, as objects of security, it is, we argue, because of their global and circulatory nature which

36 Mitchell Dean, “Nomos and the politics of world order,” Wendy Larner and William Walters, Global Governmentality: Governing international spaces (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 53.37 Giorgio Agamben, “Security and Terror”, Theory and Event 5, no.4 (2002), par.5.http://direct.press.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.4agamben.html38 One of the first, if not the first, explicit call for the expansion of the scope of security came from Lester R. Brown in a Worldwatch paper in October 1977. Lester R. Brown, "Redefining Security", Worldwatch Paper, No.14, Washington D.C.: Worldwatch Institute (October 1977), p.6. See also Richard H. Ullman, "Redefining Security", International Security, Vol.8, No.1 (Summer 1983), pp.129_153. Within the discipline of international relations, see Barry Buzan, People States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations, London: Weatsheaf Books (1983).39 Some of the most prominent, and influential, examples of these were the reports of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, chaired by Olof Palme, the Brandt Commission chaired by Willy Brandt, the World Commission on the Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland and the Commission on Global Governance. See Common Security: A Blueprint for Survival, The Report of the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); Common crisis: North-South Cooperation for World Recovery (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); Our Common Future, The Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) and Our Global Neighborhood, The Report of the Commission on Global Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).40 See, for example, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, “Redefining Security”, Foreign Affairs 68, no.2 (1989), pp.162-177.

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render them beyond remedy, subject to the mitigation of insecurities through rationalities and technologies of governmentality.

Human security – broad and narrow

While the transformations of the security discourse outlined above certainly helped in setting the context for our understanding of the advent of the concept of human security, one would be wrong to assume a direct lineage with the debates on the redefinition of security in the 1980s. Any overview of the literature on the concept of human security generally chronicles its origins as rooted in international humanitarian concerns made all the more acute with the end of the Cold War rather than the debates on redefining security. It is also to be noted that its conceptual origins are to be found in the world view of an international organization and only subsequently became enmeshed in the discourse of national foreign policy concerns and academic debates. Generally attributed to the 1994 UNDP report and some of the concurrent writings of Mahbub ul-Haq, the initial impulse was to shift the referent from the State to the “legitimate concerns of ordinary people who s[eek] security in their daily lives.”41 In other words, the objective was to bring security down to the level of human life by seeking to develop strategies in the provision of both “safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease and repression” as well as “protection from sudden and hurtful disruptions in the patterns daily life – whether in homes and jobs or in communities.”42 In so doing, security was to be decoupled from the particular national interest of states, and tied to the “universal concern[s]”43 of all people.

In articulating itself universally, human security was therefore initially meant to be built upon the bedrock of universal human rights. This move would be accompanied by efforts to identify a comprehensive list of threats that the “all encompassing”44 concept of human security would respond to – i.e. economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security.45 Clear connections were made between the severe impediments to human development and the pervasive and chronic threats to the fulfillment of human potential. In contradistinction to the traditional, state-centric notion of security, such a broad formulation sought to transcend the state insofar as it brought into question its role as a provider of security relative to other actors – e.g. IOs, NGOs, and non-military government agencies - while simultaneously identifying the state itself as a potential source of insecurity. This elision of the state as the measure of all things, where security tends to be understood in terms of defining historical moments, served also to make the quotidian its object where “a feeling of insecurity arises more from worries about daily life than from the dread of a cataclysmic world event.”46 This was reflected in the key components of human security as identified by the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report- freedom from fear and freedom from want.47 In this shift in focus, security was no longer measured in regards to the possibility of external armed

41 United Nations Development Program (UNDP), New Dimensions of Human Security, Human Development Report 1994 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.22. 42 Ibid., p.23.43 Ibid., p.22.44 Ibid., p.24.45 Ibid., p.24-25.46 Ibid., p.22.47 Ibd., p.24.

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attack but becomes calculated on the grounds of its potential abilities to manage the new panoply of insecurities understood as daily political, economic, social and environmental contingencies. In so doing, human security certainly participated in the broader redefinition of security begun in the 1970s and 1980s; however, it also set off on new terrain. Most important for the reading provided later in this paper is the manner in which human security, in shifting its referent to the individual, introduced as threats a host of contingencies that emerge from daily life, and thereby called forth a new range of state and non-state rationalities and technologies that were meant to address them.

This initial deployment of the concept in the mid 1990s was subsequently accompanied by other efforts to theorize human security in ways that would be more amenable to the multilateral and middle power approaches found in foreign policy concerns of certain states. While these efforts often continued to place threats to the life of the human at the heart of their theorizations, examples like the Responsibility to Protect authored by the International Commission on State Sovereignty in 2001 generally moved away from the broader development concerns of the Human Development Report towards a more narrow focus on introducing a new set of international norms on intervention that would guide and restrict the conduct of the state and the international community in “extreme and exceptional cases.”48 In contrast to the broad panoply of threats which informed the UNDPs understanding of human security outlined above, here the threats are concomitantly narrowed down to “violent threats to individuals”49 such as “mass murder and rape, ethnic cleansing by forcible expulsion and terror, and deliberate starvation and exposure to disease.”50 Emphasis shifts from an understanding of threats which stem form a broad set of political, social, economic and environmental contingencies, to what is deemed to be “avoidable catastrophe[s].”51 Within this context, while the life of human beings continues to be security’s referent, there is a partial return to the state in that it is through the nexus of the state that both the provision of security and insecurity, by state and non-state actors, are predominantly understood. The traditional apparatus of the state as concerns its monopoly over the (il)legitimate use of violence also makes its return in the form of military intervention as a response of last resort to the extreme violation of the rights that are held as inviolable. However, this re-coupling of state and security is not framed in terms of territorial inviolability but in relation to the inviolability of basic universal human rights.52 This then enables the shift 48 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), The Responsibility to Protect, International Development Research Center (IDRC) (Ottawa: 2001), p.31.49 Human Security Center, The Human Security Report 2005 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p.viii.50 Report of the Secretary General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, (United Nations, 2004), p.65. For its part, the ICISS report identifies “threats to life, health, livelihood, personal safety and human dignity” as the fundamental components of human security. See ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, p. 15. In relation to other key documents that mark the evolution of the definition of threats within the human security framework, see paragraphs 138 and 139 of the UN General Assembly 2005 World Summit Outcome Document, which categorize the threats to human life using the main crimes covered by humanitarian law, i.e. genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes. Finally, the Human Security Commission’s report defines human security as that which “protect[s] fundamental freedoms— freedoms that are the essence of life.” Human Security Commission, Human Security Now (New York: Commission on Human Security, 2003), p. 3. 51 High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A more secure world, p.65.52 Admittedly, there was considerable unresolved debate on the relationship between the norms of human security and territorial inviolability which was made most evident in setting the criteria to authorize a

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towards tying security to the notion of the state’s ability or inability to fulfill its responsibility to protect the human beings within its care.53 In this sense, the referent and threats continue to be articulated in non-territorial forms as within the broader notion of human security, but the responses are framed within the nexus of the state and therefore call forth a statist conception of security.

This return to the state is made all the more evident in the manner in which the narrower concept of human security centers around (re)defining norms surrounding the legitimacy of the international community’s right to intervention. At play in defining internationally the parameters of a responsibility to protect is not only the development of new norms of intervention, but also, and perhaps most importantly for what will follow, we find a significant discussion regarding the criteria that would authorize the legitimate suspension of a substantial component of conventional international inter-state law. In other words, we can isolate both an effort to inaugurate and codify a new law around a set of norms that simultaneously requires the suspension of certain foundational elements of international law in “cases of violence which so genuinely ‘shock the conscience of mankind,’ or which present such a clear and present danger to international security, that they require coercive military intervention” on the part of the international community.54

It is the concept of human security that serves to define and identify the extreme and exceptional circumstances which it itself requires in the subsequent formulation of its responses. In doing so, the human security discourse participates in setting the conditions for both the suspension of the law and the authorization of its refounding in the form of new norms of intervention.

The bulk of the most current stage of the development of the human security discourse can be found in its institutionalization within the UN. While the calls within the UN for a rethinking of the principles of sovereignty and international intervention on behalf of protecting human rights can be traced back to the early years of the post-Cold War era,55 it was not until recently that the formal process of institutionalizing and mainstreaming the human security discourse gathered steam. Beginning with the 2004 report by the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change and the Secretary General’s 2005 report In Larger Freedom, the General Assembly’s World Summit Outcome Document in September 2005 and Security Council resolutions 1674 and 1706

decision to intervene as witnessed in the Responsibility to Protect report. While this debate tended to pit the developing world, which held the principle of non-intervention as sacrosanct, against developed countries, which argued for the need for caveats in order to manage international crises, the report sides with the need to recast non-intervention by concluding that “there was general acceptance that there must be limited exceptions to the non-intervention rule for certain kinds of emergencies.” ICISS, The Responsibility to Protect, p.31. 53 As David Chandler argues, the effect of this shift as it relates to the codification of the old right of intervention in the UN Charter is substantial. First, whereas in the Charter this right overwhelmingly places the burden of proof on the intervening states, tying the rights of sovereignty to the responsibility to protect basic human rights means that the primary onus is now on the state subject to possible intervention and its (un)ability or (un)willingness to fulfill its responsibility. The sovereign state must act responsibly or face possible intervention. Second, responsibility presupposes some measure of accountability. Tying sovereignty to the responsibility to protect means that the state is now responsible to the abstract supra-national authority of universal human rights. Codifying such a conception of sovereignty therefore must entail relinquishing sovereignty in formal terms. On this argument and how it relates specifically to the ICISS report see Chandler, ‘The Responsibility to Protect? Imposing the ‘Liberal Peace’, International Peacekeeping 11, no.1 (2004), p.64.54 Ibid.55 See Boutros Boutros Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York: United Nations, 1992).

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adopted in April and August of 2006 set the stage for the formalization of the human security discourse within UN via its two main bodies. Parallel to these developments, the independent Advisory Board on Human Security and the Human Security Unit (HSU) within Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) were created in 2003 and 2004 respectively. Both were fashioned as a result of the recommendations formulated in the Human Security Commission’s 2003 report Human Security Now, and both were charged with disseminating and integrating human security within the UN and beyond. These activities have been financed by the UN Trust Fund for Human Security (UNTFHS), set up by the government of Japan, which also sponsored the establishment of the Commission.56 The Human Security Unit reports that an average of 24 projects have been funded per year since 2004.57 The formalization and institutionalization of the human security discourse within the UN draws from an assemblage of certain aspects of the broader and narrower conceptions of human security. What follows is a reading of this assemblage informed by our earlier elaboration of the concepts of sovereign power and biopower under the sign of Empire.

Human security and biopower

In (re)defining the threats to human life as its most basic operation, the discourse of human security must define and enact the human in biopolitical terms. The target of human security, whether broad or narrow, is to make live the life of the individual through a complex series of strategies initiated at the level of populations. In defining and responding to the threats to human life, these strategies have as their aim the avoidance of risk and the management of contingency in the overall goal of improving the life lived by the subjects invoked in their own operation. As with Foucault’s understanding of the biopolitical, the health and welfare of populations is human security’s frame of intervention, but until its recent institutionalization within the UN and the implementation of the above mentioned programs, the human security discourse, from the vantage point of the international, has been marked mostly by defining and identifying the global patterns and trends of human insecurity. In other words, the human security discourse’s initial move is found in creating the “metrics” that aggregate the threats to human life. The clearest example of this initial labor in relation to the narrower understanding of human security can be found in the launch of the annual Human Security Report in 2005 that boasts that “no annual publication maps the trends in the incidence, severity, causes and consequences of global violence as comprehensively”58 as the report. Within the context of the broader understanding of human security, this quest to properly order, categorize and account for the “true” threats to human life in the post-Cold War world is exemplified in the series of UNDP reports. As Mark Duffield and Nicholas Waddell point out, “[t]he UNDP […] launched its annual Human Development Report in 1990, dedicating it to ‘…ending the mismeasure of human progress by economic growth alone’ (UNDP, 1996, iii).” It is through this mapping that the human security discourse then locates its areas of strategic intervention on behalf of the health and welfare of targeted populations. It is here also that we can observe the explicit links between the broader

56 The fund was created in 1999 prior to the creation of the Advisory Board and the Human Security Unit and only subsequently brought under their umbrella. 57 The approved projects covering the period 1999 to 2006 amount to US$ 227.8 million.58 Human Security Center, The Human Security Report 2005, p.viii.

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conception of human security and development.59 In particular, the form of development that is intimately associated with human security, and the biopolitical bond between the two, is sustainable development. As Duffield and Waddell note in defining sustainable development and its links to human security:

Rather than economic growth per se, a broader approach to development emerged based on aggregate improvements in health, education, employment and social inclusion as an essential precursor for the realization of market opportunity […] Sustainable development defines the type of ‘development’ that is securitized in human security.60

Although still in their infancy, the strategies formulated in response to the trends and patterns in insecurity compiled by the human security discourse are meant to foster development as a means of securing the health and welfare of targeted populations. Recent programs detailed by the Human Security Unit, include preventing the abuse of illicit drugs in Afghanistan; addressing the health of women and adolescents affected by HIV in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala; contributing to provision of more secure access to small scale energy services for local basic necessities in Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ghana and Guinea; combating the trafficking of women and children in Cambodia and Vietnam; providing access to education in Kosovo; integrating displaced peoples in Colombia; promoting the radio broadcasting of information covering humanitarian issues in areas of Africa and Afghanistan; building civic participation and self-reliance in Timor-Leste; and stabilizing refugee host communities through a multifaceted strategy including the reduction of small arms, basic education, food and environmental security in Tanzania.61 Such programs operate at the level of the chronic insecurities in the day to day life of targeted populations. They envision human security as “comprehensive, integrated, people-centered solutions”62 that are meant to provide a measure of remedy to quotidian threats.

While the programs target specific populations in delimited locales, the threats are themselves framed in regards to circulation and seek to apportion the bad from the good flows in terms of (in)security. In this scenario, following from the program examples above, “good circulation” would include information on humanitarian issues, civic participation and self-reliance; “bad circulation” would entail, inter alia, trafficking, illicit drugs and small arms. Returning to Foucault’s understanding of security and circulation elaborated previously, the frame of intervention of the human security discourse, in seeking to maximize the positive elements and minimize the risks to human life, operates on a terrain of calculability which attempts to manage the incalculable 59 See Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001); Mark Duffield and Nicholas Waddell, Human Security and Global Danger: Exploring a Governmental Assemblage [www.bond.org.uk/pubs/gsd/duffield.pdf] (accessed December 21, 2006); Mark Duffield and Nicholas Waddell, ‘Securing Humans in a Dangerous World’, International Politics 43, no. 1 (2006): 1-23; Mark Duffield, Carry on Killing: Global Governance, Humanitarianism and Terror (Danish Institute for International Studies, Working Paper 2004/23) and Mark Duffield, Human Security: Linking Development and Security in an Age of Terror (Paper prepared for the GDI panel “New Interfaces between Security and Development, 11th General Conference of the EADI, Bonn, September 2005).60 Duffield and Waddell, “Securing Humans in a Dangerous World,” p.5.61 The United Nations Human Security Unit, Human Security for All (United Nations, 20006).62 Ibid., p.2.

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through probabilities. In its initial stages, the objective of the human security discourse, in seeking to apportion bad from good circulation, had as its primary grammar of reference sustainable development. With the post-9-11 moment and the ensuing war on terror, however, the apportioning of good from bad circulation in which the human security discourse participates tends to take as its frame of reference global order. With the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, as well as the bombings in Madrid and London, the globality of the circulation of threats for the “West” becomes more explicit and consequently a new cartography of threats and vulnerabilities is drawn up and rationalities and technologies are deployed to counter them. As Duffield and Waddell again explain:

The war on terrorism has had an acute impact upon human security as an evolving assemblage of global governance. The predominance of security concerns, especially homeland security, means that issues of global circulation – of people, weapons, networks, illicit commodities, money, information, and so on – emanating from, and flowing through the world’s conflict zones, now influence the consolidating biopolitical function of development. That is, security considerations increasingly direct developmental resources toward measures, regions and subpopulations deemed critical in relation to the dangers and uncertainties of global interdependence.63

Contrary to those who either associate 9-11 and its surrounding events as signalling the demise of the “new world order” that birthed the human security discourse or those who would see the persistence of this discourse as anathema to the war on terror, the argument advanced here, in agreement with Duffield and Waddell above, is that this discourse is, in fact, instrumental in the governmentality assembled to fight the global war on terror. However, the tack we would like to follow is not directed towards tracing the biopolitical function of international development practices in relation to the war on terror, but to the way in which the human security discourse participates in setting the terrain for and the deployment of global sovereign power which we see as characteristic of the Imperial moment of the post 9-11 world.

Human security and sovereign power

One would be hard pressed to find a more paradigmatic symbol of the post-9-11 world order than Camp Delta. Guantanamo has become the prime example through which the question of exceptionalism and its bounded relationship to sovereignty has been raised in the literature regarding the current patterns of world order. How is possible to reconcile the biopolitical function of human security outlined above, with the exceptional times of the post-9-11 world? What are the mechanisms and assemblages through which we can understand the complementarity between biopower and sovereign power? We noted earlier that in its most basic operation, human security, in its attempt to identify and intervene in order to mitigate the threats to human life, defines the human in biopolitical terms. Following Foucault, this is reflected in the broader biopoliticization of subjectivities that are produced within the modern liberal order. While the classic view of sovereignty which tended to center on the right to kill could be seen as standing in contradiction with the health and welfare functions of human security’s biopolitical

63 Duffield and Waddell, “Securing Humans in a Dangerous World,” p.10.

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operations, the work of Agamben, as explored earlier, allows us to consider a certain complementarity between these forms of power. In this section we explore what we understand to be two key dimensions that mark this complementarity and which concomitantly offer an outline of the configuration of power of Empire.

We have already explored via Agamben’s work how rendering life bare can be seen as the originary activity of sovereign power. In other words, bare life is the form of life which is made amenable to the sway of sovereignty. Drawing from the analysis developed earlier, human security participates in setting out the terrain for an exercise of global sovereign power in a post-9-11 world. In constituting threats specifically in terms of threats to human life, initially through a categorization and accounting of threats measured as violations of basic universal human rights, not only does the human security discourse operate with a view of (in)security that is global but it simultaneously biopoliticizes threats by understanding them in terms of the health and welfare of populations. The life lived by the subjects of the human security discourse is thus life lived as “bare” inasmuch as this discourse is not meant to qualify political life. In this way, through the lens of human security, life is understood primarily in terms providing for the basic sustenance of day to day life. What this enables, in the post-9-11 world, is an opening towards mapping global order in a way that apportions this bare life in relation to zones of exceptionality amenable to a logic of an exercise of global sovereign power. In this sense, the development objectives and humanitarian goals of the broad and narrow conceptions of human security, tend to submit to the dictates of the management of global order. Instead of targeting populations that are most insecure as measured with the metrics of the human security discourse and consider providing security to these populations as an end in itself, the targeting is now overridden by the hard security concerns of homelands and ends understood increasingly in terms of the aims of the global war on terror. While the human security discourse could always be critically interpreted as prioritizing its responses to populations that are threatened in relation to servicing the maintenance of the global liberal order, the shift here can be understood as mobilizing the human security discourse on behalf of proactive interventions of pre-emption and prevention. There is therefore a politicization of the threatened populations identified by the human security discourse in relation of the imperatives of the global war on terror and its concomitant world order.

The second area of complementarity can be seen as relating to the manner in which Agamben articulates the relationship between bare life and the exercise of sovereign power as one which operates through the state of exception. As we illustrated earlier, the state of exception relates to sovereign power’s ability to suspend the law while assuming the force that the law normally carries. For Agamben, this structural feature of sovereign power is made most evident in exceptional circumstances. What we argue here is that human security is instrumental in sovereign power’s ability to delineate these circumstances. This does not mean that the security discourse is hardwired to accommodate sovereign power in that, as we have seen, in a sense, its origins emanate from the humanitarian position of an international organization less concerned with state security than with protecting the world’s victims of gross human rights violations. However, what the entire discourse of human security does, whether broad or narrow, is to help define the exceptional circumstances which require the international community’s intervention. It does so by initially constructing the metrics that inform the exceptional

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circumstances that define the range of threats to human life. In turn, it contributes to the labor of defining and authorizing when the suspension of conventional international law of nations can occur. The question that surfaces at this juncture is what authorizes the suspension of the law in the name of human security when the discourse of human security has yet to find its codification as international law? Returning to Agamben, human security is, in this sense, understood as participating in the institution of a form of sovereign power insofar as it simultaneously operates within and outside the law. It finds itself in a zone of indistinction in relation to its efforts to codify the authorization of a form of international intervention. This zone of indistinction becomes apparent in the fact that this authorization has yet to receive the status of international law while, at the same time, it must invoke the force that law normally assumes. The human security discourse thus finds itself in an aporia in relation to international law which it must suspend while simultaneously invoking its force. In opening up the world to a mapping which constitutes human life as bare and participating in the authorization of the suspension of the law, human security informs the ability to institute a form of sovereign power which ultimately has as its plane of exercise the globe.

Conclusion

This paper has sought to explore the interconnections between biopower and sovereign power in relation the human security discourse under the sign of Empire. We have argued that what may appear as contradictory logics of power can be shown to participate in the constitution of an emerging assemblage of global power. An entry point into understanding factors contributing to the articulation to this emerging form of global order is to be found precisely in the shifting conceptions of security in the post-war period. In this frame, the circulatory dynamics become the new grounds upon which to understand global order in terms of security. From here, the broadening and deepening of security can be traced to the apprehension of irremediable threats at a global level, and subject to the rationalities and technologies of governmentality. It is from this general context that we can comprehend the advent of the human security discourse in both its broad and narrow forms. While the human security discourse draws from the transformations of the security in post-war environment, it also, we argued, moves towards new terrain. Most notably, it casts the problématique (in)security in biopolitical terms by having the health and welfare of populations as its referent. Much of the initial work of the human security discourse has been about developing the metrics which the objective of properly ordering, categorizing and accounting for the “true” threats to human life. More recently, the formalization and institutionalization of the human security discourse within the UN has begun to locate areas of strategic intervention that, informed by rationalities of governmentality, are meant to minimize risks by the apportioning of “good” from “bad” circulation. In the post-9-11 era, we identify continuity rather than rupture in the human security discourse. While many would see the humanitarian impulse within the human security discourse as anathema to emerging patterns of world order signed by the global war on terror, we make the argument that in rendering life in biopolitical terms, this discourse in fact prepares the ground for the operation of a form of global sovereign power. In rendering life bare and political unqualified, human security enables a form of human subjectivity amenable to the sway of sovereignty exercised from the global realm. Moreover, we conclude with the argument that the human security discourse is intimately bound with the problématique of

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exceptionality, and thus participates in providing the ground for the justification of suspending founding elements of international law while simultaneously seeking the force that law must entail in order to authorize a new form of international intervention.

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Larrinaga and Doucet - Global Governmentality - Biopower

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