The Politics of Protection Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency (The New International Relations)

The Politics of Protection Following the end of the Cold War, the security agenda has been transformed and redefined, ...

Author: Jef Huysmans

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The Politics of Protection

Following the end of the Cold War, the security agenda has been transformed and redefined, both academically and politically. This book focuses on the theme of protection and explores different ways in which political agency emerges in the regulation and definition of protection and insecurity. The contributors to this timely volume pose these significant questions, relating them to the key issues of protection and the governance of insecurity in the contemporary world. For instance, who represents those who are threatened? Who can legitimately give voice to needs for protection? From where do they derive their capacity to speak authoritatively about a need for protection? Who is not regarded as a legitimate agent and how do they speak politically? How is the capacity to claim protection and contest insecurity pre-structured by institutionalised procedures? More specifically, the contributors examine: ● ● ● ● ● ●

The role of private security companies The political agency of refugees The role of non-military security actors The reconstruction of state capacity in post-conflict situations The political role of the judiciary and the judicial regulation of armed conflict The changing relation between humanity and nature in environmental politics.

Combining political theory and empirical case studies, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of international relations and security studies. Jef Huysmans is Lecturer in Politics and International Studies at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK. Andrew Dobson is Professor at the Department of Politics and International Studies at The Open University. Raia Prokhovnik is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Studies, also at The Open University.

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The Politics of Protection Sites of insecurity and political agency

Edited by Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik, selection and editorial matter; the contributors, their own chapters This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–415–35681–4

Contents

Notes on contributors Preface 1

Agency and the politics of protection: implications for security studies

ix xii

1

J EF H UYS MA NS

2

Privatizing the politics of protection: military companies and the definition of security concerns

19

A NNA LEA NDER

3

Privatisation, globalisation, and the politics of protection in South Africa

34

R ITA A BR A H A M S E N A N D M I C H A E L C . W I L L I A M S

4

Taking rights, mediating wrongs: disagreements over the political agency of non-status refugees

48

P ET ER NY ER S

5

Resisting sovereign power: camps in-between exception and dissent

68

R A F FA ELA P UG G I ON I

6

Protection: security, territory and population

84

DIDIER BIGO

7

‘Civilizing’ the Balkans, protecting Europe: the international politics of reconstruction in Bosnia and Kosovo A LEXA NDR A G H E C I U

101

viii

Contents

8 The judicialisation of armed conflict: transforming the twenty-first century

122

ELS P ET H GU I L D

9 The limits of agency in times of emergency

136

V IV IENNE JAB R I

10 Sovereignty, international security and the regulation of armed conflict: the possibilities of political agency

154

NEIL WA LKE R

11 Do we need (to protect) nature?

175

A NDR EW DOB S ON

12 On the protection of nature and the nature of protection

189

R . B. J. WA LK E R

Index

203

Contributors

Rita Abrahamsen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. She is the author of Disciplining Democracy. Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa (Zed Books, 2000). Her current research focuses on the globalisation of private security. Didier Bigo is Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po Paris, Associated Researcher at CERI/FNSP and Director of the Center for the Study of Conflict. He is editor of the quarterly journal Cultures & Conflits and the scientific coordinator of the Framework 5 programme of the EC Commission ELISE (European Liberty and Security) and of the Framework 6 programme CHALLENGE. Among his recent publications in English is: Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild (eds) Controlling frontiers: free movement into and within Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005. Andrew Dobson is Professor of Politics at the Open University, UK. He is an environmental political theorist, and among his publications are: Green Political Thought (3rd edition, Routledge, 2000), Justice and the Environment (Oxford University Press, 1998) and Citizenship and the Environment (Oxford University Press, 2003). He is Chair of the editorial board of the journal Environmental Politics. Alexandra Gheciu is a Research Associate in International Relations, Department of Politics and International Relations (Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War), and a Research Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford University. Her research interests include international security, with a special focus on international security institutions; the politics of international socialisation; and IR theory. Recent publications include: NATO in the ‘New Europe’ (Stanford University Press, 2005) and International Institutions as Agents of Socialization? Vol. 59, Special Issue, Fall 2005, pp. 973–1012 in International Organization. Elspeth Guild is Professor of European Migration Law at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands and partner at Kingsley Napley solicitors, London, UK. She has published widely in the field of EU law and migration including the consequences of refugee movements and national conflict. She is participating, for her university, in two European Commission Framework

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Contributors Projects, ELISE and CHALLENGE, focusing on the changing relationship of liberty and security in Europe and its expression in law.

Jef Huysmans is Lecturer at the Open University (UK). He is currently working on the securitisation of migration and asylum in Europe, the political significance of fear, and the international politics of exception after 9/11. He is the author of The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (Routledge forthcoming 2005). Vivienne Jabri is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Centre for International Relations in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She is engaged in European Commission funded research on globalised warfare and the politics of security and liberty. Her publications, including Discourses on Violence (Manchester, 1996) and various recent articles, focus on developing critical understandings in International Relations, with a particular interest in war and its relationship to politics. She is currently writing a book on late modernity and the politics of violence. Anna Leander is associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark and at the Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on private authority in International Politics. She can be contacted through www.sam. sdu.dk/ansat/anl Peter Nyers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. His research focuses on the international politics of refugee and migration movements and their implications for state sovereignty, political identity and human agency. His book on refugee political subjectivity, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond the Politics of Emergency, is forthcoming from Routledge. Raia Prokhovnik is a Senior Lecturer in the Politics Department at the Open University. She is a political theorist with research interests in the concept of sovereignty, feminist political theory and early modern political thought. Recent publications include Sovereignties: Theory, History, and Practice (Palgrave, forthcoming 2005), Spinoza and Republicanism (Palgrave, 2004) and Rational Women: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy (2nd edition Manchester University Press, 2002). Raffaela Puggioni holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent. Her current research interests include issues of migration and asylum policies, and especially policies and practices of inclusion/exclusion, political identity and citizenship. She has done extensive work on Kurdish refugees in Italy. She is currently working on a project on ‘The Value of Human Life in Global Politics’, which juxtaposes the politics of life in refugee camps and the (new) politics of control post-9/11. Neil Walker has been Professor of European Law at the EUI Florence since 2000, and before that was Professor of Legal and Constitutional Theory at the

Contributors xi University of Aberdeen. He has written widely on questions of national and postnational constitutional theory, and also on the EU as an internal security domain. His recent publications include two edited volumes, Sovereignty in Transition (Hart, 2003) and Europe’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2004). R.B.J. Walker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Keele, UK, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Graduate Program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada, and Editor of the journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. Michael C. Williams is Professor in the Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Culture and Security (Routledge, 2006). His current research focuses on the globalisation of private security.

Preface

This book developed out of a workshop organised by the Department of Politics and International Studies at the Open University. The workshop had a double aim. It sought to explore the value of using an agency-focused lens to unpack the governance and contestation of protection. Participants were also asked to reflect on the analytical work that the concept of protection could do for security studies. We felt that this perspective presented a fresh and innovative way of looking at questions of protection and security. The approach of the workshop was also informed by the view that political agency and contestations of protection do not emerge from an institutional vacuum. They are always embedded in specific institutional and regulative contexts in which the need and requirements for protection define the stakes of the political game. Therefore the participants in the workshop were asked to use an agency-focused lens in relation to particular sites of insecurity. These sites ranged from local arenas, such as reception centres for refugees to global developments and institutions such as the UN and networks of private security companies. Each of the chapters relates to one of five developments in the international and domestic politics of protection: the privatisation of security by private security and military companies, the search for political voice by refugees in the countries of reception, the governance of protection in the context of peace-building and humanitarian intervention, the judicialisation of conflict and the prominence of the judiciary in the politics of protection, and finally the political contestation of environmental protection. The introductory chapter sets out the contemporary security studies research agenda and indicates how this book takes it forward. Subsequent chapters develop case studies of particular forms of politics of protection and present agency-focused research agendas in relation to one of the five developments mentioned earlier. All the chapters have been revised in light of the discussion at the workshop and subsequent comments by the editors. As with any project this one has benefited from the support of a number of people. In particular we would like to thank the Department of Politics and International Studies at the Open University for financing the workshop and Claudia Aradau and our colleagues Grahame Thompson and Michael Saward for their support and comments. Two anonymous referees have given useful suggestions. Heidi Bagtazo from Routledge deserves a special thank you for actively supporting the publication of this book, as does Harriet Brinton for effectively guiding the book through the production process.

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Agency and the politics of protection Implications for security studies1 Jef Huysmans

At the EU summit in spring 2003 the British government was seeking an agreement for EU funding of its plans to set up ‘zones of protection’. They would be organised in areas where one expected significant refugee flows. Refugees could then be protected closer to their home country and therefore would not have to come to the EU to claim asylum. The double rationale for this proposal was succinctly reported by The Guardian: British ministers also hope this will reduce refugee flows and curb asylum abuses. ‘By setting this up you offer people refuge and a safe haven close to where they live, so it’s easier to get there and get home again if the situation improves’, one official said. (Travis et al. 2003) British refugee and human rights organisations were seriously concerned about the consequences of this measure. They wrote to Prime Minister Blair: These plans will be seen as shifting responsibility for asylum seekers and refugees to some of the poorest countries in the world and send a dangerous signal about the UK’s commitment to human rights. The safety of ‘safe havens’ has frequently been called into question. (Quoted in: Travis et al. 2003) These extracts illustrate one of many instances of the political contestation of protection in the case of asylum policy. At the heart of such debates is a challenge to orthodox understandings of security that focus on the duty of the state to protect its citizens and the national territory from each other and from unwanted penetration. To fulfil this duty the sovereign state has a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Since at least the late nineteenth-century refugees and stateless persons have signalled an anomaly in this conceptualisation of security: who is going to protect those who are no longer protected by their states? (Arendt 1966: 267–302; Marrus 1985; Soguk 1999). But asylum and refugees are only one among many issues that have challenged the orthodox view. During the Cold War the legitimacy of nuclear weapons was contested because the protection they

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offered to state citizens came for some at too high a price: the risk of a nuclear winter that could erase civilisation, if not the human species or natural life as such. More recently the rise of private security firms has raised the question whether the state should retain its monopoly over the legitimate use of violence to protect its citizens. Three interrelated questions usually define these instances in which the priority of State sovereignty and its institutionalised methods of protection are asserted and challenged: (a) Who can legitimately claim a need for protection?; (b) Against which dangers can they legitimately make these claims?; and (c) Who is going to do the protecting? These questions define the politics of protection; they inform and structure the contestation of hierarchies and instruments of protection. For example, the following variations of the earlier questions define much of the political battle over the legitimacy and modality of protecting refugees: (a) Do the claims of refugees have priority over claims of politicians or border guards? (b) Should serious economic deprivation or internal displacement as a consequence of war count as a valid basis for claiming asylum? and (c) Should protection of refugees be primarily provided by neighbouring countries, the UNHCR or the more wealthy countries of North America and Western Europe? These questions refer primarily to the terms of protection: the instruments, the hierarchies between competing claims, etc. But the politics of protection is not simply a rational, rhetorical or emotional business of exchanging arguments and conflicting views on what kind of protection should prevail. This politics is also a struggle for entering the debate so that one’s voice is heard as well as a struggle for domination of different agencies expressing different views. For example, in May 2003 an Iranian Kurdish refugee, Abas Amin, stitched up his lips, ears and eyes to protest against the judicial review that the Home Office was seeking against his successful asylum application. In July 2003 another Iranian refugee protested deportation in the same way. In both cases, the Home Office spokesperson denied that this was a legitimate political act (Branigan 2003; Oliver 2003). The Iranian refugee dramatically challenged the institutionalised forms of political agency and thereby rendered visible a question that remains relatively unarticulated if one frames the politics of protection mainly as a contestation of the terms of protection: Who has what capacity to significantly intervene in the political contestation of claims of protection and how is this capacity articulated and structured? This question is what I refer to as the question of political agency. The contributions to this book look at the question of political agency in relation to specific contestations of protection. Agency-focused analysis and the notion of protection introduce a more sociologically oriented unpacking of situations of insecurity as a political struggle in a competitive field that is characterised by a particular structure of power relations and certain understandings of how political agency can be asserted. This more sociological lens embeds normative claims and discourses in specific practices through which competing claims of protection are articulated. The present chapter contextualises this argument in developments in security studies.

Agency and the politics of protection

3

The concept of protection also does important work in the book. It facilitates moving between and across three kinds of security practice: policing, defence and securing humanity and the environment. The book introduces the concept of protection to open up more easily a number of questions related to these techniques of security and the relation between them. Doing this is important given that political agendas do not hesitate to let them play into and against one another. The latter do not necessarily frame these different practices as belonging to discrete, relatively unrelated sites of insecurity. Especially after the collapse of the military-diplomatic structure of the Cold War, competition and linkages between policing, defence and securing humanity and/or nature have become more visible within political constructions of security and insecurity. The widening of the security concept in security/strategic studies in the late 1980s and 1990s, which I will refer to in the next section, can be seen as the academic mirror image of these political developments. In the next section, I sketch two developments in security studies that are the main background against which the arguments are developed. The following section makes an argument for a sociological, situated analysis of political agency and explains its implications for security studies. The final section sets out in more detail the work that the concept of protection does in the book.

The background: cleavages in security studies In the 1980s and 1990s there was a turbulent debate in International Relations about how to study security questions and which security questions to study. The debate generated a wide variety of interventions but was largely structured around two cleavages. The first split was between a narrow versus broad definition of the security (studies) agenda, known as the ‘widening debate’ (Krause and Williams 1997). This discussion was about what could and should be legitimately studied as a security question in International Relations. It had two dimensions. The first dimension concerned what kinds of threats and dangers one could and should study. Is the study of security limited to questions of military aggression and defence or does it cover a wider range of dangers and insecurities, including societal, environmental, economic and political threats (Buzan 1983, 1991)? The second dimension was about whose security could and should be given central importance. Is security studies limited to a state-centric approach that focuses on the security of states and their citizens or can it include a wider range of subjects of insecurities, such as individuals, societies, humanity and the ecological system? The widening debate can thus be represented in a simple matrix: Whose security?

Exclusively the state Including non-state referents

Which kind of threat? Military

Non-military and military

1 2

3 4

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The central cleavage was between traditionalists who argued for keeping the focus on military aggression in an inter-state world (1) (e.g. Walt 1991) and critical security studies that wanted to either broaden threat definitions (2) (e.g. Buzan 1983, 1991) or combine a wider spectrum of threats with a move beyond a statecentric approach (3) (Walker 1990; Dalby 1992; Krause and Williams 1997; Buzan et al. 1998). Another issue arose parallel to the widening debate – and sometimes explicitly ran through it: a struggle over the value of deconstruction and social constructivism for security studies (e.g. Walker 1990; Shapiro 1992; Der Derian 1993; Wendt 1995; Katzenstein 1996; Buzan et al. 1998). It split those supporting the idea that security policy was a reaction to objectively given and/or subjectively perceived threats from those for whom insecurities are an outcome of a political process that transforms phenomena from non-security questions into security questions. This debate has often been presented as an epistemological debate between positivism and post-positivism, rationalism and reflectivism or epistemic realism and relativism. But this debate cannot be reduced to its epistemological dimensions. At least as important was disagreement over the ontological status of insecurities or threats, that is the nature of their factuality. Conflicting understandings of the ontological status of language and knowledge in social relations and of how to conceptualise the factual nature of threats split more objectivist approaches from its deconstructivist and constructivist challengers. Objectivist approaches started from the understanding that threats present themselves as an external given to security agencies. They have an objective quality; they exist independently from the routines, procedures, discourses and knowledge enacted by security agencies. The central question of analysing security policy is then either one of misperception (Wolfers 1962; Jervis 1976) or one of which threats should be given political priority (Booth 1991a; Wyn Jones 1999). Do those actors who bear upon the development of security policy perceive threats truly as they are or is security policy based on misperception? Should one let securing the state and its citizens against inflows of refugees prevail over securing refugees from persecution? Approaches that were critical of these objectivist understandings of insecurity emphasised that threats are outcomes of a politics of representation. Threats are not understood to be pre-given dangers that arise in the external environment and to which security policies react. Rather, security agencies and their policies actively contribute to transforming phenomena into security questions. For this group, insecurities are internal to security policies; security policy produces insecurities because it is organised around representations of threats and dangers. While objectivist approaches focus on measuring the scope and seriousness of a threat and/or on hierarchising given insecurities on moral or ethical grounds, its deconstructivist and constructivist challengers focus on how this measuring is embedded within social, cultural and political processes and frameworks that represent or construct phenomena into threats. The latter thus try to account for the reification of threats. Reification refers to a process of representation and experience in which a human-made object or situation becomes seen as a factual given that exists externally and independently from the agencies that produced it.


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Let’s take the Soviet threat during the Cold War as an example. Objectivist security analysts discuss the precise nature and seriousness of the threat that the Soviet army posed to the United States and Western European countries. They also deal with the question of whether Western political leadership acted on the basis of a correct perception of this threat. Constructivist and deconstructivist security analysts focus instead on the cultural and policy processes through which the Soviet Union became constituted as the primary, externally given threat to the United States and the Western world. The Soviet threat was the outcome of a politics of representation in which security frameworks were applied in particular ways to make sense of the relation between Western allies and the Soviet Union. This was not a matter of perception but of social and political processes through which the Soviet Union became institutionalised as an objective threat to the Western allies. This book places its interventions on the critical side of both cleavages. The argument for making political agency a more focal point of analysis and for introducing the concept of ‘politics of protection’ is not introduced as another cleavage or as an intervention that actively engages with these cleavages. Rather it leaves this debate for what it is and turns its attention to making a contribution to a widened security studies agenda that starts from the assumption that insecurities are socially and politically constructed through processes of representation. It is within this agenda that I want to make an argument for a more political agency-focused analysis and for the concept of protection.

Situated agency: towards an agency-focused sociology of the politics of protection The widening of the security agenda to non-military threats and the growing interest in including non-state referents opened up the issue of political agency. It introduced a wider variety of security problems and thus of political sites in which competing insecurities are politically contested. Both environmental security claims and security claims in the area of immigration and refugee policies have been among the most visible areas in which significant issues have been raised about whose security claims do matter and how competing claims of insecurity open up the security agenda to a contestation of the very meaning of security. The notion of a ‘politics of protection’ emphasises this politically contested nature of claims of protection and insecurity, both in terms of their legitimacy and the techniques of administering them. Claims of protection are not simply constructed through discourse and bureaucratic routine but remain embedded in fields of contestation structured by power relations between participating agencies. The turn to a political constructivism in a widening security studies agenda necessarily leads to the questions of who are the significant security agencies that modulate the meaning of protection and insecurity in the contest of competing security claims and practices and how is their transformative capacity structured and articulated? Why raise these questions? Why ask for a more agency-focused analysis when the question of security agency emerges by definition in a widened and constructivist

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security studies agenda? The main reason is that foregrounding the question of who has what capacity to do what in the security field brings out the limitations in the way in which this security studies agenda introduced the question of agency.

From ‘Whose security?’ to ‘What transformative capacity?’ By explicitly asking ‘Whose security is one securing in security policy and knowledge?’ the so-called ‘wideners’ introduced claims of insecurity made by non-state actors, especially critical social and political movements. To name a few examples: there can be claims for securing universal human needs, universal human rights, environmental sustainability and the safety of black people during the Apartheid regime in South Africa. These claims usually questioned the priority that is given to state-centric visions of security. They introduce insecurities that often remain subordinated to securing the State and its citizenry. The purpose of this form of widening the security agenda was to challenge the conservative nature of security knowledge – its emphasis on the protection of the status quo, of the states and citizenry as they exist. A normative and political vision looking for emancipatory or progressive capacity of security claims as made by opposition movements, human rights organisations, anti-globalisation movements, aid organisations etc. drove this intervention in security studies. It was an important intervention that sharply brings out the political quality of security knowledge (Walker 1990; Booth 1991a,b; Dalby 1997; Walker 1997; McSweeney 1999; Wyn Jones 1999). But often these interventions focused on the importance of alternative security claims and on whether and how these alternative representations differed from statecentric imaginations of security. The more sociological question of how to account for the political capacity of those making and enacting these alternative security claims remained relatively untouched by these enquiries. The transformative capacity of critical security claims cannot be fully accounted for on the basis of their ethico-political appeal, their endorsing an alternative imagination of protection. This appeal is always played out in sites of struggle in which the transformative capacity of certain claims and practices is shaped by and depends upon the structural position between the competing agencies and the tactics they can and do deploy. An agency-focused sociological account thus would shift the centre of attention from the ethico-political valuation of critical security claims to the power relations that characterise particular competitions between emancipatory and conservative visions of protection.2 Let me illustrate this difference by contrasting Bill McSweeney’s (1999) call for a sociology of security driven by an ethical endorsement of the priority of individual security with Peter Nyers’s Chapter 4 in this book. McSweeney combines an argument for a structurationist approach of agency and structure, which emphasises their mutual constitutive relation and the duality of structure as being both constraint and opportunity, with an ethical argument for prioritising individual


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security over state security – or, in McSweeney’s words ‘security only makes sense if individual human beings are seen as its primary referent, or subject’ ( p. 208). Running through his work is a strong assertion of the individual’s capacity for moral choice. His work combines meta-theory and normative theory. What is missing is a sociological account of the transformative capacity of those endorsing the priority of individuals as referents for security policies, of how moral capacity is translated into political strategy and tactics, and of how change or its absence is produced relationally in a struggle that often implies asymmetrical power relations. Nyers’s Chapter 4 in this book addresses these questions in an account of Algerian refugees struggling for recognition as both human beings and legitimate asylum claimants in Canada. The ethico-political orientation is to some extent similar to McSweeney’s. It is characterised by a concern with human security claims and it strongly asserts the human capacity for freedom and ethico-political choice. But Nyers’s analysis differs in an important way from McSweeney’s. While the latter intertwines a meta-theoretical conceptual framework – that is structuration theory – with an ethical endorsement of the priority of the moral voice of individuals, Nyers focuses on the political – as different from moral – capacity as it is played out in specific sites in which actors struggle over the legitimacy of particular claims of protection. The important difference is not the fact that Nyers locates his account within a specific empirical setting – although this is part of the sociological gaze too – while McSweeney’s intervention operates at the meta-theoretical level. The main difference is that while McSweeney does not account for how moral capacity and the ethico-political position he endorses play out politically, Nyers makes this his primary concern. He looks at how moral and ethical claims can gain political voice; how transformative agency takes form in specific sites in which human beings translate ethical and moral claims into a political encounter characterised by excessive structural constraints (in this case, the iron cage of bureaucracy) and highly asymmetrical power relations. Nyers’ sociological gaze does not eliminate the ethico-political interest in alternative security claims. But he integrates ethical and emancipatory valuation of claims of protection in a sociological interpretation of the politics of protection that tries to understand how the political capacity of those making the claims of protection is structured in a relational field and how they mobilise and strategise their capacity. The question is less ‘Whose security?’ and more ‘What transformative capacity is there?’

From discourse as agency to discursive agency More discourse analytical approaches in security studies developed linguistic and cultural answers to this question of how to conceptualise more specifically the capacity for change. They focused less on mobilisation and the relational structure defined by the relative power positions of the agents involved and more on how discursive structures render subjects and their relations (Huysmans 1998, 2002). This view relocates the question of agency by implying that the transformative

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capacity is not with the agents and the relations between them but is internal to the discourse itself (Lynn Doty 1997, 1999; Wight 1999, 2000). Speaking and writing security evokes a discursive structure that renders subjects and their relations to a considerable extent independent from the intentions of the ‘speaker’. The discourse is not simply speech or writing but a rather non-elastic structure of meanings that one has inherited historically and that frames social relations in a particular way. The question is not so much one of discursive agency as one of discourse as agency, that is the transformative capacity of discourse as structure. Such an approach accounts for security effects in one of two ways. It can ground foreign and/or domestic policy in a deep cultural structure that predisposes a people to relate to other people on the basis of stark distinctions between friends and enemies, good and evil. David Campbell has accounted for a predisposition towards enemy creation in US society in this way (Campbell 1998; Milliken 1999). Alternatively this approach reads security discourse as a speech act that structures situations into security situations by calling them ‘a security problem’. Security problems are talked into existence because security language applies a particular rhetorical structure that asserts existential threats that need to be dealt with urgently to the situation (Wæver 1995; Buzan et al. 1998). These cultural and linguistic approaches emphasise the structuring power of language and symbolic representation in an attempt to move away from neorealist structuralism that emphasises the distribution of material power resources. But they also move away from intentional concepts of power. They lodge security agencies in structures of representation that they do not control. Power is not simply about X being able to define a security issue for Y, even if Y is against it. Power of representation works on the basis of political culture and language that predispose agents towards securitising phenomena; it pre-structures their intentions, identities and policy options. However, emphasising that the power of representation does not reside primarily with an intentional agent but with the structuring properties of language and culture does not solve the problem that not everyone speaking or writing security has an equal chance of producing a securitising effect. It is usually the case that presidents, police officers or generals speaking security or articulating a cultural predisposition towards enemy definition is more important than the language of shop assistants (Bigo 1994, 1996, 2000; Huysmans 2002). Taking up this issue that not everyone speaks security equally powerfully and not everyone’s predisposition matters equally does not necessarily lead to an analysis that makes intentional agencies the focus of analysis. The structuring effects of language can remain significantly bound to the way in which security discourse renders problems and works on predispositions, irrespective of the intentions of agencies. But even then the question of agency cannot be detached fully from a demand for a more sociological account of the power relations between security speaking and writing agents (Bourdieu 1982; Weldes et al. 1999; Bigo 2000). The simple idea that not all people have the same capacity to evoke a security discourse raises two important issues that are central to a more agency/agents-focused


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sociology of securitisation. The capacity to securitise depends to some extent on one’s professional status and time. Professionals of security, such as the intelligence community, the police and the military, can make security claims more often and have authority based on their professional status and their position in a hierarchical political structure. They simply have more time to securitise and they are seen as more knowledgeable about security issues. It is what they do for a living and what they are trained for. For example, Chapter 6 by Didier Bigo unpacks both the competition over the meaning of protection and the etymology of protection primarily in relation to security professionals. His analysis focuses on how the concept of protection was a stake in the redefinition of the role of the military and Gendarmerie in France and how this was tied in with changes in the definition of security questions. This is very much in line with his previous work on the concept of security field and security technology, in which security professionals are the primary securitising agencies (Bigo 1996). Anna Leander’s interpretation of the importance of private military companies in securitising processes shows that professional status and credible claims of expertise are a power resource for both the traditional public security agencies and for private military companies. They have an important stake in the competition between these agencies. Setting a security culture or rhetoric at work and opposing it in specific contests of protection also depends on the effective mobilisation of knowledge, status, public support, media coverage, etc. Mobilisation is a question of strategies and tactics informed by the structural power position one holds in the political context. This element is brought out sharply in Nyers’ analysis of how refugees try to mobilise around claims of humanity and equality in the face of bureaucratic indifference and in a highly asymmetrical power structure. Also Vivienne Jabri shows this by looking at how in a context of emergency legislation the judiciary mobilises simultaneously in defence of the State and in opposition to it. Raffaela Puggioni in her Chapter 5 on reception centres in Italy furthermore shows that mobilisation is also a question of creating institutional and everyday conditions for agency. She argues that the practical layout and daily administration of reception centres make a huge difference for the agency that refugees can assert.

Situated agency: from sectors of security to sites of protection So far I have argued that the capacity to securitise phenomena depends on both a hierarchical structure that distributes professional legitimacy, status and time and a more horizontal structure of mobilisation in which social and political mobilisation can cut across the more formalistic hierarchies of security institutions. Besides professional legitimacy and capacity, political agency depends on the position actors have and the tactics they develop in a relational field that is structured around competitions over the security agenda. Agency is therefore always situated. The concept of ‘situated agency’ refers first to the relational nature of power – that is, capacity always exists in relation to other capacities. But it also refers to

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something else. The capacity to act and the criteria for judging it are always tied in with the nature of the field in which the agents operate. Therefore agency is not externally given to a field. It is bound to the institutional and regulative contexts in which needs for protection are contested. Moreover, capacity and criteria of judgement are themselves at stake in the competition between agents. Agency is thus a political prerogative of security practice; it is itself a stake of the game (Campbell 1998: 220–221). The nature of the significant actors and the power resources that make them significant in the struggles for the transformation and reiteration of established security agendas are themselves a major stake in the politics of protection. For example, Abrahamsen and Williams draw attention to a struggle for legitimacy between private security companies and the national government in South Africa. In this struggle the legitimacy of private agency cannot fully rely on claims of expertise and efficiency. Their legitimacy remains problematic because private security arrangements reflect and possibly reinforce racialised inequalities, which obviously have a tremendous symbolic significance in post-apartheid South Africa. A main theme running through Elspeth Guild’s contribution is how changes in the international legal regulations and interventions in armed conflict are tied in with a contest over the legitimacy and the nature of the role of the judiciary in armed conflict. The authority of both the international administration and national governments in Bosnia and Kosovo is an important stake of the politics of protection in Alexandra Gheciu’s analysis of peace building. Andrew Dobson’s Chapter 11 adds another angle to the idea that agency is itself a prerogative in the politics of protection. Starting from the debates on Genetic Modification (GM), he argues that the fight against GM is not simply informed by concerns about how GM will affect the life support function of nature but also by existential concerns over what human and political agency can mean. He argues that insecurity over what it means to be human and to have human agency, that is, transformative capacity and freedom, is one of the central concerns in the arguments over the protection of nature. This mode of unpacking politics of protection shows that the sociological lens is not limited to unpacking relational power struggles but can and ultimately needs to slip in philosophical questions about the understanding of politics, freedom and necessity, as is most explicitly argued in Rob Walker’s Chapter 12. This philosophical orientation differs from ‘meta-theoretical’ categorisation that grounds sociological research – such as McSweeney’s (1999) and Wendt’s (1999) – however. It does not try to formulate a general social theory that informs more empirically oriented sociological research. Instead, the philosophical orientation is empirical. It tries to understand how contestations of insecurity in specific sites, such as the GM debate, are partly structured by general questions about the nature of things, human and non-human. In other words, the philosophical terms it unpacks are stakes of and structuring devices in the political contestation of protection itself. If agency is situated one cannot start from a general theory of political agency that identifies agency in relation to all security questions (e.g. by privileging presidential or parliamentary discourses) or in relation to general sectors (e.g. dividing


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up the security field in a number of discrete sectors such as the military, economic, societal sectors). One needs to start from particular practices of both state offices (such as police, government, judiciary) and non-state offices (such as charities, environmental pressure groups and private companies) and the relational structure that they enact. The contributions to this book bring out this turn to the study of practice (Veyne 1978; Bigo 2000: 177–178; Neumann 2002) and situated agency by reading off the nature and stakes of specific contests of protection from the practice of particular agencies. Leander highlights the complications that private military companies introduce for our understanding of policy making in the security sector. Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams highlight among others competition and cooperation between private security firms and the police in South Africa. Bigo focuses on the struggle between the Gendarmerie and the military in France. Gheciu brings out how competing claims of sovereignty between international and national authorities are played out in Bosnia and Kosovo where peace building is framed as a civilising mission by the international administration. Nyers brings out the struggle between civil servants and refugees while Puggioni highlights the relative importance of charities and local administrators as compared to national legislation in Italian reception practices. Jabri, Guild and Neil Walker focus on the importance of the tension between governmental claims of sovereignty and the judiciary in both domestic and international claims of protection. Rob Walker and Dobson look at how mobilising political agency in relation to environmental protection is embedded in, and sometimes limited by, and potentially rearticulates a specific political metaphysics that opposes humanity and nature. This approach has important consequences for the way in which one widens the security studies agenda. In the security studies debates of the 1980s and 1990s one of the more interesting ways of categorising the widening agenda was Buzan’s notion of sectors, subsequently refined in his work with Wæver and other colleagues at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (Buzan 1983, 1991; Buzan et al. 1998). Sectors are lenses that identify different security issues on the basis of series of threats and referent objects. Buzan, Wæver and their colleagues identified five sectors: military, societal, political, environmental and economic. They differ in terms of the nature of the threats and possibly in terms of the identification of what is under threat (the referent object). For example, while the military sector focuses on military threats to state sovereignty, the societal sector focuses on European integration or migration threatening national identity (Wæver et al. 1993). Using sectors to analyse security agendas and policies implies that one starts by categorising practices in terms of the sector definitions. Such an approach facilitates a general study of societal security in Africa, for example, that identifies societal threat-referent object series in African countries. Using the sectors as macro-analytical devices that allow classifying security dynamics across continents easily removes practices from their specific contexts and frames them as another illustration of societal threats and identity politics, consequently producing an image of a global societal security agenda. Such a security analysis

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reifies threat relations; it objectifies threats by cutting them loose from the specific political dynamics within which insecurities and protection are struggled over (Huysmans 1995; McSweeney 1996). Of course, the sector grid does not necessarily have to be used in this way. It partly depends on how well the security practices are contextualised and mapped as a struggle rather than a given. It is interesting, however, to see that Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, in their book Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998) that is arguably the most systematic presentation of the sector approach in constructivist security studies, sweep up different sectoral threats across the five continents thereby losing most of the politics and specifics that characterise the securitising processes. They focus on very general threat classification with a minimal account of the securitising processes. The consequence is that one gets a global map of insecurities organised in terms of five sectors suggesting a general equivalence between the genocide in Rwanda and the securitisation of migration and asylum in Europe. If one is interested in accounting for the politics of securitisation such maps are rather problematic. They suggest global equivalences between what are actually highly diverse political processes. This subsumes the sociological dimensions of the critical constructivist approaches to a form of threat definition and comparison that is not very different from the knowledge produced in objectivist security studies.3 Using the notion of situated agency as the starting point for security studies leads us away from the sector approach. The contributions to this volume do not use a grid identifying threat-referent object series but start from particular practices of protection. The question of what kind of insecurity is at stake in a particular situation is secondary to the account of both the modalities that characterise and the structural framing of the struggle over protection claims. The terms and modalities of particular contests of protection, the power relations between different actors and the tactics they deploy is seen as more important than specifying what kind of threat or insecurity is at stake. For example, Abrahamsen and Williams start from the practices of private security firms in South Africa that articulate a racially framed contestation of sovereignty and a global economic competition between private security firms. They do not focus on the question of threat and referent object but on the economic and political rationale of the privatisation of security and how privatisation takes place in an economically and politically contested field. Gheciu unpacks how the political rationale of the international administration of Bosnia and Kosovo articulates a move away from the territorial protection of national groups to a civilising process in which one attempts to limit violence by means of liberal-democratic disciplinary technologies. She also highlights how these practices structure and are structured by a conflict of sovereignty claims between the international administration and the national governments. The focus is again on the political rationale articulated by the protective practices and the field of contestation that structures these practices rather than the discourses of dangers and the nature of the threat and the referent object of security. The notions of ‘sites of politics of protection’ and of ‘situated agency’ thus express a move away from categorising security practice on the basis of relations


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between threats and referent objects and towards a focus on the rationale of these practices and the field of power relations in which they are embedded. One of the consequences is that the security studies agenda widens in less controlled ways than with the sector approach. An explicit turn to more sociological accounts, possibly combined with political theoretical analysis (as represented by Dobson and Rob Walker in this book), results in a more fragmented security studies that emphasises the heterogeneity of the politics of protection. Such an approach is less vulnerable to threat reification – that is, objectifying threats whose definition is actually a stake in a politics of protection. It refocuses security studies from threat definition and managing widening through the concept of sectors to a sociological and political theoretical account of the rationale of practices of protection, of power relations in particular processes of securitisation, of the struggle for redefinitions of security fields and of the consequences of the emergence of relatively new actors – for example private military companies – in contestations of protection.

The concept of ‘protection’ In the previous section I argued that it is important to raise the question of agency more explicitly within a widened security studies agenda that focuses on the political construction of insecurities. This section looks at the work that the concept of protection does for the book. A detailed conceptual analysis of protection is developed in Bigo’s Chapter 6 and does not need repetition here. This section focuses on how the concept of protection is used in the book to foreground a number of important characteristics of the political contestation of insecurities which tend to remain under-articulated in security studies. In the current political context it is important to let security analysis move across different security practices, especially policing, defence and securing humanity and the environment. The first focuses on identifying and disciplining deviant practices to secure public order. The second emphasises the containment of territory so as to protect it against external aggression. The third concentrates on the protection of humanity and nature from harm on the basis of universal claims about what constitutes sustainable and decent forms of life. These frameworks are becoming increasingly interconnected. Bigo (2000) has argued that security agencies are more and more undermining the distinction between internal and external security by competitively merging questions of policing and defence. This development is tied in with a discursive shift from threats of identifiable enemies to notions of risk and the idea that uncertainty is a threat in itself. Environmental security entered the strategic military discourse rather explicitly after the end of the Cold War. Migration and asylum became explicitly integrated in a policing discourse in the European Union (e.g. Schengen Agreements). In addition the military has encroached on refugee policy. One of the most spectacular cases has been the Australian military preventing a Norwegian cargo ship Tampa with refugees on board to enter Australia’s territorial waters in September 2001. Another example is NATO’s capitalisation

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on its military capacity in the regulation of refugee flows during the Kosovo crisis of 1999. The concept of protection is used to give equal conceptual status to policing, defence and the protection of environment and refugees and to facilitate research that looks at the interrelation between them. The book as a whole moves across the different practices and some of the chapters explore tensions that arise from their intertwining in the security field. For example, Bigo shows how the definition of protection is a stake in the institutional struggle between the military and French Gendarmerie. Nyers looks at how binding human insecurity to equality claims challenges policing discourses and practices. Rob Walker reflects on the tension between statist and alternative notions of security and concepts of humanity and nature in relation to environmental protection. Gheciu shows how disciplining technology – rather than territorial technologies of defence – is a key international security technology when security questions become integrated in a civilising process. Guild raises a number of important questions about how the protection of the individual, often grounded in a human rights framework, affects the regulation of armed conflict and the role of the judiciary in this regulation. The concept of protection is also used to let security analysis run more flexibly across traditional and less traditional security agencies. It helps to make security analysis more sensitive to the role and power of policing agencies and the judiciary in a discipline that has some difficulty in breaking down the State apparatuses in its constituent parts. Abrahamsen and Williams, for example, use the concept of protection explicitly to reflect on how the rise of private security companies bears upon traditional policing work and the legitimacy of the South African State as a sovereign actor in its domestic realm. Jabri explores the role of judicial scrutiny and thus the tension between the executive powers and the judiciary in contexts of emergency legislations that are claimed to be necessary to protect a population from harm. In addition, protection agendas are often driven by less conventional security agencies including the protected themselves and private security actors such as charities. The concept of protection thus facilitates coverage of the interrelationship between private or quasi-public actors and public agencies in the construction of insecurity as a public issue and/or a public good (on the notion of security as a peculiar kind of public good, see the Chapters 10 and 3 by Neil Walker and Abrahamsen and Williams, respectively). For example, Puggioni introduces the role of charities and churches in Italian refugee reception policies. Nyers reflects extensively on the political mobilisation of refugees themselves. Leander, and Abrahamsen and Williams reflect on the political significance of private military companies and private security companies in framing security policies and the possible tensions with public agencies that arise from a ‘privatisation’ of security provisions. The concept of protection can also help in opening security studies to the importance of everyday practices and routines in security practices. In security studies the concept of security has a tendency to privilege extraordinary or exceptional situations (as seen in Jabri’s Chapter 9, for example). But it is important to check out how security policy and the politics of protection are embedded in


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ordinary everyday processes. For example, to what extent are demands for increased private protection generated by the reiteration of insecurities in advertising campaigns, the marketing of domestic security appliances, etc.? How does the protection of refugees depend on the everyday organisation of reception centres? How does the introduction of judicial procedures of protection of individuals affect the international regulation of armed conflict? Can concepts of global security overcome ‘the manifold associations of common identity and purpose’ (to quote Neil Walker’s Chapter 10) that make national security such a powerful political concept? If the notion of security indeed connotes exceptionality in security studies, introducing a concept that implies more easily routines and everyday situations, like safety or protection, helps to introduce these dimensions in security studies. Finally the concept facilitates the introduction of questions of harm and victims and by implication questions of tutelage and patronage. As Bigo’s etymological analysis in this book makes clear, besides shielding from harm or danger, the concept refers to extending patronage by those offering protection to victims. It thus points to an asymmetrical power relation and to the important question of how victims can gain political agency in relations of patronage and tutelage which have an inherent tendency to neutralise the agency of the protected. Jabri similarly argues that the relation between the protected and the protector is one of ‘extraction’. Nyers and Puggioni show explicitly the institutionalisation of tutelage in relation to refugees. They also indicate how breaking through a system of tutelage and patronage is a challenging move both for the refugees involved and for the system within which they try to assert their agency. There is nothing inherent in the concept of insecurity that prevents it from introducing these dimensions. But the notion of security seems to have a tendency to direct attention to that which endangers states and citizens in extraordinary circumstances. It remains a concept that, in International Relations and Political Science, is strongly connected to securing state policies, both internationally and domestically. This book uses the concept of protection to facilitate opening up debates on insecurity to three frameworks of protection, to everyday contexts of protection, to agencies whose significance tends to be kept relatively marginal in security studies and to questions of harm, and victims and their political agency.

Conclusion The chapters in this book unpack the politics of protection by looking at political agency in specific sites and/or in relation to specific policy questions. The contributions to this book show each in their own way and in relation to specific security questions the importance of making political agency a more central bone of contention in security studies. Focusing on political agency shifts the study of insecurities from emphasising representations of threats and identities, either in discourses of danger or in perceptions, to the agencies that articulate these representations and the power relations between them. Agency is always situated in a double sense that it operates in specific political and institutional sites and that it is itself a political prerogative in the politics of protection. Emphasising the

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situated nature of agency requires that security studies read off the stakes of the game and the rationale of the politics of protection from the practices rather than through schemes classifying threat relations. In other words, it moves from studying sectors of security to studying heterogeneous practices and their relation within certain sites of protection. This move is not an argument for a naïve empiricism but for a sociological analysis of transformative capacity that looks in detail at both the tactics deployed and the structure of power relations within which competing claims of protection are made and enacted and the political rationale of these practices, including how the possibility of agency is conceptually framed.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Raia Prokhovnik for detailed and very helpful comments on an earlier draft. 2 For a more thorough analysis of the significance of the notion of emancipation for security studies: Aradau (2004). 3 For Buzan and Wæver’s response to this argument: Buzan et al. (1998: 195–213).

Bibliography Aradau, C. (2004) ‘Security and the Democratic Scene: Desecuritization and Emancipation’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 7(4), 388–413. Arendt, H. (1966) The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Inc. Bigo, D. (1996) Polices en Réseaux. L’expérience européenne. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. —— (2000) ‘When Two Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe’, in M.W. Kelstrup and M.C. Williams (eds) International Relations Theory and The Politics of European Integration. Power, Security and Community. London: Routledge, pp. 171–204. Booth, K. (1991a) ‘Security and Emancipation’, Review of International Relations, 17(4), 313–326. —— (1991b) ‘Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice’, International Affairs, 67(3), 527–545. Bourdieu, P. (1982) Ce que parler veut dire. L’économie des échanges linguistiques. Paris: Fayard. Branigan, T. (2003) ‘Friends Fail to Stop Refugee’s Protest’, The Guardian, 20 (May 2003), 7. Buzan, B. (1983) People, States and Fear, The National Security Problem in International Relations. Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf. —— (1991) People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Buzan, B., O. Wæver and J. de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Campbell, D. (1998) Writing Security. United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dalby, S. (1992) ‘Security, Modernity, Ecology: The Dilemmas of Post-Cold War Security Discourse’, Alternatives, 17(1), 95–134. —— (1997) ‘Contesting an Essential Concept: Reading the Dilemmas in Contemporary Security Discourse’, in K. Krause and M. Williams (eds) Critical Security Studies. London: UCL Press, pp. 3–31.


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Der Derian, J. (1993) ‘The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard’, in D. Campbell and M. Dillon (eds) The Political Subject of Violence. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 94–113. Huysmans, J. (1995) ‘Migrants as a Security Problem: Dangers of “Securitizing” Societal Issues’, in R. Miles and D. Thränhardt (eds) Migration and European Integration. The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion. London: Pinter, pp. 53–72. —— (1998) ‘Dire et Ecrire la Sécurité: Le Dilemme Normatif des Etudes de Sécurité’, Cultures & Conflicts, 31–32, 177–202. —— (2002) ‘Defining Social Constructivism in Security Studies: The Normative Dilemma of Writing Security’, Alternatives, 27 (Special Issue), 41–62. Jervis, R. (1976) Perception and Misperception in International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Katzenstein, P. (ed.) (1996) The Culture of National Security. Norms and Identity in World Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. Krause, K. and M.C. Williams (eds) (1997) Critical Security Studies. London: UCL Press. Lynn Doty, R. (1997) ‘Aporia: A Critical Exploration of the Agent-Structure Problematique in International Relations Theory’, European Journal of International Relations, 3(3), 365–392. —— (1999) ‘A Reply to Colin Wight’, European Journal of International Relations, 5(3), 387–390. McSweeney, B. (1996) ‘Buzan and the Copenhagen School’, Review of International Studies, 22(1), 81–93. —— (1999) Security, Identity and Interests. A Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marrus, M.R. (1985) The Unwanted. European Refugees in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milliken, J. (1999) ‘The Study of Discourse in International Relations: A Critique of Research and Methods’, European Journal of International Relations, 5(2), 225–254. Neumann, I. (2002) ‘Returning Practice to the Linguistic Turn: The Case of Diplomacy’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31(3), 627–651. Oliver, M. (2003) ‘Second Refugee Protests by Stitching Up Eyes’, The Guardian, 8 ( July 2003), 8. Shapiro, M. (1992) ‘That Obscure Object of Violence: Logistics, Desire, War’, Alternatives, 17(4), 453–477. Soguk, N. (1999) States and Strangers. Refugees and Displacement of Statecraft. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Travis, A., I. Black and M. White (2003) ‘EU Summit: Europe’s Asylum Policy Shameful, says UN: Britain to Push for Launch of Pilot Scheme in East Africa’, The Guardian, 20 ( June 2003), 4. Veyne, P. (1978) Comment on écrit l’histoire. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Wæver, O. (1995) ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in R. Lipschutz (ed.) On Security. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 46–86. Wæver, O., B. Buzan, M. Kelstrup and P. Lemaitre (eds) (1993) Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe. London: Pinter. Walker, R.B.J. (1990) ‘Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics’, Alternatives, 15(1), 3–27. —— (1997) ‘The Subject of Security’, in K. Krause and M.C. Williams (eds) Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases. London: UCL Press, pp. 61–81. Walt, S. (1991) ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 35(2), 211–239.

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Weldes, J., M. Laffey, H. Gusterson and R. Duvall (eds) (1999) Cultures of Insecurity. States, Communities, and the Production of Danger. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wendt, A. (1995) ‘Constructing International Politics’, International Security, 20(1), 71–82. —— (1999) Social Theory of International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wight, C. (1999) ‘They Shoot Dead Horses Don’t They? Locating Agency in the AgentStructure Problematique’, European Journal of International Relations, 5(1), 109–142. —— (2000) ‘Interpretation All the Way Down? A Reply to Roxanne Lynn Doty’, European Journal of International Relations, 6(3), 423–430. Wolfers, A. (1962) Discord and Collaboration. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Wyn Jones, R. (1999) Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

2

Privatizing the politics of protection Military companies and the definition of security concerns Anna Leander We make American military doctrine. (Ed Soyster, MPRI, Economist, July 8, 1999)

This chapter is about the implications of the rise of private military companies (PMCs1) for the politics of protection, that is, for the politics surrounding the definition of threats and the protection needed to secure against them.2 It suggests that the rise of PMCs has a much more profound impact than most observers recognize. Many (probably most) observers see the PMCs as tools in the hands of the state, “as a weapons system, which is what they are” (Shearer 1998b: 92) rather than as actors endowed with an independent capacity to act. The consequence is that the degree to which the rise of PMCs is affecting the politics of protection is greatly underestimated. Most would argue that the power to authorise and delegate the use of military force should remain with states, preferably at the level of the UN Security Council. But once agreed, exactly what or who is deployed is less important – the issue then is to find the most effective and least costly alternative. (Shearer 2001: 30) On this view, a cost–benefit analysis is the best guide to decide whether we should use private companies or public soldiers to ensure international security. This chapter takes issue with this view. It argues that even if the state retains formal authority over the use of force, privatization implies a considerable shift of authority from the public to the private. It does so because private actors come to shape the foundations for decisions on when to use what kind of force. As the chapter shows, increased outsourcing and privatization means that private firms are often in a position to directly define security concerns because the tasks of doing so has been directly outsourced. Moreover, private firms are increasingly active as lobbyists or hired consultants and trainers. This gives them a considerable grip on the security understanding of public officials. Finally, the growing presence of private security experts has been possible because of (and has furthered) a shift in the relative credibility of public and private security discourses. The chapter

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concludes that if these developments are taken together it is clear that privatization has a profound influence on the politics of protection: it alters who has a voice, what the voices say, and how much different voices weigh in the politics surrounding the question of protection.

The rise of PMCs Recent discussion about the role of private contractors in Iraq has made it difficult to ignore the rise of PMCs. Contractors have figured in the media as victims (beheaded and mutilated), as interrogators and torturers (notably in Abu Ghraib), and as corrupting rent seekers drawing on public sources.3 However, the extent to which this presence of private companies in Iraq is neither specific to this war nor only a matter concerning the US armed forces is often underestimated and – as a consequence – so is the importance of discussing its implications for the politics of protection. The striking re-emergence of a strong private military sector did not start in Iraq. It goes back to the end of the Cold War at least and arguably even further to the pressure created on the industry through the development of post-fordism (Kaldor 1998). The trend is visible in all available aggregate indicators. Whereas in the first Gulf War of 1991 the ratio of private contractors to soldiers was estimated as 1-to-60, it had grown to 1-to-10 in Bosnia, 1-to-2 in Kosovo and the estimates are even higher for the latest Iraq War.4 The annual revenue of the private military industry has increased from $55.6 billion in 1990 to $100 billion in 2000, and it was expected to double again and reach $202 billion by 2010 (Peterson 2002). Estimates of the number of conflicts involving “mercenaries” confirm the trend. A total of 15 entries for the 40-year period between 1950 and 1989 became 80 for the 10-year period between 1990 and 2000 (Musah and Fayemi 2000: Annexe; Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2002: Annexe A). This change reflects the development of “A Market for Force,” in which a “Private Military Industry” is offering services (Avant 2005). It has grown very rapidly since the end of the Cold War and continues to be one of the fastest growing industries in the world. “Outsourcing,” “private–public partnerships,” and “privatizations” are shaping not only economic activities but are also the “unstoppable trend” within the military (Cardinali 2001). The phenomenon of private contractors accompanying and supporting armed forces is not new. What is new and changing is the “scope, location and criticality of that support” (Zamparelli 1999: 9). In an immodest, but probably accurate, statement the CEO of DynCorp Paul Lombardi tells Fortune, “you could fight without us, but it would be difficult.”5 Aggregated indicators and a collection of statements are corroborated by the general trend to outsource, privatize, and develop public–private partnerships in most countries (Kaldor et al. 1998). The extent and form of outsourcing policies have varied by context. The UK was a forerunner. Thatcherism also touched the Ministry of Defence, which not only privatized, but actually commercialized its defense services as early as 1979 (Edmonds 1998). A logical consequence of the trend has been the introduction of the “Sponsored Reserve Act” that makes it

Privatizing the politics of protection 21 possible to include the employees of private firms (who have become indispensable for some military operations) in the armed forces while allowing them to keep their private sector salaries.6 Similarly, the US has undergone profound changes. There has been a declared preference for “private solutions” in defense restructuring plans.7 The impact on military operations is visible in the rapidly growing presence of contractors at all levels. Most other Western countries have followed similar paths to a greater or lesser extent. In France, the socialists and the right have disagreed on most things, but not on the importance of continued defense privatization. Canada and Australia have outsourced logistics functions in ways similar to the UK. Germany had a restructuring plan for its armed forces, including increased outsourcing taking place between 2000 and 2004. Even Finland has outsourced parts of its military services and is planning to go further.8 This is what leads Andersen Consulting to conclude that “outsourcing is the way of the future. We are living through a privatization of the inner workings of military forces – something of which the expanding overseas contracting is merely a spin-off.”9 In these conditions it might seem superfluous to insist that the significance of PMCs as security actors warrants attention. It is not. Mere presence does not amount to significance. This trivial yet accurate insight guides the way that the emergence of PMCs is deemed to influence the politics of protection. For those interested in economics, PMCs are seen as (potential) instruments for cutting public expenditures further. For those interested in politics, PMCs are dependent on and acting as an arm of government foreign policies. Both ways of looking at the firms make them politically insignificant. They effectively strip them of any independent political capacity to act (Leander 2004). They may complicate things, but they do not change them. As this chapter proceeds to argue, drawing illustrations mainly from the situation in the US,10 this view is simplistic and misleading.

PMCs directly defining security concerns It is misleading first of all because it underestimates the extent to which privatization has made PMCs directly responsible for deciding and defining security concerns and for providing the information (and hence the foundation) for public decisions on security matters. Most PMCs are not (or do not call themselves) military providers but consultants or logistics firms (Spearin 2001). These firms attract the bulk of the contracts in the sector. “Non-essential” functions typically make up more than half of the defense budget.11 Not all of this goes to private firms and it is hard to find exact figures on how much does. Most countries provide no figures and they often do not know or do not want to tell.12 However, it is a lucrative business: “It is the guys in the kitchens who are making the real money.”13 Cooks may not be (as is so often pointed out) the actors who weigh most heavily in the politics of protection. However, many logistics and consultancy PMCs do things other than cook. Their military consultancy/training and logistics

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are not confined to kitchens and latrines. They sometimes define threats and decide how they should be met. They are often contracted for that very purpose. PMCs are increasingly central when it comes to providing intelligence, including during military operations. Just how central, though, is hard to ascertain. Former CIA director James Woolsey estimates that about 95% of all intelligence comes from open sources and much of this is from private firms. AirScan was the “spy in the sky” for the US in Bosnia. Unfortunately, the firm used publicly accessible television, with the result that the information was available to anyone with a home satellite television (Singer 2003: 241). The US air force outsourced part of its high resolution photography to Space Imaging and Digital Globe in Afghanistan. During Operation Desert Storm, civilian contractors provided surveillance data during operational missions (Zamparelli 1999). “The private intelligence sub-sector is at the initial stage of a huge boom. For many nations and political groups, most of their intelligence analysis and operations are gradually being outsourced to private firms” (Singer 2003: 148). This is visible not least in the current trend of mergers and takeovers involving firms specializing in information technology and private military firms. By way of example, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) took over DynCorp and L-3 communications have bought up Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI). This privatization of intelligence has direct consequences for who defines threats. As a consequence of privatization, private firms provide a growing share of the information on the basis of which it is decided whether something is a security concern. First, this leads them to define categories of threats about which information is needed. As has been persuasively argued by others, this kind of classification and the related routine boxing of information is in itself a way of creating threats and security concerns that might not have existed previously (Bigo 2000). For example grouping and collecting intelligence on the illegal activities of immigrants, Muslim networks, or terrorist organizations makes it possible to provide the information necessary to constitute these groups as belonging to a category of security concerns. The practical knowledge most political actors have of the importance of these categorizing practices is well illustrated by the resistance to being lumped into a specific group and integrated into the intelligence system.14 Second, even when the categories are defined in collaboration with the military, foreign office or security officials, the firms filter which information is relevant and which is not. In many cases, the firms are also hired to analyze the intelligence provided, or in other words to tell public officials what they should think about the information the firm provides. That this matters for who speaks about security and who defines it is an obvious and classical insight. If private firms gather and analyze the information which forms the basis for decisions about what is (and what is not) a security threat, they set the agenda for any decision. Even if public actors have the ultimate authority to decide what is a threat and how it should be treated, that formal authority is of limited relevance if it is exercised in relation to an agenda controlled by private firms. The extreme case illustrating this is when, in military operations, a private firm is the sole provider of the information on the basis of which a commander makes

Privatizing the politics of protection 23 decisions. One example of such a situation is the case in which two American employees working for AirScan and flying a surveillance plane directed the Colombian air force to drop a cluster bomb. The bomb was dropped on a village and killed eighteen civilians.15 Another example is when, in March 2001, a CIA surveillance plane, flown by private employees of Aviation Development Corporation, mistakenly identified a civilian plane as carrying drug traffickers. On the basis of this information, a Peruvian military plane shot it down, killing an American missionary and her infant.16 Both examples are well known because things went wrong and highly publicized court cases ensued. The point here, is to underline that even if a public actor (a soldier) has the ultimate authority to decide when to use which kind of force (to push the button to drop the bomb or pull the trigger to shoot down the plane), this may not matter if private actors control the information. The private firm decides what is told (and what is left out). It provides the foundation for the decisions taken. In most situations, the significance of information is less immediate than in these two cases. Mostly, the pressure to decide is not as strong as in the course of a military operation. Moreover, in most discussions information comes from more than one source. For example, when it comes to deciding if a government, a political movement, or a person is a threat, there will be competing sources of information, more time to double check, and an opportunity for the government/ movement/person to present its version of the story. This moderates the impact of any one story and dilutes the importance that much intelligence is being outsourced and privatized. There is considerable scope for judgment and interpretation on behalf of public authorities. This increases the importance of thinking about how the rise of PMCs influences judgment and interpretation and, as will be argued below, it does so considerably.

Indirectly defining security concerns PMCs do have an impact on how information is interpreted and on what conclusions are drawn about threats and security. They shape how others who partake in the politics of protection think of their own interests in the field. The firms directly push for specific interpretations and more subtly train and educate others to shape their understanding of the matter. PMCs shape how information is understood by lobbying decision-makers at different levels, trying to get them to adopt an interpretation of facts, which corresponds to the interests of the firms. This may involve a rereading of who is an ally and who is a threat. For example after intense lobbying, the MPRI managed to convince the US government that the “National Security Enhancement Plan” for the formation of a coastal defense in Equatorial Guinea was a contract the MPRI could take on within the frame of US national interests; although the US has a long-standing policy of not supporting the country’s military regime which has close ties to Cuba and North Korea. The clinching winning argument was that if the MPRI did not get the contract some other firm (a French one in this case) would (Singer 2003: 196). But most of the time the questions are of a more mundane nature. They have a propensity to turn around the question of

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what kind of contract should be granted to what firm on what condition. There are innumerable allegations and quite a few investigations about the link between firms and politics. The most widely known is that linking Halliburton and Cheney.17 But there are many others. For example, the ascendance of Vinnell is usually linked to the political contacts of the firm. Frank Carlucci (Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan) was heading BDM International Inc. when the firm bought Vinnell. The firm has also had key Republican personalities (such as James Baker and George W.H. Bush) on its payroll (Peterson 2002). The importance and impact of lobbying is much discussed and well understood. However, it is mostly evoked for other (admittedly very important) reasons than here. Issues like the important (economic) costs it entails, its negative effect on political accountability and its immorality have been at the center of discussion and critique. The point here is that lobbying also shapes how security and threats are understood. Lobbying is part of the politics of protection. PMCs also shape the interpretations of security through their non-negligible role in training and consulting decision-makers at all levels: within the armed forces and in the state both at home and abroad. The bulk of training offered by PMCs is technical in nature. It involves for example, simulation exercises, pilot training, or more or less extensive introductions to the use of equipment. However, it would be wrong to conclude that this “technical” training has little or no influence on overall understandings of security and security needs. On the contrary, technical training shapes the understanding of equipment needs and to some extent of threats and threat situations. Moreover, a seller of equipment or a provider of security services has to convince the buyer that the specific “product” offered is not only important, but actually more important than other products (i.e. kinds of responses to threats) that exist on the market. This implies arguing convincingly that one’s own product is effective. It also implies arguing that the kind of threat it is responding to is a real existing, significant threat that requires a response. It is therefore not particularly surprising that lobby groups (including for example the main US group BENS – Business Executives for National Security18) spend considerable effort on general questions of what security is and how it can best be achieved. Nor does it come as a revelation that many PMCs offer nontechnical training in the form of specialized courses and consultancies. This training is designed directly and explicitly to shape the security understanding of those who take the courses. Precisely because increased outsourcing and privatization has created a more competitive market for force, this type of training is increasingly central. According to industry observers, “the leading defence company of the future will be primarily a manipulator of opinions, in a diversity of markets, rather than the familiar engineering enterprise of the past. Some companies are already becoming this” (Lovering 2000: 174). MPRI’s website is an impressive illustration of the extent to which private firms are being drawn into the training and consultancy process. It contains a striking list of activities both in the US and elsewhere. MPRI is unique in many ways. It is the biggest US firm in consultancy and training and this makes it one of the most

Privatizing the politics of protection 25 significant ones internationally. It is a firm exceptionally close to the US government. It is a firm which boasts of having more generals at its disposal than the Pentagon. It only takes contracts which have government approval and its contracts are often promoted by US diplomacy as for example in Croatia or Colombia (Peterson 2002). However, MPRI is not a monopoly firm. It illustrates a more general trend. There is a gamut of other firms offering similar services, including to the US government. Vinnell has considerable training contracts in the Middle East, including a recent contract to train the Iraqi armed forces. Cubic got the contract to equip and train the Georgian armed forces. DynCorp has had a number of significant training contracts, particularly in Latin America.19 Moreover, a number of firms offer training and consultancies on their own initiative to the clients of their choice. This becomes visible when governments complain about their activities. For example, the UK condemned the operations of Northbridge in the Ivory Coast. South Africa condemned the role played by unnamed South Africans as technical advisers in the country.20 Lobbying, training, and consultancy does not allow PMCs to dictate how security is understood and intelligence interpreted. It is nonetheless important to draw attention to the weight it gives private actors in shaping how a variety of significant decision-makers in the state, the military, or non-state organizations across the world at different levels understand security (and hence judge and react to information that they get). This prompts practical questions about who should be allowed to give what kind of training to whom. It is somewhat ironic that (at least in the US) the next generation of army leaders will be introduced to the services by private firms, according to programs and books developed by them. More poignantly, the increasing presence of private firms as lobbyists, trainers, and consultants evokes broader questions about what is happening to the political authority to define security concerns.

Shaping security by shifting the weight of security discourses Arguably, the most significant way in which the growth of PMCs has altered the politics of protection is by their influence on the relative weight of different security discourses. Many scholars working on the “PMC debate” make the point that privatization has altered the weight of different voices by moving the security debate out of the public realm, away from Congress in the US case, and into a restricted realm where the executive, the military, the secret services, and PMCs can decide how issues should be defined and handled. This point is usually made to underline the effect of PMCs on “democracy” or on the balance between different public institutions (Avant 2005). Privatization itself is often explained by the attraction of secrecy and discretion in security matters (Bigo 2004: 2). By outsourcing and privatizing, decision-makers can dispense with justifying interventions as well as with explaining body bags. In most contexts, the rules for overseeing private contractors are far less stringent than those for armed intervention. In that sense privatization is often foreign policy-making by proxy.

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For example, in the US contracts below $50 million do not have to be notified, unlike troop deployment. Moreover, if they are placed under the “foreign military sales” program they can circumvent the need for licensing (Peterson 2002). Finally, even contracts that are discussed publicly can often remain obscure. Contractors do not have a legal obligation to disclose the details of contracts. In the US, recent measures have been taken to further decrease the need to disclose information. The burden is now on the government to prove that releasing the figures would not competitively harm the firm.21 This development is a shift in terms of which public institutions can be informed about and make their voices heard when it comes to actual decisions on security matters. Beyond this direct, institutional impact on who can make their voice heard in the politics of protection, the rise of PMCs alters the standing and status of public and private voices. The rise of PMCs themselves reflects this change. Private firms increasingly pose as the security specialists par excellence, with authority equal or superior to that of public security actors. PMCs are called upon as defense specialists establishing evaluation criteria (and writing the evaluations). Not untypically, the Northrop Grunman company, Logicon, providing simulation exercises to US troops in Europe, set up its own quality control plan, as did DynCorp guarding US army installations in Kuwait (Peterson 2002). In any other business branch, allowing firms to evaluate their own performance and fulfillment of contract terms would seem a recipe for overpricing underperformance. In the private military industry, the logic seems to be that there is no more competent agency than the firm itself to set up the evaluation criteria. PMCs are now so accepted as security experts that they are also invited to establish defense policies and the criteria of evaluation for the armed forces more broadly – at least in the US. For example, the LOGCAP22 is outsourced to private firms. The development of doctrines is outsourced to MPRI. Even sensitive military related affairs are placed in private hands. In the US, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (the nuclear weapons laboratory) has been privatized. The reason given is a “string of high-profile management breakdowns – from the Wen Ho Lee case to taxpayer-funded shopping sprees.”23 The non-stated assumption is that the private sector would do a better job. Similarly, in the UK the “Defence Evaluation and Research Agency” (DERA) has been privatized to 75% and split into two separate agencies: QuinetiQ the for-profit firm and Dstl (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) an agency of the UK Ministry of Defence.24 The reason for privatizing is that it makes for better and cheaper research. The effect is that private firms set the frames for thinking in matters of security. It is important to tie in the potential change in status of private firms with much wider social changes. Susan Strange referred to this as the advent of a “business civilization” (1990: 260–271; also Gill 1995). These overall changes set the context within which PMCs have increased their status as security experts. The PMCs themselves have promoted this change, and have been very effective in marketing their own activities as efficient and competent. Tim Spicer successfully concocted an image of his firms (Sandline and its successors) and himself as significant and competent security actors. He did so by hiring a public relations specialist (Sara Pearson of Spa Way), talking to the press, turning up at conferences

Privatizing the politics of protection 27 and seminars, getting a ghostwriter to write his 1999 book, An Unorthodox Soldier, and judiciously using business graduates from the University of Maryland (van Niekerk 2002). This is an extreme case of PMC self-promotion. But it is not unique – although styles of self-promotion vary. Of the more rugged kind is Andrew Williams’ way of commenting on the role of Northbridge Services Group in obtaining the release of some 100 foreign workers held hostage by striking workers on a Nigerian oilrig: “We brought in a representative of the hostage takers and showed him the guys and their equipment waiting to go. He got the message.”25 There are many other kinds. The general point is that PMCs have done their utmost to inform the world (including policy-makers, armed forces, the media, and the wider public) about their own competencies and capacities. To bolster its own image of competence and efficiency, the industry has also used the contrast with public incompetence, mismanagement, and immorality. The discussion about the potential of PMCs for peacekeeping missions is illuminating in many ways. Advocates of the industry contrast PMC operations with public, multilateral peacekeeping. They insist on the slowness and uncertainty of deployment of multilateral forces, their inefficiency in operations, the pecuniary motives of many soldiers and the governments renting them out for profit, their involvement in scandals of various kinds (their immoral behavior), the breaking of contracts and so on.26 By contrast, PMCs are depicted as hyperefficient, low-cost problem-solvers coming in to sort out the mess left by incompetent public armed forces (Brooks 2000a). The following rendering is typical Before MPRI entered the picture . . . Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International linked ACRI (African Crisis Response Initiative) trained battalions to murders, rapes and beatings. . . . MPRI is at the top of the military training field. “Committed to ethical business practices” is written prominently on the firm’s promotional pamphlet.27 The issue here is not the accuracy of these statements, but their implications for the evolving understanding of the competence and value of public and private actors as security experts. With contextual variation, there are indications of a considerable evolution in how private and public security actors are valued. Policy-makers find it increasingly difficult to argue for the superiority of nationalized/public soldiers and armed forces. A telling illustration is Theresa Whelan’s difficulties in finding something positive to say about the use of public armed forces in the African context. After underlining the economic efficiency, greater local sensibility and competence, the rapidity and the strategic effectiveness of private contractors, she was looking for something good to say also about the use of public forces. Her efforts eventually ground to a halt. All she could find was a vague reference to a “little bit of a difference between someone who is currently in uniform and a contractor.”28 Twenty years ago, the position that private military contractors were as (if not more) competent as public soldiers was a minority position, even within the US where private control over the use of force has far deeper roots and more legitimacy than it does in Europe (Deudney 1995). Today it is far from clear that

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it is so, even outside the US. If private voices do weigh more heavily in the security debate at all levels from the narrow military to the general public, this is certainly a major reshuffling of the rules of the game of the politics of protection.

Conclusion: blurring the public–private line PMCs are present in security, but are they significant security actors and do they matter for the politics of protection? This chapter has answered these questions affirmatively. It has argued that private firms have an increasingly central role in the politics of protection. More specifically private firms define security concerns. They are hired to do so. They lobby, consult, and train with that objective in mind. Private firms do not have a monopoly say on the matter, of course. But as the last section showed, their voices sound increasingly loud in the overall cacophony about what security is and how it should be ensured. This would seem to suffice for them to qualify as significant security actors. It would also seem to suffice for a recognition that the politics of protection is being “privatized” in the sense that private (non-state) actors have an increasing say in the process. But for many people even all this is not enough. The main reason is the stubborn reluctance to admit that PMCs are private. They are reduced to the “covert wing” of Western government policies.29 A selective look at the PMCs can well make this reading plausible. Many firms have close links to the state. In some cases they are formally linked to the state through partial ownership as firms have been partially but not entirely privatized (most French PMCs would fit this category30). Moreover, personal links are strong. Policy-makers are often included on boards. Links to the military are omnipresent. In the industry, almost everyone is an ex-soldier. Some firms resemble extensions of public armed forces. Executive Outcomes (EO) (and the firms which have continued existing after it) was a product of the South African Defence Forces, Sandline was closely linked to the UK Special Forces, MPRI hires from the US armed forces etc. Most firms engaged in consultancy, training, or provision make a point of this close relationship for the rather obvious reason that the successful military careers of their staff are an important indication that the firm can provide good quality services. Finally, many firms make it a principle not to take contracts that do not have the approval of their home state. Conversely, states push contracts with specific firms onto their allies. There can be little doubt that PMCs are often closely linked to both military and political establishments. The conclusion often explicitly drawn (and confirmed by many PMC representatives) is that PMCs are acting for their “home state.” However, looking at PMCs merely as arms of government policy requires an effort to deliberately exclude the private, corporate side of the story. PMCs are heterogeneous (Leander 2005). Many firms do not have the kinds of close tie just described. But even for firms that do, an excessive emphasis on the links to politics and to the military risks making too little of the corporate and private aspect of the business. The industry, its advocates, scholars studying it, and legislators trying to regulate it (including the UN rapporteurs on mercenaries31) have

Privatizing the politics of protection 29 insisted on the label “private military company.” Part of the reason is to avoid the tainted label “mercenaries,” which places PMCs in a legal grey zone. But it is also because the firms are operating as companies based on profit motives. Allowing for variation, the firms have professional management structures and Personnel Recovery (PR) departments. They are quoted on stock markets. They use tax havens when it suits their operations. They are linked to other firms. They form strategic partnerships. They merge, consolidate, and are bought up by other firms and financial groups. Managers in the sector think of themselves as competing for market shares in a global market. They look for government patronage in doing this. Even if it is true that firms usually prefer to work with governments, it is also true that short-term strategies for ensuring profit will sometimes override this preference.32 We are witnessing a “market for force” in the making. It is not the case that governments (even the strongest) can set the rules of the game. Nor is it obvious that governments can harness the firms (even those they are closest to) to only engage in activities they approve of. It is therefore a mistake to dismiss the private dimension of private firms as pure masquerade. The price of doing so is considerable. It obscures the many and pressing practical problems created by the blurred public–private divide. This includes questions of how to hold firms and their employees accountable for their acts, how to hold states accountable for their acts, how to ensure that command hierarchies and responsibilities are clear in the armed forces, or how to create the administrative structures necessary to manage the blurring lines. More than this, the refusal to recognize blurring boundaries is an obstacle to thinking about the consequences of privatization and how far it should extend. At present, the home-states of the most competitive PMCs (possibly excluding South Africa) have much to gain from the continued expansion of the sector. Other states have correspondingly much to lose. For the latter, unless international regulation is developed, “the return of proxy wars could become a nightmarish reality where well-equipped foreign private forces are allowed to continue propping up opposing parties in today’s conflicts” (Francis 1999; Musah 2002: 928). To put things bluntly, the price of not recognizing the private dimension of PMCs and resisting discussing it comes at the price of closing down any attempt to seriously investigate a key dimension of the politics of protection today. It blocks investigation of the extent to which (as José Saramago puts it33) “the market is the super-instrument of the only powers worthy of the name: economic and financial power.”

Notes 1 In this chapter, the use of PMCs is the standard usage including provider, consulting, and logistics firms working on military matters. The choice to include all three categories of firms is driven by the blurred distinctions between these activities. For a discussion of different definitions see Leander (2005). 2 This approach to the politics of protection draws on the fundamental insight that the definition of a threat (the securitization of an issue) is of overriding importance (e.g. Huysmans 1998). One way of explaining why and how some issues are securitized and others not, is to look at how they are inscribed and made sense of in specific political

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Anna Leander discourses and how basic understandings (or discourses) produce specific security concerns. Another is to look at the political struggles over why specific discourses and understandings become dominant (McSweeney 1999; Bigo 2002). The discussion below relates more specifically to the latter question. “The Baghdad Boom,” Economist, March 25, 2004; Seymour Hersch, “The Gray Zone,” The New Yorker, May 15, 2004; “Soldiers of Misfortune,” Sunday Herald, March 14, 2004. The report presented by Major General Antonio Taguba explicitly points to the involvement of employees of CACI International Inc. and Titan Corp. in the maltreatment of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison. Peter Singer quoted in Miami Herald, March 7, 2003. “The Pentagon’s Private Army”, Fortune, March 3, 2003. Reserve Forces Act, 1996 (www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1996/1996014.htm, accessed September 12, 2005). Other countries have taken similar measures. For example, France has an arrangement which makes it possible to draw on reserves who do not have a career in the military. But unlike in the UK they cannot be “sponsored” (La Commission de la Défense Nationale et des Forces Armées 2002: 40–41). It is possible to cite for example Federal Acquisition Circular 90–29 or Bureau of the Budget Bulletin 55–4 (Michaels 1999: 14). “Fitter leaner forces for multipolar world,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, June 11, 1997; “More privatization due,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, April 26, 2000; “France’s Thatcherite Socialists,” Foreign Report, July 29, 1999; “Germany looks to the Future,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, August 8, 2001; “Finnish defence ministry considers leasing, outsourcing, and privatizing,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, January 23, 2002. Quoted in Economist, June 11, 2003. The reason for drawing mainly on the US is because of the weight of the US in international politics and because of its related impact on other countries. This choice entails limitations: the same type of PMC agency could be found elsewhere, but its significance would differ as a consequence of the (enormous) differences in the field defining the politics of protection. In the US for example, it makes up around 70% of spending by the Department of Defense. “Moving with the times,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, November 15, 2000. “Outsourcing the dirty work,” The American Prospect, May 1, 2003. “Military Industrial Complexities,” Economist, June 11, 2003. E.g. Ó Thutail begins his account of the significance of categorizing and constructing territory and geo-political space with a story of how Irish peasants resisted integration into British cartography by assassinating the mapmaker sent out to place them on the map (Ó Tuathail 1996: 1). “US pair’s role in bombing shown,” Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2003. “Outsourcing: PMCs,” Special Report, May 2002 box 4. “Details given on contract Halliburton was awared,” New York Times, April 11, 2003. BENS’ web page www.bens.com contains both overviews of its activities and the reports and studies. In this context, the more relevant include the suggested Agenda for Policy-Makers and the “Tail to Tooth Commission” for reforming (read outsourcing and privatizing) defense strategies and policies. “Vinnell’s Army on the Defensive,” IPOA List, January 21, 2004; “US privatises its military aid to Georgia,” The Guardian, January 6, 2004; “We’re already at war in Colombia,” Houston Chronicle, February 19, 2003. “The UK has warned UK company against recruiting mercenaries to work in Ivory Coast,” BBC, April 3, 2003; “Where mercenaries roam,” New Democrat, November 15, 2002. “US curbs release of contract price data,” Defense Weekly, June 17, 2002. Logistics Civil Augmentation Program – that is the planning of the logistical side of operations. “Job Opening: Los Alamos Manager,” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/ 05/02/tech/main552068.shtml (accessed January 18, 2004).

Privatizing the politics of protection 31 24 “DERA privatization plan comes under scrutiny,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, March 14, 2001; http://www.dera.gov.uk/newsite/home_2.htm (accessed September 12, 2005). 25 Quoted in “Privatised military the way for the future,” Reuter, May 9, 2003. 26 See for example (Shearer 1998a; Brooks 2000b; Isenberg 2000; Brayton 2002). 27 “Corporate Soldiers: The US government privatizes the use of force,” Multinational Monitor, March 1999. 28 Theresa Whelan (US deputy assistant secretary of defense for African Affairs at the time of the cited speech) “Remarks to IPOA Dinner,” PMC List, February 12, 2004; for a detailed analysis of the speech see Leander (2005). 29 For a discussion and rejection of these positions, see O’Brien (2000). 30 “French blueprint reveals new-look industry links,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, April 22, 1998. 31 Both the former and the present UN special rapporteur on mercenaries have insisted on the term private military company (UN 2003). 32 For an elaboration of this point applied to MNCs in general, see Evans (1997). 33 “Que reste-t-il de la démocratie?” Le monde diplomatique, août 2004.

References Avant, Deborah (2005) The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bigo, Didier (2000) “When Two Become One: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe,” in Morten Kelstrup and Michael Williams (eds) International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration. Power, Security and Community. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 171–204. —— (2002) “Le débat universitaire sur la notion de survie en relations internationales et la discussion sur son extension au domaine sociétal, aux identités,” Paper presented at the conference: Conflits, Paix, et Identité – Regard croisés franco-scandinaves. Institut de recherches sur la paix (PRIO)/Ambassade de France (November 18–29, 2002). —— (2004) “Les entreprises para-privées de coercition: de nouveaux mercenaires?,” Cultures et Conflits, (été): 1–3. Brayton, Steven (2002) “Outsourcing War: Mercenaries and the Privatization of Peacekeeping,” Journal of International Affairs, 55 (2), 303–329. Brooks, Doug (2000a) “Messiahs or Mercenaries? The Future of International Private Military Services,” International Peacekeeping, 7 (4), 129–144. —— (2000b) “Write a Cheque, End a War: Using Private Military Companies to End African Conflicts,” Conflict Trends, (1), 33–35. Cardinali, Richard (2001) “Does the Future of Military Logistics Lie in Outsourcing and Privatization? Accountants – The New Gatekeepers of War-Time Operations,” Work Study, 50 (3), 105–110. Deudney, Daniel H. (1995) “The Philadelphia System: Sovereignty, Arms Control and Balance of Power in the American States-Union, circa 1787–1861,” International Organization, 49, 191–228. Edmonds, Martin (1998) “Defense Privatisation: From State Enterprise to Commercialism,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, XIII (1), 114–129. Evans, Peter (1997) “The Eclipse of the State? Reflections on Stateness in an Era of Globalization,” World Politics, 50 (October), 62–87. Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2002) Private Military Companies: Options for Regulation, London: http://www.fco.gov.uk/Files/kfile/mercenaries,0.pdf (accessed September 11, 2005). Francis, David J. (1999) “Mercenary Intervention in Sierra Leone: Providing National Security or International Exploitation?,” Third World Quarterly, 20 (2), 319–338.

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Gill, Stephen (1995) “Market Civilization and Disciplinary Neoliberalism,” Millennium, 24 (3), 399–423. Huysmans, Jef (1998) “Security! What do You Mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier,” European Journal of International Relations, 4 (2), 226–255. Isenberg, David (2000) “Combat for Sale: The New, Post-Cold War Mercenaries,” USA Today, (March), 12–16. Kaldor, Mary (1998) “Introduction,” in Mary Kaldor and Basker Vashee (eds) Restructuring the Global Military Sector: New Wars. London: Pinter, pp. 3–33. Kaldor, Mary, Ulrich Albrecht, and Geneviève Schméder (eds) (1998) Restructuring the Global Military Sector: The End of Military Fordism. London: Pinter. La Commission de la Défense Nationale et des Forces Armées (2002) Rapport d’information sur l’externalisation de certaines tâches relevant du ministère de la défense presenté par Michel Dasseux. Paris: Assemblée Nationale (n. 3595). Leander, Anna (2004) “Private Agency and the Definition of Public Security Concerns: The Role of Private Military Companies,” Politologiske Skrifter, (8). www.sam.sdu.dk/politics/ publikationer/skriftserier.htm —— (2005) Eroding State Authority? Private Military Companies and the Legitimate Use of Force. Rome: Centro Militare di Studi Strategici. Lovering, John (2000) “Loose Cannons: Creating the Arms Industry of the Twenty-First Century,” in Mary Kaldor (ed.) Global Insecurity. London: Pinter, 147–176. McSweeney, Bill (1999) Security, Identity and Interests: A Sociology of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michaels, Joseph B. (1999) “Focused Logistics in 2010 – A Civil Sector Force Multiplier for the Operational Commander,” Air Force Journal of Logistics, XXIII (2), 14–17. Musah, Adel-Fatau (2002) “Privatization of Security: Arms Proliferation and the Process of State Collapse in Africa,” Development and Change, 33 (5), 911–933. Musah, Abdel-Fatau and Kayode J. Fayemi (eds) (2000) Mercenaries: An African Security Dilemma. London: Pluto Press. O’Brien, Kevin (2000) “PMCs, Myths and Mercenaries: The Debate on Private Military Companies,” Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, 145 (1), 59–64. Ó Tuathail, Gearóid (1996) Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. London: Routledge. Peterson, Laura (2002) “Privatizing Combat, the New World Order,” The Centre for Public Integrity, http//www.publicintegrity.org/bow/report.aspz?aid⫽148, accessed September 12, 2005. Shearer, David (1998a) “Outsourcing War,” Foreign Policy, (112), 68–81. —— (1998b) “Private Military Force and Challenges for the Future,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, XIII (1), 80–94. —— (2001) “Privatising Protection,” The World Today, 57 (8/9), 29–31. Singer, P.W. (2003) Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Spearin, Christopher (2001) “Private Security Companies and Humanitarians: A Corporate Solution to Securing Humanitarian Spaces?,” International Peacekeeping, 8 (1), 20–43. Strange, Susan (1990) “The Name of the Game,” in Nicos Rizopoulos (ed.) Sea Changes. American Foreign Policy in a World Transformed. New York and London: Council on Foreign Relations Press, pp. 238–274. UN, General Assembly (2003) A/58/115: Report on the Question of the Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impending the Exercise of the

Privatizing the politics of protection 33 Right of Peoples to Self-Determination, New York: UN, available at http://www. unhchr.ch/Huridocda/Huridoca.nsf/0/babd55569465515cc1256d9000394f4e/$FILE/ N0341712.pdf (accessed September 12, 2005). van Niekerk, Phillip (2002) “Making a Killing: The Business of War,” The Centre for Public Integrity, http://www.publicintegrity.org/bow/report.aspx?aid⫽147, accessed September 12, 2005. Zamparelli, Colonel Steven J. (1999) “Competitive Sourcing and Privatization: Contractors on the Battlefield,” Air Force Journal of Logistics, XXIII (3), 1–17.

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Privatisation, globalisation, and the politics of protection in South Africa1 Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams

From the guarding of private and commercial properties, the surveillance and control of shopping malls and airports, to the more extreme exclusionary patrolling of enclave or ‘gated’ communities, private security is a pervasive (if varied) aspect of life in modern societies. Functions traditionally seen as the exclusive purview, and even the defining rationale, of the sovereign state, such as the management and operation of prisons, have increasingly been turned over to ‘public–private’ partnerships. This ‘commodification’ of security, combined with the development of large international security companies in the North, has provided the conditions for the globalisation of private security, and recent years have seen a massive expansion of the global security service market, so that in many countries security is now provided not primarily by the state, but by commercial companies accountable to overseas shareholders. The globalisation of private security companies (PSCs), which began significantly to gather pace in the last decade of the twentieth century, represents a new and important evolution in the provision and politics of security. It is an important example of how structures of security interpenetrate at the global level, having significant impact on how security is provided, for whom, and by whom. This chapter uses the Republic of South Africa to explore some of the implications of the parallel processes of privatisation and globalisation of security. South Africa has one of the world’s most highly privatised, globalised, and politicised security sectors, and has been actively targeted by international PSCs following the end of apartheid. At first glance, the globalisation and privatisation of security appears as a classic example of the erosion of sovereignty and state power, as the state’s monopoly of legitimate violence has long been regarded as a defining characteristic of sovereignty itself. While we do not dispute that the growth of transnational private security may have significant impacts on sovereignty, the case of South Africa demonstrates that to regard the parallel process of privatisation and globalisation simply as a ‘retreat of the state’ is far too simple. Rather, the result is the emergence of new structures of security in which the authority of the state and forces in civil society is rearticulated through new technologies of governance, coercion, and control. A focus on the globalisation of private security demonstrates that these technologies are not simply utilitarian devices for the efficient deterrence of and protection against crime, but instead part of a complex

Politics of protection in South Africa

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structure of institutional and symbolic practices through which understandings of political community, authority, and legitimacy are produced, reproduced, and communicated.

The globalisation of private security in South Africa Neither private security, nor its globalisation are entirely new phenomena. Private security provision can be traced back to at least the early modern constabularies in the cities of Europe, and firms such as Pinkerton’s in the United States were active and controversial security providers throughout the twentieth century. Similarly, the long history of the exercise of force by private actors at a global level is exemplified by the extensive coercive capabilities of the great Chartered Companies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.2 The massive growth of the private security sector in the last decade nevertheless marks a significant change in the provision and organisation of security services. By the year 2000, the global security services market was estimated to be worth US$83 billion, with a predicted continued growth rate of 6–8% per year (Credit Suisse/First Boston 2001: 4). One striking aspect of this development has been the emergence of large, transnational PSCs. Since the late 1990s, the sector has undergone a process of rapid consolidation, leading to the emergence of two major global players: Securitas and Group 4 Securicor. Between them, these two companies alone operate in over 100 countries and employ in excess of 600,000 people. The 2004 merger between Group4Falck and Securicor, for example, created the second largest global security company, with over 300,000 employees. Although the largest security markets are in North America and Europe, with 43% and 37% of the global market respectively, growth in these areas has slowed in recent years. As a result, developing countries are rapidly emerging as lucrative opportunities for expansion, promising much higher rates of growth and return than the more established markets. This expansion and globalisation of private security companies has been subjected to surprisingly few scholarly analyses in International Relations and Security Studies, in particular when compared to the attention lavished on the ‘new mercenaries’, or Private Military Companies (PMCs). The size, scope, and rate of expansion of PSCs, however, dwarf that of PMCs, and while their concentration on the more mundane aspects of security (guarding, electronic alarm systems, patrolling, risk analysis, and management) may lack the eye-catching cachet of the new corporate ‘dogs of war’, they have, this chapter argues, an impact on the day-to-day provision and politics of protection that far outstrips that of erstwhile combat-active PMCs such as Sandline and Executive Outcomes.3 Nowhere is the parallel process of privatisation and globalisation of security more visible, and arguably more highly politicised, than in the Republic of South Africa. As South Africa celebrates the tenth anniversary of its democratic transition, security remains an intensely contested and divisive issue. Crime is high on the

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political agenda in the New South Africa, and as fear and insecurity have increased, so has the market for security services. As a proportion of GDP, the South African private security industry is now the largest in the world and the country alone constitutes 2% of the global security market. As of 2001, the industry was valued at R11 billion, an increase from R9 billion in 1997, and it is testimony to the pervasive fear of crime that South Africa is also one of the fastest growing security markets in the world. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s the industry experienced annual growth rates of 30%, and while future growth rates are forecasted to slow to approximately 12–17% a year, security looks set to remain a booming sector (Credit Suisse/First Boston 2001: 7). Given the size and rapid growth of the private security sector, South Africa has been a key target for transnational PSCs, seeking new, profitable market opportunities. Thus, the rapid expansion of the market has been paralleled by its increasing globalisation. While in the early days of the post-apartheid security boom the market was characterised by a large number of small ‘fly by night’ companies, numerous mergers have taken place in recent years between the most successful local companies and foreign PSCs. Today many of the largest international companies, in particular Group 4 Securicor, have a significant presence in the country, and foreign investment in the sector is estimated at approximately R2 billion (Schönteich 2002). Further consolidation is predicted, so that by 2006 six companies are expected to control 50% of the market (Credit Suisse/First Boston 2001), whereas in 2001, the top twelve companies had a combined market share of only 36%.4 Fear of crime and its movement from the townships to the suburbs, combined with the inability of the South African Police Services (SAPS) to perform an adequate policing function, provide the immediate conditions for the post-apartheid security boom. During apartheid, the privileged white minority was relatively successfully insulated from crime by a form of policing designed to contain violence and criminality within black areas.5 Apartheid policing was concerned with control of the black population, and in the words of Mark Shaw, ‘the police aimed to prevent crime in white areas not by reducing it in black areas but by preventing the uncontrolled movement of black people (Shaw 2002: 1; see also Brogden and Shearing 1993).6 In this sense, while apartheid functioned as an effective form of crime prevention for the white minority, it simultaneously ensured that the conditions for violence and crime were rife, but contained in the black townships. As the structures and boundaries of the apartheid state began to crumble, so did the minority’s ability to insulate itself from crime, and in recent years crime has moved out of the townships and into the suburbs where it is both more economically rewarding, and more likely to be recorded. Crime statistics from South Africa are hence difficult to evaluate, as during the apartheid years crime in the townships went largely unreported due to a lack of trust in the police force, and a lack of interest on behalf of the police. Crime figures from the bantustans were also not included in national statistics until 1993. Nevertheless, it seems clear that crime has increased significantly since the early 1990s, and in post-transition South Africa crime/criminality has become a highly


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politicised issue. According to the Crime Information Analysis Centre of the SAPS, the twenty most common serious crimes increased by nearly 8%, from 1,998,000 reported crimes in 1994 to 2,154,000 in 1998 (quoted in Schönteich 2000: 21). Since 1998, however, both police statistics and victimisation surveys indicate that crime rates have fallen or stabilised, but the fear of crime has continued to rise. For example, the number of people feeling very unsafe at night more than doubled in the five years from 1998 to 2003, and feelings of safety are also low when compared to other countries (Burton et al. 2004; Mistry 2004).7 Importantly, the level of fear among various groups of the population does not correspond to their likelihood of becoming victims of crime. While black and coloured people are the most common victims of crime and violence, they are the least likely to regard themselves as unsafe. Indians and white people, on the other hand, consider themselves more unsafe but are statistically less likely to experience crime (Shaw 2002: 92; Burton et al. 2004). Fear and insecurity is thus the main explanation for South Africa’s booming security sector. Currently, there are 4,226 registered security businesses in South Africa, employing a total of 234,699 active registered security officers (SIRA 2003, private communication). Not only is this 40,000 more than employed by the national police force, but it is also a substantial increase from the number of 100,000 in 1997 (Baker 2002). As a result, private security is highly visible in the country – much more so than the police. Private companies guard shopping malls, corporate buildings, private residences, and wealthy neighbourhoods, even the national headquarters of the SAPS in Pretoria. So-called ‘armed response’ services, where panic buttons in private homes and corporate offices send electronic signals via a central control room to armed security officers patrolling in cars, represent a particular growth area and such armed patrol vehicles are now a regular feature in wealthy neighbourhoods. In addition to guarding and armed response, PSCs offer a range of other services, such as assets-in-transit, electronic alarms, risk analysis, private investigation, and more recently, private prisons through so-called Public–Private Partnerships.8 In short, in the New South Africa security has increasingly become a question of private individual capacity, rather than a public good, significantly altering the relationship between the state, society, and private security providers. Importantly, while the practices and institutions of racial segregation are formally abandoned and dismantled, the new structures of protection to a significant extent still mirror and reinforce some of apartheid’s economic, social, and racial inequalities.

Private security and public authority The post-apartheid security boom represents a significant shift in the relationship between the state and private security providers. During the apartheid era, the state adopted strategic relations to other forces of social control, enlisting the powers of private actors in the pursuit of its political objectives (Brogden and Shearing 1993). The initial expansion of the private security sector dates back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the police were primarily preoccupied with

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containing black opposition and political violence. As a result, white neighbourhoods sought protection from commercial companies, and the growth of the private sector was at this point regarded as a necessary and welcome supplement to the increasingly over-stretched apartheid state. In the words of one local security provider: Instability and war within and on the borders of the frontline states put severe pressure on the state’s resources to provide security and maintain acceptable levels of order. For these reasons, the state believed that there was a need for a close relationship with private security. (quoted in Shaw 2002: 111) Rather than treating private providers as undermining the authority and functions of the state, the apartheid governments actively encouraged the commercial provision of security. The National Key Points Act of 1980 is a clear example of this public–private partnership. The Act required strategic installations and factories to seek commercial protection (see Philip 1989; Irish 1999), creating a lucrative market and substantial growth opportunities for the sector. While it cannot be argued that private security providers acted as direct agents of the state during the apartheid era, their interests, practices, and effects certainly overlapped to a significant degree. This was clearly expressed, for example, at a conference in 1987 entitled ‘Security – A National Strategy: The Integration of Security in the Public and Private Sector’, where the then Minister of Defence, General Magnus Malan argued in the opening address for a shared will to ‘resist destructive forces’ through the ‘joining of forces and efforts and the optimum use of human and financial resources’. The point was also forcefully put by a Brigadier at the conference, who maintained that public–private partnerships required ‘an integrated action in which both the public and the private sector play an indispensable role towards achieving the common goal, namely survival of the total population of our country’ (in Schalkwyk 1987: 30). In other words, the state and the private companies had a shared objective; the protection of a particular racial political and social order. The ANC government’s relationship with private security providers has been considerably less cosy, in no small part precisely because of the apartheid history outlined above. Many of the first PSCs in South Africa were started by white expatriates from Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Kenya, who emigrated south following independence (interviews). More recent companies are often owned and staffed by former officers of the apartheid state’s security apparatuses, including the South African Defence Forces (SADF) and the intelligence services. As observed by Ngoveni and Minnaar, PSCs have over the years ‘provided a natural home for disgruntled ex-police officers and elite operatives from former covert operations units in both the SAP and SADF’ (2003: 20). The affirmative action policies of the new government have also limited the possibilities for promotion for white participants in the security sector, encouraging many to seek new career opportunities in private security and military companies. Importantly, whereas the


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public security forces have undergone a thorough restructuring as part of the transition to black majority rule, the private security sector has escaped a similar process of reform, although many are now engaged in ‘black empowerment’ schemes of varying forms.9 Despite this, the private sector remains to a significant degree run by individuals who served in the apartheid state, including many former police officers, intelligence officers, and military personnel, and there were initial fears among the parts of the ANC government that PSCs might have an interest in destabilising the new political order. This was intensified by rumours that individuals and companies had been involved in political violence, paramilitary training, and weapons smuggling (interviews; see also Shaw 2002: 114). While such fear appears to have subsided, and there appears to be no reason to believe that these individuals or organisations have any interest in destabilising the government (indeed the opposite seems to be the case), the legacy of apartheid and the origins of the private security sector remain a source of unease for parts of the ANC government (interviews). The recent growth of foreign involvement in the provision of security has also been the source of considerable unease and debate in South Africa. The private sector not only dwarfs the public policing sector in terms of manpower, but also in firepower. The fact that a large proportion of these weapons, as well as the security guards that wield them, are in the employ of nominally foreigncontrolled companies has led to claims that private security represents a threat to national sovereignty and security. This fear among elements of the state bureaucracy and the governing party was most clearly articulated in the proposed Private Security Industry Regulation Bill. As originally drafted by the Parliament’s Safety and Security Committee in October 2001, the Bill included a proposal to prevent foreign ownership of private security companies. After a brief, but intense lobbying period by foreign-owned security companies, as well as the UK and US embassies, the proposal was hastily withdrawn. While there were a number of different dynamics driving the Bill, one of the key issues was clearly the fear that the sector might threaten, or even turn against, the state (interview M. George, chair of the Parliamentary Safety and Security Committee). It is probably fair to say that this type of fear and suspicion has died down, or at least is less openly expressed today, but the relationship between the ANC government and transnational PSCs remains somewhat strained (interviews).10 At the same time, it is important to recognise the economic interests involved in debates over foreign involvement in the sector. For some local PSCs, foreign companies were unwelcome competitors for clients and markets, and they saw the ban as a way of protecting their future profits, and perhaps even as a means of picking up forced foreign-owned divestments at bargain prices. Again, elements of the ANC party had traditionally been hostile towards international capitalism, and some regard the proposed ban as the result of an alliance between sections of the local bourgeoisie and certain ANC stalwarts (interviews). As such, it was probably no coincidence that the controversial Bill to ban foreign investment was launched when both the Minister of Finance and the President were out of the country. It is also a statement of the influence of the Finance Minister Trevor

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Manuel and the perceived importance of foreign investment to South Africa’s economic future that the proposal was abandoned shortly after his return. Although the proposal to ban foreign involvement in the private security sector was dropped, the bill subsequently passed in Parliament stipulates that all PSCs operating in the country must have a South African director, even if the companies remain predominantly foreign owned and listed on European and American stock exchanges. This insistence on national control over private security companies highlights the extent to which many in the ANC government regard the provision of security as an intrinsically political issue, intimately connected to issues of state sovereignty and legitimacy. In a neo-liberal trade regime, however, such political arguments are rendered largely ineffective as the provision of security is treated first and foremost as a service like any other. Accordingly, the free trade agreement between Britain and South Africa figured prominently in the campaign against the draft bill to ban foreign involvement. The fact that the bill was abandoned, yet retained the requirement for directors to be South African citizens, indicates the considerable unease surrounding the commodification of security in South Africa. In the same way as the post-apartheid security boom has changed the relationship between the government and private security providers, it has also changed relations between the public police and PSCs. The SAPS is desperately underresourced, and unable to meet the public’s demand for effective policing. According to a report by the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), about 25% of SAPS employees are functionally illiterate and have difficulties filling in forms or taking a written statement from a crime victim (Credit Suisse/First Boston 2001: 9). Many PSCs, on the other hand, have access to the latest in technology and equipment, and are able to respond to clients quickly; indeed technological sophistication is one of the points stressed by global PSCs in their marketing. The pervasiveness of the private security sector hence represents a considerable challenge to the roles, prestige, and resources of the SAPS, calling into question the idea that private security is simply a ‘junior partner’ acting in support of the public police ( Johnson 1992; Jones and Newburn 1998). While the need for some form of partnership or cooperation with the private sector is recognised, albeit at times reluctantly, by both the ANC government and the SAPS, debates over the role of private security are embedded in an institutional field of competition. Importantly, debates about the relationship and the division of labour between private security and the public police become particularly intense in a context where so much of security and crime control is already dominated by private actors, and where the incidence (and fear) of crime is very high. One paradoxical result of this is that public authorities may be less willing to cede areas of security to private actors than their counterparts in countries with stronger police forces, even when the logic of privatisation and budgetary pressures would seem to push towards it. In South Africa, for example, the privatisation of the transport of prisoners awaiting trial and courtroom security has been rejected, whereas in the United Kingdom it has been in operation for years. The very pervasiveness of private security and the relative weakness of policing set up a dynamic between these actors that is very different from countries with a more well-functioning and well-resourced police force.


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One of the key resources of public security institutions in these struggles lies in their ability to draw upon the links between policing, punishment, and the legitimacy of the state and the political order as a whole, in order to combat the intrusion of private actors into their fields of competence. In South Africa, these tensions are clearly illustrated in the issue of ‘partnership policing’ and in the desire of the PSCs to gain a greater ‘policing’ role through the granting of powers of arrest, increased levels of firearms, and a variety of other enhanced rights. There are clearly difficult and important legal issues surrounding such extensions, particularly those surrounding lines of authority and liability, and the delineation of public versus private interests. But there is also a clear element of institutional rivalry, and the debate over power of arrest, firearms, etc. is a very concrete instance of the institutional ‘politics of protection’. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this dynamic is the SAPS’ attempt to cast these questions not as instrumental extensions of security techniques or capabilities as PSCs tend to do, but as fundamental legal and political issues. By drawing upon the linkages between policing and legitimate public order, the SAPS seeks to shift the issue from one of functional or instrumental calculation to one of the legitimacy of the political order as a whole. As a recent analysis of the controversies surrounding partnership policing co-written by a Director of the SAPS has concluded: there can be no talk of security outside of the formal structures of the state . . . the bottom line then being that in no way can the police afford or be seen to abdicate from their policing responsibilities and line functions. (Ngoveni and Minnaar 2003: 21) In this context, the extent to which private security providers can be trusted to act in the public good is frequently mentioned. As expressed by the Chairman of the Committee for Safety and Security, the private sector is parasitic upon the continuation of crime and can only make a profit if crime – or at the very least – the fear of crime continues (interview). Similarly, sources in the SAPS are clear that the business of the police is to prevent crime, whereas the PSCs are only concerned to protect their particular clients from crime. The Provincial Police Commissioner in Cape Town also recently closed down several neighbourhood watch schemes, many of them using police vehicles and police reservists, arguing that they were ‘elitist’ and forbidding police reservists from working on them (Smetherham and Hartley 2004). At the same time, it is important not to overstate the competition or division between private security and the public police in South Africa. There is a great deal of cooperation between the public and private security sectors, and there are examples of formal ‘hybrid’ policing in operation, most notably perhaps in the form of City Improvement Districts where private security companies patrol jointly with the police.11 While this is not a synthesis of the two – the public police are there specifically because they are agents of public authority, and carry with them the rights of action this entails, there can be little doubt that the lines between public and private are significantly blurred under such arrangements.

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Private security and the ‘rainbow nation’ The growth of private security has been regarded by many commentators as a threat to state power and sovereignty. As the tensions between public and private security sectors in South Africa illustrate, there is certainly some truth in this view. But the shifting relationships between public and private, global and local, in the domain of security require more sophisticated appraisal if their complexity is to be grasped more fully. Commenting on the privatisation of security in the North, Garland (2001) has argued that this process does not necessarily involve the replacement of the state by private actors. Rather, it involves what he usefully terms a ‘third sector’ of security provision, existing alongside the policing and punitive institutions of the state. In general terms, this marks a shift towards a more governmental approach to security and a strategy of ‘responsibilization’. As Garland puts it: Instead of addressing crime in a direct fashion by means of the police, the courts and the prisons, this approach promotes a new kind of indirect action, in which state agencies activate action by non-state organizations and actors. The intended result is an enhanced network of more or less directed, more or less informal crime control, complementing and extending the formal controls of the criminal justice state. Instead of imagining they can monopolize crime control, or exercising their sovereign powers in complete disregard of the powers of other actors, state agencies now adopt a strategic relation to other forces of social control. They seek to build broader alliances, enlisting the ‘governmental’ powers of private actors, and shaping them to the ends of crime control. (2001: 124) To a significant extent, private security provision in South Africa can be seen to function as an adjunct to the state or, more precisely, as one dimension within a new complex of control between public and private authorities. The plethora of private security services has resulted in a process of ‘criminal apartheid’ where private and public authorities exercise an intensification of surveillance, management, and exclusion against ‘criminal’ groups defined via neighbourhoods, gated communities, or even statistical categories. PSCs are regulated through the governmental Security Industry Regulatory Authority (SIRA), which issues operating licenses, determines training standards, and sets firearms conditions. In this sense, PSCs can be regarded as part of a new, more governmental approach to security, law and order, especially in the sense that it makes security an obligation of the individual householder, rather than a public good provided by the state. Protection becomes, first and foremost, a question of responsible behaviour on behalf of individuals, neighbourhoods, and businesses. On the other hand, the South African public security apparatus is so weak that the extent to which PSCs function as a ‘third sector’ in the same way as in countries with a more effective police and criminal justice system is highly questionable.


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In countries where the increased prevalence of private security functions in cohesion with a state that can effectively integrate it into structures of policing and punishment, private provision may well have legitimising effect upon the state by reinforcing the feeling of order and security. In South Africa, however, the increase in private security has gone hand in hand with a declining capacity of the post-apartheid state to prosecute and convict perpetrators of crime. Across all crime categories clearance rates have fallen since 1994, and because of its emphasis on crime prevention and more visible policing, SAPS appear to have neglected its detective functions. On average, of every ten crimes reported to the police, only two are investigated sufficiently for the prosecution to take on a case (Credit Suisse/First Boston 2001: 9). The implication is, that in South Africa today, a notable section of the population – the super rich and increasingly the middle class, both predominantly white – rely on the private sector rather than the state for their protection and security needs, and the extent to which the PSCs function as a ‘third sector’ is limited by the lack of effectiveness of the police. South African suburbs, not to mention the millionaire locations like Cape Town’s Camps Bay, are patrolled and guarded by a plethora of private companies whereas the police are much less visible. The growing number of ‘gated communities’, entire suburbs fenced off from their surroundings, demonstrates the lack of faith in and reliance on the ability of the state to provide adequate security. These communities are, to a significant extent, severed from the state’s protective functions, as well as from the community at large. As a brochure for one of these gated villages declares: ‘The concept of whole town fortification has been with us since medieval times and it seems appropriate to take a leaf out of our past and install it into a safe future’ (quoted in Shaw 2002: 116). In sum, one is not seeing in South Africa either the emergence of a culture of ‘total security’ and surveillance, or a ‘new medievalism’ of gated communities. Rather there are elements of both these trajectories, intertwined with a great deal of differentiation, inequalities, and competition. What this development means for South Africa’s future and the ANC government’s vision of a ‘rainbow nation’ is uncertain. The provision of private security has undoubtedly followed the contours of wealth and power, and in this way, the provision of private security has allowed for the survival of many of apartheid’s structures of inequality, making these companies ‘the guardians of societal divisions’ (Shaw 2002: 115). But the impact of private security may not be limited to such conservative social effects, and the issues of physical and material security extend to the political and symbolic realm. Private security has contributed to stabilisation of the new political order by supplying policing capacities that the state itself would have been unable to provide. It has thus paradoxically helped to stabilise South Africa’s transition to majority rule at the same time as entrenching inequalities. This basic paradox defines the security situation in the country. In South Africa the synergistic relationship between public and private security thus represents a serious political tension. As Ian Loader (1997a) has insightfully argued, the provision of security is a core dimension of the symbolic structure and legitimation of a given social order. Drawing upon Michael Walzer’s notion

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that modern liberal-democratic societies are characterised by ‘complex equality’, Loader points out that a provision of security that is at least relatively equal (or at least not drastically unequal) is a key element of the shared ‘social meanings’, a part of the ‘citizen identity’ that underpins societal cohesion and political legitimacy. In his words, ‘security provision (especially in its patrolling and law enforcement modes) constitutes an integral part of the “rights and goods enjoyed in common” that help generate people’s sense of a “citizen identity” ’ (Loader 1997a: 382; see also Loader 1997b). In South Africa the shared meanings surrounding security are deeply politicised, for they resonate with the injustices of the past, the inequities of the present, and contested visions of an uncertain future. In this context, the privatisation and globalisation of security (and controversies surrounding it) are part of a broader symbolic structure and struggle over the nature of citizenship and the direction and development of the political community. Does privatisation mark a step toward enclavism and a breakdown of the fabric of society? Does it mark an unwillingness or incapacity of the country to develop a new civic identity, to create a viable and compelling form of ‘complex equality’ that can provide legitimacy for the new order? Or does it represent a necessary and positive contribution to stability, helping the country make the transition to a new, promising, and equal future? As a sign of future trajectories, private security provision plays a key symbolic role in perceptions of these dynamics. While there is a generalised culture of fear and insecurity, the private agencies to which the wealthy look for their protection have the capacity to provide protection, to insulate them from the crime outside, but not necessarily to provide a structure of meaning through which societal values are produced and reproduced. In this sense, the lack of effective policing capacity leads to a gap in the security governance structure that means that privatisation may threaten to weaken state and social legitimacy. The extent to which security is seen (or not) as a shared problem and a right to which all are entitled, and not a issue to be dealt with by (unequal) access to private means, is a key part of the ‘structure of feeling’ (Loader 1997b) underpinning different orientations toward the social order and the possibility of creating a common citizen’s identity in a country where such a concept of equal citizenship was previously explicitly denied. In such a situation, the complex symbolic order of security governance may be placed under strain and the politics of protection spread beyond physical security to the political-symbolic realm – to judgements about social solidarity and the commitment toward the ‘New South Africa’, to the legitimacy of state institutions and even of the political order itself. The controversies over international ownership can be seen in a similar light. In addition to whatever more mundane commercial motives and pressures were involved, the symbolic role of the provision of security by the New South Africa was seen by important political actors as much more than an economic issue. The commodification of security, its treatment as a neutral technique and a service to be traded freely on the international market was opposed by a vision that regarded national ownership of the private security sector as a key marker in the


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constitution and legitimation of a polity that could provide and control its own security, and thus – both symbolically and practically – its own destiny.

Conclusions The clear divisions between the domestic and the international that have traditionally underpinned the study of international politics have meant that, almost by definition, the discipline has had little concern with question of ‘domestic’ security and policing, whether public or private. Similarly, the treatment of security as synonymous with the state, and of sovereignty with control over the legitimate exercise of violence has led analysts of international security largely to ignore questions of the privatisation and transnationalisation of security, or – as in the case of most analyses of PMCs as ‘mercenaries’ – to cast the issue within the either/or categories of a challenge to ‘state sovereignty’. Neither of these is adequate. The increasing privatisation and globalisation of security demonstrates the need for new understandings of the structures and agents involved if one is to grasp the complex and important transformations entailed by these processes. One of the key themes of this book is the question of agency. We have tried to show in this chapter that the agents of security are undergoing a rapid and profound transformation as they become increasingly privatised and as large global PSCs emerge. These developments challenge many of the fundamental premises about the relationship between the private and public realms, as well as the global and local. This does not mean a simple erosion of the state’s role in the provision of security. But it does mean that to understand the rearticulation of public and private taking place it is necessary to begin from the specific, to start from the realm of practices rather than remaining wedded to notions of security, sovereignty, and territory that have traditionally dominated the study of international security, and that are deeply misleading as guides for thinking about privatisation. The situation in South Africa also demonstrates the key symbolic and political issues raised by these transformations. If the provision of security is part of a set of ‘shared meanings’ operating in a given social order, then it is inextricable from questions of legitimacy, and from complex normative debates and political struggles. Moreover, engaging the dynamics and implications of the privatisation and globalisation demonstrates not only that a concern with political economy is essential, but also that security must be seen as a cultural category central to peoples’ experiences and to the very constitution of social order and state power.

Notes 1 The research for this chapter was facilitated by grants from the British Academy (Grant No. SG-34725) and from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. We gratefully acknowledge their support. 2 On the historically varied forms of private violence, see Janice Thompson (1994). 3 The quasi-mercenary companies such as Sandline International and Executive Outcomes have attracted interest out of all proportion to their historical or contemporary

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4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11

Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams significance, particularly when compared to the incorporation of other forms (and corporations) of privatised military force within much larger processes of the privatisation of state militaries (particularly those such as Dyncorp or MPRI in the United States). However, as private military companies move increasingly towards the private security market – as evidenced to some degree in Iraq – the lines between the two sectors are becoming more difficult to draw clearly. This consolidation is driven both by the high growth rates in the sector, and by stricter governmental regulation and requirements in relation to training, which increase the entry costs to small companies and encourage economies of scale. This is not, of course, to imply that crime only originated in non-white areas, or that white-areas were free of crime. But it is important to stress how policing technologies were explicitly formulated within these apartheid structures. The South African Police’s official historian admits that during the apartheid years, only 1 in 10 members of the police force was engaged in crime detection and investigation (Dippenaar 1988: 374). For full surveys of crime rates and attitudes towards it, see the ongoing studies of the ISS project on crime, funded – interestingly – by one of South Africa’s largest financial institutions, Nedbank. SAPS crime statistics are available at www.saps.gov.za There are two private prisons in South Africa. Both are maximum security prisons, and both have substantial foreign involvement, including Group Four Correctional Services (Mangaung Maximum Security Prison near Bloemfontein) and the US Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (Kutama-Sinthumule Maximum Security Prison in Limpopo province, the largest privately operated correctional facility in the world with 3,024 beds). As part of this reform process, the South African Police (SAP) was renamed SAPS and SADF became the South African National Defence Forces (SANDF). On ‘black economic empowerment’ see Southall (2004). In particular, the possibility that PSCs could serve as covers for terrorist or transnational criminal organisations, whether internal or external, remains an issue of concern (interviews). This seems to provide some support for Johnson’s (1992) claim that an increasing merger between the public and private security is taking place.

References Baker, B. (2002) ‘Living with Non-State Policing in South Africa: The Issues and Dilemmas’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 40 (1), 29–55. Brogden, M. and Shearing, C. (1993) Policing for a New South Africa, London: Routledge. Burton, P., du Plessis, A., Leggett, T., Louw, A., Mistry, D., and van Vuuren, H. (2004) National Victims of Crime Survey, South Africa 2003, Monograph No. 101, July 2004, Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies. Credit Suisse/First Boston (2001) ‘Review of the South African Private Security Industry’, Europe: Credit Suisse First Boston, 7 February. Dippenaar, M. (1988) The History of the South African Police, 1913–1988. Pretoria: Promedia. Garland, D. (1990) Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Irish, J. (1999) Policing for Profit: The Future of South Africa’s Private Security Industry. Pretoria: ISS. Johnson, L. (1992) The Rebirth of Private Policing. London: Routledge. Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (1998) Private Security and Public Policing. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


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Loader, I. (1997a) ‘Policing and the Social: Questions of Symbolic Power’, British Journal of Sociology, 48 (1), 1–18. —— (1997b) ‘Thinking Normatively About Private Security’, Journal of Law and Society, 24 (3), 377–394. Mistry, D. (2004) ‘Falling Crime, Rising Fear. 2003 National Victims of Crime Survey’, SA Crime Quarterly, 8 ( June), 17–24. Ngoveni, K.P. and Minnaar, A. (2003) ‘The Relationship between the South African Police Service and the Private Security Industry with Special Reference to the Outsourcing of Certain Operational Functions in the Police: Post-April 1994’. Paper Presented to the International Conference In Search of Security. Montreal, Canada. 19–22 February. Philip, K. (1989) ‘The Private Sector and the Security Establishment’, in J. Cock and L. Nathan (eds) War and Society: The Militarisation of South Africa. Cape Town: David Phillip. Republic of South Africa (2001) Private Security Industry Regulation Bill. Cape Town: Government Printing Office. Schalkwyk, P.J. (1987) ‘Security and the Defense Force: The National Key Points Experience’, in R.L. Jackson (ed.) Security – A National Strategy: The Integration of Security in the Public and Private Sector. Cape Town: Lex Patria. Schönteich, M. (2000) Justice versus Retribution: Attitude to Punishment in the Eastern Cape. Monograph No. 45, Pretoria: Institute of Security Studies. —— (2002) ‘South Africa’s Private Security Industry’, ERA’s Corporate Intelligence Review, 18 July. Shaw, M. (2002) Crime and Policing in Post-Apartheid South Africa, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Shearing, C. (1992) ‘The Relation Between Public and Private Policing’, in M. Tonry and N. Morris (eds) Modern Policing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 399–434. SIRA (2003) ‘Private Communication’, Security Industry Regulatory Authority, Pretoria. Smetherham, J.-A. and Hartley, A. (2004) ‘Crime Watch Contests Closure at Concourt’, Cape Times 2 August 2004, Cape Town. Southall, R. (2004) ‘The ANC and Black Capitalism in South Africa’, Review of African Political Economy, 31 (100): 313–328. Thomson, J. (1994) Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Taking rights, mediating wrongs Disagreements over the political agency of non-status refugees Peter Nyers In the end, there is no explanation for the man who revolts. (Michel Foucault)

Introduction The international movement of people has become heavily, if unevenly, securitized in recent years. Heavily, because enhanced powers of detention and removal, together with racialized restrictions on movement and the virtual criminalization of asylum in Western states have dramatically added to the already considerable risks and dangers facing travellers from the global south. Unevenly, because despite the longer security checks at airports and border crossings, most tourists and business class travellers experience this securitization much less intensely than, say, refugees, asylum-seekers, undocumented migrant workers, and other members of the abject class of global travellers.1 Qualifications aside, one thing is for certain: earlier pronouncements that globalization was spelling an ‘end of sovereignty’ have now been seriously muted as the dynamics of migration politics have reaffirmed the continued relevance of sovereign power. In fact, the capacity to decide upon matters of inclusion and exclusion has always been an important element to this political relation. In the case of asylum-seekers, this relationship gets played out through the state’s decision to provide protection – or not. This discretionary power of sovereignty – what Schmitt (1985) saw as the capacity to decide upon the exception, or what Agamben (1998) today sees as the capacity to impose a state of exception as the norm – is as a crucial site where the state (re)founds its claim to monopolize the political. This is because, historically, the ability to provide security – to protect citizens from both each other and from the external aggression of other states – has been one of the key sources of legitimacy for sovereign power. As Alain Joxe states: From Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, and up to the most recent theoreticians of the electronic American Empire (sometimes close to fascism), the relationship between protection and obedience is said to remain the only explanation of power. (2002: 122)

Political agency of non-status refugees

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Contemporary migration politics, however, demonstrate that the relationship between protection and obedience is heavily disputed. A great deal of dissensus exists over the politics of protection. Consider, for example, the way in which migration has become a central issue for social movements seeking alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Critics of globalization often point out that neoliberal capitalist relations contribute to the displacement of millions of people, especially in the global south. At the same time, however, many campaigns on behalf of migrants subsume the experience of migration within a discourse of victimage and suffering. Nandita Sharma (2003) has shown in the case of campaigns against the trafficking of women and children that the protector/victim hierarchy tends to efface the migrants’ own agency in the migration process. Recent developments, ranging from the protests of detained asylum-seekers in Australia, to the sans papiers movement in France, to the successful Migrants Assembly at the European Social Forum in Florence in 2002, suggest the emergence of a complex politics where migrants are positioning themselves as key players in global/local political activism. By challenging the state’s prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, political movements by and in support of undocumented migrants and ‘non-status’ refugees force the matter of sovereignty to the forefront of their political strategy. Consequently, as Sandro Mezzadra argues, we need to ‘move beyond this paternalistic vision and to see migrants as the central protagonists of current processes of global transformation’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2003: 26). There is growing awareness that migration politics today requires some attentive scrutiny to the subtleties of sovereign practices. Didier Bigo (2002), for example, adroitly demonstrates the role security agents play in the ongoing process of securitizing territories and subjectivities today. I am similarly interested in the practices of security agents, but ones of a different sort. In this chapter, I examine the contemporary politics of deportation from the perspective of those agents who are at once the objects of deportation and the subjects fighting against it. Focusing in particular on the emerging movement of undocumented migrants in Canada, I examine the activism of politicized migrants and their relationship to state-centric understandings of human agency.2 To understand how these agents may be actively renegotiating the lines of sovereignty, this paper draws upon Jacques Rancière’s writings on the political. For Rancière, politics occurs precisely when the prevailing order is disrupted by those who have ‘no part’ – that is, by those who possess no agency according to sovereigntist accounts of the political. The activism of non-status refugees constitutes a key political moment from this perspective. I argue that despite the considerable risks and dangers, non-status refugees and their allies are engaging in the politics of protection in extremely provocative ways. By challenging the prerogative of sovereignty to determine insiders and outsiders, they not only question the monopoly the state has over matters of protection; they also question the monopoly citizenship has over matters of political identity and agency. The focus of this chapter will be to examine how the relationship between protection, insecurity, and agency has been negotiated by a group of non-status Algerian refugees living in Montreal, Quebec who have self-organized as the

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Comité d’Action des Sans-Statut Algeriens (CASS). The CASS is made up of individuals who fled the violence and persecution of the Algerian civil war and came to Canada seeking protection as refugees. While their individual claims for asylum were rejected, a moratorium on removals to Algeria was introduced in 1997. This meant that failed refugee claimants from Algeria could not be deported, but left them without any formal immigration status in Canada (hence, the moniker ‘non-status refugee’). After the Canadian government lifted its moratorium in April 2002, the CASS mounted a largely successful campaign to put a stop to the deportations and to regularize their immigration status in Canada. In a striking reversal of the traditional terms of the politics of protection, the CASS are taking protection – and not just waiting for it to be granted, or not – and, in doing so, recasting the terms under which we can speak about ‘humans’ and ‘agency’ today.

Humans in revolt There has been a great deal of interest among scholars on how the global/local activism of ‘citizen groups’ may, or may not, be contributing to the emergence of post-national affectations and post-sovereign political forms. The political campaigns and social movements by and in support of asylum-seekers, non-status refugees, and undocumented migrants provoke some of the most radical mobilizations and challenges in this respect. The chants of this movement – ‘no one is illegal’, ‘no borders, no nations, no deportations’, and ‘neither here, nor elsewhere’ – are indicative of a radical critique of the categories and practices of the modern state. Scholars interested in global movements typically ask questions such as: Are these activists members of a growing global civil society, where innovative forms of legal and political governance are being developed to humanize world order? Have the transnational connections and conversations of global movements created a cosmopolitan public sphere, a launching pad from which to make their seamless global, national, and subnational interventions? These are interesting, important questions. To be sure, the call to promote persuasion over polemics, to foster civil conversations over civilizational clashes, to expand the boundaries of a dialogic community through the construction of a cosmopolitan public sphere – these are all laudable endeavours. But they are efforts that inevitably and unavoidably confront some basic political questions: Who can speak? Who can act? Who possesses the agency to effect such transformations? In much of the research on dialogical forms of globalism, the answer is the ‘human’ dressed up as a cosmopolitan citizen, who is authorized to act by virtue of being a member of the global family of humanity. Pierre Hassner (1998), for example, argues that by virtue of their membership in the ‘family of humanity’, refugees should qualify as ‘a special case for cosmopolitan citizenship’. The effort to understand the political agency of non-citizen human beings is complicated by the fact that the assumptions that inform our notions of the ‘human’ are already deeply political. Hannah Arendt has perhaps most famously described the deep dilemmas facing refugees when they are classified as human.


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In her essay, ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’, Arendt reveals that [t]he conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. (1968: 179) The vexing paradox of modern claims to human rights is that to possess rights one has is to be other than human. As Arendt (1968: 180) states: ‘It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for others to treat him as a fellow man’. To be ‘nothing but a man’ is to make it seemingly impossible for ‘others’ to regard you as human. It is in this sense, for example, that Lyotard (1999) speaks no longer of ‘human rights’, but of the ‘other’s rights’. To possess rights is to be something other than human; it is to be the human’s other. But who is this other? In modern political discourse, it is the state citizen. Much of the difficulty, therefore, of envisioning the political agency of refugees and other non-citizens comes from the way the sovereign political relation biases the state and the citizen as holding monopoly rights over what counts as political space and activity, respectively. But while being political has historically had a strong affiliation with being a citizen, Isin (2002: 4) notes that ‘citizenship and its alterity always emerged simultaneously in a dialogical manner and constituted each other’. Refugees find themselves in the unfortunate position of being rendered the negative counterpart of the citizen, paradoxically included in political matters only by virtue of their exclusion (Agamben 1998). The prevailing representations (legal, discursive, visual) systematically cast refugee life as the inverted reflection of political life. The refugee’s world is upside down, both out-of-place and out-of-sync when compared to the normalized life of citizenship. Everything that the citizen has – security, protection – the refugee lacks. Everything the citizen can do – act and speak politically – the refugee must refrain from. In the face of the dominant accounts of political agency, refugees are no more than ‘speechless emissaries’ (Malkki 1996). Their voices are emptied of political content, reduced to a pitiful cry vis-à-vis the articulate speech of the citizen (Nyers 1999; Rajaram 2002). To the extent that modern theories of the political structure their accounts of authentic political community and agency around the state and citizen, respectively, there seems little manoeuvring room for refugees and other non-citizens. And yet, the question of agency will not go away. The proliferation of refugee warrior communities in Africa and Central Asia is a good example of politicized nature of refugee life in many parts of the world (Terry 2002). This politicization seems

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to hold true even in the extreme conditions of penal incarceration that is rapidly becoming the norm with regards to how Western states greet asylum-seekers without documentation. In an age of biopower, where the inscription and management of ‘bare life’ is a pivotal component of sovereign power, non-status refugees in detention have resorted to a form of bioagency. Hunger strikes, for example, are regularly taken as a form of political protest in immigrant detention centres across Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere. To avoid being force fed by detention centre personnel, some detainees have resorted to suturing their lips shut. In his discussion of these practices at the Woomera detention centre in Australia, Joseph Pugliese introduces the neologism ‘intextuation’ (i.e. ‘the act of weaving . . . intertwined with the concept of writerly inscription’) to describe the symbolic politics of these acts. By intextuating the organ of speech literally with thread, you symbolically magnify the acts of censure and prohibition that reduce you to silence. Your defiant act of silence incites the politicians and shock-jocks to hystericised speech as they fail to comprehend the passions that would drive you to a state of self-induced aphasia. These are alien passions that, for some observers, defy reasoned comprehension. Your sutured silence, in fact, exercises a power that challenges the nation to the edge of reason and language, where only guttural epithets can be uttered in order to make sense of your act: ‘wretches’, ‘repulsive people’, ‘terrorist motherfucker’, ‘Muslim motherfucker’. (2002: §17) Here, the logic that citizens have a monopoly over reasonable and articulate speech acts is revealed as entirely arbitrary. Consequently, the ability to enact agency in spite of – or better – through a regime that condemns one to silence is a remarkable achievement. While they cannot be romanticized, neither can these acts be reduced to mere acts of desperation. These acts are revealing of the violence that underscores accounts of ‘human’ agency that rely on segmentation between citizen and non-citizen.

Taking political voice The idea that a speaking-being is a human-being is a political-being is an old formulation that goes back to Aristotle. Given the problematic status of ‘human’ in Western political thought, this formulation has an obvious weakness in that its logic can be easily manipulated to exclude entire categories of people – for example women, children, workers, non-Europeans, etc. – into a marginalized non-political life. If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths. (Rancière 2001: §23)


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The political philosophy of Jacques Rancière (1999, 2001, 2003) develops a theory of political agency that speaks to this gap between human beings and political beings. Rancière argues that a ‘wrong’ exists at the heart of the classical formula that equates a speaking being with a political being. Exposing this wrong is, for him, a quintessential political moment. While Rancière is well-known for being very particular about what he qualifies as ‘politics’, he should not be understood as being a purist of any kind. To the contrary, Rancière (2001: §25) argues that politics as such ‘has no “proper” place nor does it possess any “natural” subjects’. (So far so good for the non-citizen political activist.) Something that satisfies his perception of politics can exist anywhere; but this does not mean that everything is political – only potentially. Rancière argues that politics does not result merely because power relationships are at work. Politics, he suggests, is instead the meeting of two heterogeneous and non-determinate logics: the police logic and the egalitarian logic (Rancière 1999: 32). By police, Rancière does not mean the police employed by the state apparatus. No – the policing activity Rancière refers to are the sanctioned interactions of normal(ized) political subjects; they are the normalizing forces that allocate bodies to differentiated regimes of place, visibility, and discursive capacity: The police is thus first an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. (Rancière 1999: 29) From Rancière’s perspective, much of what is thought of as ‘politics’ is, in fact, police activity. The disparity between police and politics is bridged when the police logic meets an egalitarian logic. By equality, Rancière (1999: 30) means ‘the open set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being and by the concern to test this equality’. Here, equality is not a given or an essence, but a process, an ‘assumption that needs to be discerned within the practices of implementing it’ (p. 33). The political, therefore, has no ‘proper place’, but is instead a ‘field of encounter’ between the police and egalitarian logics. The spaces established by the normalizing force of the police may at times seem ubiquitous, but they are always deeply contested and are subject to practices of re-allocation, re-shaping, and re-locating. Politics exists whenever there is a disagreement about what is political. Politics arises whenever the boundaries separating the political from the social, the economic, and the domestic are transgressed, effaced, or otherwise put into question. Politics, therefore, ‘generally occurs “out of place,” in a place which was not supposed to be political’ (Rancière 2003). Consequently, while non-status refugees would seem to ‘not count’ when it comes to political activity – their place in society is reserved to various ‘non-places’ such as the detention centre, the deportation flight, or life ‘underground’ – this is precisely where one should

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expect to find political activity, as understood by Rancière. For the excluded, those who have ‘no part’ in the social order, to articulate a grievance as an equal – as a speaking being – is a radical political moment. When individual are deemed to have ‘no part’ in the overall order and are included only by virtue of their exclusion as politically speaking beings, then they have to interrupt not just to be heard, but to be recognized as speaking beings as such. Politics, then, is ‘a specific kind of connection’ that ‘comes about solely through interruption’ (Rancière 1999: 12–13). In the sections that follow, I will explore this concept of politics through an examination of the campaign for regularization conducted by a group of non-status Algerian refugees in Montreal who have self-organized as the CASS.

In through the out door How can non-status refugee activists and their allies successfully intervene within the field of deportation? What strategies are available to mount an effective counter-discourse of migration, one that breaks through the prevailing pejorative representations that cast them as undesirable, and possibly dangerous, outsiders? The literature tends to be rather grey, bleak, and pessimistic on this matter. For example, while Bigo does recognize that various ‘amateurs’ in the security field are challenging the securitization of migration, he doubts their efficacy compared to that of the professional managers of unease: Of course, some ‘amateurs’ of the security process (associations, churches, parties not integrated in the decision-making process, ad hoc spokesmen of social movements) can intervene in this game of security and insecurity, challenging the framing of migrants and asylum seekers as a risk, but professionals have the advantage of exercising authority. (Bigo 2002: 74) The Canadian state employs a variety of strategies to achieve the expedited removal of non-status refugees and other undesired foreign nationals from its territory. Its deportation apparatus relies, in particular, on contemporary technologies of speed, invisibility, and control in order to effectively carry out deportation orders. 1. Speed Political debate over refugee and immigration issues often point to making the system more efficient, timely, and responsive. The case of deportation is no different in this respect. Typically, debates are concerned with how best to administer and control deportations; how to harmonize them with the policies of other states; how to make them more efficient, maybe even profitable, etc. Above all, there is enormous political pressure for departments and enforcement officers to rapidly execute removals. Since the discourse of deportation relies heavily on constructing the subjects of deportation as ‘bad seeds’ – criminals, terrorists, frauds, queue jumpers, and other people constructed as undesirable for inclusion in the body politic – there is further impetus for removals to take place as quickly


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as possible. Finally, this emphasis on speed is further reinforced by a desire on the part of governing officials to counter the domestic and international perception that Canada lacks the capacity to control its borders, to protect its population, to govern itself. In this sense, the speed of deportation is intimately tied to struggles over the state’s claim to govern, to perform as a sovereign nation. In this sense, deportation is a site where sovereignty is performed, and what is at stake with deportation is the political itself. As Walters (2002) has argued, deportation is one of the contemporary technologies of sovereignty, used to reaffirm and restabilize domestic(ated) conceptions of political space. 2. Invisibility Whenever possible Canadian officials prefer to conduct deportations with as little public scrutiny as possible. While the history of deportation in Canada demonstrates its usefulness for controlling political dissent and managing the supply-side of national labour markets, deportation today is typically cast as a politically neutral, administrative routine of states (Roberts 1988). Canada, for example, averages about 8,400 deportations per year that are done through co-operation with police forces, private detention, and transportation companies, etc. Anna Pratt (2001) makes note of the diminished visibility of these practices: ‘Immigration penality is even more secret and mysterious than criminal justice penality; it is more withdrawn from the public eye and receives far less critical scrutiny than do prisons’. For example, when Immigration Canada admitted in October 2002 that thirty-two non-status Algerians had been deported since the lifting of the moratorium, the CASS were caught off-guard: ‘We have no information on these people, who they are, when they were deported, or where they are now’ (Podur 2002). Moreover, when such practices do attain visibility, it is to reaffirm the state’s competence in managing the risks and dangers of contemporary living. In the realm of immigration, one of the ways that the state manages risk society is through deportations and detentions. In this sense, deportation becomes a highly symbolic act that allows the state to prove to the population that it is capable of governing. 3. Control In Canada, the use of handcuffs as well as leg irons or shackles is standard practice when carrying out deportations; enforcement officers are also given the discretion to employ transportation belts if they deem them necessary. There has been evidence that ‘uncooperative’ deportees have been forcibly drugged and sedated by enforcement officers; deportees who adamantly protest their removal have also reportedly had their mouths sealed with duct tape (Pratt 2001). These measures to neutralize the deportees’ body as securely as possible are, in part, a recognition of the fact that people, as a rule, resent their deportation. Some people react by literally fighting it to the last second. Situations in which disruptive deportees are being kicked off commercial flights, or making dramatic escapes in a waiting getaway car, are ones that Immigration officials want to avoid. The use of physical constraints, however, also has a symbolic usevalue for how it reaffirms the lack of agency on behalf of the non-citizen. Moreover, the use of handcuffs, leg irons, and transportation belts confers an unmistakable quality of criminality upon the deportee – underscoring the point that any agency that did exist would be seen as a dangerous one.

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One of Bigo’s key insights on the securitization of migration is that it is a process that relies not so much on exceptional acts, as on everyday and routine acts of security professionals. ‘Securitization’, he says, ‘works through everyday technologies, through the effects of power that are continuous rather than exceptional, through political struggles, and especially through institutional competition within the professional security field in which the most trivial interest are at stake’ (Bigo 2002: 73). This insight has not been lost on the groups that are engaged in anti-deportation and regularization campaigns in Canada, including the campaign to regularize the status of non-status Algerians. Indeed, many of the most successful political actions taken by CASS and their supporters focused on disrupting the everyday operations of securitization. The CASS, in short, have been successful at developing politically savvy counter-strategies aimed at overturning each of the technologies of deportation described earlier. As we shall see below, in contrast to the hidden world of removals, members of the CASS have made themselves heard and seen as political speaking beings. In place of passivity and defeat, the non-status Algerians have asserted themselves as active political agents. Finally, the CASS have utilized tactical reorientations of the political space/time of the Canadian state apparatus in order to slow down the deportation process and give themselves enough time to mount an effective campaign. In direct contrast to the regimes of the political that disqualify non-status refugees as political subjects, the CASS premised itself on the idea of dialogue. Prior to the removal of the moratorium on deportations, the CASS was chiefly concerned with creating a space where non-status Algerians could speak without recrimination. Typically, their meetings started by allowing everyone present to talk about their experiences, to share their fears about their lack of status in Canada, to ask questions, to tell stories, to break down into tears, etc. The whole purpose of these gatherings was to get people talking.3 Such an undertaking was important because members of this community were constantly facing institutional obstacles to speaking freely. One CASS member, Nacera Kellou, describes these obstacles in the context of the welfare office. Here, we can note the official expectation of passivity from non-status people, and the reaction to an assertive voice. We don’t speak the French of Quebec. We speak ‘French-French’, or ‘AlgerianFrench’ . . . . The welfare agents – they talk to you like they are paying out of their pocket to you. They’re arrogant. They treat you like you have no values. They explain points, but when you say to them, ‘Look, I don’t understand’, their response is: ‘Listen. I told you, I already told you’ in a very arrogant way. If you insist that you didn’t really understand, the response is: ‘Listen. Now speak softly. Don’t get upset. Don’t scream’. I had my welfare stopped because of this for a month. This is when I had no work and I had small children. This is absurd. They really do everything they can to devalue you. (Lowry and Nyers 2003: 68) Faced with the powers of abjection – that is, those forces which cast them out from the realm of speaking beings – non-status Algerians living in Montreal


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responded by forming the CASS in the fall of 2001 in order to create a space to speak freely. After the moratorium on deportations was lifted in April 2002, the CASS doubled its efforts and organized regular assemblies where votes were taken to determine demands, and where strategies were collectively discussed to mobilize the directly-affected population of non-status Algerians in Montreal. Despite the ongoing efforts of Immigration Canada to keep the deportation of non-status Algerians quiet, as just one of the many routine and invisible practices of a properly functioning sovereign state, the CASS proved to be quite successful in generating positive public support for their cause. The CASS have developed close ties with the media; they have developed press kits and many members have been interviewed by journalists from the print, radio, and television media. Both the French and English dailies in Montreal regularly follow the activities of the CASS, and columnists and editorial opinion have been largely sympathetic to their struggle. Academics and members of the activist press have also interviewed CASS members (Lowry and Nyers 2003). Members of the CASS have been invited to participate in university and other public forums in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and elsewhere. For events to which they have not been invited, they have not been shy at simply showing up, taking the stage, and articulating their grievances and demands like equals. Such was the case at the March 2004 Metropolis conference held in Montreal in which hundreds of academics, policy-makers, and other knowledge-producers on immigration and settlement issues in Canada had their opening plenary interrupted by a vocal demonstration by CASS activists. Finally, the CASS have been successful in creating a solidarity network with a diverse group of supporters and allies in Montreal, across Canada, and internationally. For example, after the deportation of one of its most active members (Mohamed Cherfi, whose case is discussed in more detail later), solidarity protests were held in major cities across Canada and in New York state. The CASS have also developed a strong presence in the public spaces of Montreal by organizing several highly successful demonstrations and marches, some of which have been attended by over a thousand people. They have set-up information tables at public events, and have printed and distributed thousands of leaflets. Other political actions have included weekly information pickets outside the offices of Immigration Canada. Here, members of the Women’s Committee wear numbers around their neck to emphasize the point that government de-humanizes them, refusing to recognize them as fully human: ‘We are treated as file numbers, not as human beings’ (Papadopoulos 2002: 1). As well, the CASS have organized several unannounced delegation visits, large and small, to Immigration offices. The desire to enforce deportations as quickly and silently as possible exposes some contradictions in the Canadian (de-)immigration process. Despite their lack of formal status, the non-status Algerians nonetheless have regular interactions with various departments and officials of the state apparatus. For example, in order to work, non-status refugees have to make an annual $150 application for a work permit. To stay in the country, the non-status refugees can make an application for permanent residency under immigration criteria. Alternatively, they can

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seek regularization on the basis of ‘humanitarian and compassionate grounds’. A common difficulty with these options is that they each involve a decision-making procedure that is independent of the others. Consequently, it is not unusual for these applications to be out-of-sync with each other, with deportation orders being enforced while other applications for that individual are still under review. In order to rectify these constitutive absurdities at work in the Canadian immigration/deportation system, the CASS organized a number of delegation visits to Immigration offices beginning in Summer 2002.4 Delegation visits are politically savvy interventions into the administrative machinery of sovereignty. The goal of these visits is to bring applications in-line, slowing down the technologies of speed, and allowing the non-status refugees to reclaim a more favourable spacetime than that of the deportation system. There are a number of advantages to these kinds of visits. An occupation by non-status people disrupts the normality of office affairs, as they bring their own personal ‘states of emergency’ directly to the state apparatus. Direct action tactics work best when they organize around existing weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the system. Despite the hype of the speed and efficiency of deportation, Immigration Canada in fact operates in a context of a massive backlog of casework (over 52,000 at the end of 2002), despite a significant drop in the number of refugee claims. Consequently, these offices do not tolerate disruption very well at all. Since these offices can’t afford to be upset, a wellcoordinated disruption (i.e. occupying all the offices, including the backrooms) can create considerable pressure for officials to agree to a request for a meeting with management and/or political officials. These meetings usually include forcing officials to read the individual case files and to listen to the testimonies of the nonstatus refugees. This is the other key advantage of delegation visits: they allow for face-to-face encounters with state officials invested with enormous powers of discretion. Once the compelling individual stories are spoken, it is not unusual for Immigration staff to be moved to tears (Montgomery 2002). But will they be moved enough to change their minds about a deportation order? We remember from Rancière that political governance always includes an accounting of the proper allotment and distribution of speaking beings. However, the assumption that all speaking beings are equal becomes politicized – or rather, politics erupts – once a body who has ‘no part’ expresses its wronged accounting. The dynamics of delegation visits are revealing in this respect, as they demonstrate the ongoing struggle of the non-status refugees in being recognized and heard as political actors. In an account of an unannounced visit to the offices of Immigration Canada, Kellou describes the intense unwillingness of the government officials to speak with the Algerians. She also describes the panic these officials felt at the prospect of other refugees and non-status people in the Immigration offices actually seeing the CASS demonstration. They were hard headed. They were telling us, ‘Give us your letter and we will get back to you’. They didn’t want to speak to us all at once. They were saying, ‘This is not the way things are done in Canada. We don’t do it this way’. . . . The Immigration officials – they wanted us to provide the good


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respectful image: that we’d come in, and we’d go upstairs, and we’d sit down, and we’d wait, and we’d talk to them like things are normal. But things aren’t normal! This was panic, and we acted in such a way. We occupied all the rooms to show that this was a serious situation. They didn’t want the other people [i.e. other refugees] in the waiting room to see us because this would dirty up their image. This would take away from their image of their administrative life, of things being done normally. This would ruin that. So that’s how we approached it. (Lowry and Nyers 2003: 69–70) Clearly, Kellou’s account demonstrates that Immigration officials were interlocutors in ‘a determined kind of speech situation’ (Rancière 1999: x), one in which they simultaneously understood and did not understand what the other (i.e. the non-status Algerian) was saying. From the outset, the prior expectation of docility and patience on the part of refugees (i.e. they should wait to be called upon) was shattered. They were instead faced with a loud, assertive group of nonstatus people, who were unwilling to be separated as (speaking) ‘leaders’ and (silent) ‘followers’. The audacity of such tactics threatens to subvert the entire framework of ‘authoritative citizen’ versus ‘passive refugee’. In this context, the significance of Immigration officials moving asylum-seekers and other non-status people out of the Ministry’s waiting room is revealed: the dominant order of speaking beings cannot tolerate the sight or sounds of non-citizens acting as political agents. Consequently, this activism must be hidden out-of-sight of other non-status people, lest they follow the example of the CASS. Rancière argues that ‘the political persists as long as there is a dissensus about the givens of a particular situation, of what is seen and what might be said, on the question of who is qualified to see or say what is given’ (Rancière and Panagia 2000: 124). For the Canadian and Quebec governments, the ‘givens’ of the non-status Algerian situation was that the sovereign state was the sole interlocutor in decisions about protection, security, and matters of inclusion and exclusion. As the Immigration Minister has insisted: ‘Enough is enough. There are some people who will be accepted, some people will be rejected and we’ll deal with each case one at a time’. For the non-status Algerians in CASS, by contrast, the ‘givens’ of the situation was that they were refugees. To prove it, they did the impossible: they insisted that they could speak and they would be political. The political demands were that asylum and criminality be de-linked; that the deportations of their community members be stopped; that the moratorium on removals to Algeria be returned; and that non-status Algerians be regularized. In fact, the CASS changed their mind on this last demand. In the Fall 2002, they changed this demand to the much more radical request that all non-status residents in Canada be regularized.5

Agency without sanctuary By the end of 2002, the CASS had secured a major victory in their campaign for regularization. The political presence of the CASS created sufficient political

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pressure to force the federal and provincial governments to make some important concessions and, in doing so, revaluate the traditional terms governing the relationship between security, territory, and the population. Acknowledging that they were facing an ‘extraordinary situation’, the Canadian and Quebec governments announced a set of ‘special procedures’ that would allow for the non-status Algerians to apply for permanent status. Within a year of the programme’s commencement over 93% of the affected population of Algerians had their immigration status regularized. By any standard, this stands as a remarkable achievement for a regularization campaign. However, the stories behind the 7% who have been excluded are revealing for how the sovereign state can assert itself even when providing concessions. Elsewhere, I have described this process of capture as ‘sovereignty’s retakings’ (Nyers 2003). Here, I will develop the implications of the government’s response with respect to the question of agency. Both the possibilities and dangers associated with the political agency of non-status refugees have been dramatically illustrated in the case of one of those whose application has been rejected, Mohamed Cherfi. Cherfi entered Canada in 1998, via the US, after fleeing persecution in Algeria for refusing mandatory military service. Like many others fleeing the civil war in Algeria, his refugee claim was denied. However, because of the moratorium on removals to Algeria, Cherfi was not deported but remained in Canada, albeit without any formal immigration status. Prior to his political activism, Cherfi never had a criminal record nor had any dealings with the police. Once he became active in the CASS, however, he found himself in jail three times in six months. On the first occasion, in March 2003, Cherfi was arrested while making a delegation visit with 20 other CASS members to the Montreal offices of the Quebec Minister of Immigration. The aim of this visit was as simple as it was audacious: to speak directly, without an appointment, to the Minister about ending the deportations of non-status Algerians from Canada. It was not this political demand that got Cherfi arrested, however. Instead, it was his simple request to be treated like a human being – with dignity. We know from our discussion earlier that this request – to be regarded as human – is never a simple or an innocent one, and is, therefore, bound to lead to trouble. A member of the solidarity group, No One Is Illegal (NOII), describes how the delegation visit, and Cherfi’s request, was received: When the group arrived at Quebec Immigration, they were blocked by security guards, ignored by the civil servants and not answered to about Minister Trudel’s whereabouts. Once inside Trudel’s offices, the staff enclosed them in, not allowing people to get water or go to the bathroom. The police were called upon to execute an eviction order. A dozen patrol cars arrived replete with police officers in bullet-proof vests and armed with billy-clubs. They effectively blocked access to one of the elevators, and began escorting the non-status out of the head office. Mohamed was one of the last to exit. He informed the police officers that he didn’t need an escort and requested that he be treated with dignity. The police officers grabbed him and wrenched


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him down through the basement and out the back, away from public view, to place him under arrest. The police officers threatened him with statements like, ‘We’re going to give a criminal record to accelerate your deportation’. (No One Is Illegal 2003) Recalling Rancière, Cherfi’s demand to be treated with dignity surely qualifies as an assertion of equality. He did not, after all, contest his leaving the building, only to do so as a dignified, autonomous, rights-bearing, and self-determining human being. This earned him an initial charge of ‘assault with trespass’. His desire for recognition as a human being became construed as a form of violencethrough-presence. As a non-status refugee, the only presence Cherfi is expected to demonstrate is an absence. His alleged violence, therefore, is tied to his presence within a physical place where he had ‘no part’ in speaking politically. In the symbolic political space of the Immigration Minister’s offices, Cherfi had no place in speaking like a dignified human being. Despite his tireless advocacy for the non-status Algerian community, in November 2003 Cherfi was refused permanent residency status by Immigration Quebec on the grounds that he hadn’t ‘contributed’ or ‘integrated’ into Quebec society. Cherfi felt he was the victim of ‘a very ambiguous and arbitrary process’ (Cherfi 2004). For others in the CASS and in solidarity groups, it looked like he was being punished for his political activity. ‘It looks like revenge’, said one CASS member (Curran 2003). Upon being notified of an immigration hearing that would lead to his removal from Canada, Cherfi opted instead to take sanctuary in a church in Quebec City. Sanctuary had proved to be an effective tactic for previous non-status Algerians. For example, the eleven-day sanctuary taken in the fall of 2002 by the Bourouisa family in a Montreal church played a considerable role in forcing Canadian and Quebec officials to introduce a regularization process for the affected non-status Algerian community. In Cherfi’s case, however, officials opted to follow the precedent taken by police and security forces in France, the US, and elsewhere, who have not been shy about violating the ‘sacred principle’ of sanctuary. Therefore, on 5 March 2004, and for the first time in Canadian history, police entered the church and violently arrested Cherfi. Within five hours of his arrest within a sanctuary zone, Cherfi was deported from Canada to the US, where immigration officials promptly placed him under immigration detention. Cherfi’s case is illustrative of the complex and dangerous politics of exclusion at work with respect to non-status refugees and migrants. His bid to stay in Canada has been complicated by host of factors, including the international economic relations between states (the moratorium on deportations was lifted the day after a Canadian trade delegation left Algeria with several hundred million dollars in contracts), but also the post-9/11 securitizations of asylum, migration, and race. For example, Cherfi was denied bail in the US in part because the court decided that he posed a ‘security threat’ on the basis of his political activism in Canada. Indeed, the whole manner in which Cherfi’s bid for sanctuary was violated is worth noting, for it is indicative of recent transformations with how state officials deal with non-status refugees and migrants. The fifteen police

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officers that chased Cherfi through the Church, tackled him, arrested him, and removed him from the sanctuary space were members of the local Quebec City police force. They arrested Cherfi on the relatively minor charge of violating bail conditions from the arrest described earlier (Cherfi did not submit a change of address when he took sanctuary). However, once Cherfi was in the local police station, these charges were dropped and the police handed him over to border security agents waiting in an adjoining room. As an official with the Canadian Border Services Agency described the situation: ‘They arrested him for one reason and he was handed over to us for another reason’ (Hanes 2004). When the lines between internal and external securitizations have been blurred to the point that it is no longer clear who is a deportation enforcement officer, does activism become too risky a political field in which the directly affected be active? In Montreal, the refugee and immigration settlement agencies took the position that anti-deportation activism by directly affected groups involved an inappropriate and unrealistic politics. Life without official status implies too many risks already, they said. After all, being ‘non-status’ means living without or with very minimal access to health care, welfare, and other social services. It means being denied the very opportunities, such as schooling, basic training, language classes, that would allow them to ‘integrate’ into Canadian society. It means having to apply for a permit every year in order to work. It means being exposed to dangerous and exploitative working conditions. Better, they suggested, that the matter of advocacy and the details of the casework be left up to experienced professionals. However, the established approaches to advocacy left the non-status Algerian refugees feeling patronized; they were ‘clients’ with very little opportunity to speak autonomously, let alone outside of conventional channels and frameworks. Amnesty International, for example, criticized the Canadian government for prematurely lifting the moratorium on deportations to Algeria. While appreciative of this support, many CASS members were left asking the question: when would it ever be appropriate to forcibly remove and transfer a population? And who would make this decision? Recalling Lyotard, it would again be another. Consequently, the CASS demanded mass regularization: essentially, an amnesty for all those affected by the moratorium’s removal. This demand was deemed too radical and unrealistic by the major coalition of refugee and immigration service agencies (Lowry and Nyers 2003). With the question of ‘dignity’ once again becoming a matter of critical importance, the members of CASS chose to operate outside the traditional terms of the patron–client relationship and advocate for themselves. To do so effectively, however, the CASS could not do it alone. As Homi Bhabha (2000: 6) affirms, ‘the value of human agency arises from the fact that no one can be liberated by others, although no one can liberate herself or himself without others’. Consequently, the CASS sought out allies that fit with their strategic objectives. A crucial ally, for example, were the various faith communities in Montreal, who provided emotional, material, and spiritual assistance through this state of emergency. Another important ally for the CASS was NOII, a group composed predominately of young, seasoned anti-globalization activists from Montreal’s Anti-Capitalist Convergence. Both of these allies proved to be


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invaluable in terms of how they could, in different ways, mediate the risks of the non-status Algerians’ public activism. The NOII collective, for example, possesses an incredible amount of knowledge about how to effectively organize and hold demonstrations, direct action delegation visits, etc. They could also take responsibility for some of the actions that had a greater risk of arrest (e.g. distributing leaflets in the highly securitized environment of Montreal’s Dorval airport). Meanwhile, the Union United Church mediated the risk on one young family’s deportation by granting them sanctuary – and, in doing so, created the necessary political pressure to force the government to respond to the political demands of the CASS. There is another reason to temper concerns about the risks of politicization. For the community to be targeted for deportation, ‘normal’ life, a life with certainties and without risks, ceases to be an option. Cherfi explains his reaction to finding out that the moratorium on deportations had been lifted: For me it is really difficult. I am someone who at the beginning didn’t speak a lot. I was really depressed. I didn’t take it really well. For example, when I was at my home I kept the lights on because I have nightmares. It is not something that is easily explainable. I’ve thought of suicide, I’ve thought of very extreme things. I was before a machine that was going to roll over me, and there was nothing I could do about it. (Lowry and Nyers 2003: 67) With a ‘normal’ life no longer an option, non-status Algerians were faced with very limited choices, all of which involved risk. First, they could simply await their deportation. That, however, would mean facing an (un)certain fate in Algeria, a country with a notorious record of ‘disappearances’. Indeed, this has been the fate of some deported Algerians already. As an alternative to disappearing they could take another option – also risky – and go ‘underground’. This option involves operating under an assumed identity and necessitates the procurement of false documents. This is a difficult life ‘choice’ that is hard to sustain over time. Also, if going underground means going to the United States, then this usually means developing relationships with people smugglers, some of whom may turn out to be dangerous human traffickers. Organizing for changing their circumstances is an alternative to going underground or getting false documents. Of course, this is also a risky and dangerous option. For the non-status to go public is to risk their exposure to authorities, both local and from their home state. Speaking out always presents the risk of exposing oneself to immigration authorities. Speaking out, as Cherfi found out, can get you arrested, which can mean doom to any application for regularized status. If one has received a deportation order, or lives in fear of receiving one imminently, this type of activism puts everything on the line. The CASS, however, found that one advantage in organizing collectively is that it puts one in a stronger position to contest the prevailing methods of evaluation under which calculations about who is and who is not a refugee in Canada. After all, the non-status Algerians took the

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status of ‘refugee’ for themselves. They self-identified and organized as refugees. ‘It’s a question of protection, not immigration’, says one member. Claiming refugee identity, in this sense, is a form of collective risk management. It allows for the issues of protection – from torture, jail, death, ‘disappearing’ – to come to the forefront of the campaign for the regularization of their status. Finally, political activity should not be understood as only being about rational calculations of risks and benefits. Despite the considerable risks that come when the non-status interrupt the public realm as speaking beings demanding recognition of a historical wrong, people find themselves in political situations acting as political actors. As Bonnie Honig argues, The self-surprising quality of action is not limited to the fact that action does not always turn out as we would have intended it to; nor even to the fact that we, as actors, are never quite sure ‘who’ it is that we have turned out to be. Action is self-surprising in another sense as well, in the sense that it happens to us; we do not decide to perform, then enter the public realm, and submit our performance to the contingency that characterizes that realm: Often, political action comes to us, it involves us in ways that are not deliberate, wilful or intended. Action produces its actors; episodically, temporarily, we are its agonistic achievement. (Honig 1992: 225, emphasis added) ‘Political action comes to us’ – but what are the stakes of this risky politics? What implications arise from the political becoming of the non-status refugee? Taking risks, it would seem, is an integral and not an incidental part of a rightsand liberty-taking subjectivity. As Cherfi states: ‘We need to be radical. That is the best way we are going to grow and be effective . . . People who are directly affected need to be the ones fighting and creating this movement with allies’ (Lowry and Nyers 2003: 71).

Conclusions Politics is nothing if not unpredictable. And yet the standard accounts of political agency are full of predictable moves: it is the state that protects; it is the secure citizen that is political. The CASS have been adamant in putting this formulation into question. In their public campaign to stop their deportations they broke through the nervous subjectivities of citizens anxious about refugees and national security. They convinced large parts of the population of Montreal (and elsewhere) that they were refugees, despite what Immigration officials said. Further, through their practices, they created enough political pressure to force sovereign power to recognize them as political agents. Of course, the tricky part is that the Canadian/Quebec governments have been equally successful in defining the conditions of this recognition. Consequently, from the perspective of assessing the impact the CASS has had on (re)constituting the political, it is clearly not enough to say that someone is taking part because the existing system doesn’t


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allow them. The radical takings of foreigners are, as often as not, deflected by the non-democratic re-takings of sovereign power. And yet, the subjectivity of the non-status refugee activist can never be completely recouped by the logic of sovereignty. As the quotation by Foucault in the epigram to this paper implies, the political remains hinged, however indeterminately, to the figure that revolts; but this figure is never only that of the citizen.

Notes 1 This class of global travellers is known by a variety of names: the ‘undocumented’, ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘irregular migrants’, ‘clandestine’, etc. Étienne Balibar (2000: 43) calls them ‘the excluded among the excluded’. Throughout this paper, I will use the term ‘non-status refugee’ when referring to this abject class of global travellers. This choice of terminology reflects the contemporary usage in Canada. 2 This is not to say that all refugees and migrants are interested in ‘politics’. We should not make the mistake of replacing the paternalism of speaking for refugees with an equally patronizing assumption that they are all new revolutionary subjects. There are probably as many reasons for migrating as there are migrants and refugees. But while this subjective element of global movements is key, its significance should not be read as heralding the return of the modern self-identical, self-determining Cartesian subject. To the contrary, it points to the relevance of ongoing processes of subjectification. As I shall argue later, the subjective elements of mobility are what enable migrants to transform themselves, and others, into agents of their own subjectification. 3 When it became apparent that the people who were doing most of the talking were the men, the women members of the CASS responded by organizing the Women’s Committee. Soumya Boussouf explains the origins of the Women’s Committee: The Women’s Committee was created as a result of our experience in the Action Committee. We noted that there were more men than women. Nacera – she speaks to a lot of women on the phone – and they were telling her, ‘Tell me what’s going on because my husband went to the last meeting, but all he’s telling me is “don’t worry,” “everything is going to work out,” and “it is alright.” But I want to know. I really want to know what happened and what’s going on’. So we decided to create the Women’s Committee. (Lowry and Nyers 2003: 69; cf. Freedman and Tarr 2000) 4 This and the next paragraph draw on material from Nyers 2003, pp. 1084–1085. 5 This is a reflection of the growing links the CASS had developed with other groups in Canada struggling to regularize the status of members of their own communities. For an excellent discussion, see Wright (2003).

References Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H. (1968) Imperialism. New York: Harvest. Balibar, É. (2000) ‘What We Owe to the Sans-Papiers’, in L. Guenther and C. Heesters (eds) Social Insecurity: Alphabet City No. 7. Toronto: Anansi, pp. 42–43. Bhabha, H.K. (2000) ‘On Minorities: Cultural Rights’, Radical Philosophy, 100 (6), 3–6. Bigo, D. (2002) ‘Security and Immigration: Towards a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’, Alternatives: Local, Global, Political, 24 (Supplement), 63–92.

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Cherfi, M. (2004) Statement by Mohamed Cherfi on Taking Refuge in the Saint-Pierre United Church, Quebec City. 14 February. Curran, P. (2003) Ethnic week off to rocky start. Minister questioned in Algerian’s case. Courchesne agrees to meet today to review rejection of activist’s bid for permanent status. Montreal Gazette, 24 November. Freedman, J. and Tarr, C. (2000) ‘The Sans-papières: An Interview with Madjiguène Cissé’, in J. Freedman and C. Tarr (eds) Women, Immigration and Identities in France. Oxford: Berg, pp. 29–38. Hanes, A. (2004) Cops storm church. Nab asylum-seeker in Quebec City. Montreal Gazette, 6 March. Hassner, P. (1998) ‘Refugees: A Special Case for Cosmopolitan Citizenship?’ in D. Archibugi, D. Held, and M. Kohler (eds) Re-Imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 273–286. Honig, B. (1992) ‘Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity’, in J. Butler and J.W. Scott (eds) Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, pp. 215–235. Isin, E.F. (2002) Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Joxe, A. (2002) Empire of Disorder. New York: Semiotext[e]. Lowry, M. and Nyers, P. (2003) ‘Roundtable: The Fight for Refugee and Migrant Rights in Canada’, Refuge: Canada’s Periodical on Refugees, 21 (3), 66–72. Lyotard, J.-F. (1999) ‘The Other’s Rights’, in The Belgrade Circle (eds) The Politics of Human Rights. London: Verso, pp. 181–188. Malkki, L.H. (1996) ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11 (3), 377–404. Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B. (2003) ‘Né qui, né altrove: Migration, Detention, Desertion. A Dialogue’, Borderlands e-Journal, 2 (1), paragraphs: 1–40. Montgomery, S. (2002) Algerians stage talk-in. Visit to Minister’s Riding Headquarters. Women facing deportation refuse to leave office until official hears their case. The Montreal Gazette, 12 October. No One Is Illegal (Montreal) (2003) Mohamed Cherfi, Comité d’Action des Sans-Statut Algeriens, Arrested March 27, 2003. The struggle for full regularization continues. Media release. Nyers, P. (1999) ‘Emergency or Emerging Identities? Refugees and Transformations in World Order’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 28 (1), 1–26. —— (2003) ‘Abject Cosmopolitanism: The Politics of Protection in the Anti-Deportation Movement’, Third World Quarterly, 24 (6), 1069–1093. Papadopoulos, S. (2002) When you can’t go home. The Concordian, 16 October, 1. Podur, J. (2002) Interview with the Action Committee of Non-Status Algerians. rabble.ca 18 December. Pratt, A. (2001) ‘Sovereign Power, Carceral Conditions and Penal Practices: Detention and Deportation in Canada’, Studies in Law, Politics and Society, 23, 45–78. Pugliese, J. (2002) ‘Penal Asylum: Refugees, Ethics, Hospitality’, Borderlands e-Journal, 1 (1), paragraphs: 1–53. Rajaram, P.K. (2002) ‘Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 15 (3), 247–264. Rancière, J. (1999) Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. —— (2001) ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Theory & Event, 5 (3).


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—— (2003) The thinking of dissensus: politics and aesthetics. Paper presented at the conference ‘Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Rancière and the Political’, Goldsmiths College, London, 16–17 September 2003. Rancière, J. and Panagia, D. (2000) ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’, Diacritics, 30 (2), 113–126. Roberts, B. (1988) Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada, 1900–1935. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Schmitt, C. (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sharma, N. (2003) ‘Travel Agency: A Critique of Anti-Trafficking Campaigns’, Refuge: Canada’s Periodical on Refugees, 21 (3), 53–65. Terry, F. (2002) Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Walters, W. (2002) ‘Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens’, Citizenship Studies, 6 (3), 265–292. Wright, C. (2003) ‘Moments of Emergence: Organizing By and With Undocumented and Non-Citizen People in Canada after 9/11’, Refuge: Canada’s Periodical on Refugees, 21 (3), 5–15.

5

Resisting sovereign power Camps in-between exception and dissent Raffaela Puggioni

Introduction The existence of camps for refugees and migrants poses important questions for the way in which the politics of life is organized, and especially for the way modern sovereign states transform undesired groups of people into biological entities and deprive them of their historical and political rights. The aim of this chapter is twofold. It will investigate issues related to the politics of life as located within a well-defined spatial context – the refugee detention centre – the camp, the space of absolute subjugation and domination par excellence. The chapter will also question the extent to which acts of resistance become possible within a space whose politico-juridical structure and geographical setting aim precisely to negate and eliminate any opportunities for the subject to emerge. Moving from a dominant conceptualisation of camps, and of migrants/refugees inside the camps, the chapter will depart from prevailing analyses and explore the extent to which camps might be transformed into spaces of resistance, into spaces where political life struggles against any reduction to bare life, and hence into spaces where sovereign power encounters opposition and challenge. Although much has been written on camps – from the Nazi concentration and death camps, to the refugee and famine-relief camps, to name a few – the vast majority of analyses tend to devote their attention to the way in which life inside becomes meaningless, hopeless and deprived of its human constitutive attributes. In other words, following Giorgio Agamben’s work, life inside the camp is reduced to bare life, to a life that has been deprived of its political defining contents and left nuda (naked) (Agamben 1998a). Agamben’s Homo Sacer represents an important starting point, precisely for the way in which the juridico-political structure of the camp is elaborated, and especially for the emphasis on the modalities according to which life and death are arbitrarily disposed of by camp administrators. Contrary to prevailing refugee literature, the chapter will attempt to move away from a state-centric perspective which always already locates the refugees in the margin, and to contest the images of passivity and non-agency that tend to dominate the International Relations discipline. Drawing on the concept of space as a location that mediates and shapes agency – as elaborated by many postmodern human geographers – I will argue that the space-called-camp cannot be evaluated

Camps in-between exception and dissent 69 simply by looking at its juridico-political structure. An evaluation of the way in which people inside and outside understand, and are engaged with that very space needs to be incorporated. This reading of the camps will allow for the emergence of an unfamiliar and ‘disruptive’ narrative (Shapiro 1997: ix) that will attempt precisely to problematize the way in which life inside the camp is theorized. It will lead to a view of camps as representing more than spaces of marginality and passivity. They are spaces structuring and structured through a complex and varied politics of protection, in which human agency, both articulating and resisting the sovereign production of bare life, becomes possible. The chapter starts with a critical evaluation of Agamben’s conceptualisation of camps, followed by the introduction of a more complex view of space, as developed by postmodern human geographers. The final section looks at some Italian camps – the so-called ‘first reception centres’ and ‘centres for temporary permanence and assistance’ (cpta) – and shows that they are complex spaces that can produce both bare life and active political agency, according to refugees’ selfunderstanding of the camp, and the specific administrative, juridical and social practices of a variety of agencies, including some Italian ‘disobbedienti’, camp administrators, social movements, and the trade union of the police.

Defining the camp The emergence of camps – and especially of new forms of detention for migrants and refugees – has recently attracted considerable academic interest. It is, however, an interest that seems to converge on a specific direction: the politicojuridical structure that makes the camp a space of exception, a space where sovereign power dictates arbitrarily the politics of life and, hence, a space where the distinction between human/inhuman seems no longer to apply (see Hayles 1999; Thrift 2000; Rose 2001; Butler 2002; Edkins 2002). The work of Giorgio Agamben (1995, 1998a,b, 2000, 2002), and particularly his Homo Sacer, has been increasingly used as the main point of reference, for his elaboration of the way in which sovereign power reduces the political qualified life into bare life, into the life of homo sacer (sacred man), as inscribed in the archaic Roman law, whose life ‘may be killed and yet not sacrificed’ (Agamben 1998a: 8). The originality of Agamben’s work lies in his articulation of a set of concepts that examines the production of sovereign power within the camp, the space of exception par excellence where ‘the most absolute conditio inhumana that has ever existed on earth was realised’ (Agamben 1998a: 166). Agamben departs from the Greek distinction between zoi (natural life) and bios (political qualified life), and identifies the inclusion of zoi into the sphere of politics – that is ‘the politicisation of bare life as such’ – at the very heart of modernity (1998a: 4). Moving from a problematization of the Aristotelian definition of the polis, founded on the opposition between life (zin) and good life (eu zin), Agamben investigates the relation between politics and life, and especially the ‘hidden point of intersection between the juridico-institutional and

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the biopolitical models of power’ (1998a: 7, 6). The Foucauldian conceptualization according to which modern politics is signalled by the inclusion of bare life into the polis is, for Agamben, incomplete. For him, the political event of modernity is signalled by the coincidence of the exception with the rule, by the coincidence of bare life with political life, and hence by the emergence of a zone of ‘irreducible’ indistinction where the separation between ‘exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoi, right and fact’ are no longer discernible (1998a: 9). The juridico-political structure of the camp reproduces precisely this very zone of indistinction, a zone where the law is suspended and its suspension allows for the emergence of a space of confinement (the camp), a space where any acts of cruelty and inhumanity are not only possible but, more tragically, they are unpunished and unpunishable. As Agamben has put it: The camp is thus the structure in which the state of exception . . . is realised normally. . . . This is why in the camp . . . every question concerning the legality or illegality of what happened there simply makes no sense. . . . Whoever entered the camp moved in a zone of indistinction between . . . exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the very concepts of subjective and juridical protection no longer made any sense. (1998a: 170, emphasis in original) The leitmotif in Homo Sacer is constructed around the notion of the state of the exception in which the coincidence of political life with bare life is concretized, and the juridico-political structure of the camp represents the most extreme expression of such a coincidence. However, the camp is not simply situated outside the normal juridical order, it is situated within the state of exception, which is configured as a ‘temporary suspension of the rule of law’ (1998a: 169). A more comprehensive account of the state of exception is offered in Agamben’s most recent work, Stato di Eccezione, according to which the state of exception does not represent ‘un diritto speciale’ (a special law), which would place it within the juridical system, but the ‘suspension of the juridical order itself ’1 (2003: 13). The state of exception is identified as a ‘stato kenomatico’ (63), that is, ‘an empty space of law, . . . in which all the juridical determinants . . . are deactivated (66),2 a space which is however ‘neither external not internal to the juridical order’ (33),3 in the sense that the norm is suspended, though not abolished altogether, and such a suspension does not eliminate its connection with the juridical order itself (34). Such a suspension does not take place exclusively in the camp, or in those spaces officially recognized as such. Virtually any space that reproduces that juridico-politico structure ought to be identified as a camp, ‘independent of the kinds of crime that are committed there and whatever its denomination and specific topography’ (1998a: 174). Hence, according to Agamben, once a space is transformed into a camp, into a space of exception, where any distinction between violence and justice no longer operates, life is per se reduced into bare life, and its control resides exclusively on the sovereign power of camp administrators.

Camps in-between exception and dissent 71 Given Agamben’s main focus on the production of bare life, no attempt is made to scrutinize the way in which the ‘intended victims’ allow passively sovereign power to transform their very life into bare life. The camp is understood as the site where sovereign power always already dominates, and this very domination seems to obscure any interest in looking at whether, and to what extent, acts of resistance against the camp might emerge. The example of the tragic internment of some 17,000 Albanians in August 1991 in the stadium of Bari (Italy) seems to exemplify this very lack of interest (1998a: 174). Despite the internment and the inhuman treatments received (Dal Lago 1999: 179–187), important acts of resistance emerged. Some 1,900 Albanians vigorously refused to be deported to their country of origin, and after prolonged fighting against the police forces, obtained temporary permission of stay in respect of the principle of non-refoulment. The modalities of the fight have been reported quite effectively, in an article of the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, whose title offers a clear picture: ‘La Vittoria degli Irreducibili’ (The Victory of the Irreducibles) (La Repubblica 15/08/1991). The very concept that the ‘irreducibles’ have reached a victory – almost a paradox: sovereign power defeated by some homini sacri – is quite telling. It clearly exemplifies the extent to which the fight itself worked as a reminder to the police forces of the rule of law, which was respected only once the ‘internees’ vigorously refused to play their assigned role as silenced and dehumanized victims. Agamben’s work is highly valuable especially because it reminds us ‘what is at stake in the politics of the decision’ as well as ‘how sovereign power operates through the state of emergency’ (Edkins 2000: 20). However, it does not provide for any account of the way in which sovereign domination might be resisted, and in particular it does not account for any resistance from within. This aspect has been recently articulated in Slavoj Zizek’s work, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: there is no place in Agamben for the ‘democratic’ project of ‘renegotiating’ the limit which separates full citizens from Homo sacer by gradually allowing their voices to be heard; his point is, rather, that in today’s ‘post-politics’, the very democratic public space is a mask concealing the fact that, ultimately, we are all Homo sacer. (2002: 100) For Agamben the distinction between full citizens and homo sacer is, hence, not simply one of voice, but one of political voice that is heard. During an interview with Beppe Caccia, Agamben argues that the acts of some Italian citizens, who broke the outside barriers of some camps, have been crucial in contesting the ‘exceptionality’ of those spaces, and in providing the ‘opportunity for these subjects to speak again’(Il Manifesto 24/10/1998).4 If my reading of Agamben is correct, it seems that those refugees and migrants held in the Italian camps have acquired a political voice only thanks to acts of dissent of Italian citizens, who have broken the barriers between the camp and the non-camp, and transformed the voice of the ‘voiceless’ into a political voice. Without disputing the importance of external protests, especially in exporting the issue of the camp in the broader public

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debate, the many attempts of rebellion and evasion organized since 1998, when the camps were first instituted (Act no. 40) should not be underestimated. Affirming that it was only the citizens who allowed ‘these subjects to speak again’ seems to ignore the initial acts of dissent against the camp organized by the ‘trattenuti’. The citizens supported, encouraged, and organized acts of dissent, only after the protests of the insiders gained some visibility in the public sphere. The importance of nationals in protesting and taking side in favour of the ‘internees’ appears in Perera’s recent work – ‘What is a Camp?’ The aim of Perera’s article is not to talk of acts of dissent but indeed of the camp as the space of exception, as the space where everything becomes possible. The key question for Perera is not simply ‘what is a camp’, but how to understand the ‘role of the camp in an Australia that was itself conceived as a permanent holding pen for those excised from citizenship in the body of the British nation?’ (2002a). Through an Agambenian reading of the camp, Perera looks at the Woomera Detention Centre, and demonstrates why its very existence is perceived as a ‘place that is . . . not Australia’, as an exceptional space which is ‘both inside and outside the nation’, and as a space of confinement where the ‘inmates of non-Australia’ ought to be kept separated and away from the eyes of the Australian people. What is interesting to capture from Perera’s article is the way that acts of protest have emerged at the Woomera Detention Centre. These protests started to gain public visibility only after eight years, and then thanks to an impressive national and international media coverage following the Tampa stand-off in August 2001 and the protracted hunger strikes in many Australian camps and especially at Woomera in early 2002. Such protests make the Woomera camp not exclusively a space of detention – ‘a space where the “national” is placed in suspension: not-Australia’ – but also a place of resistance, a resistance that has been organized both inside and outside the camp. Hence, the structure of the camp has not prevented the emergence of acts of resistance, and to use Perera’s words: Woomera, the location of the most sustained protests against the indefinite indiscriminate and compulsory detention of asylum seekers, is also the place where resistance has met with the greatest violence. . . . Woomera has been the scene of repeated breakouts, violence and, most recently, of protracted hunger strikes and extreme acts of protest, including mass lip-sewing. (Perera: 2002a) This refusal to accept that sovereign power can arbitrarily dispose of human life seems to suggest that the camp is not exclusively the site of bare life but perhaps the site where life struggles against any sovereign reduction to bare life. The camp might, hence, be conceptualized as a site in-between exception and resistance, as a site where ‘impossible ethical acts’ become possible (Zizek 2002: 117). What is advocated here is that more attention should be given to the numerous acts of resistance, inside and outside refugee camps, which have recently taken place. These acts have contested the very notion that life inside camps is transformed

Camps in-between exception and dissent 73 always already into bare life. The crucial question is thus not simply what the juridico-political structure of the camp is, but also what makes a camp a site of exception. Is it the suspension of the law? Is it the geography of the camp? Is it the administrators of the camp? Or is it the passivity of the ‘insiders’? Or is it a combination of all these aspects? And last but not least, to what extent does the transformation of life into bare life encounter resistance? To what extent does a subjective understanding of the surrounding space shape and stimulate actions? If life inside the camp depends on ‘the civility and ethical sense of the police’, the mere forced access into a camp does not always already reduce life into bare life. If this is the case, it implies that in order to make sense of what kind of life is ‘created’ within the camp, the analysis might not be exclusively directed toward an exploration of the way in which sovereign power disposes of human life, but that a look at the internal practices, norms and acts of dissent needs to be incorporated.

Re-thinking space Drawing on some of the literature of postmodern human geographers, this section demonstrates that an alternative reading of space – as an ‘enabling site’ that shapes individuals actions and social relationships – can provide some theoretical tools for making sense of acts of dissent within the camps. Hence the question is to evaluate what difference, if any, space makes. In other words, what is going to happen to the analysis of camps if we move away from the prevailing understanding of space as ‘merely a passive, abstract arena on which things happen’ (Keith and Pile 1993a: 2), and start to investigate the extent to which the way in which we engage with the world around us shapes and influences action? As argued in Michael Keith and Steve Pile’s edited volume, Place and the Politics of Identity: ‘space is more than the outcome of social relations and more than one of the dimensions through which the social is constructed. It is an active, constitutive, irreducible, necessary component in the social’s composition’ (1993b: 36). More specifically, the collection of articles in Keith and Pile’s volume attempts to identify new spaces of politics as well as to locate a new politics of identity, through a narrative that looks at three key areas of inquiry: location of struggle, communities of resistance, and political space (1993a: 5). Looking at the intimate connection between place, politics, and identity, the authors demonstrate that ‘all spatialities are political’ in the sense that they represent ‘the (covert) medium and (disguised) expression of asymmetrical relations of power’ (1993b: 38). What seems important to capture from a reading of radical human geography is the idea that spatiality should be thought of ‘in a highly active and politically enabling manner’ rather than as stasis or even as ‘the sphere of the lack of politics’, as for instance implicated in Ernesto Laclau’s work (Massey 1993: 142). Moving from a criticism of Laclau’s New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time (1990), Massey demonstrates why ‘society is necessarily constructed spatially’, and why this spatial construction makes a difference to the way in which society itself is organized. This implies that ‘space and the spatial are also implicated (contra

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Laclau) in the production of history – and thus, potentially in politics’ (1993: 146). The recognition of the spatial construction of society, and hence the spatial construction of all social relations at all levels from the local to the global, presupposes that, all social (and indeed physical) phenomena/activities/relations have a spatial form and a relative spatial location . . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that the social is inexorably also spatial . . . . [S]pace is by its very nature full of power and symbolism, a complex web of relations of domination and subordination, of solidarity and cooperation. (1993: 155–156) A close reading of Massey’s work reveals why we should start questioning prevailing conceptualizations of space and recognize the intimate relation between the spatial and the social. The uniqueness of each place is thus determined by the ‘specificity of the interactions which occur at that location’ (1994: 168). It is these very social interactions that establish the ‘identity’ of the place, an identity which is unfixed, dynamic and non-essentialist. As Massey has put it: [f]irst, what is specific about a place, its identity, is always formed by the juxtaposition and co-presence there of particular sets of social interrelations, . . . Second, the identities of places are inevitably unfixed. They are unfixed in part precisely because the social relations out of which they are constructed are themselves by their very nature dynamic and changing. (1994: 168–169) What emerges from this reading of space is the recognition that the uniqueness of each space is determined by the human relations that take place within that spatiality as well as by the effects that those very interactions produce. Hence, as suggested in Barbara Bender’s ‘Time and Landscape’ (2002), human actions are intimately connected with the way people engage with the world around them, and it is this very subjective understanding of space and of spatial relations that provokes and/or impedes a specific action and reaction. As Bender has put it: ‘[l]andscapes are created out of people’s understanding and engagement with the world around them. . . . Landscapes provoke memory, facilitate (or impede) action’ (2002: 103). The recognition of a subjective understanding of landscape presupposes, consequently, that ‘[h]uman interventions are done not so much to the landscape as with the landscape, and what is done affects what can be done’ (2002: 104). Corsín A. Jiménez goes even further and proposes a reading of space ‘as a capacity’ (2003). Jiménez’s article moves from two very specific questions: ‘[w]hat happens when people’s identity is not land-related?’, and what happens ‘[w]hen a land holds no values, no memories, no history for the people that inhabit it?’ (2003: 137). The author tries to make sense of the way social relationships are organized and shaped in the city of Antofagasta, in the desert of

Camps in-between exception and dissent 75 Atacama, Chile. More specifically, he looks at the way in which social relations flourish exclusively within a circumscribed area located in the city centre, while the rest of the city is understood simply as a ‘non-place’ in the sense that people ‘act as if the city was not there for them, as if there was nothing to care about, nothing to which to relate’ (2003: 144). Departing from the Durkheimian legacy, Jiménez argues that space can neither be understood as ‘an a priori category of meaning’, nor as the site to which people relate according simply to the territorial characteristic of the space itself (2003: 138–139). According to the author, the dominant theorising understands space as, the setting where social relationships take ‘place’ . . . space is taken to be a given, irreducible ontological category; the (geographical) framework of action; and social relationships are seen as something exterior to and distinct from the setting where they take ‘place’, no matter how this setting is thereafter signified or constructed. (2003: 140, emphasis added) Hence, if social relationships are intimately connected to the space where these relationships take place – a space which is understood as representing more than the mere geographical location – then, social relationships are themselves ‘spatial’ relations, in the sense that space itself shapes and influences people’s sociality. Moving from the work of the anthropologist Nancy Munn (1990), according to whom it is ‘practices that make space’, in the sense that practices come into existence as ‘spatio-temporal “events” ’, Jiménez conceptualizes space not merely as a landscape or a place, but indeed as a ‘condition or faculty – a capacity – of social relationships’ (2003: 141, 140). The concept of space as a capacity transforms space into an important dimension of sociality, in the sense that space is not merely the geographical framework where social relationships happen, as space is itself ‘an aspect of those relationships’ (2003: 150). A reading of space as capacity allows for making sense of the way in which the inhabitants of Antofagasta relate to the surrounding territory and especially why two very specific environments located in the city centre – Avenida del Brasil and Líder – are understood as the only spaces where ‘expression of agency and identity’ can properly flourish, as compared to the rest of the city which is perceived as a site where no social interactions can take place. What is interesting to capture from postmodern geographers is not exclusively their understanding of space as implicated in the very production of human interactions, but also their attempt to break with prevailing conceptualisations of spatial metaphors as embedded in the concept of domination, such as a ‘geometrics of domination, centre-margin, open-closed, inside-outside, global-local; liminal space, third space, not-space, impossible space’ (Keith and Pile 1993: 1). The important point is the reading of the margin as a location of struggle. As suggested by Bell Hooks, in her Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, thanks to a re-contextualisation of spatiality, the margin is transformed into a space of radical openness where a counter-hegemonic discourse can emerge and open up

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new spatial opportunities for speaking up and acting from the margins. As Hooks has put it: Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited colonized people. . . . I want to say that these margins have been both sites of repression and sites of resistance . . . . Marginality is the space of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there. (1990: 149–152) Although the margins and the counter-hegemonic resistance that Bell refers to are connected to the colonizer/colonized traditional opposition, I am interested in looking at the way in which such an understanding might provide an alternative and radical reading of the margin (i.e. of the camp) as a space of resistance, which opens up possibilities for inventing new subjectivities that attempt (though not always successfully) to resist domination and subordination. The very invocation – ‘marginality is the space of resistance. Enter that space. Let us meet there’ – is quite powerful, and it might be read as an exhortation not simply to redefine the spatial opposition margin/centre but also to enter into a new location of struggle. The idea of entering the margin seems to imply that there are struggles that can be properly fought only by moving away from the centre, and that these struggles are of concern to anyone and not simply those already on the margins. This is precisely what has happened for instance within the Italian context when a national campaign against detention centres has been organized. What was crucial during the campaign was not simply the questioning and protesting against the inhuman conditions inside the camps but, more importantly, entering the camps, communicating with the ‘internees’ and organising a common struggle with them.

Resisting Italian camps A look at some Italian camps, and especially at some acts of dissent, will attempt to demonstrate why human actions and reactions are intimately connected to the way people understand the surrounding space. Such an analysis will allow us to contest prevailing narratives that overwhelmingly picture the ‘insiders’ as silent objects, as well as enabling us to combine an alternative reading of space with acts of dissent. To begin with, it is important to draw a crucial distinction between the so-called ‘first reception centres’ and cpta, whose aims and organizations are juridically different, as established by Act no. 40 which first instituted them in 1998. The rationale of first reception centres was to offer reception to those just arrived in the country and keep them in the camps until a request of asylum was submitted and permission of stay was issued. The cpta had a complete different aim, to keep under strict surveillance those who have been caught while living in the country without legal permission – the so-called clandestini – until an order of expulsion could be carried out, within no longer than thirty days.5 Generally

Camps in-between exception and dissent 77 speaking those who reached the Italian southern coastlines in cargo-boats were more likely to experience the camps than those who reached the peninsula via other routes. At that time, the forced residence of asylum seekers within reception camps was not understood as part of the asylum procedure. The existence of reception camps was rarely contested by asylum seekers themselves, who were more prone to criticize the internal conditions of the camp than to contest their 2 or 3 weeks forced stay in the centre. This understanding was openly manifested during the many interviews I conducted between May and June 2001 with Kurdish asylum seekers. The stories I have been told when I first visited the reception camp of S. Anna – in Crotone, Calabria – were certainly not what I expected. Although the intention at that time was to carry out individual interviews with as many Kurdish asylum seekers as I could through the help of an interpreter, I soon found myself engaged with a spontaneous group conversation with more than twenty Kurds. While my interest was in receiving information on their conditions within the camp, their interest was in delivering another message: the conditions experienced by the Kurds in Turkey. From their perspective, there was very little to say about the camp, because they had no complaints, no reasons even to contest their being there. As expressed by some of them: we received a good reception when we arrived here in Italy. They provided for all our needs and equipment. . . . we are very happy in Italy . . . . We heard about Italy in a wonderful way. We have experienced this . . . . We haven’t met the police very directly; only when our fingerprints were taken, but they were kind. But if they were the Turkish police, even to take our fingerprints we would have to go through a torturous few hours.6 Such a generalized positive understanding of the camp needs to be contextualized with that particular camp at that particular time. The Kurds’ stay in the camp was understood to be an acceptable part of the process of asylum, and they were well aware that they were going to be free to move anywhere in the country after a short period of time. Although they had already spent thirteen days in the camp, they were confident that their stay was going to finish within the following week. Their stay was considered as positive compared with the dreadful journey recently experienced and the serious risk of death after the members of the crew abandoned the cargo-boat before it reached the Italian coastline. In their eyes, the Italian police had saved their lives. They trusted the information they received from the personnel of the Italian Refugee Council and from the police; information that was constantly confirmed by the interpreter, who was a refugee herself and had already experienced the asylum procedure during the previous year. The trauma of the journey as well as the hardship suffered in Turkey was still quite strong, and these memories played a crucial role in shaping their understanding of the camp. Moreover, according to the personnel of the Italian Refugee Council, those who were in charge of the camp, and the Prefect in primis, did not consider S. Anna as a camp – they aimed to accommodate people, provide food,

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medical care, and clothes until the necessary paper work was ready. The close collaboration between the personnel of the Italian Refugee Council, Red Cross and the Prefecture in order to meet the basic needs of the asylum seekers exemplifies the way in which the camp was perceived by the administrators and such a perception played a key and positive role in shaping refugees’ understanding of the camp. A completely different story has been told by those asylum seekers I interviewed in Rome at the so-called Villaggio Globale (Global Village), who have tragically experienced the reception centre – recently converted into a cpta – of Regina Pacis, Lecce, Puglia. What I found quite interesting was the interview with Ibrahim, a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who experienced a Turkish prison for quite some time. He demonstrated a strong optimism and willingness to adapt to the Italian system. Despite the many difficulties of living in Rome, given the poor reception system, he convincingly advocated that a ‘revolutionary’ like himself possesses the capacity to find the right solution and to overcome any problems even from scratch. Such a ‘revolutionary’ understanding was completely lacking during his forced stay in the camp of Regina Pacis. His attitude was to remain silent, away from trouble, and wait patiently to become free again. The camp was not at all understood as a space in which to react, and the protests organized by some were perceived as unnecessary and inadequate. Such an attitude can be explained by looking at the way in which the camp of Regina Pacis was organized and especially the clear intention of the administrators – officially the Prefect, unofficially a branch of the Church – to transform refugees’ life into bare life. A look at the description of that camp produced just a few years earlier by a group of students, who have collected their impressions and put them in the form of a diary, exemplifies the (non)value of life inside (Perrone 1999). The first impression was of entering into a space in between the formal and informal, regular and irregular. It was dominated by a confusion of roles, the absence of the application of the law, under strict surveillance by the police who refused entry to anyone who failed to possess the pass issued by the Catholic organization Caritas. It was a space in which there was neither any sign of personnel of the Italian Refugee Council nor of interpreters (Perrone 1999: 38). From the description, the centre resembles clearly a camp in the Agambenian sense: the geographical structure, the inhuman relations, the absence of law, and the passivity of refugees transformed Regina Pacis into a space of exception par excellence. ‘Insiders’ were completely unaware of their destiny, and left in subhuman living conditions. The camp was humid, dirty, unhealthy, and highly desolating. Refugees spent their days simply sitting or lying on their beds, which also acted as their ‘dining table’; the bed linen was used as towels as well; and the general hygienic conditions were deplorable (1999: 38–40). The refugees’ lives were transformed into bare life, and this very transformation had prevented any reaction: ‘[t]hey all were laying down in the beds as if they had no aspirations, no life, no soul and no expectations’ (1999: 41).7 Although the regular presence in the camp of the students created some hope, such as by organizing a hunger strike or writing on a piece of clipboard ‘we want our liberty’ (vogliamo la nostra libertà), such acts were immediately punished (1999: 46). The impossibility of communicating

Camps in-between exception and dissent 79 with anyone on the outside or of receiving help and advice, seemed to nullify even the few acts of courage demonstrated by some refugees. The students themselves have not contested what was happening in the camp at all, following the dominant understanding according to which what was problematic was not the existence of refugee camps as such but the conditions inside. What was needed was, hence, to ensure that camp administrators complied with the law, which would have guaranteed more humane conditions. A reading of national and local newspapers confirms the prevailing understanding of the camps, whose inhuman conditions were experienced especially in many cpta, where attempts to escape – such as by setting the mattress or bed linen on fire, which caused several deaths on different occasions – were constantly reported. It was this very logic – of transforming the camps into humane sites – that has led the legislator to introduce new measures that specify the building requirements, safety and hygienic conditions, not to mention the introduction of the Carta dei Diritti e dei Doveri (Charter of Rights and Duties). The recent report produced by Doctors Without Borders continues to follow this logic. Although the report contains a detailed description of all Italian cpta, the interest was in looking at the way in which prevailing norms were respected, demonstrating very little interest in communicating with those inside (Medici Senza Frontiere 2004). However, despite the many who continue to understand the cpta as necessary and even normal, some important changes have occurred since 2001, when the new immigration bill (now Act no. 189) encouraged a great part of the population, including many migrants, to organize public protests against the measures that the Berlusconi government intended to introduce. The new legislation – known as the Bossi-Fini Act – has introduced, among others, many measures that severely punish anyone found without a regular permission to stay, without distinguishing between new and old entrants. More specifically, the Act has determined the paradoxical situation of expelling not newcomers but migrants who have been living in Italy for quite some years, who have been unable to renew their permit of sojourn. It is they who have been subjected, most recently, to expulsion and deportation. What has changed, since summer 2001, is the emergence of a ‘permanent mobilisation against the Bossi-Fini laws’, a mobilization in which migrants play a key role, especially since the G8 in Genoa which signalled ‘the first encounter between the global movement and grassroots migrant organizations’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2003). Within such a climate of political ‘revival’, many local movements started to adopt a more active approach against the existence of the camps, which encouraged a direct contact with those ‘trattenuti’ in the cpta. This resulted in an increased number of protests against the camps as well as in an increased number of charges against camp administrators and police forces. The determination of many doctors and lawyers who started to listen to those kept in the camps and to create a climate of trust with them has allowed the voices of the insiders to become stronger and more courageous. It is this combined effort that has led to the closure of some camps and trials against some administrators, including those controlling Regina Pacis (Leccesera 23/07/2003; Quotidiano di Lecce 27/10/2003; Il Manifesto 24/01/2004; Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno 27/05/2004). It was within this political climate that the slogan

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‘né qui né altrove’ (neither here, nor elsewhere) emerged, and as expressed by Sandro Mezzadra: The 30 November protest in Torino was probably the largest political action ever held against the detention system in Europe. . . . By using the slogan ‘Né qui, né altrove,’ we were indicating that the protest was a matter of principle, a stance against the system of detention as such and not just against one particular centre. (Mezzadra and Neilson 2003) It was under the slogan ‘né qui né altrove’ that many acts of open dissent have been organized both inside and outside the cpta all over the country, many of which have been organized and conducted by the so-called ‘disobbedienti’. The many articles posted on the web-page of the so-called ‘Progetto Melting Pot Europa’ offer a clear picture of the many protests (www.meltingpot.org). The direct participation of many Italians as well as of many migrants’ organizations has been crucial in bringing the issue of the camps into the wider public debate. It was the protests initiated inside, which often caused many serious injuries, that have forced the outside world to open its eyes and personally investigate the way in which life was treated inside. This external interest has certainly had an impact on the way the ‘trattenuti’ have understood and resisted the camps. It was also within this political climate that some verbal protests of the SAP – the trade union of the police – could take place. While on the one hand the police are requested to ensure that the ‘trattenuti’ are kept in the cpta under constant surveillance, on the other hand the ‘trattenuti’ are not legally defined as ‘detainees’. Hence, if the ‘trattenuti’ are not juridically considered as detainees, their moving away cannot be legally defined as an escape. Although the police are willing to perform their general duties in terms of security and surveillance, they have requested exemption from the surveillance of the cpta, given the uncertainties of that role.

Some concluding remarks What the preceding pages have attempted to demonstrate is that a reading of the camp as a site in between exception and dissent allows for an understanding of the way in which insiders and outsiders understand the space-called-camp and how such an understanding influences and shapes their actions. Building on an alternative understanding of space, as suggested by many postmodern human geographers, it has been argued that acts of dissent within the camps can best be explored once a more dynamic and subjective conceptualization of space is introduced. If space shapes human relations as well as the human capacity to (re)act, it implies that a camp – despite its being always already a space of exception – is more than a geographical location and politico-juridical structure where life is reduced into bare life. A space is transformed into a camp according to the human/inhuman relationships that are established between the ‘administrators’ and the ‘victims’, in the context of the prevailing norms and practices, the

Camps in-between exception and dissent 81 structure of space itself, and the way in which people are ‘engaged’ with life inside and outside. Such an engagement makes a difference in the way sovereign power is exercized and resisted. Although the juridical-political structure of the camp enormously influences the way in which life is treated, people develop a different reading of the camp, and such a different understanding of the surrounding space is crucial in provoking and/or impeding specific actions and reactions.

Notes 1 ‘Sospensione dello stesso ordine giuridico’. All the translations from Italian into English are mine. The original is, however, always reproduced. 2 ‘Uno spazio vuoto di diritto, . . . in cui tutte le determinazioni giuridiche . . . sono disattivate’. 3 ‘Né esterno né interno all’ordinamento giuridico’. 4 ‘La possibilità per questi soggetti di tornare a parlare’. 5 The new immigration Act (no. 189, 30/07/2002) has extended the limit to sixty days. 6 The conversation was held in Turkish and translated into Italian by Halise. The quotation provided here has been translated by Mustafa Ongan from Turkish. 7 ‘Erano tutti distesi sui letti come se fossero privi di aspettative, di vita, senz’anima e prospettive’.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (1995) ‘We Refugees’, trans. by Michael Rocke, Symposium, 49 (2): 114–119. —— (1998a) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —— (1998b) Quel che resta di Auschwitz: l’archivio e il testimone. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. —— (2000) Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. —— (2002) L’aperto: l’uomo e l’animale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. —— (2003) Stato di eccezione. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Agier, Michael (2002) ‘Between War and City. Towards an Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps’, trans. by Richard Nice and Loïc Wacquant, Ethnography, 3 (3), 317–341. Bender, Barbara (2002) ‘Time and Landscape’,Current Anthropology, 43 (Supplement), 103–112. Bertolino, Valeria and Serraino, Sergio (2003) ‘Storie da un lager’, http://www.malamente. com/pubblicazioni/vulpitta.htm (accessed 20 July 2004). Bleiker, R. (2000) Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boujbiha, A. (2002) ‘My Name is Asylum and Other Poems’, Borderlands e-journal, 2 (1), http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/boujbiha_poems.html (accessed 8 July 2004). Butler, Judith (2002) ‘Guantánamo Limbo’, The Nation, 1 April, 20–24. Dal Lago, Alessandro (1998) The Impact of Migrants on Italian Society. The Italian Case. EC-DG XII – TSER. —— (1999) Non-persone: l’exclusione dei migranti in una società globale. Milano: Feltrinelli. Edkins, Jenny (2000) ‘Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp’, Alternatives: Social Transformation and Humane Governance, 25 (1), 3–25. —— (2002) ‘Forget Trauma? Responses to September 11’, International Relations, 16 (2), 243–256. Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno (2004) ‘Nella chiusura delle indagini solo i nomi di Don Cesare e dello zio’, 27 May.

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Haddad, Emma (2003) ‘The Refugee: The Individual Between Sovereigns’, Global Society, 17 (3), 297–322. Hayles, N.K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hendrie, Barbara. (1997) ‘Knowledge and Power: A Critique of an International Relief Operation’, Disasters, 21 (1), 57–76. Hooks, Bell (1990) Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Il Manifesto (1998) ‘Non più cittadini, ma solo nuda vita’, 24 October. —— (2001) ‘Il clandestino non esiste per legge’, 9 August. —— (2003) ‘No ai lager per migranti’, 29 June. —— (2003) ‘Rivolta con fuga dal cpt’, 31 July. —— (2003) ‘Torino, scappano 22 migranti, 11 riacciuffati. An: i militari nei centri’, 31 July. —— (2003) ‘In quindici giorni quattro giovani detenuti nel cpt di San Foca hanno tentato il suicidio’, 23 October. —— (2003) ‘Cpt alla sbarra processati i gestori del Regina Pacis’, 29 October. —— (2004) ‘Alla sbarra il pestaggio al cpt di Lecce’, 24 January. Il Resto del Carlino (2003) ‘Cpt colabrodo, i leghisti sono pronti a “fare le ronde” ’, 3 July. Jiménez, Corsín A. (2003) ‘On Space as a Capacity’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 9, 137–153. Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (1993a) ‘Introduction Part I. The Politics of Place’, in Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 1–21. —— (1993b) ‘Introduction Part II. The Place of Politics’, in Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 22–40. Laclau, Ernesto (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. London: Verso. La Repubblica (1991) ‘ “Ecco perché rimangono qui”. La vittoria degli irriducibili’, 15 August. —— (1998) ‘Lampedusa, chiuso il centro della rivolta’, 30 July. —— (1999) ‘Rogo nel centro d’accoglienza. Trovato il responsabile’, 29 December. —— (2000) ‘Ancora tensione immigrati. Fuga di massa da Palermo’, 31 January. Leccesera (2003) ‘Regina Pacis: “avevamo ragione” ’, 23 July. Liberazione (2003) ‘Cpt di Lamezia, tentata fuga dalla disperazione’, 17 August. Malkki, Liisa H. (1996) ‘Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization’, Cultural Anthropology, 11 (3), 377–404. Massey, Doreen (1993) ‘Politics and Space/Time’, in Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (eds) Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 141–161. —— (ed.) (1994) ‘A Place Called Home?’, in Massey, Doreen (ed.) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 157–173. Medici Senza Frontiere (2004) ‘Rapporto sui centri di permanenza temporanea e assistenza’, http://www.msf.it/msfinforma/dossier/missione_italia/CPT_FINALE.pdf (accessed 25 July 2004). Mezzadra, Sandro (2001) Diritto di fuga: migrazioni, cittadinanza, globalizzazione. Verona: Ombre Corte. Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett (2003) ‘Né qui, né altrove – Migration, Detention, Desertion: A Dialogue’, Borderlands E-Journal, 2 (1), http://www.borderlandsejournal. adelaide.edu.au/vol2no1_2003/mezzadra_neilson.html (accessed 16 June 2004). Munn, Nancy (1990) ‘Constructing Regional Worlds in Experience: Kula Exchange, Witchcraft and Gawan Local Events’, Man (NS), 25 (1), 1–17.

Camps in-between exception and dissent 83 Nascimbene, Bruno (2003) ‘Nuove Norme in Materia di Immigrazione. La Legge BossiFini: Perplessità e Critiche’, Corriere Giuridico, 4, 532–540. Perera, Suvendrini (2002a) ‘What is a Camp?’, Borderlands E-Journal, 1 (1), http://www. borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html (accessed 8 July 2004). —— (2002b) ‘A Line in the Sea: The Tampa, Boat Stories and the Border’, Cultural Studies Review, 8 (1), 11–27. —— (2003) ‘The Impossible Refugee of Western Desire’, http://www.lines-magazine.org/ textnov03/suvendrini.htm (accessed 24 May 2004). Perrone, Luigi (1999) ‘Diari dai centri di prima accoglienza’, Critica Marxista, 1–2, 38–53. Quotidiano di Lecce (2003) Abusi al Regina Pacis? II PM chiede il rocesso, 27 October. Radcliffe, Sarah A. (1993) ‘Women’s Place/El Lugar de Mujeres: Latin America and the Politics of Gender Identity’, in Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 102–116. Rajaram, Prem K. (2002) ‘Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 15 (3), 247–264. Rose, Nikolas (2001) ‘The Politics of Life Itself ’, Theory, Culture and Society, 18 (6), 1–30. Shapiro, Michael (1997) Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Simon, Jonathan (1998) ‘Refugees in a Carceral Age: The Rebirth of Immigration Prisons in the United States’, Public Culture, 10 (3), 577–607. Smith, Neil and Katz, Cindi (1993) ‘Grounding Metaphor. Towards a Spatialized Politics’, in Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 67–83. Soja, Edward and Hooper, Barbara (1993) ‘The Spaces that Difference Makes. Some Notes on the Geographical Margins of the New Cultural Politics’ in Keith, Michael and Pile, Steve (eds), Place and the Politics of Identity. London: Routledge, pp. 183–205. Sossi, Frederica (2002) Autobiografie negate. Immigrati nei lager del presente. Roma: Manifestolibri. Thrift, N. (2000) ‘Still Life in Nearly Present Time: The Object of Nature’, Body & Society, 6 (3–4), 34–57. Zincone, Giovanna (1992) Da sudditi a cittadini. Bologna: Il Mulino. —— (2001) Secondo rapporto sull’integrazione degli immigrati in Italia. Bologna: Il Mulino. Zizek Slavoj (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.

Legislation Act no. 40, 06/03/1998, ‘Disciplina dell’immigrazione e norme sulla condizione dello straniero’, Gazzetta Ufficiale, no. 59, 12/3/1998. Legislative decree (D.Lgs.) no. 286, 25/07/1998, ‘Testo Unico delle disposizioni concernenti la disciplina dell’immigrazione e norme sulla condizione dello straniero’, Gazzetta Ufficiale, no. 191, 18/08/1998. Act no. 394, 31/08/1999, ‘Regolamento recante norme di attuazione del Testo Unico delle disposizioni concernenti la disciplina dell’immigrazione e norme sulla condizione dello straniero, a norma dell’articolo 1, comma 6, del decreto legislativo 25 luglio 1998, n. 286’, Gazzetta Ufficiale, no. 258, 03/11/1999. Act no. 189, 30/07/2002, ‘Modifica alla normativa in materia di immigrazione e di asilo’, Gazzetta Ufficiale, no. 199, 26/08/2002.

6

Protection Security, territory and population1 Didier Bigo

This chapter summarises the outcome of research carried out from 1998 to 2000 by the Centre d’Etudes sur les Conflits for the Ministry of Defence concerning the role of the ‘gendarmes’ (civilian police with military status) as the main force in what is called the ‘function of protection’ (Bigo et al. 2000). It deals with the relation between defence, security and protection and tries to understand the social practices of surveillance and control which are embedded in labelling an action one of ‘protection’. I will argue that the definition of ‘protection’ is the object of intense struggles between the gendarmes and the Army, and that these struggles depend on the different ethics and norms of the two institutions. They also depend critically on the habitus of the individuals and their competitive interests inside the field of (in)security professionals. From this I develop a more general argument about the contemporary meaning of protection and the different discursive and social practices attached to the notion by distinguishing three meanings of it. The main arguments of the chapter are that the individualistic framing of protection in terms of providing a sacred place where someone could find refuge has been seriously challenged in recent history. Also the nationalistic framing of protection as the defence of the territory and the nation has also been under considerable pressure in the last two decades. Finally, I argue that the dominant contemporary framing of protection is to monitor individuals and groups at a distance. Both sanctuary for individuals and defence of the national territory have been increasingly overshadowed by technologies of filtering, channelling and surveillance of individuals for the purpose of their own protection. I develop this argument in three steps. First, I look at the competition between the gendarmes and the army over who is in charge of the ‘protection of the national territory’. Its main purpose is to show that the concept of protection is contested in the field of security professionals. It is the stake in a struggle over who has the monopoly to define what ‘protecting the national territory’ means. Then I will discuss at a more theoretical level the different narratives which are involved in the use of the term protection and the ambiguities between protection as a sacred duty, protection as interposition and struggle against an aggressor, and protection as monitoring and surveillance of the protected for their own good. Finally I will analyse the different technologies of protection and how they relate to one another, as well as their place in different security dispositifs (sovereignty,

Protection: concept and technique

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disciplinarisation of the individual, biopolitics) in the contemporary, mainly European, context.2

Defence and function of protection The French white paper on Defence of 1994 was an important one. It was the first one to be published after the end of bipolarity and it tried to ‘rethink’ what ‘defence’ might mean when it is no longer clear who the enemy is and when new risks and threats coming from multiple micro-actors are replacing it. The main outlines of the white paper of 1994 are still in use in contemporary French military doctrine. In particular, the notion of defence is divided into four parts or ‘functions’: deterrence, prevention, projection, and protection. The white paper is quite clear about what deterrence is and it continues with the idea that weapons of mass destruction will not disappear and that deterrence is still valuable. It insists on prevention by emphasising the idea that the new threats are less lethal but more diverse and the problem is not the accumulation of force but knowledge about the enemy; hence, the role of the intelligence services needs to be enhanced. The notion of projection abroad is presented as the new key concept in the White paper. It is the basis for intervening in failed states, carrying out humanitarian operations, and restoring, or installing democracy. Projection presupposes a rapid deployment force and a readiness not only to fight but also to rehabilitate, to organise civil-military operations, and to convince civilians – including journalists and NGOs – to be part of operations under control of the Army. The technicalities of projection and the necessary autonomy of the French force of projection are discussed in the White Paper at great length; more so than the ambivalences that arise from seeking to simultaneously fight and help people. However, with regard to the latter an informal neo-doctrine was formulated by General Franquart which has ‘adequate level of force to master violence’ as its key concept (Franquart 1999). The projection function includes at some point the idea of projection inside the French territory with a rapid deployment force in case of ecological disaster and a public emergency rescue team (in the name of the civil defence), but it is opposed by the prefets,3 the gendarmes, and the police force. They were not keen on this notion of projection inside the French territory because it puts the military at the centre of coordination in these cases. One of the arguments was that it would interfere with the task of protection. But protection remains a rather ambiguous notion in the White Paper. The function of protection is first of all defined negatively in the white paper. It is a residual category that refers to everything which is not covered by the three other functions. However, a more positive definition of the concept of protection exists: the protection of the Nation, which is related to the DOT (défense opérationnelle du territoire/operational defence of the territory). The general understanding was to consider that protection is linked with the defence of territory and borders. This notion gives the Army a priority role, in coordination with the

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Air Force and the Navy. It subordinates the police force and the gendarmerie to the military in case of aggression against the French territory that threatens the survival of the nation. Of course this role needs to be validated by the civilian political powers, along the lines of a specific coordination between the regional quarters of the army and the prefets. The gendarmes have a different vision of protection. They insist that protection has to do with the population and not the borders of French national territory. In this reading, the object of protection is the population in general – and victims in particular. By delineating protection in such a way the distinction between police and military tasks is blurred by indicating that everything the gendarmes do is related to ‘protection’ – including traffic police, local police, and criminal investigation, as well as their role in the surveillance of potential terrorists and organised crime leaders. ‘Protection’ is their job. So the function of protection, where it includes the task of surveillance of national territory, needs to be at least shared with the Army. An important factor in this struggle was that after the end of bipolarity and the professionalisation of the French army, which implied restriction in the number of personnel and an overcrowded generation of officers where a new colonel has fewer people under his command than a captain had before, the Army faced a serious challenge to its status of being the major force in comparison with the Navy, the Air Force, and even the gendarmerie. The discussions about what is the object of protection (territory or population), about the difference between inside and outside, and the specific location of borders and who needs to be in charge, about protection, vulnerability, threat, and survival became more and more bitter. Here, it is interesting to note that, even if the idea of protection was always present in military doctrine, it was not conceptualised as a strategic function in itself. And it is only after the end of bipolarity, because of the necessity to rethink deterrence, that the notion of protection was promoted as one of the main concepts organising military life. The notion of protection in military doctrine is the daughter of the so-called humanitarian moment, where the key concepts are vulnerability, peace consolidation, and peace enforcement. The so-called Petersberg missions which include all the actions other than war that the EU forces can undertake under the second pillar represent in some way this vision of protection without direct enemies. In these tasks, the military forces said they are used to protect the population from various threats. They are the friends of civilians against the barbarians who are the armed civilians, that is, religious or ethnic minorities manipulated by violent and fanatical rebels or terrorists. They are part of the civilised part of the world and their uniforms are signs of that. They act ‘whitely’ and have blue helmets. In contrast, the concept of protection defended by the gendarmerie seeks to differentiate itself by explicitly incorporating the public safety dimension along the following lines: The function of protection is articulated around three entities. First the protection of the citizen as an individual, understood as the safeguarding of the fundamental right to the integrity of the person and of private assets, of


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the free exercise of public freedoms. Second the protection of the Nation State, aiming at the safeguarding of freedom and continuity of its action, of the operational capacity of the organisations essential for the safeguard of the population and of the life of the nation, and of the link between Army and Nation. Third, the protection of spaces with a view to guaranteeing the integrity of national territory and of European internal security space, the free provision of transportation routes, the safeguard of the environment, the security of land and maritime approaches.4 This understanding of the protection function has become central for the gendarmerie which wants to locate all its activities under it and tries to monopolise the claim to be the sole protector if the Army agrees to take charge of the three other functions: deterrence, projection and – with the secret services – prevention. As the gendarmerie says in the same document: In the absence of a major and direct external threat to our borders, the protection function has first to answer to the increasing diversification of the threats and risks, taking into account the emergence of phenomena newly connected with the transformation of society (massive seasonal migrations, development of broad suburban areas, desertification of certain spaces, people ageing, increase in juvenile delinquency . . . ; consecutive effects of the increase in international trade and globalisation (migratory flows, mafia networks, major criminality, computer interferenc. . . .); strategies of destabilisation of French and European spaces (terrorism, ethnic or official violence . . . and the temptation of regionalist separatism). The gendarmerie succeeded in 1998 in becoming the lead agency for the protection function but only for the DOT redefined in a narrow way. They were obliged to abandon their claims to autonomy in respect of the Army. The Army on the other hand has accepted the discourse of the gendarmerie by linking protection with critical vulnerability, infrastructures and information network protection, in the name of an internal security threat, of an infiltrated enemy and the fact that to protect the nation, the protector needs to monitor in detail the protected group to avoid infiltration. Since 1998 they have developed a discourse of high technology surveillance redeploying some of the technologies of the cold war for the surveillance of migratory and tourist flows, for computerised information flows, and even for money laundering. They were helped by the private companies working in that area and by the development of a private security industry (both military and police oriented). The latter launched campaigns in favour of this way of protecting people by surveillance and the monitoring of movements, especially across borders, but also at the local level between troubled urban areas and the other parts of cities. The surveillance of the football World Cup in Paris was organised along these lines. The events of September 2001 have boosted this conception of protection that focuses on organising the life of the protected, infiltration and merging the

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protector and the protected in one body against the infiltrated enemy. Protection has become a synonym for internal security. The French military has in that sense strongly opposed the discourses of some of their American counterparts which wanted to safeguard the US from terrorism by the creation of a stronger border and by the creation of a homeland security department which will be committed only to the surveillance of borders. The military will focus on attacks against the enemy outside of the national territory and will eventually participate in the surveillance of the enemy within. Tom Ridge, as the person responsible for Homeland Security in the US, has also struggled against the idea that protection is only protection at the borders. By redefining the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) and border patrol tasks he has tried to put the homeland security department in charge of borders both inside and outside. He tried to compete against the FBI in the search for the infiltrated enemy and with the Pentagon and State Department for diplomatic initiatives with allies, especially with the UK and Australia. Establishing the frontier as a thin line where forces must be concentrated to enclose the protected group is largely finished as a technique. The leading idea is to individualise groups as groups at risk or risky groups and to monitor them (even in the same data bank as the one of Europol where the victims of terrorism and the terrorist groups are in the same register). I will not discuss here the details of this competition and its outcome (Bigo 2000), but it is interesting to see how the quarrel fits with the idea of a transformation of a territorial state to a population state developed by Michel Foucault in his seminal course Security, Territory and Population (Foucault 2004). And it is this transformation that I want to highlight in this chapter by looking at changes in discourses and technologies of protection. A series of questions arise from the analysis so far: Who or what is the object of protection and is the protected passive or not? Is the protected an individual or a population? Is it the people, the nation or a group? What is the role of the freedom of movement in relation to protection? Why is protection different from survival? Different answers to these questions characterise the contest of the concept of protection. There are three main discourses of protection that are present in the competition between the (in)security professionals that has been referred to in this section. And these three discourses generate by their combination four different techniques. The first discourse is the traditional discourse of the protection of the territory and the idea that the State and the people are only one entity, one ‘body’ with different organs. This one is present in both the military and gendarmerie, even after the latter tried to reframe the concept of protection. Protection is linked with a clear cut inside/outside. The priority is to guard the borders against the outside with the possibility of sealing the border in case of emergency. Thus the Prince is both the people and their government, and the idea is that sovereignty is harmed if the borders are not protected. The Army has the duty to repel the enemy, to block outsiders before they enter, and the secret services have to watch the infiltrated enemy (the spy and the traitor). The main threat is the invasion of the territory by a motorised and heavy military force and a fifth column helping them (Ceyhan and Peries 2001).


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The second discourse is still about territory but less about threats and battles against an enemy. It is a more inward-looking narrative about vulnerability. As the danger is not clearly identified and as it is difficult to anticipate it, the best solution is to reinforce protection by limiting the vulnerability of infrastructures, by prioritising specific zones of high and low surveillance, and by differentiating inside the territory between what is important and what is not. It is more a disciplinary moment which disaggregates the body of the Prince by protecting some parts better than others. The two narratives could go hand by hand but they are often conflated. Here the movement of population crossing the border both ways is possible but some areas are restricted, some critical infrastructures are ‘unreachable’. Part of the Army is moving towards this narrative and wants to have a more ‘analytical’ eye. The third discourse is about population and the necessity of movement. It is more than a necessity, it is an imperative. Protection cannot be located at the borders or even in some restricted areas. The focus needs to be changed by protecting people on the move, by monitoring them, even without their knowledge, by following or anticipating their traces. The protector needs to know who the real population is and who is opposed to it. A process of normalisation is necessary. Protection does not function as a way to block people in a specific place. Rather it monitors how they move, who they meet and more importantly what they like and how to open up some movement corridors that they will be happy to use. The gendarmes have tried with some success to impose this vision of protection and its technologies, both inside and outside the territory. They have moved the notion of protection from one of its original meanings to another one – from tegere to praesidere and tutore. I will now unpack these different notions of protection in more conceptual detail.

The meanings of the notion of protection The term protection has different meanings, and etymology is interesting here as it helps to show how the same term can move in opposite directions, from helping someone, to indefinite detention and to monitoring and surveillance mechanisms. In our political imagination protection refers primarily to the individual in danger, fleeing for his or her life, in fear of persecution, in search of asylum. The individual is protected by the making exceptional of a space which is considered sacred. Protection refers also to defence against enemies, to the vulnerability of oneself or someone else and to the creation of physical borders ensuring safety inside by purification and ‘frontieralisation’.5 It is the capacity to block and to exclude the enemy from a territory. Protection shifts from a religious interdiction to a military one involving a struggle in the name of the protected. It shifts from a specific space recognised by the actors, including the perpetrator, as sacred, to the qualification of an action as persecution and the possibility of third party intervention which consists of projecting forces in the name of protection of a group. The modalities of the physical protection of an individual, a group or a population are conceived as a camp which encloses them to save them, as a front

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or as locks filtering and controlling who is inside and who is outside. The camp (castra) is a military technology which imposes a discipline and goes beyond sanctuary, since a camp is organised to resist and to organise attacks. The state’s frontiers and the inside of the territory were considered as an extension of the notion of camp as a safe place where no enemy could infiltrate because the borders of a specific space are under control. The protection of the internal space ranges from symbolic interdiction to military force which protects the citizen by creating a ring of fortresses blocking the enemy, and also to the police which is charged with maintaining the peace within the population and to filter who is dangerous in case circulation with the outside is necessary. Afterwards it refers not only to the struggle against the enemy but to the relation with the population inside to be sure that no outsider is inside. Protection has a strong link with the metaphor of the body in politics and it expresses the idea of a route to not being harmed. Protection, finally, is linked with management, with monitoring, with surveillance and the creation of profiles about who is at risk or who is a risk and with the movement of population without too much risk. It relates to norms of space and safety, with the right to live somewhere and the right to move freely if wanted.

Protection as discourses of sacred place, of defence, monitoring and surveillance, and of love: the three origins6 Tegere is an old Latin term for ‘to protect’ and is of Greek origin. Tegere means to cover, to hide, to shelter. Pro-tegere, is to cover above (the protectum is the roof ), to shelter somebody with a shield (scutis protecti corpora) and preserve him or her against a danger (it is a sacred duty to do so). Tegere also has a religious meaning and is delineated in relation to a sacred place where the inside is different from the outside. Tegmen which is related to tegere is the name for a type of armour, and all that is used to defend oneself, to protect oneself against an enemy or to protect against nature (caeli tegmen, the roof of the sky), but it is also discretion, secrecy with the meaning of withdrawing from. The protector is the bodyguard, the advocate as well as the henchman. Tegere is related to combat, face-to-face relations and the idea of a specific place where you can hide or where you cannot be chased. The protector is related to the protected and to a place. The protected here is an active subject. He/she is his/her own sovereign. He/she has a voice even if he/she is obliged to hide, to withdraw. He/she is not totally dependent on the protector. The military meaning of tegere shows that protection and combat are not far from each other. The difference between the symbolic and military interdiction resides in technology. The shield is the first technology of protection after the words of interdiction. The shield is a way to avoid the sword and to block the enemy. It is related to the concept of the vulnerability of the body. It may be the physical body of one individual or the political body of the nation when sovereignty is transferred from the individual to a collective body in the name of


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a ‘contract’. The physical body or the political body of the nation inside a territory needs to be protected by a series of shields, of fortresses, of strategic defence initiatives destroying the balance of mutual attacks. The shield has changed its form through history and is now more virtual, but its meaning is quite stable. Protection is not passive, as the study of conflict (polemology) has explained in detail. Protection by a shield is active because it enacts the possibility to attack under protection, to kill without risk of being killed (Bouthoul 1958, 1961). This argument has been used from the time of Ancient Rome to the Second World War and is returning now in the form of pre-emptive attacks as protection. The idea that protection was inadequate only held during the deterrence moment of the Cold War because no shield was available, and this explains the transformation of the military function. Tegere is then religious and military; linked with the ‘body’, the sovereignty of the self. This is the first etymology of protection (i.e. protection as Tegere). Let’s now move to a second etymology: protection as praesidere. Praesidere is etymologically ‘to be placed in front of, ahead’ (prae and sideo). It is at the same time to supervise and to protect (praesidiarii are therefore the soldiers of the garrison), but also to chair (praeses belli, the head), to have precedence over (praesidebat in senatu). Praesidium is protection, defence, help to the military activity (cum praesidio, with a military escort). It involves someone else guaranteeing security and survival. It creates a differentiation between the protector and the protected. Praesidere is also the defended place, secured (locus securus) by a garrison. Praesidere is about the interposition of a third party and about intervention. It is linked with military organisation, with the protector, with the capacity to act and to speak, with the construction of camps and garrisons. In the term praesidere, by comparison with tegere, the relation is more clearly between the enemy and the protector, and the protected is objectified as subject. The protector supervises and monitors the protected which (or who) is dependent on the protector for the assumption of its sovereign autonomy. This is particularly clear when one looks at the military discourses concerning protection of the territory. Frontalierisation is a way of avoiding any contact between the enemy and the protected by interposing the protector. It is a way of enclosing a territory, creating a safe camp, a safe area and strengthening the border. However, this form of protection may also be a way of controlling the protected, to monitor him or her under the ‘necessity’ of purification and to homogenise the protected group by looking at the infiltrated enemies. Praesidere is related to discipline, to organisation, to the establishing of a grid mapping and differentiating the territory. The camp is the technology of praesidere as the shield is the technology of tegere. The camp organises the shields and involves more strategic analysis. Protection is not a thin line between the enemy and the victim, it is a frontalierisation by interposition of an organisation. It is a zone, a front, an organisation which has roots into the territory and goes beyond the borders. The protected is controlled and locked in a safe place where it is better for him or her not to move.

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The camp for refugees is very easily transformed into a detention camp. The protector has the keys of the locks. The protected may even become dangerous for the protector in its confrontation with the enemy and the protected has sometimes to worry that the protector and the enemy will have an agreement transforming him into an enemy already in detention. As long as the protected is the global political body, it is not so much at risk, but when the arrangement has differentiated specific groups, the minority at risk may be transformed into a dangerous minority for the ‘rest’ of the population. The protected minority may become a danger for the ‘society’ which must be defended and in that case the protector has a choice (Foucault 2003). Here protection is not a ‘sacred duty’ – as in the case of tegere – but a rational calculus about who is the most in need of protection. The contemporary situation of some refugee camps, hostage to their ‘protector’ and at risk of being transferred into the camp of the enemy is the illustration of the strength of the meaning of praesidium, against tegere. Now I turn to the third etymology of protection: tutore. Tutore has the sense of to look after. It is to help in the present and for the future. It reinforces the monitoring and the surveillance of the protected but in the name of love. It is a caring voice which substitutes the will of the protected for the will of the protector. It is a form of biopolitics. The agency of the protected, active in tegere, less so in praesidere, is here turned to a passive voice, reducing the political life of the protected to a biological one (Agamben 1998). The tutor speaks in the name of the pupil who has no capacity to act in law. The protected is infantilised. If in this meaning the protector appeared to protect someone else from fear, and to safeguard, to preserve him, tutela is the action to protect, to take care of, to monitor, to speak instead of. Tutore is linked with the obedience resulting from the relation between the protector and the protected. It is linked with the protectorate, with the regulation and the monitoring of the relation. In this third meaning of protection as tutore, the enemy disappears. The protector is so strong that he imposes a protectorate and tutore is related to empire and to colonialism. The relation is between the protector and the protected after the action of protection, and it enacts the dependence of the protected. Tutore is the annihilation of the threat by the reframing of protection into strict obedience. The borders disappear, and the movement is re-installed but channelled. Tutore is linked with the capacity to impose an order and to monitor the enemy as well as the protected. If the protectorate is strong enough they are obliged to live together, in the same space – as the situation in Bosnia and Kosovo has shown recently. Tutore is also the capacity to anticipate the future, to know better than the protected what he needs, what he wants. Monitoring is not only about space but about time. It is about monitoring the future (Bigo 2004, 2006). Protection is thereby the combination of three elements: first a sovereign self with the capacity to shelter, to withdraw from something or someone, to become sacred and ‘untouchable’; second a disciplinary technology which puts agents under a more powerful agent who will act instead of them, and who will lock them in indefinite detention for their own good; third a loving care that annihilates


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agency, in the sense that the protector as tutor organises the life of the protected and channels the corridor of its freedom. The ambiguities of the meanings of protection that are at play in this triptych are important to explore. First, the action of protection is a relation between subjects in asymmetric positions and more precisely between three actors – the enemy, the protector and the protected – even if the strategies of enunciations and of visibilities will try to hide at least one pole of the relation. For example, even if the discourse of the protector is to hide this asymmetry, by enabling him- or herself as committed to act to protect, it creates nevertheless a relation between protection, tutelage and obedience. The subject of the protection, the protected, is either pleased to be safe or tries to resist the objectification and the status of victim, of becoming a person without voice. Resistance is often clear against praesidere where the protected is considered as passive, and has no right to speak but only to obey in the name of his own safety, but it also applies in the case of tutore where he does not know what the protector knows. And we need to keep this lesson from etymology in mind when examining the contemporary ‘humanitarian’ vision and the discourses of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refuges (UNHCR) and some NGOs in favour of the refugees. In praesidere and tutore, the protector, by interposing itself in the relation is winning the claim to have the right to be the spokesperson of the protected. And the protection model functions very often as a process of victimisation where the protected is either a victim or a criminal – a forgery and dubious actor – if he refuses this status given through a binary image. In any case the protected has difficulty overcoming the relation to regain voice and the capacity of acting politically. So when one speaks of the politics of protection, is it the politics of the protector or the politics of the protected which is the object of research? And what does the term ‘politics’ refer to? Is it different policies? Is it about the discourses of the protectors concerning the vulnerability of the protected, its lack of strength, of security, of territory, of capacity to implement its basic needs? Is it about the strategies of legitimisation of the protectors in the face of the supposed enemy, but targetting the protected? Is it the resistances of the protected to once again exert their right and voice? Or is it about the technologies at work to ‘protect’ and their effects? In this text I will try to follow the latter track that focuses on technologies or devices of protection. How does the protector protect? What kind of technologies are used? What are the discursive and the non-discursive practices which enact the relation of protection? And what are their effects? How do they engage with the political? I will show that the mechanisms of protection are dependent on their insertion into more general ‘dispositifs’ that are related to the sovereign, the disciplinary and the bio-political.

Three techniques of protection: the shield, containers and profiling Protection is different from security, at least from the traditional definition of security as freedom from threat and survival. Protection is about the self and the

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relation of the self to the others. It has to do with the vulnerability of the body. It is less about life and death than about fear of persecution and torture, about the right to life. But the modalities of protection are diverse and the technologies involved are quite specific in comparison with technologies of defence. The first technology of protection is the shield and is related to tegere. It interposes a symbolic or material (the shield) barrier against the enemy to avoid the attack. The movement of the shield is activated by the protected or by someone else who cares about him (see the hoplites and the way they protect with their shield the body of the other to create a sense of solidarity). The technology related to praesidere refers to enclosing a territory, to create a cylinder marking the difference between inside and outside. It continues the line of protection by enclosing a territory as safe territory. It has to do with the topology of the ‘container’ so often used to explain the relation between state, territory and population.7 The people, the society are enclosed into a territory. The society is contained by the state (Giddens and Turner 1984). The concepts of sovereignty, security and borders structure our thought as if there was a collective body enveloped by a container differentiating one polity from another. The technology correlated with tutore is data banks, the monitoring of the present, the morphing and profiling of the future. This has to do with channelling the individual along corridors. As far as the individual is concerned, the oldest technology is to build a difference between a sacred place and a profane one. This has to do with sacrifice, with emissary victim, with the blood of a scapegoat (Girard 1977), the line enclosing a ‘sanctuary’ where the profane cannot enter. The asylum is absolute, and has no correlation with innocence or guilt, or with the severity of the fault. In the western trajectory of states’ formation, the construction of the right to give protection as an ecclesiastical monopoly over a specific place is the result of the struggle for influence between church and state in the late Roman Empire – especially with the distinction between the potestas and the potestas episcopalia. But as we know this ends with the success of the state in ‘rationalising’ asylum, in ‘blocking’ any power from the church from having the possibility of protecting an individual against a claim of the state. Only a state with a superior power could grant asylum. Tegere and praesidere work together in a desacralised trajectory. In this trajectory protection becomes less and less a duty, an obligation towards an individual, and more and more a capacity to speak in the name of someone (a group) considered as weak or in danger. At the institutional level, the question of protection therefore crystallised first into the question of the asylo templorum and who is in charge of it, involving a struggle between the church and the state, whether it was sacred asylum (ecclesiarum localis) or secular immunity (immunitas seculiarum localis). Protection ( protectio) was given to a building (e.g. a church, convent, inn, town hall, chancellery, or hospital) or to a public place, with the first aim of withdrawing the fugitives from private revenge and of offering them up to ordinary jurisdiction. With the secularisation of states and the Machiavellian moment, the immunity of function and place changed. It was no longer a sacred locus institutionalised by


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the church but a personal immunity of the representative, the spokesperson of the king. The diplomatic web was constituted through ‘immunity’ and protection, but was also desacralised. And as the historian Jean Delumeau has pointed out, the feeling of security is socially constructed and historically produced only if groups are at the same time reassured and protected by institutions. He has shown how the virtual monopoly of the Church over the issue of the survival of the soul has been replaced by the rise to power of the nation-state and the survival of the body. He has stressed this ‘pastoral’ dimension of the protection which maintains its religious connotations, even inside state discourse. François Ewald has emphasised the decisive role of the rise of the welfare state in which this protection function moved to the institution of an insurance system against risks. He also has shown how social security and juridical security to have rights are connected to protection. Two very different examples show that the fear of breaking the sacred barriers created by the protectio has more or less disappeared. The sans papiers in Paris in 1998 thought they were in a shelter, in a sanctuary, when they took refuge in a church to begin a hunger strike. However, the police destroyed the doors of the church and arrested them – even with part of the traditional political Right being upset with this action of the ministry of interior Jean Louis Debré. In Panama, Noriega thought he was safe inside an embassy, especially the Vatican embassy which was both under immunity and behind a sacred veil. But he was not. The US military force of the operation ‘Just cause’ succeeded in obliging him to leave the Vatican embassy, which was under an attack of ‘heavy metal rock music’. Nevertheless the tegere protection as the differentiation between a sacred and a profane space is still strong as a norm in the consciousness of people even if it has little effect as technology. The UNHCR has tried for years to play the card of specificity for asylum seekers regarding migration, even forced migration, to create an aura of the sacred around the person of asylum seekers to protect and to differentiate them from tourists and migrants. But now UNHCR is playing the cards of some states and militarising its interventions. Its personnel are more and more a supplement to the military force by drawing physical boundaries and building camps for refugees to be examined in before coming into the ‘homeland’ of Europe as the recent situation in Libya has shown. UNHCR is trying to impose a discipline to asylum by changing the meaning of what a camp is. The camp, locus of protection, is also locus of detention. Tegere is forgotten in the name of praesidere and tutore. Against this move of the UNHCR bureaucracy, some NGOs try now to constitute a cosmopolitan right at the UN or European levels to permit individuals to have a shelter where they want, and to have this basic right that democratic states cannot refuse or oppose. In that sense, religion and humanitarian NGOs as well as legal ones are not so far from each other. Global justice is the new name of tegere. But clearly the refugee camps are not sanctuaries. They are places in which to be detained quite indefinitely before some of the ‘best’ (i.e. to say the most ‘useful’ for states) can be channelled to the European countries.

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Protection, intervention and the military The idea of garrisons interposing themselves to protect civilians still plays an important role as rhetoric in the project to ‘free the world’ and to associate projection and protection. The sacred aspect of tegere is there too, but it does not affect the protected as it is now transferred to the protector. The neo-conservative rhetoric about Iraq (and perhaps even more the Blair rhetoric) plays with the confusion between projection and protection as well as with the militarisation of protection and depoliticisation of the agency. But the move is more general and older. Nationalism has set up the conditions of identification devices and the development of control and surveillance through identity papers, passports and visas. The asylum seekers began to be sans papiers. And sans papiers was associated with ‘no voice’. The distinction between citizens and foreigners creates a main difference in the level of protection. The rights were differentiated and state constitutions validated this difference. The sacred places faded but they were incorporated into the narrative of the protector. The discourses of frontalierisation of the Nation through the territory in France are highly valued as the Nation is seen as a unique body, the République, which has only one People.8 In the UK, disciplinarisation is more advanced and the layout is more subtle with the combination of multiplicities and a more accurate sense of vulnerability, of inward looking. So to protect is seen differently even if it is two versions of praesidere: the oldest one (the container) continues in France, while the new one, the grid and the mapping of vulnerabilities is more in favour in the UK. The professional line of interest is also intervening in the framing of the technology of praesidere. The Army is socialised through the container topology. The police and gendarmes prefer the layout and the differentiation of surveillance inside the population with the normalisation of movement for some but not for others. The French Army typically follows the old technique of praesidere: if military force can block the enemy at the borders, the nation is safe. The idea is to create a strong border between the inside and the outside, to exclude what is dangerous inside by expelling them or by putting them into camps and jails, and to prepare to fight the external enemy. While police and counter-intelligence tasks are important, real protection nevertheless consists in defending the border from the external enemy. This is the topology of the cylinder. As the interviews show, the Maginot line of 1940 is still an ideal in the minds of many decision-makers, even if they know that with the development of aviation, long-range missiles and nuclear deterrence, their efforts are hopeless and civilians would be the first targets (Bigo et al. 2000). Nevertheless in the military imaginary (and especially at the military college of St Cyr Coetquidan), their role is to protect civilians, to put their shield in the way, and to build their camp. They are the ones who sacrifice their life for the protected nation in general, and for their families in particular. The idea of the grandeur de la France, the grand French Nation, is reactivated beyond the Gaullist standpoint as a military tradition linked with the sacrifice of life of the protector against the enemy which gives him a superior moral standing.


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In that sense the military ethic is supposedly superior to the civilian ethic because of the capacity to protect, and because of that, in exceptional moments, the military has the right to intervene and to preside ( praesidere). The exceptionalism of the state of emergency is linked with the right and duty of the protector for the protected.

Go close: from defence to policing This traditional idea of frontalierisation has been challenged by the globalisation of flows of information, goods, services, peoples . . . and technology has been increasingly channelled towards the population, to create a series of locks to monitor the flows and to create more surveillance for some groups. Protection is therefore implemented through different mechanisms – still frontalierisation, but also ‘territorialisation by proximity’, supervision and remote control. This secures different social groups of various sizes living in the same territory by channelling them, by accompanying them along the lines of their flow. The Bosnian and then the Kosovo experiments were a generalisation of the channelling of population instead of the frontalierisation of the border. This topology corresponds more to the Klein bottle than to the cylinder. The territory is not homogenised and purified, but rather is delineated as trajectories of flows and a channelling of the population living in the same territory – for example, the trucks of the French armies accompanying three young Muslim girls going to a school in a Serbian area everyday. The tutore element is there too, as a protectorate, in which the protector obliges the enemy and the victim to live together – or at least, to live in the same space. The idea of a series of locks channelling flows of population is now very popular. It is true inside the Kosovo area, and it is more generally speaking the way Europe deals with border controls. The technology is not a Fortress Europe, a ‘crustacean’ type of European state displaying its strength at its borders , but policing at a distance, policing abroad, policing away from the border, policing upstream (and if necessary downstream) (Torpey 2001; Bigo and Guild 2003). In this respect, to protect is to implement different mechanisms – frontalierisation of an area, the management of proximity, the supervision and the monitoring of population. Frontalierisation aims to enclose a given territory as in a container. Protection as frontalierisation is then partly connected with converting territory into sanctuary. This management by proximity aims to protect individuals or groups while remaining physically as near as possible to the people and with the idea of framing and channelling flows. It has relations with structural prevention when it aims to pacify the environment and with active prevention as soon as protection is conceived in a dynamic way. The protector inserts itself inside the flow of the protected and traces the movement of the potential enemy. He/she even considers that part of the protected is a potential enemy for another group and tries to intervene as a third party. He/she imposes channels and specific roads and obliges the two opponent groups to live together. Monitoring aims to take care of individuals by continuous surveillance in the name of love. It individualises protection. Three figures of topology emerge from these techniques: the container or cylinder, the lock or the Klein bottle, and monitoring

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or the Mobius strip. The first aims primarily to control the territory at the borders, the second controls space and the third controls individuals and groups.

Technologies of Ban: policing at distance, policing the future The main strategy is now to implement these mechanisms not inside or outside of national territory but by remote control, by policing at distance and this is the fourth technique. Remote control or policing at a distance aims to anticipate the actions and the movements of individuals or of groups at risk. This policing at distance is policing outside of territory but it is also policing the future, policing time through the profiling of groups at risk, of sets of actions implementing a morphing scenario. So, to protect nowadays involves the parade, the guard, but also vigilance, monitoring, the control of the sanity of the protected group – and all this has a prophylactic connotation. It is a nano-surveillance, a micro-technology of identification and certification of the quality and purity of the (human) stock, a proactive technology which tries to control the future in the same way as the police in Philip K. Dick’s novel ‘The Minority Report’, but with the same incapacity to impose its view as the truth (Dick 1987). Finally protection does not involve so much a struggle, a battle, an aggression, influence, leadership, and manipulation, which are fundamental techniques for defence. The real fight disappears in the protection function. The enemy is considered to be invisible, nowhere and everywhere, here and there like a stealth plane, never where you think it is. Protection is then about the capacity of the protector and not about the strength of the enemy. The discourse of the Pentagon after September 11 concerning protection is clear. The identification of the external enemy is less important than the capacity to react to anything everywhere at any moment. Technology needs to preempt any danger by the speed of the capacity to put the shield into place, no matter if it is an enemy or a natural danger. The real danger, if any, is inside. This logic pushes for a quasi exclusive relationship between the protector and the protected which is intrusive – but in the name of love and protection. The tutelage of tutore has definitely taken over the capacity to shelter. Is the Orwellian ministry of love (i.e. of internal security) our near future? Is the disciplinary nature of praesidere overwhelming? Not exactly, I think, as we are living more in a banopticon than a panopticon. The already normalised people are not risky or at-risk groups, they are away from the protection as an intrusive investigation, but some groups (either victims or potential perpetrators of crime or virtual enemies) are becoming the target of such devices. Protection continues of course to involve help, a duty of assistance, aid, support, care in the medico-religious connotation which continues marking the concept, but it is not turned towards individuals in a sacred place. It is turned towards groups to monitor, instead. To care is now to embrace and to put under surveillance. It is a ‘pastoralisation’ of the individual which follows the biopolitics of its conduct. So finally, to understand protection, we have to analyse the three protection techniques in relation to the three


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‘dispositifs’ they are in: the first technique is the one of the sovereign moment, the second corresponds to discipline, and the third is linked with the biopolitics of monitoring of the future (Foucualt 2004).

Notes 1 Many thanks to the European Commission for its generous support under the Framework VI project CHALLENGE on the basis of which this research was made possible. 2 ‘Dispositifs’ is used in its Foucauldian meaning. 3 ‘Prefets’ are the most important civil servants at the region and department level in France. They are responsible for implementing the general policy of the government. 4 Internal document from the gendarmerie Direction générale de la gendarmerie nationale (DGGN 1997). 5 ‘Frontalierisation refers to homogenising territory by removing the others outside of the border’ (Foucher 1991). 6 Emmanuel Guittet has done the research concerning etymology. I am heavily indebted to him for this section. 7 For a discussion of the different form of borders and their topology cylinder, torus, klein bottle and Mobius strip see Bigo (2001). 8 The idea of different peoples inside one territory was refused many times, from the victory of the Jacobins against the Girondins to the decision by the Conseil Constitutionnel, the French supreme court to refuse the existence of the notion of people for Corsica because there exists only one people, the French one.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bigo, Didier (2000) ‘Introduction’ in La fonction de protection, CPGN [Centre de Prospective de la Gendarmerie Nationale], Paris: Rapport du centre d’études sur les conflits pour la DAS, 7–32. —— (2001) ‘The Moebius Ribbon of Internal and External Security’, in Mathias Albert, David Jacobson and Yosef Lapid (eds) Identities, Borders, Orders. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91–116. —— (2004) ‘Global (In)Security: The Field of the Professionals of Unease Management and the Ban-Opticon’, Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory, 4. —— (forthcoming) Policing (In)Security Today. London: Palgrave. Bigo, Didier and Elspeth Guild (2003) ‘The Logic of the Schengen Visa: Remote Policing’, Cultures et Conflits, 49, 5–147. Bigo, Didier, Emmanuel Guittet, Jean Paul Hanon, Anatstasia Tsoukala, and Benoît Durieux (2000) La fonction de protection. Paris: Rapport du centre d’études sur les conflits pour la DAS. Bouthoul, Gaston (1958) Traité de polémologie. Paris: Payot. —— (1961) Sauver la guerre. Lettres aux futurs survivants. Paris: Grasset. Ceyhan, Ayse and Gabriel Peries (2001) Construire l’ennemi intérieur, Cultures et Conflits 43, Paris, L’Harmattan, http://www.conflits.org (accessed 3 June 2005). Dick, Philip.K (1987) The Minority Report. New York: Citadel Press. Foucault, Michel (2003) Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. New York: Picador.

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Foucault, Michel (2004) Sécurité, Territoire, Population: Cours au Collège de France – 1977–1978. Paris: Gallimard. Foucher, Michel (1991) Fronts et frontiers. Paris: FNSP. General Franquart (1999) Maitriser la violence. Paris: Economica. Giddens, Anthony and Bryan S. Turner (1984) ‘The Body and Society’, New Society, 70 (1139), 110–111. Girard, René (1977) Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Torpey, John (2001) The Invention of the Passport. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7

‘Civilizing’ the Balkans, protecting Europe The international politics of reconstruction in Bosnia and Kosovo Alexandra Gheciu1

The conflicts that erupted in Yugoslavia in the 1990s were widely perceived in the West as indicators of the destructive force generated by the combination of hypernationalism and modern technology, and, simultaneously, as reminders that the Balkans remained an ‘un-civilized’ part of Europe that threatened to generate an endless series of problems in the region. In response – albeit with significant delays and inconsistencies – the international community carried out a series of actions aimed not simply at ending the fighting, but also preventing its recurrence. The idea behind those actions was that Kosovars and Bosnians, and, indeed, the entire region, could only be adequately protected through the establishment of a stable, rational, and ethical order in the war-torn territories, which, the argument went, would make it impossible for nationalist leaders to re-ignite the conflict. This idea found expression in the international administrations established in Bosnia and Kosovo (in 1995 and 1999 respectively). This chapter examines practices of governance enacted within the framework of the international administrations in Bosnia and Kosovo, focusing on the complexities and tensions involved in the (re)construction of ‘good’ polities. It argues that international practices of reconstruction have relied to a significant extent on modern concepts of space and time, involving an attempt to transcend neomedieval forms of political organization and create cohesive polities, in which fragmentation and divided loyalties can be superseded by more inclusive Bosnian and Kosovar political identities. This is envisaged as the first step in a process designed to lead to the integration of Bosnia and Kosovo in Europe – that is, as a process involving the disciplining of politics via their containment in particular entities, which are then to be re-articulated into a broader particular entity, Europe, regarded as a space governed by universally valid principles of reason. As we shall see, the international interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo embody several, sometimes conflicting, definitions and technologies of protection. In turn, these definitions rely upon different views of the agency of the protected: on the one hand, international institutions have pursued protection via the logic of spatial enclosure that assigns little agency to the protected Bosnian and Kosovar subjects. On the other hand, however, and increasingly prominently there has been an effort to link protection to the construction of a particular type

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of Bosnian and Kosovar agency. In enacting practices of reconstruction, the international administrators have cast themselves in the role of ‘civilizing’ actors, performing what might be seen as a contemporary version of what Norbert Elias called the ‘civilizing process’ in the modern era. Taking advantage of extraordinary mandates, they have carried out a comprehensive process of socializing Bosnians and Kosovars into a particular set of internationally prescribed norms.

International administrations and the politics of reconstruction In Bosnia as well as Kosovo, the stated goal of the international administrations has been the establishment of stable polities organized around a particular set of Western-prescribed liberal democratic norms and principles.2 The international administration of Bosnia was established as part of a peace process that culminated in the 1995 signing of the General Framework Agreement for Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Dayton Accord). While the General Framework resembles a traditional peace agreement, its Annexes established the framework for the statebuilding practices to be carried out in Bosnia.3 As stipulated in Annex 10, the task of coordinating the civilian efforts of the international community was assigned to the Office of the High Representative (OHR). The High Representative is accountable to the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), which consists of the fifty-five states and international organizations that have been involved in Bosnia since the end of the war. Initially, the High Representative was empowered merely to monitor the implementation of the peace settlement, and to promote compliance with it, relying on the cooperation of the local parties to fulfil their obligations. In that phase, the international involvement in Bosnia was loosely coordinated. This resulted in a highly atomized and unwieldy administrative framework, within which the various international actors often pursued their own agendas, sometimes undermining each other’s work (Caplan 2002: 24). The architects of Dayton put the process of political institution building on to a fast-track basis. Elections for state, entity and municipal offices were to be held – under Organization for Security and Control in Europe (OSCE) supervision – just a few months after the Agreement came into force, and the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR) was to withdraw in twelve months. It was, apparently, assumed that local parties would appreciate the need to work together in opposing militant nationalism (Caplan 2002: 40–41). Contrary to international expectations, however, postDayton Bosnia witnessed the growing influence of nationalism as voters continued to identify with nationalist parties. In effect, the elections served to confer greater legitimacy on a series of nationalist leaders, including alleged war criminals, who subsequently acted against the implementation of the principles inscribed in the Dayton Accord. This led international officials – including the chief architect of Dayton, Richard Holbrooke, to argue that democracy in the absence of a political culture and institutions that respected liberal principles of governance threatened to empower precisely the ‘fascists’, ‘racists’ and ‘separatists’ that had ignited the conflict in the first place (Holbrooke, cited in Zakaria 1997: 22).

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 103 In response to these developments the High Representative embarked on a process of curbing the authority of local parties, and also became more actively involved in the construction of those (liberal) institutions and political culture regarded as preconditions for a responsible exercise of democratic rights. Thus, at its meeting in Bonn in December 1997 the PIC empowered the High Representative to impose laws against the will of local governing parties, and to dismiss public officials whom the High Representative considered to be violating their duties under the Dayton Agreement (Bosnia and Herzegovina 1998: SelfSustaining Structures 1998: 203). The High Representative has exercised those extraordinary powers on numerous occasions: for instance, to order a restructuring of the Constitutional Commission in the Federation and the Republica Srpska Parliaments, to impose a package of new economic legislation in order to satisfy the conditions for the disbursement of World Bank structural adjustments credits; and to establish an Independent Judicial Commission to help overcome opposition to judicial reform (Caplan 2004). In addition, since March 1998 the High Representative has dismissed or banned from public office dozens of elected officials, including mayors, presidents of municipal assemblies, cantonal ministers, delegates to the entity parliaments, the President of Republica Srpska and a member of the Bosnian Presidency (Ante Jelavic).4 In brief, through the OHR, which became the leading agency in the process of reconstruction in Bosnia, the international administration allows Bosnians to govern their own affairs only to the extent that the process of self-government is conducted within the framework of the internationally defined norms and rules. In cases of perceived departure from those norms, the OHR has exercised the power to rule by decree in order to block or amend offending pieces of legislation, and to terminate the employment of individuals who sought to uphold alternative (i.e. nationalist) norms (see for instance Zaum 2003). In contrast to Bosnia, the international administration established in Kosovo in 1999 was from the start authorized to exercise extensive powers in the province. Security Council Resolution 1244 provided for the establishment of an UN-led web of international institutions, designed to provide an interim administration for Kosovo under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and which will provide transitional administration while establishing and overseeing the development of provisional democratic self-governing institutions to ensure conditions for a peaceful and normal life for all inhabitants of Kosovo.5 Resolution 1244, in conjunction with the UN Secretary General’s Report to the Security Council, provided for the establishment of a four-pillar international administration in the province. The UN assumed the control of the first pillar, interim civil administration, involving the performance of ‘basic civilian administrative functions’, and the maintenance of civil law and order.6 In carrying out its functions, United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) worked in close

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cooperation with, in many ways depended on, the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR). The OSCE assumed the leadership of the ‘second pillar’ of international administration, institution building.7 The third pillar, concerning the monitoring of the safe return of the refugees and the internally displaced people, as well as the provision of humanitarian aid, was entrusted to the UNHCR. Finally, the European Union was given the leadership of the fourth pillar: the support of economic reconstruction and the rebuilding of infrastructure in the province, with the aim to enable the creation of a dynamic market economy in the longer term. The key figure in the international administration of Kosovo, the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG), was authorized to ‘guide’ and ‘coordinate’ the various components of UNMIK.8 The SRSG also assumed the power to make and revoke the appointment of all the officials within the UNMIK structure, and was even granted the unprecedented ‘final authority of interpretation’ of Resolution 1244, and hence of UNMIK’s mandate (see Report of the Secretary General on the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo 1999). In essence, the institutions that were set up in summer/autumn 1999 gave the citizens of Kosovo very little power in the government of their province.9 UNMIK and KFOR were vested with all the powers usually attributed to the state (the executive, legislative, judiciary and law-enforcement in Kosovo). During its mandate, the international mission in the province was bound to respect Yugoslav laws issued prior to 1989, but only to the extent that they did not violate recognized international human rights standards.10 In cases of conflict, they could be repealed or substituted by regulations promoted by the Special Representative of the Secretary General – who thus acquired the role of final arbiter on the question of applicable legislation.11 From 2001 the international administrators initiated a series of actions aimed at transferring more powers to the people of Kosovo. Thus, in May 2001 representatives of the international administration, working in consultation with Albanian and Serb Kosovars, concluded a new Constitutional Framework for Provincial Self-Government. This was followed by province-wide elections, which were conducted in 2001 and led to the establishment of a 120-member law-making assembly. More recently, a Transfer Council was established. The Council, which includes representatives of UNMIK and of the provisional institutions in Kosovo, was specifically designed to facilitate the gradual transfer of powers to the people of the province. Nevertheless, the powers of UNMIK to govern Kosovo remain substantial (Gheciu 2005). Furthermore, UNMIK continues to control key aspects of the province’s external relations, and the Constitutional Framework explicitly states that Kosovar institutions are not authorized to make decisions in matters related to Kosovo’s final status. In justifying their extraordinary powers in Bosnia and Kosovo, the international administrators mobilized a discourse of universally ethical and rational principles, and portrayed the international involvement as the vehicle for implementing those principles in the war-torn territories (see Chandler 1999). For instance, Michael Steiner, the former head of UNMIK stated: ‘The legitimacy that comes

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 105 from the UN and the support of the whole Security Council means that the whole world is represented in Kosovo’ (Steiner, quoted in UN News Service release, 2003a). In other words, the UN-led mission in Kosovo was, in theory at least, very different from colonial-style rule exercised by, and in the interests of, colonial powers. The international administrators, presumably representing the whole world and enacting a highly ethical mandate, were to act only on a temporary basis, in pursuit of the goal of building democratic self-governing institutions in the province.12 The polity that the international administration set out to build is based on principles of ‘democratic values and structures’, ‘respect for human rights’ and ‘a market based economy’ – principles that were repeatedly identified as the only normative foundation that could ensure stability, freedom and progress in Kosovo (see for instance Kouchner 1999, and Report of the Secretary General of the United Nations Interim Administration in Kosovo 1999). Similarly, in Bosnia, the vision put forward by the Office of the High Representative depicted expert, trustworthy international actors, whose only aim was the establishment of a stable, democratic polity, built around principles of human rights and respect for the rule of law.13 Bosnia’s Constitution, part of the Dayton Accord, provides for the (re)construction of Bosnia and Herzegovina around (Western-defined) norms of democracy, rule of law, market economy, and extensive liberal individual rights.14 The idea that the particular set of liberal democratic norms inscribed in the Dayton Accord constituted the only acceptable foundation for the new Bosnia was reiterated in the OHR Mission Implementation Plan, formulated in January 2003. Furthermore, the Plan defined the process of constructing a viable liberal democratic polity as inextricably linked to the long-term goal of including Bosnia into the European Union. According to the Plan, the goal of the OHR can only be ‘to make peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina truly self-sustaining, and to put the country irreversibly on the road to statehood within the European Union’ (OHR Mission Implementation Plan 2003). In the process of constructing liberal democratic polities, actors operating within the framework of international administrations assumed an especially powerful role in supervising and ‘guiding’ Bosnians and Kosovars. According to Michael Steiner, ‘the most critical and delicate phase’ of the UN Mission in Kosovo involves: the transference of competencies to local provisional institutions. Responsibilities have to be transferred gradually, so that the society’s institutions have the capacity to bear them. This makes local capacity building and monitoring more important than ever. As we transfer more responsibilities, we have to intensify our monitoring of how they’re carried out. (Steiner, in UN News Service Release 2003a) In Kosovo, the negotiation of the final status of the province was made conditional upon compliance with liberal democratic principles, and the establishment of the kinds of provincial institutions prescribed by UNMIK. In February 2004, Special

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Representative Holkeri warned that beginning the process to determine final status in mid-2005 would not be automatic if adequate progress on standards was not made (Holkeri, quoted in International Crisis Group Report 2004: 5). In a similar vein, the creation of strong, reliable (i.e. liberal democratic) political, economic and judicial institutions has been defined by the international administration in Bosnia as the fundamental goal that needs to be achieved – under international supervision – before a complete transfer of power can take place. The notion involved here is that the process of preparing Bosnia for integration in Europe involves, in particular, entrenching the rule of law, reforming the economy on the basis of market principles, strengthening the capacity of Bosnia’s governing institutions, especially at the state level, establishing state-level civilian command and control over the armed forces, reforming the security sector and paving the way for integration into the Euro-Atlantic framework (OHR Mission Implementation Plan 2003: 1–2; see also Ashdown 2003a).

Space, time, and the politics of reconstruction It might be tempting to think that, consistent with the ideals formulated during the process leading up to the Dayton Accord and in UN and NATO declarations on Kosovo, the international community has always promoted multi-ethnic integration in the two territories. Yet, the history of international involvement in the Balkans is far more complicated. In fact, it is reasonable to argue that a series of actions carried out by various international actors served to foment partition and to reinforce the nexus between identity and territory.15 The tendency to reinforce the nexus between ethnic identity and territory was reflected, for instance, in the 1995 Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when the international community missed the opportunity to build on pre-war conceptions and practices of multiculturalism and, instead, established two distinct entities with their own ethnically-based political structures. A similar tendency was also reflected in Kosovo where, particularly in the first phase of the international administration, UNMIK relied heavily on a spatial solution to ethnic problems, involving the protection of minorities via the establishment of territorially defined enclaves. This approach to protecting Bosnians and Kosovars via the creation of spatial enclaves reflects a particular conception of protection. As Didier Bigo has explained, this conception involves the enclosing of a given territory, in an attempt to secure different groups, and presumably to enable them to maintain their identity, by ‘channeling’ them, locking them within particular, clearly delineated and heavily protected, spatial trajectories. In his words, [t]he Kosovo experiment was a generalization of the channeling of population . . . . The territory is not homogenized and purified, the territory is delineated as trajectories of flows and channeling of the population living in the same territory as the trucks of the French armies accompanying three young Muslim girls going to a school in a Serbian area everyday. The idea of a series of locks as channeling flow of population is now very popular.16

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 107 This conception of protection depicts the protected groups (in this case, the Bosnians and Kosovars) as passive subjects. Thus, while the protectors (the international administrators) are endowed with a significant degree of agency, reflected in their capacity to channel, exercise surveillance over and protection of the various ethnic groups locked in their enclaves, the protected are objectified, presented as victims, who must rely upon – and, therefore, subordinate themselves to – the international protectors if they are to survive. However, the problems that emerged in Bosnia and Kosovo in the first years of international administration indicated that this approach to protection was inadequate, or at least insufficient. Both entities became trapped in a situation marked by the dual problem of fragmentation of political communities based on the nexus between ethnic identity and territory and, at the same time, the internationalization of organized crime (Centre for Peace in the Balkans 2003). In the context of growing concern about the domestic (continued tensions between different ethnic groups) and particularly the potential international implications (regional instability and the spread of organized crime and terrorism to Western Europe) of those developments, the international administrators have sought to give new impetus to the process of building Bosnia and Kosovo into integrated, responsible polities. Thus, the international administrators of Bosnia and Kosovo have increasingly defined the challenge of reconstruction in terms of a double move of integration: ‘integration within Bosnia and Kosovo is key to integration within Europe’ (Steiner, in UN News Service Release 2003a).17 As part of their attempt to transcend fragmentation, the international administrators took advantage of their special powers to carry out a series of institutional and legal reforms. For instance, in Bosnia the OHR amended a series of laws deemed to perpetuate nationalist principles and exclusive identities. In 2002, the OHR imposed a new law aimed at creating a professional, Westernstyle state-level civil service, rejecting amendments proposed by the Bosnia parliamentarians, who wanted to ensure that strict ethnic quotas would be respected in the recruitment and promotion of civil servants (Zaum 2003). In April 2004 the High Representative amended the Civil Service Laws to allow civil servants to move from entity to state level, in an attempt to strengthen the resources of state institutions. According to the OHR, this move is especially important for the process of defence reform, as it will free up defence officials at the entity level to the state, to facilitate the establishment of the new Bosnian Ministry of Defence (OHR Press Release 2004a). The OHR also launched initiatives aimed at reuniting the divided city of Mostar, often regarded as a symbol of ethnic tensions in Bosnia. On 28 January 2004 the High Representative enacted a new Statute aimed at reunifying Mostar and establishing a single city administration, abolishing parallel (ethnic-based) administrative structures. At the same time, the OHR has presided over efforts by a host of international governmental and non-governmental organizations to monitor the media in order to prevent the projection of views that run counter to the principles upheld by the international administration (Chandler 1999; Paris 2002: 644).

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Since his appointment as High Representative, Paddy Ashdown has insisted that one of the key priorities of the reform process has to be the establishment of a strong, multi-ethnic state-level judiciary. He has also presided over the formulation of an education reform agenda designed to ensure a common core curriculum across Bosnia, and the removal of ‘inappropriate symbols’ and ‘inappropriate content’ from schools and national subject textbooks (Education Reform Agenda: An Update 2003). Similar steps aimed at transcending fragmentation have also been taken in Kosovo by the various institutions operating within the framework of UNMIK (see also Caplan 2002). Thus, the UN, the OSCE, the EU and NATO-led KFOR set out to construct a civil service based on Western principles of efficiency and professionalism, a multi-ethnic judiciary able and willing to bring Kosovo into conformity with international legal standards, as well as a multi-ethnic, Westerntrained Kosovo Police Service. International administrators in Kosovo have placed special emphasis on educational reforms aimed at creating an environment in which Kosovars children are encouraged to define themselves as citizens of a united Kosovar polity, above and beyond their membership in particular ethnic groups. UNMIK actors, in cooperation with non-governmental organizations like the SOROS Foundation became involved in a campaign of reconstruction of the education sector, placing a special emphasis on designing new curricula and publishing new school textbooks to ensure that the inflammatory language of exclusive ethno-nationalism would no longer be taught in schools and universities (see Leutloff and Pichl 1999). In some instances, just as their counterparts in Bosnia, Kosovo’s international administrators stepped in and blocked – or imposed the amendment of – resolutions passed by the Kosovo Assembly and deemed as ‘divisive’ (Gheciu 2005). The strategy for achieving the double goal of integration seems to embody modern ideas of political order. Ethnic-based sub-state communities, as well as transnational associations are to be disciplined within a clearly defined and carefully protected space in which multiple sets of values and rules, divided loyalties and fragmented identities can give way to a higher, more inclusive set of norms and values, and a monolithic vision of political community. The double move prescribed by the international administrators is reminiscent of the early modern process of state-building, involving the transcendence of medieval-like political fragmentation (see Walker 1993: for example, 6–21, 60–67). In the modern vision of international administrators, the reconstruction of the two territories requires the subordination of the various sets of Bosnian and Kosovar actors to political agencies that effectively control the space of, respectively, Bosnia and Kosovo, and issue authoritative rules regarding the proper organization of their political communities. The process of (re)construction, as envisaged by the international administrators, involves the replacement of one type of particularity (built around exclusive identities) by a higher, more inclusive type of particularity – via the creation of Kosovar and Bosnian entities in which the plurality of ethnic identities, value

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 109 systems and loyalties gives rise to integrated political communities, where citizens share a commitment to create new institutions around rational, liberal democratic norms. This integration within Bosnia and Kosovo is to give rise to a more important integration in Europe. In other words, in time, the political community of Bosnians and Kosovars is to be re-articulated within an even higher form of particularity – the European polity, presumably governed by norms that embody universal precepts of reason. As we have seen, the heads of the international administrations presented their integration within Europe as the unquestionable goal for Kosovars and Bosnians, as the obvious resting point of their evolution towards more rational and ethical forms of organization. The spatial coordinates within which the reconstruction of Bosnia and Kosovo is to take place are associated with very specific – again, essentially modern – temporal dimensions. The Special Representatives in Kosovo, especially Michael Steiner and his successor, Harri Holkeri, as well as Paddy Ashdown and other senior officials of the two international administrations have repeatedly stressed the importance of building a protected space within which progress can triumph, and in which the good life of freedom and prosperity can be pursued. The international administrators have contrasted the vision of a progressive future – Kosovo and Bosnia united around liberal democratic principles and integrated within Europe – to the image of a catastrophic return to the region’s violent past, should Kosovars and Bosnians fail to cooperate with the international administrators in the reconstitution of their polities. Thus, according to senior international administrators, those Bosnian and Kosovar actors who deviate from the principles prescribed by the international administrators, for instance extreme nationalists and individuals and groups with alleged links to organized crime, are dangerous because they threaten to ‘retard’ peacebuilding and to perpetuate instability in the former Yugoslavia. (US Institute for Peace Special Report February 2002 and US Institute for Peace Special Report, December 2002.)18 The international administrators also made it clear that the new institutions of Bosnia and Kosovo are expected to act in a manner ‘that builds into the future’, and does not drag their polities ‘into the past’ (Steiner, quoted in UN News Service Release 2003b; see also Press Office of the High Representative 2003 and Ashdown 2003b). In April 2004 Paddy Ashdown invoked the example of Croatia to show that it is possible to transcend a difficult legacy, to overcome nationalist ways of thinking and acting and to carry out the reforms necessary for joining Europe. Referring to the European Commission’s announcement that Croatia has successfully fulfilled the criteria for beginning accession negotiations with the European Union, the High Representative argued: Croatia has shown . . . that Europe is not an impossible dream for the countries that were so recently ravaged by war in the former Yugoslavia – but a real prospect that is waiting, if we are prepared to undertake the necessary reforms. (OHR Press Release 2004b)

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At the same time, Ashdown emphasized that there is no getting into Europe if we compromise on European standards. We will fail if . . . we continue to believe that the false protections of the past are a better bet for the preservation of our culture and human rights than the protections of a European future. (OHR Press Release 2004b, italics added) Between the promise of a free and progressive life within a Bosnia and Kosovo united around liberal democratic principles and integrated within Europe, and the danger of a relapse into a past of violent nationalism, the international administrators have identified another, highly dangerous condition: one of a criminalized present. This seems to involve a state of suspension, in which no progress is possible because the central Bosnian and Kosovar institutions are too weak (or too corrupt) to govern effectively, and because the people of Bosnia and Kosovo continue to be divided in their loyalties, and separated via exclusive definitions of political identity (see US Institute of Peace Special Report December 2002, Lawless Rule Versus Rule of Law in the Balkans). In response to this perceived threat of perpetuating a criminalized present, Paddy Ashdown declared to the Parliament of Bosnia in July 2002: ‘now we must turn our attention towards dismantling the organized criminal networks that are attempting to capture this country’s institutions and control its politics’ (Ashdown, quoted in US Institute of Peace Lawless Rule, 11). Ashdown was, in fact, echoing earlier claims by Robert Barry, former head of the OSCE Bosnia Mission. According to Barry, the combination of ‘extremist politicians, the remnants of the old security services, and organized crime in this country represents the single greatest obstacle to democratic reform, economic investment, and membership in Euro-Atlantic institutions’ (Barry, quoted in US Institute of Peace Special Report Lawless Rule, 9). The danger identified by international administrators is that, should transnational criminal networks come to effectively control the new polities, Bosnians and Kosovars would be trapped in a condition where politics becomes impossible, and where life is reduced to relations between various criminal gangs – and to the inevitable cycles of violence associated with such relations.

Beyond the spatial logic of political communities? Terrorism and the search for security In the post-September 11 era, the international effort to promote the transformation of Bosnia and Kosovo into integrated, stable polities with effective central governments has, at least in part, been motivated by the perceived need to mobilize them as effective partners in the ‘war against terror’ and organized crime. Identifying organized crime as a European and, more broadly, international problem rather than a local one, the international administrators have argued that European countries in particular have a duty to help Bosnia and Kosovo develop the institutional abilities to address this problem (Steiner, in UN News Service

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 111 Release 2003a; Ashdown 2003b). In Steiner’s words, ‘to put it starkly, Europe can either help us fill our prisons in Kosovo by supporting vital work in training police, developing the judiciary and developing technical forensic expertise. Or Kosovo will help fill prisons in Europe’ (Steiner, in UN News Service Release 2003a; Ashdown 2003b). In turn, the international administrators have argued that Bosnians and Kosovars, too, had a duty to unite in fighting organized crime – to show more ‘determination and political will’, to improve coordination among their various institutions so that organized crime-fighting can ‘get the better of organized crime’, and to evolve into reliable, effective partners within regional (particularly EU-based) and global anti-terrorist efforts (Ashdown 2003b). At the same time, there has been growing American and European pressure on Bosnia and Kosovo to do more in the fight against organized crime. For instance, in June 2003 the US Defense Minister, Donald Rumsfeld, warned that the US might cut its assistance to BiH unless Bosnian authorities took more effective steps to combat illegal trafficking of drugs and weapons (OHR 2003). Under these circumstances, the international administrators took a series of steps in the direction of creating an institutional continuum from intelligence to incarceration in Bosnia and Kosovo. The struggle against criminalized power structures is seen to require the development of greater surveillance power by the central authorities, and greater cooperation between, and enhanced power for, the judiciary and law enforcement agencies (see also US Institute of Peace Lawless Rule Versus Rule of Law in the Balkans, 11–12). The recent emphasis on fighting organized crime and terrorism has led to renewed cooperation between the military and civilian branches of the international administrations in the investigation and apprehension of suspected leaders of organized criminal networks. As the European Union inaugurated its police mission in Bosnia in January 2003, replacing the UN-sponsored International Police Task Force, it defined as one of its main goals the struggle against organized crime (American Bar Association 2003). For its part, NATO-led KFOR pledged to intensify its cooperation with UN police units in Kosovo and with the local police to crack down on organized crime in the province (Ames 2002). Noting that organized crime was undermining progress in Kosovo and creating security problems for Europe as a whole, then NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson expressed KFOR’s commitment to identify and ‘robustly deal with those that are encouraging the culture of violence’ in the province. In a broader perspective, it is interesting to note that the international visions of security arrangements designed to address the threats posed by organized crime involve a partial departure from the spatial logic of the modern political community. Thus, in the new Bosnia and Kosovo, the definition and provision of security is to be de-territorialized, at least in the foreseeable future. In a situation in which, the argument goes, the transnational criminal network that use the territory of the former Yugoslavia as a site for their activities pose a threat to international as well as domestic security, domestic agencies cannot claim the right to deal with this threat as they see fit. Rather, they must be prepared to not only

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cooperate with the transnational network of security agencies, but also to subject themselves to the gaze of experts from the United States and Western Europe that monitor organized crime and identify the threat of terrorism on a global level. It would seem, then, that at least in the foreseeable future the political authorities in Bosnia and Kosovo are not going to have the freedom to define security threats and to identify their enemies. Rather, it is reasonable to suggest, the function of identifying dangerous groups operating in Bosnia and Kosovo is likely to be performed by international experts.

‘Civilizing’ Kosovars and Bosnians While the institutional and legislative steps examined above are, perhaps, the most visible aspects of the politics of reconstruction in the two war-torn territories, they are certainly not the only ways in which the international administrations have sought to transform Bosnia and Kosovo. As we have seen, in recent years the international administrators have increasingly emphasized the importance of transcending fragmentation and achieving a particular kind of (principled) integration as the long-term solution for Bosnia and Kosovo. In part, that integration is seen in terms of a re-drawing of spatial boundaries, but linked to this there is also a vision of integration involving the production of Kosovar and Bosnian actors who would be able to take their place in Europe. In contrast to the logic of territorial enclosures and spatial ‘channeling’ of different ethnic groups, the technologies associated with this particular conception of protection – the conception of tutore, to use Bigo’s classification (see Chapter 6 in this volume) – do not involve the objectification of the protected. Rather, they involve their (re)constitution as a particular kind of modern, self-disciplined actors, who can and will protect themselves against their irrational, violent impulses. Simultaneously, this mode of protection is concerned with the identification and careful control of those individuals who are either incapable or unwilling to adopt the internationally-prescribed model of rational agency. In the words of Paddy Ashdown, the process of reconstruction in the Balkans requires a change in the prevailing political and social culture. It requires ‘reclaiming national life from the criminals that have threatened to hijack it’ (Ashdown 2003b). In a similar vein, Michael Steiner argued in 2003, Transforming Kosovo into a place where all its people can live in security and dignity is not only essential for the sake of minority communities . . . It is essential for the long-term stability of the Balkans and of Europe itself. To achieve this transformation, we need to help Kosovans to make European standards their own. (UN News Service Release 2003a) In Kosovo, UNMIK and KFOR representatives have stressed the importance of teaching Kosovars norms of democracy and human rights, and emphasized the feasibility of this pedagogic process – even as they pointed to a series of

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 113 difficulties associated with it.19 According to NATO officials involved in planning KFOR operations, the international community must ‘re-educate’ Kosovars and must ‘populate the province with enough international officials and experts to set an example’ and, in time, to alter the behaviour and nationalist mentalities of those people.20 In a similar vein, having argued that the reconstruction of Bosnia requires a difficult transformation at the level of political and social culture – a process that is far from complete – the High Representative Paddy Ashdown expressed his confidence in the ability of Bosnians to learn European norms, and eventually to ‘decriminalize’ their society (Ashdown 2003b). In other words, the process of reconstructing the two entities in the name of ensuring domestic security and progress as well as international stability was deemed to involve not only the establishment of institutions of good governance, but also the protection of Kosovars and Bosnians from their irrational, violent attitudes and habits, through their (re)education as rational, self-disciplined selves. In undertaking this process of (re)constitution of Bosnians and Kosovars, the international administrators appear to have cast themselves in a role that is similar to that performed by the political agencies involved in what Norbert Elias defined as the ‘civilizing process’ associated with the formation of modern states. As Elias argued, the establishment of centralized authority in the modern age created pacified spaces and led to the emergence of complex social patterns and increased interdependence among people (Elias 1982; Mennell 1998; Smith 2001). The establishment of modern states required the pacification of local lords and their inclusion in the new institutional arrangements as actors who subscribed to the new norms of civilization, who defined their identity around – and derived their privileges from – compliance with those new norms. This was followed by a process of ‘civilizing’ the masses, constructing them into reliable citizens whose actions were informed (and self-censored) by a uniform code of conduct. Modern society, according to Elias, is characterized by the growing specialization of social functions and the lengthening of chains of interdependence. Those developments require the socialization of people into a strong civilized habitus, which enables them to transcend their particular emotional affiliations to small communities, to control their passions and act together, in accordance with state-sponsored rules, as members of these modern, complex webs of interdependence. In response to the need to maintain orderly interaction in the new context, Elias argued, there emerged a series of institutions that sought to instill self-restraint in people in accordance to the state-defined norms and values, and to induce in the targeted population feelings of shame, guilt and fear associated with the transcendence of the ‘civilized habitus’ (Elias 1982: 105; Elias 1998: 52–54). In the case of contemporary Bosnia and Kosovo, it would seem that it is the self-defined role of international administrators, rather than domestic agencies, to disseminate a civilized habitus, to construct a unified space of self-disciplined subjects that govern themselves in accordance with a unique set of norms. Here, too, the ‘civilizing’ agencies have sought to secure the cooperation of a series of local political and military leaders and, more generally, to establish a situation in which those leaders define their roles around, and derive their benefits from, compliance

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with a unique (in this case internationally-prescribed) set of norms. For instance, in Kosovo a series of Albanian and Serb leaders were included in some of the transitional institutions established after 1999 and supported, or punished, on the basis of their willingness to conform to UNMIK regulations (see Yannis 2001: 46–48). In a similar vein, as noted earlier, the High Representative in Bosnia has made extensive use of the Bonn powers to dismiss officials deemed to be acting in violation of the norms, principles and rules promoted by the international administration. In recent years, a series of institutions operating within – or affiliated to – the international administrations have conducted a variety of training sessions, courses, workshops and exercises that bring together municipal, provincial and state-level Kosovar and Bosnian leaders of diverse ethnic backgrounds, with the explicit aim of building habits of cooperation between them, and teaching them norms of good governance, involving the protection of international standards of individual rights, the rule of law, democracy and the market economy (see US Institute of Peace Report 2001).21 This was accompanied by efforts to pacify those war-time leaders seen as likely to respond to socialization by training them in educational fora set up by Western actors. One relevant example is the inclusion of some former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighters in the Kosovo Protection Corps and the Kosovo Police Service established under the auspices of the international administration. These bodies were designed to train modern law enforcement forces whose primary allegiance would be to the province as a whole, rather than to particular ethnic groups, and who would define themselves – and identify their role – in accordance with liberal democratic norms (US Institute of Peace Lawless Rule Verses Rule of Law in the Balkans, 10). More generally, the attempt to include and (re)educate political and military leaders into the new institutions and culture of Bosnia and Kosovo is part of a wide-spread effort to disseminate internationally defined norms and standards of civilization to the people of the two territories and, in time, to build civil societies in which the norms of Western-style liberalism and democracy are taken for granted. In the context of twenty-first-century international administrations, the spread of a ‘civilized habitus’ has involved educational practices aimed at the diffusion of a series of field-specific norms, rules and procedures seen as necessary for the normal functioning of the different fields of society. To explain the dynamics of those pedagogic practices, it is useful to draw on sociological analyses of the role of modern institutions in constructing a particular set of ‘common sense’ understandings of the world, thereby leading people to take for granted the symbolic boundaries – between reasonable/appropriate practices and unacceptable modes of behaviour – that exist in their society. Particularly relevant to my study are the writings of Pierre Bourdieu. In his theory, Bourdieu placed a special emphasis on the concept of fields, understood as differentiated social subsystems, in which specific sets of practices take place (see Bourdieu 1977). In every particular field (e.g. the economic field, the legal field, the academic), agents engage in competent action and compete within the framework of a shared system of meanings. Each field is governed by a given habitus.

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 115 As Stefano Guzzini has explained, habitus provides ‘schemas of perception, thought and action which tend to reproduce practices in conformity with the field throughout time. . . . Comparable to Kuhn’s paradigm, [habitus] is a disposition to act, perceive and think in particular ways’ (Guzzini 2000: 166). Habitus is inculcated in individuals through ongoing educational processes, through which pedagogic authorities disseminate certain sets of meanings, presenting them as the objective truth, while at the same time excluding other ideas as unthinkable (see also Jenkins 1992). Over the past couple of years, Bosnia and Kosovo have witnessed the emergence of a complex set of educational practices, enacted by a network of international institutions. Those practices are explicitly aimed at socializing Kosovars and Bosnians into the norms and rules of liberal democratic self-mastery. A full analysis of pedagogic practices enacted by international actors in Bosnia and Kosovo is beyond the scope of this paper. Here, I can do no more than point to a few examples that illustrate the nature of international efforts to bring into existence societies of liberal, self-disciplined subjects. In Kosovo, in areas as diverse as training policemen and judicial and civil administrators; furthering the development of a civil society; supporting media development; organizing and supervising elections; and monitoring, protecting and promoting human rights, the OSCE has carried out a variety of activities aimed at teaching the people of the province liberal-democratic norms on the basis of which they should govern their polity (see OSCE 2002, 2003). For instance, through various seminars, organized particularly within the framework of the Institute for Civil Administration (ICA), the OSCE has sought to educate Kosovar civil servants and politicians to maintain ‘efficient and democratic government structures’ (see OSCE 2002; OSCE Report 2003). The explicit goal of the ICA is ‘to foster a professional public sector based on the rule of law and efficient management’ (see OSCE Press Release 2001). Systematic seminars are delivered regionally, ‘to ensure training is delivered to a broad spectrum of Kosovo civil servants regardless of ethnicity’ (OSCE Press Release 2001, italics added). To date, the ICA seminar programme has covered a variety of subjects, from small and medium sized enterprise development, to the role of the ombudsman office, to awareness of (UNMIK-promulgated) Kosovo regulations on self-government of municipalities, the role of the opposition, and human rights standards (OSCE Press Release 2001). In 2002, the OSCE collaborated with the Council of Europe in a massive human rights campaign targeting school children. According to the OSCE, ‘the basic idea of the campaign is that children will learn about basic human rights, contributing to ensure that the children own the message themselves’ (OSCE Report 2002). And in October 2003 the OSCE launched the first in a series of Kosovo Youth Assemblies, fora designed to teach – and encourage the practice of – norms and rules of democracy among young people of different ethnicities. The Youth Assemblies are supposed to act as ‘schools of democracy’, where, under the supervision of OSCE officials, the young Kosovars learn the basic norms and rules of democratic processes, including elections, decision-making in multi-ethnic communities, budget management, rules, attitudes and standards

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that ought to govern interactions between democratic assemblies and special committees, etc. (OSCE Report 2003). The OSCE has also stated its aim to strengthen the organizational capacity of Kosovo’s political parties, to help them develop their policy platforms and prepare for elections (OSCE 2002 ‘Supporting Democracy in Kosovo’). In the course of interactions with representatives of various Serb and Albanian parties in the province, OSCE representatives have been explicit about the importance they attached to the dissemination of UNMIK principles and rules governing the formulation of legitimate party platforms, rules of ‘good governance within political party structures’, as well as specific procedures to be followed by Kosovar parties during the elections (OSCE Press Release 2002). In a similar vein, NATO-led KFOR also became involved in the socialization of Kosovars into liberal democratic norms. For instance, KFOR initiated several pedagogic programmes aimed at teaching the norms and values of democracy, human rights, peace and reconciliation to the children and young people of Kosovo. Various contingents from NATO member states organized what they called special ‘moral classes’ in local schools, teaching Albanian and Serbian children ‘solid ideas about tolerance, friendship and cooperation’, and, more generally, about democracy and the meaning and requirements of peace (see KFOR Online 2000).22 In addition, KFOR has cooperated with UNMIK in organizing more specialized seminars and workshops, designed to teach the people of the province the principles, rules and procedures of economic life in a liberal society. For instance, KFOR and UNMIK have conducted a series of seminars on the development of small and medium enterprises, in an attempt to promote a liberal economic way of thinking and to teach business skills (e.g. involving efficient management of enterprises, capital/credit procurement, etc.) to people who have virtually no experience of living in a liberal society (Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Kosovo 2001). International administrators in Bosnia have also enacted a series of pedagogic practices aimed at socializing Bosnians into a particular set of (internationallyprescribed) liberal norms. Similar to its involvement in Kosovo, the OSCE has been engaged in educational programmes aimed at teaching the next generation of Bosnian leaders the norms and attitudes of good (liberal democratic) governance, as well as the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ and skills required to run businesses in a market economy.23 The OSCE has also initiated a series of parliamentary support programmes, designed to teach Bosnian MPs and parliamentary staff the roles of representatives in modern democratic legislature, the proper competences and behaviour of special parliamentary committees (e.g. defense and finance committees), as well as the rules governing the interaction between a modern parliament and the media. Also significant is the role played by the OSCE, in cooperation with the European Union and other agencies (like the US Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Programme) in monitoring, advising and training law enforcement authorities in protecting domestic order, and adopting international techniques and complying with Western standards in protecting Bosnian borders and fighting organized

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 117 crime and terrorism (see the International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program 2003). Such practices of socialization are likely to become even more widespread in the future, as the international administrators prepare to hand over more power to the people of Bosnia and Kosovo. At the same time, it is difficult to predict the extent to which these practices are going to lead to the successful socialization of Bosnians and Kosovars. A full analysis of the outcome of socialization is impossible here, not least because it will take years to establish if the new ‘habitus’ disseminated through the various branches of the international administrations is internalised to the point of persisting following the withdrawal of the international administrators from the province. From the point of view of the international administrators, the problem is that Bosnian and Kosovar political elites, as well as the public, are increasingly critical of the extensive powers (coupled with a lack of domestic accountability) exercised in the name of building democracy in those territories (see Caplan 2004; Gheciu 2005). Moreover, the logic of habitus-diffusion requires that the socializing agency be recognized and trusted as the legitimate expert in its social field. If, however, the trust in that agency were to break down, those who have been socialized could easily come to see the prescribed habitus as the reflection of a particular political agenda, rather than the normal, common-sense set of concepts and dispositions. Linked to this, if those socialized in this case, the people of Kosovo and Bosnia, were to perceive any sign of compliance with the rules prescribed by the international administrators as an unacceptable form of cooperation with an international administration that acted against their polities’ interests, then the adoption of the habitus disseminated by those administrators might come to be regarded as an act of betrayal. Likewise, the refusal to adopt the habitus might come to be recognized, within those territories, as a sign of patriotic defiance. If that were to happen, it is not difficult to see that Kosovar and Bosnian political and administrative elites could find themselves under significant pressure from their constituents to resist all international attempts at socializing them into internationally prescribed ideas and dispositions. Given the complexity of problems faced by Bosnia and Kosovo, the violence of the wars they recently experienced, and the importance of avoiding a relapse into that kind of violence, it might be argued that a comprehensive involvement by the international community is the only way forward, the best recipe for the reconstruction of these societies. This may well be so. This paper has not attempted to answer the question of whether the international community should play a role in the reconstruction of those territories. Rather, my focus has been on the nature of the particular mode of international involvement, specifically on the actual practices of reconstruction enacted by the international administrators in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the conceptions of protection that are at the heart of those practices. My goal was to examine the complexity, and some of the inconsistencies, of power-filled practices carried out within the framework of the two international administrations. Over the first half of 2004, a series of Western policy-makers and political analysts have argued that the success of the international administrations in Bosnia and Kosovo suggests that this is a model of intervention that

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should be replicated in other parts of the world (including, according to some, in Iraq). That is one more reason why it is important to examine the dynamics and implications of the international administrations centred on UNMIK and the OHR. A close analysis of those administrations reveals that the real story in Bosnia and Kosovo is much more complicated, and arguably more problematic, than the narrative of reason and progress formulated by advocates of this model would suggest.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Jef Huysmans, Raia Prokhovnik and all the participants in the July 2003 workshop on The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency for their extremely helpful comments on the first draft of this paper. 2 On the goals of the international administrations in Bosnia and Kosovo, see Caplan (2002), especially Chapters 1 and 2. 3 The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly Annex 10. For a detailed account of the powers of the International Administration, see Caplan (2002). 4 For a critical analysis of the international administration in Bosnia see, for example, Chandler (1999). 5 United Nations Resolution 1244 (1999), S/RES/1244, 10 June 1999, paragraph 10, reprinted in Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon (2000), Appendix C. 6 On the meaning attached to the two functions, see Resolution 1244, para.11. 7 Ibid. 8 See UN Doc. UNMIK/REG/1999/1 Section 1, 25 July 1999. 9 For a less critical assessment of the UN-led administration of Kosovo, see Yannis (2001). 10 The question of Yugoslav legislation to be applied in Kosovo caused a significant degree of controversy in the province. Initially, UNMIK appeared willing to apply the entire body of legislation enacted by Belgrade right until the NATO campaign. Predictably, the Albanians were opposed to the application of laws passed after the revocation of the province’s autonomy; in their view legislation was built around a systematic discrimination of ethnic Albanians. In response to that opposition, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General redefined the issue of applicability of Yugoslav law. Thus, Regulation No.1999/24 (passed in December 1999) – on the Law Applicable in Kosovo – excludes Yugoslav laws adopted after 22 March 1989. 11 For a more detailed account of the tensions between the principles advocated in Resolution 1244 and the actual practices enacted by the international administration, see Gheciu (2004). 12 These principles, as noted above, were emphasized in Security Council Resolution 1244 (paragraph 10). 13 See, for example, Caplan (2002), especially Chapter 1. 14 The Accord stipulates the primacy of international law over domestic law, and states that extensive rights and freedoms incorporated in European legal instruments are directly applicable in Bosnia and Herzegovina (see Article II, Annex 4, of the General Framework Agreement). 15 See David Campbell’s analysis of the spatial effects of international diplomacy in Bosnia (Campbell 1999: 395–435). 16 Didier Bigo, Chapter 6 in this volume, p. 4. In Bigo’s analysis of the three modes of protection, this represents an instantiation of the second mode. 17 The goal of creating a unified state and integrating it in Europe is also stated in the OHR Mission Implementation Plan.

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 119 18 The report was based on the findings of the Balkan Working Group convened by the Institute to discuss policy options in the Balkans – a group that consisted of Balkans experts from the US Administration, Congress, governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in the Balkans, think tanks and the media. 19 For instance, in reaction to difficulties experienced by the main Kosovo Albanian parties in negotiating a power-sharing agreement that would enable them to fill key positions in the new, self-governing institutions, then UNMIK chief Michael Steiner argued that the wrangling showed the ‘parties still had a lot to learn about democratic principles and compromise’ (see Deutsche Presse-Agentur Press release 2002). 20 Interviews with NATO officials, Political Affairs Division and the Office of the Secretary General, November 1999 and March 2000, Brussels. 21 See also the OSCE reports on its educational programmes aimed at Kosovar MPs and parliamentary staff, police forces, journalists, etc. (http://www.osce.org/kosovo/ democratization). 22 Also relevant are the subsequent issues of KFOR Online. 23 For an empirical account of the pedagogic practices enacted by the OSCE in Bosnia see the sections on education and democratization, the OSCE Mission to Bosnia 2003.

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Education Reform Agenda: An Update (2003), June 2003. Elias, Norbert (1982) The Civilizing Process, vol. 2, Oxford: Blackwell. —— (1998) On Civilization, Power and Knowledge, Stephen Mennell and Johan Goudsblom (eds), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gheciu, Alexandra (2005) ‘International Norms, Power and the Politics of International Administration: The Kosovo Case’, Geopolitics, 10 (1), 121–146. Guzzini, Stefano (2000) ‘A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 6 (2), 147–182. International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (2003) Project Overview: Bosnia, available on the web at http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/icitap/TextBosnia.html (accessed 17 January 2004). International Crisis Group Report no. 155 (2004) Collapse in Kosovo. Brussels: ICG. Jenkins, Richard (1992) Pierre Bourdieu. London and New York: Routledge. KFOR Online (2000) 28 October 2000. Kouchner, Bernard (1999) ‘The Challenge of Rebuilding Kosovo’, NATO Review, 47 (4), available on the web at http://www.nato.int/docu/review/1999 (accessed 7 June 2003). Leutloff, Carolin and Richl, Elmar (1999) ‘The State of Education in Kosovo after the Cease-fire in June 1999’, in Ulf Bunnbauer, Hannes Grandits, Siegfried Gruber, Karl Kaser, Robert Richler and Christian Promitzer (eds) Education and Media in Southeast Europe: Country Reports. Graz: Center for the Study of Balkan Societies and Cultures. Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Kosovo, newsletter, Issue no. 35, April 2001. OHR (2003) BiH Media Round-Up, 17 June 2003, available on the web at http://www.ohr.int/ohr-dept/presso/bh-media-rep/round-ups/default.asp (accessed 14 July 2004). OHR Mission Implementation Plan (2003) Office of the High Representative, 30 January 2003, available on the web at http://www.ohr.int (accessed 21 January 2004). OHR Press Release (2004a) ‘Defence Officials Move from Entity to State Level’, 21 April 2004. —— (2004b) ‘Reform is for the Citizens, not just Europe’, 21 April 2004. OSCE (2002) ‘Supporting Democracy in Kosovo’, available on the web at http://www.osce.org/kosovo/democratization (accessed 15 May 2003). OSCE Mission in Kosovo (2003) available on the web at http://www.osce.org/kosovo (accessed 6 January 2005). OSCE Mission to Bosnia (2003) available on the web at http://www.oscebih.org/ education and http://www.oscebih.org/democratization (accessed 21 September 2004). OSCE Press Release (2001) ‘New Training Seminar for Kosovo Civil Servants Underway’, 8 June 2001, available on the web at http://www.osce.org/kosovo (accessed 15 May 2003). —— (2002) ‘OSCE Reminds Kosovo Political Entities of Registration Requirements’, 8 March 2002. OSCE Report (2002) ‘Human Rights Promotion’, March 2002. —— (2003) ‘OSCE Initiates First Kosovo Youth Assembly’, 28 October 2003. Paris, Roland (2002) ‘International Peacebuilding and the Mission Civilisatrice’, Review of International Studies, 28 (4), 637–655. Press Office of the High Representative (2003) ‘High Representative Underlines Seven Pillars of Peace Keeping Lessons Learned In BiH’, 19 June 2003. Report of the Secretary General on the United Nationals Interim Administration in Kosovo (1999), UN Doc.S/1999/779 of 12 July 1999. Smith, Dennis (2001) Norbert Elias and Modern Social Theory, London: Sage.

‘Civilizing’ Balkans, protecting Europe 121 UN News Service Release (2003a) ‘Kosovo Mission at Its Most Difficult and Delicate Phase – UN Envoy’, UN News Centre, 8 May 2003, available on the web at http://www.un.org/apps/news (accessed 29 April 2004). —— (2003b) ‘UN Envoy says Kosovo Assembly’s Resolution Divisive’, 15 May 2003. US Institute of Peace Report (2001) ‘Kosovo Municipal Leaders Agree on GoodGovernance Initiatives’, Peace Watch, VII (3), 1–6. US Institute of Peace Special Report no. 83 (February 2002) Taking Stock and Looking Forward: Intervention in the Balkans and Beyond, Washington, DC: US Institute of peace. US Institute of Peace Special Report no. 97 (December 2002) Lawless Rule Versus Rule of Law in the Balkans, Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace. Walker, R.B. J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (2000) ‘Europe is Not Where It Is Supposed to Be’ in Williams, Michael C. and Morten Kelstrup (eds), International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration, London: Routledge. Yannis, Alexandros (2001) Kosovo Under International Administration, Athens: Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. Zakaria, Fareed (1997) ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, Foreign Affairs, 76 (6), 22–43. Zaum, Dominik (2003) ‘The Paradox of Sovereignty: International Involvement in Civil Service Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, International Peacekeeping, 10, 102–120.

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The judicialisation of armed conflict Transforming the twenty-first century1 Elspeth Guild

Traditionally, war and courts have provided two alternative mechanisms for the resolution of disputes. War has primarily been an interstate mechanism used as an in extremis threat or reality in the arsenal of diplomacy and interstate relations. Courts, however, have provided a mechanism for the legitimation of the use but also the control of violence where a claim to a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence has been achieved in a particular territory (Weber 1978). War takes place between groups where there is a challenge to a claim to a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence or where there is no one actor capable of such a claim. The courts, as a dispute resolution mechanism, depend on a monopoly of violence within which the individual, rather than the group (even when the individual is part of a group such as in the case of gang violence), is the focus. Traditionally, national courts are an important mechanism to control violence, particularly in liberal democracies and to adjudicate on the responsibility of the individual in respect of violence. International courts have as their subjects states, whose leaders are protected by the mantle of state immunity from individual responsibility for acts assigned to the state. However, this way of looking at war and courts is under challenge. This chapter seeks to examine the challenge which this transformation constitutes for the international community. I will set out some of the recent developments in the relations between states and how the transformation of the individual as a supranational rights holder changes the nature of protection and politics. States, courts and individuals are finding themselves in new articulations as regards their relationships to armed conflict and its definition. The complexity and importance of the current changes need to be examined in depth and I include in this chapter a research agenda to this end. The challenge is one of protection: how is the individual protected in the face of armed conflict? The transformation of a state institution: the courts, into a supra national entity with a highly defined protection responsibility in respect of the individual has fundamental consequences for our understanding of armed conflict and state responsibility. The meaning of protection changes when it moves to a focus which is firmly on the single individual, as the object of protection and the failure to protect or as the person responsible for denying or depriving the individual of protection.

The judicialisation of armed conflict

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Courts violence and democracy Since the end of the Second World War, the justification for war internationally has been highly circumscribed. Article 2 of the UN Charter states (1) All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered. (2) All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. The importance of the UN as the exclusive mechanism capable of justifying armed conflict is demonstrated by the intense efforts of the US and the UK to obtain a clear mandate from the Security Council for the attack against Iraq in February 2003. Much controversy regarding the legitimacy of that war revolves around this question. The only exception for states lawfully to engage in war under the Charter is in accordance with Article 51: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security. A state’s decision to use armed attack is not only subject to political and possibly legal challenge within the state itself and to political challenge from other states, but also to legal challenge from the international community in the form of the UN. The Cold War held in check the development of the legal consequences of the use of armed attack not least because of the scepticism of the Soviet Union on the role of law in international relations (Bassiouni 1999). However, almost immediately following the dissolution of the USSR, courts as arbiters of the legitimacy of armed attack were established in the international field, specifically the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia2 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.3 In both cases, the courts are entitled to bring proceedings only against individuals – the individual shorn of the mantle of state immunity. The individual as nothing greater than bare life4 appears as the subject of international criminal proceedings before international criminal courts.5 Traditionally, courts are not only a part of the state but an indispensable part of the democratic state’s claim to be entitled to punish an individual (i.e. state use

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of violence). Where there is a successful claim to the monopoly of violence, the use of armies within the territory can become problematic. The state is entitled (and obliged) to enforce the peace through the use of civilian forces (i.e. police, or in some cases police with military status such as gendarme). A timely example of the conflict between the two mechanisms is the speech by the Irish Prime Minister, Bertie Ahern on 17 October 2004 when discussing the future of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) ‘The future of Ireland will be defined by democracy, not by paramilitaries of any description . . . Our constitution provides for only one army, one Oglaigh na hEirann . . . Democracy and private armies do not mix.’6 The transformation of the discourse regarding the IRA from an external force in Northern Ireland to an internal one and therefore now in competition with the legitimate state institutions is striking. It is also a warning to the IRA that what has been formerly described as political violence, that is, violence between military armies subject to international diplomacy as a mechanism for resolution, may now be treated as crime subject to the control of the police and courts. The role of courts in the establishment of a democratic state’s claim to the legitimate use of violence is important. The appeal to democracy and the rule of law as the safeguards for the citizen against the state’s abuse of power is a powerful tool of governance. There may be a trade off between groups and individuals regarding the abandonment of a claim to the legitimate use of violence by one group (for instance in the decommissioning of weapons) and the security which the hegemonic power delivers (or promises to deliver) in the form of rule of law and the institutions of civil justice, that is, legitimate courts. The end of bipolarity has led to much discussion about the nature of US dominance of international relations, for instance Hardt and Negri’s vision of Empire (2000) or Chomsky’s perspective on hegemony (2004). There has been less comment on US military dominance in conjunction with the development of international courts capable of and designed to deal with the individual human being as a disobedient international subject, the international criminal courts.7 This proximity provides the background for any discussion of judicialisation of armed conflict.

War, politics and law The relationship of war and international politics has been much discussed, not least by Clausewitz on the one hand and Schmitt and Foucault on the other: the former claiming there is a case for arguing that war is the continuation of politics by other means, the latter the reverse, politics are the continuation of war by other means. International diplomacy, whether related to war or otherwise, and law also have an uneasy relationship. On the one hand diplomacy depends on a general respect for the immunity of the leaders of states and their representatives – formulated in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 1961. On the other hand, the institutions which give effect to and interpret the convention are national and subject to national courts. As national courts are embedded in the national structures of state governance and the state itself is the foremost


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subject of international law, interpretation and implementation by the national institutions may be suspect. Impartiality is a hard won virtue in such circumstances. International courts have been few until the second half of the twentieth century. An example from the pre-Second World War period is the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague, but under its jurisdiction only states are the visible participants.8 After the Second World War, the use of international military tribunals to try the leaders of those on the losing side, the tribunals of Nuremburg and Tokyo, have had a somewhat mixed legitimacy (Cassese and Roling 1994). The resurgence of sovereignty claims over the same period led to an increasing insistence on the immunity of political leaders. The same post-Second World War period saw the development of international agreements which in conjunction with the principles of customary international law provided a framework of law surrounding the use of war as a dispute resolution mechanism. As the justification for armed conflict has become codified in the UN Charter around either defence of the state itself, or protection of individuals, that is, humanitarian, so has the legitimacy of techniques used in armed conflict been modified. In particular, the development of principles and agreements on international humanitarian law in the post-Second World War period, including the treatment of individuals caught up in interstate conflicts, has brought an element of legality into the practices of war. It has given a foundation to the allocation of liability for abuse through court mechanisms primarily after the conflict has been resolved (Fleck 2004). The codification of the rules on the conduct of war which is found in the Geneva Conventions 1949 and their 1977 protocols is critical to this development. The institution responsible for the oversight of the application of the Conventions, the Red Cross has shown, in the context of the revelation of shocking abuse of prisoners in Iraqi jails under the jurisdiction of US forces in 2002–2003, in particular Abu Ghraib, just how important these conventions are to the protection of individuals caught up in international conflicts. However, the creation of international rules regarding the treatment of individuals in war and armed conflict has brought with it the demand for enforcement. With the demand for enforcement has come the need for adjudication. To what extent was the treatment suffered by the prisoners in Abu Ghraib gaol properly categorised as torture? The US forces have sought to limit to a minimum the practices which are so categorised.9 The Red Cross, some governments, external observers and non-governmental organisations do not appear to be in complete agreement.10 Those states with a history of submission to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) have already made the link between that court’s definition of torture and state liability and responsibility in Iraq. The resort to judicial dispute resolution mechanisms is ‘hard wired’ into the modern concept of rule of law which, as the EU constitution claims, is one of the foundations of European democratic societies. Its relationship to democracy as a core element of legitimacy in the use of violence leads directly to the development of supra national judicial dispute resolution mechanisms. Conflicting claims

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about the legitimacy of violence do not easily find resolution without external, independent adjudication. The final word on legitimacy in the use of violence by liberal democratic states appears less and less to lie with the executive. Courts, and in particular international courts, are increasingly engaged. Their cultivation of impartiality as regards the state’s claim to a right to violence depends on finding against the state at least some of the time. The ECtHR is a supra national court based in Strasbourg which has jurisdiction to receive complaints from individuals that states, parties to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) have failed to fulfil their obligations under the convention. The UK is a signatory of the ECHR and must submit to the jurisdiction of the ECtHR, thus the condemnation of the UK military action in Gibraltar against suspected terrorists by a supra national court is revealing. On 6 March 1988, UK military officers (in the form of the Special Air Service (SAS) shot and killed three persons who were suspected of being about to carry out a terrorist attack in Gibraltar. Some of the relatives brought proceedings against the UK before the ECtHR for a failure to comply with Article 2 ECHR, the right to life.11 The ECtHR held that on the one hand, [the UK authorities] were required to have regard to their duty to protect the lives of the people in Gibraltar including their own military personnel and, on the other, to have minimum resort to the use of lethal force against those suspected of posing this threat in the light of the obligations flowing from both domestic and international law.12 As a result the ECtHR found that In sum, having regard to the decision not to prevent the suspects from travelling to Gibraltar, to the failure of the authorities to make sufficient allowances for the possibility that their intelligence assessments might, in some respects at least, be erroneous and to the automatic recourse to lethal force when the soldiers opened fire, the Court is not persuaded that the killing of the three terrorists constituted the use of force which was no more than absolutely necessary in defence of persons from unlawful violence within the meaning of Article 2 . . .13 In a situation of armed conflict where the military is deployed by the state to protect the citizen, a supra national court capable of acknowledging the individual as a party, may find the state to be in breach of its own undertaking to respect the rules on the use of violence.

The search for legitimacy The UN Charter, as I mentioned in the introduction, is central to the changes which have taken place as regards the legitimacy of armed conflict. Chapter VII provides the circumstances in which armed conflict will be lawful under


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the Charter and limits these to self-defence. As I pointed out earlier, Article 51 states that Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Thus other reasons for armed conflict are excluded. Throughout the period of bipolarity, the balance of power between the US and Soviet blocks meant that recourse to law as a mediator in respect of violence was only one of a number of alternatives. The risk of ‘real’ war being triggered by regional conflicts engaging states in differing blocks provided an alternative factor in respect of dispute resolution.14 The change in the nature of armed conflict after the end of bipolarity (which was symbolised by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989) also had consequences for the relationship of war and courts. In this period in particular, traditional inter state armed conflict, around which the instruments of humanitarian law are based, has become the exception. It has been superseded by intra state conflict where interest groups within a state, with or without the support of outside actors, use the techniques of war to settle disputes. This change in the face of armed conflict has created new challenges for the conception of war and necessitated the development of new mechanisms for its containment. The response of the international community to this change has in part been the increasing involvement of international forces, whether under the direction of the UN or otherwise constructed, to intervene in intra state conflict. This role, often referred to as a policing role – first limited to peace keeping, now extending to peace making, presents new challenges to the legal structure of war. It also engages centrally the problem of the legitimacy of the use of political violence. One of the bedevilling aspects of international military operations around the establishment and maintenance of peace is to what extent the use of violence by the outside force is acceptable. The genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia in 1995, is to no small extent the result of this difficult issue (Rodhe 1998). When the international community intervenes in any situation of conflict, some parties will benefit and others will suffer. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the 1999 NATO bombing campaign of Serbia over human rights abuses in Kosovo. The Albanian ethnic community benefited at the expense of the Serb community in the area (de Charette 2002). The legitimacy of such action must be justified, first of all politically. However, as the dispute is political by its very nature and political legitimation at the international level is weak, there is an increasing pressure to use other instruments which do not have an overt party political function yet which determine the legitimacy of violence – the courts. The courts are the ‘high priests’ of the rule of law – their function is to safeguard the rule of law, itself an indispensable characteristic of democracy (at least, in the European discourse). The exact content of the rule of law is somewhat less

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clear, but it finds one of its sources in international human rights instruments such as the ECHR, which with its own judicial dispute resolution mechanism, provides an increasing comprehensive and, in the context of European state violence, unavoidable, arbiter of the internationally legitimate. The admissibility judgement in the case of Bankovic before the ECtHR is a good example. The case arose from the complaints of individuals harmed by the bombing of the Radio Televizije Srbije facilities in Belgrade (the Belgrade Television Tower) by NATO forces on 23 April 1999. This was part of air strikes announced by NATO on 30 January 1999 on the territory of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) as a result of non-compliance by FRY with the demands of the international community. On 24 March 1999 air strikes began in accordance with a decision by the North Atlantic Council that all efforts to achieve a negotiated, political solution to the Kosovo crisis had failed. Six individuals who had suffered the loss of family members or injury themselves in the Belgrade Television Tower strike began an action against the European NATO countries participating in the bombing campaign on the basis of a breach of Article 2 ECHR. The ECtHR found the case inadmissible on the basis that the actions of the respondent states did not take place within their jurisdiction. But in doing so, the ECtHR was required to clarify its role and the character of the Convention in relation to the exercise of state violence across borders. It stated The Court’s obligation, in this respect is to have regard to the special character of the Convention as a constitutional instrument of European public order for the protection of individual human beings and its role . . . is to ensure the observance of the engagements undertaken by the Contracting Parties . . . It is therefore difficult to contend that a failure to accept the extra-territorial jurisdiction of the respondent States would fall foul of the Convention’s ordre public objective, which itself underlines the essentially regional vocation of the Convention system . . .15 However, it did state that In sum, the case-law of the Court demonstrates that its recognition of the exercise of extra-territorial jurisdiction by a Contracting State is exceptional: it has done so when the respondent State, through the effective control of the relevant territory and its inhabitants abroad as a consequence of military occupation or through the consent, invitation or acquiescence of the Government of that territory, exercises all or some of the public powers normally to be exercised by that Government.16 Thus the principle of state sovereignty remains the base line, but against it the supra national court will consider the realities of whether a state is in control of a territory and its population for the purposes of providing a remedy to individuals harmed by the state. The involvement of courts in the resolution of disputes involving armed conflict is also in the process of changing not least in recognition of the nature of


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the phenomenon. The traditional use of courts in relation to armed conflict has been three fold: 1

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The International: the determination of the legality of techniques used during conflicts by state actors (e.g.: the attempts by Nicaragua and Vietnam to bring actions before the ICJ against the US over the mining of their harbours); The Sui Generis Supra national: after the end of the conflict, to determine the level of responsibility of the leaders of the vanquished often related to the assessment of penalties and damages (e.g.: the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War); The Domestic: within states involved in the armed conflict, the use of domestic courts by commercial interests to seek reparation or damages against their own state for loss caused by its involvement in the conflict (e.g.: the challenges in the US and the UK regarding Gulf War syndrome, a condition affecting veterans of the Gulf War 1991 for which individuals suffering the syndrome have sought compensation from their governments).

These traditional ways of understanding the intersection of armed conflict and courts no longer satisfy. The struggle of individuals to appear before the international courts, the sui generis supra national criminal courts with no apparent end such as the ICTY, the search for ‘justice’ beyond the state for human rights abuses all fail to be encompassed in this schema.

The new challenges to the relationship of war and courts The change in the role of state actors in armed conflict has resulted in a change in the role of courts. This changing role and its consequences for armed conflict require reconsideration. I will set out briefly here four developments:17 1. Principles of the legal control of conflict: protecting the victims? Punishing the perpetrators? A court monopoly over revenge? The increasing use of international tribunals established by international bodies to determine the liability of individuals involved in intra state armed conflict. The examples of the tribunals set up following the Bosnian and Rwandan wars provide the clearest examples of this type of mechanism: the ex post facto use of specialist courts to determine liability and pass sentence on actors involved in the disputes. The use of the technics of criminal law investigation, pursuit of action and trial as the basis of the functioning of these tribunals has a number of consequences. First, the de facto development of concepts of criminal law which are presented as capable of universal application. The dividing line in law between national and international in this heartland of sovereignty, criminal law, deserves attention. Second, the mirroring of national court structures at the international level with specific competence and jurisdiction relating only to armed conflict within a specified state merits reflection.

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The ousting of the role of the national legal system as the allocator of culpability in behaviour framed as criminal in nature needs to be teased out. The traditional role of international law has been to regulate the arrangements of states among themselves. Since the settlement of the peace of Westphalia the principle of the nation state as sovereign within its own territory has been central to the articulation of the modern state (Caporaso 2002). From the end of the Second World War, the protection of fundamental human rights became an increasingly pressing political concern at the international level. Commencing with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1949, the UN became engaged in defining fundamental rights and seeking to ensure the compliance of states with the Declaration’s standards. The creation of legal instruments at the international level creating rights for individuals and duties for states also created expectations that the rights would be respected. However, widespread human rights abuses by states, signatories of international instruments, continued against their own nationals and others. Accordingly, pressure increased for mechanisms to force states to comply with their human rights duties. This pressure was augmented by the duty on all states to provide protection to individuals fleeing persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a social group under the UN Convention relating to the status of refugees 1951 and its 1967 protocol. Thus the perpetration of grave human rights abuses by one state had the consequence of triggering international obligations in other states towards individuals seeking refuge from the first state. Various mechanisms have been developed to seek to achieve a high level of compliance with human rights obligations by states, not least the creation at UN level of a High Commissioner for Human Rights. Among the mechanisms which are increasingly proposed and becoming increasingly requested are the establishment of tribunals competent to determine whether human rights abuses have occurred and penalties for states where found responsible for human rights abuses. At the regional level this judicialisation of human rights is most apparent in the creation of the ECHR and the Court created to adjudicate individual complaints against the state. The resulting appearance of the individual on the stage of international law changes the relationships of states between themselves and of individuals towards their states of nationality. The relationship of citizenship is transformed by the right of the individual to seek rights at a level beyond that of the national constitution against the exercise of power by the state. At the same time, the legitimacy of the state’s claim to a monopoly over the use of violence is called into question. The state itself is no longer the final authority over the use of violence but is now answerable to the international community through the mechanism of a court triggered by its nationals against it. One question becomes increasingly unavoidable: where states are responsible for human rights violations, what sanctions should be applicable? Is the state itself in general responsible or is there a mechanism for determining responsibility for violations within the structures of the state? Thus the solidarity inherent in a monolithic vision of the state begins to crumble as the perpetrators within the state structures themselves become the objects of the offences against fundamental human rights.


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2. Policing the world: the role of the international community and the creation of the International Criminal Court The slaughter which took place in Bosnia in 1992 and Rwanda in 1994 shocked the world. The scale of the violence and the clear evidence of grave breaches of fundamental human rights gave impetus to demands for the creation of an international criminal jurisdiction responsible for determining guilt and sentencing those responsible for grave human rights offences carried out in the name of the state. The development of international human rights norms and the gradual strengthening of non-governmental organisations at the international level concerned about human rights abuses internationally, such as Amnesty International, Médécins sans Frontières and others, were central to the creation of an environment where human rights abuses began to be seen as a concern of the international community even where this results in conflict with the principle of state sovereignty. The idea for the creation of an international criminal court developed through the end of the 1980s and 1990s – a discussion carried forward by governments primarily in the western world seeking to find solutions to the legitimacy of international intervention. The consequence was the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) which began work in the Hague on 1 July 2002. The ICC is a permanent court which has a wide jurisdiction to pursue individuals for crimes defined in its statute. The first indictments have now been issued and the first trials are expected to begin before too long. The development of an international criminal tribunal marks a particularly important staging post in the relationship between war and courts. The international community has created an international court with jurisdiction to frame the behaviour of individuals involved in armed conflict anywhere in the world18 as criminal acts to be tried and sentenced according to its rules. Armed conflict, either inter or intra state, is thus, prima facie at least, transformed into a potentially criminal act. Again the role of the national legal system of the state within which a conflict has been played out is put in question. The meaning and consequences of this development must be considered. 3. European judicialisation of human rights and conflict: the European court of human rights The development of the international policing function has brought with it questions regarding the control of the behaviour of the new ‘policemen’. The mirroring of national structures of policing within the framework of international responses to armed conflict results in the mirroring of the national court based mechanisms of control into the international arena. This area which is not yet well developed, deserves particular attention. The traditional mechanism for the control of the behaviour of military personnel by the state is through a specialised legal framework of court marshal, controlled by the military and given legitimacy not least by its mirroring of the legal and court mechanisms applicable to civil society. This system, in the new framework of international policing, is being challenged. Its legitimacy has been transformed, within the national sphere of Western Europe, by the acquisition of policing responsibilities. In the Western European internal legal order, the activities of police are controlled by the criminal and civil courts.19 This framing of responsibility is being transferred to the new international ‘police’. The court based recognition of the rights of individuals in areas of armed conflict vis-à-vis the behaviour of military personnel carrying out

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peace keeping (or indeed now peace making) activities has occurred in at least two jurisdictions (Belgium and Canada) as regards national troops’ activities in Somalia. The structural consequences of these developments need to be considered – in particular, obedience of soldiers to their superiors depends to no small extent on their confidence that the system will protect them as individuals against charges of a criminal nature for the carrying out of acts which within civil society are unlawful. If the system no longer provides that protection or qualifies it then what are the consequences for armed conflict? The European human rights system provides a framework within which to examine this issue. This system was the result of human rights concerns in the post-Second World War period. The definition of a set of fundamental rights and a supra national court to determine individual complaints against states for abuse of those rights became central to a manner of considering responsibility and rights. The conception of individual rights as overflowing from the national territory and as capable of being upheld from outside the national judicial system and indeed in opposition to it was central to the development in Europe of acceptance of the individual as an actor at the international level. In respect of human rights abuses arising from armed conflict, the ECtHR has considered in respect of three regions in particular the rights of individuals against the duties of states: the Northern Ireland conflict, the Cyprus conflict and the Bosnia conflict. What is the right of the state to engage in armed conflict which results in harm to individuals and to what extent does the state owe a duty of care to individuals who are caught up in armed conflict either as non-combatants or as combatants? 4. Refugees and the internationalisation of armed conflict A final consideration relates to the treatment of the victims of armed conflict who move in search of protection: refugees. The Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees 1951 and its 1967 Protocol obliged the signatory states not to refoule (i.e. expel a refugee) persons to the country whence they have come where they have a well founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. This duty, which is the treaty expression of a right to protection in customary international law, brings the human consequences of armed conflict home to the international community. This will have substantial consequences for international relations, since the act of recognising and providing protection to an individual as a refugee, in effect is a statement that the country whence he or she comes is engaging in or permitting torture and persecution on its territory. The duty to protect the individual finds further expression in the region domain in the ECHR (in particular Article 3 prohibiting torture and interpreted by its Court to include the return of a person to a country where he or she is likely to suffer torture). People and their movement across borders begin to play an important role in the international consideration of intra state armed conflict. New tensions and challenges to states are created all of which lead away from the national level for their ultimate resolution. At the national level of states participating in international ‘policing’ operations, legitimacy


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is given to protection claims by potential victims of the conflict which has consequences for their treatment by the state. The relationship between international instruments designed to protect individuals, such as the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees 1951 and its 1967 Protocol and the ECHR (in particular Article 3 prohibiting torture and interpreted by its Court to include the return of a person to a country where he or she is likely to suffer torture), and the international participation in intra state armed conflict are creating new tensions and challenges to states. At the national level of states participating in international ‘policing’ operations, legitimacy is given to protection claims by potential victims of the conflict which have consequences for their treatment by the state. The response of European states to asylum seekers from the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts deserves attention as providing a new framing of asylum issues within the structure of supra national engagement in intra state armed conflict. This is the starting point for a reconsideration of the relationship of armed conflict and courts. At the centre of this research must be the transformation of international relations and the rise of a single superpower, the US. It is in the context of redefining the legitimacy of the use of state power that the mechanisms of the judicial have begun to be deployed at the international level with both increasing effectiveness and contestation. The legitimate use of armed force has been codified in the UN Charter. The focus of that codification is the protection of the integrity of the state and the state’s capacity as an actor both externally and internally. Notwithstanding the criticisms of the UN system as regards its capacity to implement the rules, the fact that, in 2004, the US government has invested substantial resources in strenuously promoting its interpretation of Article 2 of the UN Charter as permitting forms of pre-emptive armed attack indicates the pervasiveness of the UN system of legitimacy in the field. The principles of rule of law seem to be acting as a constraining force even in a monopolar world. At the same time, the UN members have not only developed an increasing number of international human rights instruments for the protection of the individual, they have signed and ratified them at an increasing pace. The protection of the individual within the state has become the international duty of the state. The intersection, then, of the rule of law regarding the right to engage in armed conflict and the duty of the state to protect the individual has transformed the way in which international law perceives the individual. One of the consequences of the regulation of a field by the law is to place it at one remove from the field of politics. Where negotiations fail, in a field regulated by the rule of law, the next step is an appeal to the judges. As armed conflict has increasingly been subjected to the principles of international rule of law for the purposes of the protection of the individual, so the mechanisms for challenging and adjudicating disputes about legitimacy have sought judicial venues in which to express themselves. The individual has appeared as the central object of protection but also as an actor demanding protection within the judicialisation of armed conflict.

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Notes 1 Many thanks to the European Commission for its generous support under the Framework VI Project CHALLENGE on the basis of which this research was made possible. 2 The ICTY was established by Security Council resolution 827. This resolution was passed on 25 May 1993 in the face of the serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991, and as a response to the threat to international peace and security posed by those serious violations. 3 Recognizing that serious violations of humanitarian law were committed in Rwanda, and acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the Security Council created the ICTR by resolution 955 of 8 November 1994. The purpose of this measure is to contribute to the process of national reconciliation in Rwanda and to the maintenance of peace in the region. The ICTR was established for the prosecution of persons responsible for genocide and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the territory of Rwanda between 1 January 1994 and 31 December 1994. 4 In this sense bare life is that of an individual where nationality is not central; state belonging is not the point of reference (Agamben 1998). 5 It is important to note that these international criminal courts are not military tribunals as were the International Military Tribunals which followed the Second World War – Nuremburg and Tokyo. In the former case, the jurisdiction was highly limited. Article 1 of the Second World War Tribunals Charter states ‘there shall be established an International Military Tribunal (hereafter called “the Tribunal”) for the just and prompt trial and punishment of major war criminals of the European Axis.’ 6 18 October 2004, Irish Independent, p. 15. 7 One welcome addition to this field is Byers and Nolte (2003). 8 http://www.icj-cij.org/icjwww/igeneralinformation/icjgnnot.html 9 US Department of Defense news briefing 4 May 2004, by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. 10 See for instance Amnesty International, 7 May 2004 “An open letter to President George W. Bush on the question of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” 11 The state duty to respect the right to life is qualified in Article 2(2) Deprivation of life shall not be regarded as inflicted in contravention of this article when it results from the use of force which is no more than absolutely necessary: (a) in defence of any person from unlawful violence; (b) in order to effect a lawful arrest or to prevent the escape of a person lawfully detained; (c) in action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection. 12 McCann and Others v United Kingdom Case 17/1994/464/545; ECtHR 5 September 1995 para 148. 13 Ibid., para 213. 14 The resolution of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise liner in the Mediterranean is considered by A. Cassese in his work Terrorism, Politics & Law – the Achille Lauro Affair: The Achille Lauro Affairs (1992). It is surprising how the existence of a powerful Soviet Union was determinant in the affair. 15 Bankovic & Ors v Belgium & ors application no 52207/99; ECtHR 21 December 2001 para 80. Emphasis as in the original. 16 Ibid., para 71. 17 These also form the basis of a five year research project, CHALLENGE funded by the European Commission in the context of Framework 6. 18 Subject of course to the jurisdictional issues which caused such problems during the negotiation of the agreement establishing the tribunal. 19 This is not to underestimate the importance of internal police control mechanisms and complaints procedures.


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Bibliography Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bassiouni, C. (1999) Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law. The Hague: Kluwer Law International. Byers, M. and Nolte, G. (2003) United States Hegemony and the Foundations of International Law: The Effects of US Predominance on the Foundations of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Caporaso, J. (2002) The Westphalian System in Historical Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell. Cassese, A. (1992) Terrorism, Politics & Law – the Achille Lauro Affair: The Achille Lauro Affairs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cassese, A. and Roling, B. (1994) The Tokyo Trial and Beyond. London: Polity Press. Chomsky, N. (2004) Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. London: Penguin Books. de Charette, P. (2002) Les Oiseaux noirs du Kosovo: Un juge à Pristina. Paris: Michalon. Fleck, D. (2004) The Handbook on Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rodhe, D. (1998) Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II. Boulder, CO: Westview. Weber, M. (1978) Economy and Society: An outline of Interpretive Sociology vol. 1, (ed.) Roth G. & Wittich C., Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

9

The limits of agency in times of emergency Vivienne Jabri

Politics, since the events of September 11, 2001, has been dominated by a discourse of security, one that is replete with references to the immediate threat of terrorist attacks in urban areas, at times framed by very graphic descriptions of the consequences of such attacks in heavily populated centres. There is a persistent iteration of threat, from daily pronouncements on the need for vigilance through to the enactment of legislative and other measures deemed necessary in the face of what is presented as being an immediate and present danger. The discourse of security combines with a set of institutional practices, involving a complex array of agencies, the actions and interactions of which defy easy spatial and temporal limits, for just as domestic legislative measures point to a global sphere of threat, so too their implementation comes to be heavily reliant on the intersection between the local and the global. Whether it be domestic legislation, cross-border transnational policing and surveillance, incarceration, or warfare, practices of security appear, at least at first hand, to be at some distance removed from the immediate polity, and its public sphere. Such practices could, therefore, be construed as an attempt, both intentional and unintentional, to stifle politics and the possibility of contestation. The effect is multiplied when such practices are located in a discourse of emergency, raising immediate questions relating to the emergence of political agency; that is, the capacity to contest the claims of state sovereignty in the name of security. The chapter concentrates specifically on the politics surrounding emergency legislation. At first glance, this legislation is framed in a discourse of protection, providing administrative means for the literal removal of suspects so that protective measures are deemed to act in a preventative fashion. The state, through its legislative machinery, performs its protective role, reiterating its classic remit, its primacy, in the provision of security towards those within its borders. What is crucial is the juxtaposition of protection and prevention, so that preventative measures undertaken come to be framed, and indeed legitimised, in terms of the ultimate role of government as protector of the society it oversees. There are a number of dualisms that emerge from a conception of prevention of terrorist acts in terms of protection. There is, first, the protector/protected dualism. Another is that of protector/perpetrator. With respect to the latter, the perpetrator is clearly only a potential perpetrator, and has to be constructed as such if preventative

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measures are to be construed as credible. It is the former relationship that is of primary interest to this chapter, for it is here that we can discern the subjectivities produced in a relationship of protection and how these relate to the emergence of political agency. The aim of this chapter is to explore the implications for subjectivity and the emergence of political agency of a return to protectionism as the lynchpin of political discourse. It seeks to conceptualise the relationship between practices of state, namely security practices, productive of particular subjectivities, and the emergence of political agency, specifically a form of agency that emerges in contestation of the claims of the state in relation to security practices. The argument the chapter makes is that such practices seek the removal of politics from security, but that it is this very removal that reinforces the political moment and, put more strongly, re-enacts the political.1 The chapter argues that the implications of the politics of protection for emergent agency are at once both annihilating and productive, the former obliterating the possibility of agency, while the latter is reliant on a generative conception of relations of power that are constitutively built upon the capacity to act. The chapter explores the subjectivities emergent from the rendition of government based on protection, arguing that the relationship of protection conditions the possibility of action, thereby limiting, but not necessarily annihilating, political agency. There is hence a politics of security that targets particular others and governs the rest. This mode of governance reinforces the sovereign moment that is the state, while putting in place the machinery that institutionalises practices that underpin the relationship of protection. The subjectivities formative of this relationship can never be fully fixed, however, and it is this possibility of excess that provides a glimpse into how political agency might emerge despite the odds. Classically, and especially within realist conceptions of the international system, the threat to the state derives from other states, and the object of security, that which is to be protected, is the state and the citizens within its borders (Williams and Krause 1997). The machinery of the state, and especially its security services, the police, intelligence, and the military, develop historically to maintain their monopoly internally while targeting their firepower outwards towards the external threat. However, we know historically that the state’s security apparatus has always been directed ever inwards towards its own population, and specifically certain elements constructed as threats to the well-being of the state and its monopolistic remit in the control and government of its population. What we see, therefore, even in the context of the modern European state, is that the contiguity between state and citizen is not necessarily one that withstands close historical scrutiny, and more specifically, that the machinery of state is itself a complex apparatus the components of which are by no means constitutive of a coherent whole acting as one in the name of security. In exploring legislative measures enacted by the liberal democratic state, the aim is precisely to explore questions that arise in relation to political agency in the context of security. Such an exploration requires firstly an elaboration on the question of subjectivity in relation to the politics of protection. It requires secondly, an elaboration on the

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apparatus of the state involved in the remit of security and its implementation. In the context of emergency legislation, the location of politics may be imminent to the state itself and the various components of its apparatus. Ultimately, the liberal state’s operations in the field of security, it will be argued, focus on self-government, enabling, as will be argued later, a form of self-scrutiny that encompasses a legitimising process for the enactment of exceptional measures. The judiciary emerges as a component of state involved at one and the same time in a paradoxical role, on the one hand that provides legitimacy for exceptional politics, while on the other being a significant location wherein contestations of such measures may be possible. The first section of the chapter investigates the relationship between the subjectivities emergent from protectionist measures and the possibility of agency in the face of such measures. The section argues against claims that the politics of security denies the possibility of political agency. In addition, the section raises questions relating to the location of such agency and how this might emerge. The second section of the paper explores the location of such agency, arguing specifically that the apparatus of state within the liberal polity centres upon practices geared towards self-government, defined in this context in terms of self-scrutiny and self-legislation. In this light, the role of the judiciary becomes salient and suggests itself as the nexus between the state and the individual. What is crucial to point out, however, is that the judiciary should not be deemed to be acting against the executive; rather, it is imminent to the state and being imminent provides the possibility of scrutiny and contestation against the executive and its capacity to define threat.

Subjectivity and the politics of protection The discourse of protection places powerful limits upon political agency. It produces a form of subjectivity that is denied, not just a capacity for self-protection, but the ability to reflect upon the credibility of threat and danger. Historically, this concept of protection has been applied to, for example, children, women, the elderly, and the disabled, reinforcing either the view that protection is a positive relationship of care or that it perpetuates structures of domination that permeate across levels of social interaction. We know, both from the sociological literature on the state and the feminist literature on gender and citizenship, that protection has come at a price, and the price highlighted by authors from Charles Tilly (1985) on the sociological side and Carol Pateman (1988) on the feminist side, is extraction of one sort or another.2 What I want to highlight here is that the form of extraction we see in the present context of emergency is the extraction of political agency. An understanding of such extraction can emerge if we consider protectionist measures as constituting a multiform array of practices the consequence of which is the limitation of agency. How does this limitation of agency take place? What form of subjectivity does it produce and how is such subjectivity transformed so that agency is somehow retrieved? In formulating this question, the aim is to distinguish at the outset between subjectivity and agency. There is often a tendency


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to confuse the subject and the agency of the subject. Where the subject, according to Foucault, is constituted in discourse and matrices of power, the agency of the subject, as Judith Butler highlights, is precisely derivative from this very constitution and the historical/institutional backdrop that precisely renders meaningful, or indeed possible, the subject who speaks and acts. The agency of the subject is hence always formed in relation to ‘institutional practices’ and ‘matrixes of power’ that confer ‘authorising power’ to the subject who speaks and acts (Butler 1995: 42–47). Hobbes’s Leviathan reminds us of the security imperative of the modern state. As Giorgio Agamben points out, ‘Hobbes already mentions it as the opposite of the fear which compels human beings to unite and form a society together’ (Agamben 2002). What is of significance is that while human beings are compelled, for Hobbes, they themselves ‘will’ that a state is formed. Their agency is not in question. What is in question is the limit of agency, for any relationship based on the idea of protection is constitutively built upon other elements that render it meaningful, elements that include relations of subordination as well as exchange.3 While agency may bring forth the claim or demand for protection (e.g. witnesses demanding entry into a witness protection programme in exchange for their testimony), once the agents enters relationships defined by protection, their capacity to determine the modalities of that protection is limited. But how does such limitation emerge and what are the practices that generate it? When politics is reduced to security and the ever-present condition of threat and uncertainty, conformity and predictability come to form the imperatives of governmental measures geared towards the establishment of control and regulation. An environment that is uncertain is hence constructed and moulded into frameworks the machinery of which may be subject to calculative certainty. Antiterrorist legislation in the United States and United Kingdom,4 for example, are not simply geared at those immediately targeted under such legislation, but the wider public domain where the entire population is so subjected.5 While there is clearly a difference in the experience of such measures, measures undertaken in the name of protection come to constitute sovereign decisions that not only foreground the state, but put in place measures of government that define the role of the state in terms of its population, the well-being of the population. The increasing surveillance of the population is rendered necessary, and hence legitimised, in the name of that very population. The discursive grammar of protectionist measures incorporated into antiterrorist legislation is framed in terms of limitation to access. The machinery that such legislation puts in place, in other words, limits those who may have access to its control mechanisms. As we will see later, the United Kingdom’s derogation from European human rights law so that legislation may be passed to enable the incarceration of foreign nationals without trial is allowed with little public protest and minimal parliamentary dissent. The declaration of emergency comes to constitute an act of exceptionalism that juridically constructs enemies who are outside the normal bounds of the law (Agamben 1998). In being outside the law, those enemies are forbidden the normal right to due process. We do not hear them.

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Their lawyers speak on their behalf, but they too cannot fully participate in speech for they are prohibited from having access to information used to condemn their clients. The politics of security comes to rely upon the production of subjects deemed carriers of threat. It is further built upon a compliant subjectivity, one that accepts protection in return for the limitation of political agency. The compliant subject is one that accepts, or simply fails to question, the terms of legislation, terms that rely upon the use of and access to privileged information. The relationship between power and subjectivity comes to form a crucial link into conceptions of political agency and its emergence. Any conception of political agency must hence be situated in time and place, recognised in terms of the operations of power that generate particular subjectivities. If the indeterminacy of the present context generates the legitimising discourse for the emergency measures that circumscribe agency, as we will see, it is precisely this indeterminacy that enables the questioning of such measures and hence the emergence of contestation and politics. The paradox is that both the curtailment and the very possibility of political agency are based upon the same ground: the indeterminacy of the present context. Protectionist measures produce particular subjectivities, the subordinate, the compliant, the conforming. Nevertheless, protectionism can also produce the non-compliant, the holder of that which is valued by the protector. Protection generates at one and the same time a relationship of both subordination and exchange. There is hence extraction (protection comes at a price, as indicated earlier), but it is extraction that is conditional upon the presence of the protected. What is significant in the present late modern context is that the protection generated by the state is geared towards not just the singular individual, but the population as a category of politics, what Michel Foucault refers to as ‘biopower’ (Foucault 1990: 140–144). What we see emerging is not the absence of agency; rather, it is the limitation of agency in relation to practices that invoke security in the name of society and the public at large. As we will see later, such limitation also arises from transformations of late modern life, transformations that impact upon the spatial articulation of the political sphere. Analysis of emergency legislation provides some indication as to how protection relates to subjectivity and political agency. The politics of security centres on a set of practices that are global in reach and transcend space and time. Domestic legislation in the present context responds not only to domestic conditions or the existence of a domestic threat. Rather, such legislation responds to a complex global condition that is constructed in terms of a global threat emerging from dispersed, network organisations whose aims are indeterminate, and whose targeting behaviour appears, at least in its construction and prior to any political analysis, random and unpredictable.6 The so-called ‘war against terrorism’7 incorporates practices of government (surveillance, incarceration, pacification, discursive construction) that are transnational and that function across state and region, occurring at local, national, regional, and global levels. While the sovereign state enacts decisions relating to emergency and the state of exception, the boundaries of the state are no-longer a limitation to such practices that operate across state


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boundaries and involve professionals that interact (and compete) transnationally (Bigo 2002). We see a complex array of practices ranging from the sovereign decisions of states to the normalisation of such decisions in the administrative and juridical routines that come to structure the administrative processes driving the surveillance of clandestine organisations, individuals, and populations. Anti-terrorist measures can hence be conceptualised as being located within a complex social/juridical/political matrix of regulation that produces subjectivities based on the protector/protected dualism. The state or condition of protection suggests the protector as sovereign entity capable of decisions relating to danger and threat. The sovereign element comes into being, is indeed manifest, at every instance of such decisions. It would, however, be a mistake to consider such sovereign decisions as emanating from an abstract unity, the state. Rather, it is an array of practices that cumulatively constitute a social/juridical/political matrix of regulation that is built upon and reinforced by a discourse of threat as well as institutional mechanisms that enable such practices. The subjectivities emerging from the protector/protected dualism are hence formed within the social/juridical/political matrix of regulation that inscribes the state and its institutional clusters as protector and the population as the protected entity. As I stated earlier, the relationship has always been one based on extraction; in the late modern context of complex societies and the inter-penetration of the local and the global, the relationship is one based on the extraction of agency on the part of the protected, the population at large. The so-called protected element of the dualism is not devoid of agency, for the subjectivity emergent from the dualism is one that has a capacity to refuse or indeed challenge the legitimacy of the dualism and the knowledge base upon which it is built. The politics of protection may hence place a limit upon agency, but it is this very limit, the very divide in the dualism between the protector/protected that challenges the construct itself and raises the possibility of political agency.

Anti-terrorist measures, security, and political agency The bombings in Madrid and the apparent discovery by the British police of bomb-making components in the south east of England bear testimony to the ever-present threat of violence emanating from clandestine organisations and cells. Both Spain and the United Kingdom have historically experienced such violence in their main urban cities and elsewhere, responsibility for which was claimed by their home-grown organisations, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty) (ETA) and the IRA respectively. Both countries have historically instituted emergency legislation that lies outside the normal criminal law. In the case of the United Kingdom, these measures have recently been expanded so that, where previously, the focus of operations was Northern Ireland, in the current context, the remit of operations involves the international sphere.8 Domestic legislation is hence no longer confined to the domestic threat; rather it responds to an international arena that is characterised by networks and

142 Vivienne Jabri information technology as the formative dynamic. This transformation of the limits of sovereign decisions9 has an impact on re-defining politics and the location of political agency. The social/juridical/political matrix of regulation may emerge in the state, but its remit of operations expands beyond, so that the subject protected comes to acquire a spatial existence that is global in scope. The protector, the state, sees its role shifting transnationally beyond the state. How is subjectivity and political agency affected in this ever-expanding matrix of regulation? As will be argued in the following section, the ever-expanding spatial articulation of the threat has its own implications for the expression of political agency. What is of interest in this section is the matrix of regulation that produces subjectivities based on the protector/protected dualism. As I stated earlier, protection suggests the protector as sovereign entity capable of decisions relating to danger and threat. The sovereign element is manifest at every instance of such decisions. The sovereign element is not, however, an abstract unity, the state. Rather, it is an array of practices that cumulatively constitute a social/juridical/political matrix of regulation that is built upon and reinforced by a discourse of threat and the institutional mechanisms that reinforce and enable such practices. The subjectivities emerging from the protector/protected dualism are hence formed within a matrix of regulation that inscribes the state and its institutional clusters as protector and the population as the protected entity. What this section argues is that while the securitising imperative seeks to deny political agency, it is this very practice that enables the possibility of agency. The question is, however, what is the location of such agency and how is it articulated within conditions that clearly seek to limit such articulation? The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA2001) Act in the United Kingdom came into force following the events of September 11, 2001 in a parliamentary context of near unanimity. This, along with the Terrorism Act 2000, constitutes the measures undertaken by the UK government in response to what it sees as the security threat in the present context. Analysis of how these Acts operate should potentially indicate the locations wherein political agency emerges in a context that, is defined by a social/juridical/political matrix of regulation. Part 4 of the ATCSA2001 Act contains powers that enable the indefinite incarceration of foreign nationals suspected of being international terrorists.10 These individuals are not simply suspected, but must be ‘certified’ as ‘terrorists’ by the Secretary of State. The certification may relate to acts committed within the United Kingdom and/or elsewhere. The Act allows for an appeals process whereby internees may appeal to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) which alone has jurisdiction to hear challenges to the Home Secretary’s certification. David Blunkett, the then Home Secretary, provides an indication of the reasoning underpinning the certification and detention without trial of foreign nationals under Part 4 of the ATCSA2001 Act. He states that the challenge emanated from people who had come here often seeking asylum – ironically perhaps from the consequences of their illegal actions in their home countries. Their asylum claims had failed, they were involved in international terrorism.


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And yet it has not been possible to convict them of criminal offences. Our own adherence to our international obligations meant that we could not remove them to the countries from which they came because of the threat that they would face if returned. I could not justify to the British people a situation in which we simply left these individuals to walk our streets. (Blunkett 2004) There are a number of elements in this statement that require highlighting. The first is that the security threat as defined by Blunkett emanates from particular foreign nationals. These individuals are inscribed as carriers of a distinct terrorist threat to the United Kingdom. Their corporeal removal from ‘our streets’ becomes the imperative of state and of Blunkett in particular as Secretary of State in charge of public safety. The life of the population is the basis upon which Blunkett’s rationale is based and is reminiscent of practices of government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries geared towards the incarceration of those deemed a danger to the health of the citizenry (Foucault 2001). Blunkett goes on to state that the individuals certified ‘are free to leave the UK whenever they chose . . . .’ The implication of this statement is that the ‘protected’ include the British public face the threat of terrorism from the incarcerated who are themselves incarcerated rather than deported because of the ‘threat’ they in turn face in their home countries. The logic here is that the internees are also amongst the category of the protected within the Home Secretary’s remit. What form of political agency emerges in conditions of emergency? What is significant in the legislation described earlier is that it provides for the exceptionalism upon which law is instantiated. Every action and decision undertaken in the name of emergency legislation is at once a founding moment for the state, where the individual targeted faces the state and its capacity to draw boundaries. The difference, in the present circumstances is that these boundaries are no longer confined to the external/international boundaries of the state, but are inscribed upon the subjectivity of the ‘other’; in this case, the other certified as ‘international terrorist’ ( Jabri 2003). Any challenge against certification constitutes a political challenge against the state’s decisions relating to what constitutes a threat and how the population is protected. This point is significant, for the usual challenges made to the procedures of appeal relate to the human rights obligations of the British government (see for example, Liberty). These are clearly important. However, within the context of this chapter, the political agency of interest is that relating to security. To challenge the Home Secretary in this regard is hence to challenge his definition of threat and his agency in relation to security. It is precisely such a challenge that constitutes political agency in the context of security. The legislation and the dynamics it has produced in relation to political agency are crucial in the context of our understanding of agency in security studies. The challenges to the Home Secretary, or indeed the executive arm of government, relate at one and the same time to human rights within the democratic polity and to security. These are related challenges in that they are co-present in the contestations presented against the form in which anti-terrorism measures have

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been defined and implemented. To reiterate the point, any challenge against certification may invoke human rights, but this is an invocation that at once challenges the constitutive moment of the certification, namely its inscription of the sovereign as protector and of a particular subject as threat against which the protected must be defended. It is in this sense that the role of the judges becomes of crucial significance, for while they invoke human rights legislation, they at once challenge the remit of the state to define security. Hence, as I will argue later, the ambivalent position of the judiciary and the political agency that challenges the sovereign moment wherein decisions are made in relation to threat. The challenge to the Home Secretary has primarily been manifest through the mechanisms of appeal that the legislation enables. The conditions of possibility for the emergence of agency are internal to the discursive limits of emergency measures and the knowledge/power nexus that enables their institutionalisation. The ATCS Act 2001 contains within it the possibility of appeal for those incarcerated without trial. On appeal, the SIAC has the power to cancel a certification if it does not agree with the Home Secretary. As pointed out by the British civil liberties group, Liberty, SIAC is designed to channel all immigration and asylum cases based on national security issues . . . proceedings may be carried out in the absence of the applicant, the applicant’s legal representatives or both. Evidence can also be given without the applicant or his representative being present. Moreover, the reasons for decisions can be withheld. (2002: 23) The workings of the Appeals Commission provide an insight into the ways in which information is utilised in the nexus between power and knowledge, where the subject is in a sense formed in the game of truth surrounding and constituting the so-called ‘war against terrorism’. As the Appeals judges highlight in their judgement of 23 July 2002, ‘The SIAC is entitled to consider not only material which can be made public but also that which for reasons of national security cannot . . . neither the appellants nor their legal representatives can see any of the closed material’ (SIAC 2002: 9). How does such suspension of the law come to be incorporated into the legal framework of a liberal society? One answer to this question could, of course, derive from a Schmittian perspective on sovereign power as the capacity to decide on the state of exception, to suspend the law for the survival of the state (1985). A more fruitful approach for our present concerns about subjectivity and political agency derives from revealing the actuality of the practices involved in the implementation of emergency measures. The judges recognise the limits placed on their capacity to question sovereign power while highlighting these limits in their public statements: ‘that the appellants are at a disadvantage in relation to the closed material. They have not seen it and cannot therefore meet it . . .’ (SIAC 2002). The instantiation of a state of emergency, enabling derogation from established human rights law, is constituted by practices of power and knowledge. It is not


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that the judges have access to closed material that is a manifestation of their capacity to oppose the Home Secretary. The so-called closed material is always already conferred the status of truth, so that while the judges may certainly view the material, they cannot, however, question it. It is not that they are prohibited from questioning it. They themselves regulate their capacity to question it, as is evident from this statement: ‘Even though we have the material, we do not have the specific advice and expertise in this area of enormous importance for all the citizens of this country which was and is available to the Secretary of State’ (SIAC 2002: 14). The game of truth in which the judges find themselves subjects them into a position whereby they deny themselves the capacity to form judgement on the credibility of the closed material as reliable evidence. The appeals procedure is hence confined within conditions of possibility that enable executive certification of those deemed other; other to the welfare of the population, to public safety, to national security. Judges appointed for the scrutiny of executive powers are enabled by the legislation to do so, and in some cases have done, but it is clear that in the enactment of their appeals function they come to govern themselves within the regimes of truth that surround the ‘national security’ in times of exceptional politics. Apart from the Home Secretary himself, the judges in charge of appeals procedures possess the closest proximity to the implementation of sovereign decisions relating to exclusion; in this case the incarceration of certified foreign nationals. In the protector/protected dualism, the judges are clearly of the former element. Their agency in this regard is, however, limited by the deference they accrue to the Home Secretary in relation to matters of security. Nevertheless, their judgements with regard to emergency legislation and its legitimacy come to be highly political challenges, indicating what might be referred to as an ‘internal split’ in the sovereign that claims to ‘national security’ seek to mask.11 I want to argue in the following section that the reification of national security, its naturalisation as the remit of the executive constitutes the conditions of possibility for the emergence of political agency. Any such agency that does emerge is constituted by the discourses and institutions that underpin the state of emergency. Political intervention is subject to the limitations and constraints deriving from the matrices of regulation put in place through practices of knowledge and power, but such intervention is also and at the same time enabled by these practices. The dissenting voice, in other words, is only meaningful in terms of the grammar against which that voice is aimed. This grammar is, furthermore, not only constituted by the construct of ‘national security’ but by the spatial dimension of the ‘international’ as well.

Subjectivity and the (international) politics of emergency As Rob Walker points out, ‘It is no longer a simple matter to know where one is politically’ (Walker 1993: 115). The transformation of spatiotemporal processes means that ‘Simple distinctions between inside and outside may still provide a

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basis for rhetorics and chauvinisms but the hope that temporality may be tamed within the territorial spaces of sovereign states alone is visibly evaporating’ (Walker 1993: 155). Anti-terrorist legislation is, in the so-called war against terrorism, directed not just towards the domestic threat, but incorporates the space of the international in its remit of operations. This does not suggest the diminution of sovereignty; rather, it is the assertion of sovereign power that, in late modern times, seeks to extend beyond the territorial boundaries of the state.12 This has profound implications for the spatiotemporal location of political agency, for subjectivity is also transformed, as is the subject’s sense of what it means to be part of a political community. The grammar of emergency politics is centred on discursive and institutional practices that rely upon national security and the sphere of the international. There is hence a ‘national’ security imperative that responds to an ‘international’ threat. There is, in this rendition, no distinction between inside and outside, however. Domestic legislation and the practices of the security professionals are not confined to the domestic sphere, but extend beyond into the global arena. What, in this context, renders the domestic always already international is the construct of security and the regimes of truth upon which it is built. These regimes of truth are generative of subjectivities that self-govern, but that enable at the same time the emergence of protest and dissent. The United Kingdom’s anti-terrorist measures enable the certification of organisations and individuals as terrorist. The impact on agency is well-expressed by Gareth Peirce, lawyer to the internees: ‘Security’ is such a potent and yet undefined symbol that those in positions of power are able to curb criticism and shut off debate by invoking it and claiming to possess vital knowledge (which of course it is also claimed cannot safely be revealed) to support their actions or policies. They draw on traditions of deference and non-partisanship when it comes to security, making it unnecessary for governments to provide reasoned justification where it is said to be involved. (2003) The invocation of security, according to Peirce, silences debate. The term ‘security’ contains such resonance that the word itself confers capital to those who claim to be its guardians or guarantors. This claimed ownership of the means of protection confers to the speaker an authority that derives from the term security. Peirce sums up what I call, following Foucault, the power-knowledge nexus that so informs the regulatory matrix that is the so-called war against terror: There is a curious vicious circle that surrounds the whole area. Deference is in part fed by ignorance and ignorance is in turn fed by claims of indispensable secrecy instead of fully reasoned explanations. . . . Frighteningly, in any nation, the potential political function of security is as a part of the coinage of power hoarded and used by ministerial and bureaucratic elites to ignore or short-circuit normal democratic processes. (2003: 1)


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Given such deference on the part of those charged with judicial scrutiny of executive action, any challenge from the judicial sphere comes to constitute political intervention, for the stakes associated with the politics of emergency are so high that any challenge to sovereign authority and executive discretion is conferred authority in its own right. Peirce is one such political voice as is the intervention of other jurists, including Lord Johan Steyn (2003), who, like Peirce, highlights the ‘deference’ of the judiciary in the face of he who claims to know. Theorists such as Ole Waever (1995) and Buzan et al. (1998) stress precisely Gareth Peirce’s point, namely that securitisation seeks to short-circuit the political process. My stress in this chapter is, however, that the very invocation of security enables the radicalising moment of any challenge targeted against the executive’s claims with regard to security. The grammar of the national security state nevertheless seeks to limit discourse, conferring authority to the sovereign entity whose role is defined in terms of protection. However, we see earlier that the very practices that invoke security generate a counter-discourse that questions the legitimacy of the executive to define the threat and the mechanisms through which the protection of the public/population is implemented. There are, however, severe limitations on the articulation of political agency in relation to security. The judiciary, as I state earlier, is imminent to the grammar of emergency legislation, indeed is a constitutive element of this grammar and its legitimisation. The internal split that it generates through the contestation of national security claims acquires political resonance precisely given the judiciary’s role in the administration of emergency measures. It must be stressed, however, that the locations in which such articulations of dissent from sovereign power take place are severely limited and these limitations in themselves raise the stakes every instance that challenges are presented in relation to the national security claims of the executive. That the discourse of protection generates the subjectivity of the protected limits agency in a different way. A population so subjected comes to be the target of governmental practices that precisely limit agency. Michel Foucault’s work is consistent in its portrayal of the liberal state and practices of government geared towards the control of populations. Emergency legislation in the name of security is directed at proscribed individuals and organisations; the practices involved are also aimed at the population at large, the protected. The distinctions and discriminations contained in anti-terrorist legislation are at once practices of control that impact upon the whole population. The conferral of authority to the executive is at once the extraction of agency from the population. Another limitation to political agency derives from invocations of the international as the arena of activity towards which domestic legislation is aimed. The set of historical governmental practices we witness in the present must be analysed in the context of global effects and transformations. To render the population at large as the global subject of protection in many ways leaves no space for the emergence of subjectivity that proclaims its autonomy from such protectionist measures. Nevertheless, populations have witnessed a multitude of protest actions directed at practices that proclaim emergency.

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These range from public meetings directed against the defamation of entire communities, to liberal press concerns with practices that violate the human rights of citizens and non-citizens, to mass demonstrations conducted across the globe against the war in Iraq. In conditions where not so long ago some had predicted the end of politics, we have in recent times witnessed the rebirth of political activity and protest, but this is a rebirth that is tinged with an element of helplessness, a view that while we might assume a position of protest, while we might speak this protest, our capacity to possess agency is somehow diminished. Somehow, this has to be linked to the subjectivity of the protected. There is will, to use Hobbes, but this is a will to abdicate agency in exchange for protection. However, crucially, the subject protected retains a capacity to question, to dissent, within the discourse of protection; to proclaim, in other words, that the protector’s claim with regard to security is questionable and itself a source of danger. Political agency in relation to the discourse of security is hence immanent to that discourse. The anti-terrorist measures I describe earlier are distinctly liberal forms of legislation, for they contain within them codes designed to confer them legitimacy, codes that enable forms of scrutiny. There are different levels of scrutiny, the judicial, the parliamentary, and the societal, through the activities of non-governmental organisations such as Amnesty International and Liberty. Judicial forms of scrutiny derive from a number of sources. Where the appeals process has tended to uphold the rights of the Secretary of State to define the threat, the occasions when it has upheld the appeal contribute to wider discourses of contestation that question the authority of the executive. The judicial arena has also produced lone voices of dissent, voices like Gareth Peirce and Lord Steyn, who have questioned the authority of the executive not just in relation to violations of human rights, but in relation to the construct of security itself and its impact on the limitation of discourse. The distinction between the judgements of appeals judges and the public statements of agents from the judicial sphere, Peirce and Steyn, is that where the former confine their judgement to the individual case at hand, the latter frame their discourse distinctly in relation to the politics of security and its wider implications. Another form of judicial scrutiny is enabled by the legislation itself. The role of the ‘Reviewer’ is precisely aimed ‘to make detailed enquiries of people who use the Act, or are affected by it, and the Reviewer may see sensitive material’ (Carlile of Barriew 2000). The process of consultation is wide and includes legislators, lawyers, judges, academics, civil liberties groups, as well as members of the public ‘who have had some contact with Terrorism Act 2000 (TA2000), whether as observers, witnesses, persons made subject to powers given under the Act or as terrorist suspects’ (Carlile of Barriew 2000: 6). While the consultation is wide, the material used for surveillance, detention, stop and search powers, are not made available to those consulted or their lawyers, nor is this information available in the public domain. The Reviewer has the capacity to view closed material and starts with two assumptions that at once both diminish his role and elevate that of the Secretary of State: (a) that the legislation is necessary and (b) that ‘there is little likelihood of the UK government using the definition of terrorism as an instrument


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of oppression’ (Carlile of Barriew 2000: 9). What is significant in relation to the question of the relationship between judicial scrutiny and political agency is that while the Reviewer makes public all contending views surrounding the legislation and its workings, he does not challenge or contest the executive’s remit on security, taking it as said that the judgements of the executive are beyond doubt: Lord Carlile, the Reviewer of both TA2000 and the ATCSA2001 states that the government, through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office seeks to ‘send out a clear signal that the United Kingdom does not welcome terrorists, and proscription is a useful flag in that signal’ He further reiterates the government’s position on closed material, judging that deliberations regarding proscription ‘can never be fully transparent in any society reliant upon secret intelligence services and the like.’ Carlile exercises a self-government that ultimately constitutes a denial of agency in the protector/protected dualism, for the former of the two elements always prevails in judgements relating to the ‘overwhelming national security . . . ’ (Carlile of Barriew 2000: 13–15). In contrast to Carlile, the Privy Council appointed by Blunkett to scrutinise the workings of the legislation has exercised a role that suggests the conditions of possibility for agency that derives from the discourse of security itself. As I state earlier, such agency questions the remit of the protector, thereby raising doubts, not just in relation to the legitimacy of the legislation, but more crucially in relation to the authority of the protector in enacting the function of protection. The report of the Privy Council indicates that the iteration of national security does not constitute a rarefied discourse that is beyond question. The core criticism of the Privy Council is that the ATCSA2001 fails to meet ‘the full extent of the terrorist threat’ and should be replaced. The report particularly challenges the targeting of foreign nationals, explicitly stating that ‘terrorist networks’ with ‘global reach’ also involve UK citizens, thereby calling for measures that ‘deal with all terrorism whatever its origin or the nationality of its suspected perpetrators.’ Members of the Privy Council reiterate the role of the state ‘to protect the public from harm’ that the most effective means of doing so is pre-emption. However, ‘Extensions to the powers of the state in securing the safety of its people should always be tested rigorously for both necessity (which encompasses proportionality) and effectiveness’ (Privy Councillor Review Committee 2003). Of significance therefore is that the Privy Councillors’ report centres on the efficacy of the legislation and its scope. Furthermore, it questions the extension of state powers, the so-called ‘Henry VIII’ powers, enabling the executive to extend emergency legislation in the absence of parliamentary approval. There is a prevalent view among Habermasians and constructivists alike that speech necessarily translates to action or agency. I want to argue that under conditions that, by definition, seek to restrict, questioning sovereign claims in relation to national security comes to constitute a form of political intervention, and therefore political agency. The operations of power under conditions of emergency relate to, as we have seen earlier, the use of information coupled with the right of access to such information. Over and above the possession of knowledge, it is the nexus between knowledge and power that is of importance in discerning

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the possibility of political agency. Participation in the ‘game of truth’ that is the politics of security is at the heart of both how power operates and the capacity to resist, to question the relationship between protector and protected, the legitimacy of the extractions exacted in the name of protection, and the institutionalisation of discourses upon which the politics of protection is based.

Conclusions A number of conclusions and thoughts for future research emerge from the earlier discussion. Of particular significance for security studies is the question of the implications of emergency for democratic processes. The claim by executive power of exceptional times seeks to constrain discourse and debate, especially in the capacity of other agents to question claims relating to national security. Such claims seek to assert sovereign power as embodied in the executive and its capacity to enact the role of the state as protector. The securitising moment is at once a moment that seeks to pre-empt the political, the emergence of a possibility for contestation. The discourse that frames emergency measures inscribes the protector as sovereign unity, possessing the capacity to protect. What is significant, however, is the question of how the political moment is reclaimed, how, in other words, political agency emerges. By exploring the workings of emergency legislation, the chapter shows that the discourse of security, rather than denying the possibility of political agency, is itself the very condition of possibility for political agency, a form of agency that contests the remit of the protector, the sovereign who claims the capacity to protect. Political agency is hence imminent to the discourse of security; the stakes are so high that contesting claims to authority with regard to security is itself instantiated, and indeed enabled, by the very apparatus that administers the security imperative of the state. Politics is hence imminent to the protector/protected dualism. The chapter also highlights the limits to political agency that the protector/protected dualism generates. We witnessed the highly ambivalent position of the judiciary, at once part of the state apparatus surrounding emergency measures, while possessing the potential to generate an internal split challenging the sovereign unity of the state and its claims relating to national security. What is especially significant in the discussion is that the articulations of the judiciary in relation to emergency measures are distinctly political expressions of agency when the executive’s claims in relation to national security are questioned. It is important to highlight that the judiciary’s scrutiny cannot simply be confined within a discourse of human rights. Rather, it acquires resonance when it questions the security imperative of the executive, as indeed was the case in the recent ruling that proclaimed the ATCSA2001 unlawful under the ECHR.13 The remit of the protector is here questioned raising doubts, as I state earlier, concerning both the legitimacy of emergency measures and above all the authority of the protector in enacting, or indeed fulfilling, the role of protection. Contesting authority must hence emerge as the distinctly political moment in the relationship of protection constructed in terms of emergency. It is this


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contestation of authority, a contestation based on the very discourse upon which authority seeks to establish legitimacy, that the subjectivity emergent from a relationship of protection comes to acquire a distinctly political voice. The chapter also seeks to argue that the possibility for the emergence of such a voice are subject to limitation, limitations that derive not just from the resonance carried by the construct of security, but by the very nature of the subject protected, the category of population, and by the spatiotemporal domain contained in the remit of protection. These themes are beyond the remits of this particular chapter. Nevertheless, it is important to highlight them, if only to stress that the specifics of agency can only be analysed in the situated practices of concrete manifestations of politics. More importantly in the present context, the subjectivities emergent from relationship of protection are in themselves subjected differently to the limits that this relationship produces. Exceptional times are extracted times, extracted from history and its continuities, thereby dislodging the subject of politics from the discursive and institutional continuities, the ‘ontological securities’14 that tell the subject who she is and what is in her power to change/transform. Exceptional times also disturb boundary, bringing into the remit of the possible distant spaces unconnected to the subject, somehow unknown in the terms promulgated by the manipulations of knowledge that define the relationship of protection. The category of population in itself limits agency, for this is a category that is diffuse, beyond easy definition. We could hence suggest that when population is invoked, it is the singular voice that is significant politically. Political agency is, however, always related to power. When Foucault makes the all-encompassing claim that power can only operate in relation to free subjects, what he is referring to is not the autonomous Cartesian self who somehow stands in some external relation to the contingent, the historical, and the grounded. The subject is always constituted within the continuities of social and political life, but is at once also capable of shifting through the terrain of the knowable, the interstices and connections of life and relations. At core is the relationship between emergent forms of subjectivity and practices of power. The play of power in the context of emergency is not related to the possession of knowledge and access to knowledge. It is related to the nexus between power and knowledge. This nexus is the location in which, to use Foucault’s terms, the conduct of conduct and the conduct of self constitute the ‘governmentalities’ (Foucault 2000) defining the state of exception. As we see from the earlier discussion, prohibition is not simply an oppressive act that denies agency. It could be argued that prohibition itself generates a condition wherein every act of speaking the prohibited is itself a transgressive act and hence expressive of agency.15 However, it must also be recognised that the singular act of speaking the prohibited, of questioning the remit of sovereign power, is not necessarily a transformative act, for agency is always subject to limitation, the conditions of possibility in contingent social matrices. What also becomes apparent from an analysis of the mechanisms of emergency politics is that self-government is as much an aspect of governmentality as the practices geared towards the conduct of conduct. The resonance of

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security, the abstraction of systems beyond reach, all constitute discursive as well as institutional limits to what is possible, but these are not external to the subject. Rather they constitute a subjectivity that is self-governing and self-restricting. Practices of government based on the politics of protection at one and the same time involve both protector and protected and when the latter challenges the authority of the former, the remit of the former, then the challenge is itself a statement that seeks an exit strategy from the relationship. The singular transgressive act of speaking the prohibited does not imply transformative capacity, but it can awaken a process wherein the legitimacy of that which is carried out in the name of protection is questioned.

Notes 1 The state, historically, defines the basis of its sovereignty in terms of its capacities in the provision of security. 2 Extraction, according to Charles Tilly (1985), is protection at a price. 3 Investigating both familial and wage relations, Pateman (1998: 148) stresses the subordinating element deriving from ‘protection’. 4 Especially significant legislative measures include The Patriot Act in the United States and the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 in the United Kingdom. 5 Increasingly invasive surveillance measures include the monitoring of banking transactions and borrowing habits in university libraries, both measures enabled by the Patriot Act in the United States. 6 Violent acts by clandestine organisations have included, since the events of September 11, 2001, attacks in Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Spain, and now London among others. 7 A phrase coined by the Bush Administration. 8 Where measures directed against the IRA included the surveillance of its members’ international networks of support, the present anti-terrorist measures proscribe organisations not involved in terrorist activity in the United Kingdom. An example includes the Tamil Tigers, whose conflict is with the Sri Lankan government, but whose supporters may involve members of the Tamil community in Britain. 9 According to Michael Hardt, ‘With the decline of national sovereignty, there is even less distinction between inside and outside . . . there is the tendency toward the formation of a global space of sovereignty that has no outside’ (Hardt 2002). See also R.B.J. Walker (1993: 179) on the question of the ‘rearticulation of political space/time’. 10 This part of the Act requires derogation from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and specifically Article 5(1) of the Convention relating to the ‘right to liberty and security’. 11 I am grateful to Jef Huysmans for highlighting this point. 12 One controversial interpretation of this extension or transformation of sovereign power is that of Hardt and Negri (2000). 13 One of the Law Lords, Lord Hoffman, ruled that there is ‘no state of public emergency threatening the life of the nation’. See Guardian report on the ruling, The Guardian, 17 December 2004, p. 1. 14 This is a term used by Giddens when he states: ‘In most circumstances in social life, the sense of ontological security is routinely grounded in mutual knowledge employed such that interaction is “unproblematic,” or can be largely taken for granted’ (Giddens 1979: 219). 15 This is what Foucault refers to as the ‘speaker’s benefit’ (Foucault 1990: 6).


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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgo (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —— (2002) ‘Security and Terror’, Theory and Event, 5 (4). Bigo, Didier (2002) ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’, Alternatives, 27 (Special Issue), 63–92. Blunkett, David, Home Secretary (2004) Defending the Democratic State and Maintaining Liberty – Two Sides of the Same Coin? Speech to Harvard Law School on 8 March 2004. http:// www.homeoffice.gov.uk/docs3/hs_speech_harvard04.html (accessed 29 March 2004). Butler, Judith (1995) ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” ’, in Benhabib, Seyla, Butler, Judith, Cornell, Drucilla and Fraser, Nancy (eds) Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 42–47. Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Foucault, Michel (1990) The Will to Knowledge, History of Sexuality, Vol.1, trans. Robert Hurley, London: Penguin Books. —— (2000) ‘Governmentality’, in James D. Faubion (ed.) The Essential Works, Vol. 3, Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, pp. 201–222. —— (2001) Madness and Civilisation, trans. Richard Howard, London: Routledge. Giddens, Anthony (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory. London: Macmillan. Hardt, M. (2002) ‘Sovereignty’, Theory and Event, 5 (4). Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jabri, Vivienne (2003) Totality and Globalised Warfare; Implications in the Liberty/Security Problematiqu, Third Meeting of ELISE Consortium, 7 April 2003, Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels. Liberty (2002) Anti-terrorism Legislation in the United Kingdom, www.liberty-human-rights. org.uk (accessed 21 July 2003). Lord Carlile of Barriew Q.C. (2002) Report of the Operation in 2001 of the Terrorism Act 2000. www.homeoffice.gov.uk (accessed 27 February 2004). Pateman, Carol (1988) The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press. Peirce, Gareth (2003) Internment: The Truth Behind the ‘War on Terror’, Liberty Lecture, 15 December 2003, The LSE, London. See www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk (accessed 19 February 2004). Privy Councillor Review Committee (2003) Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act 2001 Review: Report. London: The Stationary Office. Schmitt, Carl (1985) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concepts of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. SIAC (2002), Appeal No.: SC/1–7/2002. Steyn, Lord (2003) Guantanamo Bay: The Legal Black Hole, Twenty-Seventh F.A. Mann Lecture, 25 November 2003. See Statewatch News Online. Tilly, Charles (1985) ‘War Making and State Making as Organised Crime’, in P.B. Evans, Rueschemeyer, D. and Skocpol, T. (eds) Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169–191. Wæver, Ole (1995) ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.) On Security. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 46–86. Walker, R.B.J. (1993) Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Michael C. and Krause, Keith (1997) ‘Preface’, in K. Krause and M.C. Williams (eds) Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases. London: Routledge.

10 Sovereignty, international security and the regulation of armed conflict The possibilities of political agency Neil Walker The aims of this chapter are to think through the shifting connections between sovereignty, security and the regulation of armed conflict in the contemporary geopolitical landscape, and to examine the different ways in which political agency has been and may become articulated within that fluid context. Sovereignty provides the deep structure of this exploration because it remains such a dominant matrix for framing our sense of political and legal agency. For its part (international) security is a key variable, as it is a central reference point for explaining and for thinking normatively about the range of approaches to armed conflict resolution. Agency is fundamental because trends in security and conflict resolution politics depend upon who does or does not get to decide upon or wield influence over problems of definition and resolution, at what level and with what interests and values to the fore. The structure of the chapter is built around this conceptual troika. First, the resilience of the sovereignty frame and the scope for development within it are discussed. Next, the troublingly paradoxical implications of this for the relationship between political agency on the one hand and the contemporary framework of international security and conflict resolution on the other are explored. Finally, it is suggested that a more legitimate conception of political agency in the field of armed conflict resolution requires a simultaneous – and mutually reinforcing – revision of the systemic and ideological properties of sovereignty on the one hand and of the concept of security on the other.

The resilience of the sovereignty frame To what extent does the sovereignty frame continue to structure the actual and available approaches to questions of international security and armed conflict resolution in the modern world? The answer to this question depends upon a prior appreciation of the crucial framing properties of sovereignty over both law and politics more generally. Later in the chapter I argue that political agency emerges in the name of sovereignty at the boundary or in the tension between these two spheres of practice, law and politics. Elsewhere, in response to more empiricist or essentialist understandings, I have argued that sovereignty

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 155 may be defined as: the discursive form in which a claim concerning the existence and character of a supreme ordering power for a particular polity tends to be expressed, which supreme ordering power purports to establish and sustain the identity and status of the particular polity qua polity and to provide a continuing source and vehicle of ultimate authority for the juridical order of that polity. (Walker 2003: 6) Extrapolating from this definition, we may see sovereignty not as a descriptor of a certain state or of affairs (or its absence) but rather as a hermeneutic category – a way of understanding and representing the world. On this view, sovereignty has a number of different dimensions of significance which may be arranged into three categories: 1. Epistemic In its basic epistemic sense, sovereignty may be seen as a particular way of knowing, representing and ordering the social and political world. It involves conceiving of the possibility of creating an ultimately authoritative ‘unity [out] of a manifold’ (Lindahl 1997), of imagining and identifying discrete polities or political communities who can organize and act in the name of an undifferentiated collective notwithstanding an internal diversity of interests, values and wills. According to this view, sovereignty enables a form of politics and a form of law both within and between such polities. The crucial question is then what this basic epistemic framing of politics and law implies for our understanding of the potential of both. As regards politics, while what is enabled through the sovereignty frame is by no means all of politics, sovereignty is certainly the organizing template for two key types of politics (Huysmans 2003). It enables politics as self-defined by its key actors as ‘constitutional politics’, that is, politics within that legal-constitutional framework of the polity which is presupposed and sustained under the authority of the ‘sovereign’. Sovereignty also enables politics as self-defined by its key actors as ‘international politics’, that is, politics between thus created and sustained polities on the basis of the doctrine of ‘sovereign equality’. This leaves at least two other forms of politics that are not directly framed by sovereignty. First there is the very politics of sovereignty-assertion, which precedes and always underpins the successful ‘sovereign’ frame, which is not itself structured by the sovereign frame, except as an aspiration. Vivienne Jabri, in Chapter 9 in this volume, explores this kind of politics in the context of emergency legislation. Indeed, such politics of ‘sovereign becoming’ points to the paradox of sovereignty as both pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué, as ruler and ruled, creator and created, political and legal, Schmitt and Kelsen. The second form of politics not directly framed by sovereignty refers to the diverse forms of national or transnational politics that ignore or resist the framing of constitutional or international law. Whether because their defining purpose is critique, destabilization or destruction or because they envisage a new kind of political authority, they do

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not claim the comprehensiveness or continuity of decision-making authority required for sovereign polity constitution and maintenance. Nevertheless, such politics will also be a form of collective action, and thus of political agency – whether we are dealing with transnational civil society or the Al Quaeda terror network. Accordingly, in order to be effective actors, and indeed, to be identifiable as distinct actors, the bearers of these political forms need to be organized, however fluidly, so as to assume and construct their own sense of unity (Lindahl 2003). If some politics remains capable of being conceptualized other than under the frame of the sovereign, it is more contentious whether any law does. For many legal positivists, all domestic law flows from the command of the sovereign. Even those who see law as custom or natural right or obligation, are apt to trace the formal pedigree of law – if not its moral credentials – back to the sovereign creator. Of course, such is the self-referentiality of law (the claim of law to provide its own final source of authority) that even the sovereign creator is reconceptualized within legal discourse as a construction of law, and often as something that can be modified by law. An example is the commonly available technique of altering the Constitution, and so changing the form of the ‘sovereign’ law-giver, by virtue of a mechanism provided for in the Constitution itself. International as well as domestic law clearly presupposes sovereignty, in that sovereignty identifies the salient actors of international law. Yet there is a deep and highly significant paradox here. The overriding purpose of sovereignty is to establish and sustain the identity of the polity qua polity. But the very sovereignty claim that makes inter-national law possible also seems to render international law impossible, in its resistance to any external claim that might compromise that purpose. As Koskenniemi (1989) famously suggested, is not the very idea of law between sovereigns oxymoronic? To summarize then, in epistemic terms, sovereignty frames much of both politics and law. It does so by limiting and constraining the space for both other than in its own terms, while simultaneously problematizing one particular – and for present purposes vitally important – field of law which it helps to create, namely international law. 2. Symbolic Here we are concerned with sovereignty as a symbol of power, and as a claim to authority. The claim of sovereignty is important in providing a distinctive discursive register in which the bid for ultimate or supreme authoritative unity is made. That is to say, the claim is made to sovereignty rather than, say, to representation or agency more generally, and it involves a certain type of signification. The invocation of sovereignty involves a ‘speech act’ (see e.g. Austin 1961; Searle 1969; Werner and De Wilde 2001) with real effects on social and political practice, and these effects are inseparable from sovereignty’s particular history and present constellation of meaning associations. If ideology is about the ways in which meaning is constructed to facilitate domination, then sovereignty is a deeply ideological category. There is undoubtedly a degree of fluidity and contestation around sovereignty, often reflecting particular historical compromises (for instance federations or confederations) in state-building and state-sustenance. Crucially, however, behind this diversity there has remained a deeper common

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 157 ideological assumption that ultimate authority over the internal operation of the polity is exhausted by internal sources and modes of expression and that there is no remainder available to external sources. If we turn now to external sovereignty, there are two salient and connected ideological uses of sovereignty, both of which reaffirm the predominance of the state in the international domain. Here, strikingly, the use of the language of sovereignty is less fluid. One pattern of usage concerns the deep resistance of states to granting the title of sovereign to non-state entities. The second concerns the resilience of the language of sovereignty as a code for understanding the connection between states – the idea that relations between states are essentially relations between indivisible sovereigns with exhaustive title to represent these states, regardless of the internal division of authority within each state. In turn, the coherence of the internal and the external claim to sovereignty is made possible by the conviction, already referred to, that the plenitude of ultimate authority over internal affairs, however diversely institutionalized and however contested its legitimate mode of expression, continues to reside within the polity. And this equation of internal and external sovereignty as both referring to the plenitude of internal authority sharply highlights the difficulties of binding such self-referential units of authority to a stable discipline of international rules. 3. Systemic International relations theorists often use the language of ‘system’ – as in the ‘system of states’ or the ‘Westphalian system’. Sovereignty is important in accounting for this systemic quality. Apart from its epistemic and symbolic dimensions, sovereignty speaks to an idea of system or structure – of wholeness and self-regulation, of latency and self-reproduction. The very systemic qualities of the sovereignty configuration make for a degree of path dependency. In the final analysis, however profound the epistemic difficulties of establishing a stable legal order between sovereign states, the deeply iterative pattern of their mutual recognition as the key actors of the international system provides a stability to the general enterprise of international law, if not necessarily to some of its particular manifestations. Conversely the same systemic qualities militate against other forms of recognition beyond the state form, and the conservative quality of the systemic logic can also be seen at work in the broader unfolding of international relations and international law. There is no deep epistemic reason why non-state actors should not have some kind of ‘title’ or agency or personality in international law short of sovereignty. Indeed in recent years we have seen a growth in this area, with NGOs and other non-state actors increasingly allowed standing before international tribunals and in international legislative contexts. However, there are structural or systemic limits to these developments. States, as the historically dominant actors of the international system, will not lightly use their sovereignty to reduce their authority. Reflecting this, many of the substantive precepts of international law such as equality, non-interference, sovereign immunity and the like have a conservative quality, a disposition to maintain the formal internal and external sovereignty of states which is the starting point of international law – the international ‘state of nature’. In addition, the point or purpose of having title

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crucially depends upon who you can claim to legitimately represent and who you can effectively commit. Since notions of legitimate representation are developed in the image of the state and the population of the state is deemed to be the relevant community of attachment – the object represented – and since the means of effective implementation lie in the hands of the states as the sole domestic sovereigns, again non-state actors are marginalized. 4. The primacy of the epistemic core So sovereignty is a multi-layered idea. However, in a fundamental sense, the symbolic and systemic features are contingent – all ideology is contestable and all systems are more or less open to transformation. We can therefore distinguish between the core epistemic features of sovereignty, and its secondary symbolic and systemic properties. Moreover, when examining the significance and mutability of sovereignty in the context of international security and conflict resolution, we should bear in mind both the analytical separation and the practical interweaving of the different layers or dimensions. The effects of the sovereignty frame cannot be fully appreciated without understanding the close relationship between the epistemic on the one hand and the symbolic and the systemic on the other. Yet if it is accepted that the epistemic dimension of sovereignty is primary, it follows that a crucial constraint is placed on the reimagining of sovereignty, since that dimension of the sovereignty frame must be retained. The space for transforming the sovereignty frame then depends upon the possibilities of reimagining and asserting the symbolic and systemic dimensions differently from their dominant contemporary formulations in the light of an irreducible and immutable epistemic core. The limits thereby set are both sociological and normative. They ask both how plausible it is to change the contingent symbolic and systemic dimensions against a background where the epistemic remains constant, and what the normative implications of any such change would be. But if this degree of reimagining of sovereignty is considered inadequate, then a set of formidable questions can be posed, for any more fundamental alternative would be committed to replacing sovereignty at the epistemic level. A key question is how, if at all, to conceive of a dominant matrix of political agency in which sovereignty does not figure prominently, still less does not figure at all. Moreover, the same sociological and normative questions that we ask of sovereignty would also apply. At the level of social praxis, is such an alternative framing, whatever form it might take, strategically possible and plausible? And at the normative level, would this alternative framing produce answers that were more just to questions of the overall pattern and distribution of security and the normative thrust of conflict resolution? Would it produce a better ethics and more effective politics of protection? Whether or not it is possible to replace the epistemic frame of sovereignty, and to do so in a manner that meets the threshold of sociological plausibility and normative adequacy, are deep questions. They are by definition epistemological questions about the very possibility of other ways of knowing and ordering the world, and ones that have never convincingly been answered in the positive

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 159 (Huysmans 2003). What passes for empirical claims or predictions or normative aspirations concerning the demise of sovereignty and the reinvention of politics by other means tends often merely to speak to internal movements in the ideological and systemic superstructure (Van Roermund 2003; Walker 2003). In any event, if we are concerned with security politics in the here and now, and in any imaginable and plausible current projection, as we are in this chapter, it is precisely from the premise of internal transformation that we must begin. We have no alternative, then, but to start with the given epistemic frame of sovereignty, and think through the transformative opportunities, dangers and limitations at the symbolic and systemic levels.

Models of political agency in the new security configuration September 11 and its aftermath have undoubtedly created new instabilities in the international order and its approach to security and armed conflict, but in many ways they are just the latest manifestation of old problems rooted in the epistemic, symbolic and systemic matrix of sovereignty. The law relating to the use of force was always apt to dramatize Koskenniemi’s (1989) claim about the oxymoronic qualities of international law, and in particular about the way in which international law is situated in perennial tension between the twin poles of ‘apology’ and ‘utopia’, between mere rationalization of state practice and a utopian vision of putting-in-common and collective good which transcends the sovereign autonomy of the original parties. On the one hand, war or its threat is the ultimate challenge to sovereign statehood and to the effective authority of the state. So it is in this area that states may be least inclined to be tightly bound by any international regulation of their interests or legitimate modes of action. States resist such regulation, even if it would seem equally imperative from the same state-centred perspective that international law be accepted at least to the extent that it address the minimally convergent interest of all in state self-preservation and so provide the wherewithal to condemn and meet any act of aggression in violation of the sovereignty of another. On the other hand, insofar as international law speaks to some vision of collective global concern, surely war’s colossal humanitarian toll provides the most urgent test of the collective will and the means to act upon that concern regardless of immediate state self-interest. The record is that 20 million have died in over 100 major conflicts since 1945, and countless others live with the threat of physical violation or death under conditions of military subjugation or in violently contested regimes. Crucially, as we shall see, the resilient attraction of each pole destabilizes efforts to achieve solutions by exclusive reference to the other. The utopian vision is perennially obstructed by the dominant influence of the state-sovereigntist perspective. Equally, however, the tension within the state-sovereigntist perspective is complicated and even reinforced by the residual pull towards a more robustly collectivist perspective. The state-sovereigntist view is caught between

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preserving the prerogative to defend national self-interest, and submitting to a minimal collective institutional framework for protecting convergent interests in security, and thus to the deeper question of the very possibility of international law as a stable and enforceable normative framework. We can see these tensions playing out in different but overlapping ways from the perspective of both realism and liberalism – the two major schools of international relations theory that privilege state-based conceptions of political agency and which, accordingly, are most closely tied to the epistemic, ideological and systemic bases of the received sovereignty paradigm. Traditionally, the distinguishing feature of the realist approach has been its emphasis on the self-interest of state actors, the prevalence of power politics and the consequent law-resisting ‘anarchy’ of the international system (Bull 1977) – similar to the Hobbesian state of nature but with no credible Leviathan to impose international order. Accordingly, the perspective of realists is directly informed by the epistemic paradox of sovereignty. They see international cooperation as hard to achieve, difficult to maintain and always ultimately dependent upon the balance of state powers and interests. In this picture the achievements of international institutions and regimes in mitigating the anarchic impulses of the international order can only ever be modest and contingent. Realism is commonly regarded as the dominant theory – and even more dominant practice – in the history of international relations. While the concerns of the realists have tended to remain located around the ‘apology’ pole of the international order, liberalism by contrast has been described as the ‘tradition of optimism’ (Clark 1989: 49). It is easy to overstate the extent of this optimism, and to lose sight of the significant continuities between the realist and the liberal perspective.1 Yet unlike realists, liberal internationalists have tended to believe in the possibility of international peace and order being consolidated through some harmony or concurrence of interests. Some have gone further to posit the sharing or development of certain ideals concerning the proper conduct of international relations and its due respect for individual and collective values (Dunne 1997). For the liberal, short-term self-interest is always mitigated by a longer-term sense of the value of cooperation. For them, peace and order may be nurtured and stabilized through a transnational institutional framework in which success is defined not in terms of the absolute interests of states – even the most powerful states – but in terms of the prospect of ‘positive sum’ gains for all. In this perspective we see an idea of enlightened self-interest and of a more embedded commitment to shared background norms pushing, however hesitantly, towards the utopian pole of the continuum. But this goes alongside the familiar ‘realist’ concern with finding some kind of workable equilibrium that minimizes the threat or fact of war, and seeking to provide more substantial ballast for any such arrangement. Let us now try to see how these abstract positions have played out since the second half of the twentieth century. With the development of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second Word War, the attempt was made to move away from the more extreme anarchic impulses of realism through an institutionalized system of collective security under the Security Council. Article 2(4) of

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 161 the Charter prohibits the use of force by states except in two circumstances. First, Article 51 protects the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence on the part of states if an armed attack occurs. Secondly, the Security Council is permitted under Chapter VII to use or authorize the use of force if it unanimously determines that there exists a threat to international peace or an act of aggression, and if peaceful measures would be inadequate to address the situation. Enforcement actions may be carried out directly on behalf of the Security Council, or, as has in fact been the practice where the Chapter VII route is taken, through coalitions of states or regional organizations such as NATO. What is immediately apparent in this arrangement is an important tension between substance and form – between the sovereign state that holds an excess of substantive international agency and international institutions characterized by an excess of formal agency. The question of the politics of protection in this context is thus one of a battle between substantive and formal capacity in international politics, and between arbitrary or interest-led exercise of power and legally sanctioned exercise of power. The substantive thresholds remain tied to the interests of individual or aggregated sovereigns in self-defence or in responding to international aggression or its threat. But the preferred form or procedure of action, certainly in cases of threats to international peace, should be general agreement and implementation. The case holds even for individual or collective self-defence, although here the prior sanction of the Security Council is not required. States must nevertheless immediately report their use of force in selfdefence to the Security Council, which, in theory, retains ultimate authority to take measures necessary to maintain international peace and security once the merely ‘temporary’ measures of the self-defending state or states have run their course. That the law and practice of war remains caught on the horns of Koskenniemi’s dilemma under the UN system is evident from the twin criticisms commonly leveled against it, as at so many attempts to use international law to transcend a narrow assertion and contingent balancing of state interests. The collective security system has been challenged as both procedurally excessive and substantively inadequate – as too much ‘institutional form’ and too little ‘substance’. It has been too much in the sense that, institutionally, it has sought to go beyond the mere ‘apology’ of state practice. It requires states to heed the views of others as to whether they have a right to defend their basic integrity as states where they claim to be directly threatened by aggression. More strongly, the collective security system requires states to defer to the general view on the salience or otherwise of a threat to international peace even though it may also, if more indirectly, threaten their particular national security. Yet the collective security system has also been too little substance in the sense that the new common institutional capacity has exposed the distinctly ‘sub-utopian’ limitations of scope, clarity, agreement and consistency of application which attend the substantive grounds for the use of force. In the age of Cold War bipolarity, of course, this tension remained latent. The particular configuration of traditional sovereignty concerns meant that the

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danger of excessive collective institutional capacity was stillborn. The USSR and the United States as the two dominant permanent members of the Security Council, even where they were not in direct ideological opposition over a particular arena of conflict, did not trust each other sufficiently to make common cause in this area or to defer to the veto of the other. Neither did they accept the legitimacy of ‘lesser’ powers dictating or influencing their military strategy. Chapter VII, with the partial exception of the Korean conflict in 1950, remained a dead letter, an eloquent reminder of the resilience of realist impediments to providing for the effective articulation and implementation of law between ‘sovereigns’. With the end of the Cold War, the procedural barriers to common action became less pronounced. Force was authorized under Chapter VII against Iraq as the aggressor state when it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Since then the Security Council has not again authorized force against an aggressor state, but it has increasingly intervened in the internal conflicts that have grown exponentially over recent years. Mary Kaldor (1999, 2003) has dubbed these the ‘new wars’, emerging from various crises of state authority nurtured by the ravages of economic globalization and its backlash of violently assertive identity politics. So, for example, we have witnessed the authorization of force to secure the delivery of humanitarian aid in Somalia and Yugoslavia, to protect safe havens and enforce no-fly zones in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to restore democracy in Haiti, to protect a refugee camp in Rwanda, as well as to maintain borders and engage in peacebuilding in post-conflict situations in East Timor, Kosovo, Macedonia and Rwanda (Gray 2003: 607–609). But in the same historical moment, we have seen only limited and de post facto Security Council support for intervention in Kosovo in 1999 in response to Yugoslavia’s repression and displacement of ethnic Albanians, and, notoriously, condemnation of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This patchwork of activity, which has seen the institutional capacity – and so, political agency – of the collective security system selectively released, has in turn exposed the thinness of the substantive bases for action. Again, as with the power of the veto to neuter the Security Council’s procedural capacity, sovereignty concerns have acted as a brake on the development of more robustly interventionist doctrines. This can be seen at work in both of the avenues for armed intervention – the collective system under Chapter VII and the right of selfdefence. Particularly in the context of the ‘new wars’, strenuous efforts have be made by some states, with the United Kingdom especially prominent, to develop a doctrine of humanitarian intervention as a way of supplementing or sharpening the more general collective power to act against threats to international peace. However, this release of political agency remains at best an underdeveloped doctrine. It failed to gain the clear endorsement of the Security Council in the Kosovo case and, due to its wide-ranging potential to justify external intervention in the sovereign affairs of states, continues to divide opinion in international law and diplomacy (Gray 2003: 595–597). In the context of the Iraq war, the doctrine of self-defence has incited even more controversy. Building on a broader strategy of response to September 11 that had already led to their justifying armed intervention in Afghanistan in terms

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 163 of self-defence, the Bush administration sought to develop a doctrine of preemptive or anticipatory self-defence to account for their intervention in Iraq. In their view, a combination of factors meant that previous conceptions of deterrence or containment were outmoded, and earlier and more diverse armed initiatives than had been traditionally countenanced under the law of self-defence were now required to safeguard national and international security (Record 2003). Those factors were a new wave of terrorism with global reach, failed or weak states that harbour or assist such organizations, ‘rogue states’ that brutalize their own people, squander national resources and fail to participate in or respect the framework of international law, all underscored by the growing availability of weapons of mass destruction. The Security Council, in what was already a controversial departure in terms of international law, had in the immediate aftermath of September 11 been prepared to accept the initial intervention against Afghanistan not as the sponsoring state for the attacks on New York and Washington, as the previous law would arguably have required (Gray 2003: 603–605), but rather simply as the state harbouring the responsible non-state actor. Two years on, it balked at the more ambitiously aggressive American plan to violate sovereignty on the basis of a far broader conception of the sources of ongoing terrorist threat. The American plan described a much more expansive ‘axis of evil’, and indulged a much less immediate and more speculative conception of risk. If we summarize these developments, we see countervailing pressures at work in terms of the continuing significance of the traditional ideological and systemic features of sovereignty. On the one hand, the contemporary legal regime does not constitute a decisive break from the tradition of sovereign autonomy of states in international relations. The veto system in the Security Council, the opposition to the development of use of force doctrine in more interventionist directions, and the continuing capacity of individual states or groups of states to act alone either under or against the UN framework, all speak to the strong legacy of sovereignty. They also speak to the continuing relevance of a realist or only narrowly liberal reading of political agency. On the other hand, there are institutional and geopolitical developments that undoubtedly push against the existing sovereignty frame. Institutionally, the end of the Cold War has strengthened the hand of the Security Council to act in concert in some circumstances. Where there is the collective will to do so, the uncertainty of doctrinal limits can act in favour of an expansive reading of the right to intervene, just as much as it can provide rhetorical justification for non-intervention where there is no such consensus. Geopolitically, two developments stand out as particularly significant. First, there has been a gradual replacement of the inter-state Clausewitzean wars of classic modernity by ‘new wars’ marked by the internal conflict or oppression of weak or ‘rogue’ states and the emergence of transnational terrorist threats within and across but not coterminous with these states. This replacement has provided the practical impetus for the de facto development of the justifications of self-defence and humanitarian assistance into previously uncharted areas, even while doctrine hesitates. Second, the continuing capacity to act beyond the Security Council framework may at first

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glance look like a reassertion of state sovereignty. But a different reading is possible. The case of the US post-September 11 shows that the wherewithal to exercise that capacity is now concentrated in an unprecedented manner within one state newly motivated to prosecute its foreign security policy aggressively. Rather than a reassertion of the conditions for a more dispersed balance of sovereign powers, the end of the Cold War on this view may instead have ushered in the conditions for a more severe imbalance – one dominated by the new ‘American empire’.2 These trends do pose a challenge to the traditional sovereignty frame, but their scattered roots mean that it is difficult to predict the course this will take. The strengthening, however selective, of the collective security framework and the doctrinal developments suggested by the phenomena of ‘new wars’, may encourage a more robust liberal internationalism. But the increasing military hegemony of the United States speaks to the possibility of unipolarity. Yet these possibilities are not as divergent as they tend to be portrayed (Kagan 2004). Indeed, they have arguably been mutually reinforcing both in practical and in ideological terms. In practical terms, both trends contribute to and benefit from the stretching of doctrinal boundaries beyond very narrow criteria of intervention. It is important to remember that, for all that the European powers who backed intervention in Kosovo but not in Iraq contended that the two cases were very different, the United States could strongly maintain a different view. According to the European powers, one case was based on humanitarian intervention and the other on the product of an excessive doctrine of self-defence. The United States could retort that in the earlier case just as much as in the later case, the procedural requirements of the collective security framework were not allowed to stand in the way of a more substantive principle and the imperative it provided for action. Indeed, the United States could argue that in one case as much as in the other, the substantive principle was stretched to meet new circumstances. In ideological terms, it must also be recognized that although the narrow legal reasoning of the Bush administration for intervention in Iraq was one of preemptive self-defence, the broader rhetoric within which that reasoning was located was in fact a kind of surrogate liberal internationalism. The argument was consistently made that the United States was not tying to usurp effective liberal-internationalist institutions. It was, rather, simply supplying the initiative where these institutions lacked the collective will in order to do what was necessary in the name of liberal principles – to remove an oppressive and illiberal state which also provided or harboured a threat to all liberal regimes in the international community. Of course, this is not to deny the profound tension between a rhetorical commitment to liberal principles and an approach to decision-making that does not treat the views of other affected parties as worthy of equal concern and respect. Nor should we lightly equate public justification with private motivation. The fact remains, however, that, an ultra-realist, arch-apologetic view of the legalprocedural framework for collective security may nevertheless profess to provide the space for the development of substantive policies that are just as concerned

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 165 and consistent with a thickly liberal agenda. The ultra-realist position is thus just as adjacent to a utopian conception of international law as a more procedurally constrained liberal approach. Indeed the ultra-realist view may be better placed to deliver than is the liberal. This, then, is the bind in which the slow and uneven movement away from the received paradigm of sovereignty is currently threatening to place the law and practice of armed conflict resolution. Law and conflict resolution are caught between an ersatz liberalism that lacks the procedural courage of its convictions, and an aspirational liberalism whose lacks of substantive consensus renders its decision-making and implementation procedures ineffective. It follows from this that political agency – given that the international diplomatic politics of protection with regard to intervention and self-defence is both shaped by and shaping this tension – is either frustrated or rendered ineffective. What is more, as each position is apt to cite the inadequacies of the other as justification of its status as least worst alternative, it is a bind that is likely to be reinforced rather than overcome at the ideological coalface of contemporary international security politics (Kagan 2004). In terms of the epistemic, symbolic and systemic dimensions of sovereignty, what we are witnessing is a severe disjunction in the symbolic dimension. On the symbolic level there are competing claims to authority, of state versus international institutions, caught within a tension between form and substance. It is through possible changes to how this tension is played out between the United Nations and states, that the symbolic transformation of sovereignty might take place, with a non-state actor credibly claiming superior power.

Revisiting sovereignty and security In this final section, I try to sketch a way in which we can escape the cul de sac of a mutually reinforcing tension between imperfectly liberal-internationalist alternatives. One alternative is paralyzed by collective disagreement or indecision, and the other is corrupted by its unilateralist pedigree. The present drift away from the classic sovereignty frame may trap us in this tension. The concern is not with the detail of institutional redesign, but rather with the conceptions of agency and ethical purpose that presuppose and must undergird any such redesign, and in particular how they might address the twin problems of procedural and substantive legitimacy that confound the liberal approach. Agency, here, is conceptualized not as mere capacity, but as capacity tied to substantive and/or formal principles that legitimate this capacity. In pursuing this tack, we need to revisit both the sovereignty frame and our understanding of what kinds of security concerns justify and should motivate the prevention or resolution of armed conflict. In the section that deals with the resilience of the sovereignty frame, I argued that the possibility of reimagining the symbolic and systemic superstructure of sovereignty differently was limited by the constraints imposed by the epistemic base. That said, however, once the epistemic base is separated out from the dominant symbolic and systemic superstructure with which it is closely associated, these

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constraints reveal themselves to be less restrictive, and less mortgaged to the reproduction of the classic Westphalian idea of sovereignty and the Clausewitzian model of warfare and conflict resolution with which it has an elective affinity, than is often assumed. In particular, there are three relevant inferences that are often drawn from the classic sovereignty model but which, on reflection, are not necessary implications of the epistemic core of a supreme ordering power establishing and sustaining a polity. In the first place, there is the classic paradox of the (im)possibility of international law. As we saw, this paradox lies in the question of the feasibility of law between sovereigns, the overriding purpose of each of whose supreme power lies in the maintenance of the identity of the polity qua polity. Sovereignty both makes international law possible by identifying its dramatis personae, and simultaneously threatens to make it impossible by compromising or undermining the freedom of action of sovereigns to pursue their overriding purpose. Chapter 7 by Alexandra Gheciu in this volume shows how these competing claims play out in the example of Kosovo and Bosnia. Gheciu describes how the ‘international authority’ tries to overcome this competition by making Kosovo and Bosnia into democracies that function like Western democracies, through disciplining technologies. This approach is to some extent a replay of the old idea that only civilized nations (i.e. democracies) can be full members of the international society of sovereign states. But just because there can be no answer to this paradox within the terms of the epistemic frame of reference itself, we have no option but to turn to the ideological and systemic glosses for the candidate solutions. Here we find conflicting evidence. At the ideological level, the resilience of realist models of agency – and indeed the legacy of realist assumptions underpinning the new model of American unipolarity, testify to the continuing currency of a highly sceptical approach to international law as a stable, self-standing legal-normative order. Equally, however, the liberal model of states with convergent interests and a threshold of common values provides an alternative symbolic currency more affirmative of the integrity of international law, and one, crucially, which is backed up by a deeply sedimented systemic bias in favour of the very idea of an international order of states. In Chapter 7 in this volume, Gheciu shows that, in the case of Kosovo and Bosnia, states are employing in a de facto manner and between these two positions, society-shaping technologies of discipline to remake a sovereign state into an acceptable sovereign state. Second, there is the question of non-state polities. As argued in the section that deals with the resilience of the soverignty frame, it does not necessarily follow from the idea of supreme ordering power that the sovereigns who claim such power should be divided into territorially discrete and exclusive units. Rather, this is a function of ideological pressures that militate against the assertion of supreme authority other than at the state level backed up by system inertia. System inertia allows little room for the recognition of other sites of authority, due to the uncompromising nature of the dominant pattern of state claims. Yet what seems epistemically irreducible in the sovereignty claim is only the general proposition that that claim should be one of supreme authority ‘over’ some represented unity.

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 167 This in turn implies a self-constructed boundary between the inside and the outside, rather than the more specific proposition that the imagined unity should involve an exclusive territorial claim and that the boundary should be one of physical borders. Significantly, there seems no epistemic reason, in other words, why supremacy cannot be supremacy ‘over’ certain policy functions in geographical areas which overlap other more traditional territorial jurisdictions. Supremacy only need imply non-dependence or autonomy of authority within the claimed jurisdictional domain of that polity, however that jurisdiction be territorially and functionally imagined. Therefore, even though there will be more and more complex boundary disputes once the territorial principle no longer provides the universal template (Walker 2003), non-state polities are not epistemically precluded. Finally, there is the question of the recognition of the title of other collective actors to participate in the international domain short of the claim to sovereignty and to polity status. Here the epistemic openness of the system is least difficult to demonstrate. There is nothing in the epistemic claim to sovereignty that excludes the recognition of other voices as influential rather than authoritative, even if powerful limits to that influence are again imposed by state-centred ideological and systemic pressures. This deconstruction of sovereignty crucially suggests that the sovereignty frame need not condemn the framework of international conflict resolution to the present procedural and substantive impasse. The prevailing symbolic and systemic superstructure do nevertheless provide significant obstacles to change. The relatively closed, state-centric nature of the system helps to stabilize and legitimize the international order. It provides resilient support for the liberal ideology of international law as ‘the gentle civiliser of national self-interest’ (Kennan, quoted in Koskenniemi (2002)) in countering or modifying the forces of realism, even in the new age of American power. Yet this is a double-edged sword, for the very same state-centric impulses militate against the two developments whose confluence seems necessary to overcome the present impasse. First, the dominance of states makes it difficult for the kind of procedural development to take place that, in seeking to move beyond the twin dangers of stalemate and avoidance or circumvention that blight the present state-centred UN procedure, would allow other agencies with a legitimate interest to have an influential voice in the arenas of international deliberation and decision over armed conflict. Such legitimate agencies include stateless nations and, since 1989, the burgeoning manifestations of global or transnational civil society. Second, the dominance of states as sovereign polities and thus as the most authoritative sites of collective self-interest makes it difficult for other substantive conceptions of collective security interest to find an authoritative foothold. Other forms of collective security interest are situated at the regional or global level and are not themselves merely state-derivative, and accordingly do not merely replicate the contemporary difficulties associated with finding legitimate consensus out of the manifold of distinctive state interests. Further, these obstacles to change are mutually reinforcing. It is difficult if not impossible to imagine the emergence and the effective legitimization of a

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non-state-derivative conception of collective interest without the significant representation of non-state actors in the policy and decision-making process (Kaldor 2003, chs 4–6). Equally, however, the relevance and persuasiveness of the voices of agents beyond the state depends upon there being some prior sense of a distinctive conception of state-transcending collective interest which they wish to cultivate and which state interests must also acknowledge. What we need to focus on in conclusion is what such a state-transcending conception of collective security interests might look like. This is the primary epistemic challenge in breaking the dominance of the present sovereignty frame. Only once we are clear as to what we are looking for here can we coherently suggest institutional proposals for articulating that new conception of collective interest at transnational sites in an authoritative manner. Indeed, only then can we conceive of how to give appropriate voice to new (non-state) and old (state) types of agents in the ‘bottom-up’ process of constructing that new conception of collective security interest. But how do we begin to imagine a conception of collective security interest that is not state dependent? International relations theorists and scholars of strategic studies outside of the realist and liberal schools have spent much effort in this inquiry. They have drawn upon the same insight as informs the present chapter – that a liberal internationalism dependent upon the mere balance of state-centred interests and concurrence of state-centred values ultimately provides too thin a basis. Moreover, liberal internationalism provides a basis that is insufficiently insulated against the forces of realism to deliver other than a deeply contingent ‘negative peace’. A ‘negative peace’ refers to one that particular state interests always threaten to disturb. It also refers to a peace whose attainment and maintenance involves an asymmetrical distribution both of the risks and dangers of war and of the goods which make peace tolerable in favour of powerful states or coalitions of states. Both social constructivists and cosmopolitans have sought in overlapping ways to develop models of political agency that overcome this limitation. Constructivists have been most influential in the study of the viability of regional ‘security communities’ (Adler and Barnett 1998a). These might be broader polities such as the EU or security specific frameworks such as NATO. Constructivists have sought to examine how enduring peace might be established within such communities through ‘the institutionalization of mutual identification, transnational values, intersubjective understandings and shared identities’ (Adler and Barnett 1998b: 59). For their part, cosmopolitans have been more interested in how the common interests of humanity hold out the prospect of a genuinely ‘global covenant’ (Held 2004). Their approach is based on a conception of human nature that questions the resilient dominance of affective ties rooted in the traditions and practices of particular states and societies. The cosmopolitan approach also draws upon an institutional theory that sees in the development of global human rights regimes and other subject-centred rather than state-centred regulatory frameworks, the seeds of a conception of political community that is both broader in jurisdiction and more individuated in its focus.

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 169 What is missing, or at least underdeveloped, in both approaches, however, is a conception of security that makes a compelling fit with the state-transcendent social ontology. That is to say, there is insufficient attention paid to developing an understanding of security which is capable of moving beyond a state-centred and state-aggregative register to provide a focus for common values and common identity formation beyond the state. Take, for example, the influential approach recently conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on ‘global public goods’ (Kaul et al. 1999a, 2003a), one that has been enthusiastically endorsed by a leading intellectual figure in the cosmopolitan movement – David Held (2004). This project begins from a standard economic definition of public goods as those whose consumption is ‘non-excludable’ and ‘non-rival’, and holds that to provide for one is to provide for all, enjoyment by one does not detract from enjoyment by all. Street lighting, clean air and national defence are among the paradigm cases of public goods thus conceived. Because of the externality and free-riding problems associated with the (market) provision of such goods, they require some mechanism of compulsory collective action if they are to be adequately provided or even provided at all, and the state is generally considered to be the most fitting of such mechanisms. Global public goods share these elements. But, according to Kaul et al. (1999b), they possess the added criteria that their benefits – or, in the case of ‘public bads’, costs – ‘extend across countries and regions, across rich and poor population groups, and even across generations’ (Kaul et al. 2003b: 3). A pollution-free environment and financial stability are cited as examples here, as, importantly, are peace and security. In this view, then, public goods are those that individuals have a convergent instrumental interest in producing but which due to various collective action problems – notably, lack of information and trust, and free-riding – are under-provided. These problems, well known in national settings, are compounded in respect of global public goods by the lack of capacity, motivation and authority of transnational institutions to provide a compulsory framework of collective action at the global level. Kaul et al. label these a threefold gap of jurisdiction, participation and incentives between institutions and action. The state at this level is no longer the solution (or at least it is only part of the solution), but is also part of the problem – an impediment to better global management. Hence the authors’ emphasis on the key role, in providing global public goods, of both international regimes and nonstate actors from the corporate sector and transnational civil society. These authors make an undoubted contribution by demonstrating that, in rational economic terms, there are good reasons to pool efforts to produce goods beyond the state. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether this thin conception of the value of collective action is enough to bridge the various gaps they cite. What is absent in their conception of public goods is a thicker, more sociological dimension, one which both provides a fuller and truer measure of the problem they seek to overcome and offers the prospect of a solution. As I have argued elsewhere with Ian Loader with regard to the overlapping question of security from crime and disorder (Loader and Walker 2001, 2006), to

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speak of the ‘publicness’ of a good such as security and of the interests to which it refers in these thicker sociological terms is to make two distinct, if connected, claims. It involves the claim that security as a public good has a prominent social dimension. To begin with, there is something of significance in the fact that unlike such classic public goods as clean air, transport or utilities provision under the economic model, security has an inherently social foundation. All public goods, including the merely convergent public goods on which the economic perspective concentrates, obviously require a high degree of social coordination and regulation for their successful provision. But the public good of security has the added dimension that it addresses a root problem – namely insecurity – that is itself socially generated. So security refers not only to the provision of the objective measures of safety put in place in the form of armed troops, peace officers etc., at the level of ‘problem-solution’. Security also refers, and more fundamentally, to the insecurity-generating risks and dangers inherent in the social environment. Furthermore, and providing a second distinctively social dimension, even at the level of ‘problem-solution’ the accomplishment of security as a public good depends not just on the objective preventive and protective measures established (which, as noted, themselves require a degree of social coordination and regulation) but also on how the adequacy of these measures is interpreted and experienced by the individual. That is to say, security, again unlike the classic economic public goods, is not simply a matter of objective provision but also has an inherently subjective dimension. Security inheres, finally, in the sense of freedom from care, anxiety, apprehension, unease and alarm of individuals in the face of their social environment and in the light of the objective safety measures put in place. And this subjective dimension itself must in some measure be a function of the deeper social relations of the individual. For the degree of security or insecurity persons feels depends upon their perception of the adequacy of safety measures within what they understand as their significant social environment. Such a perception is itself conditioned both by their immediate and mediated experience of that environment and their general threshold of manageable fear. Fear is, in turn, a function of a person’s wider sense of confidence in, and ease with his place within, the social world bounded by that environment. This brings us to the second dimension of our ‘thicker’ sociological analysis – namely the constitutive dimension of security as a public good. For the very idea of public goods presupposes an identifiable ‘public’ that understands itself to possess collective interests, one that evinces a preparedness to put and pursue things in common. Security, we may suggest, is not only a key convergent – or thin – good that individuals, according to the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke and others, would choose to pursue collectively for reasons of enlightened selfinterest. Because its successful achievement both presupposes and vindicates a degree of social ‘connectedness’ within a population, security is also among the goods that enables political community to be made and imagined in this sense in the first place. The aspiration for security against internal and external threats is – like common language and common territory – prominent among the matters that help to found and give meaning to people’s sense of ‘we-feeling’, a means

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 171 by which stable communities register and articulate their identity as stable communities engaged together in a common project. Security measures also provide an important symbolic vernacular and affective register through which these bonds between strangers come to be and remain commonly understood as common political community. This is because they must assume and may give practical effect to the mutual trust, abstract solidarity and mediated loyalty that bind together individuals who remain strangers to one another. That is to say, the instrumental and the affective dimensions of security as a public good are symbiotically related and operate in a mutually enforcing dynamic in the very making and sustenance of the collective project of common ‘publicness’. In introducing these social and cultural dimensions of ‘publicness’ to our framework for understanding the common public interest in security, we confront head-on just why it is so difficult to think and act beyond state or sub-state national or proto-national interests. The sense of mutual trust, common engagement and general readiness to put things in common, and the centrality of security as both medium and outcome of that recursive process, have been and remain strongly associated with nations and nation-state, with expressions of national identity and with the boundaries of traditional state sovereignty (Walker 1990). National security encompasses an assemblage of practices made possible by the stable institutionalization of the nation state, yet this same stable institutionalization in turn depends in some measure upon the manifold associations of common identity and purpose made and sustained through the idea of national security. This stubborn self-reinforcement of circuits of trust, loyalty and abstract solidarity at the state level is not something we can, or, indeed, should wish away. This is a point that is insufficiently appreciated in much of the constructivist and cosmopolitan literature. The national (security) community is too powerfully embedded a social phenomenon just to wither away under conditions of globalization. Precisely because the irreducibly subjective component of the sense of security as a thick public good is tied to stable membership of existing communities, then, despite the many internal and external evils perpetrated in the name of a narrow national self-interest, something of significant value would be lost if it were to do so. Yet this need not mean that the search for effective state-transcendent conceptions of security is hopeless. Rather, what it required is that these regional or global conceptions be similarly thick, equally capable of forging the link between common community and common security at their own postnational sites. Negatively, anything less will simply collapse back into a liberal internationalism or a more individuated and so socially ungrounded and politically unpromising cosmopolitanism. Positively, the existence of forms of political community and associated security practices below the state indicates that there is no conceptual reason why different notions of thick community – and thick security – cannot exist at different levels of political institutionalization and in different layers of the social imaginary. Trust, loyalty and solidarity are not finite social resources to be parcelled out in indivisible portions to each individual and to be divided in a zero-sum manner between different collective sites. They are instead generated separately and for the most part cumulatively at different collective sites with

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overlapping memberships. We may all indeed experience dilemmas of trust, conflicts of loyalties and competing solidarities, but the very fact that we can imagine these tensions speaks to the viability of multiple political identities. Of course, to assert that a thick conception of security at the regional and global levels is conceptually possible is not to say that its mature development is imminent or likely. It is often remarked, not least by cosmopolitans, that the common store of memories, myths, symbols and languages around which forms of identification and belonging can coalesce, which in turn is necessary to the effective articulation of security as a collective public good, is absent at regional and global levels (Held and McGrew 2002: 30). Indeed, the failure of the European Union to develop common cause over either Kosovo or Iraq reminds us that the difficulties can be just as profound for regional as for global institutions. Yet none of this justifies a categorical dismissal of future prospects, or, indeed, certain immanent trends. Once we recognize that security is not just the regulatory end of community – of common publicness – but can also be its imaginative means and vehicle, the possibilities become more fluid. For instance, for Roland Robertson (1992), the sense of the world as a single ‘imagined community’ was nurtured by the feelings of common vulnerability and shared empathy alike aroused by the wars of the twentieth century and by such defining events as Hiroshima and the Holocaust. What we see here is the familiar complex and cumulative mix of the instrumental and the affective in creating bonds between strangers. It is the same mix as that found in later phases in the combination of self-interest and altruism that defined much protest against the nuclear arms race and, now, in much shared concern with the simultaneous global reverberations of instability and local humanitarian disasters triggered by many new wars and forms of network terrorism. In an ever more extensively connected world there may be many more instrumental reasons for putting things in common – ‘thin’ motives for promoting transnational public goods. But by creating a fledgling ‘common consciousness of human society on a global scale’ (Kaldor 2003: 112), these forms of instrumental engagement lead to an expansion of the horizons of personal security thresholds. Such thresholds encompass more distant significant others, and, in turn, create imaginative openings for wider and thicker forms of empathy and solidarity. They can complement, and perhaps moderate, those extant at the domestic level. The institutional vindication of these possibilities may remain remote. But rather than an impediment to this, sovereignty as a portable metaphor for authoritative collective decision and action at whatever and however many levels of political authority, remains its necessary epistemic precondition.

Notes 1 See in particular the so-called ‘neo-neo debate’ in which neo-realist and neo-liberal institutionalists over the course of the 1980s and 1990s gradually converged on a common agenda of debate and priorities, and even began to share some founding premises (see Baldwin 1993).

Sovereignty and the regulation of armed conflict 173 2 The post-September 11 (and post Hardt and Negri (2000)) literature on American empire is voluminous and diverse, ranging from the celebratory to the denunciatory, and differing greatly on the degree of central control, unity of purpose and national selfinterest that the conduct of empire is claimed to entail. See, for example, Ignatieff (2003), Todd (2003), Mann (2003), Barber (2003), Johnson (2004), Ferguson (2004).

Bibliography Adler, E. and Barnett, M. (eds) (1998a) Security Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —— (1998b) ‘A Framework for the Study of Security Communities’ in E. Adler and M. Barnett (eds) Security Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 29–66. Austin, J.L. (1961) Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldwin, D. (ed.) (1993) Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Barber, B. (2003) Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy. New York: Norton. Bull, H. (1977) The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Clark, I. (1989) The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Burca, G. (2003) ‘Sovereignty and the Supremacy Doctrine of the European Court of Justice’, in N. Walker (ed.) Sovereignty in Transition. Oxford: Hart, pp. 449–460. Dunne, T. (1997) ‘Liberalism’, in John Baylis and Steve Smith (eds) The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 147–164. Ferguson, N. (2004) Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York: Penguin Books. Gray, C. (2003) ‘The Use of Force and the International Legal Order’, in M.D. Evans (ed.) International Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 589–622. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Held, D. (2004) Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus. Cambridge: Polity Press. Held, D. and McGrew, A. (2002) Globalization/Anti-Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Huysmans, J. (2003) ‘Discussing Sovereignty and Transnational Politics’, in N. Walker (ed.) Sovereignty in Transition. Oxford: Hart, pp. 209–228. Ignatieff, M. (2003) Empire Lite. London: Vintage. Johnson, C. (2004) The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan. Kagan, R. (2004) ‘America’s Crisis of Legitimacy’, Foreign Affairs, 83 (2) March/April, 65–79. Kaldor, M. (1999) New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kaul, I., Grunberg, I. and Stern, M.A. (eds) (1999a) Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (1999b) ‘Defining Global Public Goods’ in I. Kaul, I. Grunberg and M.A. Stern (eds) Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 2–19.

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Kaul, I., Conceição, P. Le Goulven, K. and Mendoza, R.U. (eds) (2003a) Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2003b) ‘Why do Global Public Goods Matter Today?’, in I. Kaul, P. Conceição, K. Le Goulven and R.U. Mendoza (eds) Providing Global Public Goods: Managing Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 2–20. Koskenniemi, M. (1989) From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument. Helsinki: Lakimiesliiton kustannus. —— (2002) The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindahl, H. (1997) ‘Sovereignty and Symbolization’, Rechtstheorie, 27, 3–24. —— (2003) ‘Acquiring a Community: The Acquis and the Institution of European Legal Order’, European Law Journal, 9, 433–450. Loader, I. and Walker, N. (2001) ‘Policing as a Public Good: Reconstituting the Connections between Policing and the State’, Theoretical Criminology, 5, 9–35. —— (2006) ‘Locating the Public Interest in Transnational Policing’, in J. Sheptycki (ed.) Crafting Global Policing. Oxford: Hart (forthcoming). Mann, M. (2003) Incoherent Empire. New York: Verso. Record, J. (2003) ‘The Bush Doctrine and War with Iraq’, US Army War College Quarterly, 4, 10–21. Robertson, R. (1982) Globalization, Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Searle, J.R. (1969) Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todd, E. (2003) After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. New York: Columbia University Press. Van Roermund, B. (2003) ‘Sovereignty: Unpopular and Popular’, in N. Walker (ed.) Sovereignty in Transition. Oxford: Hart, pp. 33–54. Walker, N. (2003) ‘Late Sovereignty in the European Union’, in N. Walker (ed.) Sovereignty in Transition. Oxford: Hart, pp. 3–32. Walker, R. (1990) ‘Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Politics’, Alternatives, 15, 3–27. Werner, W.G. and De Wilde, J. (2001) ‘The Endurance of Sovereignty’, European Journal of International Relations, 7, 283–313.

11 Do we need (to protect) nature?1 Andrew Dobson

If nature did not exist we would have to invent it. Except that we couldn’t, because nature is the precondition for everything else – including invention itself. Nature, both as thing and as idea of thing, has played a critical and multifarious role in human development. So varied has this role been, indeed, that a full answer to the question that heads this chapter is well beyond my present scope. Here I want to argue simply that the ‘nature question’ raises issues of agency, security and protection in quite unique ways. For our present purposes I shall refer to two types of security – ‘life support’ and ‘existential’. I shall deal with the first of these quite quickly before showing how the role played by nature in existential security is changing in late-modern societies, opening up new spaces for politics and political agency that are related to the changing relations between human beings and the non-human natural world.

Life-support security ‘Environmental security’ comes in various forms. The first type is the ‘life support’ security associated with nature as a provider of environmental goods and services. If someone asks you (as children are wont to do) where all the goods in shops comes from, it is no good saying ‘from a warehouse’, because that just prompts the Russian doll question – ‘and where does that come from?’ The only answer that makes any sense is ‘from the Earth’. And this is the first and most obvious answer to the question of why we may need to protect nature. We need to because without nature we could not do the things that every species of animal needs to do in order to survive: grow food and provide shelter. We should resist the temptation, then, to believe that post-industrial societies are also post-material ones. The enduring truth is that we are material creatures with material needs that can only be satisfied by what nature provides. Economists sometimes refer to this kind of nature as ‘critical natural capital’ – those bits of nature that are critical for the health and welfare of human beings. Few will deny that we need to protect this kind of nature. As with every debate regarding nature, though, such a claim is an invitation to border disputes. Even if we admit to a category called ‘critical natural capital’ we still have to ask what ‘critical’ might mean (how much ‘redundancy’ is there in

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ecological systems?), as well as the key question: critical for whom or for what? The answer to this question will be different for human beings and parakeets because they need different types of natural capital in order to survive and reproduce. In this sense we do not know what nature ‘is’ and we shall soon see that there are some who deny its existence altogether, but the key thing is that nature is a relational idea: ‘nature in relation to what?’ is the question we must ask (human beings or parakeets?). We also therefore do not know what ‘protection’ of nature means – or at least we know that it might mean a number of things, in connection with a number of different types of potential objects of protection, which might in turn be protected in a number of ways. A full account of the ‘mights’ and ‘potentials’ in that sentence would amount to providing an exhaustive account of the descriptive and normative issues raised by environmental policy disputes over at least the last forty years. Such an account is evidently beyond our scope here, so I propose to focus on an unusual and certainly tendentious way in which the security debate is inflected by contact with ‘the environment’. One way into this is by considering the debate around genetically modified (GM) crops. Talk of ‘this kind of nature’ or ‘critical natural capital’ implies that there are other types of nature or natural capital. And it is true that nature is one of the most complex words in our vocabulary (Williams 1988; Soper 1995). ‘Critical natural capital’ is just one answer, and the furore over GM crops has made it clear that people are definitely worried about nature’s future in this sense in the GM context. Typical questions are: might the genetic manipulation of nature affect nature’s ability to underpin our health and welfare? Will not GM crops damage our health rather than enhance it? Determinate answers to these questions have yet to be given, and may never be so. The key point, nevertheless, is that we can see that the ‘life support’ interpretation of environmental security is present in public reaction to the debate about the genetic modification of crops. But polls consistently reveal another curious and underreported fact: that people are worried about GM because of what it will mean for nature at a different – let us say existential – level. These polls point to a rather different inflection of the question of what happens to the idea of ‘security’ when it is brought into contact with the environment.

Existential security In a 2000 Eurobarometer survey on ‘Europeans and Biotechnology’ interviewees were asked to respond to 13 statements about biotechnology. One of them was, ‘Even if GM food has its advantages, it is basically against nature.’ Another ran, ‘GM food threatens the natural order of things’ (INRA 2000: 59). Respondents were asked to indicate their levels of support for each of the 13 statements, including these 2. The striking result was that these 2 statements had higher levels of support than any of the others. In other words, Eurobarometer respondents were more worried, more consistently and in greater numbers, about what we can only call the metaphysical or existential implications of GM plant and animal technology than they were about the more prosaic health and safety implications.

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This concern about what GM technology as a practice signifies points to a different kind of security concern to that associated with the more high profile welfare debate. The technology is consistently regarded as being ‘against nature’ and opposed to the ‘natural order’, and I am going to argue that this response signifies a security concern of great moment in late-modern societies: (in)security about what it means to be human. It is worth pointing out that this concern is human-centred; it does not trade on arguments for the ‘intrinsic value’ of nature. A standard analytic approach to the ‘why protect nature?’ question is to divide the answers into ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘ecocentric’ categories, with the former referring to human-interested reasons for protection and the latter to those that stem from ‘the interests of nature’. The life-support argument for protecting nature is an obvious candidate for anthropocentric status (assuming that it is human life that is at stake of course). Other arguments are perhaps less obviously anthropocentric but still nevertheless fall into that category – the aesthetic or spiritual pleasure that human beings derive from different manifestations of the non-human natural world, for example. In our present context the role that nature plays in providing existential security for human beings also falls into the anthropocentric category, and in this sense it is no different in kind to the argument for protection outlined in the previous ‘life-support’ section. Set against the context of rapid advances in genetic technologies, the recent rash of books by public intellectuals on the ‘what it means to be human’ question is surely no coincidence (Fukuyama 2002; Gray 2002; McKibben 2003; Fernández-Armesto 2004). Each of these books and its author argue (or in Gray’s case make mention of the fact) that the nature of human being has been put into question by the genetic modification of humans. So Bill McKibben writes, ‘if we aggressively pursue any or all of several new technologies now before us, we may alter our relationship not with the rest of nature but with ourselves’ (2003: ix). In similar vein, Francis Fukuyama offers the argument that there is such a thing as human nature, and that this nature has a significant genetic component. Against this background, the problem with biotechnology is that it portends a ‘posthuman future’ (that of his book’s title) ‘in which biotechnology will give us the capacity to alter that [stable human] essence over time’ (2002: 217). Attempts such as these to anchor the human to fixed reference points can be confronted in a number of ways. It might be suggested, for example, that there is no such thing as a stable human essence. Certainly Fukuyama’s attempts to establish one are rather unconvincing. He calls the ‘human essence’ Factor X (as if it were a shampoo) (2002: 150), and writes that it ‘cannot be reduced to the possession of moral choice, or reason, or language, or sociability, or sentience, or emotions, or consciousness, or any other quality that has been put forth as a ground for human dignity. It is all of these qualities coming together in a human whole that make up Factor X’ (2002: 171). This is a mildly disappointing conclusion, as it comes close to saying that what makes humans human and therefore special is . . . their humanity. Fukuyama, like others who write in this vein, seems reluctant to

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confront the suggestion that the search for a human essence outside of social and economic processes – outside of history – is doomed to failure. Similarly, McKibben suggests that in a future in which human beings are genetically engineered, the self disappears and is replaced by a ‘self ’. He illustrates this with the example of running. Imagine, he says, that you (a genetically engineered you, that is) are running a marathon, and ‘say you’ve reached Mile 23 and you’re feeling strong. Is it because of your hard training and your character, or because the gene pack inside you is pumping out more red blood cells than your body knows what to do with?’ (2003: 6). Then, in a typical turn of phrase, he says that ‘as we move into the new world of genetic engineering, we won’t simply lose races, we’ll lose racing’ (2003: 6, emphasis in original). In an appeal to authenticity – and authenticity is absolutely central to the positions held by Fukuyama, McKibben and others who argue in the same vein – McKibben asks rhetorically of a genetically engineered future, ‘just what human excellences are we supposed to be celebrating?’ (2002: 5). As with Fukuyama, McKibben’s position is open to attack. We might wonder, for example, whether racing ever was pure and authentic. Times tumbled when we moved from cinder to synthetic tracks. Footwear technology has improved. Is it my hard work or my new $100 trainers that helped me knock 5 seconds off my 1 kilometre personal best last week? McKibben has chosen running to illustrate his distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic, in part because it is as ‘raw’ a sport as you can get, with performance apparently unmediated by technology. But even there we can see that technology intervenes (shoes, tracks), and it is difficult – if not impossible – to strip the activity down to its bare human (as opposed to ‘posthuman’) essentials. Take something like golf and attempts to isolate an authentic version of the game are even further strained. Is it my hard practice or my titanium shafted driver that now enables me to drive the ball 350 yards instead of 200? Do we now play ‘golf ’ rather than golf because we no longer play with the mashie niblick? These objections to the idea of a ‘human essence’ are powerful, but we cannot ignore the significance of this rash of attempts to hang on to it. And what they signify is a profound concern about the nature of human being in late-modern societies. In a word, these books express an insecurity about human being and being human, and it is this insecurity that I want to spend the rest of the chapter discussing. I introduced the work of Fukuyama and McKibben by saying that their argument is that the nature of human being has been put into question by the possibility of genetically engineering humans themselves. While this is a plausible interpretation of what is happening it is not the only one. I suggest, in contrast, that the genetic modification of non-human nature can similarly affect our conception of ourselves as human – and this, I believe, is one key aspect of the Eurobarometer responses to genetic technologies that has been under-examined. We define our humanity in a number of ways, but two in particular are most common. The first is represented by Fukuyama’s attempt to define a ‘human essence’. In this approach, a characteristic or set of characteristics specific to human beings is identified, and this provides a checklist against which to assess


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organisms’ claims to human-ness. The second approach is explicitly to contrast ‘being human’ with ‘being non-human’. Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2004) has written a recent popular account of the history of the negotiation between these two terms, and his book suggests that we do not seem to be able to do without non-human nature when we think about what it is to be human. But for a book about the history of the relationship between human and non-human nature, So You Think You are Human? is curiously ahistorical. I do not mean that FernándezArmesto fails to trace the history of the relationship between the two, but that he does not consider the possibility that the relationship between them is itself historical: the historical process alters the ontological terms of reference. The classic modern way of articulating this process in our context is in terms of the humanising of nature. This is in keeping with modernity’s self-conception as a project whose objective is to bring non-human nature under the rational control of progressive practice. But such is the heuristic authority of this self-conception that we can easily forget that the historical process is a dialectical one, characterised not only by the humanising of nature, but also by the naturalising of the human. From the point of view of analytic as opposed to dialectical reason the existence of this latter process seems counter-intuitive. If human beings do indeed exert increasing control over the non-human natural world, as the story of modernity has it, then how can any naturalising of the human be taking place at all? But there is plenty of theoretical and empirical evidence that humans are being naturalised, in the sense of being subject (heteronomously) to nature – except that we must now understand nature as humanised nature. Over forty years ago Jean-Paul Sartre developed the dialectical category of the ‘practico-inert’ which he defined as ‘matter in which past praxis is embodied’ (Sartre 1960/1976: 829). Praxis is human historical activity, and Sartre’s matter is therefore what we have been calling ‘humanised nature’. Sartre makes the point that the practicoinert returns to act on humans in ways that are intelligible but usually unexpected, and that therefore have the characteristics of ‘nature’ in the sense of beyond human control. The example he gives in Volume 1 of the Critique of Dialectical Reason is deforestation in China, where the humanising of nature (clearing trees to free land for cultivation) creates a sphere of the practico-inert which returns to act on humans (now naturalised in the sense of ‘at the mercy of nature’) in the form of floods: deforestation as the elimination of obstacles becomes negatively a lack of protection: since the loess of the mountains and peneplains is no longer retained by trees, it congests the rivers, raising them higher than the plains and bottling them up in their lower reaches, and forcing them to overflow their banks. (Sartre 1960/1976: 162) This example, given by someone not exactly renowned as an environmentalist, at the very beginning of the modern environmental movement, is of striking contemporary relevance. Received wisdom now is that many disasters we call ‘natural’ should not be so regarded – they have an anthropogenic element in

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which humanised nature returns in the form of Sartre’s practico-inert to act upon humans in unexpected and not always benign ways. Climate change is another example of the same dialectical phenomenon. The condition of ‘being on the receiving end’ of humanised nature is the other pole of the dialectic: not the pole at which nature is humanised, but the pole at which humans are naturalised.

Genetic modification and human identity So the humanising of nature takes place at the same time as the naturalising of the human, and this has the effect of altering the nature of the boundary between the human and non-human spheres. Of course this boundary has always been disputed (Thomas 1984; Evans 1987; Fernández-Armesto 2004) but the idea of a boundary has always existed – and it is this idea that is arguably so crucial to our self-conception as human beings. The suggestion here is that genetic technologies are in the (dialectical) process of erasing the very idea of a boundary between the human and non-human natural worlds, and that this has profound consequences for the security of our identity as human beings. This, perhaps, is what lies behind the Eurobarometer responses to GM technologies that we discussed earlier. Of course it will be objected that this is unscientific nonsense and that GM is merely an extension of what farmers have been doing for thousands of years: cross-breeding plants and animals to create hardier and more productive breeds. The counter-objection is that this is sophistry rather than sense: Mendel could cross two types of pea but he couldn’t put a jellyfish gene in a pig. Genetic engineering and traditional breeding as modes of relation to non-human nature are even further apart than are walking and space travel as forms of locomotion. Traditionally, species are regarded as distinct when hybrids between them turn out to be infertile, and this is what marks off the ‘natural’ from the ‘unnatural’ as far as most people are concerned (our Eurobarometer respondents, for example). From this point of view GM’s capacity to cross species boundaries at will makes it a quintessentially unnatural (as well as a quintessentially modern, in its capacity to humanise the natural) technology. This, perhaps, is the point at which not only is a boundary being crossed, but the very idea of a boundary is being undone. From this perspective, resistance to the genetic modification of plants and animals amounts to an affirmative answer to our animating question ‘do we need (to protect) nature?’ – and not only as the critical natural capital that sustains physical life but also, it seems, in response to some larger need.

Being human: identity and security So what is this larger need? In common with many others, Fernández-Armesto is prepared to entertain the thought that humanity’s distinctiveness is a myth: ‘That humans are uniquely rational, intellectual, spiritual, self-aware, creative, conscientious, moral or godlike seems to be a myth – an article of faith to which we cling in defiance of the evidence’ (2004: 170). The evidence suggests, indeed, that we


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share these supposedly special and human-defining characteristics with many non-human animals. This evidence becomes ever more conclusive and the space available to those who wish to argue for human distinctiveness (let alone specialness) shrinks correspondingly. Yet the myth survives. Why do so many people cling so tightly to such an apparently hopeless case? Lacking the special knowledges required to address this question with any confidence, I can only speculate – but let me do so in terms that animate this book. The key words, perhaps, are ‘identity’ and ‘security’ – and I shall also mention ‘politics’. More particularly what is at stake here are human identity and existential security. Social identities – who we think we are and how we are placed in relation to others – have always functioned, positively, as solace and security and, negatively, as stricture and straitjacket. The move from traditional to post-traditional societies is characterised by the multiplicity and provisionality of identity, with all the social freedom of movement that this entails. But identity liberation brings heightened insecurity in its train, and predictable searches for stable points of reference ensue. In traditional societies such stable points of reference are both intra- and extrasocial, involving fixed points in the social hierarchy and the authoritative relationship between human beings and God. In post-traditional societies the social hierarchy is undone and God is dead. The identities that offered security are gone but the need for security remains, and this, arguably, is where non-human nature comes in. In traditional societies people could (and can) afford the luxury of a promiscuous and playful identity relationship with nature. Are humans a part of nature or apart from it? When identities are fixed and known, this question is asked but the answer hardly matters. In post-traditional societies, though, so many props have been kicked away that our very conception of ourselves as human is at stake. And here, it will be pointed out, is the biggest irony. Just at the moment when our insecurity is greatest, the ‘other’ – nature – against which we might most successfully define ourselves as human is in the process of being extravagantly humanised. For what is genetic engineering if not an exercise in bringing nature under the sign of the human manufacturer? What is global warming if not a magnificently successful attempt to bring ‘every inch and hour of the globe’ (McKibben 1999: 46) under human influence? We want to assert our identity as human beings, but our point of reference – nature – is ever more imbued with the human. All this has led some eminent and influential people to argue that it is too late to ask whether we need to protect nature since there is none left anyway. We have so humanised nature that it can no longer be regarded as separate from us. Anthony Giddens, sociologist and architect of Tony Blair’s ‘Third Way’ politics, has said that that ‘nature no longer exists’ (Giddens 1994: 11), that ‘nature . . . has all but dissolved’ (47), and he delights in the paradox ‘that nature has been embraced only at the point of its disappearance’ (206). So does this mean that nature has gone, just when we need it most as a way of confirming our sense of ourselves as human?

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This is the key question and there are two kinds of answer to it. The first answer denies the disappearance of nature and asserts in rather a traditional way that there is still enough nature ‘out there’ to perform its role as the point of reference against which we define our being human. I shall outline this answer in more detail below. The second answer takes seriously the dialectical approach to human/nature relations that I discussed earlier. This answer agrees with Giddens up to a point: it accepts that nature has been increasingly humanised. But it adds what Giddens’ analysis omits: that in humanising nature, humans are naturalised. On this account nature does not ‘disappear’ but comes back in a different form, as naturalised humanity. There is little solace in this second answer for those who would wish a traditional (modern) conception of nature to survive so as to buttress a traditional (modern) conception of human identity. In return, though, we are offered two alternative conceptions – humanised nature and naturalised humanity – that open up new prospects for the sphere of politics and notions of agency. I shall say more about this further on, but let me first offer a traditional defence of nature against Giddens’ claim that it has disappeared. It might be objected that Giddens is wrong on two counts. First, the fundamental laws and processes of nature are unaffected by human activity: there is nothing we can do to alter the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Nature, understood as its laws and powers, exists independently of human beings (even if our interpretation and use of the Second Law is itself human). Second, Giddens seems to believe that every human contact with the non-human natural world entirely transforms the natural into the social. He will neither allow the possibility and significance of there being degrees of the humanisation of nature, nor that nature survives this contact in important ways. Consider the following: At the bottom of my garden is a pond, which I dug. The pond contains tadpoles and newts. The tadpoles are there because I put frogspawn in from a neighbour’s garden. I have no idea where the newts came from, but they wouldn’t be there either if I had not dug the pond in the first place. The pond is therefore a human creation. But are the newts and tadpoles in it as much a human creation as the house whose garden provides their habitat? When I see our children lying next to the pond, heads over the water, watching the tadpoles go about the production of their lives, I can only think that they are watching ‘nature’, not ‘humanity’. Children seem to think, in opposition to eminent sociologists, that nature exists and its death has been too hastily announced. So while it is probably true that global warming means that not one square inch of the planet is as it would have been without the presence of human beings, and while the thought that without the greenhouse effect this or that rainstorm might have occurred tomorrow rather than today is a striking one, there is still the possibility of knowing that there is an independent nature. And paradoxically it is those of us who live the most artificial lives who are best placed to know this, since we need lower doses of nature to persuade us that it is there. Arguably, then, there is enough nature against which we define our humanity in traditional (modern) ways. And the importance of this does not stop at securing our identity as human beings, since our modern view of what politics


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itself consists is bound up with the distinction between the human and natural spheres. In this traditional conception, then, we need nature to tell us what politics and its agents are.

Politics and the sphere of nature So far we have it that identity and security, and the security of identity, are at stake here. ‘Being human’ seems to be important to us, and the idea of the non-human natural world has a role to play in this self-conception. But it also turns out that nonhuman nature is critical to our modern conception of what politics is because in this conception ‘doing politics’ is bound up with ‘being human’. Politics in the modern idiom is regarded as a quintessentially human activity. For us to recognise it as such we need a non-human realm in which politics does not take place. Thus ‘protecting nature’ is not only a means of ‘protecting (an idea of ) the human’, but also of ‘protecting (the sphere of ) politics’. Most of us in the northern and western worlds are heirs to the Aristotelian notion that ‘man is a political animal’. This is a very neat way of simultaneously expressing our membership of a wider biota (we are ‘animals’), and our human distinctiveness (we are ‘political’). Here we find the genesis of the modern conception of politics as an activity that marks us off from – and yet depends upon the concept of – non-human nature. As politics has become more ineluctably associated with being human, the dependence of the sphere of politics on a sphere of nature has become less and less remarked, less and less visible. Most of us, as I say, are heirs to this Aristotelian conception – at least in its modern inflection. The modern inflection of Aristotle’s maxim has it that politics is a fundamentally artificial activity, whereas for Aristotle politics was a potentiality of man’s (as he put it) nature. This modern inflection, with its marked separation of the human and non-human realms and its notion that politics only takes place in the former, has the effect of effacing the natural as a condition for our modern conception of the political. This effacement is most strikingly on display in commentaries on politics where nature has disappeared altogether – but some excavation is required to bring the point to light. It is where nature has disappeared altogether that it is most obvious just how much the modern conception of politics requires it. An especially noteworthy such theory can be found in Jacques Rancière’s landmark book, Disagreement (1999). The first page of the book has all the trappings of a beginning. It is, after all, Chapter 1 (itself entitled ‘The beginning of politics’), page one starts with the words ‘Let’s begin at the beginning’, and Aristotle’s Politics (itself a beginning of sorts, of course) is the main feature. Indeed it is hard to think of a page that could present itself more self-consciously as a beginning than this one. On this first page Rancière quotes a passage from the first book of Aristotle’s Politics on the contrast between the human and non-human realms: Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and she has endowed man alone among the animals with the power of speech. Speech is something different from voice, which is possessed by other animals also and used

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Andrew Dobson by them to express pain or pleasure; for their nature does indeed enable them not only to feel pleasure and pain but to communicate these feelings to each other. Speech, on the other hand, serves to indicate what is useful and what is harmful, and so also what is just and what is unjust. For the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, the just and the unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state. (quoted in Rancière 1999: 1)

Humans speak while other animals have only voice, and humans have conceptions of right and wrong while other animals only feel pleasure and pain. These remarks are in themselves perhaps unexceptional and unexceptionable, but the ferocious sting in their tail is that they serve, for Rancière, as a means of defining the political sphere: humans are inside it, and other animals are not. Politics begins, then, where human and non-human nature part company. Rancière assumes with Aristotle, in other words, that political beings must be speaking beings – but nowhere is this defended or argued for. This assumption suggests there is another, unspoken, beginning to Rancière’s tale, a beginning before Rancière’s, a moment when it is decided that politics is for speaking beings only, and that voice does not count as speech. As it happens there is a Preface to Rancière’s Disagreement, a beginning before the beginning. It starts with another quotation from Aristotle: ‘The question we must bear in mind is, equality or inequality in what sort of thing?’ (quoted in Rancière, 1999: vii). But this is not the new beginning we were looking for. In fact it just compounds the felony, for surely the primordial question is not ‘equality or inequality in what sort of thing’ but ‘equality or inequality of what sort of thing’. Rancière proposes an enquiry into the nature of politics without enquiring of what kind of being the word ‘politics’ can be predicated. At the very least we must surely admit that the two questions: (1) of what kind of being can ‘politics’ be predicated? and (2) ‘what is politics?’ are closely related. But the former question is rarely asked in the modern idiom, and this is because Aristotle’s answer, captured in the quotation above, is so firmly established as the context for our thinking. The consequences of Rancière not asking that first question are interesting. One of his key distinctions is between ‘politics’ and ‘policing’. Policing is defined as ‘the organization of powers, the distribution of places and roles, and the systems for legitimizing this distribution’ (28). Politics is defined as ‘antagonistic to policing’: ‘whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration – that of the part of those who have no part’ (29–30). In his own terms, then, we must regard Rancière’s book as an exercise in policing rather than politics. By distinguishing between ‘speech’ and ‘voice’ and valorising the former over the latter he is, precisely, ‘distributing places and roles’. Doing ‘politics’, on the other hand (and again in Rancière’s own terms) would have involved questioning the ‘presupposition that, by definition, has no place in


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that configuration – that of the part of those who have no part’ – that is, the presupposition that the condition for belonging to the circle of ‘equal beings’ is the capacity to speak. Once again, Rancière denies himself the possibility of exploiting the full richness of his conception of politics by beginning where he does. ‘Before the logos that deals with the useful and harmful’, he writes, ‘there is the logos that orders and bestows the right to order’ (16). But before that there is the decision (rarely explicitly argued for, and certainly not by Rancière) that politics – the ‘disruption of the natural pecking order’ (18) – only occurs among speaking beings: those in possession of the logos. Thus ‘The brilliant deduction of the political animal’s ends from the properties of the logical animal’ certainly does ‘patch over a tear’ (21), but not the one Rancière identifies. In truth, the patch hides the move through which the political animal becomes identical with the logical animal (i.e. the animal in possession of the logos: the human animal). Once this identity is created, we are no longer perhaps in the presence of a ‘brilliant deduction’ but of a truism. The consequences of this for non-human animals are significant. It is, writes Rancière, an ‘immemorial and perennial wrong’ to doom ‘the majority of speaking beings to the night of silence or to the animal noises of voices expressing pleasure or pain’ (22). But his construction of this wrong itself consigns non-speaking beings to ‘the night of silence’ and the ‘mere’ (23) signalling of pleasure and pain. It seems that Rancière’s construction/construal of the political realm rests on placing non-human animals beyond the reach of politics – and justice. Rancière’s work is all of a piece with Fukuyama’s, whose position we explored earlier. Rancière’s is also an act of instantiating humanness and naturalness through securing a clear boundary between them. The addition is that securing humanity is also an act of securing politics – or at least a certain notion of what politics is. From Rancière’s perspective, resistance to GM is not so much about the health of either humans or the environment but rather a struggle relating to the nature of the political. Claims regarding the protection of nature feed fundamentally into a politics of the protection of our own self-understanding as humans and political animals.2 We can now speculate on what Rancière’s answer to the question that constitutes the title of this chapter might be. Given all that has gone before, he would surely have to conclude that nature must be protected, since without it the foundations on which he has built his conception of politics would disappear. As I suggested earlier, it is in theories where nature is most invisible that its necessity is most obvious – once the necessary excavation is carried out. We have reached the position where the issues of security, identity, protection and nature seem to be bound up in the following way. Stable identities can provide security. One of the many identities that we find ourselves negotiating in late-modern societies is our identity as human beings. This negotiation takes on a critical character in such societies because the effects of the practices carried out in them (GM, for example) humanise the natural in such dramatic ways as to put in question the very notion of a boundary between humanity and the non-human natural world. More specifically, if this boundary were to disappear then our

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modern conception of politics – which depends on the availability of a contrast between the human and natural realms – would be undermined. So ‘nature’ appears to be a condition for the possibility both of ‘humanity’, and of that quintessentially human activity called ‘politics’. Do we need to protect nature, then? Yes – if we believe that humanity and politics can survive in their current (that is to say, historically and culturally specific) forms.

Nature humanised and humans naturalised: a new politics But this only carries us to the beginning of a longer, and potentially more interesting, story – one in which neither humanity nor politics survive in their current nature-related forms. At this point the second answer to the question I posed earlier swims indistinctly into view. The question was: has nature disappeared just at the moment when we most need it as a way of confirming ourselves as human? The answer I offered earlier resisted the thesis that nature has disappeared in favour of the view that enough of it remains to do its traditional job of providing a reference point against which to check our humanness. But there are signs that this human/nature distinction is an unsatisfactory and unsustainable one. The signs of dissent are already visible, and indeed have been so ever since Darwin claimed that humans are descended from apes. We might mention the contemporary ‘deep ecologists’ who cast caution to the winds and urge that we abandon any thought that humans might be ‘apart from’ nature, in favour of the view that we are wholly and ineluctably ‘a part of ’ nature. Then there are the campaigners for the Great Ape Project (www.greatapeproject.org) who unsettle the boundaries less dramatically but equally pointedly: ‘We demand the extension of the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobes, gorillas and organizations’ (http://www.greatapeproject. org/declaration.html). Important as they are, though, both these positions take humans and non-humans as they are traditionally conceived. Their radicalism consists in showing how it is inconsistent to award the title of ‘human’ to one set of beings without seeing that the qualities and characteristics that qualify those beings for humanness are also possessed by beings usually regarded as non-human. The dialectical approach I described earlier, though, suggests an alternative undermining of the human/nature distinction: one in which the ontological terms of reference are altered by the dialectical nature of the historical process. This process is one, as I have said, in which nature is humanised and humans are naturalised. What are the implications of this dialectical point of view for the protection of nature, for security, and for political agency? In his recently translated book (2004), Bruno Latour represents the traditional view of the relationship between politics and nature as the to-ing and fro-ing between two ‘assemblies’ or ‘houses’. He writes that, ‘The first house brings together the totality of speaking humans . . . [and] . . . The second house is constituted exclusively of real objects that have the property of defining what exists but that lack the gift of speech’ (Latour 2004: 14). Epistemologically, the first house is a realm of uncertainty (our knowledge of the social world is constitutively


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uncertain given the view of the human being as a creature possessing free will), and the second house is a realm of certainty, governed by the immutable laws of nature. He regards this as unsustainable: Hmm, how curious: So you are trying to organise civic life with two houses, one of which would have authority and not speak [nature], while the other would have speech but no authority; do you really think this is reasonable? (Latour 2004: 17) Latour’s solution is to dissolve the two houses, recognising that ‘The social world is no more made up of subjects than nature is made up of objects’ (51). In the traditional conception humans are obliged to think of themselves as free, and therefore are constantly at war with the realm of necessity that both threatens and defines them – the realm of nature. Once the ontological terms of reference are changed, though, humans no longer have to make this choice that is imposed upon subjects [the choice between freedom and necessity]. Once freed of what has been a veritable cold war, humans are going to take on a very different aspect, and, instead of existing by themselves, they are going to be able to unroll the long chain of nonhumans, without which freedom would be out of the question. (Latour 2004: 52) Latour then asks us to revise our conditions for what should count, politically. It is not a matter of speech, voice, or even pain and pleasure, but of surprise: Humans are not specially defined by freedom any more than they are defined by speech: nonhumans are not defined by necessity any more than they are defined by mute objectivity. The only thing that can be said about them is that they emerge in surprising fashion . . . Political ecology . . . finds itself engaged in an experiment in the course of which actors, during the trial, try to connect with one another or do without one another. Yes, the collective is indeed a melting pot, but it does not fold in together objects of nature made with matters of fact and subjects endowed with rights; it mixes together actants defined by lists of actions that are never complete. (Latour 2004: 79–80, emphasis in the original) Latour does not employ dialectical thinking to reach these conclusions, but I do think that the programme for politics he sets out is appropriate for a historical moment in which the dialectical and thus simultaneous process of the humanising of nature and the naturalising of the human is becoming ever more evident. This process changes the ontological terms of reference in such a way that the dissolution of the two houses of which Latour speaks is actually taking place. The implications for identity, security, protection and agency are profound. The dissolution of the two houses, upon whose existence our conception of ourselves as human depended, entails a new version of ‘humanness’; the security upon which the

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prior stable conception of being human rested is undermined; agency is thrown open to question and experiment. And protection? Latour counter-intuitively suggests that, Political ecology does not seek to protect nature and has never sought to do so. On the contrary it seeks to take charge, in an even more complete and mixed fashion, of an even greater diversity of entities and destinies. If modernism claimed to be detached from the constraints of the world, ecology for its part gets attached to everything. (2004: 21) The price for losing our traditional conception of humanity looks well worth paying: a richer and more diverse world in which object and subject, truth and construction, humanity and nature become thoroughgoing political categories occupying one house rather than two.

Notes 1 I am very grateful to my colleagues Jef Huysmans and Raia Prokhovnik for their invaluable critique of an earlier version of this chapter. 2 I am indebted to Jef Huysmans for this formula.

Bibliography Evans, E.P. (1987/1906) The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals. London: Faber and Faber. Fernández-Armesto, F. (2004) So You Think You’re Human? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fukuyama, F. (2002) Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, London: Profile Books. Giddens, A. (1994) Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. INRA (Europe) – ECOSA (2000), Eurobarometer 52.1 ‘The Europeans and Biotechnology’, http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/pdf/eurobarometer-en.pdf (accessed 6 June 2003) Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). McKibben, B. (1999) The End of Nature. New York: Anchor Books. —— (2003) Enough: Genetic Engineering and the End of Human Nature. London: Bloomsbury Press. Rancière, J. (1999) Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1960/1976) Critique of Dialectical Reason Volume 1. London: New Left Books. Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human. Oxford: Blackwell. Thomas, K. (1984) Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Williams, R. (1988) Keywords. London: Fontana.

12 On the protection of nature and the nature of protection R.B.J. Walker

Protection of nature No doubt quotation marks are called for. The claim that we might somehow ‘protect’ ‘nature’ retains enormous appeal, for reasons that require scant elaboration. As in so many other areas of contemporary political analysis, neither evidence of trouble nor competing accounts of the relevant causalities is in short supply. There are all too many reasons for concluding that what we call nature is in need of some sort of protection. It is difficult to assign credibility to any account of contemporary political life that does not respond to this need in some way. Nevertheless, all three terms at the heart of this claim – protection, nature, and, especially, of – express deeply problematic assumptions about what we are trying to talk about and how we are supposed to go about doing so. As in so many other contexts, also, neither evidence nor causal analysis leads automatically, or even easily, to persuasive or responsible judgements. The assumptions expressed in this claim become most obviously troubling if we attend to what is at stake in the notion that we should be concerned with the protection ‘of ’ nature rather than with, say, protection ‘from’ nature. The line between ‘acts of God’, as the insurance companies like to call them, and the effects of human action on the various ‘environments’, ‘ecologies’, and ‘systems’ in which they act is never easy to draw. Nevertheless, insurance companies are not alone in insisting that the line must be drawn. Definitions are called for so as to name which is one and which the other: a familiar, indeed crucial practice of modern political life, as we might gather from Thomas Hobbes’ constitutive account of the conditions under which we might think politically as moderns (Hobbes 1991: especially chapters 4 and 5). The problematic character of the terms nature and protection is magnified by the terms we use to relate one to the other. At the most obvious level, no serious analysis of modern political life can afford to forget that the very possibility of modern political life depends on negotiations of a profound rupture between man and nature: the rupture that many have seen as constituting the world of modernity: a world, that is, in which the world, understood as nature, is cast out of the world of man, understood as that being who is what he is by virtue of not being natural, despite various sorts of evidence to the contrary.1

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Many paradoxes and contradictions find a footing here. Modern man knows himself to be and instantiates himself as modern precisely because he is a subject cut adrift from the objective world of nature, a subject that might be protected from, or might protect, that from which he is apart, not a part. Is it nature or nurture, as we have so often asked? Is it man or nature, man and nature, man over nature, nature over man, or something in between: something that is somehow both at once, both natural and human, both naturally given and historically cultivated, part beast or part genetic but also part of a radically undivine creation, a work of art and artifice? To imagine that modern man can protect nature or that he can be protected from nature is already to work within a dualism that is at once the great glory of modern accounts of what it means to be a proper, mature, and free human being and the source of great angst and alienation.2 Negotiations of this rift and the multiple contradictions it has generated have been complex and contested. They have been at play in struggles to reconcile secular with sacred, universal reason with particular conscience, bodily being with conscious judgement, natural law with the law of sovereign states, abstract space, and legal property with blood, sweat, and soil. In a narrative that captures much of what is at stake in attempts to link protection with nature, Hobbes bequeathed an especially influential way of retaining a ruthlessly minimalist understanding of ‘natural right’, a right to physical existence, within a maximalist understanding of a secular sovereignty; a secular sovereignty, that is, not entirely at odds with a theological injunction that man ought not destroy what God has made.3 Very clever, we might well say. Every modern account of political authority has had to negotiate a similar accommodation. Modern man had to be invented anew from the ruins of neo-Aristotelian hierarchies of natural inequality. This man had to be protected: secured as we are more used to putting it in Hobbesian style, to be made subject, obedient, and safe; or safe, subject, and obedient. Disenchantment set in, as Weber put it much later. Magic went out of the world. Continuities and qualities were displaced by discontinuities and quantities. Nature, like God, disappeared; and then reappeared in a new form, the transcendent God immanent within conscience, the mysterious nature made visible by the categories of a specifically modern duet of rationalism and empiricism. Man was (re)invented. Nature was (re)invented. Now we live with the consequences, worrying not only about a richer palette of dangers than Hobbes or even Weber knew how to portray but also about who this we is that might yet learn how to protect nature. So yes, quotation marks are called for. They mark a specific account of the relation between modern and thus unnatural man as protected and protector, as both secured subject and securing subject, and a nature that is at once beyond man’s subjectivity yet somehow brought within man’s conscious being, his reason, his deepest, brightest and darkest subjectivity. Modern man draws the line, sharply, cleanly, or so it always appears in retrospect. We know the trouble this brings when we discriminate between state and state, legal and illegal, friend and foe, peace and war. We know what troubles come from struggles to work out precisely who gets to draw the line, to discriminate and to authorize the discrimination, to decide where one stands, with Weber, able to do no other, to decide the exception that affirms the

Protection of nature and nature of protection 191 norm, as Schmitt would put it even more fatefully in his account of the sovereign delimitation of the modern state (Schmitt 1988; Weber 1994). Modern man can draw such lines in part because he once insisted on drawing a similar line between himself and the world outside of himself, the world he constructed as the exterior of his own interiority, the world we know, in part, as nature. Now, it seems, that nature is in need of protection by that very same man, that abstract archetype of the rational being who needs that exterior as a guarantor of its own being. Two obvious and daunting questions inevitably arise as a consequence. One concerns whether the man constituted as a modern subject enabled within and limited by a nature external to itself is going to be able to respond to the damage his own subjectivisms and objectivisms have wrought upon the world in which he has acted. If modern political practices have been set up to enable and reproduce the human domination of nature, to revert to an older phraseology, there are obvious difficulties in expecting those practices to go against their ‘essential nature’, as some might be prepared to say, and do more than make a few ameliorative gestures, the reshuffling of chairs aboard a sinking ship. This is perhaps an especially difficult problem for liberal traditions of political engagement, for it is in these that one finds the clearest attachment to the kind of modern subjectivity that has been most liable to reify nature as its own internal externality. Liberals are never fond of confronting the limits within which they articulate their seductive claims to universality, substantively or procedurally, but their claims do work only within limits, and the limit at which modern man meets the modern delineation of nature cannot be ignored forever. Many other traditions also run into great difficulties in this context, of course, including those which seek to return to neo-Aristotelian notions of natural law so as to avoid all questions of political responsibility, or which construct Romantic oppositions to Enlightenment rationalities, thereby reproducing the original dualism in a different form, or which seek to overcome capitalist commodifications in a grand gesture of apocalyptic revolution. Here one might follow many trails of political imagination and creativity, attempts to find alternatives to failed alternatives, probably in practice more than in theory, and certainly not in relation to a nature or environment understood as separate from man. One concerns the uneasy relation between the external world of nature that has come to be constructed within a discourse of man and nature and any other possible understanding of the world in which we live. What we call nature has been constructed as an externality within a discourse of internalities and externalities, a discourse that in bringing nature into modernity must always leave something outside, unknowable, mere phenomena, as Kant would say.4 Moderns, of course, suspect that they know this outside by knowing their own outside, that they can conflate their own construction of the world as coextensive with the world. They are prone to think the same way about humanity, to assume that the modern account of human possibility is what all of humanity must necessarily be, or become. Both modernization theory and the theory of international relations affirm this particular way of thinking about inclusion and exclusion, particularity and diversity, the modern world and the world.

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It is largely as a consequence of disturbances expressed in such questions that this account of what is involved in talking about the protection of nature has been put into critical suspicion in many quarters, and even framed as the deeper problem from which we need protection, or towards which it is necessary to develop greater resistance. While it may make considerable sense in many contexts to speak unproblematically of the protection of nature, in another sense it is precisely the form of social, cultural, economic, ethical and political order that can think that a claim to protect nature is unproblematic that is the core problem we have to confront. Many people, of course, simply want to do what they can with the resources already to hand: to get a New Labour government to at least act more in accordance with its occasionalist environmental agenda, for example, or to get intergovernmental agreement on at least something like the Kyoto protocols. Others insist that such hopes are already too little and too late. The problem is deeper, they say, more systemic, more a matter of capitalism, modernity, and the western way of life. Caught between such debilitating options, contemporary political actors are often tempted to shrug at the impossibility of the task ahead; tempted, that is, by the most debilitating option of all. What is at stake, however, is not a false choice between parochial pragmatisms and grand historical/structural transformations, but the need to pay attention to how larger historical/structural forces are always at play in specific practices and sites. Any attempt to protect nature will necessarily involve challenges to and reinstantiations of prevailing accounts of both man and nature, and of political possibility. To start thinking about the enormous historical forces that are expressed in apparently innocent phrases like the protection of nature all too easily leads to both extremist forms of liberal arrogance (masquerading as the sensible, the pragmatic, the progressive, the ethical, and so on) and equally arrogant repudiations of liberal modernity in the name of some alternative outside, some world that is somehow more natural, more authentic, more real. But leaping outside is an especially difficult trick for modern man, who certainly knows well enough the outside that he has himself produced but also too easily assumes that to escape to this outside is to escape himself, his own limits, his own responsibilities. It is a familiar pattern. We know how to travel from the domestic to the wild but not how to think otherwise about the domesticated opposition between the domestic and the wild. It is unlikely that people trying to work on immediate and concrete problems of the kind that can be framed as the protection of nature can afford to tolerate either form of arrogance. It is more likely that they will be forced into complex and contradictory attempts to renegotiate the line that modern man has drawn between himself and the world in the process of inventing a modern subject who must be protected and a modern nature that this modern subject might exploit or perhaps protect. This renegotiation will no doubt involve struggles over the material conditions of life, over what it means to have life, over patterns of production and ownership, over claims to rights under law, over technologies that crush categories and categories that resist technologies. References to nature, like references to that man that invented himself against nature, will seem increasingly quaint. The effect of this renegotiation will be profound, and unpredictable. It will involve

Protection of nature and nature of protection 193 a renegotiation of assumptions about where and what we take political life to be. A convergence between ‘political’ discourses that can speak about protection and ‘environmental’ discourses that can speak about nature should expect nothing less. To start moving in this direction is to begin to remember some other related dilemmas that have long been familiar, even if not always forcefully present, in discourses about how the modern world is to be made safe for human beings. Hobbes, for example, once told us that if we are indeed all to be understood as moderns, as free and equal subjects, then we are all ‘naturally’ in what is now called a ‘security dilemma’. That is, we can really become who and what we already are as the kind of modern being against which a Hobbes could project a world of nature simultaneously ‘back then’ in time and ‘out there’ in space and from which we had to return to the present here and now, where we already were, through a stunning, and logically impossible, contractual myth of foundation. The ‘state of nature’ is both history and geography produced as a negation of the present; it is an invention of the present. He also told us that the only way out of this situation was to get into what could equally be called a security dilemma, the calculated gamble that sovereigns would not do more damage in the act of protection, in the securing of the modern subject, than would occur otherwise. Sovereignty was portrayed as a certainty but Hobbes knows full well that it presented an enormous risk, just as he knew that the claim to certainty rested on a cute set of contestable assumptions and rhetorical gestures. States still promise to provide both liberty and security, under the law, but the provision of security has always threatened to overwhelm liberty, within the law if possible, beyond the law if necessary. The cure has not always been better than the disease, even when incantations about democracy and rights mask some of the pain. Similarly, the modern international order has attained widespread legitimacy because it has offered to reconcile claims to cultural diversities, particularistic freedoms, and national self-determinations with some sort of overarching order. The problem, of course, has been to know how the competing claims of overarching order and the particular authorities who both constitute and are enabled by that order are to be reconciled. This remains the unbridgeable aporia of modern political life, despite all the waffling that has sought to drive a grand bridge across the claim to citizenship within states and the claim to a humanity expressed in a system of states, as if polis and cosmopolis are not already mutually constitutive parts of the same contradictory order.5 For all its achievements, it is an order that always seems to be on the brink of bringing ever greater disasters, of wars to defend freedom and self-determination, on the one hand, or hegemonies and proto-empires acting in the name of some greater humanity, on the other. Again, conventional wisdom affirms that this is the best we can hope for. Modern man wants his freedoms and equalities, so he must obey, must trade his natural state for his civil potentials within the sovereign state. A natural right to mere life can expand to a more mature sort of freedom, as a Kant might hope. Put controls on the institutions of government under and within the sovereign law and the threat that the state might devour its citizens in the process of protecting

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them will hopefully diminish, at least in times of peace abroad. Similarly, multilateralism survives, perhaps. Wars have been averted through systemic adjustment and accommodation. Kant’s vision of a system of autonomous states internalizing a moral law that applies to all the world, to all of humanity, retains a powerful grip on the contemporary political imagination: to the extent that liberals are once again prepared to use force to impose a particular version of such a moral law on other states, and the remaining hegemon has allowed principles of imperial rule to override principles of international order with increasing vigour. In relation to the structural logic of both the modern sovereign state and the modern states system, we have become used to thinking about the limits within which it is possible to sustain hopes for modern man, for the kind of subject that can play out a life between conflicting principles of a popular sovereignty and a state sovereignty, or between competing claims to particular citizenships and some broader humanity; who can internalize a universal reason within a particular subjectivity, enact difference while retaining a recognizable humanity. Or at least, we have become so used to taking these limits for granted that entire literatures have turned them into a convenient backdrop, the Rawlsian curtain dropped over all background conditions, so that questions about politics are simply turned over to the philosophers, moralists, and students of cultural fantasy. The difficulties of our time, however, are broadly recognized as putting those limits into very serious and dramatic question. We are uneasy about the way claims about security so easily trump claims to liberty. We are concerned that established forms of international order are not up to the job of preventing wars of increasingly destructive capacity. We are concerned about the degree to which the idealized form of an international order that has served since the seventeenth century as a regulative ambition of a modern politics seeking to reconcile claims to unity and claims to diversity is being swept away by appeals to imperial and global hierarchy, and the relegitimation of both new forms of violence and new forms of inequality. The we I am referring to here, of course, is presumably different from the we with which I began.

Nature of protection It is in this context that it is worth reflecting both on what was at stake in those claims about ‘national security’ that dominated all discourses about the relation between a politics of protection and claims about political subjectivity for much of the twentieth century. These claims still provide a paradigm of what it means to be realistic in political life, to be able to stipulate the limits of possibility and the necessities that must bring such limits. This is the paradigm in which nature was entirely erased from discourses about politics except insofar as it could be translated into a calculous of state power, as an inventory of capabilities. There are many grounds on which such claims might be dismissed, but their vulnerability to easy criticism should not detract from the enormous resources, of principle as well as of material force, that such claims were able to express. Three difficulties are especially worth noting.

Protection of nature and nature of protection 195 First, the claim to national security masqueraded as an answer, a given, when it was in fact the name for a massive array of questions about who precisely must be secured. The primary subject of national security has been precisely the securing of the modern subject. Claims about national security were always draped in rhetorics about political realism but were first and foremost claims about a political ideal, a normative claim about the necessary self-identity of modern citizen-subjects and the legitimacy of those statist institutions. Insofar as one can identify a primary tradition of international relations theory, and of those forms of security predicated on it, it is what we have come to call idealism not realism. Kant is the canonical text to think about here, along with the various Hegelian and Weberian traditions he enabled. Any attempt to think about either the state or the modern system of states by starting with a claim about a political realism, or ending with a claim about Kant as a solution to the problem of political realism, can only end up in caricatures. These caricatures ensure the loss of any sense that claims about the state, or the nation, or sovereignty, or the relation between the sovereignty of states and the demands of the system of states are first and foremost responses to problems, not a simple given. If state sovereignty is taken to be the proper solution to all problems of authority in a secular modernity, or the nation is assumed to be the proper answer to all problems of political identity, or a specific relation between the claims of sovereign states and the demands of a system of states that makes the existence of states possible is taken to be the proper way of resolving all relations of universality and particularity in political life, then certain (though always contestable) implications follow. Claims about a political realism and national security may or may not have much to say about such consequences, but they follow a prior conditionality. If one idealizes a particular conception of authority, of political community, of humanity, of man, then the demand for national security may follow, but the demand rests on an idealistic conditionality first and a consequentiality second. There are many ways of playing out the effects of the reversal of conditionality and consequentiality in discourses about the state, the international and the necessary relation between liberty and security in modern political life, but it is a fairly straightforward matter to see how our most influential account of what it must mean to protect depends on an affirmation of a modern subject that is radically severed from anything we might want to call nature. Though the narratives of national security might make appeals to human nature, it is a nature invoked as a way of filling out the behavioral characteristics of an already idealized modern subject, the citizen of the modern state radically severed from any common humanity. Though these narratives might appeal to the consequences of a possessive territorialism, it is a territoriality expressed in the most abstract form as an idealized spatiality, a spatiality expressed as the limits of sovereign law not as a line that nature has somehow carved through its own joints. Second, it masqueraded as a claim about state/nation as the highest form of political authority and thus about the essentially pluralist, fragmented, or even anarchical character of the modern system of states. In this sense it reproduced

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the modern statist claim to sovereignty within a specific territoriality. As any serious theorist of international relations will insist, however, this can only be half the story, though we might endlessly debate about which half – the sovereign state or the states system – has priority in the story of what international relations must be. The modern sovereign state itself depends on the existence of the states system, although it may not embody an account of an overarching form of legitimate authority of the kind associated with states, as the condition of possibility of state sovereignty in effect works as an even higher principle of authority. We might read this in relation to various historical claims about the need to be European, or secular, or modern, or civilized, in order to participate in the states system. We might read this in terms of the implicit obligation to preserve the state system against any relapse into empire, and thus of the crises induced by various ‘hegemonic’ states from the post-Revolutionary France of Napoleon to the post-Cold-War America of our own time. Or we might read this in terms of the relation between the modernizing dynamic through which capitalism and a globalizing economy are expressed in and through the states system and the responses of particular states seeking to modernize. The concept of national security as it emerged in the Cold War era expressed a systematic erasure of much of the ambivalent or dialectical character of the relation between state and states system. It especially encouraged accounts of a possible shift from the plural fragmentation of the states system to some kind of unity, and discouraged attempts to think about the ways in which both the state and the states system already expressed less an account of pluralism and fragmentation than of the proper, necessary, relation between plurality and unity: a relation expressed by the claim to state sovereignty as well as between state sovereignty and its systemic conditions of possibility. It still encourages claims that we might be able to do much more to protect nature, among other things, by moving from a world of fragmented national interests to some more cosmopolitan and universalizing community. To try to rethink relations between universality and particularity, in relation to questions about these extraordinary densities we know as sovereignty, man, and nature is going to require a lot more critical imagination than this familiar dead end has to offer. Third, both of these points – that realism expresses a prior idealism, and that modern political life expresses a fundamental contradiction between the sovereignty of particular states and the sovereignty of the system of sovereign states – converge to explain how the concept of national security tended to masquerade as a claim about power when it was primarily a claim about authority, albeit a claim that worked so as to ensure that questions about authority could always be answered through claims about the necessities of power. The claim to national security worked so as to present norms as realities, possibilities as necessities, necessities as impossibilities, historicities as structures, processes as contingencies, dualities as dualisms, problems as solutions. It is all too easy to dismiss the claim to national security as the simplistic rhetoric or propaganda deployed by aggressive nationalists, militarists, and governments desperate to hang on to power, as of course it often was and continues to be. But it is only a claim that works this way

Protection of nature and nature of protection 197 because it expresses ideals that have come to seem massively legitimate. It is also all too easy to suggest that we have somehow left the claims of national security behind, replaced them through our willingness to speak about interdependences, multilateralisms, the engagements with development, environment, identity, and all the rest. Few people working in and around concepts of security now resist the notion that they are indeed responding to a ‘new security agenda’ of some kind, partly as a consequence of processes we identify with the dates of 1989 and 9/11/2001 and partly in relation to those multiple processes that are both known and made mysterious by the term globalization. Thus we have seen the elaboration of notions of ‘alternative’, ‘common’, ‘democratic’, ‘environmental’, and ‘human’ security as well as the establishment of supposedly ‘critical’ forms of security analysis and accounts of a new form of ‘risk society’.6 On the upside, we might say that at least ‘security’ has become a question, a name for concepts and practices that have come to seem increasingly problematic and in need of more sustained, more sophisticated, and more critical scholarly interrogation. Security has been in encounter groups with ‘development’, been battered by competing claims about the relationship between physical, political, and social security, cast a knowing nod to ‘environment’, offered a tentative hand to ‘identity’, not least in relation to claims about gender and culture, and understood itself to be mixed up with, and by, ‘discourse’, sometimes even somewhat embarrassed to be associated with the stereotypical world of guns and bombs. On the downside we might say that the problematic character of what we mean when we talk about security has come to exceed our capacity to imagine a security that is somehow alternative, common, or human. Apparently novel accounts of what security must be have been deployed in various situations: in the name of humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and preventive interventions in Iraq, to take the most obvious examples. We have certainly seen a shift from accounts of security that assume a logic of competitive insecurities in a pluralistic system of states to accounts that assume both a somehow more ‘global’ context and a more elaborate array of political actors and sources of danger and insecurity. Yet while the need for something other than the ideological mantras about national security we were forced to repeat over and over again in the era of Cold War bipolarities has been difficult to ignore, it is not clear that all the talk about what this something other might be has taken us very far. A few brave souls have kept their faith in the old mantras. Others have revamped their thinking in line with claims about an end of history, a coming anarchy, a conflict of civilizations, a democratic peace or a war to defend democracies against some global terror: claims that are interesting as an expression of something important about the limits of the modern political imagination but not of any great insight into the complexities and contradictions that have undermined so many of the assumptions that once gave claims about security such an air of natural necessity. Yet if we do conclude that ‘security’ has become a question, a problem, then we need to come to terms with the ways in which claims about security are constitutive of modern claims about the possibility of politics at all. To make

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claims about the need for a ‘new security agenda’ is to pose questions about what we mean by notions of security, and the relation between security and politics, that are not alternative, not critical, not about humans, but are somehow conventional, or – the word I want to stress here – normal; normal in the double sense of being an assumed ground of normality, continuity, and presence and of being a normative aspiration for a world that is somehow better, different from what has become the norm. A lot hangs on how something is said to be normal, and thus on how we distinguish it from that which is something else: an exception as we say. Not least, I want to draw attention to the connection between the problem of framing some notion of a security that is different from some normalized account of security and the framing of the relation between norm and exception that is at the very core of the way we came to construct a normalized account of security over the course of the twentieth century. For it is here that we can see an exemplary case of the practice of seeking an alternative to the present and the conventional when the present and the conventional are themselves at least partly understood to be practices that are framed as presence and absence, or convention and alternative, or norm and exception; or, to invoke terms that draw attention to the uneasy tensions between theological and secular traditions at work in modern political life, the immanent and the transcendent. Insofar as one can summarize the key moves that have been made in and around the more critical literatures on security I would say that they involve three primary claims. First, they point to a broader and more pluralistic account of the threats from which we need to be secured; broader and more pluralistic, that is, when compared to the claim that the primary threat to people’s security comes from states operating within a states system. Second, they point to a more differentiated and pluralistic account of the people, and peoples who are threatened; more differentiated and pluralistic, that is, when compared with the singular account of people and peoples expressed in the claims of the modern nation state. Third, they point to the various ways in which the practices of modern security are precisely practices, rather than objectively identifiable necessities; that is, they are practices, discourses, institutions, and principles that do things, authorize decisions, produce situations, deploy and legitimize violence, and reproduce/ transform the conditions under which violence is taken to be a necessary and legitimate part of contemporary political life. Fairly predictably, all three moves have run into major difficulties. I think of two in particular. They are closely related. First, as both the sources and subjects of (in)security have multiplied, the term security has come to seem less and less precise, to evaporate into too many different meanings, to have become both analytically obscure and politically promiscuous. It is not obviously the case that it has been wrong to insist that the sources and subjects of security have in fact multiplied. It is not all that difficult to tell a convincing story about the many vulnerabilities of human and other forms of life on an ecologically vulnerable planet. Rather, the decreasing precision that the term has come to have is an effect of a radically transforming political context in which terms that could once

Protection of nature and nature of protection 199 be assumed to have a more or less fixed meaning have become less effective at suturing fundamental principles onto emerging practices. Second, as the sources and subjects of (in)security have multiplied, the practices through which security is to be achieved have multiplied also. Many scholars have worried about the implications of attempts to work out less overtly militaristic or realist accounts of security for quite some time. They have tempered their suspicions of the old security agenda with concerns about the degree to which more and more aspects of our life have been securitized. Be careful about what you wish for, they have suggested, because if you demand a more elaborated account of security then a securitized world will indeed be elaborated for you. Thus we might read at least some of the attempts to work out better accounts of security since the end of the Cold War as a variation on the longstanding theme of the tension between liberty and security that animates liberal accounts of political life in the modern state. We might also read much of the concern about the increasing securitization of various societies since 9/11 – the mobilization of security against terror, against Islam, against migrants and refugees, against crime, and all the rest – as a response to a shift along an axis from liberty to security; as working within an account of politics that relies on the state to provide security while recognizing, along with Hobbes, that the state is always likely to get you killed in the process of protecting you; as securing you for its own purposes quite as much as securing your capacity to act out your own liberties under the law. In this account, we confront yet again the need to find an appropriate line between declarations of a state of emergency and struggles to sustain a civil society of democratic rights and freedoms under the law. Much might be achieved by reading recent debates about the need to rethink security in relation to some of the key moments in which the claims of security and the claims of liberty have previously been in serious tension. The title of Norberto Bobbio’s book Democracy and Dictatorship comes to mind here, as does Michael Howard’s War and the Liberal Conscience, the former alluding to many longstanding concerns about the conditions under which democracies are subverted through appeals to collective necessities and the latter reminding us that far from being intrinsically peaceful, liberal democracies have a long history of justifying the suspension of democratic norms in the name of wars of conscience (Howard 1976; Bobbio 1989).7 This is also one of those contexts in which Hobbes is important for thinking about security precisely because he identifies a problem, a contradiction, that is central to the working of the modern sovereign state, the workings of a we that can distinguish itself, authorize the distinctions that it makes, and then struggle to modulate the violence that is the consequence of its contingent conditionality. Claims about national security did a lot of work to affirm the natural necessity of a specifically modern (statist, nationalist, subjectivist) account of what it means to be human: the human that understands itself to be radically split from other humans, as always aware that it must affirm its freedom, autonomy, identity, interest, security, and subjectivity from all others. Attempts to find alternative forms of security are drawn to imitate the same logic they explicitly seek to resist. Searching for an alternative to a structure of norms and alternatives, to find a way

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out of a structure of insiders and outsiders, attempts to renegotiate what it could possibly mean to achieve security and identify new modalities of protection inevitably lead to the most basic questions about human subjectivity, identity, and the rest that claims about national security worked so hard to insist need never be asked again. One of the effects of the claim to national security was to legitimize an extraordinary narrowing of the discourse, and of the ranks of those enabled to discourse, about what it means to be secure, to protect, to be the kind of being worthy of protection. The specialists in violence at the margin, the military strategists, the secret services, were the ones who were permitted to answer all hard questions about political subjectivity, usually through the simple reproduction of statist accounts of what the answers must be. One could blame the specialists in violence at the margin. It would be more appropriate to blame all those more cosily domesticated specialists of the centre, those who have been content to work within the lines that have been drawn and protected, kept the veils drawn around the naturalized limits of modern political life. The lines that have been drawn and protected, however, have not just been the lines drawn at the margins of sovereign states. The discourses of national security have themselves been secured by the drawing of other lines. The human has been distinguished from the non-human, partly as a rift between man and nature and partly as a rift between those who are properly human and those who are rather less so: those who are rather closer to nature, not quite worthy of participating in the world of modern man. It has been one of the characteristics of contemporary political analysis and debate that it has been difficult to see any connection in principle between the difficulties that have been abundantly discussed in relation to what we now call the environmental and difficulties that have been even more abundantly discussed in relation to a politics that is simultaneously statist and international. That environmental problems are also statist/international problems is quite evident. That statist/international problems are environmental problems is quite evident also. The advantage, and the challenge, of thinking about any notion of a need to protect nature, I think, is that it ultimately demands much more sustained engagement with the interplay between the discriminations we authorize between ourselves as modern and properly human rather than ‘merely’ natural subjects and the discriminations we authorize between ourselves as citizens aspiring to be properly human subjects. The invention of a modern subjectivity posed in opposition to an invented nature enabled modern man to get caught in all the fundamental contradictions of freedom and security in a statist/international politics. In both cases, the account of human subjectivity affirmed both by the apparently simply phrase protection of nature and by the equally dense and anything but simple phrase national security is falling apart. It will not be enough to think we can try to protect nature without also placing our capacity to protect the modern subject into the deepest suspicion. If it has been said, with mixed emotions, that we are at the end of the era of man, then it must also be said that we are at the end of the era of nature; though of course one can only speak about

Protection of nature and nature of protection 201 ends if one knows where things begin. In this case, we might hope that ignorance may lead in positive directions.

Notes 1 These phrases struggle to sustain some control over vast and contested literatures. Mere intimations of just how vast can be found in: Glacken (1967), Whitehead (1920), Collingwood (1945), Burtt (1952), Buchdahl (1969), Tuan (1977), Rapacynski (1987), Meyer (2001), and Evendern (1992). 2 Again the literature is almost as vast as the critique of modernity itself, not to say the concern of many academic sub-disciplines. Some of the suggestive directions I have in mind here are marked by Schmidt (1971), Leiss (1974), Luke (1999), Haraway (2004), Castree and Braun (2001), Cronon (1995), Steinberg (2001), and Magnusson and Shaw (2003). 3 Hobbes, Leviathan. There are of course many controversies about the precise manner in which Hobbes neither did nor did not manage to reconcile either physis with nomos and secular sovereignty with divine sovereignty. Whatever one makes of these controversies, it is enough for my purposes here simply to stress that the opening of huge gaps between the secular authority of modern man and an authority derived from either physis or from a transcendent God posed a problem that had to be solved by thinkers like Hobbes, and that it has subsequently proved exceptionally convenient to be able to affirm the priority of the sovereignty of man while maximizing the appearance of continuities between secular sovereignty and the authority of nature, God or both. As with the interpretation of Hobbes, modern political life becomes intensely problematic once the appearance of continuity is dropped, or when attempts are made to equate secular with either natural or divine authority. The continuities that are of most interest here are those between the modern scripting of always difficult lines containing a purely immanent secular authority in the age of Hobbes and the increasing difficulty of scripting such lines under many contemporary conditions. 4 Here I think especially of Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1983), but the theme runs right through to the later writings on political possibility and the philosophy of history. 5 The opposition in international law between Schmitt’s reading of sovereignty and Kelsen’s ‘pure theory of law’ has been a particularly important expression of this aporia. I have tried to develop readings of the significance of contemporary attempts to ignore this aporia in a sequence of essays on a wide range of literatures; see especially Walker (2002, 2003a,b, 2004, 2005). 6 Among many: Krause and Williams (1997) and Dalby (2002). 7 Both texts express mid-twentieth century recollections of debates that centred on Carl Schmitt’s writings on sovereignty in the 1920s.

Bibliography Bobbio, Norberto (1989) Democracy and Dictatorship. Cambridge: Polity Press. Buchdahl, Gerd (1969) Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Blackwell. Burtt, E.A. (1952 [1924, revised 1932]) The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Castree, Noel and Braun, Bruce (eds) (2001) Social Nature: Theory, Practice and Politics. Oxford: Blackwell. Collingwood, R.G. (1945) The Idea of Nature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cronon, William (ed.) (1995) Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. New York: Norton.

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Dalby, Simon (2002) Environmental Security. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Evendern, Neil (1992) The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Glacken, Clarence J. (1967) Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Haraway, Donna (2004) The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge. Hobbes, Thomas (1991) Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Howard, Michael (1976) War and the Liberal Conscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1983) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan. Krause, Keith and Williams, Michael C. (eds) (1997) Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Leiss, William (1974) The Domination of Nature. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Luke, Timothy W. (1999) Capitalism, Democracy and Ecology. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Magnusson, Warren and Shaw, Karena (eds) (2003) A Political Space: Reading the Global through Clayoquot Sound. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Meyer, John M. (2001) Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rapacynski, Andrzej (1987) Nature and Politics: Liberalism in the Philosophies of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Schmidt, Alfred (1971) The Concept of Nature in Marx. London: New Left Books. Schmitt, Carl (1988 [1922]) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. by George Schwab. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Steinberg, Philip E. (2001) The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Walker, R.B.J. (2002) ‘On the Immanence/Imminence of Empire’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31(2), 337–345. —— (2003a) ‘Polis, Cosmopolis, Politics’, Alternatives: Local, Global, Political, 28(2), 267–286. —— (2003b) ‘War, Terror, Judgement’, in Bulent Gokay and R.B.J. Walker (eds) September 11, 2001: War, Terror and Judgement. London: Frank Cass, pp. 62–83. —— (2004) ‘Conclusion: Sovereignties, Exceptions, Worlds’, in Jenny Edkins, Veronique Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (eds) Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics. New York: Routledge, pp. 239–249. —— (2005) ‘L’ International, l’impérial, l’exceptionnel’, Cultures et Conflits, Été, 58, 13–51. Weber, Max (1994) ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Max Weber: Political Writings, ed. and trans. by Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North (1920) Concept of Nature. Cambridge Cambridge: University Press.

Index

9/11/2001, events of 87, 136, 142, 152n. 6, 162, 163, 197; increasing securitization 199 Abrahamsen, R. 10, 11, 12, 14, 34 Abu Ghraib prison 125; maltreatment of prisoners in 20, 30n. 3 Achille Lauro, hijacking of 134n. 13 Adler, E. 168 Afghanistan: armed intervention in 162–163 African National Congress government 38, 39, 43; see also South Africa Agamben, G. 48, 51, 69, 134n. 3, 139; bare life 71; conceptualisation of camps 68 agency: discursive 7; limits in times of emergency 136; situated 5–6, 9–13; of subject 139 Ahern, B., Irish Prime Minister 123 AirScan 22, 23 Albanians 114, 127; refugees in Italy 71 Algerian refugees in Canada 7, 49, 50, 54, 56, 62 Al Quaeda terror network 156 American Bar Association 111 Ames, P. 111 Amnesty International 62, 131, 134n. 9, 148 ANC see African National Congress Andersen Consulting 21 anti-terrorist measures 139, 141–145; global 111 Antofagasta 74 Aradau, C. 16n. 2 Arendt, H. 1, 50, 51 Aristotle: on man as political animal 183; Politics 183

armed conflict, search for legitimacy 126–129 ‘armed response’ services 37 Ashdown, P. 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 asylum seekers 49, 96, 133; without documentation 52 Austin, J.L. 156 Australia 21, 88; refugee camps, hunger strikes in 72; Woomera Detention Centre 52, 72 Avant, D. 20, 25 Aviation Development Corporation 23 axis of evil 163 Baker, B. 37 Baker, J. 24 Baldwin, D. 172n. 1 Balibar, É. 65n. 1 Balkans: Constitutional Commission in Federation, restructuring of 103; Constitutional Framework for Provincial Self-Government 104; criminalized 110; protection, concept of 107 Barber, B. 173n. 2 Barnett, M. 168 Barry, R. 110 Bassiouni, C. 123 Belgrade Television Tower strike 128 Bender, B. 74 BENS (Business Executives for National Security) 24, 30n. 18 Berlin Wall, fall of 127 Bhabha, H. 62 Bigo, D. 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 22, 25, 29n. 2, 49, 56, 84, 88, 92, 96, 97, 99n. 6, 112, 118n. 16, 141 biopolitics 92; models of power 70 biopower 52, 140

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bipolarity, end of 85, 86, 124, 127 Blair, T. 181; ‘Third Way’ politics 181 Blunkett, D. 142, 143, 149 Bobbio, N. 199 Booth, K. 4, 6 Bosnia 10, 20, 92, 97, 112–118, 166; Constitution 104, 106; definition and provision of security, de-territorialized 111; education reform agenda 108, 116; humanitarian interventions in 197; international politics of reconstruction in 12, 101; Mission Implementation Plan 105, 118n. 17; multi-ethnic state-level judiciary 108; no-fly zones in 162; Office of the High Representative (OHR) 102, 103, 107; (re)construction of 105; scale of violence 131; war, tribunals 129 Bourdieu, P. 8, 114 Boussouf, S. 65n. 3 Bouthoul, G. 91 Branigan, T. 2 Braun, B. 201n. 2 Brayton, S. 31n. 26 Britain see United Kingdom Brogden, M. 36, 37 Brooks, D. 27, 31n. 26 Buchdahl, G. 201n. 1 Bull, H. 160 Burton, P. 37 Burtt, E.A. 201n. 1 Bush, G.W.H. 24 Bush administration 163; intervention in Iraq 164 Butler, J. 69, 139 Buzan, B. 3, 4, 8, 11, 12, 16n. 3, 134n. 6, 147 Byers, M. Caccia, B. 71 CACI International Inc. 30n. 3 Campbell, D. 8, 10, 118n. 15 camp for refugees 73–76, 80, 92; administrators, sovereign power of 70; defining 69–73 Canada 21, 49; agency without sanctuary 59–64; anti-deportation and regularization campaigns in 56; control 55; (de-)immigration process 57; governments, non-status Algerian situation 59–60; immigration/ deportation system 54, 58; moratorium on deportations 57, 62; see also Comité d’Action des Sans-Statut Algeriens (CASS);

Montreal; No One Is Illegal (NOII); Quebec Caplan, R. 102, 103, 108, 117, 118nn. 3, 13 Caporaso, J. 130 Cardinali, R. 20 Carlile of Barriew, Lord 148, 149 Carlucci, F. 24 CASS see Comité d’Action des Sans-Statut Algeriens Cassese, A. 125 Castree, N. 201n. 2 Centre for Peace in the Balkans 107 centres for temporary permanence and assistance (cpta) 69, 76, 79, 80 Ceyhan, A. 88 Chandler, D. 104, 107, 118n. 4 Cheney, Dick 23 Cherfi, M., case of 57, 60–64 Chomsky, N. 124 citizenship, relationship of 130 Civil Service Laws 107 Clark, I. 160 Clausewitz, Carl von 124; model of warfare 163, 166 Cold War 3, 123, 161, 197 collective security system 161; legal-procedural framework for 164 collective self-interest 167; end of 13, 20, 162, 163, 199 Collingwood, R.G. 201n. 1 Colombia 25 Comité d’Action des Sans-Statut Algeriens (CASS) 50, 54–57; non-status Algerians in 59; political demands of 63; public campaign to stop deportations 64; women members of 65n. 3; see also Canada 50 Council of Europe 115 courts: monopoly over revenge 129; relation to armed conflict resolution 128; violence and democracy 123–124 cpta see centres for temporary permanence and assistance criminal law 129 criminal networks: organized 111; transnational 110 Croatia 25, 109 Cronon, W. 201n. 2 Cubic 25 Curran, P. 61 Dalby, S. 4, 6, 201n. 6 Dal Lago, A. 71

Index Darwin 186 Dayton Accord 102, 103, 105 Debré, J.P. 95 de Charette, P. 127 Delumeau, J. 95 deportation: discourse of 54; moratorium on 56; of non-status Algerians 57; protests against in UK 2; rules in Italy 80; speed of 55; standard practice 55 Der Derian, J. 4 detention: camp 92; for migrants and refugees 69; political protest in immigrant centres across Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand 52 detention without trial of foreign nationals 142 Deudney, D.H. 27 De Wilde, J. 12, 156 Dick, P.K. 98 Dippenaar, M. 46n. 6 Dobson, A. 10, 11, 13, 175 Dstl (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory) 26 Dunne, T. 160 Dyncorp in the United States 20, 22, 25, 26, 45n. 3 East Timor, post-conflict situation in 162 ECHR see European Convention on Human Rights ECtHR see European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) Edkins, J. 69, 71 Edmonds, M. 20 Elias, N. 102, 113 emergency legislation: analysis of 140; politics surrounding 136 environmental agenda 192; security 5, 13, 175 Equatorial Guinea 23 Eurobarometer survey on ‘Europeans and Biotechnology’ 2000 176, 180 Europe: court of human rights 131; integration or migration threatening national identity 11; integration within 109, 112; judicialisation of human rights and conflict 131; rights and freedoms incorporated in legal instruments 118n. 14; see also NATO European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 126; Article 2 128; Article 3 prohibiting torture 133; Article 5(1) 152n. 10; creation of 130

205

European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) 125, 126, 128, 150 European Union 108; constitution 125 Europol 88 Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Liberty) (ETA) 141 Evans, E.P. 180, 188 Evans, P. 31n. 32 Evendern, N. 201n. 1 Ewald, F. 95 Executive Outcomes 35, 45n. 3 existential security 175–180 Fayemi, J. 20 FBI 88 Ferguson, N. 173n. 2 Fernández-Armesto, F. 177, 179, 180 fields, concept of 114 Finland 21 Fleck, D. 125 Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2002 20 Fortress Europe 97 Foucault, M. 48, 65, 88, 92, 99, 124, 139, 140, 143, 146, 147, 151, 152n. 15 Foucher, M. 99n. 4 France 21, 30n. 6; Army 85–86, 96; Centre d’Etudes sur les Conflits 84; defence and function of protection 85–89; force of projection 85; gendarmerie in 9, 86, 87; gendarmes and the Army, conflict 14, 84; sans papiers 49, 95, 96; white paper on Defence 1994 85 Francis, D.J. 29 Franquart, General 85 Freedman, J. 65n. 3 frontalierisation 91, 96, 97, 99n. 4 Fukuyama, F. 177, 178, 185, 188; human essence 178 Garland, D. 42 The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina 102, 118n. 3 Genetic Modification (GM) 10; food 176; and human identity 178, 180; technology as a practice 177 Geneva Convention 1949 125 Geneva Convention relating to status of refugees 1951 133 Germany 21 Gheciu, A. 10, 11, 12, 14, 101, 104, 117, 118n. 11, 166 Giddens, A. 94, 152n. 14, 181, 182, 188

206

Index

Gill, S. 26 Girard, R. 94 Glacken, C. 201n. 1 globalisation 97, 197 GM see Genetic Modification Gray, C. 162, 163, 177 Great Ape Project 186 Group 4 Securicor 35, 36, 46n. 8 Guild, E. 10, 11, 14, 97, 122 Guittet, E. 99n. 5 Gulf War, second 20 Guzzini, S. 115 habitus 114, 115 Haiti 162 Halliburton 23 Hanes, A. 62 Haraway, D. 201n. 2 Hardt, M. 152nn. 9, 12, 173n. 2; and Negri’s vision of Empire 124 Hartley, A. 42 Hassner, P. 50 Hayles, N.K. 69 Hegelian tradition 195 Held, D. 168, 169, 172 Hersch, S. 30n. 3 Herzegovina: 1995 Constitution of 106; no-fly zones in 162; see also Bosnia Hiroshima 172 Hobbes, T. 139, 148, 170, 189, 190, 193, 199, 201n. 3; state of nature 160 Hofman, L. 152n. 13 Holbrooke, R. 102 Holkeri, H. 106, 109 Holocaust 172 Honig, B. 64 Hooks, B. 75, 76 Howard, M. 199 humanising of nature 179 humanitarian intervention, doctrine of 162 humanitarian law 127; international 125 human/nature: ‘administrators’ and ‘victims’, relationships between 80; distinction 186; relations 182 human rights: abuses in Kosovo 127; abuses internationally 131; campaign targeting school children 115; framework, protection of the individual 14; global regimes 168; paradox of modern claims to 51 humans: naturalised 186–188 human subjectivity 200 Huysmans, J. 1, 7, 8, 12, 29n. 2, 118n.1, 152n. 11, 155, 159, 188n. 2

ICJ see International Court of Justice ICTR see International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) ICTY see International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Ignatieff, M. 173n. 2 immigration 61; in Canada 55, 57, 58; penality 55; refugee policies, security claims in 5 Independent Judicial Commission 103 insecurity: claims of 6; competitive, in pluralistic system of states 197; concept of 15 Institute for Civil Administration (ICA) 115 intelligence: community 9; privatization of 22 International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Hague 125; actions against the US 129 International Criminal Court (ICC) 131 International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program 117 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 123, 134n. 2 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 123, 129, 133n. 1 International Crisis Group Report 106 international law, classic paradox of (im)possibility of 166 International Military Tribunals 134n. 3 International Relations 3, 15, 68; and Security Studies 35 international relations theory 191; two major schools of 160 IRA see Irish Republican Army Iranian refugees 2 Iraq 96, 118, 162; jails, shocking abuse of prisoners in 125; preventive interventions in 163, 197; role of private contractors in 20; war, context of 162 Irish, J. 38 Irish Republican Army 124, 141, 152n. 8 Isenberg, D. 31n. 26 Isin, E.F. 51 ISS see Institute for Security Studies Italian Refuge Council 77 Italy: Act no. 40 72, 76, 83; Berlusconi government 79; Bossi-Fini Act 79; camps, resisting 76–80; Charter of Rights and Duties 78; new immigration bill (Act no. 189) 79, 81n. 5; reception practices 11

Index Jabri, V. 9, 11, 14, 15, 136, 143, 155 Jelavic, A. 103 Jenkins, R. 115 Jervis, R. 4 Jiménez, C.A. 74, 75 Johnson, C. 173n. 2 Johnson, L. 40, 46n. 11 Jones, T. 40 Joxe, A. 48 judicialisation: of armed conflict 122; of human rights 130 Kagan, R. 64, 165 Kaldor, M. 20, 162, 168, 172 Kant, I. 191, 193, 195, 201n. 4 Katzenstein, P. 4 Kaul, I. 169 Keith, M. 73, 75 Kellou, N. 56, 58, 59 Kelsen, Hans 155; pure theory of law 201n. 5 Kennan, George F. 167 Kenya 38 KFOR see Kosovo Force knowledge and power, nexus between 149 Korean conflict in 1950 162 Koskenniemi, M. 156, 167; claim about oxymoronic international law 159, 161 Kosovo 10, 12, 20, 92, 108, 112–118, 166; civil service 108; complexity of problems 117; definition and provision of security, de-territorialized 111; educational programmes 116; international politics of reconstruction in 101; Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs 116; Police Service 108, 114; post-conflict situations in 162; Protection Corps 114; Youth Assemblies 115 Kosovo Force (KFOR), NATO-led 104, 109, 111, 112, 116; operations 113 Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) 114 Kouchner, B. 105 Krause, K. 3, 4, 137, 201n. 6 Kuhn, paradigm of 115 Kurdish asylum seekers 2, 77 Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) 78 Kuwait 162 Kyoto protocol 192 L-3 Communications 22 Laclau, E. 73, 74 Latour, B. 186, 187, 188

207

Lawless Rule Versus Rule of Law in the Balkans 110 Leander, A. 9, 14, 19, 21, 28, 29n. 1 Leiss, W. 201n. 2 Leutloff, C. 108 Leviathan 139, 201n. 3 liberalism/liberal 160; internationalism 168; model of states 166 Liberty 144, 148 life-support security 175–176 Lindahl, H. 155 Loader, I. 43, 44, 169 lobbying as part of politics of protection 24 Locke, John 170 LOGCAP 26 Logicon 26 Lombardi, P. 20 Los Alamos National Laboratory 26 Lovering, J. 24 Lowry, M. 56, 57, 59, 62, 63, 64, 65n. 3 Luke, T.W. 201n. 2 Lynn Doty, R. 8 Lyotard, J.-F. 51, 62 Macedonia, post-conflict situation in 162 McGrew, A. 172 McKibben, B. 177, 178, 181, 188 McSweeney, B. 6, 7, 10, 12, 29n. 2 Magnusson, W. 201n. 2 Malan, M., General 38 Malkki, L.H. 51 Mann, M. 173n. 2 Marrus, M.R. 1 Massey, D. 73, 74 Médécins sans Frontières 131 Medici Senza Frontiere 79 Mendel, Gregor Johann 180 Mennell, S. 113 Meyer, J.M. 201n. 1 Mezzadra, S. 49, 79, 80 Michaels, J.B. 30n. 7 Migrants Assembly at European Social Forum 49 migration politics 48, 49 military consultancy/training and logistics 21 Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI) in the United States 22, 23, 25, 26, 45n. 3; website 24 Milliken, J. 8 Minnaar, A. 38, 41 minorities, protection of 106

208

Index

The Minority Report 98 Mistry, D. 37 modernization theory 191 modern man 190, 191, 192; limits for 193–194 Montgomery, S. 58 Montreal 63; Anti-Capitalist Convergence 62; see also Canada Morocco 152n. 6 MPRI see Military Professional Resources Incorporated Munn, N. 75 Musah, A.-F. 20, 29 national security 171, 194; claim to 195, 196, 199; in cold War era 196; primary subject of 195; state 147 National Security Enhancement Plan 23 NATO 113, 128, 161, 168; bombing campaign of Serbia 1999 127; capitalisation 13; Implementation Force (IFOR) 102; see also Kosovo Force nature humanised 186–188 nature of protection 189, 194–201 Nazi concentration and death camps 68 Negri, A. 152n. 12 173n. 2; and Hardt, vision of Empire 124 Neilson, B. 49, 79, 80 Neumann, I. 11 Newburn, T. 40 A New Framework for Analysis 12 New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time 73 New York and Washington, attacks on 163 Ngoveni, K.P. 38, 41 Nicaragua 129 Nolte, G. 134n. 6 No One Is Illegal, Canada 60, 62, 63; see also Canada Noriega, Manuel 95 Northbridge Services Group 27; in the Ivory Coast 25 Northrop Grunman company 26 Nuremberg trials after Second World War 129; 134n. 4 Nyers, P. 6, 7, 11, 14, 15, 48, 51, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65n. 3 O’Brien, K. 31n. 29 O’Hanlon, M. 118n. 5 Oliver, M. 2 Operation Desert Storm 22 Organization for Security and Control in Europe (OSCE) 102, 108, 115, 116;

Bosnia Mission 110, 119n. 23; reports on educational programming 119n. 21 organized crime 110, 111 OSCE see Organization for Security and Control in Europe 108 Ó Thutail, G. 30n. 14 Panagia, D. 59 Panama 95 Papadopoulos, S. 57 Paris, R. 107 Pateman, C. 138, 152n. 3 patronage 15 peace: consolidation 86; enforcement 86 Peace Implementation Council (PIC) 102; meeting in Bonn 103 Pearson, S. 26 Peirce, G. 146, 147, 148 Perera, S. 72 Peries, G. 88 Perrone, L. 78 Petersberg missions 86 Peterson, L. 20 Philip, K. 38 Pile, S. 73, 75 Pinkerton 35 PMC see private military companies Podur, J. 55 police 9; counter-intelligence tasks 96; and politics 53 policing: at distance 98; partnership 41 political agency 15; emerging in conditions of emergency 143; issue of 5; limitation of 140; new security configuration, models of 159–165; non-status refugees 48; possibilities of 154 political communities, spatial logic of 110–112 political ecology 188 political voice 52–54, 71 politics: of identity, new 73; of protection 194; of security 140; of sphere of nature 183–186 power-knowledge nexus 146 praesidere, concept of 91, 94, 96 Pratt, A. 55 private military companies (PMCs) 19, 35; as arms of government policy 28; directly defining security concerns 21–23; indirectly defining security concerns 23–25; as ‘mercenaries’, analyses of 45; peacekeeping missions, potential for 27; providing

Index intelligence 22; rise of 20–21; in securitising processes, importance of 9; as security actors 21; self-promotion 27; status as security experts 26 private security companies (PSCs) 34–45, 46n.10; globalisation of 34, 45 Prokhovnik, R. 118n. 1 protection 84; combination of three elements 92; concept of 3, 13–15, 138; defence, monitoring and surveillance 90; defending border from external enemy 96; discourses of sacred place 90; etymology of 91; frontalierisation 97; of internal space 90; intervention and the military 96; of love 90; meanings of 89–90; military doctrine, notion of 86; of nature 189, 192; of people on the move 89; physical, of individual 89; as synonym for internal security 88; of territory 88; three techniques of 93–95 protectionism: anti-terrorist legislation measures incorporated into 139; as lynchpin of political discourse 137; measures 140 PSCs see private security companies ‘public–private’ partnerships 28–29, 34 Puggioni, R. 9, 11, 14, 15, 68 Pugliese, J. 52 Quebec 59, 60, 61; see also Canada QuinetiQ 26 Rajaram, P.K. 51 Rancière, J. 49, 52, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 183, 184, 188 Rapacynski, A. 201n. 1 rationalism 4 realism 160 reception camps 77; in Italy 9 Record, J. 163 Red Cross 78 reflectivism 4 refugees: and famine-relief camps 68; flows 1, 14; literature 68; and migrants held in Italian camps 71; understanding of camp 78; warrior communities, proliferation of 51 Richl, E. 108 Ridge, T. 88 Roberts, B. 55 Robertson, General Lord 111 Robertson, R. 172 Rodhe, D. 127

209

Roling, B. 125 Rose, N. 69 rule of law: content of 127; modern concept of 125 Rumsfeld, Donald 134n. 8 Rwanda 12: post-conflict situation in 162; protection of refugee camp in 162; scale of violence 131; violations of humanitarian law 134n. 2; war, tribunal 129; see also International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) Sandline International 26, 28, 35, 45n. 3 Saramago, J. 29 Sartre, J.-P. 179, 180, 188 Saudi Arabia 152n. 6 Schalkwyk, P.J. 38 Schengen Agreements 13 Schmidt, A. 201n. 2 Schmitt, C. 48, 124, 155, 199; on sovereignty 144, 201nn. 5, 7 Schönteich, M. 36, 37 Searle, J.R. 156 Second World War 123; aftermath of 160; Tribunals Charter 134n. 4 Securitas 35 security: alternative, common, or human 197; claims about 197; concerns, definition of 19; from crime and disorder 169; critical literatures on 198; decreasing precision of term 198; dilemma 193; and politics, relation between 198; practice, three kinds of 3; public good, constitutive dimension of 170; question in International Relations 3; regional and global levels 172; sectors of 9–13; shaping by discourses 25–28; territory and population 84; two types of 175 self-defence: doctrine of 162; pre-emptive 163, 164 September 11, 2001, events of see 9/11/2001 Serbs 97, 104, 114, 127 Shapiro, M. 4, 69 Sharma, N. 49 Shaw, K. 201n. 2 Shaw, M. 36, 37, 38, 39, 43 Shearer, D. 19, 31n. 26 Shearing, C. 36, 37 SIAC see Special Immigration Appeals Commission Singer, P.W. 22, 23, 30n. 4 Smetherham, J.-A. 42

210

Index

Smith, D. 113 Soguk, N. 1 Somalia, humanitarian aid in 162 Soper, K. 176, 188 SOROS Foundation 108 South Africa 25; apartheid regime in 6, 36 38, 43; competition between private security and public police in 41–42; controversies over international ownership 39, 44; crime statistics from 36; globalisation of private security in 35–37; Institute for Security Studies (ISS) 40, 46n. 7; National Key Points Act of 1980 38; national ownership of private security sector 40, 44; Parliament’s Safety and Security Committee 39; private security and public authority 37–41; private security and ‘rainbow nation’ 42–45; Private Security Industry Regulation Bill, proposed 39; Security Industry Regulatory Authority (SIRA) 37 South African Defence Forces (SADF) 28, 38 South African National Defence Forces (SANDF) 46n. 9 South African Police Services (SAPS) 36, 37, 38, 43, 46n. 7 Southall, R. 46n. 9 sovereignty 193; claims 125; epistemic 155–156; frame, resilience of 154–159; ideological uses of 157; international security and regulation of armed conflict 153; primacy of epistemic core 158–159; and security 165–172; state, challenge to 45, principle of 128; symbolic 156–157; systemic 157–159 Soviet Union 162: dissolution of 123; on role of law in international relations 123; threat during Cold War 5 Soyster, E. 19 Space Imaging and Digital Globe 22 Spain 152n. 6; Madrid bombings 141 Spa Way 26 Spearin, C. 21 Spicer, T. 26 state/s: authority, claim about 196; of exception 70; modern, sovereign delimitation of 191; monopoly of legitimate violence 34; nation as highest form of political authority 195; power, inventory of capabilities 194; as sovereign polities, dominance of 167; transcendent conceptions of security 171

Stato di Eccezione 70 Steinberg, P.E. 201n. 2 Steiner, M. 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, 119n. 19 Steyn, Lord, J. 147, 148 Strange, S. 26 subjectivity 137, 145–150; and politics of protection 138–141 Taguba, A., Major General 30n. 3 Tamil Tigers and Sri Lankan government 152n. 8 Tampa, Norwegian cargo ship 13 Tarr, C. 65n. 3 Technologies of Ban 98–99 tegere, concept of 90–91, 94, 95 terrorism and search for security 110–112 Terry, F. 51 Thomas, K. 180, 188 Thompson, J. 45n. 2 threats, definition of 4, 29n. 2; as challenge to sovereign state-hood 159; and security concerns, creating 22 Thrift, N. 69 Tilly, C. 138, 152n. 2 Titan Corp 30n. Todd, E. 173n. 2 Torpey, J. 97 Travis, A. 1 Tuan, Yi-Fu 201n. 1 Turner, B.S. 94 tutore, conception of 92, 94,112 UK see United Kingdom UNHCR see United Nations High Commission for Refugees 95 United Kingdom (UK) 88, 141; Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA2001) 142, 144, 149, 150, 152n. 4; anti-terrorist measures 146; attack against Iraq 123; Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) 26; derogation from European human rights law 139; disciplinarisation 96; government definition of terrorism 148; and Gulf War syndrome 129; Home Secretary, challenges to 2, 143, 145; military action in Gibraltar against suspected terrorists 126; plans to set up ‘zones of protection’ 1; Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) 142, 144; Sponsored Reserve Act 20; Terrorism Act 2000 (TA2000) 142, 148, 149, 152n. 4

Index

211

United Nations (UN): Convention relating to status of refugees 130; as exclusive mechanism capable of justifying armed conflict 123; International Police Task Force sponsored by 111; News Service Release 109; Security Council resolution 827 133n. 1; Security Council resolution 1244 103, 118nn. 5, 11; use of force by Security Council 161; veto system in Security Council 163; see also United Nations Charter United Nations Charter 125, 126; Article 2 123, 133, 160; Article 51 123, 127, 161; Chapter VII of 134n. 2, 162 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on ‘global public goods’ 169 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) 92 United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) 103, 104, 112, 114, 115, 116, 118n. 10; police units 111; spatial solution to ethnic problems 106 United States 162; air force in Afghanistan 22; attack against Iraq 123; in Bosnia 22; Department of Justice’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Programme 116; dominance of international relations 124; and Gulf War syndrome 129; INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) 88; invasion of Iraq 123, 162; Patriot Act 152n. 4; post-September 11 164 United States Institute of Peace 111, 114, 119n. 18 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 130 UNMIK see United Nations Mission in Kosovo USSR see Soviet Union

Wackenhut Corrections Corporation 46n. 8 Waever, O. 8, 11, 12, 16 n. 3, 147 Walker, N. 11, 14, 15, 154 Walker, R.B.J. 4, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 108, 145, 146, 152n. 9, 155, 159, 167, 169, 171, 189–194, 201n. 6 Walt, S. 4 Walters, W. 55 Walzer, M. 43 war 159; against terrorism 140, 146; and courts 122, 129–133; and international politics, relationship of 124–127 Weber, M. 122, 190, 191, 195 Weldes, J. 8 Wendt, A. 4, 10 Werner, W.G. 156 Whelan, T. 27, 31n. 28 Whitehead, A.N. 201n. 1 Wight, C. 8 Williams, A. 27 Williams, M.C. 3, 4, 10, 11, 12, 14, 137, 176, 201n. 6 Williams, R. 188 Wolfers, A. 4 Woolsey, J. 22 World Bank structural adjustments credits 103 World Cup in Paris, surveillance of 87 Wright, C. 65n. 5 Wyn Jones, R. 4, 6

Van Roermund, B. 159 Veyne, P. 11 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations 124 Vietnam 129 Vinnell 24, 25

Zakaria, F. 102 Zambia 38 Zamparelli, S.J., Colonel 20 Zaum, D. 103, 107 Zimbabwe 38 Zizek, S. 71, 72

Yannis, A. 114, 118n. 9 Yugoslavia, Federal Republic of (FRY) 101, 128; humanitarian aid in 162; legislation 118n. 10; see also International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)

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