ChapterPDF Available

Biopower, Security, and Development

January 2010

In book: Governing Childhood into the 21st Century (pp.153-178)

Authors:

Arizona State University West Campus

Biopolitics approaches population as a political and scientific problem-space. Contemporary biopolitics operates primarily, although not exclusively, through security mechanisms rather than disciplinary ones. This chapter specifically addresses how populations, particularly childhood populations, are constituted in political and social policy as national and international security concerns. The chapter explores two specific childhood populations. First examined is the growing population of poor children living in a politically aware, but disenfranchised, developing world. Examined next are the children of migrant flows into the United States over the last several decades and how cultural imaginings and governmental technologies have approached this population. These discussions are contextualized in relation to the idea of the United States as a “security state.”

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CHAPTER SIX

BIOPOWER, SOVEREIGNTY, AND AMERICA’S GLOBAL SECURITY

The biopolitics of population and the re-assertion of the sovereign right to kill and

to execute exceptions to the liberal rights of citizenship suggest neoliberal

governmentalities are increasingly rent with contradictions. On the one hand, neoliberal

government operates from afar through individualized technologies of the self and

through dispersed expert/bureaucratic/managerial decision making. Market models of

government increasingly replace state-directed ones in the public sphere as social-welfare

and education are either privatized or operated in accord with “free-market” strategies

and technologies. These reforms are viewed as disciplining and/or transforming the

inefficient apparatuses of the welfare-state. Moreover, contemporary market mechanisms

extend neoliberal technologies of government globally through contracts (e.g.,

international trade agreements and organizations), transnational corporations, and through

international finance, securities, and related derivatives. Although market mechanisms

involve dispersed sovereignty and disciplines, these tend to be viewed as impersonal and

necessary for secure and expansive market operations.

On the other hand, the proliferation of risks associated with barriers to market

penetration and derived from the uncertainties surrounding market contingencies seem to

require centralized and often state-controlled intervention and government. Risks to

market security are posed by energy disruptions or limitations, geopolitical conflict,

resistance by nation-states such as Venezuela to neoliberal market operations, and, most

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recently, terrorism. In the context of these problematics, security exigencies are

represented as warranting the re-assertion of the sovereign capacity to kill, and as

legitimizing abnegation of liberal “rights” of personhood.

Consequently, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, public acceptance

grows for forms of sovereignty and discipline that might otherwise be viewed as

impinging against liberal self-government and liberal notions of privacy. In effect, the

ethos of government through freedom is increasingly characterized by “exceptions”

whereupon populations are deemed incapable of self-government, warranting the

withholding of life, forceful discipline, and/or sovereign repression. Whereas preceeding

chapters stressed biopower’s more pastoral operations and emphasized technologies of

the self, Chapter Six addresses how sovereignty and discipline have been used recently to

reduce the risks associated with, or perceived as threatening to, neoliberal and

neoconservative principles of government.

Sovereignty is the “underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued

existence” (Foucault, 2004, p. 80). As explained previously, sovereignty is a relatively

under-theorized dimension of Foucault’s triangular structure of power within the

secondary governmentality scholarship. Foucault’s relatively infrequent references to

modern expressions of sovereignty no doubt resulted from his contention that power in

the modern period is caught up with living beings and applied at “the level of life itself”

(2004, p. 82). For Foucault, the productive capacities of biopower are more pervasive and

insidious than the capacity to “disallow” life expressed as sovereignty (p. 80).

Yet, the sovereign capacity to disallow life, either through death or its gradients in

incarceration, torture, starvation, enforced marginalization, and scientific stigmatization,

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continues to operate upon populations. Moreover, sovereignty is increasingly implicated

in (coerced) implementation of neoliberal and neoconservative biopolitical principles of

government, particularly in relation to the disciplining of markets. Finally, in the context

of everyday life, expert authority and popular sentiment may support authoritarian

measures and strategies of government as necessary supplements to government through

freedom (see Dean, 2002a). The events delineating the turn of the twenty-first century

have generated increased academic interest in sovereign power as the supplement or

underside of biopower, as have the complex relations among and across discipline,

government, and sovereignty.

This chapter provides a brief genealogy of Foucault’s work on sovereignty and

addresses the literature surrounding the idea of the exception.

Foucault, Agamben, and Sovereignty

Foucault’s thoughts on sovereignty are most explicitly developed in the essay,

“Right of Death and Power Over Life” (2004) and in the posthumously published, Society

Must Be Defended, part of his Lectures at the Collège de France (2003b). Across these

texts, sovereignty is considered in relation to the capacities of life and death, race and

war. Whereas the essay, “Right of Death” emphasizes the contemporary sovereign

capacity to let die Society Must be Defended provides a genealogy of the nation-state

founded in metaphors of war and establishment of racialized universalizing identities,

linking the sovereignty of the state to violence under the banner of national vitality.

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault (2003b) observed war was initially

thought of as “a war between races” in early European history (p. 239)

. But over time,

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the very notion of this war was eventually “eliminated from historical analysis by the

principle of national universality” (p. 239). As explained in Chapter Two,

universalization of race in the name of the nation-state involved new expressions of

sovereignty altering the traditional formulation of the rights of life and death.

Accordingly, Foucault (2003b) described how the state endowed with military

institutions emerged after the Treaty of Westphalia. Although sovereignty lacked precise

definition in the early modern state, it was characterized in 1606 by the French jurist Jean

Bodin as including the power to “‘give law,’ power of war and peace and the making of

foreign alliances, power of taxation, appointing magistrates and coinage” (cited in Orr,

2002, p. 476). Under this new regime of government, police apparatuses administered the

population according to the normalizing constraints of law and the exigencies (i.e.,

imperatives and risks) of commerce and population. The military-diplomatic apparatuses

supplemented the power of police and could be used by empowered agents to suppress

resistance, often (but not always) under the guise of a state of exception entailing

suspension of law.

Resistance was (and is) endemic to state formation and operations. Foucault

observed with early state formation, the philosophico-juridical discourse organized

around the problem of sovereignty and law was confronted by historical-political

discourses challenging the universality of the former discourse of sovereignty. According

to Andrew Neal (2004), the ascendant modern discourses of the nation-state ultimately

functioned to displace and colonize contestations, such as those posed by historical-

political discourses, as a dominant group or nation emerged hegemonic.

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Sovereignty was exercised in the strategies and tactics of conflict as particular

groups battled for hegemony. For example, in the U.S., the interests, values, and

perspectives of white, land-holding men immersed in Enlightenment ideals and laissez-

faire capitalist principles ultimately organized and articulated a collective identity and the

legitimate forms and operations of political authority; although early colonial life

involved people of diverse cultures and religions. The emergence of the American state

thus entailed the hegemony of a universalizing and shared identity—the nationalization

of a racialized identity—solidifying and unifying the state against external and internal

enemies. Coinciding with the birth of biopolitics in the second half of the eighteenth

century (Foucault, 2003b), the early American state henceforth looked to cultivate the

wealth and health of its populace through police while disciplining and socializing unruly

elements (e.g., immigrants) and excising those who posed a threat to the national ideal

(e.g., Native Americans) (see Hannah, 2000). Racism is thus “inscribed as the basic

mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States” (Foucault, 2003b, p. 254). In

effect, nationalization and extension of the racialized identity of the nation-state entailed

sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitical practices internal to the state aimed at

pacification and normalization.

What exactly did racism mean for Foucault and how was it linked to sovereignty

and conflict? According to Foucault, after the nineteenth century, racism was “primarily a

way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break

between what must live and what must die” (2003b, p. 254). Thus racism fragments the

“field of the biological that power controls” (p. 255). Race also entails the idea that one

must kill or take lives to live, and thereby makes war “compatible with the exercise of

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biopower” (p. 255). Julian Reid’s (2006) work provides a concise summary of the

contiguity across race, biopower, and war:

In a biopolitical context where power is exercised at the level of the life of

populations, war occurs in the form of a struggle between populations whose

particular existence as the expressions of species life that they are is at stake. The

participation of populations in war is therefore reconceived not as the product of a

right of seizure, but as a positive, life-affirming act. (p. 136)

Although new understandings of race and nationhood inflect or build upon older ones,

modern nation-states continue to wage war against one another to securitize the national

identity, the way of life in the name of life itself. Wars between nation-states, or within

them, involve distinctions between self and enemy based on racialized norms of identity

and ways of life. As Reid argued, biopolitical wars distinguish foes by “their racial

differentiation from the norm, and wars are waged by mobilizing populations to defend

racial norms against rival populations . . .” (p. 145). Accordingly, Foucault concluded,

“the principle underlying the tactics of battle—that one has to be capable of killing in

order to go on living—has become the principle that defines the strategy of states” (1990,

p. 137).

The sovereign power over death is justified in the modern era to ensure life.

Enemies are represented as “threats, either external or internal, to the population and for

the population” (Foucault, 2003b, p. 256). The logic holds that eliminating the threat

improves the race or species. Foucault asserted: “If the power of normalization wished to

exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist” (p. 256). Thus, when “the

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State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can justify the murderous function of

the State” (p. 256).

Understood in this context of meaning, sovereignty can be thought both in terms

of the capacities of the biopolitical authorities and forms of expertise to fragment and

exploit the biological continuum, and in the institutional capacities of the nation-state and

other “sovereign” entities to deny life or to kill (purportedly) to protect and enhance the

security of the race. As explored in Chapters Four and Five, the capacities to delimit

normality and thereby label and enable/disable forms of life are found throughout the

social field and are executed by a wide array of biopolitical authorities. Sovereignty thus

arises in the decision of exceptionality and in the concomitant use of repression to

discipline those deemed incapable of self-government. The exercise of sovereignty can be

de-centered in the practices of everyday life, or it can be centralized in state or

institutional authorities who use symbolic and/or corporeal violence to securitize life.

Nineteenth century biopower operated in the sovereign mode by designating

populations as degenerate and/or threatening, leading to their institutional exclusion in

enclosed and disciplinary spaces. Twentieth century biopower sought to engineer the

health of the population through hygienic and neo-hygienic technologies, which

eventually stressed technologies of the self. Still, sovereignty operated in the biopower

mode in the classification of domestic and foreign populations as “risky” - as requiring

supervision, and pastoral or authoritarian control. Within the U.S., women, poor

populations, and populations of people targeted by their non-whiteness have been subject

to sovereign decisionality regarding their exceptionality, as illustrated by the

incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the contemporary practice

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of incarcerating African-American juvenile offenders. Abroad, the United States

exercised state sovereign apparatuses covertly and overtly to pursue markets and/or

strategic objectives including the expansion of markets in Vietnam, and the protection of

national corporate interests such as ITT and United Fruit in South and Central America.

Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, the extension of neoliberal

governmentality has occurred primarily through market mechanisms. The racialized

biological identities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have given way (in

some locales) to more generic identities delimited by particular market-based practices

and market-based technologies of selfhood. The “racialized” identities promulgated at the

beginning of the twenty-first century speak to an autonomous, liberal, marketized-

persona lacking biological specificity. Simultaneously, however, western, neoliberal

constitutions of personhood and market autonomy ground idealized identities against

which are pitted constructions of unreasonable, pre-modern articulations of others who

are perceived as irrationally resisting the dissemination of neoliberal market principles

and personhood. The indigenous peasant and the Orientalized “terrorist” represent such

others.

Globalization of neoliberal market operations requires security apparatuses that

minimize and/or leverage risk. At issue are not those of the nineteenth century seeking to

protect a geographically delimited territory. Rather, security is thought in terms of global

circulations of goods, information, and people. Consequently, the modern art of

government is not limited to the population and territory of individual states, but extends

to the larger population of people and things encompassed by the entirety of the world

system. The well-managed neoliberal state, imagined after a business, strives to exploit

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global economic opportunities while managing the risks posed by global flows of

information, capital, and peoples (Walters, 2004). For the authorities of market and state,

the encompassing nature of the emerging world system requires extensive surveillance

systems capable of monitoring dispersed locales in order to identify risks that can be

leveraged or require management. Authorities must be trained to interpret voluminous

data, while still others must be armed with technologies able to influence and administer

disclosed risks and opportunities. In effect, neoliberal governmental rationalities—

problem-solutions, modes of conduct, forms of expertise, strategic interventions—might

be understood as colonizing the world system.

As described by Agamben (2001), turn of the twenty-first century security leads

to an opening and globalization in contrast to the closuring and isolating of territories by

discipline. Integrally tied up with neoliberal forms of government, security intervenes in

processes to direct and regulate disorder but does so in a context of (relative) freedom of

traffic and trade. Thus, neoliberal security problematics framed in relation to

“circulation” emphasize complex interdependencies and use techno-scientific

technologies to calculate and exploit risks (Dillon, 2005, p. 2). Still, disciplines continue

to be employed to produce order in enclosed spaces (e.g., refugee camps, corporatized

global supply chains, formal immigration bureaucracies).

In essence, analyses of global governmentality suggest the dissemination of

neoliberal systems of government most typically involve dispersal of neoliberal market

disciplines and technologies of the self, particularly linked to consumption and work-

related identities. Power thus centers on life and operates most ubiquitously through the

authority of the norm and calculations of risks. The juridical powers of the sovereign

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state and international governmental agencies adjudicate competing freedoms and

liberties. Sovereign power is illustrated in such contexts by the emergent and/or

institutionally defined capacity of agents to deny opportunities to pursue life by somehow

curtailing others’ freedoms or by restricting others’ access to the means of life (e.g.,

through “aid” or privatization).

However, although neoliberal governmentality typically operates from afar, more

overt expressions of discipline and sovereign force remain supplementary resources in

the context of everyday life and in relations between states, as Foucault observed in his

discussion of the biopolitics of race and war (2003b). Scholarship by Barry Hindess and

Mitchell Dean are particularly illuminating on the subject of sovereignty in the

framework of (neo)liberal governmentality.

In the essay, “Liberal Government and Authoritarianism,” Dean (2002a) argued

persuasively that authoritarian measures are compatible with, and indeed integral to,

liberal government. Dean explained the very idea of the liberal norm of the autonomous

individual is carved out against forms of life viewed as constituting exceptions, including

welfare dependency and statelessness (see also, Ong, 2006; Sassen, 2006). Government

of exceptions relies more extensively on authoritarian and despotic measures guided by

the biopolitical operations of the “liberal police” (made up of biopolitical authorities,

forms of expertise, embodied disciplines, etc.).

Hindess (2006, 2001) argued modern states retain the sovereign capacity to use

violence and terror, to exercise the despotic power of death over populations. The state’s

monopolization over violence is legitimized in two foundational myths; one realist and

one normative. Both myths explain the formation of the modern world in relation to the

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concentration of terror in the hands of the state: the realist approach emphasizes the state

as a historical outcome of religious conflict in Europe, while the normative approach

stresses the contractual emergence of the state’s monopoly over violence. Hindess’ point

in relating these foundational myths rests in their combined capacities to legitimize

violence by the state against those internal to the state represented as threatening its peace

and security, and those external to the state represented as threatening its very existence

or the existence of the nation-state system.

States’ routine uses of violence against criminals/terrorists and others viewed as

threatening the economic and cultural stability of the state or state-system is legitimized

as regrettably necessary. As explained above, state sovereignty, as practiced through

overt state controls and violence, is often vindicated through racialized discourses of

national identity cast in terms of foundational mythos.

Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2000, 2005) suggested sovereignty entails withdrawal

and suspension of law, in the decision of the state of exception (following Carl Schmitt,

1985). In order to maintain the fantasy of a society of self-governing individuals the

system must constantly purify itself of those peoples and institutions whose very

existence belies the fantasy: Agamben stated: “when, starting with the French

Revolution, sovereignty is entrusted solely to the people, the people becomes an

embarrassing presence, and poverty and exclusion appear for the first time as an

intolerable scandal in every sense” (2000, pp. 32-33). The “solution” then is to “fill the

split that divides the people by radically eliminating the people of the excluded” (p. 33).

Agamben’s paradigmatic example of the state of exception is the concentration camp, but

he also applied the concept to explain the U.S. detention of prisoners in Guantánamo:

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these prisoners have no legal status and are subject “only to raw power” (cited in Raulff,

2004). Additionally, sovereign exceptions may be enacted in the course of everyday life

when authorities deem particular subjects incapable of self-government (as defined by

particular technologies of government).

Following Agamben, Judith Butler (2004) described sovereignty as a performance

enacted in the suspension of rule of law:

It is not, literally speaking, that a sovereign power suspends the rule of law, but

that the rule of law, in the act of being suspended, produces sovereignty in its

actions and as its effect. This inverse relation to law produces the

‘unaccountability’ of this operation as sovereign power, as well its illegitimacy.

(p. 66)

Butler emphasized the distinction between sovereignty and the rule of law since the

former produces a “suspension” of rule of law (p. 66). Moreover, the performance of this

suspension is regarded somehow as normative.

Both Agamben and Butler described sovereignty in relation to the power of

decision and acts of exclusions, suggesting sovereignty implies exceptionality. However,

Andrew Neal cautioned in “Foucault in Guantánamo” (2006) against regarding

sovereignty as somehow restricted to extraordinary circumstances, intimating that

Agamben-inspired theorizing may risk formulating the exception as distinguished from

the norm. Neal noted such theorizing also tends to “privilege a sovereign center” (p. 34)

in relation to “formal conditions of sovereignty” or the “metaphysical possibility of the

exception” (p. 39). Neal argued instead for exploring the “dispersal and historicity of the

conditions of possibility of exceptionalism; to stress that successful and mobilizing

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declarations of exceptions are only possible because of an already discursive formation of

objects, subject positions, enunciative modalities, concepts and strategies” (Neal, 2006, p.

44). Neal’s points that sovereign operations should not be regarded as exceptional nor

necessarily centered are well taken and raise awareness of the dispersal of sovereign

power throughout everyday life.

In “Police, Sovereignty, and Law: Foucaultian Reflections,” Mariana Valverde

(2007) made a similar argument by observing the state’s security apparatuses routinely

exercise sovereignty over the population. Valverde suggested the governmentality

scholarship’s interest in the logic of security has focused disproportionately on police’s

more pastoral operations, thereby eliding how police apparatuses also invoke sovereign

logics in forbidding, disciplining, and punishing. However, while nineteenth century

police apparatuses aimed at normalizing individuals through discipline and punishment,

neoliberal and neoconservative police apparatuses work to assess and control public

security risks (Garland, 2001; Valverde & Mopas, 2004). The significance of this shift

toward risk management is public safety is administered through risk factors rather than

through the exclusive supervision of specific concrete individuals. Risk management

requires extensive surveillance, engendering the possibility for “targeted governance” of

risky spaces, activities and populations (Valverde & Mopas, 2004, p. 245). But targeting

does not involve less government (in the Foucauldian sense); rather, it implies an endless

and expansive project of targeting more, requiring ever more surveillance. Finally,

targeting requires repressive apparatuses to be available for managing and suppressing

identified risks.

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These analyses raise questions about the utility of the language of exceptionality

when studying the operations of sovereignty across everyday life, between states, and in

relation to the dispersal of global governmentality. However, Randy Lippert (2004)

demonstrated how the language of exception can be maintained without necessitating that

exceptionality stand opposed to normativity. Lippert argued, “governmentalities

manufacture and defer to sovereign power and create the capacity to make the exception

when resistance is encountered in governmental spaces that then become sovereign

territories” (p 543). Further, “both liberal and pastoral rationalities are dependent on the

capacity to make the exception, which at times is realized as symbolic salvation but at

others as exclusion and coercion” (p.548). Thus, Lippert’s argument contends

normativity is manufactured biopolitically in relation to sovereignty and, concomitantly,

creates the conditions of possibility for sovereign exceptionality.

In sum, in contemporary neoliberal societies, sovereignty is intimately connected

to biopower and operates most insidiously in the capacity to let die as distinguished from

the capacity to kill. Sovereign decisions about life and death occur through biopolitical

and disciplinary practices delineating normal, desirable, or optimal forms of life from

those forms of life viewed as risky, abnormal, undesirable, and sub-optimal. Racialized

identities are thought in relation to the technologies and forms of expertise used to divide

the bio/cultural continuum of humanity. Individuals and practices viewed as abnormal

(e.g., amoral) or undesirable (e.g., risky or dangerous) may be subject to authoritarian

measures by petty tyrants, state apparatuses, or privatized “police.” The purported

“exceptionality” of individuals deemed incapable of self-government legitimizes brute

force, authoritarianism, and the invocation of sovereign decision making about life and

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death. The sovereign capacities to disallow or disable “freedom” and the capacities for

life are integrally caught up with biopower. Moreover, the ancient sovereign capability to

kill (as distinguished from the modern capacity to disallow life) can be invoked by states

and other agents when rationalized by the preservation of life itself. Brute sovereignty

meets resistance and there is battle and/or war.

War is not antithetical to neoliberal governmentality. In The Liberal Virus, Samir

Amin (2004) insisted neoliberalism entails a “permanent war” of military interventions

against people at the global market’s periphery (p. 24). Amin’s expansive approach to

war included nearly all police action against resistant populations (see also Giroux,

2004). Even those who view war in more conventional terms (defined in relation to the

nation-state) predict proliferating conflicts due to environmental, market, and biopolitical

exigencies. Circulating commodities, such as small arms, amplify regional conflicts.

Under neoliberalism, “just wars” are waged to attain resources, to “open

markets,” and to free individuals from “human rights” abuses (Douzinas, 2003, p. 172)

Costas Douzinas observed that wars fought under the guise of protecting human rights

entail overwhelming material force often implemented in the form of “police” operations

aimed at preventing, deterring, and punishing (purported) criminal perpetrators (p. 172).

Offenders are represented as unjust and inhuman, deserving no mercy, although critical

examination reveals definitions of abuses, perpetrators, and victims as politically

contingent (see Mboka, 2007).

Still, even the most de-territorialized or “just” of wars requires populations be

mobilized to support or condone violence. Mobilization of support for violence often

entails articulation of a racialized identity, or way of life, represented as threatened by

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outsiders, criminals, dissenters, etc. Compelling moral narratives must be drawn upon to

fuel cooperation for repression and death (see Cairo, 2006).

Although much can be written about war, conflict, and sovereignty under

neoliberalism, in what follows, I focus primarily on how sovereignty operates in and

through the formal and ideological technologies of the U.S. state and its outsourced

agents in the context of the “war on terror” and the invasion of Iraq. This emphasis is not

intended to collapse sovereignty into the state. Across this book, I have demonstrated the

biopolitics of petty sovereignty. But the governmentality of the state in and through the

biopolitics of population does not exhaust contemporary discussions of power and

control.

Thus, this chapter returns to the state to demonstrate that centered forms of brute

sovereignty continue to exist. Following Foucault, I address the technologies of

government that both constitute sovereign agents, and are employed by them, in the

deployment of control over populations. The types of technologies I explore include: (a)

“technologies of production;” (b) “technologies of sign systems”; (c) “technologies of

power;” and (d) “technologies of the self” (Foucault, 1988, p. 18). First, I address the

racialized construction of the American state and its population around the principle of its

exceptionality, emphasizing how sign systems unify the population against security

threats. I then explore how informatic technologies of production allow the state’s police

apparatuses to monitor the population directly and indirectly, and how the surveillance

state produces new technologies of power operating upon, and through, populations.

Finally, I conclude by discussing how the state’s civilian and military agents exert brute

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sovereignty over those “othered” as criminal, dangerous, or invisible by America’s

racialized nationalistic identity.

The United States of America: Biopower, Race, and Sovereignty

America’s national identity is predicated upon the idea of American

exceptionality as the forms of knowledge, thought, and expertise constituting self-

understanding have historically stressed America’s sovereignty before God in relation to

all others.

As mentioned above, in the United States, the interests, values, and perspectives

of white, land-holding men immersed in Enlightenment ideals and laissez-faire capitalist

principles served to organize and articulate a collective identity and the legitimate

operations of political authority. Nationalization of a racialized identity, combined with

the doctrine of Manifest Destiny (explained in Chapter Two), fueled expansion over

North America and, when expedient, justified genocide against Native Americans and the

economic exploitation and marginalization of “others” including immigrants (e.g.,

Chinese railroad workers), slaves, etc. As explained by Coles (2002):

The origin of America was rhetorically explained as an act of providence—that is,

‘God led people (white Europeans) to America to found a new and superior or

exceptional social order that would be the light onto all nations… This chosen

nation myth has been the oldest and most continuous creed in American civil

religion. (p. 406)

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The doctrine of Manifest Destiny rationalized expansion of the American way of life

abroad through war and/or intervention (Coles, 2002). Manifest Destiny has served to

unify the population against threats both internal and external.

Within the contemporary United States, neoliberal, neoconservative, and

conservative Christian principles, practices, and problems of government find legitimacy

in appeals to racialized constructions of origins and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. The

U.S. media, judicial courts, history education, and national monuments all contribute to

contemporary understandings of the foundational mythos, one characterized by

enlightened, entrepreneurial “Founding Fathers” contractually constituting a politically

and economically free society. The spread of U.S. territory, from the founding states to

the current territorial expansiveness, serves retroactively to prove the essential

“correctness” of the doctrine, as does the 1948 Marshall Plan and the implosion of the

Soviet Union.

Historical events or phenomena that could potentially rupture the universalization

of the mythos are erased or trivialized, or are retroactively constituted as “exceptions” to

the principles of the benevolent American state and its protections of universal liberal

personhood. For example, contemporary acknowledgements of genocide against Native

Americans and the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II are

framed rhetorically as irregularities arising from very isolated historical convergences of

events. The more pervasive and mundane practices of exclusion and coercion used

against “others” - recent immigrants, women, people of color, laborers - tend toward

historical invisibility. American cultural exceptionalism in relation to the global system is

vindicated in the popular imagination by the nation’s willingness to recognize and learn

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from the overt and gross “exceptions” to American exceptionalism (e.g., as compared to

Japan’s unwillingness to claim full responsibility for W.W. II atrocities).

U.S. foreign policy and industry tactics violating the state’s juridical-political

principles were, and continued to be, justified in relation to American cultural

exceptionalism and the attendant doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Accordingly, covert and

overt U.S. military engagements in the Middle East, South East Asia, and Central

America were explained in relation to the securitization and dissemination of liberal,

democratic capitalist ways of life rationalized in the 1947 Containment Doctrine, 1957

Eisenhower Doctrine, 1960s Domino Theory, and 1980s Reagan Doctrine, among others

(Waldman, 2004). When acknowledged, brute authoritarian force used against dissenting

peasants, workers, and rebels in distant lands found legitimacy in the necessities of life.

“Enemies” not effectively dehumanized or othered were represented as misguided, naïve,

or childlike. Human “collateral costs” were, and continue to be, represented as regrettable

necessities in order to preserve the American national way of life: liberal democratic

capitalism.

As explained previously, in the post-Cold War context, the American way of life

was increasingly cast in relation to neoliberal principles and practices of “freedom”

linked in the popular imagination to the historical ideals of America’s entrepreneurial,

rational, free-market founders. However, although efforts to promote American-style,

“democratic” capitalism abroad in the 1980s and 1990s typically operated “from a

distance,” market and biopolitical authorities also sought to map and govern risky

individuals using both pastoral and repressive strategies. For example, peasants in Central

America protesting neoliberal “reforms” impoverishing populations typically met

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repressive state force. Poor populations in Nigeria resisting transnational energy

corporations exploiting national resources met privatized security. Labor unions in liberal

western democracies protesting outsourcing and flexibilization met technocratic analyses

and public apathy. The Seattle World Trade protests of 1999 operated as a site of

condensation for organized resistance to neoliberal market imperatives, suggesting

opportunities for dispersed forces to gain strength through new alliances fostered and

coordinated using new information technologies such as the Internet.

In response to resistance against the effects of neoliberal market strategies and

technologies, a wide range of private and public “philanthropic” apparatuses emerged (or

became more visible), and promised to foster liberal, democratic values and markets

abroad. American philanthropic institutions often display their missionary zeal in their

statements of “democracy promotion” (House, 2006, p. A26). Among others, these

organizations include:

The National Endowment for Democracy: Public funded. “The Endowment is

guided by the belief that freedom is a universal human aspiration that can be

realized through the development of democratic institutions, procedures, and

values. Governed by an independent, nonpartisan board of directors, the NED

makes hundreds of grants each year to support prodemocracy groups in Africa,

Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East.”

(http://www.ned.org/)

The International Republican Institute: Public and private funding. “A

nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, the International Republic Institute advances

freedom and democracy worldwide by developing political parties, civic

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institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law.”

(http://www.iri.org/)

The Center for International and Private Enterprise: Public and private funding.

“CIPE provides management assistance, practical experience and financial

support to local organizations to strengthen their capacity to implement

democratic and economic reforms.” (http://www.cipe.org/)

Freedom House: Public and private funding. “Freedom House, a non-profit,

nonpartisan organization, is a clear voice for democracy and freedom around the

world. Through a vast array of international programs and publications, Freedom

House is working to advance the remarkable worldwide expansion of political and

economic freedom.”( http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=1)

Together, international lending, trade, and “democracy promotion” organizations aim to

promote and securitize world-wide neoliberal governmentalities by facilitating market

penetration while “educating” overseas populations in the principles and practices of

marketized, democratic personhood. For example, President Bush’s “Millennium

Challenge Corporation,” created in 2002, sought to ensure “good governance” by making

foreign assistance contingent upon compliance with social, market, and governmental

policy (Phillips, M., 2006). These discourses of democracy promotion reflect the

missionary zeal of Manifest Destiny but are couched in secular frameworks of American-

style good governance.

However, the sacred dimensions of Manifest Destiny have been reinvigorated

within the discursive alliance of the neoconservative and conservative Christian

movements. This union shares neoliberal market values but distrusts government from

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afar. That is, although the union embraces the idea of a self-regulating global society

operating according to neoliberal regimes of government, it demands sovereign

intervention to achieve and securitize this ideal domestically and abroad. In particular,

neoconservatives view sovereign state authority as necessary to remove barriers to the

global flows of capital and to enforce market disciplines upon dependent and/or unruly

populations rendered useless by bloated social securities. Neoconservatives favoring

expansion of the philanthropic complex to reduce security risks and to shepherd

vulnerable and/or ignorant populations empowered Christian “relief” and charitable

organizations within the domestic sphere (prisons and welfare operations) and abroad.

Neoconservatives and Christian conservatives have also tried to reinvigorate patriotism

domestically while fostering the image of a strong state abroad.

As illustrated by the homepage for The Project for the New American Century,

neoconservative authorities, forms of expertise, and strategies prefer direct state action to

enforce dispersion of American liberal-democratic capitalism:

The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational

organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American

leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such leadership

requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle.

The Project for the New American Century intends, through issue briefs, research

papers, advocacy journalism, conferences, and seminars, to explain what

American world leadership entails. It will also strive to rally support for a

vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement and to

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stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy and America’s role

in the world. (“The Project,” n.d.)

Supplementing this introduction is the organization’s statement of principles by leading

members, which articulates commitments including an explicit need to “accept

responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international

order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles” (“Statement,” n.d.).

As Norton (2004) argued in Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire, the

Straussian-influenced neoconservative policy agenda has directly shaped U.S.

intervention in the Middle East, engineering its policy toward Israel, and its efforts

toward regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq (see also Drury, 1999; Postel, 2003).

The

American religious right strongly favors U.S. support for Israel because of their belief

Israel fulfills Biblical prophecy (Higgins, 2006). The convergence of neoconservative

foreign policy agendas and evangelical support for Israel shaped U.S. foreign policy

under the George W. Bush administration (2001-present). Manifest Destiny oddly

embraced Zionism.

George W. Bush’s administration strove to revitalize America by reinvigorating

patriotism domestically while fostering an image of national strength abroad. The

collapse of the Soviet Union had posed an epistemic problem for the U.S. across the

1990s as it had lost its central, defining adversary (Stephanson, 1995). The global

dissemination of (neo)liberal market operations, technologies, and ideologies provided a

kind of (secularized) proof of Manifest Destiny but lacked the ideational impact

necessary to mobilize populations. Moreover, neoliberal market technologies and

ideologies were subject to multiple, populist and moralistic, discourses of resistance.

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The events of September 11 reinvigorated American patriotism while presenting a

force against which America’s Manifest Destiny could be pitted. “Global terrorism” and

“despotic regimes” became the new enemies uniting the nation. Accordingly, at the onset

of the twenty-first century, terror and security are the problem spaces occupying

neoconservative authorities, and the articulation of these “problems” occur in the contexts

of the imagined spaces of American racial/national/cultural identity and Manifest

Destiny. Increasingly, these “problems” occupy the imagination of the broader American

public as well.

The historical conditions of possibility for the rise to prominence of these linked

problem formulations of terrorism and security stem (at least in part) from past neoliberal

governmental policy objectives, including securitization of resources for the state (oil)

and capitalist accumulation strategies (open markets). However, although U.S. foreign

policy objectives in the Middle East are fundamentally driven by the neoliberal

imperatives of securitizing energy flows vital to the American way of life, they are also

inflected and rationalized by a racialized national discourse formalized in the “Lewis

Doctrine” (Waldman, 2004, p. A12) and Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis

(1993a). Together, the Lewis and Huntington doctrines narrate the epic struggle between

the forces of modernity and light (embodied in America’s Manifest Destiny) and the

forces of pre-modernity and otherness.

The “Lewis Doctrine” was coined by Peter Waldman, a journalist for The Wall

Street Journal when describing the political interpretations and policy implications of

works by the prominent Middle Eastern historian, Bernard Lewis. For at least sixty years,

Bernard Lewis provided a looking glass through which western nations have beheld the

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Middle East (e.g., Lewis, 1966). In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, which

critiqued Lewis’ work for producing a simplifying and colonial construction of the

Middle East and its peoples. Despite Said’s criticism, Lewis’ work continued to define

(or legitimize) hegemonic western interpretations and policy orientations in the region.

Lewis’ continued impact is illustrated in Waldman’s (2004) article. In particular,

Waldman invoked the policy implications of Lewis’ idea of Mideastern “malaise.”

Accordingly, Waldman argued: “Most Islamic countries have failed miserably at

modernizing their societies . . . beckoning outsiders—this time, Americans—to

intervene” (p. A1). Waldman continued, “Mr. Lewis’s diagnosis of the Muslim world’s

malaise, and his call for a U.S. military invasion to see democracy in the Mideast, have

helped define the boldest shift in U.S. foreign policy in 50 years” (p.A1). From this

emerges fundamental problematics: how to reduce neoliberal market barriers, contain

terrorism, and promote democracy:

Terrorism has replaced Moscow as the global foe. And now America, having

outlasted the Soviets to become the sole superpower, no longer seeks to contain

but to confront, defeat and transform. How successful it is at remolding Iraq and

the rest of the Mideast could have a huge impact on what sort of superpower

America will be for decades to come: bold and assertive -- or inward, defensive

and cut off. (p. A1)

Waldman cited Paul Wolfowitz as stating: “Bernard has taught us how to understand the

complex and important history of the Middle East, and use it to guide us where we will

go next to build a better world for generations to come” (p. A12).

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Samuel Huntington’s idea about the “clash of civilizations,” published first in

1993 in Foreign Affairs, drew directly upon Lewis’ work, particularly The Atlantic

Monthly essay, “The Roots of Muslim Rage” (1990). Huntington’s essay was produced as

part of the Olin Institute’s project on “the Changing Security Environment and American

National Interests” (p. 22). It initially received limited attention until it was popularized

in the press after the attacks of September 11.

Huntington (1993a) claimed “principal conflicts of global politics occur between

nations and groups of different civilizations” (p. 22), primarily between the Western

civilizations (including the “European” and “North American” “variants”) and Islam

(with its “Arab, Turkic and Malay subdivisions”) (p. 24), although he also postulated

potential conflicts with Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American

and possibly African civilizations. Huntington argued that “fault lines between

civilizations” replace Cold War ones. In such clashes, “the question is ‘What are you?’”

(1993a, p. 27). Huntington focused most exclusively on the “bloody borders” of the

“crescent-shaped Islamic bloc” (p. 34) as a source of impending conflict. Huntington

(1993b) asserted in, “If Not Civilizations, What?” that on important issues, “the West is

on one side and most of the other civilizations are on the other” (p.189). In 1996, Francis

Fukuyama referred to Huntington’s thesis as the “leading paradigm for post-Cold War

world politics” (p. A20).

Huntington claimed “Faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify

with and what they will fight and die for” (1993b, p. 194). Yet, Huntington presupposed

his categories of analysis, failing to acknowledge the (bio)politics and sovereign

decisionalism implicit in his delineations of distinct “civilizations” and “fault lines” (C.

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Aradau, personal correspondence, August 6, 2007). The politics of economic

development, capital accumulation, colonialism, and the Palestinian conflict are invisible

in Huntington’s racialized interpretation of cultural conflict (Abrahamian, 2003; Boal,

Clark, Matthews, & Watts, 2005; Ibrahim, 2003). Despite invoking stereotyped and

homogenizing representations of Middle Eastern people and politics, Huntington’s work

helped popularize a set of truth statements about the nature of conflict in the world,

particularly in the Middle East, shaping perceptions in the United States and other

western nations.

Although neither Huntington nor Lewis actually propounded a Manichean view of

the world, their homogenized accounts of Middle Eastern otherness have been grafted

upon a pre-existing Manichean theology. The American consciousness is steeped in

Manichean dualism cultivated across disparate sites, including Hollywood productions

(e.g., Star Wars) and Cold War political rhetoric (e.g., Reagan’s account of the Soviet

“evil empire”). The public’s perception of a racialized threat of the other is exacerbated

by the cultural imaginings of the religious right. Xenophobic fantasies of clashes of

civilizations blend oddly with the Armageddon/End-Of-Days narrative chronicled in the

LaHaye Left Behind series. Many Americans believe it is their destiny to challenge the

forces of unreason and evil because of America’s unique historical and spiritual status.

Thus, the seemingly bewildering complexity of Middle Eastern politics is simplified and

rendered immediately intelligible through the imposition of these pre-existing ideologies.

President Bush’s Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People

on September 20, 2001 dramatized stark conflict between good and evil represented by

terrorism:

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Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in

this chamber -- a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-

appointed. They hate our freedoms -- our freedom of religion, our freedom of

speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other…

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.

With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the

world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us, because we stand in their

way…

This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just

America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the

fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom. . . .

Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that

God is not neutral between them….

Although Bush carefully avoided casting all peoples in the Middle East as terrorist, his

binary rhetoric reinforced a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil and

cast U.S. military actions as “just” protections of human rights (see Coe, Domke,

Graham, John, & Pickard, 2004). Bush’s repeated warnings of terrorist threats posed by

“Islamic extremists” condense and exacerbate general social anxiety (Fletcher, 2006b).

Consequentl, as illustrated by Tony Blankley’s popular text, The West’s Last

Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? (2005), many Americans today believe

“western civilization” is itself threatened with annihilation. The nation, already prepped

by a “discourse of fear” cultivated since the mid 1990s by sensationalist media reporting

(Altheide, 2002, p. ix), responded to the spectacle of destruction wrought by terrorists

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with fear and anger. In this context of paranoia, Vice President Dick Cheney offered his

“1% Doctrine,” which legitimized pre-emptive action against foreign nations or peoples

if there were even a 1% chance terrorists could attain “weapons of mass destruction.”

(“America’s Longest,” 2006, p. 22).

Cheney’s 1% doctrine can be understood as formally inaugurating a new

formulation of risk. Accordingly, Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster (2006) stated a

dispositif of “precautionary risk” currently governs U.S. evaluation and response to

terrorist risk. They compare this “precautionary risk” with “prudentialism,” which

typically governs neoliberal risk assessment. Whereas prudentialism entails prudent

calculation and minimization of risk under contingency, precautionary risk implies

catastrophic contingency (“risk beyond risk”) (p. 13) and therefore invokes a “dispositif

at the limit” (p. 17). Precautionary risk operates as such as a dispositif at the limit

because it is premised on the incalculability of risk conjoined with the catastrophic nature

of potential effects. Precautionary risk governance thus entails tendencies toward drastic

prevention. Whole populations become suspect leading to limitless surveillance:

Precautionary technologies change the relation to social groups, to the population

as created by the dispositif of insurance. Statistical computation and risk

management relied upon the scientific representation of social groups that were to

be governed; profiling was an important technology for selecting these groups and

targeting them. At the limit of knowledge, this relation to representation becomes

an arbitrary connection. ‘Suspected’ terrorists are arbitrarily gleaned from larger

categories, such as migrants or Muslim communities. (p. 15)

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The effect is risk assessment becomes “decisional” in the sense that a sovereign decision

is made outside of juridical processes because “responsibility is uncertain and a priori to

the event and therefore impossible to accommodate by the juridical system” (pp. 16-17).

As formulated in the Manichean/clash of civilizations thesis, precautionary risk

government is absolutely necessary because the American way of life is itself at risk of

extinction. Consequently, even the most chilling of measures - including the torture of

prisoners at Abu Grave and the long-term incarceration of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay -

are viewed as justified by the security and ideological imperatives of this epochal

struggle for life itself.

The Bush administration drew upon the logic of precautionary risk when

justifying the impending invasion of Iraq, as demonstrated by his radio address to the

nation: “Our cause is just, the security of the nations we serve and the peace of the world.

And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam

Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people” (Bush, 2003). The public,

primed by the terrorist acts of 9-11 and conditioned against “those who hate freedom”

responded to the invasion announcement by displaying American flags on their person,

autos, offices, and houses (Bush, 2002). Fear for the “American way of life” permeated

the popular imagination as the public was warned of hidden Iraqi weapons of mass

destruction.

By 2004, Bush’s rhetoric had shifted away from precautionary risk as weapons of

destruction failed to materialize in Iraq. Instead, the discourse of Manifest Destiny

emerged as retroactive justification for the invasion as Bush described the December

2005 Iraqi elections as a “watershed moment in the story of freedom” (Bush, 2005).

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Subsequent media reports of staggering civilian fatalities in Iraq soon unraveled the story

of freedom. The clash of civilizations thesis was subsequently adapted to explaining civil

conflict within Iraq as the forces of freedom within Iraq were represented as combating

the forces of terror and tyranny.

In 2006, the clash of civilizations thesis again embraced the entirety of Iraq as

Bush represented the U.S. as engaged directly in “a struggle for civilization” (cited in

Rutenberg & Stolberg, 2006, p.12). Moreover, Bush warned again of a radical Islamic

network “determined to bring death and suffering to our homes” (p. 12), thereby

articulating the danger as personal and proximate to American citizens removed from the

immediacies of war.

Critics’ efforts to understand the “truth of the invasion” may reveal neoliberal

market imperatives but obscure the reality of the war of the races as experienced in the

popular imagination. Many Americans fear for their way of life and for the safety of their

families and homes as the rhetoric of terror permeates their daily lives. For them, the

clash of civilization is real as the fantasy of Manifest Destiny encounters a ferocious but

spatially dislocated other. Terrorists serve as sites of condensation for displaced social

anxieties (e.g., xenophobia, neoliberal market pains, confusion about complex systems),

purifying Americans’ sense of global purpose in an otherwise complex and risky world.

The regime of truth thriving in this charged political environment tolerates little

substantive dissent while masquerading as reasoned discourse (Bratich, 2003, 2004).

Simplified understandings prevail while complex accounts implicating American

complicity in producing global risks are often rejected as exaggerated, conspiratorial,

and/or unpatriotic. According to Jack Bratich, popular discourse encourages moderate

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skepticism while simultaneously enjoining subjects to reject any discourse of truth that

problematizes norms of political rationality. The discourses persisting in problematizing

simplified norms and understandings are radicalized and rejected. Thus, the regime of

truth operates in a disciplinary fashion as individuals monitor their talk and the talk of

social others for the contagion of radicalism and, particularly, conspiracism (Bratich,

2003).

American repressive and surveillance apparatuses have become more apparent,

more visible in this environment of suspicion and fear. They find justification in the

belief by many that extraordinary measures are required to address extraordinary

circumstances. The examples developed below illustrate how the ideological and material

constitutions of security threats engender and legitimize the resurgence of state

sovereignty and police apparatuses in the context of what Ben Chappell (2006) described

as “threat governmentality,” which refers to the surveillance of space and population in

the context of a panopticon of threat (p. 314). Threat governmentality’s hegemony stems

from particular formulations of risk.

Surveillance, Threat Governmentality, and Precautionary Risk

Threat governmentality finds justification in precautionary risk, warranting

sovereign decisionality outside of de jure juridical processes. In this section I illustrate

sovereign decisionality in relation to the state’s extension of security apparatuses.

In the context of precautionary risk government (Aradau & van Munster, 2007),

the Bush administration pursued secretive strategies for rendering the populace visible

enabled by new surveillance and database technologies. In 2001, the administration

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launched a clandestine intelligence program monitoring communications between people

residing in the U.S. and other countries when they were was suspected of having terrorist

connections (Pincus, 2007). The program was found unconstitutional by a federal judge

in 2006 (Liptak & Lichtblau, 2006). The administration also secretly collected the

domestic telephone and email records of millions of U.S. businesses and households,

violating federal law and/or agency rules more than 1000 times (Solomon, 2007). The

surveillance data were entered into huge databases and analyzed using informatic

programs (Gellman & Mohammed, 2006). Data mining has also been used by the

Pentagon to target teenagers for military recruiting (Mohammed & Goo, 2006). Wide

spread surveillance and data mining illustrate the fantasy of informatic, targeted

governance (Amoore & De Goede, 2005) while concretely demonstrating how

information, once produced, can be used for other and potentially insidious purposes

(e.g., targeting recruits or suppressing dissent).

When faced with accusations of privacy abuses, the Bush administration

employed juridico-legal means to legitimize its sovereign decisionality. First, they

appealed to the U.S. Constitution’s vague but broad description of presidential powers

(Leonnig, 2006). Then, in 2006, Bush justified the “need” for greater wiretap authority by

appealing to changing technologies which demand application of more pervasive

surveillance systems: “The nature of communications has changed quite dramatically,”

Bush warned in an address, “The terrorists who want to harm America can now buy

disposable cell phones and open anonymous e-mail messages. Our laws need to change to

take these changes into account” (cited in Asthana & DeYoung, 2006, p. A1). In 2007,

Bush’s administration revised the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),

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which stipulates the conditions under which the government can conduct surveillance.

Revisions expanded potential targets for surveillance and warrantless surveillance

(Pincus, 2007). Additionally, federal authorities unveiled a new initiative which allowed

federal, state, local and tribal agents to use data from spy satellites for domestic

enforcement of civil and criminal law (Warrick, 2007). Precautionary risk management

warrants juridical expansion of sovereign decisionality.

Targeted governance and precautionary risk management together have produced

a legacy of indefinite detention at Guantánamo and elsewhere. In 2007, The Washington

Post reported nearly 300 inmates at Guantánamo have never been charged with any crime

and lack the right to challenge their imprisonment under habeas corpus. Inmates may

appeal to review panels set up by the Pentagon, but are denied access to an attorney and

to the information used against them (“Spectacle,” 2007). Moreover, they are barred by

federal judicial order from revealing the details of the “alternative interrogation methods”

used upon them (Leonnig & Rich, 2006, p. A1). U.S. war conduct in Iraq has also led to

indefinite detentions: detainees numbered 24,500 in August 2007 (Shanker, 2007).

Precautionary risk management of possible terrorist attacks no doubt contributed

to the U.S. support of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon aimed at quelling Hezbollah forces,

although this dissident group is unconnected to al Qaeda. Amnesty International (2007)

reported approximately 1,200 civilians died during that invasion. Additionally, precaution

risk management and targeted governance organize the U.S. state’s current drive toward

an aerial assault on Iran.

Foreign policy is thus inflected by the logic of precautionary risk management,

thereby necessitating new strategies for targeted territorial surveillance and control. Arms

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inspectors, spy satellites, and human infiltrators are supplemented by informatic analysis

of currency flows and commodity transactions. Perhaps most bizarrely, precautionary risk

management outweighs the potential risks to domestic populations as the government

invests extensively in “bioterror” by building classified facilities to research biological

weapons (Warrick, 2006, p. A1). As explained by Melinda Cooper (2006), a pre-emptive

logic governs U.S. research on bioterror. Rather than attempting to halt others’ dangerous

advances, this anticipatory logic mobilizes innovation to pre-empt potential fall-out.

However, pre-emption escalates risk and increases the need for surveillance over one’s

own and others’ innovations.

Consistent with neoliberal market imperatives, much of the work involved in

targeted governance and precautionary risk management has been accomplished by

private contractors (see Pincus, 2006a, 2006b). Although private contracting exemplifies

neoliberal logics, it also points to new opportunities for consolidation of power and

control. Particularly ominous in this regard is the U.S. reliance on private security

contractors such as Blackwater Corporation, which was employed domestically in the

aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and currently enjoys a multi-million dollar contract with

the U.S. State Department for work in Iraq. Blackwater’s strong ties to the religious right

raise alarm (Scahill, 2007), as does the more general tendency for the state’s repressive

and foreign policy apparatuses to be outsourced to market-driven contractors unregulated

by legislative and/or judicial oversight (see Hartnett & Stengrim, 2006). In September

2007, Blackwater employees opened unprovoked fire in Baghdad, killing unarmed

civilians, raising wide-spread criticism about contractors’ war conduct, especially given

their immunity to prosecution in Iraq (Fadel & Hammoudi, 2007).

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Securitization of the state has also included a wide and often bewildering array of

micro-practices, often funded by federal authorities but implemented by local officials.

For example, federal money brought surveillance cameras to small towns to protect

against terrorist threats (Fahrenthold, 2006). Additionally, the Homeland Security

Department created a unit to combat “homegrown terrorists,” targeting radicalization at

prisons and universities. As the news report reads, “Impressionable students are

particularly susceptible to charismatic leaders aiming to ‘instill a brand of extreme

ideology,” especially as “extremists ‘manipulate social situations to create perceptions of

victimization’” (Hall, 2007, p. A4).

Security has also been localized through informal, community based policing.

Immediately following the 9-11 attacks, people were advised to report suspicious

individuals, exacerbating cultural xenophobia in an increasingly panoptic society.

Individual civilians were interpellated as the first line of defense against the dispersed

and circulating networks of “enduring terror,” which could purportedly contaminate the

safety of any neighborhood in any town (cited in Fletcher, 2006b, p. A1).

As James Hay (2006) described in “Designing Homes to Be the First Line of

Defense,” American citizens are encouraged by the Department of Homeland Security to

securitize their homes using a standardized diagram of preparedness supplemented with

the homeowner’s personal customization. In effect, civil defense is understood as a kind

of “‘social security’, a form of welfare articulated as paramilitary preparedness” (p. 357).

New, militarized, and prudential understandings of social security replace social welfare

ones (Aradau, personal communication, August 6, 2007) as individual citizens are

constituted as “soldiers” (Hay, 2006, p. 374) and are encouraged to self-manage risk,

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through training and home securitization, since these activities demonstrate civic

responsibility and the capacity to self-govern responsibly. Home security not only

illustrates government at a distance and the promulgation of a militarized ethos, but also

effectively simplifies the broader context of international events by hystericizing their

significance in terms of threats to personal security.

In this context of meaning and action, it is not surprising citizens actively report

comments of “suspicious” activities, particularly in high-security locales such as airports,

public transportation (trains, subways), and malls. Passage of the Patriot Act in October

2001 expanded legal surveillance while public concern about personal security fostered

support for heightened surveillance. Bilge Yesil (2006) observed this amplified scrutiny,

particularly in relation to widespread video surveillance, also increased individual angst,

leading to more diligent self-surveillance, bolstering the capacity for normalizing

government at a distance in the absence of force.

Chappell (2006) argued individuals identified as ethnic minorities are

disproportionately caught up in the panopticon of targeted surveillance extended and

legitimized by the Patriot Act and other homeland security initiatives. Importantly, liberal

notions of citizen rights tend to be outweighed by the epidemiological construction of

public security risk, while empowering “petty sovereigns” tasked with protecting public

safety. Security apparatuses fail to distinguish between crimes and acts of war, and,

moreover, often fail to differentiate between criminal offences and minor public order

disturbances (Hörnqvist, 2004).

For all Americans, even those targeted for heightened surveillance, security

anxiety, coupled with the individualization of risk and responsibility, encourages personal

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vigilance and militancy echoing Cold War paranoia (Hay, 2006). Conservative

Americans respond particularly vehemently to threat governmentality and precautionary

risk, consolidating their alignment with hawkish candidates, especially supporting

candidates who espouse a worldview representing Americans as engaged in a “heroic

battle against evil” (Pyszczynksi cited in Begley, 2006c, p. B1). In this discursive milieu,

camouflage fashion, Star Wars style media Manichaeism, G.I. Joe inspired toys, and

SUVs and Hummers contribute to a kaleidoscope of militancy into which young children

are interpellated. Jonathan Rutherford’s (2005) essay, “At War,” provides a powerful and

chilling account of the culture of war at home, including the military’s creation of an

official war video game, which provides soldiers and citizens alike a “simulacrum of

fetishized technology and weaponry, and a frontier land of a collapsing Middle Eastern

urbanscape” (p. 633).

This framework of understanding renders intelligible America’s popular support

for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. American television news networks reported on the war

under the “war on terror” heading, legitimizing the invasion even after intelligence links

between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were acknowledged to be false. America’s belief

in Manifest Destiny, anxiety about oil, and vague understandings of the cultural and

political complexities of the Middle East, coupled with specters of terrorist others,

converged to solidify continued backing of the war until late in 2006, when rising

American casualties and Iraqi civil war began to undermine support. However, since by

this time Iraq had become a training ground for terrorists, precautionary risk mandated

continued involvement to reduce attendant risks.

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Sovereign Exceptionality

“Once politics is construed as the continuation of war, once war becomes conceived as a

condition for the possibility for life, for the pursuit of security and the increase of its

being, however that conception may be grounded, the conditions are created whereby life

itself becomes the object for various forms of destruction, annihilation, and quiet

extermination” (Reid, 2006, p. 149)

Contemporary security exigencies are represented in political discourse and in the

popular imagination as warranting the re-assertion of the sovereign capacity to kill, and

as legitimizing abnegation of liberal “rights” of personhood. Fearing for the national way

of life, public acceptance grows for forms of sovereignty and discipline that might

otherwise be viewed as impinging against liberal guarantees. Government through

freedom is increasingly characterized by “exceptions,” justifying the withholding of life,

forceful discipline, and/or sovereign repression abroad. Domestically, police apparatuses

discard pastoralism in favor of authoritarianism against suspect or dangerous individuals

(see Giroux, 2004). Likewise, the conservative Supreme Court has issued rulings limiting

citizens’ abilities to challenge government and corporate policies, particularly through

use of the doctrine of standing (Bravin, 2007). and through the purported protection of

state secrets (Sherman, 2007).

Precautionary risk government is used to legitimize sovereign decisionality by

executive authorities. For four years, Vice President Cheney has claimed that his office is

exempt from federal orders regulating handing of security information; he recently tried

to abolish the office responsible for enforcing those orders (Baker, 2007). President Bush

has claimed unprecedented presidential authority and has argued he is not subject to bills

338

he authorizes (Weisman, 2007). The 2007 nominee for Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey,

echoed the administration’s prevailing attitude that the U.S. Presidency defines the

parameters and applications of law, including constitutional law, stating the U.S.

President has the capacity of “putting somebody within the law” (cited in Shenon, 2007,

p. A1). However, perhaps the most ominous instances of sovereign exceptionality

revolve around ancient biopolitical rights, including habeas corpus.

The Bush administration pursued secret detention and rendition of “terrorist”

suspects within the U.S. and abroad. These suspects, some of whom are citizens of

western “democratic” states such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia, often end up in

“secret” prisons abroad where they are subject to “aggressive” interrogation techniques

including psychological and corporeal torture (Moore, 2007), and lack access to juridical

protections. Journalists seeking to publicize these events have been threatened with

censorship and criminal charges, including war crimes accusations (Stone, 2006). When

forced to vindicate illegal extraditions and torture, the Bush administration asserted

detainees were war combatants who lack protection by Geneva Conventions (DeYoung,

2007). U.S. judicial authorities stymied efforts by the wrongly accused to challenge

detention and torture, arguing judicial review would expose state secrets (Sherman,

2007).

As the recent declassification of the CIA’s “family jewels” illustrates, U.S.

political actors and petty tyrants knowingly violated the constraints of international and

national law across the second half of the twentieth century using banned strategies such

as press censorship and harassment, targeted assassinations, and torture (DeYoung &

Pincus, 2007, A1). As revealed by these documents, there is nothing new about the use of

339

sovereign decisionality to strip individuals of all rights and protections, thereby rendering

them bare life. The very perseverance and typicality of these operations calls into

question the existential viability of liberal protections.

What is new is the transformation of law to legitimize these acts of sovereign

decisionality. After the Supreme Court’s ruling that enemy combatants were protected by

Geneva Conventions, the Bush administration passed new rules in 2006, and again in

2007, for interrogation and prosecution allowing aggressive methods, retroactively

protecting American military and personnel who previously tortured suspects, and

severely limiting courtroom rights for those defendants fortunate enough to be granted

trials (DeYoung, 2007; Fletcher, 2006a). The 2006 rules were justified by their purported

role in preventing terrorist attacks:

This program has been one of the must successful intelligence efforts in American

history. . . . It has helped prevent attacks on our country. And the bill I sign today

will ensure that we can continue to use this vital tool to protect the American

people for years to come. (Bush cited in Fletcher, 2006a, p. A4)

Continued allegations of CIA detainee abuse in 2007 met with claims that CIA

interrogation programs were conducted “lawfully, with great care and close review,

producing vital information that has helped disrupt terrorist plots and save lives” (cited in

White & Tyson, 2007, p. A1). The rules passed in the summer of 2007 provided new

protocols allowing “harsh interrogation” while offering only the most basic levels of

biological protection to prisoners, rendering them simply bare life. Accordingly, a senior

administration official stated any future use of “extremes of heat and cold” would be

340

subject to a "reasonable interpretation . . . we're not talking about forcibly induced

hypothermia" (quoted in DeYoung, 2007, p. A1).

American soldiers in Iraq support the use of torture, particularly in the context of

precautionary risk:

More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they

believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about

insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday. Four in 10 said they approve of such

illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier. (Ricks & Tyson, 2007,

A1)

Fear Up Harsh (Lagouranis & Mikaelian, 2007) chronicled use of torture in Iraq at Abu

Grave, among other sites, including the use of attack dogs, hypothermia, waterboarding

and beatings. In a National Public Radio segment, Lagouranis (2007) described using

torture on a prisoner he did not believe had vital intelligence, stating he was “simply

exerting power over this person, trying to topple his will through cruelty and violence.”

Lagouranis also documented how biopolitical authorities, including Army medical

doctors and psychiatrists, were employed to “break” prisoners (also see Miles, 2006).

Lagouranis acknowledged torture by the U.S. is not new but argued the “real difference

here . . . is that this is being allowed tacitly and explicitly all the way up to/through the

Pentagon and to the White House and that’s a real shift . . . now we’re throwing away

Geneva conventions.”

Claudia Aradau (2007) recently suggested the practices of torture found in

Guantánamo and other locales stem less from sovereign decisionality than from the

“necessary consequence of naming the war on terror a different war” (p. 496). Aradau’s

341

point was that the law is not suspended by an act of decisionality, but rather it is

transformed through its materialization, its sublimation to “concrete situations and

representations of spaces and subjects” (p.496). In response to the supposed exigencies of

situation, law thus codifies opportunities for legally creating exceptions to the

universalizing discourses of rights.

Aradau’s observation reveals the population as always/already subject to

sovereign power. We are all bare life. Perhaps this recognition, conjoined with the

ascendant war of the races, explains popular nonchalance regarding extraordinary

renditions. Elimination of “dangerous bodies” (Cairo, 2006, p. 288) from the global

population is believed essential to securitization of the American way of life. A more

pastoral biopolitics of population cultivation through foreign aid gives way to a

“terroristic” eugenics aimed at excising risk and dangerousness.

This eugenics of terror explains public nonchalance toward civilian casualties in

Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, public outrage was muted in response to The

Lancet’s biopolitical report of 600,000 Iraqi mortalities stemming from the war

(Burnham, Lafta, Doocy, & Roberts, 2006). Moreover, the massacre and subsequent

cover-up of unarmed civilians in Haditha by U.S. Marines also failed to generate

widespread public outrage (Whi, 2007).

In the popular imagination and in the policies of neoconservative authorities,

sovereign force over life is warranted by the threats of terrorism, by the clash of

civilizations, and by the dispersed micro-populations of individuals who misunderstand

and resist the expansion of American markets and values.

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Sovereignty and Liberal Governmentality

In 2007, Amnesty International issued a report online that asserted:

Five years after 9/11, new evidence came to light in 2006 of the way in which the

U.S. Administration treated the world as one giant battlefield for its ‘war on

terror’, kidnapping, arresting, arbitrarily detaining, torturing, and transferring

suspects from one secret prison to another across the world with impunity, in what

the U.S. termed ‘extraordinary rendition.’

Amnesty International’s Secretary General insisted, “Nothing more aptly portrayed the

globalization of human rights violations than the U.S.-led ‘war on terror’ and its

programme of ‘extraordinary renditions’ which implicated governments in countries as

far apart as Italy and Pakistan, Germany and Kenya,” damaging the rule of law and

human rights institutions at national and international levels. Consequently, the world has

witnessed a resurgence of ruthless sovereignty:

Through short sighted, fear-mongering and divisive policies, governments are

undermining the rule of law and human rights, feeding racism and xenophobia,

dividing communities, intensifying inequalities and sowing the seeds for more

violence and conflict. (Amnesty International, 2007)

Although the Amnesty report attaches a kind of pastoral benevolence to the rule of law

and human rights that empirical examination might refute (see Mboka, 2007), it points to

growing disregard for liberal rights and protections.

Liberal governmentality purportedly operates by means of the production and

self-government of “free” individuals. And yet, the ancient capacities of sovereignty, to

kill and inflict suffering, remain intact, ready to be executed. Liberal protections

343

including habeas corpus and due process lack existential guarantee. In particular,

destruction and annihilation occur when war becomes perceived as the condition for life

(Reid, 2006). Life is stripped of rights and dignity, revealed as “bare life” (Agamben,

1995) as the liberal rights of citizens are denied under sovereign decisionality in the state

of permanent war.

The rise of the logic of precautionary risk management, coupled with the

expansion of the technologies of surveillance, have produced regimes of government that

target dangerous and risky individuals using all the technological might and brute force

of twenty-first century repressive apparatuses. Moreover, militant security technologies

and logics govern individual practice, producing everyday panopticons of surveillance of

self and others.

Totalitarianism and fascism take hold when populations organized around

common articulations of national or racialized identity are mobilized by fear and anxiety.

Yet, even while liberal rights are stripped, the liberal imagination cannot readily come to

terms with creeping totalitarianism. The banality of many domestic sovereign

technologies, as illustrated by computerized surveillance, mystifies the consolidation of

sovereign power (see Arendt, 1963). Simultaneously, many of the symbolic practices

involved in producing biopolitical distinctions between preferred and denigrated or risky

forms of life are decentralized ones, promulgated in the neoliberal marketplace of goods

and ideas.

It is my argument that totalitarianism always/already haunts liberal

governmentalities. First, liberal governmentalities promoting rational subjecthood

obscure how understandings of self and other are inflected by economic, political, and

344

often racialized, social relations. This chapter explored how Manifest Destiny informs

Americans’ self-understandings, shaping perceptions of others who fail to conform to, or

resist, liberal norms of economic, cultural, and political conduct. In the American popular

imagination, deviant, risky, irrational, illiberal others require application of sovereign

apparatuses. The de-territorialization of risky persons - their circulation across

geographic spaces - heightens fear and demands limitless technological and personal

surveillance. Intensified surveillance further amplifies fear, rendering populations

vulnerable to authoritarian seductions impinging against liberal freedoms.

Second, market imperatives produce fertile conditions of possibility for state and

market authoritarianism. As observed by classical political economy, the self-governing

market presupposes the state ensure conditions of possibility for market stability and

growth by regulating labor, by guaranteeing resources, and by facilitating expansion.

Mercantile problem-solution frames bind states to market formulations of value,

prompting colonial undertakings. Neoliberal governmentalities purport to shun state

mercantilism, but market interests and state strategic initiatives are served by military

undertakings that secure needed resources while producing opportunities for arms

dealers, defense contractors, and private security firms.

In sum, although liberal governmentalities profess resistance to centralized and

repressive power, they simultaneously rely on them to securitize everyday life and to

extend the liberal freedoms of the market. Latent “exclusionary principles” within liberal

philosophy and practices legitimize consolidations and executions of power that would

otherwise belie liberal sensibilities (see Mehta, 1999, p. 75). Liberal governmentalities

are thus haunted by the sovereignty they require to extend and protect liberal operations

345

and fantasies. Neoconservative governmentalities embrace these hauntings while striving

to materialize neoliberal imaginings inflected by racialized origins and destinies.

Importantly, Foucault argued modern understandings of racism emerged in the

nineteenth century. Therefore, early modern race wars reflected differences in cultural

practices and identities. Race was not understood in biological and scientific terms. See

Chapter Five for discussion.

This foreign policy orientation has raised alarm among traditional conservatives,

“realist” policy advisors, and military strategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski (2004).

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

The 2007 nominee for Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey, echoed the administration's prevailing attitude that the U.S. Presidency defines the parameters and applications of law, including constitutional law, stating the U.S. President has the capacity of "putting somebody within the law

Jan 2007
1

Weisman

authorizes (Weisman, 2007). The 2007 nominee for Attorney General, Mr. Mukasey, echoed the administration's prevailing attitude that the U.S. Presidency defines the parameters and applications of law, including constitutional law, stating the U.S. President has the capacity of "putting somebody within the law" (cited in Shenon, 2007, p. A1). However, perhaps the most ominous instances of sovereign exceptionality revolve around ancient biopolitical rights, including habeas corpus.

recently suggested the practices of torture found in Guantánamo and other locales stem less from sovereign decisionality than from the "necessary consequence of naming the war on terror a different war

Jan 2007
496

Claudia Aradau

Claudia Aradau (2007) recently suggested the practices of torture found in Guantánamo and other locales stem less from sovereign decisionality than from the "necessary consequence of naming the war on terror a different war" (p. 496). Aradau's