Security after emancipation? Critical theory, violence and resistance

Review of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 1113-1135

  Peoples, Columba ^a  

^a University of Bristol   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 79960227513     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210510000884     Document Type: Article

References (172)

1. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, 'Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern', Development and Change, 23:3 (1992), pp. 5-41, 7-8; on the etymology of emancipation see also: {http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipate} accessed on 15 July 2009.
2. See the special issue on 'Critical International Theory after 25 years', Review of International Studies, 33:S1;
3. Richard Devetak, 'The Project of Modernity in International Relations Theory', in Steven C. Roach (ed.), Critical Theory and International Relations: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2008), and ch. 7 of the same volume, pp. 227-65.
4. Most notably Nicholas J. Rengger, who suggests that 'critical theory has a profound ambiguity about the question of emancipation, an ambiguity which weakens, possibly fatally, the sense of "emancipation" as the possible route out of the problem of order', and, by implication, that emancipation is thus potentially a 'worm' at the core of critical international theory that 'constantly threatens to pollute the whole project' - International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order: Beyond International Relations Theory? (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 159, 151.
5. Andrew Linklater, 'Toward a sociology of global morals with an "emancipatory intent"', Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 135-50.
6. Hayward Alker, 'Emancipation in the Critical Security Studies Project', in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2005), p. 200. Emphasis in original.
7. Usually this 'School' is taken to be comprised primarily by Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones and their respective works on security; see the C. A. S. E. Collective, 'Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto', Security Dialogue, 37:4 (2006), pp. 443-87, 448.
8. For the purposes of this article, though, the term 'Welsh School' is generally eschewed (the notion of 'Schools', as noted below in relation to the Frankfurt School, is itself inherently problematic) in favour of a specific use of the term 'Critical Security Studies' (CSS), used as shorthand here to refer primarily to the work of Booth and Wyn Jones.
9. Ken Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', Review of International Studies, 17:4 (1991), pp. 313-26; 316. The article was drawn from the plenary address to the British International Studies Association (BISA) annual conference in 1990.
10. Booth, Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Theory of World Security.
11. Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 45.
12. See in particular Claudia Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene: Descuritization and emancipation', Journal of International Relations and Development, 7 (2004), pp. 388-413; (Pubitemid 40059052)
13. also Jef Huysmans, 'Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy', Contemporary Political Theory, 3:3 (2004), pp. 321-41.
14. See, for example Ken Booth, 'Introduction to Part 3', in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2005), pp. 181-2
15. Booth, Theory of World Security, p. 278.
16. Richard Wyn Jones likewise argues that CSS reconceptualises security by virtue of being 'Focused, crucially, on emancipation as the prism through which both the theory and practice of security should be viewed', Security, Strategy and Critical Theory (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 1999), p. 166. Emphasis added.
17. See, for example, Michael Sheehan, Security: An Analytical Survey (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2005), pp. 164-8.
18. Some of which are discussed in more detail below.
19. See references in n. 11 above and, for example, Richard Wyn Jones, 'On Emancipation: Necessity, Capacity, and Concrete Utopias', in Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics.
20. Booth, 'Introduction to Part 3', p. 181.
21. Booth, 'Introduction to Part 3', p. 183.
22. See also Ken Booth, Theory of World Security; for example pp. 110-1.
23. Booth, 'Critical Explorations', in Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics.
24. Emancipation is the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and the threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation, not power or order, produces true security. Emancipation, theoretically is security.' - Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', p. 316.
25. With the conference at York University in Toronto that eventually led to Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
26. Most notably Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory.
27. Booth, 'Beyond Critical Security Studies', pp. 261-3.
28. Theory of World Security, p. 41.
29. Booth, 'Beyond Critical Security Studies', p. 261;
30. see also Theory of World Security, p. xv.
31. Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 2.
32. Booth, Theory of World Security, pp. 39-41.
33. Max Horkheimer, 'Traditional and Critical Theory', in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell and others (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).
34. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 23.
35. Horkheimer, cited in ibid., p. 23.
36. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 23.
37. Ibid., p. 77.
38. See Sheehan, Security: An Analytical Survey, p. 167.
39. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974).
40. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1979).
41. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 35.
42. 'Emancipation', Nicholas J. Rengger argues, 'was not one of Adorno's major concerns', and his collaboration with Horkheimer is conventionally seen to curtail the thematic of emancipation - Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order, p. 162.
43. In another sense, though, Adorno's later work might be read as an attempt to re-conceive emancipation in a manner that is not identitarian/totalitarian and avoids some of the potential pitfalls of subjectivism and violence that are discussed later in this article - see especially Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1973).
44. More recently Andrew Linklater has sought to ground a sociology of global morals in a reading of Adorno - see Andrew Linklater, 'Toward a sociology of global morals with an "emancipatory intent"', Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 135-50, 143
45. And 'Distant Suffering and Cosmopolitan Obligations', International Relations, 44 (2007), pp. 19-36, 23.
46. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 134.
47. A position subsequently reiterated in Wyn Jones' 'On Emancipation'.
48. Booth, 'Beyond Critical Security Studies', p. 263.
49. Booth, 'Introduction to Part 3', p. 181.
50. As argued at length in Wyn Jones, 'On Emancipation', p. 219.
51. Martin Shaw, 'There is No Such Thing as Society: Beyond Individualism and Statism in International Security Studies', Review of International Studies, 19 (1993), pp. 159-75
52. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæaver and Jaap De Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
53. See Sheehan, International Security: An Analytical Survey, pp. 165-6 for an overview.
54. See Hayward Alker, 'Emancipation in the Critical Security Studies Project' and Nicholas J. Rengger 'Negative Dialectic? The Two Modes of Critical Theory in World Politics', in Richard Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 98.
55. C. A. S. E, 'Critical Approaches to Security in Europe', p. 456;
56. Claudia Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene: Desecuritization and emancipation', Journal of International Relations and Development, 7 (2004) pp. 388-413, 398. (Pubitemid 40059052)
57. Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene', p. 398.
58. Ibid., p. 390.
59. Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 4, 5. Emphasis in original.
60. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 55.
61. See ch. 5 of Security, Strategy and Critical Theory.
62. Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
63. See, Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New York: Routledge, 2004).
64. Douglas Kellner, preface to Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Vol. 1, edited by Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. xiv.
65. For an overview see Beate Jahn, 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Critical Theory as the Latest Edition of Liberal Idealism', Millennium, 27:3 (1998), pp. 613-41. (Pubitemid 128646813)
66. Kellner (ed.), Introduction to Technology, War and Fascism, pp. 12-5.
67. When Marcuse does refer to DoE it is usually in the form a positive endorsement; see, for example, Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 137, 157.
68. See Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1972), esp. pp. 76-7.
69. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 161.
70. Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', p. 324.
71. Hebert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 20.
72. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Allen Lane, 1969), p. 10.
73. Compare Booth: 'Critical theory escapes the confines of privileged referents [of security] by embracing no static interest save that of the primordial human being and the species in nature' - 'Critical Explorations', in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics, p. 12.
74. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. viii.
75. Ibid., pp. ix-x.
76. On the tendency towards interchangeable use of the concepts of 'emancipation' and 'liberation' more generally, see Pieterse, 'Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern', p. 11.
77. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 76.
78. Ibid., p. 13.
79. See Kellner, Introduction to Technology, War and Fascism for further historical background.
80. As an aside we might note a parallel lack within the 'Copenhagen School' approach with regard to the role of violent resistance in processes of 'desecuritization' (or 'counter-securitizations') - see Ole Wæaver, 'Securitisation and Desecuritisation', in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 46-86;
81. Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene: Descuritization and emancipation', p. 399;
82. Thomas Diez, 'The Paradoxes of Europe's Borders', Comparative European Politics, 4 (2006), pp. 235-52.
83. Booth, 'Introduction to Part 3', p. 183.
84. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, pp. 19, 25.
85. Ibid., p. 27. See also pp. 40-3
86. Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1972), pp. 2-3.
87. Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', p. 316.
88. Ibid., p. 323.
89. Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 2-3.
90. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1965).
91. Compare Wyn Jones' argument that 'the relative security of the inhabitants of the North is purchased at the price of chronic insecurity for the vast majority of the world population [⋯] So, far from being a necessary condition for the good life, statism appears to be one of the main sources of insecurity - part of the problem rather than the solution'; prior to this he argues that 'When a broader definition of security that includes non-military threats is applied, it is clear that many states are deeply implicated in the creation of other forms of insecurity for their own populations, for example in such issues as food and environmental security.' - Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 99.
92. Ibid., p. 37.
93. [T]o countless millions of people in the world it is their own state, and not the "Enemy" that is the primary security threat.' - Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', p. 318.
94. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, p. 67.
95. Johan Galtung, 'Violence, Peace and Peace Research', Journal of Peace Research, 3 (1969), pp. 167-91.
96. On CSS's identification with this understanding of violence see Steve Smith, 'The Contested Concept of Security', in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies, p. 54.
97. For Marcuse, domination exists as something of a social fact and a 'decisive tendency in current politics'; indeed, one of the major problems for Marcuse's own analysis (given his own search for elements of resistance and liberation) is that his conception of domination is so all-encompassing - to the point that 'society' and 'domination' are essentially one and the same - see his Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (London: Allen Lane, 1970), p. 1
98. More generally, Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.
99. Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, pp. 75-6.
100. Marcuse, 'The End of Utopia Q&A', in Five Lectures, p. 72-3.
101. Essay on Liberation, pp. 71-2.
102. Essay on Liberation, p. 72.
103. Ibid., p. 73.
104. Richard Kahn, 'The Educative Potential of Ecological Militancy in an Age of Big Oil: Towards a Marcusian ecopedagogy', Policy Futures in Education, 4:1 (2006), pp. 31-44, 35.
105. Essay on Liberation, pp. 76-7.
106. Herbert Marcuse, 'Repressive Tolerance', in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jnr. & Herbert Marcuse (ed.), A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969).
107. Kahn, 'The Educative Potential of Ecological Militancy', p. 35.
108. 'No matter how non-violent our demonstrations are or will be, we must expect them to be met with new institutional violence' - 'The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition', in Five Lectures, p. 105.
109. Marcuse, 'The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition', in Five Lectures, p. 89.
110. 'Repressive Tolerance', p. 90.
111. Ibid., p. 102.
112. Cf. Étienne Balibar on 'Violence, Ideality and Cruelty', in Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002) - 'there are certainly degrees in the amount of violence which goes along with civilizing ideals; but nothing like a zerodegree. Therefore there is no such thing as non-violence' - p. 145.
113. Counterrevolution and Revolt, p. 78.
114. Marcuse draws here on Delacroix's painting of liberty leading the people as illustrative of a potential female counter-force: 'She wears no uniform; her breasts are bare, and her beautiful face shows no trace of violence. But she still has a rifle in her hand [⋯].'
115. Marcuse (ed.), 'The End of Utopia Q&A', in Five Lectures, p. 78.
116. Ibid., pp. 78-9.
117. Where in a revolution this sort of terror changes into acts of cruelty, brutality and torture, then we are already talking about a perversion of the revolution' - Marcuse, 'The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition', p. 103.
118. Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene', p. 397.
119. As advocated more explicitly in, for example, Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', p. 321.
120. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 161.
121. Essay on Liberation, p. 53.
122. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 43;
123. cf. Ken Booth and Peter Vale, 'Critical Security Studies and Regional Insecurity: The Case of Southern Africa', in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds), Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
124. Booth, 'Security and Emancipation', p. 326. Booth also considers peaceful anti-nuclear protests at length in the article.
125. Booth, Theory of World Security, p. 112.
126. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals as cited in Booth, Theory of World Security, p. 87.
127. As Pieterse notes, 'The various definitions of emancipation, liberation, participation and empowerment show a tendency towards circularity, one being defined in terms of the other. Emancipation is a form of liberation, liberation is a form of emancipation etc.' - 'Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern', p. 11.
128. Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene', p. 401.
129. Similarly, Ernesto Laclau argues that emancipation has a necessarily 'dichotomic dimension': 'otherness [⋯] is required by the founding act of emancipation' - Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007), p. 4.
130. Rens van Munster, 'Review of Ken Booth, Theory of World Security' in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21:3 (2008), pp. 437-9, 438.
131. Booth, Theory of World Security, p. 113.
132. Ken Booth, 'Response to Rens van Munster', Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21:3 (2008), pp. 439-41, 440.
133. van Munster, 'Review of Theory of World Security', p. 439.
134. Neocleous, Critique of Security, pp. 7, 26-9;
135. Karl Marx, 'On the Jewish Question', [1844] in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 163.
136. See, for example, Douglas Keller, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
137. See Essay on Liberation, pp. 50-2.
138. Essay on Liberation, p. 7.
139. Ibid., p. 69.
140. Ibid., p. 93.
141. Ibid., p. viii.
142. Marcuse, 'The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition', p. 89 Emphasis added.
143. Marcuse, 'Repressive Tolerance', p. 116.
144. Cf. Walter Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence', in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978).
145. In a similar vein, Slavoj Žižek has urged a move 'from the rejection of false anti-violence to the endorsement of emancipatory violence' - Violence (London: Profile, 2009), p. 174.
146. See C. A. S. E., 'Critical Approaches to Security in Europe', pp. 455-7.
147. 'Repressive Tolerance', pp. 109-10.
148. Neocleous, Critique of Security, p. 74.
149. Ibid., pp. 104-5.
150. Marcuse, 'Repressive Tolerance', p. 117.
151. Žižek, Violence, pp. 9, 147.
152. Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 27.
153. See, Arendt's On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006);
154. See also Douglas Keller, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 283
155. And, more generally, Bhiku Parekh, 'Marxism and the Problem of Violence', Development and Change, 23:3 (1992), pp. 103-20.
156. For a recent counter-reading, of 'The Terror' in particular, see Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2007).
157. Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 11.
158. Cf. Jahn, 'One Step Forward, Two Steps Back'.
159. Booth (ed.), Theory of World Security, pp. 134-48.
160. Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, pp. 125-60.
161. Cf. Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene'.
162. Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern', p. 14.
163. See, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory.
164. Aradau, 'Security and the democratic scene'.
165. Briefly, Badiou's focus on emancipatory 'events', Rancière conception of emancipation as 'listening to the unheard' rather than treating the poor/dispossessed as 'a cog in the philosopher's explanatory machine', Balibar on emancipation as 'the battle against the denial of citizenship' - see Nick Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Rethinking Emancipation (London: Continuum, 2007) for an overview and discussion.
166. For applications and more extensive evaluations of such perspectives in relation to international studies, see Claudia Aradau, 'Security and the Democratic Scene', op cit, and her Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics out of Security (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
167. Rens van Munster, Immigration, Security and the Politics of Risk in the EU (London: Palgrave, 2009).
168. Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), p. 6.
169. Emphasis in original; p. 30.
170. Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Rethinking Emancipation, p. 135.
171. For a further critique of Balibar's ambiguities on the role of violence see also p. 153.
172. For a related argument in regard to the relationship between the Frankfurt School and Critical International Theory more broadly see Nicholas J. Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order: Beyond International Relations Theory? (London: Routledge, 2000): 'the notion of 'emancipation' in this context [⋯] creates the problem - rather than the project of critical theory per se.' - p. 162.