Technostrategic war-making discourse is steeped in gendered notions of vulnerability – control must be instrumentalized by the masculine, rational actor at all costs because to be vulnerable is to be feminized, irrational, and open for exploitation.

Vulnerability: Denials and displacements Ruddick writes that three demands—for preservation, growth, and social acceptability—constitute maternal work: “to be a mother is to be committing to meeting these demands by works of preservative love, nurturance, and training” (Ruddick, 1989: 17). Of these three demands, the one that most obviously is an equally central demand of state security practice would be preservation, classically in the form of preservation of the (one’s own) state. (It would be very interesting and potentially fruitful, though, to imagine what it might mean to security practice if preservation and growth of “Other” states, and social acceptability of one’s own state, were included among the central demands of security work.) The demand for preservation stems from the fact of vulnerability, and indeed, vulnerability is implicitly one of the concepts at the core of both maternal thinking and security thinking, although how and where it does or does not make its appearance, and what counts as a “rational” response to it, is strikingly differently in each. A foundational contrast is found in the object of preservation, that is, in who or what is seen as vulnerable and in need of preservation. Clearly, in maternal thinking, it is the human child. In contrast, in the technostrategic discourse of nuclear strategists, human vulnerability is entirely absent, literally unspeakable; when the word “vulnerable” appears, it is in discussion of the “vulnerability” of both weapon systems themselves and the technological communication systems which are central to the “command and control” of those weapons (Cohn, 1987). In broader US national security discourse, the vulnerability of humans is also effaced, and it is the vulnerability of the state to penetration of its physical boundaries that is of concern, as well as the vulnerability of its stability and its “interests.” (“Interests” can be understood as an extremely plastic concept that has allowed US security practice to extend far beyond the state’s own borders and into the territory or political affairs of many other state whose activities have been labeled as threatening to what the state has broadly defined as its “interests.”) Two things are striking in this contrast between who or what is seen as vulnerable in maternal thinking, on the one hand, and in these security discourses, on the other. The first is that while maternal practice and thought is centered on and responsive to the vulnerability of the mother’s Other—the child—in national security discourses the vulnerability of the state’s Other—other states—goes either unimagined or imagined only as weaknesses to be exploited; certainly, it is rarely if ever imagined as requiring or evoking a preservative response (the very limited exception might be among states deemed as close allies, extensions of the Self). The second, perhaps even more fundamental, issue which emerges in this contrast is the invisibility of human vulnerability in nuclear and national security discourses, and its displacement onto weapons and states. So in nuclear technostrategic discourse, for example, when human death must be referred to, it is euphemized and abstracted into “collateral damage,” and this construction “makes sense” because human suffering is in this discourse collateral to the only vulnerability which matters—that of the discourse’ subject, which is weapons (Cohn, 1987). Similarly, in US discourses on conventional warfare, the death and injury of civilians is also referred to as “collateral damage.” So while human vulnerability is at the center of maternal thinking, it is beyond the margins of national security discourses, the reality of its inexorability unaddressed, while anxieties about vulnerability are displaced elsewhere. Although this article’s focus is the way vulnerability is treated in security discourses, it is worth briefly noting that human vulnerability’s absence, denial, and displacement have characterized much of Western social and political theory, as well as the institutions and policy frameworks to which they have given rise. It is only in recent years that this lacuna is starting to be named and explored, and that vulnerability has started to be more attentively theorized. Martha Fineman (2008, 2010), for example, argues that the rational, autonomous, instrumentalist subject posited by political and legal theorizing in the liberal tradition fundamentally denies the vulnerable and interdependent nature of human beings, and that “the vulnerable subject,” rather than the “liberal subject,” should be at the heart of our theoretical and political projects. Her interest is in moving beyond discrimination-based models to more substantive equality, and she argues that the understanding that vulnerability is “universal and constant, inherent in the human condition” can and should become the basis for “a more responsive state and egalitarian society” (Fineman, 2008: 8). Moving from the state to interstate relations, Beattie and Schick (2013) bring the idea of the vulnerable subject to a rethinking of international relations (IR) theory; their starting point is that IR’s rationalism denies vulnerability as anything other than a problem to be solved. Judith Butler (2004, 2009) finds in universal human vulnerability not a problem rather a potential basis for community and a nonviolent ethics; a central concern is the way in which some people are made more vulnerable than others and their lives less grievable. Erinn Gilson (2011), too, sees vulnerability as “not just a condition that limits us but one that can enable us” as “a condition of openness, openness to being affected and affecting in turn” (p. 310). The emphasis on the relational aspect of vulnerability found in Butler’s and Gilson’s work is also found in Peadar Kirby’s (2006a, 2006b) work on the value of the concept of vulnerability in theorizing globalization’s social impact. Kirby (2006a) argues that the inherent relationality in the concept of vulnerability makes it a “surer concept” than human security, as human security lends itself to the methodological individualism, militarism, and commodification characteristic of the concept of state security, from which it is derived (p. 646). These and other authors who have been engaged in the retheorization of vulnerability take the universal, inexorable vulnerability of humans, rescue it from its denial and displacement in rationalist liberal social and political theory, and make it a cornerstone of their theorizing, instead.3 There has been, in the last few decades, another, more common, albeit more partial, form in which vulnerability has appeared in theory and policy, and that is in the concept of “vulnerable groups” or “vulnerable populations.”4 Vulnerable groups is a concept used in discourses ranging from human rights to humanitarian assistance, development assistance, bioethics, research ethics, ethics of care, public and global health policy, and environmental policy. In contrast to the centering of vulnerability as a universal defining feature of human life in the work of the theorists above, “vulnerable groups” discourses focus on defining which human subgroups are especially vulnerable, at risk and in need of protection. The literature variously locates the sources of a group’s vulnerability in multiple factors, including physiological frailty or dependency; limited capacity or freedom (Macklin, 2012); the violation of human rights (Reichert, 2006; Turner, 2006); the ways that people are positioned in economic, political, and social structures and processes (Aoláin, 2011; Ben-Ishai, 2012; Luna, 2009; Rogers et al., 212); warfare (Turner, 2006); globalization and neoliberalism (Kirby, 2006); the physical and social conditions that facilitate the spread of disease (Bluhm, 2012; Edström, 2007; Onuoha et al., 2009); the ways that people’s geographic location and livelihoods have made them susceptible to humanly—and/or naturally produced environmental change or disaster (Alaimo, 2012; Kirby, 2006) or environmental conflict (Perry et al., 2010); and the myriad factors that lead to human displacement and statelessness (Butler, 2004; Hanafi, 2009). Logically, there should be no intrinsic incompatibility between a universal human vulnerability approach and a focus on vulnerable populations—that is, between understanding all humans as vulnerable, and then exploring the specific factors that make some more so than others (e.g. at particular moments in a life cycle or within specific political and economic relationships). Indeed, most universal human vulnerability approaches tend not only to acknowledge but also to give serious attention to the latter. Yet, in both theory and practice, the concept of “vulnerable groups” has in many ways been at odds with an approach which apprehends vulnerability as a defining aspect of the human condition; instead, it tends to treat vulnerability as the property of some groups, not all (more on this below). Human vulnerability is then, in a sense, displaced onto a subset of humans. I believe that the reasons for the various denials and displacements of vulnerability referenced above (as well as later in this article) are multiple and complex, and require a thoroughly multidisciplinary treatment that is far beyond the scope of this piece. For the moment, however, I want to briefly address what I think is one important piece of the puzzle—the ways in which vulnerability is intensely gendered at a symbolic level. It seems noteworthy, and not coincidental, that the majority of theorists who have focused on the implications of human vulnerability have been women, and many of them feminists. Prevailing Western gendered meaning systems associate vulnerability with femininity, weakness, dependency, passivity, lack of control, emotionality, and victimhood; at the same time, they associate invulnerability with masculinity, power, autonomy, agency, control, cool rationality, and stoicism. As I have argued elsewhere, this means that in national security discourses, there is an extremely high premium on avoiding thinking about human fallibility, vulnerability, and suffering. To admit those things not only threatens the constructions of rationalist hegemonic masculinity that are built into the entire intellectual project; they also tend to threaten the legitimacy and identity of the speaker who brings them up, because in speaking about them, one assumes the “feminine” (and thus devalued) position in the discourse (Cohn 1987, 1993). Although my own empirical research has been only in national and international security communities, my experience in those locations suggests that vulnerability’s symbolic gender coding as feminine would make it hard to put the inevitability of universal human vulnerability at the center of other masculinist projects of theory or policy as well. Whatever the range of motivations and mechanisms that underlie the denial and displacement of vulnerability, I think the phenomenon itself should be of grave concern. When theorists and policymakers are not grounded in an apprehension of their own bodily contingency and frailty, and their own physical and social dependence, a host of consequences follow. When it is only the “Other” who is vulnerable, it is much easier to cut or destroy social safety nets, to support violently repressive rulers in the name of “stability” or of protecting one’s own interests, to start and prolong wars, or to put profit over the health of the planet’s ecosystems. At the very least, this suggests that we should be wary of any security discourses which invisibilize the universality of human vulnerabilitys, and try to imagine security practices which center it, instead. Hence, we return to Ruddick.