The 1AC’s study of liberal military structures embodies a methodological whiteness that assumes a universal white subject as the basis of analysis, occluding the very colonial structures that constitute the roots of imperialist warfare

Liberalism has traditionally been associated with the quest for peace, not least in IR scholarship (cf. Doyle 1983a, 1983b; Levy 1988)1 . More recently ‘illiberal’ security practices (i.e. torture; indefinite detention) deployed by liberal states as part of post-9/11 wars have called this relationship into question. One common response, on both right and left, has been to decry the liberal claim to use war as a means to end war (cf. Howard 2008) as a hypocritical paradox, and to blame exceptionalist rhetoric or securitization (cf. Aradau and van Munster 2009; Huysmans 2008). Amidst this clamor, Foucauldian Security Studies (FSS) claims to mount a more fundamental critique. For FSS, the paradox of liberal peace “turns out to be not a paradox at all” (Reid 2004, 74). Instead, liberalism is predicated on the model of war, and relations of war suffuse even its domestic and seemingly benign operations (Jabri 2006; Reid 2010). Building on Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, FSS sees the ambitions of liberal war as going beyond the merely territorial (Bell 2011; Bell and Evans 2010; Dillon and Reid 2009; Evans 2011; Howell 2014, 2015; Jabri 2006, 2007a), aiming to transform and improve spaces and populations cast as developmentally backwards (Holmqvist 2016). Contemporary liberal war is therefore a vital force claiming to serve “humanity as species being” (Jabri 2007a, 187). FSS, then, purports to offer new ways of understanding liberalism and war, to “theorize with Foucault beyond Foucault” (Dillon and Reid 2009, 36) in order to understand the biopolitics of security. Unfortunately, despite these ambitions, contemporary FFS largely perpetuates Foucault’s undertheorization of racism. As a result, like the liberal approaches it criticizes, FSS whitewashes the foundational role of colonial and racist violence and exploitation in modernity. FSS overwhelmingly ignores racialized and colonial relations, subjects and spaces subjected primarily or exclusively to punitive sovereign forms of power, and the constitutive role of racial and colonial violence in the genealogy of biopower. As a result, FSS exemplifies “methodological Whiteness” (Bhambra 2017a, 2017b): a way of reflecting on the world that fails to acknowledge the role played by 1 Jack Levy (1988, 661) famously celebrated the liberal peace thesis as "the closest thing we have to empirical law in the study of international relations." 2 race in the very structuring of that world, and of the ways in which knowledge is constructed and legitimated within it. It fails to recognise the dominance of ‘Whiteness’ as anything other than the standard state of affairs and treats a limited perspective – that deriving from White experience – as a universal perspective (Bhambra 2017b, np). This methodological Whiteness gives rise to two core propositions in the FSS literature on the biopolitics of security: First, that the reason for the martial character of liberal politics is that human life cannot ever be secured; Second, that everyone is (potentially) dangerous, and vulnerable to the punitive or lethal dimensions of liberal power. Both claims represent spectacular failures to engage with racism and coloniality. The claim that life cannot be secured, we argue, fails to take account of how – conceptually and materially – the idea of human life is an effect of racism and colonialism. This history has been amply documented in Black studies, Black feminist, and decolonial thought – fields which have challenged Foucault’s Eurocentric account of the rise of biopower. These histories have been widely discussed in IR and security studies (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Agathangelou 2010a, 2010b, 2013; Barkawi and Laffey 1999, 2006; Biswas 2001; Chowdhry and Nair 2004; Grovogui 1996, 2001; Howell 2018; Inayatullah and Riley 2006; Jabri 2007b; Krishna 2001; Muppidi 1999, 2001; Richter-Montpetit 2007, 2014; Sabaratnam 2013; Shilliam 2008). Despite its claim to internationalize Foucault, FSS scholarship on liberal war and the biopolitics of security has not seriously engaged with questions of racism or coloniality. In order to move beyond methodological Whiteness, FSS needs to inquire into subjects who were never understood to be (fully) human in the first place. Likewise, the claim that everyone is potentially dangerous, potentially a target of violent security practices, we argue, obscures the fundamentally “parasitical nature of white freedom” (Morrison 1997, 57) and White security, which require certain lives to serve as their “literal raw materials” (Agathangelou 2013, 455). If it isto apprehend the raciality and coloniality of contemporary liberal order and war, including the postcolonial and settler colonial present, FSS will have to grapple, not only with the ways subjects are targeted differently for security interventions by virtue of racialization, but, more fundamentally, with the mutually constitutive nature of modernity and colonialism. To be clear, our argument is not that race and racism are ignored in FSS. Both Foucault and FSS ascribe racism a central role in the martial operations of liberal rule. However, because they rely on White humanist notions of Man prior to racialization, the racism they deal with is a kind of racism-without-colonialism, more an unfortunate cultural artifact than a global system of expropriation fundamental to the conditions of possibility for the liberal way of war and biopolitical security assemblages. This minimization of racism results from a lack of sustained engagement with (feminist) critical race, Black studies, or postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, as documented throughout this article. We focus on the debates in FSS on the biopolitics of security because this literature forms a core of the FSS approach as an intellectual space within which theoretical debates about war, security, biopolitics and liberalism have been significantly elaborated. Situated at the intersection of Security Studies and International Political Sociology, the broader FSS field 3 has similarly deployed concepts of biopolitics, liberalism, and war more empirically. Indeed, this journal has been a major hub of research on topics situated at this intersection, including mobility, migration and airports (Salter 2007; Chambers 2011; D'Aoust 2013; Frowd 2017); humanitarianism and the development-security nexus (Reid 2013; Abdelnour & Saeed 2014; Ilcan & Rygiel 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2015); counter-terrorism (Dillon 2007, Debrix & Barder 2009; Neal 2012 de Goede, & de Graaf 2013); technoscience and security (Lundborg & Vaughan-Williams 2011; Thomas 2014; Busse 2015; Allinson 2015); global health security (Howell 2007, 2012, Elbe 2012) and the political economy of security (LoboGuerrero 2008; Abrahamsen and Williams 2009; Best 2016). In focusing on the biopolitics of liberal war thesis, we equip readers to judge whether the problems we identify in this approach also underwrite the more empirical FSS literature. This article thus provides a tool to challenge the full breadth of the FSS literature as well as the wider use of the concept of biopolitics in International Political Sociology and International Relations (IR). Our argument proceeds in three sections. The first provides a précis of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and biopower and details (feminist) Black studies, postcolonial and decolonial critiques. The second analyzes FSS scholarship on the biopolitics of security and liberal war, arguing that it consistently underestimates, undertheorizes and misconstrues the raciality and coloniality of liberal modernity. The third explores some of the resulting empirical oversights in FSS, including examples relating to state violence, the molecular and digital ‘revolutions’, and labour, capital and enslavement.