Endless war

Security never seems to make any progress. Despite military investments, security reviews and ever more powerful technological surveillance, European and North American populations are continually represented as unsafe. The most powerful states in the world, enjoying historically unprecedented levels of health, prosperity and stability, are simultaneously the most hysterically possessed by security-related fears. The compulsion to experience the self as insecure, despite evidence to the contrary, is the starting point for this paper. ¶ Much has been written about political anxiety in the fields of political theory and sociology. Corey Robin has explored the developing permutations of fear in Western philosophical thought as an operational concept (Robin 2004); Frank Furedi has explored how the social alienation and declining community ties associated with contemporary neoliberalism have led to cultures of insecurity (Furedi 2002), and Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck have both written about the transformation of risk and anxiety in an age where technology produces its own, sometimes existential, dangers (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990). Fear and risk are prominent topics on sociological and philosophical landscapes.¶ Not wanting to be left behind, international relations has also produced substantial literatures on the risk discourses and anxieties which dominate contemporary political life. Much of this research was initially located within the Copenhagen School of securitisation theory, which analysed the construction of threat by political elites and the centrality of speech acts to processes of securitisation (Buzan, Wæver, and De Wilde 1998; Hansen 2012a; McDonald 2008). The functionality of securitisation is here understood in terms of identity: identifying and invoking an external threat serves to performatively constitute the nation (Jackson 2005; McCrisken 2003).¶ In the wake of securitisation theory, European international relations developed a poststructuralist critique of Beck’s ‘Risk Society’ thesis. In their rethinking of risk, Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster critiqued Beck’s macro-sociological assumptions that risks exist independently in the world from the governmental technologies which invoke them (Aradau and Van Munster 2007). The incalculability of contemporary risks does not make them ungovernable, as Beck suggests; rather governance structures have shifted to incorporate the unpredictability of certain dangers into precautionary risk management. Incalculability becomes the modality of security.1 Poststructuralist International Relations has found fertile terrain in the idea of risks and their governance. Pushing this research beyond its focus on the security sector, Emmy Eklundh, Andreja Zevnik and Emmanuel Pierre-Guittet have explored the logics of anxiety at play in austerity politics and security governance, and the anxious and resistant subjectivities produced therein (Eklundh, Zevnik, and Pierre-Guittet 2017).¶ But what does it mean to centralise anxiety, fear and risk in Western political and sociological thought at a time of relative geopolitical stability and wealth? In his own take on the politics of anxiety, Mark Neocleous (2000) tackled the proliferation of (in)security and risk discourse in sociology and international relations, arguing that the acceleration of (in) securitisation reflects the policing of civil society to protect bourgeois property and status. The articulation of pollution, terrorism and migration as security threats depoliticises them; it silences the social and political creation of these issues, enabling governing structures to pursue technocratic solutions which efface the real genesis of threats: capital accumulation.¶ It is important to note that the arguments made by Neocleous, poststructuralist scholars of risk and securitisation theorists share more in common than their focus on political anxiety. They all also describe ambivalence within security practices towards the threat object. While politicians promise that destroying the enemy will bring about resolution and ontological stability, IR literatures show that frames of enmity enable the pursuit of other goals: biopolitical governance, identity consolidation and the furtherance of capital accumulation. There is a gap between security and its threat object. The threat object is made hypersignificant in political discourse, but it is simultaneously treated ambivalently and can be replaced at will. New objects wait in the wings as potential vessels for enmity.