Foucaults Legacy: Security, War and

Violence in the 21st Century

BRAD EVANS*

School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK

Anticipating the strategic confluence between liberal ways of war
and liberal ways of development, the ideas of Michel Foucault have
increasingly resonated in the field of security studies. Foregrounding
in particular the biopolitical imperative at the heart of liberal gov-
ernance, critical attention has been given to the manner in which life
itself becomes the principle referent object for security practices. In
mapping out these key debates, this article will nuance our under-
standing of Foucaults relevance by explaining: how liberal security
governance today operates within a globally inclusive imaginary to
the defection of all meaningful Newtonian distinctions; how liberal
biopolitics displaces the bare life of the sovereign encounter with the
bare activity of species survival; how principally tasking security
practitioners with sorting and adjudicating between different forms
of species life reveals a distinct biopolitical aporia, in the sense that
making life live demands the elimination of that which poses an inter-
nal cultural threat to its will to rule; how the rationalization of violence
through doing what is necessary out of species necessity implies that
humanitys most purposeful expression appears through the battles
that are waged upon life, for life, on a planetary scale; how the liberal
encounter has created conditions akin to a global state of civil war that
offers a marked conceptual departure from traditional sovereign para-
digms; and why the onto-theological dimensions that give moral sanc-
tion to liberal biopolitical rule now demand the most serious critical
attention.
Keywords liberal problematic of security global civil war Foucault
necessary violence liberal war thesis

Foucaults Intervention

ICHEL FOUCAULTS RECENT RENAISSANCE has undoubtedly

added renewed political force to his remarkable intellectual oeuvre.
Much of this is due to the influential works of Michael Hardt &
Antonio Negri (2000, 2004), along with Giorgio Agamben (1995, 2005), whose
application of Foucauldian thought to the areas of security, global war and
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violence have highlighted Foucaults relevance to some of our most pressing

political concerns. This has been matched by the translated publications of
the series of lectures Foucault (2003, 2007, 2008) gave at the Collge de France
from the mid- to the late 1970s. Bringing to the fore his thinking on biopower
and biopolitics, these texts have contributed to the numerous writings that
take critical aim at what is now commonly termed the liberal problematic of
security. Invariably, what has been taking place here with these efforts is a
necessary rewriting of Foucaults legacy. Not only do these endeavours move
us beyond the normative Question of Truth (which, to be frank, served the
dialectical entrapments of Frankfurt theorists such as Jrgen Habermas more
than it ever did Foucault); they also force us to pose new questions con-
cerning the nature of power in our modern societies. Foucaults resurrected
spectre, however, does come with its challenges. As Foucault (2008: 3) himself
would explain, when one begins to pose the problem of power biopolitically,
an entirely different grid of intelligibility is adopted that no longer provides
us with the comfort of a rehearsed orthodoxy:
Instead of deducing concrete phenomena from universals, or instead of starting with
universals as an obligatory grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices, I would
like to start with these concrete practices and, as it were, pass these universals through
the grid of these practices. ... Historicism starts from the universal and, as it were, puts
it through the grinder of history. My problem is exactly the opposite. I start from the
theoretical and methodological decision that consists in saying: Lets suppose univer-
sals do not exist. And then I put the question to history and historians: How can you
write history if you do not accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society,
the sovereign, and subjects? ... Not, then, questioning universals by using history as a
critical method, but starting from the decision then that universals do not exist, asking
what kind of history we can do.

Enthusiasm for Foucaults revival has been expectedly muted in certain quar-
ters. Even some Foucauldian scholars albeit of a distinct liberal persuasion
have expressed their concern with the applicability of his lecture series to
contemporary political analysis (Patton, 2007). Leaving aside the claim that
this body of work somehow represents Foucaults wasted years or, for
that matter, that the concepts explored during this period were not really
Foucauldian at heart (especially biopolitics) the most serious charge concerns
the lack of sufficient academic rigour in the lecture series. Beatrice Hanssen
(2000), for instance, has correctly pointed out that despite the attention given
to race war during this time, the history of colonization is scantly considered.
This is certainly true. It is also the case that when Foucault did apply his bio-
political method to colonialism, he only attended to the colonial heartland,


See, in particular, Dillon & Neal (2008a); Dillon & Reid (2009); Duffield (2007); Edkins, Pin-Fat & Shapiro
(2004).

As John Protevi (forthcoming) suggests, To the (in)famous demand that Foucault provide a normative
standard, we can reply that he does; its just that he trusts the governed to know when intolerable
governance needs resisting without having to wait for a philosopher to bless their resistance by having it
match some universal standard.

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not the overseas dominions/borderlands that have attracted a great deal of

the contemporary focus (see below). It is fair to say that Foucaults efforts are
somewhat incomplete. They leave us wanting more empirical depth. That is
not, however, to deny their usefulness. As John Marks (2008: 88) argues,
the lectures are an expression of Foucaults attempt to analyse power in terms of its oper-
ation, functions, and effects, rather than in terms of sovereignty and juridical models.
They are a continuation of his project to look at power from the perspective of its func-
tions and strategies, as it operates under the radar as it were, of the juridical system of
sovereignty.

So, while these lectures may lack the rigorous empirical depth of Foucaults
academic texts, it is the introduction of concepts that can be put to use today
politically that affords them their meaningful value.
Biopoliticians, however, are far from a unified church. Hardt & Negri (2000,
2004), for instance, argue that contemporary biopolitics needs to be matched
up with Gilles Deleuzes notion of control societies in order to account for the
new post-industrial cartography of productive relations. Then, taking this to
be their point of theoretical departure, they invoke the notion of biopolitical
production (arguably another way of saying labour) to afford the concept the
potential for liberation. The term biopolitics is therefore said to reveal both
exploitative and resistive qualities, enabling us, diagrammatically speaking,
to map out the entire social morphology of power relations in our modern
systems. Truer to his academic style, on the other hand, Agamben offers a
more protracted genealogy in order to reveal how biopolitics is fully implicit
in the production of those subjects that, open to the technologies of pure
rule, are stripped of their political and moral values. Such de-subjectivized
souls refer us to what he aptly terms bare life: the fundamental categori-
cal pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy but that of bare life/
political existence, zoe/bios, exclusion/inclusion (Agamben, 1995: 8). While
these works have rightly enjoyed notable academic success (partly due to
their notoriety), they have nevertheless tended to muddy the waters when it
comes to defining the biopolitical. Indeed, since bad readings of these texts
allow for the concept to be associated with the governance of any form of
political community whatsoever, there is a danger that the biopolitical melts
into meaningless abstraction. Given the political stakes, this lack of concep-
tual clarity is simply not satisfactory. A return to Foucaults original provoca-
tion therefore seems to be warranted.
For Foucault, the biopolitical specifically referred to the political strategiza-
tion/technologization of life for its own productive betterment. Effectuating,
then, the active triangulation between security, territory and population, bio-
politics forces a re-prioritization of those concerns ordinarily associated with
human development/progress in a manner that complements traditional
security paradigms. Importantly, for Foucault, since the biopolitical takes
issue with the open recruitment of life into political strategies for the internal

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defence of societies as a whole doing what is necessary out of species neces-

sity from the outset the following key question needs addressing: What happens to security discourses and practices when life itself becomes the principle object
for political strategies? This line of enquiry should immediately resonate. That
security is now written in human terms is well established. Many would even
say the concept only makes theoretical and practical sense once humanitarian
qualities are assumed. While this is well established in liberal thought, politi-
cally however it is far from settled. Some have even suggested that humani-
tarianism is precisely the meta-narrative that permits de-politicization of
indigenous life to take place. With the aim, then, of critically foregrounding
the humanization of security, this article will (1)provide a concise overview
of the liberal biopolitics of security in the 21st century; (2)explain why the
security rationalities underwriting this serve to radicalize our understanding
of the warpeace continuum; (3) illustrate how liberal war invokes its own
particular form of necessary violence that, serving to authenticate life, reveals
a very distinct racial imperative predicated on cultural difference; (4) ques-
tion how liberal security governance allows us to map out a new global cart
ography of power relations; (5) emphasize why this poses direct challenges to
some key assumptions made concerning the global nature of contemporary
warfare; and (6) identify some possible areas for further biopolitical enquiry
in this cutting edge field of critical human security studies.

The Biopolitics of Security

Foucault (2007: 10) suggested that security implied the modification of
something in the destiny of the species. Taking life, then, to be the princi-
pal referent object for security discourses and practices, biopolitics attends
to those general strategies for power that, in the process of making life live,
entail the regulation of populations for societys overall betterment. Biosecurity,
for Foucault (2007: 29), thus involves not so much establishing limits and
frontiers, or fixing locations, as, above all and essentially, making possible,
guaranteeing, and ensuring circulations. Promoting species life, it is all about
letting things happen: a question of constituting something like a milieu of life,
existence (Foucault, 2007: 30). Since security here is seen to be a thoroughly
creative enterprise, it cannot be explained negatively. As Michael Dillon &
Andrew Neal (2008b: 15) suggest, Making live cannot be secured by lock-
ing up life processes. Securing life poses quite a different game. With this in
mind, entirely different analytical methods are invariably sought. As Didier
Bigo (2008: 10) explains, Security presupposes that one analyses mobilities,
networks and margins instead of the frontier and isolation that goes with
demarcation. Security is thus a dispositif of circulation within a life environ-

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ment and not a dispositif of disciplining bodies. A security dispositif does not
isolate, it is built as a network. Biopolitics accordingly not only functions
through mechanisms that elevate contingency into a dominant field of forma
tion for western societies as a whole, it similarly also opens up an entirely
different spatial configuration of security. If distribution is the spatial figura-
tion that characterizes traditional geopolitical rationalities and technologies
of security, circulation is the spatial configuration that characterizes the biopolitics of security (Dillon, 2007: 11).
Vitalizing security undermines the privileged position once afforded to
the sovereign/juridical model Cutting the Head off the King, as Foucault
(1980: 121) put it! While the reason for this move was quite straightforward,
the implications are nevertheless profound. Recognizing that power is hetero
geneous, Foucault wanted to illustrate that there was more than one way to
rationalize/conceptualize security, warfare and political violence. Indeed,
specifically attending to internal conceptions of threat, Foucault (2007: 65)
wanted to explain how notions of threat actually provide societies with their
generative principles of formation:
we see the emergence of a completely different problem that is no longer of fixing and
demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them,
sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly
moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the
inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out.

That security has a performative function has been understood for some time.
David Campbells (1998) Writing Security, for instance, provided wonderful
insight into how the domains of inside/outside, self/other and domestic/
foreign are constituted directly in relation to the writing of threat. Importantly,
for Campbell (1998: 13), the process of signifying threat was not simply
bound to some negative process of exclusion; it is also a productive condi-
tion of possibility. Nevertheless, while Campbells work displays evident
allegiance to Foucault, his method still remains committed to sovereign ten-
sions. Subjectivity is therefore constituted in relation to some epiphenomenal
decision that provides the endangered political community with its shared
sense of belonging. Where Foucaults biopolitical analytics mark their most
important departure, however, is to turn our attention away from these con-
ventional markers. Exposing instead the nature of those ordering/securing
mechanisms that operating in the name of species progress/development are
more immanent to the conduct of life, sovereignty is seconded by a more
positive account of security that is synonymous with the production of free-
dom realized:
If I employ the word liberal, it is first of all because this governmental practice in the
process of establishing itself is not satisfied with respecting this or that freedom, with
guaranteeing this or that freedom. More profoundly, it is a consumer of freedom. ... It

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consumes freedom, which means it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize
it. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in
the sense of the imperative: be free, with the immediate contradiction that this impera-
tive may contain. The formula of liberalism is not be free. Liberalism formulates simply
the following: I am going to produce what you need to be free. And so, if this liberalism
is not so much the imperative of freedom as the management and organization of the
conditions in which one can be free, it is clear that at the heart of this liberal practice
is an always different and mobile problematic relationship between the production of
freedom and that which in the production of freedom risks limiting and destroying it
(Foucault, 2008: 6364).

Shifting the analytical focus away from the primacy of sovereign power, along
with all its neat, static, fixed demarcations, towards the problems posed by a
productive account of freedom that is always haunted by its own capacity for
self-destruction should not be underestimated. Demanding a more positive
approach to power, this perspective exposes one of liberalisms key founda-
tional myths:
If natural law could not cover all the juridical exigencies and contingencies which con-
fronted the operationalization of the social contract legislatively, neither was law, alone,
sufficient to discharge the task of rule which liberalism posed. Although positive law
was, therefore, required to supplement natural law, governance was required to supple-
ment the law as such (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 17).

Understood this way, the problem of security is not simply a problem of law
or legal transgression. The problem of security is always a problem of security
governance (see Dean, 2007). Taking this on board, one might argue that in
order to conduct any thorough investigation of the securitization process, it
is necessary to account for all the sets of practices and mechanisms (whether
juridical, technical or military) involved in securing the political subject
what Foucault termed the dispositif de scurit:
By the term apparatus [dispositif] I mean a kind of formation, so to speak, that a given
historical moment has as its major function the response to urgency. The apparatus
therefore has a dominant strategic function. ... I said that the nature of an apparatus is
essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of
relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relation of forces, either
so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and
to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power. ... The
apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and
supported by, certain types of knowledge (Foucault, 1980: 194 196).

While liberals have since Immanuel Kant understood the potential plan-
etary virtues of security governance, it was not until the 1990s that a global
imaginary of threat allowed for the possibility to govern all illiberal life on
the basis that the species as a whole would be less endangered. This ability
to collapse the local into the global has resulted in an unrivalled moment of
liberal expansionism (Human Security Centre, 2005). Importantly, however,

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despite the normative basis for these adventures, this advance did not appear
through some declared universal subscription to a value system; more oppor-
tunistic, liberal expansionism proceeded on the basis of alleviating unneces-
sary suffering in zones of political instability and crises. Invariably, since these
adventures bypassed traditional concerns with sovereign integrity, providing
the requisite legitimacy necessarily depended upon the consolidation of a
number of key assumptions: (1) the New Wars offered a new set of prob-
lems that could no longer simply be scripted in terms of Cold War rivalry;
(2)conditions of underdevelopment replaced notions of outright barbarity or
ideological contest to become the principal diagnostic for understanding the
causes of conflict and violence; (3) because indiscriminate violence became
the hallmark of the complex political emergency, more sustained obligations
to less fortunate others were demanded; (4) interventionism could be justified
on humanitarianism grounds providing that the ends justified the means; and
(5)with maladjusted populations open to remedy and demanding engage-
ment, the wholesale transformation of societies could be sanctioned in the
name of creating lasting conditions/capacities for peace. Ultimately, then,
since underdeveloped life was seen to be capable of its own (un)making, new
analytical tools were demanded in order to overcome the problems life posed
to itself:
In (re)defining the threats to human life as its most basic operation, the discourse of
human security must begin by defining and enacting the human in biopolitical terms.
The target of human security, whether broad or narrow, is to make live the life of the indi-
vidual through a complex of strategies initiated at the level of populations. In defining
and responding to threats to human life, these strategies have as their aim the avoidance
of risk and the management of contingency in the overall goal of improving the life lived
by the subjects invoked in their own operation. In this sense, as with Foucaults under-
standing of the biopolitical, the health and welfare of populations is human securitys
frame of intervention (De Larrinaga & Doucet: 2008: 528).

This brings us to the pioneering work of Mark Duffield, who has provided
a thorough critique of the developmentsecurity nexus so central to contem-
porary liberal power. While Duffields Global Governance and the New Wars
undoubtedly makes some implicit biopolitical gestures, his Development,
Security and Unending War represents a consolidation of his thought on the
applicability of biopolitics to the fields of development, human security and
global war. Importantly, for Duffield, mapping out these connections draws
our attention to a global cartography of power relations that is being effec-
tively shaped by the liberal encounter:


See Duffield (2001, 2007). I recently questioned Duffield about the deployment of biopolitics in his work.
He replied: The first reference I can track down is a paper on emerging political complexes given at a
conference in Leeds in May 2002. However, regarding the explicit use of the terms biopower/biopolitics,
the first reference I have found is a 2004 working paper on global governance, humanitarianism and
terror published by the Danish Institute for International Studies.

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Initially, I had thought that development involved a universalising of the technologies

that Foucault had outlined in relation to Europe, a sort of scaled up bio-politics that acts
on a global population. The answer, however, now seems as obvious as it is simple;
rather than a universalising bio-politics, development is the opposite. It is a means of
dividing humankind against itself in the generic form of developed and underdevel-
oped species life (Duffield, 2007: ix).

Such divisions, he believes, are crucial. Not only do they provide us with
a considered genealogy of the formative figures of political modernity (the
civilized, the savage and the barbarian), exposing the liberal will to rule;
they also directly challenge the claims that the project is somehow politically
empowering:
Understanding conflict has also moved its locus from wars between states to conflicts
within and across them. Like sustainable development, households, communities and
populations furnish the terrain on which such conflicts are fought. Within this continua-
tion of total war by non-industrial means, both development and war take communities,
livelihood systems and social networks as their point of reference. For the former they
are sites of entry, protection and betterment; for the latter they are objects of attack and
destruction. ... In other words, both sustainable development and internal war albeit
for opposing purposes take life or population and not the state as their reference point
(Duffield, 2007: 117118).

Duffields principal message here is clear and provocative: Liberalism proceeds on the basis that Others are the problem to be solved. With politics therefore
becoming the handmaiden of necessity, mired in the instrumental pursuit
of power, any form of political subjectivity that stands against the technical
recovery of the good life is necessarily rendered dangerous for the greater
social good. This is significant. Since de-politicization is said to occur when
life is being primed for its own betterment that is, within the remit of human-
itarian discourses and practices it is possible to offer an alternative reflec-
tion on Agambens bare life. Bare life for Agamben is seen to be a product of
the sovereign encounter. Life, in other words, becomes bare since it is beyond
the recourse of any legal frameworks/obligations hence set outside (aban-
doned in Agambens terms) the juridical protections that normally guaran-
tee the subject a place in our moral and political universe of obligation. What
Duffield implicitly suggests, however, is that the bare life of the biopolitical
encounter is the product of a different logic. No longer banished from the
realm, life is denied its political quality as the bare essentials for species
survival take precedence. No longer then made bare in order to be rendered
inactive to the society it endangers, life is stripped bare of its pre-existing
values on the basis that those precise qualities impede its potential produc-
tive salvation. Hence, while this life is equally assumed to be without mean-
ingful political quality though in this instance because of some dangerous
lack of fulfilment permitting the restitution in the life of the body implies
that exceptional politics are displaced by the no less imperial and no less

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politically charged bare activity of species survival. Barely active life accord-
ingly has not only become the privileged object of global security govern-
ance. Global battle lines are effectively drawn around its hollowed-out form
in order to gain mastery over the productive spoils of global existence.

The Liberal War Thesis

Imposing liberalism has often come at a price. That price has tended to be
a continuous recourse to war. While the militarism associated with liberal
internationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008),
Foucault was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has
been declared. Denouncing the illusion that we are living in a world in
which order and peace have been restored (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out to
disrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalism
and times of peace/civic normality. War accordingly now appears to condi-
tion the type of peace that follows. None have been more ambitious in map-
ping out this warpeace continuum than Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009).
Their liberal war thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality of
making live. Liberalism today, they argue, is underwritten by the unreserved
righteousness of its mission. Hence, while there may still be populations
that exist beyond the liberal pale, it is now taken that they should be included.
With liberal peace therefore predicated on the pacification/elimination of
all forms of political difference in order that liberalism might meet its own
moral and political objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war is
declared in order to achieve it: In proclaiming peace ... liberals are nonethe-
less committed also to making war. This is the martial face of liberal power
that, contrary to the familiar narrative, is directly fuelled by the universal
and pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired (Dillon & Reid,
2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here of universalizing war in its pursuit
of peace:
However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, espe-
cially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical think-
ers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in the pursuit of its
own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly
shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied
Foucaults Society Must Be Defended lectures specifically attend to the role war plays in the very formation
of political modernity: I would like to try and see the extent to which the binary schema of war and
struggle, of the clash between forces, can really be identified as the basis of civil society, as both the prin-
ciple and motor of the exercise of political power (Foucault, 2003: 18). For Foucault (2003: 47), this raises
an altogether new set of problems: When, how and why did someone come up with the idea that it is a
sort of uninterrupted battle that shapes peace, and that the civil order its basis, its essence, its essential
mechanisms is basically an order of battle?

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commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims (Dillon & Reid,
2009: 7).

While Dillon & Reids thesis only makes veiled reference to the ontotheological dimension, they are fully aware that its rule depends upon a
certain religiosity in the sense that war has now been turned into a verita-
ble human crusade with only two possible outcomes: endless war or the
transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul-
tures (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a new
set of problems. Unlike Clausewitzean confrontations, which at least pro-
vided the strategic comforts of clear demarcations (them/us, war/peace,
citizen/soldier, and so on), these wars no longer benefit from the possibility
of scoring outright victory, retreating, or achieving a lasting negotiated peace
by means of political compromise. Indeed, deprived of the prospect of defin-
ing enmity in advance, war itself becomes just as complex, dynamic, adaptive
and radically interconnected as the world of which it is part. That is why any
such war to end war becomes a war without end. ... The project of removing
war from the life of the species becomes a lethal and, in principle, continu-
ous and unending process (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building on
from these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage further to suggest
that since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life-chance
divide, it is now possible to write of a Global Civil War into which all life is
openly recruited:
Each crisis of global circulation ... marks out a terrain of global civil war, or rather a
tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself. ... What
is at stake in this war is the Wests ability to contain and manage international poverty
while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means
(Duffield, 2008: 162).

Setting out civil war in these terms inevitably marks an important depar-
ture. Not only does it illustrate how liberalism gains its mastery by posing
fundamental questions of life and death that is, who is to live and who can
be killed disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to be
the point of theoretical departure, civil war now appears to be driven by a
globally ambitious biopolitical imperative (see below).
Liberals have continuously made reference to humanity in order to justify
their use of military force (Ignatieff, 2003). War, if there is to be one, must be
for the unification of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out
of favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporary
zones of occupation, which has become biopolitical (hearts and minds) in
everything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of these
strategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers associated with liberal
idealism (see Gray, 2008), insufficient attention has been paid to the contested
nature of all the tactics deployed in the will to govern illiberal populations.

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Foucault returns here with renewed vigour. He understood that forms of war
have always been aligned with forms of life. Liberal wars are no exception.
Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its most
meaningful expression through the battles waged in its name:
At this point we can invert Clausewitzs proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means. ... While it is true that political power puts an end to war and
establishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly does
not do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibrium
revealed in the last battle of war (Foucault, 2003: 15).

What in other words occurs beneath the semblance of peace is far from politi-
cally settled:
political struggles, these clashes over and with power, these modifications of relations
of force the shifting balances, the reversals in a political system, all these things must
be interpreted as a continuation of war. And they are interpreted as so many episodes,
fragmentations, and displacements of the war itself. We are always writing the history
of the same war, even when we are writing the history of peace and its institutions
(Foucault, 2003: 15).

David Miliband (2009), without perhaps knowing the full political and philo
sophical implications, appears to subscribe to the value of this approach,
albeit for an altogether more committed deployment:
NATO was born in the shadow of the Cold War, but we have all had to change our
thinking as our troops confront insurgents rather than military machines like our own.
The mental models of 20th century mass warfare are not fit for 21st century counterinsurgency. That is why my argument today has been about the centrality of politics.
People like quoting Clausewitz that warfare is the continuation of politics by other
means. ... We need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means.

Milibands Foucauldian moment should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitz

on a planetary scale hence promoting the collapse of all meaningful dis-
tinctions that once held together the fixed terms of Newtonian space (i.e.
inside/outside, friend/enemy, citizen/soldier, war/peace, and so forth), he
firmly locates the conflict among the world of peoples. With global war there-
fore appearing to be an internal state of affairs, vanquishing enemies can
no longer be sanctioned for the mere defence of things. A new moment has
arrived, in which the destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered on
the success of humanitys own political strategies. No coincidence, then, that
authors like David Kilcullen a key architect in the formulation of counter-
insurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgency
paradigm without too much controversy. Viewed from the perspective of
power, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the advent of a global
civil war fought for the biopolitical spoils of life. Giving primacy to counter-
insurgency, it foregrounds the problem of populations so that questions of
security governance (i.e. population regulation) become central to the war

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effort (RAND, 2008). Placing the managed recovery of maladjusted life into
the heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined-up response in which
sovereign/militaristic forms of ordering are matched by biopolitical/devel-
opmental forms of progress (Bell & Evans, forthcoming). Demanding in other
words a planetary outlook, it collapses the local into the global so that lifes
radical interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance.
While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more humane recovery
to the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, war-
fare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanized
in the name of local sensitivities, doing what is necessary out of global spe-
cies necessity now implies that war effectively takes place by every means.
Our understanding of civil war is invariably recast.
Sovereignty has been the traditional starting point for any discussion of
civil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonized
peoples have never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopian
prolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent.
Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by colonialisms
own brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his-
tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that alternative
histories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolization
of political terms not least civil war for Foucault in particular there was
something altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoever
to ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars
may insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to the
sovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory to
help make sense of reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here to
engage fully with the implications of our global civil war paradigm, it should
be pointed out that since its biopolitical imperative removes the inevitabil-
ity of epiphenomenal tensions, nothing and nobody is necessarily dangerous
simply because location dictates. With enmity instead depending upon the
complex, adaptive, dynamic account of life itself, what becomes dangerous
emerges from within the liberal imaginary of threat. Violence accordingly can
only be sanctioned against those newly appointed enemies of humanity a
phrase that, immeasurably greater than any juridical category, necessarily
affords enmity an internal quality inherent to the species complete, for the
sake of planetary survival. Vital in other words to all human existence, doing
what is necessary out of global species necessity requires a new moral assay
of life that, pitting the universal against the particular, willingly commits vio-
lence against any ontological commitment to political difference, even though
universality itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of destroying political
adversaries through the contingency of particular encounters.

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Necessary Violence
Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners is
to sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct
biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that making
life live selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design inevitably
writes into that very script those lives that are retarded, backward, degener-
ate, wasteful and ultimately dangerous to the social order (Bauman, 1991).
Racism thus appears here to be a thoroughly modern phenomenon (Deleuze
& Guattari, 2002). This takes us to the heart of our concern with biopoliti-
cal rationalities. When life itself becomes the principal referent for politi-
cal struggles, power necessarily concerns itself with those biological threats
to human existence (Palladino, 2008). That is to say, since life becomes the
author of its own (un)making, the biopolitical assay of life necessarily por-
trays a commitment to the supremacy of certain species types: a race that is
portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to
define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those
who pose a threat to the biological heritage (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently,
what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensions
aside, racial problems occupy a permanent presence within the political
order (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is precisely
through the internalization of threat the constitution of the threat that is
now from the dangerous Others that exist within that societies reproduce
at the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the subject, since
everybody is now possibly dangerous and nobody can be exempt, for politi-
cal modernity to function one always has to be capable of killing in order to
go on living:
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the
purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity; massacres have become
vital. ... The principle underlying the tactics of battle that one has to become capable
of killing in order to go on living has become the principle that defines the strategy of
states (Foucault, 1990: 137).

When Foucault refers to killing, he is not simply referring to the vicious act
of taking another life: When I say killing, I obviously do not mean simply
murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of expos-
ing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite
simply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on (Foucault, 2003: 256).
Racism makes this process of elimination possible, for it is only through the
discourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is capable of intro-
ducing a break in the domain of life that is under powers control: the break
between what must live and what must die (Foucault, 2003: 255). While kill-

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ing does not need to be physically murderous, that is not to suggest that we
should lose sight of the very real forms of political violence that do take place
in the name of species improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, when
notions of security are invoked in order to preserve the destiny of a spe-
cies, when the defence of society gives sanction to very real acts of violence
that are justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity to
legitimate murderous political actions in all our names and for all our sakes
becomes altogether more rational, calculated, utilitarian, hence altogether
more frightening:
When a diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinary
model, when it becomes the bio-power or bio-politics of populations, controlling and
administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that point
law increasingly renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put some-
one to death, but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides: not
by returning to the old law of killing, but on the contrary in the name of race, precious
space, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be better
than its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but as
a toxic or infectious agent, a sort of biological danger.

Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hence

meaningful example of necessary killing the violence that is sanctioned in the
name of species necessity (see Agamben, 1995, 2005). Indeed, for Agamben,
since one of the most essential characteristics of modern biopolitics is to con-
stantly redefine the threshold in life that distinguishes and separates what is
inside from what is outside, it is within those sites that eliminate radically
the people that are excluded that the biopolitical racial imperative is exposed
in its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seen
to be the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a space in which
power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media-
tion (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agambens intellectual sophistry,
such a Schmittean-inspired approach to violence that is, sovereignty as the
ability to declare a state of juridical exception has certainly gained wide-
spread academic currency in recent times. The field of international rela-
tions, for instance, has been awash with works that have tried to theorize the
exceptional times in which we live (see, in particular, Devetak, 2007; Kaldor,
2007). While some of the tactics deployed in the Global War on Terror have
undoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of understanding
violence they are limited. Violence is only rendered problematic here when it
is associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the inva-
sion of Iraq, Guantnamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate.
Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence that
take place within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices, there
is a categorical failure to address how necessary violence continues to be an
essential feature of the liberal encounter. Hence, with post-interventionary

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forms of violence no longer appearing to be any cause for concern, the nature
of the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberal
occupations is removed from the analytical arena.
Racism is not what it used to be. Cultural fitness has now replaced biological
heritage to contour the new lines of political struggle (Balibar, 1991; Castells,
1997; Hardt & Negri, 2000). This shift from notions of biological supremacy
to cultural difference is not incidental. While liberals would agree that the
former is abhorrent, they nevertheless govern through the latter (Duffield,
2007; Dillon & Reid, 2009). There is an important history to this. Initially, for
the postwar liberal fraternity, claiming that Nazism was some aberration or
failure of modernity proved to be essential to this process (Bauman, 1991).
With modernitys biopolitical capacities for species manipulation therefore
left firmly intact, alternative judgements on the stock of life could be made.
Importantly, as Etienne Balibar (1991) has pointed out, in the light of the fact
that the history of modern thought has always shown some affinity with cul-
tural prejudice (albeit because both have been inexorably intertwined), what
concerns today has already existed beneath the surface for some considerable
time: We now move from the theory of the races or the struggle between the
races in human history, whether based on biology or psychological princi-
ples, to a theory of race relations within society, which naturalizes not racial
belonging but racial conduct (Balibar, 1991: 22). Evidently, while these concerns
with the conduct of others have been used for decades by right-wing govern-
ments to warn of the dangers of global migration flows, liberals more gener-
ally have upheld the overriding concern that radically different ways of life
are a principal source of societys ills (Blair, 2007). Marked divisions based on
cultural difference are therefore:
just as intractable and fundamental as the natural hierarchies they have partly replaced,
but they have acquired extra moral credibility and additional political authority by being
closer to respectable and realistic cultural nationalism and more remote from bio-logic
of any kind. As a result, we are informed not only that the mutually exclusive cultures
of indigenes and incomers cannot be compatible but also that mistaken attempts to mix
or even dwell peaceably together can only bring destruction. From this perspective
exposure to otherness is always going to be risky (Gilroy, 2004: 157).

In the light of this, as Alain Badiou (2002: 25) suggests, what passes for liberal
multicultural tolerance is beneath the surface a remarkable deception:
Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics
and of the right to differences are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference.
... This celebrated other is acceptable only if he is a good other which is to say what,
exactly, if not the same as us?

Demanding then their proper inclusion, questions pertaining to political

authenticity are made in a highly contingent fashion depending upon the
nature of the encounter with illiberal life. This has very little to do with politi-

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cal rights and democratic freedom. The case of Hamas provides sufficient
evidence to testify this fact. What concerns more is the capacity of others
to be culturally autonomous. Not only does this foreground explicitly in
our imaginary of threat the radicalization/politicization of cultural forms,
de-authentication can effectively take place once cultural perversion can be
attested. While this inevitably sanctions certain types of violence (Arquilla
& Ronfeldt, 1997, 2001), it also brings to the fore the global logic of species
partitioning made possible by the liberal way of war:
culturally coded racism striates the world of peoples, separating good from bad, useful
from useless in terms of their contribution to international security. Based on the politi-
cal interpretation of the genuine fears of ordinary people, this racism decides the sover-
eign boundary between the included and excluded, between those exempted from the
zone of exception and those destined to disappear within it (Duffield, 2007: 227).

A Field Still Most Fallow

Foucaults intervention into the field of security studies represents a wel-
come departure. Making purposeful use of his analytical method, biopolitical
analytics have provided us with a meaningful window onto those relations of
power at the heart of security governance. Exposing the martial face of liberal
power, necessary questions have been raised concerning the use of violence
in contemporary theatres of war. What is more, dismissing the myth of the
universal neutral subject endowed with natural rights, it has become possible
to critically attend with intellectual purpose to the deceptive smokescreens
behind which liberal rationality continues to find sanctuary. These develop-
ments alone represent considerable political gains. The irony has certainly
not been lost on postmodern and post-structural theorists, who have long
since been condemned for being too esoteric or abstract, yet when demanding
that our analysis works at the level of power have been accused of not being
visionary (hence abstract) enough! Nevertheless, despite these efforts, engag-
ing with the ideas of Foucault in certain political disciplines still appears to
be a marginal sport. The field thus remains, to echo Bigos (2008) sentiments,
still most fallow. While a number of areas warrant further consideration,
arguably it is the moral assay of life that now demands our critical atten-
tion. Morality not only justifies liberal interventionism, it provides lasting
political purchase. Questions of morality are, however, notoriously difficult.
Not only do they take us into the realm of the purely subjective; connect-
ing immanent political practices with transcendent/metaphysical principles
of human perfection, they require us to engage with some highly challeng-
ing problems of a political and philosophical nature. Nevertheless, since we
should be unfazed by this daunting intellectual task, there is an important

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methodological point to be reiterated here: Our task is not to extrapolate what

is universal in moral thought; nor is it to offer some alternative universal
standard against which all activity is to be judged. Our task is to understand
how security governance becomes moralized through the contingency of the
encounter. This is not a question of law. Onto-theologically speaking, it is a
question of political economy.
Recent history can provide us with a critical point of entry here. When US
President George W. Bush declared that he wanted to rid the world of evil,
he was making a profound philosophical declaration a statement of truth
that made evil out to be something that is part of this world. Beyond the obvi-
ous ecclesiastical bearing this has upon the political, this premise also implied
that something in the order of the divine (unquestionable truth, goodness,
justice) equally belonged to this world:
We who stand on the other side of the line must be equally clear and certain in our
convictions. We do love life, the life given to us and to all. We believe in the values that
uphold the dignity of life, tolerance, freedom, and the right of conscience. And we know
that this way of life is worth defending. There is no neutral ground no neutral ground
in the fight between civilization and terror, because there is no neutral ground between
good and evil, freedom and slavery, life and death (Bush, 2004).

This sentiment is not just a testimony to the value of life. Nor is it simply
a testimony to the necessity for violence. It is a testimony to the power of
faith. Now, while it would be easy for us to critique this with us/against
us religiosity in terms of some grand Manichean struggle, what should con-
cern us more is how the underlying assumptions have been assimilated into
the contemporary liberal sensibility in a more sophisticated fashion that
is to say, how the so-called Manichean order of things has been effectively
reworked in a more positive Kantian fashion that is more suited to our com-
plex, adaptive, dynamic and radically interconnected times. In his Nobel
Prize acceptance speech, US President Barack Obama (2009) offers a more
considered reflection:
Violence never brings permanent peace.It solves no social problem: it merely creates
new and more complicated ones.As someone who stands here as a direct consequence
of Dr. Kings life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. ... But
as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their
examples alone.I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to
the American people.For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world.A non-violent
movement could not have halted Hitlers armies.Negotiations cannot convince al
Qaedas leaders to lay down their arms.To say that force may sometimes be necessary
is not a call to cynicism it is recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the
limits of reason.

Foregrounding these connections between evil and the imperfections of

man offers a more rigorous critique of liberal governance. Invariably, this will
require us to directly engage with the phenomenon of liberal terror the most

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natural grounding for contemporary notions of good/evil (see Evans, forth-

coming). Terror has become the defining emblem of our age. Omnipresent
and hostile, its aura has created the image of a global security crisis that has
required fighting on many fronts. While terror, however, is now widely rec-
ognized to display many of the hallmarks of modern liberal societies, unfor-
tunately most of the analysis still writes of it in epiphenomenal or exceptional
terms. Unknowable in nature, it still appears to be something that exists out
there. This re-inscription of outdated Clausewitzean logic needs to be recti-
fied, not least since the phenomenon can actually be used diagnostically in
order to explain the main transcendent/divine principle for liberal power.
Humanity, despite protestations, cannot live up to these demands. It is too
dangerously unfulfilled to achieve unification in itself. Nor is the transcend-
ent to be aligned with some sovereign/juridical framework. The imperfec-
tions of biopolitically ascendant life cannot be reasonably recovered in this
way. Instead, liberalisms transcendent principle has to be something in the
order of the divine economy of life. It is in these terms that Kantian political
philosophy becomes truly contemporary. Kant gives to evil its unnecessary
quality (Anderson-Gold, 2001). Confronting evil as such in a Kantian sense
requires us to do what is necessary to alleviate all forms of unnecessary suf-
fering. Hence, when Philip Bobbit (2008: 52) insists that it hardly matters
whether the forces of destruction arise from militant Islam, North Korean
communism, or Caribbean hurricanes, he is perhaps acknowledging more
than is readily appreciated. For in the process of rendering all randomness
potentially evil and all intentionality potentially disastrous, the promise of the
Kantian universal (unification of the species) is firmly displaced by the alto-
gether more contingent problem of the Kantian infinite (anything is possible),
which in the process of placing terror/evil into the operating fabric of our
societies further re-enforces the principal biosecurity mantra that humanity
must be prepared to do what is necessary out of global species necessity.
While the problem of terror will no doubt take us into some fertile biopoliti-
cal territory, fortunately some of the important groundwork has been partly
covered. Dillon and Agamben will once again become pivotal figures here.
While Dillon, for instance, has more recently been concerned with immanent
relations of power, his earlier works on the politics of security specifically
attended to the metaphysics of closure (Dillon, 1997). Drawing these efforts
together should therefore allow us make possible connections between a
metaphysical analytics of infinity (everything is possible, so it is imperative
upon us that moral limits must be established) with a biopolitical analytics of
finitude (everything is limited, so it is imperative upon us that we improve/
widen the life-chances of the species). Agambens more recent theological
concerns, on the other hand, will inevitably provide us with an important
commentary. As Negri (2008: 97) insists, since Agambens latest work brings
economy, political theology and bio-politics into close relation, he is finally

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able to nuance (hence move beyond the structural limitations of) his own
juridical paradigm by showing how economy becomes a simple agency of
theological-political power: an exercise, thus, in the worldly reproduction of
social life. Therefore, despite any reservations we may have about Agambens
protracted take on the biopolitical, this particular onto-theological trajectory
should be followed with vested interest.
* Brad Evans is Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University
of Leeds and Programme Director for International Relations. He is currently working
on a number of projects, including co-edited special edition volumes on Deleuze and
War (Theory & Event, 2010) and Post-Intervention Societies (Journal of Intervention and
State Building, 2010); a single-authored book Liberal Terror: Global Security, Divine Power
and Emergency Rule (Routledge, forthcoming); and a co-edited book Fascism in Deleuze and
Guattari: Securitisation, War & Aesthetics (Routledge, forthcoming).

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