P O L ITICA L STU D IES: 2005 VO L 53, 284–302

World Risk Society and War

Against Terror
Keith Spence
University of Leicester

I interpret the ‘war against terror’, declared following September 11 2001, as adopting concepts
drawn from the work of Ulrich Beck, as a projection of world risk society. Despite its global char-
acter, war against terror is constructed through outmoded vocabularies of national security and
sovereignty, within which the reasoned negotiation of risk is marginalized. This exclusion con-
tributes to the intensification rather than reduction of terror and terrorism. In so doing the moment
of violence inscribed within the concept of the political resurfaces in the constitution of war against
terror, Homeland Security, and the identities and anxieties that they reproduce. Contrary to Slavoj
Ž iž ek’s claim that risk society is incapable of resolving the dilemmas that it exposes, Beck’s
approach cuts across established ideological and methodological boundaries, anticipating key trans-
formations of discourse required to address the prevailing global predicament through the vocab-
ularies and logic of cosmopolitan risk, rather than those of absolute security, terror and war.

In his address at the close of the Azores summit on 16 March 2003, President
G. W. Bush identified the global campaign against terror as the first war of the
twenty-first century (Bush, 2003a). He did not acknowledge that it is also the first
conflict that is distinctly a part of the second modernity, to adopt Ulrich Beck’s term
capturing the forces and transitions constituting the ‘risk society’ with which his
name is synonymous (Beck, 1992). Just as war against terror is a global war, risk
society is amongst other things a paradigm of globalization, and as such is partic-
ularly suited to the interpretation of the response to September 11 2001, and its
effects.
The economies of discourse in general and those produced by the institutions,
agencies and associates of the US administration in particular have, however,
constructed war against terror in terms of a monolithic conception of national secu-
rity. Dominated by this imperative, practices of evaluation, decision, negotiation
and compromise, that is of the reasoned assessment of disparate and variously
tractable risk situations, are inconvenient distractions. Instead, the task of elimi-
nating perceived challenges to the integrity of the nation-state supplants the rela-
tional and heterogeneous risk problematic with that of absolute security and its
constitutive other, terror. In the case of Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003), for
example, the opportunity to manage the present but containable risk posed by
Saddam Hussein’s regime through transnational institutions and instruments was
bypassed in favour of pre-emptive, militarily effected regime change. In terms of
global risk the level of threat posed by Iraq was marginal and manageable. From
the perspective of absolute security, any danger associated with terror or terrorism
demands eradication. Reasons advanced in justification of the campaign were,

© Political Studies Association, 2005.

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 285

subsequent denials notwithstanding, produced in support of this underlying objec-

tive. A tripartite pattern, previously outlined in Kosovo and Afghanistan, is con-
firmed in Iraq and likely to be repeated over time in other locations that are initially
labelled as rogue or failing states, then constructed as immediate threats to US (or,
more broadly, ‘Western’) interests, and finally subjected to regime change.

This interpretation of war against terror is shaped by concepts appropriated from

risk society, but proceeds in full awareness that the unfolding meanings and con-
sequences of September 11 2001 and its aftermath are as multiple, contested and
ambiguous as the events themselves were emphatic. No single theory or method
can contain this multiplicity. The discussion begins by establishing the global cre-
dentials of risk society through a selective exposition of Beck’s position, attending
in particular to the treatment of the nation-state as a ‘zombie category’, and to the
mutual vulnerability and equality of exposure that typifies contemporary experi-
ences of risk. This equality was decisively demonstrated by the 2001 attacks, and
subsequent sections consider the tensions engendered by the paradoxical attempt
to address an acknowledged global problematic through the vocabulary of the
nation-state. Both domestically in the guise of ‘Homeland Security’, and in mili-
tary engagements elsewhere, the pursuit of war against terror inevitably com-
pounds and reproduces the conditions and anxieties that it purports to address.
These developments recall Henry Kissinger’s cautionary observation that ‘[t]he
desire of one power for absolute security means absolute insecurity for all the
others’ (Kissinger, 1961, p. 148; 1964, p. 2). Under conditions of globalization,
however, the predicament of insecurity applies without exception and Kissinger’s
maxim is amplified, not just echoed.

The critique of war against terror inevitably provokes questions concerning the
provision of an alternative response. Contrary to Slavoj Ž i ž ek’s assertion that risk
society is incapable of resolving the dilemmas that it exposes, supplanting the logic
and language of national security and inviolability with discourses oriented around
risk and interdependence promises just such an alternative. Beck’s initial analysis
of ‘Globalization’s Chernobyl’ (Beck, 2001) interpreted the events as a vindication
of his critique of neo-liberalism that simultaneously ‘brought forth an era of glob-
alized government’ in keeping with cosmopolitan aspirations present throughout
his work. Cosmopolitanism is itself a developing and contested field, to which risk
society contributes by offering an analysis of the nation-state that, conceiving terror
and terrorism as risks demanding multilateral, co-operative responses, provides
novel justification for reform initiatives by reconstructing established but outdated
conceptions of national self-interest. The penultimate section considers this recon-
struction in relation to institutions with the potential to act on a global scale in
order to manage and mitigate risk.

Although developments since September 11 depart significantly from Beck’s envis-

aged collective recognition of a ‘global sphere of responsibility’ (Beck, 2002, p. 36),
world risk society challenges war against terror by addressing its underlying
assumptions and their consequences. These assumptions substantially concern the
perceived security and interests of the nation-state, and it is not coincidental that,
as a theory of globalization, risk society is also a critique of this archetypically
modern political formation.
286 KEITH SPENCE

Modernization, Globalization and the Nation-State

The transition within modernity from a first industrial stage towards a second,
reflexive iteration is blurred and ambiguous. Absent a decisive rupture or break,
characteristically modern themes and processes – most notably individualization
and detraditionalization – are extended and intensified in a conjectured phase of
development that is contiguous with its predecessor, as ‘modernization ... is dis-
solving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being’ (Beck, 1992,
p. 10). Modernity itself undergoes modernization, a self-overcoming experienced
across social, political, economic and personal life as novel forms of opportunity,
vulnerability, possibility and, most distinctively, as consciousness of risk.

The emergence of Beck’s theory coincided with a series of industrial disasters

(including the Bhopal (1984), Chernobyl (1986) and Exxon Valdez (1989) inci-
dents) that were readily interpreted to a public increasingly aware of and anxious
about exposure to previously distant hazards. In so doing Risk Society (Beck,
1992) became a performative text, producing the cultural environment that an
unabating stream of subsequent events (such as BSE/vCJD, SARS, and the collapse
of Barings, Enron and WorldCom) continue to entrench. The culture of fear
(Glassner, 2000; Furedi, 2002) of recent sociological vogue, which Beck regards as
a pathological evasion rather than a rational engagement with risk (Beck, 1998,
pp. 147–8; 1999, p. 2f) is an intrinsic but unfortunate aspect of this experience that
is well illustrated in the behavioural response to the September 11 attacks, which
prompted a decline in air travel and compensating increase in car use despite the
fact that road accidents cause as many deaths per week in the US as terrorism did
throughout the 1990s (Myers, 2001). Risk society helps to explain these responses,
but also challenges them by locating risks in appropriately global and critical envi-
ronmental, political and economic contexts.

Processes of modernization are approached from the outset in opposition to tradi-

tional boundaries of class, gender and, most significantly here, of the nation-state.
Differences and limits that industrial modernity conceived, fixed and organized
itself around are overwhelmed by hazards that expose vulnerability to manufac-
tured risk as a universal condition. In Beck’s own reduction, ‘poverty is hierarchic,
smog is democratic ... [risks] possess an inherent tendency towards globalization’ (Beck,
1992, p. 36, emphasis original). This theme has remained a constant throughout
subsequent work, where the nation-state features as a ‘zombie category’ (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p. 206; Boyne, 2001, p. 47), a simultaneously obstructive
yet ineradicable presence within dialogues concerning globalization, unaware of its
status and like others of its kind ‘doomed to live out a twilight existence ... in the
misty zone that divides life from death’ (Farson and Hall, 1978, pp. 59–60). Just
as the second modernity develops from the first, zombie categories – with all of
the affinities conveyed by that appellation – usefully convey the tensions and ambi-
guities associated with the transformation from within that reflexive moderniza-
tion involves.

Defining globalization, Beck concedes, is ‘like trying to nail a blancmange to a wall’,

but the phenomenon minimally entails ‘that borders become markedly less rele-
vant to everyday behaviour’ (Beck, 2000, p. 20). In particular, the global commu-
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 287

nication infrastructure, ‘opens up the space of an unlimited public sphere, sur-

mounting and undermining the national construction of “foreign” and “indige-
nous” ’ (Beck, 1997, p. 75). This blurring of boundaries is inevitably partial and
contested. Nationalism, for example, persists in the form of balkanizing and irre-
dentist movements, but such reactive symptoms of the ‘disappearing possibilities
of maintaining and renewing alterity’ (Beck, 1997, p. 76), successively more frag-
mentary and marginal, should not be mistaken for a revival of or return to out-
moded forms of organization and governance.
Traditional ideas of the geographical nation as the purpose and symbolic centre of
the state similarly persist, but it is symbolic and nostalgic dimensions of tradition
that increasingly predominate, masking a reality that no longer functions as the
bounded container of an imagined homogeneous unity. The globalizing state is
instead host to an overlapping diversity of multiply-sourced identities forging local,
hybrid and hyphenated self-understandings, forms of association and ways of
belonging, for which identification with the nation is partial or contingent rather
than essential and defining. Moreover, as the state becomes increasingly incor-
porated within transnational institutions it too is transformed. Concerns that were
routinely divisible into national and international categories become blurred and
mediated within global processes of interdependence and exchange, and the nation
as sovereign territory becomes progressively less determinant of its activities and
preoccupations.
Conventional notions of the nation-state are inevitably undermined by this inter-
play of local and global forces and effects, but zombiedom is a subtle condition.
Although the nation and its self-images are attenuated by remorseless interroga-
tive processes, these images – especially where they depend explicitly upon borders,
differences and oppositions – do not simply disappear. Relationships between states
are vestigially constructed in vocabularies of boundaries and limits that, subjected
to constant problematization, become points of instability and contingency rather
than permanence and certainty. This appreciation of continuity and resistance
within transformation precludes the inviting but premature declaration of the
simple demise of the nation-state. Undead or otherwise, in its established modern
form it is, however, an entity in transition. Nation and state co-exist in increas-
ingly de-coupled modes and the latter, which remains a primary site of power, is
active transnationally and, both epistemologically and territorially, constituted
fluidly.
This de-coupling involves a parallel reconsideration of the ‘trumping’ political
primacy of sovereignty claims. ‘The future’, Beck insists, ‘cannot be understood
and withstood in the conceptual framework of the past’ (Beck, 1997, p. 14).
Attempts to grasp the territorially unbounded character of contemporary conflict
within realpolitik assumptions of the established international system are compro-
mised from the outset, confirming the requirement for a revised lexicon of appro-
priately global concepts.
Within Beck’s framework of reflexivity and risk the challenge posed by terrorism
(and by weapons of mass destruction) is identified, long in advance of war against
terror, as a threat where damage ‘loses its spatio-temporal limits and becomes
global and lasting’ (Beck, 1999, p. 36). This falls short of a prediction of
288 KEITH SPENCE

September 11, but does suggest how risk society can contribute to its interpreta-
tion and understanding. Firstly, the attack on globalization and its symbols (the
commercial and military-industrial centres of the hegemonic power) was itself
reflexive in that it exploited and was enabled by the very existence of global infra-
structures of transport, mobility, communication and capital. Secondly, at least
2825 lives were lost of individuals from over 115 countries (Raines, 2002, p. 232)
in the collapse of the WTC towers, sited at the centre of an unreservedly global
city. Thirdly, although the events of September 11 were highly specific and partic-
ular in terms of location, they were simultaneously experienced and interpreted
in a multitude of ways throughout the global village. The twin towers remain
omnipresent in the public imaginary, in its archives and iconographies, and in con-
spicuous representations (such as the coda to Martin Scorsese’s 2002 cinematic
homage to the city, Gangs of New York). Every such appearance offers itself as a
memorial, prompting interplays of absence and presence that place in stark relief
the extent to which the exposure to risk of globalization’s ostensibly favoured bene-
ficiary is comparable to that of its weakest victim. The ‘new normal’ of life ‘in the
shadow of no towers’ (Spiegelman, 2003) is hereby disclosed as a discomfiting con-
dition where the distribution of terror is as democratic, and as unconstrained by
the boundaries of the nation-state, as that of smog. In addressing this normality
the US clearly recognised aspects of the challenge posed by this exposure. The doc-
trine of military pre-emption chosen to combat it is, however, an instrument of
national security singularly ill-fitted to a problem of global risk.

Pre-emption, National Security and Terror

The US response to September 11 was direct and paradoxical: a recognition of vul-
nerability accompanied by the pledge to eradicate it without remainder. On the
following day President Bush described the attacks as ‘more than acts of terror;
they were acts of war’ (cited in Raines et al., 2002, p. 68) and declared war against
terror on a worldwide scale. In so doing he simultaneously acknowledged the
global dimension of the terrorist threat, and placed the distinction between acts of
war and acts of terror on a continuum. Terrorism within the US had hitherto been
predominantly treated as a law enforcement issue demanding investigation and
prosecution according to prevailing standards of due legal process. The September
12 redescription, however, specified as global both the territory of the ‘new’ enemy
and the space that US policies subsequently traversed, overturning in an instant
the Kennanite norms of deterrence and containment that shaped US strategic
thinking throughout the Cold War, and continued (in the form, for example, of
no-fly zones and trade sanctions imposed upon Iraq) to exert a guiding role in the
uncertain formation of the ‘hot peace’ that followed.
The apparent novelty of this approach resides in its adoption of pre-emptive force,
a strategy more commonly associated with the aggression of rogue states against
which the US previously defined its virtue, and with processes of terror itself.
Indeed, effective acts of terror typically depend upon pre-emption as targets, for
example, are unpredictably or arbitrarily selected, or attacked without warning or
provocation. Neither the conduct nor outcomes of such acts are fully predictable
or controllable, and as war and terror overlap and blur so too do distinctions
separating civilian from combatant, collateral from non-collateral, and innocent
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 289

from other victims. Moreover, by leveraging sentiments of uncertainty amongst

target populations, pre-emption, like all mechanisms of terror, enlarges the impact
of aggression, provoking fears that permeate the cultures thereby constituted and
reproduced. This effect too is uncontrollable, and just as fear and terror can bring
about compliance and acquiescence their outcomes inevitably include transgres-
sion and resistance.
President Bush’s formulation of the pre-emptive strategy conjoined terror and war
with weapons of mass destruction, to construct a shifting category of enemy
located:
... at the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology ... even weak
states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power ... and we will
oppose them with all our power. Deterrence ... means nothing ... Con-
tainment is not possible ... the only path to safety is the path of action
... our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and
resolute, to be ready for pre-emptive action (Bush, 2003b, p. 269).
Significant questions – in particular regarding the simultaneous disavowal of im-
perial ambition, affirmation of the universality of American values, and determi-
nation of good and evil – arise here but exceed the scope of the present discussion
(see Johnson, 2002). Three points of immediate note are, however, prompted by
this doctrinal formulation. Firstly, pre-emption overturns both the longstanding
formal convention of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of other states, and
the UN-backed norms and laws that legitimate the use of force only under specific
situations justifying self-defence against actual rather than merely possible threats.
Criticism of its unilateral pursuit (see Annan, 2003) notwithstanding, that pre-
emption was readily acknowledged as a principle of action testifies to both the
pervasive influence of the US and the rapidity of the transformation of the inter-
national order as globalization and its consequences are encountered in intense
contemporary forms. Secondly, the depiction of the vaunted threat is entirely, but
pathologically, of a piece with Beck’s depiction of risk society as ‘not a revolution-
ary society, but more than that, a catastrophic society. In it the state of emergency
threatens to become the normal state’ (Beck, 1992, pp. 78–9, emphasis original).
The vocabulary of peril, catastrophe, anticipation and resolution invoked in Bush’s
speech enunciates the contours of the new normality, and aspects of its manifes-
tation as ‘Homeland Security’ are considered below. Thirdly, in addressing any and
all threats, both potential as well as actual, the doctrine responds to global condi-
tions by abandoning conventional norms of space, time and restraint. This radical
globalization of legitimate violence engenders a temporally and territorially
unbounded cycle where the ‘enemy’, always in the process of becoming, is iden-
tified and eliminated on the basis of predicted and phantasized future events rather
than demonstrable intentions, actions and capabilities. The rationale underlying
the initiative, affirmed in the subsequent National Security Strategy (NSC, 2002,
pp. 15–16) was directly proclaimed by the President himself. ‘If we wait for threats
to fully materialize’, he explained ‘we will have waited too long’ (Bush, 2003b,
p. 269).
In each specific instance the detailed process of pre-emption is not wholly fore-
seeable, but inevitably traces the logic of absolute security and terror, exhibiting
290 KEITH SPENCE

patterns that establish and regulate the doctrine, the acts that it authorises, and
the reactions provoked. The criteria for inclusion on the list of rogue states sus-
ceptible to pre-emptive force, for example, are uncertain but available for inter-
pretation using the template of labelling and construction identified in the case of
Iraq. Indeed, initial perceived progress in Iraq led to speculation concerning the
existence of a ‘laundry list’ of potential targets including Iran, Syria and Pakistan
(Bush, 2003c; Rice, 2002; Glass, 2003). The possibility of defeat in conventional
military terms is eliminated in advance by the asymmetry of forces confronting
any target of US military force, and in the absence of meaningful opposition there
can be no conflict bar a short process of destruction and surrender. The element
of surprise within terror conceded by the scale of deployment is re-established in
the use of ‘smart’ weaponry targeting civilian and urban locations, exacerbating
the fears of the population that their liberators might attack invisibly and un-
predictably at any moment. Justification, as Deputy Secretary of Defence Paul
Wolfowitz inadvertently conceded over Iraq, is a matter of the cultivation and
management of public perceptions and ‘bureaucratic reasons’ (Wolfowitz, 2003).
Finally, although the immediate outcome of any particular operation is never in
doubt, the totality of the stated objective of war against terror, which ‘will not end
until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated’
(Bush, 2001) is specified in terms that are rendered unsatisfiable by the manner
of its conduct.
As the cycle inaugurated by the doctrine of pre-emption progresses, its completion
is indefinitely postponed as one vanquished target produces another. In the for-
mative stages of war against terror, for example, a tangible increase in terrorist
activities throughout North and East Africa, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, the Indian
subject-continent and the wider Gulf Region occurred. By responding to terror in
this manner, the US and its allies incorporate its logic as the basis of their actions,
and in so doing, wittingly or otherwise, become its begetters as well as its oppo-
nents. This dilemma, that responding to terror in its own terms deepens rather
than eradicates recurrent violence, recalls Kissinger’s dictum concerning the pursuit
of absolute security which, however sincerely undertaken, cannot but result in its
opposite. Kissinger, that most subtle of realists, has voiced cautious support of the
Bush doctrine when ‘issues of ultimate national security such as Iraq’ (Kissinger,
2002) are at stake. As David Hendrickson (2002, p. 9) observed, it would behove
both the former Secretary and his latter-day successors to retrieve and reinterpret
his abandoned maxim in a manner befitting the transformed contemporary envi-
ronment.
Irrespective of long-term outcomes, pre-emptive regime change in Iraq has fuelled
regional disturbance on a massive scale. It is not yet possible to assess Egyptian
President Hosni Mubarak’s prediction that ‘instead of having one bin Laden, we
will have 100’ as a consequence of Operation Iraqi Freedom (quoted in Black and
McGreal, 2003). It is nevertheless evident that as presently constituted the cam-
paign accepts and incorporates terror as its own modus operandi, and through the
identification of threats prior to their materialization functions as a mechanism that
perpetuates its own basis in the form of terror, resistance and insurgency. This is
an inevitable effect of the adoption of pre-emption, a doctrine bearing a logic that
applies to the United States and its partners just as it is applied by them. The fading
of the boundaries separating internal national and external international concerns
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 291

also ensures that its effects are felt within as well as without even more acutely
than in earlier conflicts.

Identity, National Security and the Homeland

The endorsement of pre-emption and concomitant ambition to eradicate terror,
although ostensibly innovative developments, are not without precedent. Indeed,
for commentators such as Noam Chomsky (2003) and Gore Vidal (2003) the dec-
laration of war against terror is both predictable and consistent with US interven-
tions and undertakings since the republic turned towards empire following the
Second World War. Its recent manifestations are, from this standpoint, merely
accelerated by developments within terrorism. Such criticisms, although unques-
tionably acute, are incomplete and univocal. Their mode of opposition to the US
is as unshaded and binary as the Bush administration’s separation of the world into
good and evil, terrorist and anti-terrorist, friend and enemy. They do, however, call
attention to the role of the past in the interpretative production of the present, and
to ‘the residue of founding violence ... an archaic form of irrationality’ erupting in
periodic outbreaks that are ‘inscribed in the very structure of the political’ (Ricoeur,
1998, p. 98).
It is not the case that the US became an agent of terror in responding to the
September 11 attacks, rather that the response exemplifies the violence that
inheres within the state as a political form. In addition to Iraq and elsewhere, this
archaic excess is prominently elaborated at Guantanomo Bay, where deterritorial-
ization and pre-emption are materialized in a legally determined limbo beyond the
reach of civil and international law. Although US Supreme Court decisions of 28
June 2004 granted the pre-emptively detained captives at Camp Delta the right
to a hearing, this was held to require a limited combatant status review tribunal
(Dworkin, 2004) and fell short of extending protected legal status under the
Geneva Conventions to the detainees. The long-term consequences of the Court’s
rulings await clarification in an ongoing series of decisions and appeals. The process
of suspension and deferral is, independent of ultimate legal outcomes, emblematic
of the new normality. Some ninety miles away, in a vivid conjunction of the local
and the global, its restrictions and violations are subtly replicated within the disci-
plines and practices of Homeland Security.
It is far from accidental that ‘Homeland’ replaced ‘Fatherland’ as the politically
correct rendering of Patrie. The Jacobin terror, prefigured by the Declaration of 11
July 1792 of ‘le Patrie en danger’ [the Fatherland in danger] began as a means of
asserting the authority of the nation-state. ‘Let us be terrible so that the people
will not have to be’ declaimed Danton, as the initial assembly of a Committee of
Vigilance (Comité de Surveillance) was succeeded in April 1793 by the Committee of
Public Safety (Schama, 1989, pp. 624, 706–7). Just as war against terror is waged
in the name of peace, so Homeland Security, the latter-day incarnation of the
Comité, is established in the name of freedom (Ridge, 2003). The ‘domestic’ facet
of the global campaign against terrorism, Homeland Security incites and precipi-
tates a condition of anxious conformity throughout the population. Within the
society of catastrophe it is a key mechanism through which the state of emergency
becomes institutionally established as the norm.
292 KEITH SPENCE

As with the persons and communities that comprise and inhabit them with varying
degrees of enthusiasm, reluctance, solidarity and resentment, states are sites of
identification incorporating an unstable and overlapping patchwork of narratives,
myths, traditions, inventions, oppositions and discriminations. The reproduction of
these multiple meanings is an ongoing process of articulation establishing identity
over time in terms of variously dense and sedimented, or contested and contin-
gent, commonalities and differences (Taylor 1989, pp. 19–24; Connolly 1991,
pp. 64–8). In Washington and New York as surely as in Paris, terror recurs through-
out these discourses and the symbolic order that they establish and sustain.

The detail of this presence is exposed in David Campbell’s reading of the US state
as a site of fixity and order defined in opposition to a panoply of dangers, each an
instance of the ‘other’ that, as difference, determines its enduring identity as a
secure (enclosed, self-sufficient, distinct) entity. Harbingers of disorder and ambi-
guity against which security is written into the symbolic order variously include
communism, drugs, alien immigration and sexual deviance, as well as more
opaquely subversive and ‘un-American’ activities. Cultures of fear and moral panics
invoking these dangers (such as McCarthyism, the ‘war on drugs’, and anti-
feminist moral majoritarianism) function in turn to consolidate the nation-state as
the site of stability (for example Campbell, 1998, pp. 141–7, 172–4, 185–7) and
bind the patriotic citizen to it.

Terrorism features within this discourse as one of the dangers against which the
impress of security is applied, and is present in multiple registers within the reper-
toire of significations through which identities achieve articulation and recognition
in public space. The impact of September 11 is confirmed in this context as a re-
figuration, rather than a wholesale transformation, as terror came to prominence
as the other against which stability and order are defined, and terrorism as the
label applied without discrimination to behaviours and identities experienced as
disturbing to or incompatible with the orthodoxies thereby prescribed. Before the
attacks agents of terror, a feature of American experience (Hewitt, 2003) from
the Ku Klux Klan to Timothy McVeigh, were marginalized within the master-
narratives of the nation’s self-image, values and norms. Transnational terrorism
was comparably banished to ‘an external and anarchic environment’ (Campbell,
1998, p. 8), of which the territorial US did not imagine itself to be a part. Follow-
ing the attacks the fiction that the ‘other’ was without rather than within, along
with the boundary sustained by the distinction, was exposed, and terror became
prominently and rapidly normalized within processes of identity formation.
Most Americans were ‘spectators to the event and participants in the suffering’
(McInness, 2003, p. 173) but this suffering extends beyond the travails of mourn-
ing and remembrance. It is also experienced in the everyday demands of
Homeland Security, a set of performances that establish, reproduce and consolidate
the identity of inhabitants of the new normality, and of the state that enacts its
realization.

The principal text of and commentary upon Homeland Security is provided by the
USA Patriot Act and the responses that it precipitated. The Act has been widely
challenged, in particular regarding its allegedly unconstitutional extension of
powers of surveillance, detainment and expulsion (American Civil Liberties Union,
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 293

2002; Cole, 2003). The critique from the perspective of civil liberties and immi-
grants’ rights importantly monitors and resists the spread of a soft despotism in the
expanding activities (such as the Orwellian monitoring (Harris, 2003) of library
users’ borrowing records) of the state and its agencies. The apparatuses of panop-
ticism long predate the declaration of war against terror, however, and the ten-
dency to polemically depict their extension as part of an undeclared war waged by
the US against its own citizens (Vidal, 2003, p. 101) obscures the more subtle and
penetrating effect of which they are a part – the institutionalization of a psychology
and subjectivity befitting the logic of security and terror.

Mike Davis offers a summary of this effect that outlines its variation on the now
familiar pattern of pre-emption: ‘law enforcement is being restructured so that
the FBI can permanently focus on the war against terrorism ... The globalization
of fear thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Davis, 2002, pp. 17–8). The dif-
ference with Homeland Security is that the pre-emptive pattern of labelling, con-
struction and transformation is ‘domesticated’, assuming a prophylactic guise of
vigilance, anticipation, and relief. Within this cycle uncertainty is cultivated but
remains unresolved as the act that completes the sequence – the event of terror –
is defined in such a way that, although inevitable, its occurrence is always deferred
into an unpredictable future rather than the foreseeable present. Like the war
against terror of which it is a part, completion of the cycle is indefinitely
postponed.

This postponement is expressed in routines that inform the everyday experience

of Homeland Security, a preoccupation throughout mass media, commerce and
civil society as well as the state. The sources contributing to the production of its
subjectivity are therefore multiple, but mainstream channels of information and
exchange typically follow the agenda and practices established by the state and
most succinctly communicated in its mantra of vigilance and preparation. The
official website, www.ready.gov, is presented under the title ‘Be Ready!’ with a
sound bite from founding Secretary Tom Ridge proclaiming that ‘Terrorism forces
us to make a choice. We can be afraid. Or we can be prepared’. This is, however,
a false opposition, as readers are warned in alarmist terms about threats that are
simultaneously real but unknowable and inevitable but unpredictable. The injunc-
tion to prepare thereby anticipates its own object, and in a now familiar manner
contributes decisively to its production: rather than assuaging fear, Homeland Secu-
rity incites and reinforces its own spurious necessity. This in turn is transmitted,
reproduced and disseminated throughout discourses of citizenship. In daily brief-
ings and Internet updates, for example, the current threat situation is simplified
into vague and disturbing categories of danger graded from green to red. Carefully
orchestrated drills, rehearsals and simulations maintain security and terror at the
forefront of public awareness, supplemented by exercises, such as port closures and
flight cancellations, suggesting a more proximate but still intangible threat to the
nation-state and its borders. The outcome of this frenzy is an ever more prominent
anxiety located within a space of epistemic vacuum, stimulating a condition of sus-
pense and unease of which the subject is constantly reminded.

Terror is thereby insinuated within the structures of the social world, part of
the background of prejudgements, assumptions and understandings that shape
294 KEITH SPENCE

the reception, experience, and reproduction of everyday life. This process was
infamously demonstrated when a recommendation that windows might be ren-
dered airtight against biological agents through the application of plumbing tape
and plastic sheeting led, in a self-supporting cultural circuit of media hype and
public panic, to reports of unprecedented demand, stockpiling and shortages
(Hindo, 2003). States of alert function here as indices of terror, internalized by the
self-disciplining, fearful and prepared subject of Homeland Security, the identity
and satisfactions of the patriot combining with acts of consumption and con-
tributing to the economy of fear in all senses of the term.

Slavoj Ž i ž ek goes so far as to suggest that by cultivating a condition of perpetual

readiness, ‘the US is deliberately fomenting the fear of impending catastrophe,
in order to reap the benefits of the universal relief when it fails to be realised’
( Ž i žek, 2003). The ‘enemy’ is a phantasy made real in order to underwrite the
extension of the state’s activities. This insight certainly identifies one mechanism
at work within Homeland Security, but confuses intention and effect. This confu-
sion is also present in Ž i ž ek’s second, avowedly paranoid, suggestion that
‘the real target of the “war on terror” is the disciplining of the emancipatory
excesses in American society itself’ ( Ž i ž ek, 2003).

Whilst it is impossible to establish the veracity of this judgement, to the extent that
it has taken place, any curtailment of protest is charitably viewed as a welcome
side effect of the response to September 11 rather than a guiding aim. Even
more welcome, however, is the impact upon the wider population. Polling data
(American Broadcasting Corporation, 2003) suggests that two thirds of Americans
broadly support the erosion of their rights, regarding the Patriot Act and subse-
quent institutionalization of Homeland Security as warranted intrusions. The pro-
duction and normalization of the psychology of fear is thereby willed by a receptive
citizenry that participates in its construction, and whose compliance sustains it. The
extent of this effect is only apparent at the stage when the state of emergency and
the anxiety that attends it assume an appearance of permanence, with the associ-
ated erosion of rights similarly rationalized, reconciled and justified, and the logic
of security and terror thoroughly integrated within the habits and customs of the
new normality.

Homeland Security thereby reinforces the insecure subjectivity that is its pre-
requisite. As the state is increasingly presented – and its actions justified – against
the ‘other’ of terror, it simultaneously inculcates and diffuses these identifica-
tions. This subjectivity is of course incomplete, and its simplicity occludes beliefs,
affinities and commitments that complement, complicate and exceed the conven-
tions of patriotic allegiance. This limitation notwithstanding, insofar as it amplifies
the impact of terror, the disciplinary politics of Homeland Security is effective
as a means of shaping the beliefs and anxieties of malleable, self-regulating sub-
jects who associate citizenship with conformity and patriotic duty. In so doing
the paradoxes of absolute security and pathologies of war against terror are repli-
cated upon the domestic stage. As with the strategy of pre-emption, the fixation
of Homeland Security upon an increasingly obsolete conception of the bounded
nation-state renders it inadequate to the complex interface of globalization and
risk.
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 295

Globalization and Cosmopolitanism

The explanatory efficacy of themes drawn from Beck’s framework invites the ques-
tion of whether an analysis embracing risk, which at the strategic level is all but
excluded from the discourse shaping war against terror, supports alternative
responses to the consequences of globalization. Ž i ž ek suggests that it cannot do so
because risk society founders upon a paradox of its own:

The ultimate deadlock of the risk society lies in the gap between knowl-
edge and decision, between the chain of reasons and the act which
resolves the dilemma ... the situation is radically ‘undecidable’; but we
nonetheless have to decide ... . ( Ž i ž ek, 1999, p. 334)

Where Homeland Security seeks to cover the breach between information and
knowledge with an unsustainable dualism of preparation and fear, the lacuna spec-
ified by Ž i žek between knowledge and sufficient reason appears, superficially,
equally unbridgeable. Ž i žek’s provocative critique is, however, incomplete and the
deadlock he identifies far from ultimate. That Ž i žek believes this to be the case is
attributable to his own standpoint, a radical, idiosyncratic universalism located
firmly within the fading first modernity (for example Ž i ž ek, 2001, pp. 169–73) and
its assumptions. Ž i ž ek’s posited impasse also presupposes a probabilistic, calcula-
tive and utilitarian model of risk (see Gigerenzer, 2002, pp. 26–8) in contrast to
the globalized understanding that is fundamental to Beck’s theorization. This inad-
vertently underlines the significance of the invitation of world risk society to recon-
sider the political order in a cosmopolitan form shorn of illusory claims to territorial
sovereignty and monopoly of violence. Ž i ž ek’s deadlock is thereby addressed, and
the chasm between decision and action potentially at least bridged by the recog-
nition of mutual vulnerability and interdependence that a reflexive understanding
of globalization and risk underwrites.

This transition in reasoning, to reiterate, does not depend upon the implausible
disappearance of the nation as category, but does conceive of the state as an
institution that is, increasingly, transnationally and co-operatively constituted.
Although the residue of violence inscribed within the concept of the political is
ineradicable, the condition exposed on September 11 does not invite the US to
assume the mantle of global leviathan. Such a response is reflexive in the crudest
sense – a knee jerk characteristic of an earlier period rather than a considered
response to the actuality of prevailing circumstances. Security, to the extent that
freedom from Hobbes’s (1991, p. 89) ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death’
is attainable, is an inexorably conditional and transient by-product of co-operative
endeavour that is never absolute and, under conditions of globalization, only inci-
dentally national in form. From this perspective September 11 can be appropriated
as an unlikely catalyst. The immediate and spontaneous declarations of solidarity
by transnational institutions (including NATO, the UN and the League of Arab
Nations) following the attacks demonstrates, contrary to the ambitions of its pro-
tagonists, that ‘global terrorism ... has pushed us into a new phase of globalization,
the globalization of politics, the moulding of states into transnational co-operative
networks ... the rule has been confirmed that resistance to globalization only accel-
erates it’ (Beck, 2002b, p. 46).
296 KEITH SPENCE

This prognosis has been largely disappointed by subsequent developments, in

Beck’s view due to the persistence of outmoded concepts, a ‘silence of language’
(Beck, 2002c, p. 1) in facing the event that underlines the veracity of its critique.
It also attests to a continuing confusion of leadership and dominion, as the US seeks
to determine the course of globalization rather than participate in its construction
in a consistent and equitable manner. The outcome is an unstable, oscillating
multilateralism where retreat towards moribund self-interest is maintained as
the option that becomes inevitable whenever the hegemon’s immediate will is
thwarted or questioned.

To note just three familiar examples, the benefits of free trade are recited liturgi-
cally by a US administration that routinely imposes tariffs and distributes subsidies
in order to perpetuate asymmetries of power that developed during the first moder-
nity but cannot survive the scrutiny of the second. The perceived interests of the
advanced post-industrial economies are thereby protected from the effects of the
global marketplace (for example Stiglitz, 2002, pp. 172–3) that they avowedly
espouse. Comparably, the National Security Strategy extols the virtues of global
co-operation but rejects the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court (NSC,
2002, pp. 30–1), the most significant development towards the establishment of
global judicial standards of the post Cold War era. Thirdly, in his speech marking
the first anniversary of September 11, President Bush provocatively asked the
United Nations General Assembly whether it ‘will serve the purpose of its found-
ing or will it become irrelevant?’ (Bush, 2002). Operation Iraqi Freedom offers one
response to that rhetorical question, as does a wide-ranging joint statement calling
upon ‘all nations to join together in common purpose ... to recognise our respon-
sibility to work for the common good in the world’ made without reference to the
UN (Blair and Bush, 2003). Yet these stances too are qualified by ongoing partic-
ipation within UN structures and processes, not least the diplomacy that produced
the anaemic but symbolically significant Security Council Resolution (USC 1511
[2003]) on the reconstruction of Iraq.

This metronomic pattern was again in evidence in the aftermath of President Bush’s
2004 electoral success, when his acknowledgement that ‘we have common duties:
to protect our peoples, to confront disease and hunger and poverty in troubled
regions of the world’ was devoid of reference to the development of, or role of the
US within, institutions dedicated to those very tasks. The President did suggest that
he ‘would continue to reach out to our friends and allies’ (Bush, 2004b), but the
dominant and predictable pledge was to expend newly acquired political capital –
obtained in no small measure through an election campaign that relentlessly
invoked thematics of Homeland Security – upon war against terror, which ‘we will
fight ... with every resource of our national power’ (Bush, 2004a).

These briefly observed abridgements of principle and practice are far from novel.
Every such ambivalence marks an anxiety of transition between the modernity of
the nation-state and its emergent globally oriented successor, the atavistic impulse
to ‘pour formless global threats into old territorial bottles’ (Ó Tuathail, 2000,
p. 174) enacting nostalgia for a fondly imagined (and hence unimpeachable) era
of stability, authenticity and self-assurance. Risk society confronts this melancholy
and the diminished certainties that provoke it, reconstructing the idea of national
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 297

interest within a global and collective framework: ‘[t]ransnational co-operation [is

the only solution] ... in order to pursue their national interest, countries need to
denationalize and transnationalize themselves’ (Beck, 2002b, p. 48). The state
already contains the resources as well as the contradictions that provide the basis
of its development, globalization requiring the recasting and relocation rather than
abandonment of priorities and prerogatives, including security, that are no longer
simply national in form. This aspect of continuity between formations of moder-
nity is easily obscured by the prominence of misleading distinctions – between
national and international, inside and outside, domestic and foreign – the efforts
required to police and maintain boundaries between them, and the tensions
thereby produced.

For Beck (2002b, pp. 51–3), cosmopolitanism presents itself as a methodological

programme with sweeping objectives – the reconstitution of society and sociology
– fully in the tradition of grand social theory. Within any such scheme the part and
the whole are only precariously divisible, and this discussion does not seek to
endorse the wholesale disciplinary reinvention of which the interpretation of war
against terror and its consequences is but a part. This part is nonetheless a signifi-
cant one, shifting the terms of political discourse away from the consuming obses-
sion with absolute security and terror. In so doing a re-orientation towards coping
rather than dominating, where the exclusive claims of the nation-state give way
to a collective understanding of globalization as both formative environment and
site of political response, is enabled.

This site is not of course singular, and involves a rethinking of established orders
where the ‘sub-politics’ of local and transnational awareness, advocacy and protest
disturbs established boundaries of governance. The sub-political crucially cultivates
the political consciousness without which cosmopolitanism remains an unrealized
theoretical conjecture, but is not sufficient in and of itself and must be paralleled
by institutional and policy innovation (Beck, 1999, pp. 14, 37–9, 91–108). A view
of transnational institutions, including the WTO, ICC and UN as well as NGOs,
political coalitions and protest movements, as agencies of reflexive modernization,
susceptible to reforming agendas consistent with the diagnosis supported by risk
society, is thereby advanced.

Instead of distancing itself from such institutions, or perpetuating the debilitating

inconsistencies of present practice, the option of undivided co-operation within
transnational processes affords an opportunity to address the patterns of and vac-
illation and indecision exposed in the course of this discussion. As Stiglitz (2003)
argues in respect of the WTO, reform ‘is imperative – if we want a better and more
equitable world, or even if we just want a safer world’. This observation is as
relevant to justice and co-operation as it is to economics, and the notion that the
reconfiguration of existing relationships requires unrealistic altruism or sacrifice by
traditionally dominant powers towards the less advantaged is a fanciful remnant
of the ‘methodological nationalism’ (Gane, 2004, pp. 143–6) that presupposes all
interests to be national in form. Redistribution, for example, already occurs on a
scale as vast as it is irrational. Setting aside the limited contribution of aid pro-
grammes, the $1.9 trillion estimated economic impact of a decade-long engage-
ment in Iraq (Nordhaus, 2002, p. 76) suggests the extent of potentially available
298 KEITH SPENCE

resources. The proposal that investments of this scale be directed more construc-
tively and imaginatively is ultimately a modest one. Although the costs of co-
operation may be less readily accountable than those of military adventures, the
potential benefits accruing are unquestionably greater and, insofar as they resolve
difficulties attending the attempt to pursue global politics in the language of the
nation, normatively compelling.

Many initiatives directed towards the reform and extension of transnational agree-
ments and institutions after September 11 (Archibugi and Young, 2003; Held, 2004,
p. 148) are consistent with world risk society, but do not originate with or depend
upon it. The equality of vulnerability that is fundamental to Beck’s framework, and
the democratic potentials that inhere within it, creates novel incentives and invig-
orated motivations to revisit the fears, resentments, inequalities and failures of
recognition that contribute to the reproduction of terror. Rather than a vehicle of
pax americana, in a world exceeding the mastery of even its most powerful occu-
pant, an adequately achieved globalization must be cosmopolitan in the fullest
post-national and post-hegemonic sense.

Cosmopolitanism is of course far from unproblematic, and is the subject of flour-

ishing multidisciplinary debate (Brown, 1992; Held, 1995; Archibugi, 2003). Rather
than offering a simple solution to the permanent crisis of the nation-state, it is a
set of processes and possibilities contributing to a developing politics of global
governance. Its universalism is prospectively thin and fragile, and its tolerance of
alterity constantly placed in question by forms of life and norms of conduct that
test the limits of any pluralism. In this context Beck (2002a, p. 36) writes of the
possibility of multiple cosmopolitanisms, rather than a single prospectively homo-
genizing model with which permissible social forms must render themselves com-
mensurate. Europe, with all of the tensions and contradictions inherent within its
union and institutions, is offered as an unlikely paradigm of cosmopolitan prac-
tice. It is, he claims ‘a unity of diversity’, the denial of which ‘misses that this is
already also true of the nations that make it up’ (Beck, 2003, p. 32).

The sense conveyed – that as the sources of cosmopolitanism are abundantly plural,
so must their container be – is superficially plausible. The relationship of the one
and the many is, however, left conveniently and optimistically open. Extending
the boundaries of cosmopolis raises concerns regarding monistic associations and
origins of the term, and its capacity to cope dialogically with differences and con-
flicts that are as constitutive as shared ideals and collective ambitions. As a frame-
work for collective decision-making and risk-sharing, it inevitably generates
boundary tensions as its own limits are exposed and tested, and is not a pangloss-
ian solution in which any and all conflicts can be dissolved. Pace Kant, risk society
projects a cosmopolitan purpose without a universal history and, as Beck candidly
concedes, involves a ‘ruse’ where vagueness and equivocation ‘stands for openness
to the world ... there is no substantial founding principle’ (Beck, 2002a, pp. 36–7).
Cosmopolitanism is not therefore a utopian project or a teleological inevitability,
its progress contingently bound up with the critical development of a globalization
that seeks to make its institutions and practices more transparent and accountable.
This thin foundation has yet to be thoroughly tested (Beck, 2002a, p. 24), and
Beck’s ruse may in time be exposed as a bluff. Its avowed openness does, however,
WORLD RISK SOCIETY AND WAR AGAINST TERROR 299

promise to accommodate proliferating relationships, affinities, dependencies, dif-

ferences and antagonisms – including those connected with terror and terrorism –
that surround globalization and resist solution in terms that posit and naturalize
the nation-state as the original and primary unit of political analysis.

Conclusions
A more complete account of the causes and effects of contemporary terror would,
minimally, incorporate eschatological, petrochemical, postcolonial and neo-
conservative elements beyond the scope of this discussion. Even within its limited
deployment here, however, world risk society supports an understanding of war
against terror and its contexts that is simultaneously critical and constructive,
challenging the calcified assumptions of national security with alternative vocab-
ularies and norms of mutual risk, vulnerability, dependence and responsibility.
Kissinger’s paradox – that absolute security for one entails its opposite for the rest
– implies that the security ambitions of modern nation-states are at best confused
and at worst self-defeating. Overcoming this conundrum, and with it the deadlock
specified by Ž i žek, is significantly enabled by a perspectival shift from national
security towards cosmopolitan risk.
This transition is immanent rather than inevitable. The normative purchase of any
theory upon the world that it interprets cannot be gainsaid or guaranteed, and
as yet the language of global risk has not decisively informed the response to
September 11. The ever-decreasing circle of difference and repetition inscribed
within identity-forming discourses by the institutions, practices and disciplines of
war against terror and Homeland Security is, however, inevitably incomplete and
open to challenge. World risk society contributes to this contestation by identify-
ing within processes of modernization both sources of prevailing discontents, and
resources that address them in innovative forms.
Nostalgia for a fondly imagined era of the nation-state is a homesickness that
cannot be resolved by the optimistic invocation of obsolete conventions. Equally,
‘[e]veryone is wrong about the future’ (Kundera, 2002, p. 5, p. 143), especially
those tempted to pre-empt it. As the fortunes of war against terror demonstrate,
the desire in the name of security to dominate terror rather than negotiate risk
serves only to proliferate that which it aims to extinguish. Overcoming a paradox
often requires the displacement of entrenched habits of thought and action by less
constrained or predictable alternatives. In this regard, world risk society forcefully
gives voice to an ethos befitting cosmopolitan forms of governance, making possi-
ble a transforming engagement with the problems and opportunities surrounding
globalization in general, and with global security and terror in particular, that is
otherwise likely to be eclipsed in the pursuit of a forlorn absolute.
(Accepted: 10 January 2005)

About the Author

Keith Spence, Department of Criminology, University of Leicester, 154 Upper New Walk,
Leicester LE1 7QA, UK; email: kgs3@le.ac.uk
300 KEITH SPENCE

Note
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 PSA Annual Conference at the University of
Lincoln, and at the Political Theory Workshops hosted by the Department of Politics at the University of
York, where I benefited in particular from the searching comments of Sue Mendus, Matt Matravers and
Tim Stanton. In addition I am grateful for the advice received from the anonymous reviewers for this
journal, and for additional feedback on the draft kindly provided by Jan Rockett and by Catherine Wynne.

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