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SAGE Publications, http://sdi.sagepub.comVol. 41(4): 413–433, DOI: 10.1177/0967010610374313

Foucault’s 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 warand liberal ways of development, the ideas of Michel Foucault haveincreasingly 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 lifeitself becomes the principle referent object for security practices. Inmapping out these key debates, this article will nuance our under-standing of Foucault’s relevance by explaining: how liberal securitygovernance today operates within a globally inclusive imaginary tothe 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 securitypractitioners with sorting and adjudicating between different formsof 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 violencethrough doing what is necessary out of species necessity implies thathumanity’s most purposeful expression appears through the battlesthat are waged upon life, for life, on a planetary scale; how the liberalencounter has created conditions akin to a global state of civil war thatoffers 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 criticalattention.

Keywords liberal problematic of security • global civil war • Foucault• necessary violence • liberal war thesis

Foucault’s Intervention

MICHEL FOUCAULT’S RECENT RENAISSANCE has undoubtedlyadded 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 Foucault’s relevance to some of our most pressingpolitical concerns. This has been matched by the translated publications ofthe series of lectures Foucault (2003, 2007, 2008) gave at the Collège de Francefrom the mid- to the late 1970s. Bringing to the fore his thinking on ‘biopower’

and ‘biopolitics’, these texts have contributed to the numerous writings thattake critical aim at what is now commonly termed the liberal problematic ofsecurity.1 Invariably, what has been taking place here with these efforts is anecessary rewriting of Foucault’s legacy. Not only do these endeavours moveus beyond the normative ‘Question of Truth’ (which, to be frank, served thedialectical entrapments of Frankfurt theorists such as Jürgen Habermas morethan it ever did Foucault);2 they also force us to pose new questions con-cerning the nature of power in our modern societies. Foucault’s resurrectedspectre, however, does come with its challenges. As Foucault (2008: 3) himselfwould explain, when one begins to pose the problem of power biopolitically,an entirely different ‘grid of intelligibility’ is adopted that no longer providesus with the comfort of a rehearsed orthodoxy:

Instead of deducing concrete phenomena from universals, or instead of starting withuniversals as an obligatory grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices, I wouldlike to start with these concrete practices and, as it were, pass these universals throughthe grid of these practices. . . . Historicism starts from the universal and, as it were, putsit through the grinder of history. My problem is exactly the opposite. I start from thetheoretical and methodological decision that consists in saying: Let’s suppose univer-sals do not exist. And then I put the question to history and historians: How can youwrite 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 acritical method, but starting from the decision then that universals do not exist, askingwhat kind of history we can do.

Enthusiasm for Foucault’s 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 tocontemporary political analysis (Patton, 2007). Leaving aside the claim thatthis body of work somehow represents Foucault’s ‘wasted years’ – or, forthat matter, that the concepts explored during this period were not really

Foucauldian at heart (especially biopolitics) – the most serious charge concernsthe lack of sufficient academic rigour in the lecture series. Beatrice Hanssen(2000), for instance, has correctly pointed out that despite the attention givento 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,

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

2 As John Protevi (forthcoming) suggests, ‘To the (in)famous demand that Foucault provide a normative“standard,” we can reply that he does; it’s 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 itmatch some universal standard.’






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Brad Evans Security, War and Violence in the 21st Century 415

not the overseas dominions/borderlands that have attracted a great deal ofthe contemporary focus (see below). It is fair to say that Foucault’s efforts aresomewhat incomplete. They leave us wanting more empirical depth. That isnot, however, to deny their usefulness. As John Marks (2008: 88) argues,

the lectures are an expression of Foucault’s 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 ofsovereignty.

So, while these lectures may lack the rigorous empirical depth of Foucault’sacademic texts, it is the introduction of concepts that can be put to use todaypolitically 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 matchedup with Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘control societies’ in order to account for thenew post-industrial cartography of productive relations. Then, taking this to

be their point of theoretical departure, they invoke the notion of biopoliticalproduction (arguably another way of saying labour) to afford the concept thepotential for liberation. The term ‘biopolitics’ is therefore said to reveal bothexploitative and resistive qualities, enabling us, diagrammatically speaking,to map out the entire social morphology of power relations in our modernsystems. Truer to his academic style, on the other hand, Agamben offers amore protracted genealogy in order to reveal how biopolitics is fully implicitin the production of those subjects that, open to the technologies of purerule, are stripped of their political and moral values. Such de-subjectivizedsouls 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). Whilethese works have rightly enjoyed notable academic success (partly due totheir notoriety), they have nevertheless tended to muddy the waters when itcomes to defining the biopolitical. Indeed, since bad readings of these textsallow for the concept to be associated with the governance of any form of

political community whatsoever, there is a danger that the biopolitical meltsinto meaningless abstraction. Given the political stakes, this lack of concep-tual clarity is simply not satisfactory. A return to Foucault’s 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 withhuman development/progress in a manner that complements traditionalsecurity paradigms. Importantly, for Foucault, since the biopolitical takesissue 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 hap-pens 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 evensay the concept only makes theoretical and practical sense once humanitarianqualities 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 ofindigenous life to take place. With the aim, then, of critically foregroundingthe ‘humanization of security’, this article will (1) provide a concise overviewof the liberal biopolitics of security in the 21st century; (2) explain why thesecurity rationalities underwriting this serve to radicalize our understandingof the war–peace continuum; (3) illustrate how liberal war invokes its ownparticular form of necessary violence that, serving to authenticate life, revealsa 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 tosome key assumptions made concerning the global nature of contemporarywarfare; and (6) identify some possible areas for further biopolitical enquiryin 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 attendsto those general strategies for power that, in the process of making life live,entail the regulation of populations for society’s 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 aboutletting things happen: ‘a question of constituting something like a milieu of life,existence’ (Foucault, 2007: 30). Since security here is seen to be a thoroughlycreative 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 inmind, entirely different analytical methods are invariably sought. As DidierBigo (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 notisolate, it is built as a network.’ Biopolitics accordingly ‘not only functionsthrough 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 technologiesof security, circulation is the spatial configuration that characterizes the bio-politics of security’ (Dillon, 2007: 11).

Vitalizing security undermines the privileged position once afforded tothe 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 torationalize/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 anddemarcating 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, constantlymoving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that theinherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out.

That security has a performative function has been understood for some time.David Campbell’s (1998) Writing Security, for instance, provided wonderfulinsight 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 Campbell’s work displays evidentallegiance to Foucault, his method still remains committed to sovereign ten-sions. Subjectivity is therefore constituted in relation to some epiphenomenaldecision that provides the endangered political community with its shared

sense of belonging. Where Foucault’s biopolitical analytics mark their mostimportant departure, however, is to turn our attention away from these con-ventional markers. Exposing instead the nature of those ordering/securingmechanisms that operating in the name of species progress/development aremore immanent to the conduct of life, sovereignty is seconded by a morepositive 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 theprocess 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 organizeit. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not inthe 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 simplythe 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 theconditions in which one can be free, it is clear that at the heart of this liberal practiceis an always different and mobile problematic relationship between the production offreedom and that which in the production of freedom risks limiting and destroying it(Foucault, 2008: 63–64).

Shifting the analytical focus away from the primacy of sovereign power, alongwith all its neat, static, fixed demarcations, towards the problems posed by aproductive account of freedom that is always haunted by its own capacity forself-destruction should not be underestimated. Demanding a more positive

approach to power, this perspective exposes one of liberalism’s 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 lawwas, 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 lawor legal transgression. The problem of security is always a problem of security

governance (see Dean, 2007). Taking this on board, one might argue that inorder to conduct any thorough investigation of the securitization process, itis 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 sécurité :

By the term apparatus [dispositif ] I mean a kind of formation, so to speak, that a givenhistorical moment has as its major function the response to urgency. The apparatustherefore has a dominant strategic function. . . . I said that the nature of an apparatus isessentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation ofrelations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relation of forces, eitherso as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, andto utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power. . . . Theapparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, andsupported 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 globalimaginary of threat allowed for the possibility to govern all illiberal life onthe basis that the species as a whole would be less endangered. This abilityto 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 appearthrough 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, providingthe requisite legitimacy necessarily depended upon the consolidation of anumber 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 orideological contest to become the principal diagnostic for understanding thecauses of conflict and violence; (3) because indiscriminate violence becamethe hallmark of the complex political emergency, more sustained obligationsto less fortunate others were demanded; (4) interventionism could be justifiedon 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 thename of creating lasting conditions/capacities for peace. Ultimately, then,since underdeveloped life was seen to be capable of its own (un)making, newanalytical tools were demanded in order to overcome the problems life posedto itself:

In (re)defining the threats to human life as its most basic operation, the discourse ofhuman 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 definingand responding to threats to human life, these strategies have as their aim the avoidanceof 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 Foucault’s under-standing of the biopolitical, the health and welfare of populations is human security’sframe of intervention (De Larrinaga & Doucet: 2008: 528).

This brings us to the pioneering work of Mark Duffield, who has provideda thorough critique of the development–security nexus so central to contem-porary liberal power. While Duffield’s 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 theapplicability of biopolitics to the fields of development, human security andglobal war.3 Importantly, for Duffield, mapping out these connections drawsour attention to a global cartography of power relations that is being effec-tively shaped by the liberal encounter:

3 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 aconference 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 andterror” published by the Danish Institute for International Studies.’






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Initially, I had thought that development involved a universalising of the technologiesthat Foucault had outlined in relation to Europe, a sort of scaled up bio-politics that actson 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 ofdividing 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 witha considered genealogy of the formative figures of political modernity (thecivilized, the savage and the barbarian), exposing the liberal will to rule;they also directly challenge the claims that the project is somehow politicallyempowering:

Understanding conflict has also moved its locus from wars between states to conflictswithin and across them. Like sustainable development, households, communities andpopulations 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 theyare sites of entry, protection and betterment; for the latter they are objects of attack anddestruction. . . . In other words, both sustainable development and internal war – albeitfor opposing purposes – take life or population and not the state as their reference point(Duffield, 2007: 117–118).

Duffield’s principal message here is clear and provocative: Liberalism pro-ceeds 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 technicalrecovery of the good life is necessarily rendered dangerous for the greatersocial good. This is significant. Since de-politicization is said to occur whenlife 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 Agamben’s bare life. Bare life for Agamben is seen to be a product ofthe sovereign encounter. Life, in other words, becomes bare since it is beyondthe recourse of any legal frameworks/obligations – hence set outside (‘aban-doned’ in Agamben’s 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 biopoliticalencounter is the product of a different logic. No longer banished from therealm, life is denied its political quality as the ‘bare essentials’ for speciessurvival take precedence. No longer then made bare in order to be renderedinactive to the society it endangers, life is stripped bare of its pre-existingvalues 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 dangerouslack 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 formin 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 bea continuous recourse to war. While the militarism associated with liberalinternationalization has already received scholarly attention (Howard, 2008),Foucault was concerned more with the continuation of war once peace has

been declared.4 Denouncing the illusion that ‘we are living in a world inwhich order and peace have been restored’ (Foucault, 2003: 53), he set out todisrupt the neat distinctions between times of war/military exceptionalismand 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 war–peace continuum than Michael Dillon & Julian Reid (2009).Their ‘liberal war’ thesis provides a provocative insight into the lethality ofmaking live. Liberalism today, they argue, is underwritten by the unreservedrighteousness of its mission. Hence, while there may still be populationsthat exist beyond the liberal pale, it is now taken that they should be included.

With ‘liberal peace’ therefore predicated on the pacification/elimination ofall forms of political difference in order that liberalism might meet its ownmoral and political objectives, the more peace is commanded, the more war isdeclared 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 universaland pacific ambitions for which liberalism is to be admired’ (Dillon & Reid,2009: 2). Liberalism thus stands accused here of universalizing war in its pursuitof 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 itsown global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundlyshaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied

4 Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended lectures specifically attend to the role war plays in the very formationof political modernity: ‘I would like to try and see the extent to which the binary schema of war andstruggle, 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 raisesan 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 essentialmechanisms – 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 & Reid’s thesis only makes veiled reference to the onto- theological 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 thetransformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cul-tures’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 5). Endless war is underwritten here by a newset 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 possibilityof 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, adaptiveand radically interconnected as the world of which it is part. That is why ‘anysuch war to end war becomes a war without end. . . . The project of removingwar from the life of the species becomes a lethal and, in principle, continu-ous and unending process’ (Dillon & Reid, 2009: 32). Duffield, building onfrom these concerns, takes this unending scenario a stage further to suggestthat since wars for humanity are inextricably bound to the global life-chancedivide, it is now possible to write of a ‘Global Civil War’ into which all life isopenly recruited:

Each crisis of global circulation . . . marks out a terrain of global civil war, or rather atableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself. . . . Whatis at stake in this war is the West’s ability to contain and manage international povertywhile 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 posingfundamental questions of life and death – that is, who is to live and who can

be killed – disrupting the narrative that ordinarily takes sovereignty to bethe 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 befor the unification of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means outof favour. More recently it underwrites the strategic rethink in contemporaryzones of occupation, which has become biopolitical (‘hearts and minds’) ineverything but name (Kilcullen, 2009; Smith, 2006). While criticisms of thesestrategies have tended to focus on the naive dangers associated with liberalidealism (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 warhave always been aligned with forms of life. Liberal wars are no exception.Fought in the name of endangered humanity, humanity itself finds its mostmeaningful expression through the battles waged in its name:

At this point we can invert Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continua-tion of war by other means. . . . While it is true that political power puts an end to war andestablishes or attempts to establish the reign of peace in civil society, it certainly doesnot do so in order to suspend the effects of power or to neutralize the disequilibriumrevealed 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 relationsof 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 historyof 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 ourthinking 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 counter- insurgency. 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 othermeans. . . . We need politics to become the continuation of warfare by other means.

Miliband’s ‘Foucauldian moment’ should not escape us. Inverting Clausewitzon 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), hefirmly 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 hasarrived, in which the destiny of humanity as a whole is being wagered onthe success of humanity’s own political strategies. No coincidence, then, thatauthors like David Kilcullen – a key architect in the formulation of counter-insurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, argue for a global insurgencyparadigm without too much controversy. Viewed from the perspective ofpower, global insurgency is after all nothing more than the advent of a globalcivil 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 intothe heart of military strategies, it insists upon a joined-up response in whichsovereign/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 life’sradical interconnectivity implies that absolutely nothing can be left to chance.While liberals have therefore been at pains to offer a more humane recoveryto the overt failures of military excess in current theatres of operation, war-fare has not in any way been removed from the species. Instead, humanizedin 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 ofcivil war. While this is a well-established Eurocentric narrative, colonizedpeoples have never fully accepted the inevitability of the transfixed utopianprolificacy upon which sovereign power increasingly became dependent.Neither have they been completely passive when confronted by colonialism’sown brand of warfare by other means. Foucault was well aware of this his-tory. While Foucauldian scholars can therefore rightly argue that alternativehistories of the subjugated alone permit us to challenge the monopolizationof political terms – not least ‘civil war’ – for Foucault in particular there wassomething altogether more important at stake: there is no obligation whatsoeverto ensure that reality matches some canonical theory. Despite what some scholars

may insist, politically speaking there is nothing that is necessarily proper to thesovereign method. It holds no distinct privilege. Our task is to use theory tohelp make sense of reality, not vice versa. While there is not the space here toengage 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 dangeroussimply because location dictates. With enmity instead depending upon thecomplex, adaptive, dynamic account of life itself, what becomes dangerousemerges from within the liberal imaginary of threat. Violence accordingly can

only be sanctioned against those newly appointed enemies of humanity – aphrase that, immeasurably greater than any juridical category, necessarilyaffords enmity an internal quality inherent to the species complete, for thesake of planetary survival. Vital in other words to all human existence, doingwhat is necessary out of global species necessity requires a new moral assayof life that, pitting the universal against the particular, willingly commits vio-lence against any ontological commitment to political difference, even thoughuniversality itself is a shallow disguise for the practice of destroying politicaladversaries through the contingency of particular encounters.





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Necessary Violence

Having established that the principal task set for biopolitical practitioners isto sort and adjudicate between the species, modern societies reveal a distinct

biopolitical aporia (an irresolvable political dilemma) in the sense that makinglife live – selecting out those ways of life that are fittest by design – inevitablywrites 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 isportrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled todefine the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against thosewho pose a threat to the biological heritage’ (Foucault, 2003: 61). Evidently,what is at stake here is no mere sovereign affair. Epiphenomenal tensionsaside, racial problems occupy a ‘permanent presence’ within the politicalorder (Foucault, 2003: 62). Biopolitically speaking, then, since it is preciselythrough the internalization of threat – the constitution of the threat that isnow from the dangerous ‘Others’ that exist within – that societies reproduceat the level of life the ontological commitment to secure the subject, sinceeverybody 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 togo on living:

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they arewaged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for thepurpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity; massacres have becomevital. . . . The principle underlying the tactics of battle – that one has to become capableof 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 actof taking another life: ‘When I say “killing”, I obviously do not mean simplymurder 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, quitesimply, political death, expulsion, rejection and so on’ (Foucault, 2003: 256).Racism makes this process of elimination possible, for it is only through thediscourse and practice of racial (dis)qualification that one is capable of intro-ducing ‘a break in the domain of life that is under power’s 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 weshould lose sight of the very real forms of political violence that do take placein the name of species improvement. As Deleuze (1999: 76) duly noted, whennotions 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 violencethat are justified in terms of species necessity, that is when the capacity tolegitimate murderous political actions in all our names and for all our sakes

becomes altogether more rational, calculated, utilitarian, hence altogethermore frightening:

When a diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favour of a disciplinarymodel, when it becomes the ‘bio-power’ or ‘bio-politics’ of populations, controlling andadministering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that pointlaw 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, preciousspace, conditions of life and the survival of a population that believes itself to be betterthan its enemy, which it now treats not as the juridical enemy of the old sovereign but asa toxic or infectious agent, a sort of ‘biological danger’.

Auschwitz arguably represents the most grotesque, shameful and hencemeaningful example of necessary killing – the violence that is sanctioned in thename 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 radicallythe people that are excluded’ that the biopolitical racial imperative is exposedin its most brutal form (Agamben, 1995: 171). The camp can therefore be seento be the defining paradigm of the modern insomuch as it is a ‘space in whichpower confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any media-tion’ (Agamben, 1995: 179). While lacking Agamben’s intellectual sophistry,such a Schmittean-inspired approach to violence – that is, sovereignty as theability 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’ haveundoubtedly lent credibility to these approaches, in terms of understandingviolence they are limited. Violence is only rendered problematic here when itis associated with some act of unmitigated geopolitical excess (e.g. the inva-sion of Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, use of torture, and so forth). This is unfortunate.Precluding any critical evaluation of the contemporary forms of violence thattake place within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices, thereis 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 natureof the racial imperative that underwrites the violence of contemporary liberaloccupations 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 supremacyto cultural difference is not incidental. While liberals would agree that theformer is abhorrent, they nevertheless govern through the latter (Duffield,2007; Dillon & Reid, 2009). There is an important history to this. Initially, forthe postwar liberal fraternity, claiming that Nazism was some aberration orfailure of modernity proved to be essential to this process (Bauman, 1991).With modernity’s biopolitical capacities for species manipulation thereforeleft 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 factthat the history of modern thought has always shown some affinity with cul-tural prejudice (albeit because both have been inexorably intertwined), whatconcerns today has already existed beneath the surface for some considerabletime: ‘We now move from the theory of the races or the struggle between theraces in human history, whether based on biology or psychological princi-ples, to a theory of “race relations” within society, which naturalizes not racialbelonging but racial conduct’ (Balibar, 1991: 22). Evidently, while these concernswith 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 lifeare a principal source of society’s ills (Blair, 2007). Marked divisions based oncultural 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 beingcloser to respectable and realistic cultural nationalism and more remote from bio-logicof any kind. As a result, we are informed not only that the mutually exclusive culturesof indigenes and incomers cannot be compatible but also that mistaken attempts to mixor even dwell peaceably together can only bring destruction. From this perspectiveexposure 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 liberalmulticultural tolerance is beneath the surface a remarkable deception:

Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethicsand 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 politicalauthenticity 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 sufficientevidence to testify this fact. What concerns more is the capacity of othersto be culturally autonomous. Not only does this foreground explicitly inour imaginary of threat the radicalization/politicization of cultural forms,

de-authentication can effectively take place once cultural perversion can beattested. While this inevitably sanctions certain types of violence (Arquilla& Ronfeldt, 1997, 2001), it also brings to the fore the global logic of speciespartitioning made possible by the liberal way of war:

culturally coded racism striates the world of peoples, separating good from bad, usefulfrom 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 thezone of exception and those destined to disappear within it (Duffield, 2007: 227).

A Field Still Most Fallow

Foucault’s intervention into the field of security studies represents a wel-come departure. Making purposeful use of his analytical method, biopoliticalanalytics have provided us with a meaningful window onto those relations ofpower at the heart of security governance. Exposing the martial face of liberalpower, necessary questions have been raised concerning the use of violence

in contemporary theatres of war. What is more, dismissing the myth of theuniversal neutral subject endowed with natural rights, it has become possibleto 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 certainlynot been lost on postmodern and post-structural theorists, who have longsince been condemned for being too esoteric or abstract, yet when demandingthat our analysis works at the level of power have been accused of not beingvisionary (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 Bigo’s (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 lastingpolitical 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 principlesof 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 whatis universal in moral thought; nor is it to offer some alternative universalstandard against which all activity is to be judged. Our task is to understandhow security governance becomes moralized through the contingency of the

encounter. This is not a question of law. Onto-theologically speaking, it is aquestion of political economy.

Recent history can provide us with a critical point of entry here. When USPresident 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 impliedthat 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 ourconvictions. We do love life, the life given to us and to all. We believe in the values thatuphold the dignity of life, tolerance, freedom, and the right of conscience. And we knowthat 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 betweengood 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 simplya testimony to the necessity for violence. It is a testimony to the power offaith. Now, while it would be easy for us to critique this with us/againstus religiosity in terms of some grand Manichean struggle, what should con-

cern us more is how the underlying assumptions have been assimilated intothe contemporary liberal sensibility in a more sophisticated fashion – thatis to say, how the so-called Manichean order of things has been effectivelyreworked in a more positive Kantian fashion that is more suited to our com-plex, adaptive, dynamic and radically interconnected times. In his NobelPrize acceptance speech, US President Barack Obama (2009) offers a moreconsidered reflection:

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely createsnew and more complicated ones. As someone who stands here as a direct consequence

of Dr. King’s life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. . . . Butas a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by theirexamples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats tothe American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violentmovement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince alQaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessaryis not a call to cynicism – it is recognition of history; the imperfections of man and thelimits of reason.

Foregrounding these connections between ‘evil’ and ‘the imperfections ofman’ 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. Omnipresentand hostile, its aura has created the image of a global security crisis that hasrequired 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 exceptionalterms. Unknowable in nature, it still appears to be something that exists ‘outthere’. This re-inscription of outdated Clausewitzean logic needs to be recti-fied, not least since the phenomenon can actually be used diagnostically inorder to explain the main transcendent/divine principle for liberal power.Humanity, despite protestations, cannot live up to these demands. It is toodangerously 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 thisway. Instead, liberalism’s transcendent principle has to be something in theorder of the divine economy of life. It is in these terms that Kantian politicalphilosophy becomes truly contemporary. Kant gives to evil its unnecessaryquality (Anderson-Gold, 2001). Confronting evil as such in a Kantian senserequires us to do what is necessary to alleviate all forms of unnecessary suf-fering. Hence, when Philip Bobbit (2008: 52) insists that it ‘hardly matterswhether the forces of destruction arise from militant Islam, North Koreancommunism, or Caribbean hurricanes’, he is perhaps acknowledging morethan is readily appreciated. For in the process of rendering all randomness

potentially evil and all intentionality potentially disastrous, the promise of theKantian 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 oursocieties further re-enforces the principal biosecurity mantra that humanitymust 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 partlycovered. Dillon and Agamben will once again become pivotal figures here.

While Dillon, for instance, has more recently been concerned with immanentrelations of power, his earlier works on the politics of security specificallyattended to the metaphysics of closure (Dillon, 1997). Drawing these effortstogether should therefore allow us make possible connections between ametaphysical analytics of infinity (everything is possible, so it is imperativeupon us that moral limits must be established) with a biopolitical analytics offinitude (everything is limited, so it is imperative upon us that we improve/widen the life-chances of the species). Agamben’s more recent theologicalconcerns, on the other hand, will inevitably provide us with an importantcommentary. As Negri (2008: 97) insists, since Agamben’s 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 oftheological-political power: an exercise, thus, in the worldly reproduction ofsocial life’. Therefore, despite any reservations we may have about Agamben’s

protracted take on the biopolitical, this particular onto-theological trajectoryshould be followed with vested interest.

* Brad Evans is Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the Universityof Leeds and Programme Director for International Relations. He is currently workingon a number of projects, including co-edited special edition volumes on ‘Deleuze andWar’ (Theory & Event, 2010) and ‘Post-Intervention Societies’ ( Journal of Intervention andState Building, 2010); a single-authored book Liberal Terror: Global Security, Divine Powerand Emergency Rule (Routledge, forthcoming); and a co-edited book Fascism in Deleuze andGuattari: Securitisation, War & Aesthetics (Routledge, forthcoming).

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