Brad Evans

Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the resilient subject

What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political question being asked by ideologues and policy makers who want us to abandon the dream of ever achieving security and embrace danger as a condition of possibility for life in the future. As this article demonstrates, this belief in the necessity and positivity of human exposure to danger is fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’. Resilience demands our disavowal of any belief in the possibility to secure ourselves and accept that life is a permanent process of continual adaptation to dangers said to be outside our control. The resilient subject is a subject which must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, and not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility. However, it is a subject which accepts the dangerousness of the world it lives in as a condition for partaking of that world and which accepts the necessity of the injunction to change itself in correspondence with threats now presupposed as endemic. This is less than acceptable. Not only is it politically catastrophic, it is fundamentally nihilistic. Identifying resilience as a nihilism that forces the subject to wilfully abandon the political, we argue for a wholesale rethinking of the question of what a politics of life is and can be.

Foucault’s Legacy: Security, War and Violence in the 21st Century

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

Exhausted by resilience: response to the commentaries

Writing our response to the commentaries featured in this volume proved more difficult than either of us anticipated. Not that we are unappreciative and humbled by the positive reception the book has received since publication. Nor that we do not want to encourage others to engage our arguments and condemn the debasement of the political subject in whatever form it takes. It is however difficult to respond to a problematic the writers feel to be politically and intellectually exhausted. Our journey across the resilience terrain forced us to appreciate the hidden depth of its nihilism, the pernicious forms of subjugation it burdens people with, its deceitful emancipatory claims that force people to embrace their servitude as though it were their liberation, and the lack of imagination the resiliently minded possess in terms of transforming the world for the better. We too have become exhausted by its ubiquitous weight and the chains it places around all our necks. Thankfully, the positive reviews we have received by the contributors in this volume and elsewhere have made our task easier. Not only do they each affirm to us the importance of our critique of the resilience doctrine. As each of these contributions share our suspicions of the doctrine as a new form of political nihilism that forces us to accept the inevitability of the liberal politics of catastrophe, we are encouraged that prominent academics from the fields of development, anthropology, political theory, sociology, architecture and criminology appreciate the political and philosophical stakes of our critique. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to us that the only field where a review of the text is absent remains International Relations. This is of little consequence, in all seriousness, for the discipline remains isolated, policed by dogmatic ‘theorists’, beset by the reductionism of its sovereign gaze, entrapped in a worldview long since abandoned by those in power or those who appreciate there is a critical world beyond the times of Arendt and Heidegger. However, instead of labouring on the inadequacies of a discipline for allowing us to interrogate power and violence in the contemporary period, we would like to talk to some of the main themes identified here and raised elsewhere by addressing why we believed that such a devastating critique was necessary; what this means for the question of biopolitics as understood to be the governance of planetary life complete; and where this might lead us in terms of moving beyond modes of liberal subjectivity that have exhausted their emancipatory potential. What the doctrine of resilience ultimately points to are endemic terrains of inevitable catastrophe and destruction that are leading us to political ruin.

Terrorism to Insurgency: Mapping the Post-Intervention Security Terrain

Abstract This article examines developments in the Global War on Terror in terms of a shift in focus from terrorism to insurgency. We argue that the recent focus on the problematic of insurgency involves understanding the threat of terrorism as a matter of low-intensity conflict that can best be addressed through technologies of conflict management and peace-building. The article is composed of five sections. It begins with a discussion of the shifting terrain of ‘threat’ to encode a wider logic of security tied to the governance of life. It then examines the distinction between terrorism and insurgency as a shift from an exterminatory logic poised to excise ‘enemies’ towards a focus on whole populations as besieged by underdevelopment and illiberal forms of social organisation to are to be ‘corrected’. The third section maps the shift from the preoccupation with terrorism as a form of incalculable danger to insurgency as calculable and thus rooted in socio-economic probabilities that are said to contribute to conflict within host societies. Section four investigates the spatio-temporal dimensions attached to the problematic of insurgency as signifying a movement from a terminal exceptionalism to the field of complex emergency involving the incorporation of life into technologies of international management. The article concludes by arguing that the conceptualization of insurgency signifies yet another regeneration of life wars which rearticulates and deepens the division of humanity into qualitatively distinct forms of life, contributing to the dramatic materialization of global civil war at the level of life itself.

Revolution without Violence

What other guerrilla force has convened a national democratic movement, civic and peaceful so that armed struggle becomes useless? What other guerrilla force asks its base of support about what it should be doing before doing it? What other guerrilla force has struggled to achieve a democratic space and not take power? What other guerrilla force has relied more on words than bullets? —Subcomandante Marcos

Post-Interventionary Societies: An Introduction

ion; a force, in other words, at work beyond human agents. Opting instead for an agency-centred approach to the ontology of neoliberalism, Harrison accounts for the repertoires, habits and conduct that have become germane to the compulsion to intervene and reform. At the same time, conceptualizing neoliberalism as a social practice connects not only to its propensity to demand change, but also points to its cohabitation with complex tapestries with other, often resistant, social practices. Mark Duffield argues that since the politicization of aid has made the task of helping others increasingly dangerous, the fortified aid compound has become a ubiquitous feature of the post-interventionary global borderland. Following the local backlash against the politicization of aid, the industry is bunkering itself. In examining these developments, Duffield looks at the spatial turn, or rather its absence, in the field of international assistance. The potential for UN fieldsecurity training to normalize risk-aversion and the necessity, even desirability, of segregated living thus poses a new site for critical enquiry. Not least since the onset of defensive living in the global borderland (even in times of ostensible peace) appears to be leaving an increasingly permanent architectural footprint which is radically altering the benefactor/beneficiary relationship, and is arguably counter to the humanitarian impulse. With saving strangers becoming fully conditional upon the protection of the self, the creation of riskaverse aid worker subjectivity reshapes the perceptions, interactions and exchanges that link aid workers to their host societies. Pathologizing risk, a personal insurance savvy subjectivity thus becomes the default setting of contemporary aid work in zones of fragile peace and low-intensity conflict. Fortified aid compounds are the logical outcome of this risk-based strategic paradigm. Caught between war and peace, it provides an important material dimension to liberal expansionism and post-interventionary settlement. Speaking then to the future, these post-intervention architectures signal the longer-term ambitions for governing problematic populations. Drawing in particular upon the author’s experience in the Sudan, it is suggested that the fortification of aid poses much wider problems. In particular, the logic which underwrites these spatial divides resonates with the fragmentation of private urban space more generally. Compound life thus represents the habitual reality for many transitory visitors to these modern security enclaves in otherwise dangerous zones of global crises. Remarkably, then, what one finds in this postinterventionary setting is that space itself is logically inverted. For what constitutes the ‘inside’ is a nodal sovereign protectorate offering safe temporary occupancy (an archipelago of international liberal space) to the illustrious traveller; while what constitutes the ‘outside’ is precisely the problematic active living space of those underdeveloped populations whose reality from a planetary perspective is becoming increasingly sedentarized. Importantly, for Duffield, the onset of these new sovereign fortifications is truly symptomatic of the deepening crises within the development/security nexus itself. The gradual politicization of aid has increasingly led to local forms of resentment and violence and, in the name of humanity, the fractious imposed divisions between the developed/insurable/ INTRODUCTION 369

The State of Violence

berlinale forum 2011 Menschen wie Bobedi, der Protagonist des Films, werden in Südafrika „Black Diamonds“ genannt. Als schwarzer Aufsteiger aus ärmsten Verhältnissen wird Bobedi mit 35 Jahren zum Chef eines jener Bergbauunternehmen befördert, denen Johannesburg seinen Reichtum verdankt. Doch der Höhepunkt dieser glänzenden Karriere wird zum Wendepunkt seines Lebens: Vor seinen Augen ermordet ein maskierter Einbrecher seine Ehefrau Joy, eine riesige Blutlache macht sich in der Designer-Eleganz des Appartements breit. Auf der rachedurstigen Suche nach ihrem Mörder verliert Bobedi allmählich die Kontrolle über sein Leben als Neureicher, denn die Spuren des Mörders führen ihn zurück in die berüchtigte Township Alexandra, wo ihn seine Vergangenheit einholt und sich seiner bemächtigt. In Südafrika hat Gewalt in all ihren vielen Erscheinungsformen das Ausmaß einer kaum mehr kontrollierbaren Plage angenommen. Sie breitet sich aus wie ein Virus, sie verändert sich in der Erinnerung derer, die ihr als Täter oder Opfer begegnet sind, sie vergrößert sich in der Angst vor ihr. State of Violence durchleuchtet die Machtfülle von Gewalt im einstigen Apartheid-Staat in einem Thriller, der seine Spannung auch der Herkunft des Regisseurs als Dokumentarfilmer verdankt. Dorothee Wenner In South Africa, people like Bobedi, the film’s protagonist, are called “Black Diamonds”. At the age of 35, Bobedi, a black man who has made his way up from extremely poor conditions, becomes the head of one of the mining companies Johannesburg owes its wealth to. But the climax of his glowing career also becomes a turning point in his life: A masked burglar murders his wife Joy right before his eyes, with a pool of blood spreading through their apartment’s designer elegance. In his search for the murderer, thirsty for revenge, Bobedi gradually loses grip on his nouveau riche life as his tracks lead him back to the infamous township of Alexandra where his past catches up and takes hold of him. Violence in its manifold forms has reached the proportions of an uncontrollable plague in South Africa. It spreads like a virus, transforming itself in the memories of those who have encountered it either as perpetrators or as victims and growing when faced with the fear of it. State of Violence sheds light on the power of violence in the former apartheid state in a thriller, which also owes its suspense to the director’s background as a documentary filmmaker. Dorothee Wenner State of Violence

Imagination warfare: targeting youths on the everyday battlefields of the 21st century

ABSTRACT Working on from the understanding that youths have become a notable, if under-theorized object for power and violence in the everyday battlefields of the twenty-first century, this paper offers a rethinking of the politics of violence in the contemporary period. Moving beyond conventional understandings of the violence that neatly map it out in terms of civilization versus barbarity, it is our contention that both sides to the conflict have effectively created a Gordian knot through which the recourse to violence reigns supreme. Indeed, once we recognize that the conflicts of today are fought over the site of imagination itself, so there is a need to offer a fundamental rethink if we are to break the cycle of violence, and ensure that our collective futures are not violently fated.