Columba L Peoples

Security after emancipation? Critical Theory, violence and resistance

Within the current configuration of Critical Security Studies (CSS) the concept of ‘emancipation’ is upheld as the keystone of a commitment to transformative change in world politics, but comparatively little is said on the status of violence and resistance within that commitment. As a means of highlighting this relative silence, this article examines the nature of the connection between CSS and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. In particular it disinters the reflections of Herbert Marcuse on the connections between emancipatory change, violence and resistance as a means of interrogating and challenging the definition of ‘security as emancipation’. Doing so, it is argued, points towards some of the potential limitations of equating security and emancipation, and provides a provocation of contemporary CSS from within its own cited intellectual and normative foundations.

Assuming the Inevitable? Overcoming the Inevitability of Outer Space Weaponization and Conflict

Is armed conflict in and from space inevitable? In recent years a consensus has emerged that space has become increasingly militarized – in the sense that technologies placed in outer space are increasingly used to facilitate and augment traditional military activities. But actual use of weapons in or from outer space remains highly controversial. The aim of this article is to assess the attitudes of major space-faring powers towards space weaponization. Central here, the article argues, is the question of whether the weaponization of space and/or conflict in space (taken here to mean the occurrence of military conflict in outer space itself, or from the Earth directed at any systems deployed in outer space) is inevitable, and the extent to which the major space powers espouse this proposition. This article shows that the idea of inevitability retains a prominent place (although for subtly differing reasons) in American, Chinese, and Russian perspectives on space weaponization. What it is that is inevitable frequently varies, based on assumed but underspecified technological developments. This risks creating a discursively constructed security dilemma that increases the likelihood of actual space weaponization. It leads to the conclusion that renewed negotiations between the major space powers and international cooperative agreements are essential to combat the fatalism of the inevitability thesis.

Redemption and Nutopia: The Scope of Nuclear Critique in International Studies

What should the scope of nuclear critique within international studies be? This article addresses that question by making two interrelated arguments. First that political programmes of international nuclear order are crucially underpinned by what is termed here as ‘nutopianism’: a mode of understanding nuclear power that is imbued with a spirit of technological optimism in relation to ‘peaceful’ nuclear power, but simultaneously qualified by an awareness of the destructive uses and catastrophic potentialities of nuclear weapons. Second, that such nutopianism is in turn predicated on the ‘saving power’ of ‘the atom’: the assumption that nuclear power has redeeming features crucial to human progress and economic prosperity, the development of which should be facilitated within the structures of international order. The article makes the case that although critical thought within international studies focuses on nuclear weapons within international order, it has tended to remain largely silent on the issue of ‘civil’ nuclear power beyond nuclear weapons and the complex imbrication between the two. On that basis the article considers whether a more holistic and expansive form of nuclear critique is both possible and necessary.

New nuclear, new security? Framing security in the policy case for new nuclear power in the United Kingdom

Over the period of the past decade and across successive governments, the case for new nuclear power in the UK has, in policy terms, become embedded as a key facet of UK energy policy. Crucial in this respect, this article argues, has been the framing of the case for nuclear power stations and associated infrastructure in security terms: that is, the case for new nuclear power has come to be articulated and reiterated in direct relation to future energy provision and climate change as key impending ‘security challenges’ faced by the UK. This article assesses the political significance and effects of framing nuclear power in security terms. In particular, it focuses on how the specific and ‘performative’ framing of new nuclear power in relation to security has the political effect of narrowly defining and delimiting the ways in which security – and nuclear insecurities – can be articulated and understood.

The Securitization of Outer Space: Challenges for Arms Control

The concepts of militarization and weaponization dominate debates on space security, and radically different implications for arms control follow depending on which of these two characterizations is adopted. Yet the militarization–weaponization debate in many ways fails to capture the vagaries of contemporary space policy. An increasing number of international actors now argue that the infrastructure of modern society – including communications, media, and environmental monitoring – is crucially reliant upon satellite technologies. As a result it is now more accurate to say that outer space is becoming ever more securitized: that is, access to space is now commonly framed as essential to the military, economic, and environmental security of leading states and international organizations. The article illustrates the contribution of a securitization approach in this regard via an analysis of United States and European Union space policy. In the process it argues that attempts at securitization in these space policy discourses maintain an inherent tension between global and national security concerns, and thus provide a weak basis for space arms control. However, in closing the article the author makes the argument that securitization of outer space, if configured around an alternate vision of space security that moves beyond the statist foundations of traditional arms control, can potentially mobilize the political will required for controlling the means of violence in and from outer space.

Technology, philosophy and international relations

Though technology is part of the fabric of global politics the ‘question of technology’, to borrow the title of Martin Heidegger’s famous essay, has received relatively little sustained attention within the study of International Relations (IR). Although exceptions to this general rule certainly exist (as is well illustrated, for example, in William Scheuerman’s contribution to this section), traditionally in IR the tendency has been to treat technology and technological change as a taken-forgranted ‘variable’ (see Herrera 2003; Reppy 1990). This contrasts with the degree of philosophical reflection given over to the social implications of technology by various thinkers who are now increasingly cited as intellectual resources within critical IR theory such as Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and the various thinkers associated with Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. In addition, IR has been also largely oblivious to currents in the philosophy of technology ranging from Heiddeger to Haraway, as well as more recent work in the field of science and technology studies. Given this, more substantive consideration of the contemporary ‘technological condition’ (Sharff and Dusek 2003) within IR is long overdue. The aim of this section, then, is to create a space to (re)consider the relationship between technology and international relations. Each of the articles in the section does so by drawing on and referring to a diverse range of philosophical traditions, and in doing so each makes a distinctive contribution to the overarching thematic of the section. In the first article in the section, ‘Realism and the critique of technology’, William Scheuerman examines the ways in which prominent thinkers commonly associated with Realist IR theory have treated the subjects of technology and technological development. In keeping with the picture painted above, contemporary (neo)Realist thinkers have, Scheuerman argues, adopted a striking ‘nonchalance’ towards these subjects. By way of contrast, Scheuerman excavates a more substantial discussion of these issues within the classical Realist thought of Hans Morgenthau and John Herz. Taken as a whole, Scheuerman argues, the reflections of Morgenthau and Herz amount to a ‘distinctively Realist critique of technology’ that, though not directly connected, in many ways parallels key

Life in the nuclear age: Classical realism, critical theory and the technopolitics of the nuclear condition:

Classical realist thought provides a diagnosis of the significance nuclear weapons that calls into question the very possibility of politics in the nuclear age. While sharing similarities with this outlook, critical theoretic reflections suggest a more expansive consideration of the nuclear condition as underpinned by combinations of dystopian fears of nuclear destruction and utopian visions of nuclear futures. Most prominently Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory intimates an understanding of the nuclear condition as one that is rendered tolerable so long as nuclear technologies are associated with and related to innovation, progress and modernity. The study of the technopolitics of the nuclear condition might thus look not only to classical realists’ concern with ‘Death in the Nuclear Age’ but also incorporate corresponding critical awareness of claims to the life-sustaining applications of nuclear technologies in areas such as energy production, industry and medicine. Applying an ‘aporetic’ form of immanent critique, and to exemplify how the international politics of the nuclear age has often been predicated on efforts to distinguish and relate different kinds of nuclear technologies, the article revisits the United States–led post-war vision of ‘Atoms for Peace’ and compares it to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s contemporary ‘How the Atom Benefits Life’ campaign.

New Space for Security

This chapter uses the period covered by this Yearbook as a microcosm to assess the changing playing field of outer space in respect to security, geopolitics and sustainability.