Susanne Krasmann

Law’s knowledge: On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security matters:

Contrary to the prevailing debate on the governance of security with its focus on emergency and exception, a Foucauldian perspective enables us to capture how law transforms in a rather gradual and unnoticed manner. As a practice, law constitutes itself through knowledge. Relying upon knowledge, it is notoriously susceptible to security matters. This will be illustrated by analysing the rationality of pre-emptive action that is facilitated by automated surveillance technologies. Taking a recent torture debate as an extreme example elucidates that a conception of law as practice also serves as a tool of critique and articulating dissent.

Targeted Killing and Its Law: On a Mutually Constitutive Relationship

Although initially perceived as illegal and illegitimate, targeted killing has gained legal approval and greater acceptance as a tactic in the US fight against terrorism. Rather than being accomplished extra-legally or gradually normalized as an exception to the rule, as critics proclaim, targeted killing becomes inscribed into a law that was, and is, prepared to accept it as a practice. Conceiving of law as a practice renders the mutually constitutive relationship between targeted killing and the law visible. As a practice, law is indissoluble from the forms of knowledge that both enact it and that its enactment invokes. Targeted killing could assert itself as a security dispositif that displaces and relocates political notions underlying and defining international law.

Secrecy and the force of truth: countering post-truth regimes

ABSTRACT Post-truth regimes are disconcerting to the extent that they confuse the distinction between true and false and thus obfuscate and obstruct political debate. And they dismantle the secret by imitating its habit: they constantly make claims while leaving us to guess what exactly the true content is – or whether there is any content at all. In an imagined world without secrets, there would be no curiosity or confidentiality, no sincerity or trust, and no political possibility of thinking otherwise. Analysis of the logic of secrecy, the article argues, helps us to revisit the established confidence in our culture in the force of truth, and to confront a challenge post-truth regimes pose: that to establish truth involves affective force. Contrary to the common belief that truth – and secrecy – is something to be revealed, a Foucauldian reading suggests that to mobilize truth requires both truthfulness and a moment of creation. Truth relies on the secret but will always only emerge on the surface.

Wissenschaft und Innere Sicherheit

In diesem Kapitel sollen der wissenschaftliche Werdegang und die Desiderate auf dem Forschungsgebiet der Inneren Sicherheit angesprochen werden. An Stelle einer geschlossenen Ausarbeitung der Einschatzung eines oder weniger Autoren zum Thema haben wir denWeg der unmittelbaren Befragung der Vertreter einer Reihe von Forschungsansatzen gewahlt. In unserem Anschreiben wurde gebeten, auf maximal drei Seiten folgende Fragen zu beantworten: 1 In welchem Arbeitsgebiet der Inneren Sicherheit haben Sie vor allem in Ihrer beruflichen Laufbahn wann und wo gearbeitet? 2 Wie hat sich aus Ihrer Sicht dieses Arbeitsgebiet in dieser Zeit entwickelt? 3 Welche Problemstellungen werden in diesem Arbeitsgebiet zurzeit diskutiert? 4 Wie wurden Sie Ihren theoretischen oder methodischen Ansatz in diesem Arbeitsgebiet skizzieren und zu welchen anderen wissenschaftlichen Gebieten gibt es wesentliche Bezuge? 5 Nennen Sie bitte bis zu funf fur Sie wegweisende Publikationen aus diesem Arbeitsgebiet.