News
The ESRC Seminar Series on Contemporary Biopolitics of Security has now concluded. A report on each of the four events can be found by clicking on this link.
The Emerging Securities Unit and the Biopolitics of Security Network wishes to thank all participants for lively discussions and timely contributions to the development of the biopolitics of security as a distinctive area of research.
The Biopolitics of Security Network is now being hosted by the Emerging Securities Unit @ Keele, Research Institute for Law, Politics, and Justice, Keele University
Book Launch- After the Globe, Before the World
R.B.J. Walker click here
(September 2009)
This book explores the implications of claims that the most challenging political problems of our time express an urgent need to reimagine where and therefore what we take politics to be. It does so by examining the relationship between modern forms of politics (centred simultaneously within individual subjects, sovereign states and an international system of states) and the (natural, God-given or premodern) world that has been excluded in order to construct modern forms of political subjectivity and sovereign authority.
It argues that the ever-present possibility of a world outside the international both sustains the structuring of relations between inclusion and exclusion within the modern internationalized political order and generates desires for escape from this order to a politics encompassing a singular humanity, cosmopolis, globe or planet that are doomed to disappointment. On this basis, the book develops a critique of prevailing traditions of both political theory and theories of international relations. It especially examines what it might now mean to think about sovereignties, subjectivities, boundaries, borders and limits without automatically reproducing forms of inclusion and exclusion, or universality and particularity, expressed in the converging but ultimately contradictory relationship between international relations and world politics.
Book Launch- Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty
Stuart Elden click here
(November 2009)
Today’s global politics demands a new look at the concept of territory. From so-called deterritorialized terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda to U.S.-led overthrows of existing regimes in the Middle East, the relationship between territory and sovereignty is under siege. Unfolding an updated understanding of the concept of territory, Stuart Elden shows how the contemporary “war on terror” is part of a widespread challenge to the connection between the state and its territory.
Although the importance of territory has been disputed under globalization, territorial relations have not come to an abrupt end. Rather, Elden argues, the territory/sovereignty relation is being reconfigured. Traditional geopolitical analysis is transformed into a critical device for interrogating hegemonic geopolitics after the Cold War, and is employed in the service of reconsidering discourses of danger that include “failed states,” disconnection, and terrorist networks.
Looking anew at the “war on terror”; the development and application of U.S. policy; the construction and demonization of rogue states; events in Lebanon, Somalia, and Pakistan; and the wars continuing in Afghanistan and Iraq, Terror and Territory demonstrates how a critical geographical analysis, informed by political theory and history, can offer an urgently needed perspective on world events
Book Launch- The Biopolitics of the War on Terror
Julian Reid click here
Manchester University Press is delighted to announce that Julian Reid’s acclaimed book, The biopolitics of the war on terror, is now available in paperback.
“The war against terror is widely represented as a conflict in which societies tasked with achieving security for human life are imperilled by an enemy dedicated to destroying the conditions for the flourishing of human life. The enemy is not simply one that is motivated against the interests of common humanity, but an enemy which, in being so driven, resorts to subhuman tactics, and which therefore requires, paradoxically, a less than human response in defence of the integrity of human life. Against such understandings, this book demonstrates why this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life, but a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being outright rejected. The future of humanity is indeed at stake in this conflict, but only in the sense that its resolution depends now on our abilities to exceed the horizons of existing understandings of what defines human life and its political potentialities. Building on the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Virilio and Negri, this book examines the possibilities for such a movement. What forms might life take, it asks, when liberal understandings of humanity are no longer understood as horizons to strive for, but impositions against which life must struggle in order to restore its integrity? What forms does life assume when war against liberal regimes becomes the determinate condition of its possibility? Answers to such questions are pressing, this book argues, if we earnestly desire an escape from the current impasses of a war on terror.”
Book Launch- The Liberal Way of War
Michael Dillon and Julian Reid click here
“The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism’s original commitment to ‘making life live’. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls ‘the biohuman’.
Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information – complex, adaptive and emergent – while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing.
The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.”
Book Launch – Foucault on Politics, Security and War
Edited by Michael Dillon and Andrew W. Neil click here
February 2009
“This diverse collection of essays is the first to specifically engage Michel Foucault on questions of politics, security and war. It is also the first to take up the provocations found in Michel Foucault’s recently published Collège de France lectures, particularly Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of biopolitics. The contributors reassess the way Foucault worked experimentally and in collaboration and dialogue with others. In so doing, the essays pursue lines of enquiry that Foucault briefly extolled but did not exhaust, and take him in directions that he could not have foreseen, including the War on Terror, risk, biosecurity and biopolitics, AIDS, racial and ethnic conflict, and the critique of law. Foucault on Politics, Security and War is an essential contribution to Foucault scholarship and also poses wider challenges to political theory, international relations, security studies and legal theory.”
Book Launch – Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror
Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror Living, Dying, Surviving Cristina Masters and Elizabeth Dauphinee http://www.palgrave.com/products/results.aspx?k=Cristina+Masters http://www.palgrave.com/products/results.aspx?k=Elizabeth+Dauphinee
Julian Reid’s book ‘The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: life struggles, liberal modernity and the defence of logistical societies’ has been launched
Manchester University Press, Reappraising the Political Series (Jon Simons and Simon Tormey eds.) December 2006, 0-7190-7405-3 The biopolitics of the war on terror 234x156mm 192pp.
The Biopolitics of Security Network 