ABSTRACT

The central argument advanced in this chapter is that rather than opening the avenue for an expansion of a humanist and cosmopolitan ethics as many conventional readings advocate, the more fundamental labour of the concept of human security is to bring about a unique dual exercise of sovereign power and biopower which furthers the rule of the liberal order via a global regime of governmentality. This regime of governmentality, of which human security is, among others, a component,2 assembles forms of power that seek to govern populations in the borderlands of the global liberal order. Following Michel Foucault, such a regime of governmentality brings to bear on populations forms of knowledge and rationalities of power which, in line with its origins in the individualizing and totalizing effects of pastoral power seeks to secure the well-being of ‘all and each’ (2007: 128). The argument here is that human security as a governmental rationality with the globe as its plane of operation is bound up with forms of power that are meant to target the health and welfare of populations, and in doing so must specify along particular lines rather than others what ‘(un)healthy’ and ‘(un)secure’ populations look like. At the same time, we argue that the concept of human security also brings to light a form of sovereign power which much of Foucault’s work on modern forms of power ‘under the rubric of a multiplicity of force relations’ sought to sever (Neal 2004: 375). Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, the latter part of this chapter explores how human security brings to the forefront the connection between biopower and the juridico-political order by further entrenching and defining the grounds for the conditions of ‘exceptionality’ and ‘emergency’ which assist in legitimizing and authorizing sovereign power’s international interventions in zones where, as the UN Human Security Unit dramatizes, ‘the threshold below which human life is intolerably threatened’ is deemed to have been met (Human Security Unit 2009: 7). Using Agamben, human security is read as qualifying human life in a biopolitical form (what Agamben calls ‘bare life’), and thus rendering humans amenable to the potential exercise of sovereign power. This potential exercise of sovereign power appears in the work that human security performs on behalf of laying the groundwork for the suspension of foundational elements of conventional inter-state law (e.g. the suspension of the rights of sovereignty and territorial

inviolability as advanced in the responsibility to protect doctrine) by assisting in defining ‘cases of violence which so genuinely “shock the conscience of mankind”, or which present such a clear and present danger to international security, that they require coercive military intervention’ (ICISS 2001: 31). Thus, in the concept of human security we find not only elements of governmentality which operate on the field of the health and welfare of populations, but we also find the groundwork for the potential articulation of sovereign power, which draws from life constituted as bare in order to justify or authorize international interventions.