ABSTRACT
On 5 February 2003 the US Secretary of State Colin Powell convened a press conference at the United Nations Security Council to present the US case for a war on Iraq. Such conferences are routinely held against the backdrop of a large tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s famous anti-war testament, Guernica. For this occasion, and without precedent, the tapestry was covered up. Guernica depicts the material effects of the first deliberate carpet bombing of an entire town-an act designed to strike terror into the hearts of the Basque people and of all would-be anti-fascists. Powell could not stand in front of Guernica and argue for the (precision) carpet bombing of Iraq. The New York Times commented, “Mr. Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses” (Dowd 2003). The shrouding of Guernica is symbolic of a deep contradiction in the US
mission to secure the globe, making it safe for markets and democracy. On the one hand, there is the abstract appeal to universal security and the material abstraction of military technology; on the other is the concrete effect in terms of human suffering and the absolute insecurity of warfare. In this respect we may say that the pursuit of security necessarily produces insecurity; but insecurity for whom? Action to address insecurity is double-sided as it defines whose freedom is to be protected, and whose freedom is to be limited. Security is “both a freeing from (danger) and a constraint or limitation imposed upon it” (Dillon 1996: 122). In broader terms, this realm of security-of bounded freedom-constitutes society. Within this realm, the “sin of security,” as Dillon puts it, is the failure to feel insecure. That insecurity is required to protect security is neatly exemplified in the US detention center for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, which declares itself “Honor-bound to Defend Freedom.” In capitalist societies insecurity is systemic. Capitalism literally produces
insecurity. The opportunity to profit and the risk of loss is capitalism’s lifeblood. Capitalist security hinges on private property, on “having” rather than “not having” and on the security that possessions provide. As wealth is stratified, so is security and with the concentration of property ownership comes the concentration of security. Here the question of pursuing security is
profoundly political. When security is defined by the powerful, “making safe” tends to serve the status quo. When security is defined by the subordinated, it tends to challenge the social order. Removing sources of insecurity for the subordinated means removing the means to dominate, and under capitalism this means removing the “inalienable right” to private property. With deepening capitalist relations, systemic insecurities are intensified.
The process of commodification and financialization has gained global reach, deepening the integration of livelihoods and living environments into a universal cash nexus (Rupert 2003). Societies as a result become ever-more vulnerable to volatile flows of liquid assets, rendering them radically insecure. This globalization of insecurity is deeply stratified, with sharpening divides between those suffering under it and those profiting from it. Indeed, globalizing capitalism is best understood as a system displacing insecurity from rich to poor across the globe. Such systemic insecurity is socially concentrated at the collision between living environments and marketization, and profoundly exacerbates social divides, including contributing to the feminization of poverty. It is spatially concentrated in a growing range of poorer and vulnerable states, but, as argued here, the side-effects of systemic insecurity rebound on the center. There is increasing anxiety amongst dominant states about vulnerability to refugee flows, to the “contagion” of financial instability, to cross-border environmental crises, to subversive information flows, to transnational political violence, to flows of laundered money, to illicit drugs and arms flows. Reflecting this, there are increasingly intensive efforts to secure external borders and escalating interventions against “failed” or “rogue” states on the periphery. Against this backdrop, the US-led “War on Terror” and Powell’s efforts at
the UN become symptomatic of a broader geopolitics of insecurity where the center strikes out to secure itself against an increasingly insecure periphery. Overall, we may perceive three elements in this production of global insecurity. First, intensive commodification and financialization generate systemic insecurity. Secondly, systemic insecurity is displaced to the social and spatial margins. Thirdly, the resulting side-effects generate militarist interventions from the center, to impose order by command. The chapter explores each of these three elements after first charting insecurity dilemmas in the War on Terror.
