ABSTRACT
Either explicitly or implicitly this relies on the assumption that security has to be oriented around the notion of emancipation. ‘Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin’, we are told. Emancipation is security, both theoretically and empirically, because ‘emancipation, not power or order, produces true security’ (Booth 1991: 319, 323). Simply put, the logic of the work generated around the label ‘human security’, and to a large degree also the work in ‘critical security studies’, is that ‘security’ can be reconfigured in such a way as to render the fundamental dimension of both global and local politics as human. The project is to humanize one of the most important aspects of state power in the service of emancipation. In this chapter I want to challenge this set of assumptions. I want to do so by linking security not to emancipation, but to fascism.
