Tina Managhan - Unknowing the ‘War on Terror’ (Routledge Critical Terrorism Studies)

This book offers new insights into the excesses and uncanniness of the War on Terror via an engagement with the pleasures of risk.

Engaging with the unconscious, the excess, the uncanny and the spectacular dimensions of the War on Terror as made evident, for example, in the 2012 London Olympic Games and the 2013 manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers leads this book to probe the so-called order of things that has made this war intelligible in both mainstream and critical approaches to Security Studies and International Relations. Specifically, this book brings to light and theorizes the obscene pleasures of the War on Terror and its supplementary precautionary risk logic. Coming to grips with this (i.e., the pleasures of risk), ultimately via an engagement with critical psychoanalytic theory, leads this book to argue that we may be other than we think we are within critical International Relations (IR) traditions. Furthermore, albeit without discounting the madness, if not desolation, of the present (extending from the War on Terror to the politics of Brexit and Donald Trump), it suggests there may be some relief in that yet.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, critical security studies, political theory and International Relations broadly.

Tina Managhan is Senior Lecturer in the Politics and International Relations Programme at Oxford Brookes University, U.K.

Series Editor: Richard Jackson

University of Otago, New Zealand

This book series will publish rigorous and innovative studies on all aspects of terrorism, counter-terrorism and state terror. It seeks to advance a new generation of thinking on traditional subjects and investigate topics frequently overlooked in orthodox accounts of terrorism. Books in this series will typically adopt approaches informed by critical-normative theory, post-positivist methodologies and non-Western perspectives, as well as rigorous and reflective orthodox terrorism studies.

A Critical Theory of Counterterrorism

Ontology, Epistemology and Normativity

Sondre Lindahl

Narratives of Political Violence

Life Stories of Former Militants

Raquel da Silva

Islam and Sectarian Violence in Pakistan

The Terror Within

Eamon Murphy

Writing Southeast Asian Security

Regional Security and the War on Terror after 9/11

Jennifer Mustapha

Constructing the Cyberterrorist

Critical Reflections on the UK Case

Gareth Mott

Unknowing the War on Terror

The Pleasures of Risk

Tina Managhan

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Critical-Terrorism-Studies/book-series/RCTS

The Pleasures of Risk

Tina Managhan

First published 2020

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2020 Tina Managhan

The right of Tina Managhan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Managhan, Tina, author.

Title: Unknowing the War on Terror : the pleasures of risk / Tina

Managhan.

Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge critical

terrorism studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019048265 | ISBN 9781138485648 (hardback) |

ISBN 9781351048606 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. | War on

Terrorism, 20012009. | TerrorismPrevention. | RiskSocial aspects. |

National security. | Sensuality. | Social psychology.

Classification: LCC HV6432.7 .M336 2020 | DDC 363.325dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048265

ISBN: 978-1-138-48564-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-04860-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

This project is indebted to all those who variously enabled and/or sustained me during the writing of this project.

Thank you to Steve, Jordan and Karma Bowser for nourishing me in my day-today life with your love, humour and indignant defences of my honour when things got me down. Thank you for being my home.

Thank you to Tom and Carol Managhan for encouraging my inclination to pursue things from a very early age and for allowing me to stay and work at your lakeside lodge so that I could complete the book while my other home was being temporarily disbanded and moved across continents. Thank you also for offering the all-inclusive package (with good coffee, great food, unlimited kayak use and lake-side glasses of wine) free of charge.

Thank you to Brien Managhan and family for tempting me to join you for some of those lake-side drinks and conversations on the dock for helping me to realize when it was time to call it a day.

Thank you to Tamsin Barber, Chris Hesketh, Maia Pal and Doerthe Rosenow for providing me with drinks, laughter, enriching conversation and encouragement over the longue dure of this book. Mud, blood and tears you were there.

Thank you to those who perhaps unknowingly steered me at critical junctures along the road of this project, shaping the form it would take. Thank you to Veronique Pin-Fat for intervening in the very early days of this project (when I was just beginning to try to give expression to something that was bothering me) by posing a question to me at a conference that I could not answer and for the many invigorating conversations that followed. Thank you to Mark Salter and Judith Butler for your generous engagement at later conference talks and separate encouragement to pursue the critical psychoanalytical angle that (at the time you heard me speak) was just beginning to knock. With your encouragement, I opened the door.

Last, but not least, thank you to Richard Jackson, for whose work on the War on Terror I am immensely grateful and whose support and enthusiasm helped tremendously in providing me with the confidence to pursue this work.

As one of my colleagues so aptly expressed it, The War on Terror is weird.pleasures (that is, the pleasures of risk) and drawing psychoanalytic insights from Lacanian-inspired critical social theory, this book will argue that we may be other than who we think we are or, at least, who we have long been imagined to be within critical International Relations traditions. Furthermore, and without discounting the madness of the present, it will suggest there may be some relief in that yet.