Jef Huysmans - Security Unbound: Enacting Democratic Limits

Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions.

We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross-border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship.

Security Unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

Jef Huysmans is Professor of Security Studies, The Open University, UK.

Critical Issues in Global Politics

This series engages with the most significant issues in contemporary global politics. Each text is written by a leading scholar and provides a short, accessible and stimulating overview of the issue for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of international relations and global politics. As well as providing a survey of the field, the books also contain original and groundbreaking thinking, which will drive forward debates on these key issues.

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Sandra Halperin

Sustainability
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Security Unbound
Enacting democratic limits
Jef Huysmans

Security Unbound

Enacting democratic limits

Jef Huysmans

First published 2014
by Routledge
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by Routledge
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2014 Jef Huysmans

The right of Jef Huysmans to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent 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.

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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
Huysmans, Jef, author.
Security unbound : enacting democratic limits / Jef Huysmans.
pages cm. (Critical issues in global politics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Privacy, Right of. 2. Democracy. 3. Electronic surveillance Social aspects. 4. Electronic surveillance Political aspects. 5. Information technology Social aspects. 6. Information technology Political aspects. 7. Social psychology. 8. Social control. I. Title.
JC596.H88 2014
323.43 dc23
2013031455

ISBN: 978-0-415-44020-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-44021-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-81724-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books

This book is concerned with the political effects of diffusing insecurities. Like much of my work on security, it has its roots in the understanding that when security issues, institutions and practices take a prominent role in the organisation of social, political, cultural and economic issues, inequalities, exclusions, violence and other limits to democratic politics become more pronounced. In this book, I look in particular at how both exceptionalist modes of securitising and more diffusing processes of assembling suspicion enact limits to democratic practice. It draws at times extensively and at others more indirectly on insights developed in the context of various projects and collaborations that I have been involved in during the last seven years. They include the work on exceptionalism that I did in discussion with researchers of the European Commission-funded FP7 project CHALLENGE (the Changing Landscape of Liberty and Security in Europe); discussions on the evolving social construction of threats in many workshops that were part of European funded COST Action A24, including the c.a.s.e. collective; research on mobility and the enactment of European citizenship that I did with Claudia Aradau, Vicki Squire and Rutvica Andrijasevic in workpackage 3 Enacting Mobility: Making a More Democratic European Citizenship in the FP7-funded project ENACT (Enacting European Citizenship); the work on citizenship and security that I developed with Xavier Guillaume and in the continuing exchange of ideas on acts of citizenship with my colleague Engin Isin; some of the work done for the ESRC-funded International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies; and discussions in the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, in particular in its Research Programme Securities and, when that programme was concluded, in the Research Programme Enactments. I am indebted to far too many people in the context of these projects and collaborations to mention them all here but without them my understanding of security and politics would not be where it is now.

In addition I would like to thank Victoria Basham for research assistance at the very early stages of this book, and the students and colleagues at the University of Namur where I taught earlier drafts of the book as Franqui Chair in 20102011. A special thanks also to my doctoral students Helen Arfvidsson, P.G. Maciotti, Bruno Magalhaes and Stephan Scheel, and to Anne-Marie DAoust for discussions in several seminars, one of which coined the final title of the book. I benefited from many comments on several other occasions where I presented ideas and draft chapters of the book. In particular I would like to thank for comments and questions participants at the keynote address The Politics of Insecurity: Threats, Speech Acts and Beyond at the workshop Critical Voices in IR, the University of Geneva and Graduate Institute Geneva (IHEID), Geneva (10 April 2008); the seminar What is in an Act? Diffusing Politics of Insecurity at the Central European University, Budapest (3 November 2010); the CAST Research Seminar at the University of Copenhagen of 14 December 2011; the keynote Security Unbound: Insecurity, Democracy, Political at the conference International (Dis)order: Disruptions, Exclusions and Alternatives at the Institute of International Relations, PUC-Rio, Rio de Janeiro (29 October1 November 2012); the seminar Security Unbound: Enacting Limits of Democracy at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), Brussels (12 March 2013); and the panel on International Political Sociology at the AFSP (Association franaise de science politique) 12th conference in Paris, 911 July 2013. I also want to thank Craig Fowlie from Routledge for first inviting me to write for the Critical Issues in Global Politics series and then for bearing with me when I kept on moving the deadlines because of other commitments that continued to interfere with finishing the book. And as usual, Leen, Lucas and Hannah deserve big hugs for the many distractions that make life so interesting.