The Ethical Subject of Security : Geopolitical Reason and the Threat Against Europe

ISBN-13: 9780415499828 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 248 str.

J. Peter Burgess

Opis

While critical security studies largely concentrates on objects of security, this book focuses on the subject position from which securitization' and other security practices take place. First, it argues that the modern subject itself emerges and is sustained as a function of security and insecurity. It suggests, consequently, that no analytic frame can produce or reproduce the subject in some original or primordial form that does not already reproduce a fundamental or structural insecurity. It critically returns, through a variety of studies, to traditionally held conceptions of security and insecurity as simple predicates or properties that can be associated or not to some more essential, more primeval, more true or real subject. It thus opens and explores the question of the security of the subject itself, locating, through a reconstruction of the foundations of the concept of security, in the modern conception of the subject, an irreducible insecurity. Second, it argues that practices of security can only be carried out as a certain kind of negotiation about values. The analyses in this book find security expressed again and again as a function of value cast in terms of an explicit or implicit philosophy of life, of culture, of individual and collective anxieties and aspirations, of expectations about what may be sacrificed and what is worth preserving. By way of a critical examination of the value function of security, this book discovers the foundation of values as dependent on a certain management of their own vulnerability, continuously under threat, and thus fundamentally and necessarily insecure. This book will be an indispensible resource for students of Critical Security Studies, Political Theory, Philosophy, Ethics and International Relations in general.

The aim of this new book is to open up and analyze the subjective side of security practice, and its underlying values or ethics.

The new field of critical security studies has revolutionized scholarship on security practice. Guided by securitization theory, this new field has focused largely on the objective side of the security practice, or the processes by which certain objects become objects of security. This book questions the subject-position from which 'securitization' and other security practices takes place. Unlike most current security theories, it focuses on the subject of security, from which security objects are identified and acted upon. It charts and analyzes the way in which the subject of security is determined or co-determined by a variety of forces normally considered heterogeneous to security practice.

The second innovation of the book is that it poses the question of this subjective side of security practice as an ethical one. By ‘ethical’ the book does not mean a set of principles or conventions but, rather, refers to the general axiom that the subject of security is profoundly structured by values. In other words, it understands security and insecurity as questions of what an individual, group, state or community holds as valuable, and consequently what political, social, cultural, moral exchanges can be made in its name. By studying the subject of security in terms of values the book will uncover a level of security practice that has not been treated by present theorizations of security.

The primary case material for the book will be the European Union and its rapidly evolving security complex. The book argues that this complex formulates and plays out security issues on a variety of levels and in a variety of social, political, cultural, legal, and other domains. The long and many-sided process by which the EU has created itself involves multi-faceted dynamics of security, involving tensions across not only national borders, but institutions, social layers, cultural identities, history and traditions, religions, political economies, etc. All of these contribute to the formation of the European security subject. This book asks from what position security in the name of Europe is carried out.

This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Security Studies, European Politics, Political Theory, Philosophy and IR in general.

Spis treści

Introduction: Security as Ethos and Episteme  Part 1: Theory of the Ethical Subject  1. Nietzsche, or Value and the Subject of Security  2. Foucault, or Genealogy of the Ethical Subject  3. Lacan, or the Ethical Subject of the Real  4. Butler, or the Precarious Subject  Part 2: Holding Together  5. Identity, Community and Security  6. Insecurity of the European Community of Values  7. Psychoanalysis of the National Thing  8. Security Clture and the New Ethos of Risk  9. Intolerable Insecurity  Part 3: Geopolitical Rationalities of Europe  10. The Modernity of a Cosmopolitan Europe  11. The New Nomos of Europe  12. A Federalist Europe between Economic and Cultural Value  13. Justice in Political, Legal and Moral Community  14. War in the Name of Europe and the Legitimacy of Collective Violence.  Conclusion: The Many Faces of European Security

O autorze

J. Peter Burgess is Research Professor at PRIO, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, where he leads the Security Programme and edits the interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal Security Dialogue, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels.