US Domestic and International Regimes of Security: Pacifying the Globe, Securing the Homeland

✍ Scribed by Markus Kienscherf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 199
• Series: Routledge Critical Security Studies Series + 9
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book maps the increasing convergence of US domestic and international security regimes, analyzing the trend towards global pacification in the name of 'security'.

The dream of liberal world peace after the Cold War is on the verge of collapsing into permanent global pacification – not only in the global south but also in pockets of the ‘Third World’ within the territory of Western states. In this volume, the author explores the ways in which regimes of security have been extended into increasingly large aspects of social life and shows that their expansion has been driven by a constant broadening of the notion of 'war'.

Filling a gap in the literature, the book demonstrates how US security agencies have sought to develop indeterminate security capabilities aimed at distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate flows of people and resources. This analysis of regimes of security is tied to a more general discussion about the persistence, or even multiplication, of illiberal forms of power within liberal governmentality.

This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations in general.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 5
Introduction 7
From ‘defense’ to ‘security’ 7
Threats to the global homeland 9
Method 12
The book 16
The ‘reality’ of insecurity 17
1 Liberal security and the biopolitics of global pacification 19
Security beyond the inside/outside divide 19
A permanent state of exception? 20
Political power as war and/or government 23
Liberal government 25
Liberalism and its others 27
Biopolitics and the pacification of illiberal life 29
Governmentalities and agents of liberal security 35
2 Expeditionary pacification 37
Introduction 37
The rise of counterinsurgency doctrine 38
Security, development and the management of modernization 40
The military contribution 45
Vietnam and the ‘end’ of US counterinsurgency doctrine 49
Counterinsurgency revamped 53
How new is the new doctrine? 55
Conclusion 59
3 Domestic pacification 60
Introduction 60
Nixon and the war on drugs 61
COINTELPRO 64
The war on drugs under Reagan 65
The war on drugs under Bush and Clinton 68
Managing risky populations 70
Paramilitary policing 73
Domestic pacification 74
Conclusion 77
4 Geographies of security 79
Introduction 79
Command, control, surveillance and reconnaissance 80
Interdicting ‘risky’ circulations 82
Global borderlands 82
Domestic borderlands 85
The securitization of urban design 88
Warehousing ‘risky’ populations 92
The violence of detention 97
Conclusion 99
5 Organizing security 101
Dreams of omnipotence through omniscience 101
A changing security environment 104
Violent non-state actors 104
The militarization of policing and the ‘policization’ of warfighting 107
The privatization of security 109
Losing hearts and minds 113
Plugging cultural knowledge into the US military 115
Conclusion 120
6 Legitimizing security 122
Introduction 122
The biopolitics of human (in)security 122
Biopolitical pacification 126
Legitimizing expeditionary pacification 130
Legitimizing domestic pacification 134
Enemies of humanity 139
Conclusion 140
The problematic of liberal violence 140
How to challenge liberal violence? 141
Notes 145
Introduction 145
2 Expeditionary pacification 145
3 Domestic pacification 148
4 Geographies of security 148
5 Organizing security 149
References 150
Index 182

✦ Subjects

international security us security policing pacification governamentalities of security geopolitics