Human security as power/knowledge: the biopolitics of a definitional debate

Abstract

This article interrogates the parameters of the human security debate as a site of biopolitics in order to gain an understanding of how it has been possible to shape the debate in certain ways and not others. The role of cosmological realism in grounding knowledge claims within the debate is explored. By privileging objectivist claims to knowledge of human (in)security, it is argued that empiricism and rationalism, as forms of cosmological realism, foster the production of logics which facilitate forms of biopolitical intervention. The quest for precision, measurement, causality and policy relevance that define the production of human security knowledge is shown to have important political effects beyond the definitional debate itself in terms of agency, normalcy, and the scope for intervention. Therefore, this article demonstrates how the demarcation of human security as a field of knowledge is a process pregnant with relations of power that are important to understanding contemporary political dynamics.

Notes

¹ An earlier version of this article was presented at the Standing Group on International Relations conference at the University of Torino (12–15 September 2007). The author is grateful to the anonymous referees at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs for their thoughtful comments, which made this article stronger. Any omissions or errors remain the author's own responsibility.

² See Acharya (2004), Alkire (2004), Axworthy (2001; 2004), Bajpai (2004), Buzan (2004), Evans (2004), Hampson (2004), Hampson et al (2002), Hubert (2004), Leaning (2004), Liotta (2004), Macfarlane (2004), Newman (2004), Paris (2004), Pettman (2005), Suhrke (2004), Thakur (2004), Thomas (2004) and Uvin (2004). Also, Winslow and Eriksen's (2004) anthropological approach perceptively questions the equation of clarity with utility.

³ The form that biopolitics takes is never fixed; and in his later lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault (2008) traced German ‘ordoliberalism’ and American neoliberalism as specific examples.

⁴ For a richer account of the genealogy of the art of government, see Foucault (2003b; 2007; 2008).

⁵ For example, see Price (1998).

⁶ For a far richer treatment, see Beier (2005).

⁷ These could include the approaches infamously identified by Robert Keohane (1988) as ‘rationalist’, as well as several strands of those he labelled as ‘reflectivist’.

⁸ I am thankful to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

⁹ At the levels of ontology and epistemology, Wendtian constructivism is not a radical departure from neorealist or liberal institutionalist understandings of the relationship between the world, our thoughts about it and prudential action. See Wendt (1999), Smith (2000b) and Doty (2000).

¹⁰ Power/knowledge shapes who is allowed to speak, the positions that can be acceptably articulated, the institutions that are able to serve as conduits of speech and the institutions that store and distribute what is said (Foucault 1990, 11). More importantly, the institutional sites, authorities, bodies of knowledge, discourses and discursive formations at play establish specific relations of power with differing degrees of fluidity. This is not to say policy-relevant research is necessarily ‘false’, but it is arbitrary. Knowledge could potentially take other forms and contribute to different relations of power (Foucault 1977).

¹¹ Andrew Mack was the lead researcher of The human security report.

¹² It bears noting that for analysts so concerned with policy-relevance (for example Paris 2001; Mack 2004; Hampson 2004), there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the importance of concrete definitions for the policy process. Definitional malleability has great political utility for it is easier to justify the expansion or narrowing of policy agendas from first principles when one can change how he or she is defining a concept with relative ease.