Parrhēsia Today: Drone Strikes, Fearless Speech and the Contentious Politics of Security

Abstract

Foucault is more often used to theorise political logics of securitisation than to understand the contestation of security policies. Yet Foucault's work offers a wealth of conceptual tools and ideas pertinent to the study of the contentious politics of security. In his lectures on parrhēsia in Ancient Greece, Foucault explored the practice whereby individuals choose at great risk to confront rulers or publics with uncomfortable truths. This article argues that a refashioned concept of parrhēsia can illuminate certain elements of the contentious politics of security today. The article develops this claim through an examination of the photojournalism of Noor Behram, a man who has spent four years photographing and exposing US drone strikes in the region of Waziristan in Pakistan. The article analyses Behram's activity in terms of parrhesiastic exposure, a concept that is intended to capture aspects of the changed circumstances under which fearless speech can be exercised in mass-mediated, globalised societies. The article concludes by observing how further engagement with parrhēsia might contribute to our understanding of political action, the relationship between emotions and political struggle, and the politics of secrecy.

Foucault and the Contentious Politics of Security

In a recent examination of the relevance of Foucault's idea of counter-conduct for understanding the politics of protest, Carl Death observes that, for all the discussion of power and resistance associated with Foucault's thought, “the direct influence of Foucault's work on contemporary social movement studies is more limited than one might expect.”¹ This he ascribes in part to an assumption on the part of many scholars that Foucault had “more to say about regimes of power than he did about forms of resistance or alternative politics.”²

I suspect a similar assumption is also at work in critical security studies. Foucault's explorations of governmentality, disciplinary and bio-power, his methodological reflections on genealogy and microphysics, and conceptual themes like dispositif and panopticism have made a very significant impression on studies of securitisation. More often than not, however, Foucault is called upon to theorise techniques of control and strategies of power. When it comes to analysing the politics of security, notwithstanding certain notable exceptions,³ far less attention has been paid to his writings on a range of topics that we might group under the broad heading of logics of contestation. This would include Foucault's thematisation of counter-conducts,⁴ his outline of an analytics of struggle,⁵ or the various reflections on revolt, refusal and the responsibilities and rights of the governed that are scattered across his interviews and which sometimes arise in the context of Foucault's own engagement in specific conflicts.⁶ When scholars have sought tools and guidelines for theorising the contentious politics of security, they have usually looked elsewhere—to the areas of postcolonial theory, theories of enactment and performativity, sociological studies of fields and bureaucratic struggles, and philosophies of action and interruption.⁷ Foucault is of course indirectly present in many of these debates via the influential place he has within, say, Butler's thinking on performativity or Rancière's work on politics. But I argue that Foucault's writings also offer a great deal that might be directly relevant to the study of contestations of security. Granted, it is indeed the case that, for all his insistence on the inseparability of power and resistance, when it comes to his major works—the monographs on madness, punishment, illness and sexuality, and the lectures on government—it is the schemes, tactics and dreams of experts and authorities that take centre stage in his explorations. However, this should not mean that we cannot push Foucault's thoughts on contestation, and more importantly the kind of ethos of inquiry he brings to political analysis, much further than we have to date.

A key lesson we learn from Foucault on power is the need to break regimes down. Instead of positing big systems of power, after Foucault we begin to see power in terms of its polymorphous character and changing forms. However, this variegated landscape of power is less evident when we turn to the analysis of contestations of security. There, it seems, our thinking is still blunted by some rather lumpy and undifferentiated categories like “resistance.” When it comes to thinking on the contentious politics of security, the richness of the analytics of power stands in sharp contrast to the thin and rather impoverished analytics of contestation that are at our disposal.⁸

It is with the aim of beginning to redress this imbalance that I take up Foucault's discussion of parrhēsia ⁹ in this paper. Parrhēsia is a political and ethical practice that Foucault traces back to Ancient Greece. Foucault interprets parrhēsia as “fearless speech,” “free-spokenness (franc-parler),”¹⁰ “the act of truth”¹¹ and one among several “modalities of truth telling.”¹² In its political version, parrhēsia is exemplified by the citizen who speaks critically in front of a tyrant or an assembly, voicing a truth he or she feels needs to be heard, and risking the wrath of the sovereign or people in doing so. Parrhēsia is therefore an act: it is not just a matter of what is said but the fact that an individual “binds” themselves then and there to that truth, assuming ownership of their words.¹³ But parrhēsia is also for Foucault a game.¹⁴ The parrhesiast is prepared to risk much in voicing an uncomfortable truth. At the same time they hope that, precisely because they speak frankly and courageously, their words might strike a chord with the sovereign or with the demos. As a consequence, there is always the hope in parrhēsia that this frank speech will have a positive impact on the affairs of the community, and their act will be met with a certain respect rather than punishment.

In this article I argue that the idea of parrhēsia can contribute to a more nuanced and variegated understanding of contestation within the field of security today. There are at least three ways in which parrhēsia can be useful:

1. Parrhēsia can sensitise us to the impact that individual (or, more accurately, individualised) actions and the mobilisation of personal, embodied, experienced truths can make on the politics of security. The analysis of parrhēsia can compensate for the tendency to analyse resistance mainly at the level of the activity of groups, or to associate transformation only with the pressure of faceless social forces. It can thus contribute to a growing interest among scholars in the difference made by acts.¹⁵

2. Parrhēsia alerts us to the place of courage and personal commitment in politics. Hence it might contribute to an expansion of our understanding of the force of emotions and affects in effecting political change.

3. Parrhēsia addresses situations where speaking out is dangerous. Few things are more dangerous in our societies than speaking out and disclosing certain truths pertaining to the arcana imperii, the secrets of the state. Parrhēsia can therefore be a useful tool to expand understanding of the politics and modalities of secrecy and disclosure, an aspect of security studies that surely merits further theoretical reflection.¹⁶

In making this argument for the relevance of Foucault's investigation of parrhēsia to the study of the contentious politics of security, it is necessary to offer a caveat. It is certainly not my intention to cast Foucault as a kind of philosophical Home Depot—all your conceptual tools conveniently gathered under one roof! I mentioned above that a range of theories and authors have been utilised by scholars interested in theorising contestation within security fields. This theoretical pluralism is a positive feature of the literature, and definitely not something I wish to criticise. My point is a different one. Echoing Death's point about social movement studies,¹⁷ or Ferguson's recent argument about governmentalities of the left,¹⁸ it is that Foucault has more to offer the study of the contentious politics of security than has hitherto been acknowledged. This is the argument I seek to develop by means of a discussion of parrhēsia.

My argument proceeds in three sections. First, I briefly introduce Foucault's writing on parrhēsia. Then, I consider the question of parrhēsia today: is it valid and useful to use this concept in the analysis of contemporary issues? Parrhēsia is a useful concept, I argue, but should not be projected onto contemporary situations without qualification. Our world is not that of Ancient Greece. For example, how do the forms of publicity, the forms of sovereignty, the forms of communication and representation that distinguish modern societies affect the ways in which an individual might speak out critically against authorities today? In the final section I connect this discussion of parrhēsia to a particular incident. I examine the recent case of Noor Behram, a man who has spoken out in the context of the USA's use of armed drones in Pakistan to target suspected militants in its global war on terror. Behram is a resident of Waziristan, the region of Pakistan where drone strikes have been especially intense. For many years he made it his mission to photograph each strike, documenting extensive civilian casualties that had not been acknowledged by western media or governments. At considerable risk he claims to be placing a truth about the nature of drone warfare before a western public. Building on this case I develop a concept of parrhesiastic exposure. This is intended to capture certain transformations within this mode of truth telling. Finally, in my conclusion I relate this discussion of parrhēsia back to debates in critical security studies, highlighting its relevance for our understanding of the politics of individual action, courage and emotions and, albeit very briefly, the politics of secrecy.

Foucault on Parrhēsia

Towards the end of 1983 Foucault delivered a series of six lectures at Berkeley. The theme was “discourse and truth.”¹⁹ Concluding these lectures, Foucault explained that he sought to engage “not … with the problem of truth, but with the problem of the truth-teller, or of truth-telling as an activity.”²⁰ The lectures centre upon a particular mode of truth telling called parrhēsia that Foucault locates in Ancient Greece. Parrhēsia makes it first appearance in Greek literature “in Euripides [c.484–407 BC], and occurs throughout the ancient Greek world of letters from the end of the Fifth Century BC.”²¹

Parrhēsia is one of several “modalities of truth-telling.” The others that Foucault mentions are prophecy (where a person speaks not “in his own name” but typically “transmits the word of God”), the wisdom of the sage, and tekhnē (the “know how” or expertise of doctors and other technicians).²² One reason he looks to Antiquity to study truth telling is that it enables him to “separate out” these different modalities. “Because, in Antiquity, they are fairly clearly distinguished and embodied.”²³ In his studies of governmentality, Foucault had emphasised the necessity of moving to the “outside” of the state by investigating the rationalities and practices through which it is constituted.²⁴ Part of making that move involved identifying archaic forms like polizei that—because they are quite alien to us today—foster a kind of reflexivity about our own logics of rule. With parrhēsia he seems to apply a similar kind of historical method to the practice of truth telling.

But there are significant differences in Foucault's method as well. Foucault notes that parrhēsia is a “spidery kind of notion.”²⁵ Unlike some of the other archaic concepts that Foucault reintroduces into the present, it does not reside at the centre of its own dedicated body of literature. Unlike, say, Polizeiwissenschaft, there are very few great treatises or compendia devoted to the understanding and exercise of parrhēsia. “It is a notion which is used and referred to, but it is not considered directly or thematized as such.”²⁶ With parrhēsia Foucault is following fine trails, tracking this practice as it scuttles nimbly across discursive surfaces, appearing in historical encounters, now disappearing, then reappearing. “It is a theme which runs from one system to another, from one doctrine to another, so that it is quite difficult to define its meaning precisely or identify its precise system.”²⁷ Like a spider web, there is a centre but it is not fully fixed.

So what is parrhēsia? In introducing these lectures Foucault offers the following summary of this complex term.

[Parrhēsia] is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In [parrhēsia], the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.²⁸

In one of the more illuminating commentaries and uses of Foucault's discussion of parrhēsia, Jonathan Simon clarifies some of its features. Parrhēsia is speech, but a particular kind of speech. It is not to be confused with the pursuit of truth by means of “reasoned argument,” nor does it entail “the manipulation of less reflective instincts (as philosophy or rhetoric might).” Instead, parrhēsia refers to a truth that “comes uniquely from her self and her experience and is directed critically at a listener whose power places the speaker in potential danger.”²⁹

In the classic Athenian mode, a parrhesiastic speaker confronted a god, a sovereign, or the assembled citizenry through a direct revelation of experienced truth. As such, [parrhēsia] is dangerous speech, raising the possibility that those with power will retaliate against the speaker as much as the possibility that the holder of power will be shamed or otherwise moved to redress the wrong. Because of its risk, [parrhēsia] was not a form of self-interest or therapy. Rather, it was a recognition of a duty to another or to society as a whole.³⁰

Parrhēsia is not a static practice but is capable of taking several forms. We can read Foucault's project as providing elements in a history of parrhēsia. “His main point,” according to Martin Jay, “is that it migrated from a public concept as a guide to good citizenship in Athenian democracy into a more personal quality, a way to fashion a good life.”³¹ In the former case, there is a “political parrhēsia”:³² an individual addresses the sovereign or people frankly and critically about the follies of government. Foucault juxtaposes this with “parrhēsia in the field of ethics”:³³ an individual offers frank criticism to a friend or confidant. They value that relationship and that person so highly they are prepared to risk that same relationship in the hope that their words will produce a positive effect in their interlocutor.

In a way that is consistent with a great deal of his writing on relations of power and truth, Foucault likens parrhēsia to a game. This is because it entails a set of moves and countermoves, risks and interactions. What is it that grounds the truth claims of the parrhesiast? What is the basis on which their words might carry weight? It is not the appeal to the accumulated knowledge of a profession that the technician mobilises. Nor is it like the word of God that the prophet transmits. Instead, it is a sense that the parrhesiast is a person of conviction and courage, who speaks of something they know from personal experience. But note it is their precise context that gives their words a certain force: because their words are very likely to be unpopular, there is little they have to gain personally from uttering them. They are to be taken seriously precisely because they freely risk so much in order to speak. “If there is a kind of ‘proof’ of the sincerity of the parrhesiastes, it is his courage. The fact that a speaker says something dangerous—different from what the majority believes—is a strong indication that he is a parrhesiastes.”³⁴

Parrhēsia Today?

Does parrhēsia exist today? More appropriately, can we relate this notion of parrhēsia, drawn as it is from Antiquity, to contemporary experiences of political rule and its contestation? Can the idea of parrhēsia advance our understanding of the contentious politics of security? I think the answer to these questions is yes, but it is a qualified one.

Understood as a subject of philosophical reflection and problematisation, parrhēsia went into decline in Greece during the fourth century BC. It barely registers in modern theories of government.³⁵ Foucault observes that where the “parrhesiastic modality” does appear it is only as something “grafted on or underpinned” by one of the other modes of truth telling he compares it with.³⁶ Hence, revolutionary discourse, which Foucault regards as a modern form of prophetic truth telling, can play a parrhesiastic role when it undertakes a critique of society. And the discourse of scientists, the modality of tekhnē, can have a parrhesiastic function when it challenges prevalent “prejudices,” “dominant institutions” and “current ways of doing things.”³⁷ More than that, Foucault gives us little indication about what parrhēsia might mean today, or where we might find it.

According to Simon one of the most visible ways in which parrhēsia occurs today is in connection with the political activity of victims. “Today, victims have emerged as perhaps the most important source of [parrhēsia]. By reproducing the violent emotions they have experienced, victims who choose to speak parrhesiastically can destabilize political and legal authority.”³⁸ Speaking of the United States, he notes that for more than two decades this parrhesiastic force has been directed against the criminal justice system, with victims of violent crime speaking out “against the courts, parole boards, and other decisionmakers whose management of dangerous criminals has failed them.”³⁹

However, this political energy that some victims can stir up when they speak out can operate in other forums and issue areas. Observers of politics have noted the way in which official public inquiries are often convened in the expectation that they will contain or even depoliticise controversies.⁴⁰ But Simon notes that with the 9/11 Commission this was not the case, whatever the original intentions of the Bush administration. In this particular case there were the communities who, constituting themselves as the 9/11 families, brought a form of truth and a political energy to the Commission that was different.⁴¹ “The Commission's relationship with the victims transformed it from an institution anchored completely in the analytics of truth to one infused with parrhesiastic truth.”⁴² As a result, where the Commission might have been expected to do little more than cover up for the errors of the government, it became capable of bringing a certain measure of accountability to bear upon an executive branch that had, under the guise of national emergency, largely escaped scrutiny.

Another area where we might glimpse parrhēsia today is in the disclosure of the whistleblower.⁴³ When in 1984 Mordecai Vananu revealed details of Israel's secret nuclear weapons programme to London's The Sunday Times, he demonstrated that if the rise of the nuclear state would call forth what Masco has termed a secret governmentality on a truly massive scale,⁴⁴ such a regime would soon engender its own forms of counter-conduct. This secret governmentality would prove to be susceptible to the episodic acts of disclosure on the part of scientists, technicians and military personnel who, under various circumstances, felt compelled to speak out. The fact that Vananu was snatched from Rome, drugged and transported to Israel, tried behind closed doors and then sentenced to 24 years imprisonment illustrates amply the kind of risks associated with this modern form of parrhēsia. The fact that Vananu was a junior technician working within the nuclear complex, that he revealed technical details, suggests that what we are seeing in this case is some combination of parrhēsia and tekhnē.

In suggesting that Vananu exemplifies the whistleblower as parrhesiast I do beg an important question. The fact that Vananu was considered by many as a traitor (especially in Israel) yet elsewhere celebrated by the anti-nuclear movement and repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize suggests there will nearly always be heated questions of identity at play.⁴⁵ When individuals speak out on controversial issues they invariably attract smear campaigns and accusations about their true motivations. Is the revelation of state secrets motivated purely by conscience or is the truth teller driven by less noble considerations? Are they seeking financial reward? Do they bear allegiance to another state? These doubts prompt us to ask certain questions as scholars. Does a public have to recognise their act as courageous, as truthful for it to count as parrhēsia? If their speech does not provoke self-questioning on the part of a sovereign or a public, is it still parrhēsia? Which public needs to listen, and over what time scale do we judge the impact of their speech? These are difficult questions, and the ambiguity they suggest may be enough for the more positivist-minded analyst to conclude that parrhēsia is too fuzzy and hence “inoperable” as a concept for examining contestation in the field of security governance. Notwithstanding these reservations, I think we can say that by its very nature parrhēsia is always going to be an essentially contested activity. The very recognition of an act as parrhēsia—rather than heresy or treason—is a political act. For this reason parrhēsia is as much a matter of social interaction as it is a matter of individual action. ⁴⁶

Thus far I have given two examples that do bear strong resemblances to the kinds of truth telling that, Foucault tells us, ancient societies recognised as parrhēsia. But to satisfactorily address the question of parrhēsia today—or more specifically, what parrhēsia is today—it is not sufficient to merely identify contemporary expressions. To proceed along that path is to repeat the move of many scholars who, having read Foucault's writing on panopticism, or more lately neoliberalism, applied these concepts rather directly to the present, and found panopticism and neoliberalism lurking everywhere! This move leads invariably to overgeneralisation and a loss of specificity and historicity in our understanding of power relations. Concepts that Foucault fashioned with a certain “proximity to concrete situations,”⁴⁷ concepts forged through encounters with particular knowledges and designed to express singular constellations of rationality and practice, become generalised in a way that effaces rather than enhances our capacity to discern change. Rather than treat parrhēsia as a unity, a name for a thing existing in the world, it is better to see it as an analytic, or following Deleuze, in terms of “lines of [continuous] variation.”⁴⁸ If absolutely nothing about the world is fixed, if “variations are all that exist,”⁴⁹ then our task is a different one. We need to engage parrhēsia at the level of its “grafts” (Foucault), or what I have elsewhere called critical encounters.⁵⁰

One way to tackle this theme of variation is by considering what we might call the mediation of parrhēsia. The parrhesiastic speech that Foucault reconstructs from the Ancient world is always specifically located speech. It happens in particular places and social contexts: in the agora before an assembly of citizens, in the court before a king, or, removed from public view, in the ear of the tyrannical prince. It seems that for parrhēsia to happen, all the players in the parrhesiastic game have to be physically present at the same time. It is “the great scene of the man standing up to the tyrant and telling the truth before the eyes and ears of the whole court.”⁵¹

With contemporary forms of parrhēsia it is rarely the case that fearless speech is performed and experienced in this way. Certainly there can be the frank statement uttered before a commission or inquiry. Recall the words of Richard Clarke when he began his testimony to the 9/11 Commission: “Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you.”⁵² And such words are all the more powerful for being spoken unexpectedly before an assembled audience. But if such acts of frank speech attain a certain power today to unsettle, enrage or shame an audience, it is not only or even primarily on the scale of those physically present at the moment of utterance. Concomitant with the rise of the modern public sphere, that particular “social space mediated by the reflexive circulation of discourse,”⁵³ the coordinates of parrhesiastic activity have changed significantly. With the rise of “mediated visibility,”⁵⁴ we speak, hear and see in the midst of distributed technological assemblages that far exceed the boundaries of the agora, the court or even the nation. If it is true that parrhesiastic activity is by definition never reducible to the action of its subject but dependent upon a certain risky interaction with others, then it is also true that under conditions of extensive technological and communicative mediation, the geographical and temporal scales on which this interaction can occur have been stretched considerably.

New forms of mediation and the way in which they change the time and place of parrhēsia provoke a further question. Is it still parrhēsia if an angry crowd cannot immediately stone you, or the king cast you into prison? Is it still parrhēsia if a vast ocean separates you from the addressees of your frank criticism? Here I think we need to recognise that it is not just the power and the scale of communication that have been vastly extended. The technologies of violence and intimidation by which the affronted sovereign can respond to the parrhesiast have also changed dramatically since Ancient Greece. Targeted assassination by drone or commando elite are only the most recent techniques available to the vengeful sovereign. What the long history of spies, assassins and, more recently, the networking of national intelligence agencies confirm—and what Mordecai Vananu discovered to his great personal cost—is that to speak out is sometimes to risk everything, no matter where you go on earth.

In this section I have asked some questions about parrhēsia today. One preliminary conclusion we can draw is that there is a relationship between the possibility and effectiveness of parrhēsia and the scales on which communicative and political power operate. But these are by no means the only lines of variation we should consider. In his careful reading of the Ancient Greeks, Foucault also discerns a relationship between parrhēsia and the political character of rule. For the Ancient Greeks, “democracy is not the privileged site of parrhēsia , but the place in which parrhēsia is most difficult to practice.”⁵⁵ In part this is because in a democracy, where the freedom to speak is widely distributed, it becomes harder to discern frank and courageous speech amidst “the hubbub of all the orators arguing with each other and trying to seduce the people.”⁵⁶ I will return to the question of the relationship of parrhēsia to forms of political government in my conclusion.

But more immediately, another variable we should consider is the expressive forms of parrhēsia. In Foucault's explorations, parrhēsia is nearly always a verbal activity. One of the points I develop in the short case that follows is that verbal activity does not exhaust the possible forms of fearless “speech.” In confronting a public with uncomfortable truths today, it is more likely that the truth teller will—if they are to engage an audience and hold its attention—need to employ some combination of words, images and sounds.⁵⁷ This is especially the case whenever parrhēsia is combined with other modes of truth telling, such as the tekhnē of documentary and photography. In such situations parrhēsia resembles the situations that Rancière describes as demonstration: its mode is simultaneously “argumentative and poetic,”⁵⁸ that is, a matter of building argument “and opening up the world where argument can be received and have an impact.”⁵⁹ Fearless speech under contemporary conditions is compelled to negotiate between two poles. It has to retain a commitment to frankness and clarity in order to convey its critical point. But it must also utilise expressive forms that garner attention within a public space where attention is in short supply.

To summarise, Foucault's exploration of parrhēsia does provide us with a valuable analytical tool to illuminate certain forms of truth telling and their place within contentious politics today. However, use of the concept has to be sensitive to the very different circumstances under which individuals and groups speak out. Among other things it needs to take account of the changing topographies of the public sphere, the expanded reach of technologies of violence and retribution, and new expressive forms and modes of communication. Given these changes, perhaps it makes sense to view parrhēsia less as a pure form, and more as an adjective that might qualify particular practices and experiences. This, at least, is the direction Simon takes when he speaks of parrhesiastic accountability, and the line I pursue in the remainder of this article where I consider the practice and condition of parrhesiastic exposure.

Parrhesiastic Exposure: Noor Behram's Documentation of the Covert Drone War in Waziristan

Since at least June 2004 the US government has been using armed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) to conduct hundreds of missile strikes in northwest Pakistan.⁶⁰ The use of drones to carry out so-called “targeted assassinations” against suspected terrorists marks a new and dramatic turn in US counterterrorism policy. Data collected by investigative journalists seeking to expose this otherwise largely secret war reveal that the advent of the Obama presidency saw a marked escalation in the use of drones, both in northwest Pakistan and increasingly in other regions.⁶¹ The Bush presidency approach to counterterrorism was associated in the public eye at least with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conducted in the name of counterterrorism and “regime change,” with the secretive programme of extraordinary rendition, with techniques of interrogation and torture such as waterboarding, and with the detention facilities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. By contrast, the Obama approach is increasingly identified with such practices as the policy of targeted assassination, the “kill list” and the Hellfire missile dispatched by the Predator and Reaper drones.⁶²

For many years the USA's use of drones in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the area where most of the strikes have taken place, went largely unreported in western media. “For years, the government would neither confirm nor deny the existence of the strikes, and only began to outline the practices and legal justifications following significant pressure from domestic and international civil society.”⁶³ It is only very recently that a more detailed picture of this covert drone war is emerging. One of its most controversial features is the issue of civilian casualties. For example, in June 2011, John Brennan (at the time Obama's chief counterterrorism adviser) went on record claiming there had been no civilian casualties for “almost a year.” Yet evidence is fast being accumulated that tells a different story.⁶⁴

Scholarship on drone war has escalated almost in proportion to the use of drones as a new weapon of counterterrorism and surveillance tool. For example, scholars have begun to assess what the drone means in terms of new kinds of scopic regime, surveillance practice and security scape,⁶⁵ and how its potential for killing by remote control might shape the future of war and peace.⁶⁶

What has been less examined, and what interests me here, are the practices by which drone warfare has been constituted as an object of public knowledge in the first place. What practices have individuated a set of events as “covert drone war,” and disclosed these events before a public? How has the campaign being waged in North Waziristan become not just a front line in the global war on terror, but also a key site in the contentious politics of security? To answer these questions we could of course examine the work of investigative journalists and human rights campaigners who have sought to uncover the covert drone war. We might also consider the networks of communication and intra-elite negotiations in Washington and other capitals, the practice of leaking to shape and control the way in which knowledge of this programme has been brought into the public realm. But while these are important lines to follow, I want to pursue a different angle in the remainder of this article. I want to ask how one tells the truth about the covert war on terror, and what it costs to tell that truth. What role does the courageous activity and speech of particular individuals and not just organisations play in making this war more visible to a public?

To answer these questions I propose to link the previous discussion of contemporary parrhēsia to one particular case: the photojournalism of Noor Behram.

In July 2011 several international newspapers and websites carried stories about a man who had made it his mission to bear witness to the impact of the war on terror, and of drone war in particular, on his home region.⁶⁷ They told the story of Noor Behram, a resident of Waziristan and journalist, who had spent the past four years documenting the “collateral damage” of US drone strikes in this “tribal area,” “interviewing survivors of drone attacks, shooting video footage and close-up stills of the damage.”⁶⁸ Spiegel Online reports that between 2007 and 2011, and working independently from his employer, Al Jazeera, Behram visited 70 sites and witnessed 600 corpses.⁶⁹ Taking photographs under such circumstances was not easy. “He had to ask permission … from clan elders and Taliban commanders. He had to convince them he was not a spy, not one of the people who pass on coordinates for possible drone strikes to the CIA.”⁷⁰

Behram's work appears to reveal the truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan's tribal region—that far more civilians are being killed than Americans or Pakistanis will admit. His images cannot be independently verified but are backed up by credible documentation. It also raises questions about the ethics of this new video-game warfare. How likely is it that a “reachback operator” sitting at a video screen 7,500 miles away at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, will hit the right target in the middle of the night?⁷¹

Behram's work was displayed at an art event in Lahore in the autumn of 2011. British press coverage of Behram's work was sparked by its prominent inclusion in a multimedia exhibit at London's Beaconsfield gallery entitled “Gaming in Waziristan.” Here his photos and videos were shown alongside some other artistic explorations of drone warfare and surveillance. In the US major media outlets had, until very recently, been quite circumspect in their reporting of drone strikes. Nevertheless, Behram's photographs were the subject of a major article in Wired's online Danger Room blog, which announced them as “rare photos from a war zone most Americans never see.”⁷² As Wired put it, despite reservations due to the questions “anonymous US officials” had raised about Behram's collaborators, “after careful consideration, we chose to publish some of these images because of the inherent journalistic value in depicting a largely unseen battlefield.”⁷³

In Wired, a selection of Behram's photographs document a series of drone strikes. A place name and a date is given for each photo. Behram's recollection of the scene accompanies each image: particular smells, stories, characters are attached to pictures that testify to incidents of loss, horror and destruction.

For example, one image is entitled “Dande Darpa Khel, August 21, 2009.” It shows three young children standing in a field of debris. A fire is glimpsed in the background, suggesting the missile attack was very recent. The two older children stare straight at the camera, the youngest, in the middle, turns her head to look at her sister. Apparently in shock, all three hold up pieces of their neighbour's house, clutching it “as if the rubble could comfort them.” “The stench that Behram smelled when he arrived at Dande Darpa Khel came from the charred bodies of Bismullah Khan and his wife. Near the bombed-out remains of their house, Behram found the Khan's three living children.” According to Behram, “These kids had no idea where their parents were. They didn't know their parents were killed.”⁷⁴

On first inspection Behram's activity possesses many of the hallmarks and characteristics that Foucault identifies as parrhēsia. Consider it first as a form of truth telling. Faced with the covert war and the secrecy of the US and Pakistani governments, a number of groups are doing the essential work of reporting the as-yet-unreported. They are making visible the toll that the drone campaign is taking in terms of civilian deaths, damage to communities, and social and psychological harm. Such data are now being gathered in the form familiar to modern social research: reports, graphs, statistics, often accompanied by testimonies gathered from witnesses and survivors.⁷⁵

Behram's reporting is, in contrast, much more situated, personal and embodied. His disclosure is an act in its own right, a relatively undetached account of what he saw and felt as he arrived at each scene. Behram is a subject in this war: he speaks in part as a resident living in its midst. One photo is entitled “Above Noor Behram's Home in North Waziristan, Dec. 12, 2010” and reveals a grainy image of a drone hovering against a grey sky. Bird-like because of its altitude, the drone is circling above his house.

Second, and perhaps more specifically, Behram is taking great risks to tell this truth about the drone war. Some of this danger is hinted at in his own words.⁷⁶ He tells of local communities who are hostile to the presence of media, whom they do not trust and sometimes blame. Hence, in one case he took a quick picture of the destruction of a house then decided to leave the scene “in order to defuse hostility.”⁷⁷ Another risk, perhaps far more serious, is the threat of himself being killed in a drone strike.⁷⁸ There are grounds to believe the US has made the follow-up strike one of its practices. Funeral goers and rescuers, it seems, are sometimes considered legitimate targets.⁷⁹

But above and beyond these dangers lies the possibility of being deliberately targeted and assassinated for speaking out. Here we should recall the fate of Hayatullah Khan, a journalist whose past work included freelancing for PBS's Frontline. Khan reported the death of an alleged Al Qaeda figure named Hamza Rabia and four others in December 2005 in the town of Miran Shah. Khan's story and pictures of shrapnel indicated the victims had been killed by a US-made Hellfire missile,⁸⁰ thus contradicting the Pakistani government's official explanation that Rabia was killed by a blast caused by explosives stored in the house.⁸¹ Khan was kidnapped the day after his story appeared. His body was found six months later, with five or six bullet wounds. It was unclear whether he had been killed by Pakistani security forces or the Taliban. A year later his widow was reported as killed by a bomb placed next to her bedroom.⁸²

Given the risks and threats that investigative journalists can face in Pakistan, and especially in FATA, it seems reasonable to infer that it takes great courage for Behram to speak out about drone strikes.

No doubt we could pass other aspects of Behram's experience through the analytical grid Foucault offers us when discussing parrhēsia. That is, we could also consider it under the headings of criticism and duty or responsibility to oneself and to others. But rather than emphasise the specific ways in which this particular act of fearless speech might be isomorphic with the parrhēsia of Ancient Greece, I want to use my remaining space to examine some important shifts in parrhēsia.

In the case of Behram's intrepid photojournalism I want to suggest that we are faced not with the eternal recurrence of parrhēsia across the ages but with a novel constellation of elements. Let's call it parrhesiastic exposure. Here I want to play upon the full, if not fullest, range of meanings that can be attached to the word “exposure.” As we all know, one set of meanings of exposure is “the action of bringing to light (something discreditable); the ‘showing up’ of an error … or evil” (Oxford English Dictionary online). This overlaps with an understanding that exposure can also mean “presentation or disclosure to view; public exhibition.”

Now in nearly all the instances and contexts in which Foucault discusses political parrhēsia, it entails a direct confrontation with a ruler. Or if it's a public, it's the bounded, finite public of the agora where the parrhesiast confronts the citizens with an uncomfortable truth. But, as I argued above, in liberal democracies and autocracies today the truth teller is rarely in a situation where they can address the ruler in such a direct fashion. This is especially so when it is not their own sovereign or people they seek to confront but that of a foreign power. Behram states that his agenda is “to show taxpayers in the Western world what their tax money is doing to people in another part of the world: killing civilians, innocent victims, children.”⁸³ Noor Behram doesn't really need to address Barack Obama or the US Congress directly. For he offers his criticisms under conditions where, at least since the time of the Enlightenment,⁸⁴ the addressee of truth telling is a different kind of audience: the “virtual social object” and “indefinite audience” convened by modern modes of publicity.⁸⁵

But if the public to which this truth is addressed is typically diffuse, then so are the source and the form of danger that the truth teller confronts. In Foucault's examples the parrhesiast runs the risk that the tyrant or the people will turn on the speaker. There is a definite, identifiable source of danger. The danger in Behram's case is of a different kind. It is at this point we need to note another meaning of exposure: an “unsheltered or undefended condition.” Behram's attempts to reveal a truth about the killing of civilians by US drones exposes him to the threat of being injured or killed by a number of different factors and circumstances – by a follow-up strike, by angry residents, by secretive intelligence agents or by Taliban militants. The risks and dangers are multiple and complex.

That said (and recalling Foucault's frequent references to parrhēsia as game), there is also the possibility that these two senses of exposure can play off one another. The visibility a parrhesiast acquires before a public can sometimes offer a degree of security, and lessen their exposure to danger.⁸⁶ Indeed, Behram makes this point himself. “Now, he says—since he's known by the locals, since he's become a public figure—nothing can happen to him.”⁸⁷

But the term exposure also carries a third set of meanings, this time more technical. Exposure is, of course, an absolutely key technique and variable in photography where it indexes the amount of light that is allowed to fall upon a photographic film or image sensor. Exposure can be automated, as any amateur photographer will tell you, but for the expert photographer it is a matter of skill, judgement and experience. For example, a long exposure time will capture movement and dynamism in the way that a short exposure cannot. But it comes at the cost of blurring and loss of sharpness. In short, exposure constitutes a way in which the photographer, through a combination of skill and technology, can consciously manipulate an image in pursuit of particular effects.

By invoking parrhesiastic exposure in this third sense I want to highlight the fact that Behram's principle medium for truth telling is not just the verbal activity that Foucault makes so central to his understanding of parrhēsia but instead verbal activity combined with the visual image.⁸⁸ More pointedly, I am suggesting that parrhēsia can be visual as well as verbal. This is a matter that the eminent scholar of politics and vision, Martin Jay, has addressed at some length.

There are ways … in which resistance to power may take visual form, but these are understood by Foucault in largely negative terms, as disturbances in the hegemonic visuality of an era, like Manet's challenge to traditional perspectivalist painting. They rarely, if ever, translate into positive expressions of another visual order that comes closer to a truth grounded in a form of life, a critical practice whose effects Foucault came to value, both theoretically and in his own life as a deeply engaged intellectual.⁸⁹

Certainly we can agree with Jay that “there is no visual parrhēsia for Michel Foucault”⁹⁰ if by visual parrhēsia one means a practice that “could somehow do an end run around discursivity and provide a basis for a truth that was not merely an effect of a specific discursive regime.”⁹¹ But if by parrhēsia we mean a truth that confronts authorities with uncomfortable realities, a truth that is not simply some facts but “me saying this,”⁹² then it seems we should be willing to accept that parrhēsia today will only occasionally take the form of pure verbal expression. Much more likely, as with Behram's photography, we will encounter it as some combination of words, sounds and images. Indeed, we could go so far as to speculate that in a social world for which communication has become so bound up with the visual, in a modern environment ever more “thickened” by photographs and other communicative objects,⁹³ that “speaking out” with words alone is the exception rather than the norm.

In speaking of exposure in this way, in drawing analogies with the art and even the chemistry of photographic exposure, I am suggesting that the exercise of fearless speech has an entire technical dimension that we should not ignore. Parrhēsia is not a skill or a technique, as Foucault noted. One does not become an expert in this form of truth telling. But it does nevertheless have its “technical aspects,”⁹⁴ a point Foucault makes but fails to elaborate on. This is especially so in contemporary societies: to tell the truth in public requires all manner of props, mediators, technological prosthetics and social connections.⁹⁵ Foucault's account of parrhēsia veers towards a somewhat heroic conception of the speaker. This is quite understandable given the way in which great courage is a defining characteristic in the definition of the figure of the parrhesiast. Without wishing to downplay the necessary and irreducible element of courage, I do wish to emphasise that in addition to courage, fearless speech calls upon a set of sociotechnical associations—the associative and rather banal side that serves as the counterpart to the individual and heroic.

In Behram's case his photography, his truth did not come to the attention of the press in the UK or US through the sheer force of its content. Instead, it required allies of various kinds who arranged events, publicity and so on. Behram has received support from a number of actors and groups who are actively campaigning to bring transparency and justice for the people who are on the receiving end of the US drone campaign in Waziristan. Prominent among these are the lawyer Shahzad Akbar, based in Islamabad where he heads the Foundation for Fundamental Human Rights, and the UK-based legal campaign group Reprieve, directed by Clive Stafford Smith. It was the latter, for instance, who was instrumental in staging the art exhibition in London. Meanwhile, Wired recounts some of the contributions of Akbar. For instance, Behram has not only taken photographs but also collected materials from the drone strikes. Survivors of drone strikes have given him pieces of the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles with which the drones obliterate their targets. It was Akbar who assisted in transporting these parts to a city in Punjab and then on to Islamabad. Wired reports Akbar saying it was “a ‘hassle’ to get the missile parts out of North Waziristan, as it would have been difficult to explain to a soldier or a policeman what they were doing with missile fragments in their car.” “Hassle” is perhaps an understatement! In light of this one remark, and more generally as a way of complicating the image of fearless speech as the singular activity of one individual or even group, perhaps it might be useful, following Vandekerckhove and Langenberg, to speak of a “parrhesiastic chain.” Sometimes it takes an interactive play of courageous acts and connections in order for the truth to be spoken and, crucially, heard.⁹⁶

There is one final sense in which I want to work the notion of exposure. What happens to materials when they are exposed to the environment: to the actions of wind, sunlight, ice and rain? They can become weathered. If they are shiny they may lose their lustre. If brightly painted, they may become faded and worn. At the risk of overworking this metaphor, we might also observe that once exposed, a particular truth may also undergo a certain weathering process. It may also, with time, and subject to the social and political forces that greet it, undergo a change in appearance. It may lose some of the critical charge that it first carried into the public domain. Fearless speech may provoke disquiet; it may open a certain space of freedom where something can be posed in a different light. But we should not overlook the fact that the truth revealed may also undergo certain operations which may have the effect of blunting or transforming it. Let us return to Behram's photographs and missile parts one last time. At the start of its feature, Wired offers the following statement:

Before posting Behram's photos we took a number of measures to confirm as best we could what was being shown. We verified Behram's bona fides with other news organizations. We sifted through the images, tossing out any pictures that couldn't correlate with previously reported drone attacks. Then we grilled Behram in a series of lengthy Skype interviews from Pakistan, translated by Akbar, about the circumstances surrounding each of the images.⁹⁷

With this remark it seems we are returned to the theme of Foucault's “grafts,” of combinations between the different truth-telling modalities that I mentioned earlier. For media organisations to find the resolve to relay Behram's uncomfortable truths, to place them before a wider audience, these truths and their bearer have to be fact-checked. Behram's words and images carry a certain force due to the fact that, like all parrhesiasts, he risks so much in order to be heard. But at the same time, they only get into circulation if they can satisfy certain scientific and journalistic criteria of veracity. The embodied, motivated truth of parrhēsia becomes entangled within the disembodied, abstract methods of tekhnē and its regime of truth production.

Do the referent objects of Behram's exposure become weathered as a result of this entanglement? Do the injustices he catalogues lose some of their aura, and with it their capacity to shame and shock a public? Do they now derive their power to unsettle less from the fact that these are personal, embodied experiences, and more on the basis that they have been independently verified? Perhaps any given truth, once it is exposed and reproduced may ultimately fade or, if it endures, do so only through its translation into the modern regime of knowledge. No doubt a whole essay could be written on the theme of parrhēsia in the age of mechanical reproduction, to adapt Benjamin's famous thesis.⁹⁸ This article has pursued the more modest task of explaining parrhēsia and analysing some of its connections to the present. It is to something like a history of whistleblowing that we might look in order to answer the questions I have just raised about the weathering of truth. That history remains, for now, unwritten.

Concluding Remarks

At the outset I suggested that there are at least three areas in which engaging with the question of parrhēsia can advance our understanding of the contentious politics of security: the impact of the individual within contentious politics; the place of courage within the politics of resistance; and the contemporary politics of secrecy. By way of a conclusion I now revisit these areas in light of the preceding discussion.

First, parrhēsia provides a frame to analyse more clearly the place of individual action within the field of contentious politics. More specifically, it offers tools to study the act of speaking out. Research on social movements and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has documented at length the tactics such social actors use to bear witness to injustice and to identify wrongs before a public.⁹⁹ These collective agents are in key respects the descendants of the truth-telling modality that Foucault called tekhnē. Many invoke the authority of law, medicine, psychology and other expert knowledges when they campaign. But things are somewhat different when a person speaks out not as a representative for an organisation or an expert but unexpectedly and at great risk to themselves, as a principled conscientious subject. It means a name, a face, a conscience, a fate can become attached to an injustice in the public eye. Parrhēsia allows us to bring greater analytical precision to certain situations when protest takes the form of an individual who bears witness, or engages in some act of refusal or dissent.

The contentious politics of security and surveillance is today visibly contoured by some very public controversies involving individuals—Assange, Manning, Snowden and others—who have spoken out about the excesses of security practices, in some cases disclosing highly secretive information and facing the wrath of powerful sovereigns as a consequence. There is clearly a need for theoretical tools that can sharpen our accounts of political situations where political controversy crystallises around individual action. I argue that parrhēsia can be helpful here.

That said, we should not overgeneralise about parrhēsia. Like any concept it becomes rather blunt if stretched to cover all manner of acts of resistance and counter-conduct. Better to use it to make distinctions. For example, we might speculate that the truth telling of Daniel Ellsberg, Noor Behram, Edward Snowden or Malala Yousafzai is closer to the history of parrhēsia than the radical transparency of Julian Assange. To better understand Assange's place within the field of contentious politics one would surely look, at least initially, to other practices of dissent and their lineage. For example, one might fruitfully contextualise Assange and his political practice by relating them to the history of secret societies,¹⁰⁰ but equally to the history of those bourgeois groups who mobilised their polemics against the principles of arcana imperii upheld by the absolutist state.¹⁰¹

The bigger point here is not to suggest that political practices be placed in tidy little boxes, or that there is a hierarchy of political virtue with parrhēsia at the top. Rather, it is to suggest that a better account of individualised truth telling (for the subject is not just a bearer but an effect of these practices) and its relationship to the politics of security will benefit from a fuller grasp of parrhēsia. But equally it will require a clearer understanding of other, cognate practices of truth telling and counter-conduct. With his sketch of other modalities of truth telling pertinent to the Ancient world—the practice of the sage, the prophet and the technician—we saw how Foucault offers some coordinates for just this kind of wider understanding. But Foucault's should not, of course, be the last word. We do not live in Ancient Greece; we also need to fashion new concepts to register emergent forms and practices. How to make sense, for instance, of the anti-individualised truth-telling practices that are today associated with the moniker Anonymous? Unlike the parrhesiast who assumes “ownership for [her] words,”¹⁰² it would seem that with Anonymous the ambiguous figure of the masked man/woman (Conspirator? Bandit? Superhero?) is reinstated within the public sphere.

Turning now to my second theme: what does a focus on parrhēsia bring to our understanding of the relationship between emotions and politics? This special issue has analysed the connection between affective economies and governmentality, a nexus of some interest to scholars of security. Recent studies have explored the governmentality of love in the area of migration,¹⁰³ the intertwining of compassion and repression that characterises many projects of humanitarian government,¹⁰⁴ and most of all the politics of fear and alienation animating many programmes of securitisation.¹⁰⁵ These undertakings all attest to a growing scholarly interest in emotions and governmentality, affect and power.

Certainly we could throw courage into this affective mix. One could perhaps speak of a governmentality of courage. This might draw attention to the various ways in which experts and authorities have sought to foster courage and manage fear, whether on the scale of a platoon of soldiers or a public at war. Courage might be read in this sense alongside studies in the engineering of resilience and morale.¹⁰⁶

I argue that the kind of courage at stake with parrhēsia is not reducible to governmentality but neither does it entirely escape the realm of programmatic calculation and technologies of administration. Security studies tends to privilege the analysis of situations where emotions become entangled within calculative practices and function within administrative programmes—the management of morale, technologies of fear, etc. This is a legitimate and necessary focus. Yet I want to insist on the possibility of affective energies which exceed, if only temporarily, frameworks of capture and instrumentality.

To understand how parrhēsia overlaps with programmes of governmentality one only has to consider the powerful symbolic appeal that courage has in contemporary societies. Whether the focus is on survivors of terrorism, breast cancer or a tsunami, it is clear that tales of courage sell newspapers and raise charitable funds.¹⁰⁷ As a virtue, courage has great symbolic value in western public culture, much more than, say, humility. Events often get scripted in terms of a narrative of courageous action.

It is public respect for heroism that furnishes parrhesiastic action with what Hacking would call its “ecological niche.”¹⁰⁸ No doubt many complex social, political and psychological forces and contingent elements affected Noor Behram in his decision to photograph and document drone strikes in Waziristan. To single out his courage risks a kind of simplistic reduction: we fit him into a familiar hero narrative.¹⁰⁹ But in the dominant representation of his activity in western media—and within my own account here in terms of parrhesiastic exposure—this is precisely how his activity is coded. This becomes its dominant mode of signification. The larger point is that when parrhēsia takes place under contemporary conditions of mass-mediated publicity, it is subject to and even complicit in the same processes of selection, reduction and reification that shape most other forms of public communication. Parrhēsia does not enjoy a status that entirely escapes or transgresses the norms of governmentality and the grammar of the public sphere.

And yet to leave our assessment at that would risk a rather gloomy and somewhat fatalist account of parrhēsia. It might imply that parrhēsia today is subject to the same kind of instrumentalisation that Habermas and others associate with the decline of the modern public sphere.¹¹⁰ This is not my intent. While parrhēsia mutates it does not vanish. I want to hold open the possibility that despite, or even in conjunction with forces of instrumentalisation and recuperation, there is an excess to parrhēsia, a surplus energy that can sometimes overflow governmentality and unsettle, however briefly, a given state of affairs. It is perhaps a matter of marking those occasions when an individual or a group risks their life or livelihood to exercise a freedom, a freedom that exceeds whatever right of freedom or promise of life a given regime holds on offer to its subjects. The Obama administration is reported as prosecuting whistleblowers in the security and intelligence domain at “double the number of all [US] presidents combined.”¹¹¹ This fact alone suggests that parrhēsia today is still, in whatever modified form, a significant and viable source of political energy.

Finally, there is the question of parrhēsia and regime types, specifically its relationship to liberal democracies. As we noted earlier, Foucault observes that for the Greeks democracy was “the place in which parrhēsia is most difficult to practice.”¹¹² This had much to do with the institutionalisation of freedom of speech among citizens. When a certain right to speak freely is guaranteed, the potential for speech to shock and unsettle is perhaps lessened. Does the guarantee of freedom of speech that liberal democracies promise us make parrhēsia more difficult and more rare today? Perhaps. But that is a question I cannot satisfactorily address in the space that remains. What can be said is that freedom of speech is not only institutionalised but exercised very unevenly in our societies. It is of course not a supreme value that trumps all others so much as a principle that exists in tension with other imperatives, none more so than national security. As Galison has documented so effectively, while the history of political secrecy is very long indeed, the regime of modern governmental secrecy only takes shape during World War II.¹¹³ It is then, in conjunction with the rise of nuclear weapons research, that a vast “modern secrecy system” comes into being. One of its consequences is that when it comes to published knowledge, “the classified universe … is certainly not smaller, and very probably much larger than the unclassified one.”¹¹⁴ When we consider the extent of this classified universe, and the other associated ways in which speech is suppressed, (self-)censored and distorted in the name of security, when we take stock of the redacted state of our public sphere, it seems reasonable to conclude that there is ample scope and subject matter for parrhēsia today.

About the Author

William Walters is cross-appointed in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at Carleton University, Canada. His most recent book is Governmentality: Critical Encounters (Routledge, 2012). He is currently researching the material politics of secrecy.

Notes

1. Carl Death, “Counter-Conducts: A Foucauldian Analytics of Protest”, Social Movement Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2010), p. 236.

2. Ibid. Death mentions J. Simons' Foucault and the Political (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 82, as illustrative in this respect.

3. For example, see L. Amoore, “‘There is No Great Refusal’: The Ambivalent Politics of Resistance”, in Marieke de Goede (ed.), International Political Economy and Postructural Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); on “psy disciplines” and the contestation of military authority, see Alison Howell, Madness in International Relations (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2011).

4. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

5. For example, Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in J. Faubion (ed.), Michel Foucault. Power (New York: New Press, 2000).

6. Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?”, in Faubion, op. cit.

7. I borrow the idea of contentious politics from social movement theory where it organises the study of a broad range of disruptive political claims-making activities; see Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).

8. See Death, op. cit.

9. There is some variation in the transliteration of this word. In the social science literature it appears as parresia, parrēsia and parrhēsia. I adopt the latter and for reasons of consistency have changed certain quotations, indicating this with square brackets.

10. Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2.

11. Ibid., p. 11.

12. Ibid., p. 2.

13. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 65.

14. For example, Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. J. Pearson (New York: Semiotext(e), 2001), pp. 16–17.

15. Jef Huysmans, “What's in an Act? On Security Speech Acts and Little Security Nothings”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 42, No. 4–5 (2011); Engin Isin and Greg Neilson (eds.), Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed Books, 2008), pp. 371–383.

16. Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge”, in B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds.), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Eva Horn, “Logics of Political Secrecy”, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2011), pp. 103–122; Joseph Masco, “Lie Detectors: On Secrets and Hypersecurity in Los Alamos”, Public Culture, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2002), pp. 441–467.

17. Death, op. cit.

18. James Ferguson, “Toward a Left Art of Government: From ‘Foucauldian Critique’ to Foucauldian Politics”, History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2011), pp. 61–68.

19. In this article I read the Berkeley lectures (published from tape-recordings as Foucault, Fearless Speech, op. cit.) in conjunction with the final two lecture series Foucault delivered at the Collège de France, both of which orbit around the problem of parrhēsia. These are Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op. cit. and Foucault, The Courage of Truth, op. cit.

20. Foucault, Fearless Speech, op. cit., p. 169.

21. Ibid., p. 11.

22. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, op. cit., pp. 15–31.

23. Ibid., p. 26.

24. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 78.

25. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op. cit., p. 45.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Foucault, Fearless Speech, op. cit., pp. 19–20, quoted in Jonathan Simon, “Parrhesiastic Accountability: Investigatory Commissions and Executive Power in an Age of Terror”, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 114 (2005) p. 1422.

29. Simon, “Parrhesiastic Accountability”, op. cit., p. 1422.

30. Ibid.

31. Martin Jay, “Visual Parrhēsia? Foucault and the Truth of the Gaze”, in M. Jay (ed.), Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011), p. 83.

32. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, op. cit., p. 73.

33. Ibid.

34. Foucault, Fearless Speech, op. cit., p. 15. His italics.

35. Simon, “Parrhesiastic Accountability”, op. cit.

36. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, op. cit., p. 30.

37. Ibid.

38. Simon, “Parrhesiastic Accountability”, op. cit., p. 1422.

39. Ibid.

40. Andrew Barry, “The Anti-Political Economy”, Economy and Society, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2002), pp. 75–94.

41. As one anonymous reviewer pointed out, the case of the victims/families could be compared with individuals who protest wars as parents of (dead) soldiers. For example, see Tina Managhan, “Grieving Dead Soldiers, Disavowing Loss: Cindy Sheehan and the Im/possibility of the American Antiwar Movement”, Geopolitics, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2011), pp. 438–466. The fact that they speak as fathers, and especially mothers, suggests in turn a whole dimension of gender that could be brought into the study of parrhēsia.

42. Simon, “Parrhesiastic Accountability”, op. cit., p. 1423.

43. Wim Vandekerckhove and Suzan Langenberg, “Can We Organize Courage? Implications of Foucault's Parrhēsia”, Electronic Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies, Vol. 17 (2012), pp. 35–44.

44. See Masco, op. cit.

45. “Vananu: Traitor or Prisoner of Conscience”, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 April 2004, available: <http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/04/21/1082530235940.html> (accessed 11 July 2013).

46. Vandekerckhove and Langenberg, op. cit., pp. 35–36.

47. Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 3.

48. Gilles Deleuze, “What is a Dispositif?”, in T.J. Armstrong (ed.), Michel Foucault, Philosopher (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 166.

49. Paul Veyne, Foucault, His Thought, His Character (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), p. 10.

50. William Walters, Governmentality: Critical Encouters (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2012).

51. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op. cit., p. 65.

52. As quoted in CBS News, “Your Government Failed You”, 11 February 2009, available: <http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-224_162-608526.html> (accessed 11 July 2013).

53. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2005), p. 90.

54. John Thompson, “The New Visibility”, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 22, No. 6 (2005), pp. 31–52.

55. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, op. cit., p. 57.

56. Ibid., p. 37.

57. Michael C. Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics”, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2003), pp. 511–531.

58. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 59.

59. Ibid., p. 56.

60. International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic (Stanford Law School) and Global Justice Clinic (NYU Law School), Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan (September 2012); The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), “Secret Documents Show Brennan's ‘No Civilian Drone Deaths’ Claim Was False”, 11 April 2013, available: <http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2013/04/11/secret-us-documents-show-brennans-no-civilian-drone-deaths-claim-was-false/> (accessed 11 July 2013); Ian Shaw and Majed Akhter, “The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in Fata, Pakistan”, Antipode, Vol. 44, No. 2 (2012), pp. 1490–1509.

61. TBIJ, op. cit.

62. Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama's Principles and Will”, New York Times, 29 May 2012, available: <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&> (accessed 15 July 2013).

63. Living under Drones, op. cit.

64. TBIJ, op. cit.

65. Tyler Wall and Torin Monahan, “Surveillance and Violence from Afar: The Politics of Drones and Liminal Security-Scapes”, Theoretical Criminology, Vol. 15, No. 3 (2011), pp. 239–254.

66. Frank Sauer and Niklas Schörnig, “Killer Drones: The ‘Silver Bullet’ of Democratic Warfare?”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 43, No. 4 (2012), pp. 363–380.

67. Hasnain Kazim, “Drone War in Pakistan: Photos from the Ground Show Civilian Casualties”, Spiegel Online International, 18 July 2011, available: <http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/drone-war-in-pakistan-photos-from-the-ground-show-civilian-casualties-a-775131.html>; Jemima Khan, “Under Fire from Afar: Harrowing Exhibition Reveals Damage Done by Drones in Pakistan”, The Independent, 29 July 2011, available: <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/under-fire-from-afar-harrowing-exhibition-reveals-damage-done-by-drones-in-pakistan-2327832.html?action=Gallery&ino=3>; Saeed Shah and Peter Beaumont, “US Drone Strikes in Pakistan Claiming Many Civilian Victims, Says Campaigner”, The Guardian, 17 July 2011, available: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/17/us-drone-strikes-pakistan-waziristan> (all accessed 15 July 2013).

68. Jemima Khan, op. cit.

69. Kazim, op. cit.

70. Ibid.

71. Jemima Khan, op. cit. My italics.

72. Spencer Ackerman, “Rare Photographs Show Ground Zero of the Drone War”, Wired, 12 December 2012, available: <http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/12/photos-pakistan-drone-war/?utm_source=Contextly&utm_medium=RelatedLinks&utm_campaign=Previous&pid=999&viewall=true> (accessed 11 July 2013).

73. Ibid. As one of Behram's allies explained to me in an interview (London, 4 July 2012), this exhibition was a matter of bringing truths about the activities in FATA to bear upon mainstream Pakistani society. FATA was not only remote to the west, but to metropolitan Pakistan as well.

74. Ibid.

75. For example, see TBIJ, op. cit.; Living under Drones, op. cit.

76. Kazim, op. cit.

77. Ackerman, op. cit.

78. Kazim, op. cit.

79. Chris Woods and Christina Lamb, “Obama Terror Drones: CIA Tactics in Pakistan Include Targeting Rescuers and Funerals”, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 4 February 2012, available: <http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/02/04/obama-terror-drones-cia-tactics-in-pakistan-include-targeting-rescuers-and-funerals/> (accessed 11 July 2013).

80. Amnesty International, “Hayatullah Khan—Justice Denied One Year On”, ASA 33/011/2007, 16 June 2007, available: <http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA33/011/2007/en/c38d9612-d385-11dd-a329-2f46302a8cc6/asa330112007en.html> (accessed 11 July 2013).

81. Bob Dietz, “The Last Story: Hayatullah Khan”, Committee to Protect Journalists: Special Report, 20 September 2006, available: <http://cpj.org/reports/2006/09/khan.php> (accessed 11 July 2013).

82. “Slain Tribal Area Journalist's Widow Murdered”, Reporters without Borders, 17 November 2007, available: <http://en.rsf.org/pakistan-slain-tribal-area-journalist-s-17-11-2007,24417.html> (accessed 11 July 2013).

83. Ackerman, op. cit.

84. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).

85. Warner, op. cit., pp. 55–56.

86. I owe this point to Anelynda Mielke.

87. Kazim, op. cit. A corroborating point was made to me by a journalist with extensive knowledge of the region and its conflicts (interview, London, 25 June 2012). The more that drone attacks in Waziristan have become public knowledge in western media, the less that the means of controlling information relies on killing and silencing rather than influencing and shaping the way events are reported. In a complex situation where there are multiple interested “players,” including the CIA, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Taliban, perhaps the danger attendant upon speaking out becomes attenuated.

88. An extensive body of work has explored the power of visual images to construct and contest security worlds and identities. See, inter alia, Elspeth Van Veeren, “Captured by the Camera's Eye: Guantánamo and the Shifting Frame of the Global War on Terror”, Review of International Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2011), pp. 1721–1749; James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); and Williams, op. cit.

89. Jay, “Visual Parrhēsia?”, op. cit., p. 89.

90. Ibid.

91. Ibid., pp. 81–82.

92. Vandekerckhove and Langenberg, op. cit., p. 40.

93. Susan Sonntag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001), p. 3.

94. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, op. cit., p. 14.

95. Barry, op. cit.

96. Analysing whistleblowing within the corporate world, Vandekerckhove and Langenberg (op. cit., p. 39) argue: “[B]ecause most organizations are layered hierarchically, critique might have to travel upwards. This implies that the disorganising impact of [parrhēsia] can require a number of steps in a speaker-hearer/speaker chain, where a middle management hearer will need to become a speaker to top management.”

97. Ackerman, op. cit.

98. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).

99. For example, see Fuyuki Kurasawa, The Work of Global Justice: Human Rights as Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. ch. 1.

100. For example, note Assange's background in anonymous hacking or his likening of Wikileaks to “an intelligence agency of the people”; see Mark Jenkins, “‘We Steal Secrets’: A Sidelong Look at Wikileaks”, National Public Radio, 23 May 2013, available: <http://www.npr.org/2013/05/23/185533081/we-steal-secrets-a-sidelong-look-at-wikileaks> (accessed 11 July 2013).

101. Habermas, op. cit., pp. 52–54. On secret societies as incubators for “modern political man,” see Horn, op. cit., pp. 111–112.

102. Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, op. cit., p. 65.

103. Anne-Marie D'Aoust, “Circulations of Desire: The Security Governance of the International ‘Mail-Order Brides’ Industry”, in M. de Larrinaga and M.G. Doucet (eds.), Security and Global Governmentality: Globalization, Governance and the State (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2010).

104. Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012).

105. Jennifer Hyndman, “The Securitization of Fear in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka”, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 97, No. 2 (2007), pp. 361–372.

106. Ben Anderson, “Morale and the Affective Geographies of the ‘War on Terror’”, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2010), pp. 219–236.

107. I owe this point about the commodification of courage to one of my anonymous reviewers.

108. Ian Hacking, Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illnesses (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998).

109. The public acclamation of heroism is of course not exclusive to modernity. On the importance of narratives of heroism in Ancient Greece and the role of dramatic arts in conveying the “full meaning” of the hero to the public, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 186–187.

110. Habermas, op. cit.

111. Glenn Greenwald, “On Whistleblowers and Government Threats of Investigation”, The Guardian, 7 June 2013.

112. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, op. cit., p. 57.

113. Galison, op. cit., p. 590.

114. Ibid.