Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9 11 (Routledge Studies in Liberty and Security)

Terror, Insecurity and Liberty

This edited volume questions the widespread resort to illiberal security practices by contemporary liberal regimes since 9/11, and argues that counter-terrorism is embedded into the very logic of the fields of politics and security. Although recent debate surrounding civil rights and liberties in post9/11 Europe has focused on the forms, provisions and legal consequences of security-led policies, this volume takes an inter-disciplinary approach to explore how these policies have come to generate illiberal practices. The book argues that policies implemented in the name of protection and national security have had a strong effect on civil liberties, human rights and social cohesion – in particular, but not only, since 9/11. The book undertakes detailed sociological enquiries concerning security agencies, and analyses public discourses on the definition of the terrorist threat. In doing so, it aims to show that the current reframing of civil rights and liberties is in part a result of the very functioning of both the political and the security fields, in that it is embedded in a broad array of domestic and transnational political, administrative and bureaucratic stakes. This book will be of much interest to all students of critical security studies, counter-terrorism, international relations and political science. Didier Bigo is Professor of International Relations at Sciences-Po, Paris, and visiting Professor at King’s College London. Anastassia Tsoukala is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at University Paris XI, and Research fellow at University Paris V-Sorbonne.

Routledge studies in liberty and security Series editors: Didier Bigo, Elspeth Guild and R.B.J. Walker

Terror, Insecurity and Liberty Illiberal practices of liberal regimes after 9/11 Edited by Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala

Terror, Insecurity and Liberty Illiberal practices of liberal regimes after 9/11

Edited by Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

© 2008 Selection and editorial matter, Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-92676-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-46628-8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-92676-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-46628-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-92676-5 (ebk)

The opinions expressed in this book engage only the authors

Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements 1

Understanding (in)security

viii ix 1

DIDIER BIGO AND ANASTASSIA TSOUKALA

2

Globalized (in)security: the field and the ban-opticon

10

DIDIER BIGO

3

Defining the terrorist threat in the post-September 11 era

49

ANASTASSIA TSOUKALA

4

‘Hidden in plain sight’: intelligence, exception and suspicion after 11 September 2001

100

LAURENT BONELLI

5

Military activities within national boundaries: the French case

121

EMMANUEL-PIERRE GUITTET

6

Military interventions and the concept of the political: bringing the political back into the interactions between external forces and local societies

146

CHRISTIAN OLSSON

Select bibliography Index

178 194

Contributors

Didier Bigo is Maître de Conférences des Universités at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris, and Visiting Professor at King’s College, Department of War Studies. He is scientific coordinator of CHALLENGE for the CERI/CNRS, and editor of the journals: International Political Sociology; Cultures & Conflits. Latest book: co-edited with Elspeth Guild: Controlling Frontiers, Ashgate, 2005. Laurent Bonelli is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Paris X – Nanterre. He is Research Fellow at the Groupe d’Analyse Politique (GAP) and a member of the editorial board of the journal Cultures & Conflits. He is the author of: La France a peur. Histoire Sociale de ‘l’Insécurité’, La Découverte, 2008. Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre International de Criminologie Comparée (CICC) of the University of Montreal (Québec/Canada). He is associate editor of the quarterly Cultures & Conflits, member of the Managing Editorial Board of the journal International Political Sociology, and member of the C.A.S.E. Collective. Christian Olsson is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris, and associate researcher at the Centre d’Etudes sur les Conflits. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Cultures & Conflits and International Political Sociology, as well as a member of the C.A.S.E. Collective. Anastassia Tsoukala is Maître de Conférences des Universités at the University of Paris XI, Research Fellow at the University of Paris VSorbonne and Research Associate at the Panteion University, Athens. She is associate editor of the quarterly Cultures & Conflits, and the author of Football Hooliganism in Europe, Palgrave (forthcoming).

Acknowledgements

This work falls within CHALLENGE – The Changing Landscape of European Liberty and Security – a research project funded by the Sixth Framework Programme of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research (www.libertysecurity.org). The translation has been supported by a grant from the French Ministry of Defence. In the article, ‘Defining the terrorist threat in the post-September 11th era’, by A. Tsoukala, part of the paragraph ‘Immigration and asylum’ has been published in E. Berggren et al. (eds) Irregular Migration, Informal Labour and Community, Maastricht: Shaker, 2007. For a meticulous proof reading, we thank Claudia Aradau, Diana Davies, Fiona MacIver, Dearbhal Murphy, Andrew Neal, and Christian Olsson.

1

Understanding (in)security Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala

Since the late twentieth century, research on security issues has become an area of increasing interest to scholars. The concept of security, the framing of security policies, the defining of threats, and the implementation of (in)securitization processes have been approached from a range of disciplines, going from International Relations (IR), psychology and law to history, sociology and criminology. Yet, regardless of its intrinsic quality, research on these issues did not end up with a satisfactory set of interpretations because it relied on single disciplinary analyses. The writings of IR scholars on security thus borrow only some elements from the psychology and sociology of decision, and ignore the works of sociologists, criminologists and historians on crime, insecurity and crime control issues. Their epistemic community has immediately considered that security is about ‘serious’ things, i.e. war, death, survival, and not about everyday practices concerning crime, or about the feeling of insecurity, the fear of poverty and illness. The definition of security studies has been mixed up with strategic studies. Other practices have been considered as ‘out of the scope’ and downgraded to a ‘law and order’ question irrelevant for security in IR. This ‘law and order’ aspect has been thoroughly studied by sociologists and criminologists but their analyses never went beyond their respective epistemic borders to cover, for instance, external security issues. On the other hand, security studies (even the critical ones) refused or could not get to grips with the corpus of knowledge already constituted in sociology, anthropology and cultural theory. Instead of reproducing the usual fragmented interpretation of social reality, this volume seeks to analyse security issues by bringing together conceptual and operational tools borrowed from the realms of IR, sociology and criminology. We are not the first to establish these bonds. Ethan Nadelmann, Malcolm Anderson, Richard Ericson, Kevin Haggerty, and David Lyon have tried to expand criminology beyond the narrow national agenda the discipline often follows.1 In IR some authors like Peter Katzenstein have tried to combine the individual-societal dimension and sociological approaches with a more traditional security agenda.2 Rob Walker and Richard Ashley have also more fundamentally questioned the security

2 D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala discourse of survival, and they have contributed to unpacking the political dimension of the notion of security by insisting on the legitimating effects of the security label on practices of violence and coercion, perceived as the side effect of the necessary protection of a certain political community.3 The knowledge of who needs to survive, be protected and from what, also supposes knowing who is sacrificed in this operation. That is perhaps one of the limits of understanding security as survival or as protection and reassurance.4 Security is also, and mainly, about sacrifice. In this volume, we continue on this track but add to the political theory approach a sociological line of enquiry borrowing its epistemological and methodological instruments from a Bourdieuan perspective amended and criticized with some Foucaldian insights.5 A central notion for this volume is the field of professionals of the management of ‘unease’; we try to define and contextualize this field in relation to the media and political fields, and to relocate it in a more transversal approach, dealing with the contemporary form of governmentality of liberal regimes that we call a ban-opticon dispositif. That dispositif is characterized by exceptionalism inside liberalism, a logic of exclusion resting upon the construction of profiles that frame who is ‘abnormal’, and upon the imperative of freedom transformed into a normalization of social groups whose behaviours are monitored for their present and their future. All the political and professional uses of technologies of surveillance, which are oriented towards prevention and try to read the future as a ‘past future’ already known, thus acquire a particular importance. The study of the aforementioned dispositif with regard to the current counter-terrorism policies in Europe has led us to use the notion of illiberal practices of liberal regimes in order to avoid two main theses. The first one is that we are in a war, in a dirty war at the global level. Everything potentially useful to struggle against the enemy is then justified insofar as the goal is still to safeguard liberal regimes and physical collective security. This brand of analysis insists on the novelty of the phenomenon, and on the opening of a ‘new’ era, called hyper-terrorism, which justifies, for the states under attack, radical emergency measures and new relations with the freedom of the population living in their territory and abroad, to counter this extraordinary practice of violence, which has moreover no reasonable claim that can be dealt with by diplomacy. The defenders of this thesis diverge on the intensity of the measures to be introduced but, for all of them, change may be important and long-lasting, thus imposing a new balance between danger, freedom and security that justifies more surveillance and restriction on individual freedom.6 The second thesis is that 11 September 2001 has been the testimony of the slow transformation of representative democracy and its erosion in favour of the development of a governmental politics without checks and balances. The critics of exceptionalism accept more or less the novelty of the post-September 11th situation and that insecurity relates to ‘terror’.

Understanding (in)security 3 But they put the emphasis on the reaction of the state and discuss the legitimacy of the ‘war on terror’. For them the situation is new, not so much because of al-Qaida, but because of the US’ answer to the bombings. The main actors are still the states and the world system, not the network of clandestine organizations. Giorgio Agamben has been one of the first to accurately capture this dimension of war on terror and its ensuing internal obedience turning into feverish support. He has criticized this move towards a politics of exception and has explained its long rising process in our democracies. Along with others he has tried to show how the professionals of politics play with the uncertainty of the timing of the attacks, the uncertainty of who is the enemy, and the uncertainty of the roots of violence in order to establish a ‘permanent state of exception’ or ‘of emergency’ – thus justifying the introduction of tough measures in many realms beyond the management of political violence and especially with relation to asylum-seekers and migrants.7 The spectrum is wide, from those who partly accept the argument of necessity and complain that the answer is just disproportionate, to those who consider that 11 September has solely uncovered the mask of liberal democracy and shown the true face of modernity (revealed by the holocaust and the reduction of the human to bare life) or the face of global capitalism (with the unification of the global market blocked by the fragmentation in different nation states of the necessary political arena, and the making of a global empire impeded by a coalition of public and private interests of the most powerful). The critique of the politics of terror is important. It refuses the argument of pure necessity of the authors and actors in favour of a permanent state of exception, and shows that some governments have played with the opportunities of the situation to impose other political agendas. But, in this vision, the source of the problem of illiberalism is related with terror as if it was a malicious code introduced into the society and contaminating a liberal frame. Every problem derives from the counter-terrorism and its reframing of everyday life. We disagree with both narratives as they put terror as ‘the’ form of insecurity which is under discussion, blaming either clandestine organizations or governments. On the contrary, we insist on the mimetic relation between transnational clandestine organizations using violence, the coalition of governments of the ‘global war on terror’ and a complex web of vested local interests. Then, for us, these two broad theses are part of the same general form of aestheticization of the political, resumed into one principle: the obligation to choose who the enemy is and to declare it publicly. The theses of politics of terror, a politics of exception as a generalized exception, are in that sense focusing too much on the spectacular and ignoring the routine, the everyday practices of late modernity, the heterogeneity and multiple lines of flight of these practices. Contrary to that, we believe that it is important to contextualize them, to immerse them into a

4 D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala ‘societal logic’ and into a political sociology that insists on a different way of conceptualizing the (in)securitization process, far from freedom from fear and terror, but concerned with insecurity as risk and unease.8 Following that analysis of a politics of unease, we refute the idea that the present growing restrictions on human rights in Europe stem only from the reframing of counter-terrorism policies in the post-September 11 era. Far from seeing in them a conjectural and, hence, temporarily unfavourable balancing of freedoms in democracy, or as a structural trend of modernity eroding democracy and impossible to modify, we consider them as the result of the very functioning of a solidly constituted security field of professionals of management of unease, both public and private, working together transnationally along professional lines mainly in European and Transatlantic ‘working groups’. Though the effects of this field are creating illiberal practices, they are not the result of exceptional decisions taken by the professionals of politics following a master plan. They are heterogeneous, globally incoherent, but nevertheless highly predictable in their local effects for the researchers looking at these different transversal networks. The outcome of this set of interactions and contradictory goals, interests, norms and habitus developed between domestic and EU politicians, police and intelligence officials, army officers, security experts, journalists, and the part of the civil society enrolled into these (in)security games, is neither the implementation of a state of exception decided by an empire in the making, a pooling of sovereign actors, nor a destiny leading to Armageddon or the Camp. A refusal of grand narratives of the global versus the sovereign is necessary for understanding the production and diffusion of (in)security at the transnational level and for resisting these illiberal practices. It supposes a sociology of (in)security producers and of their different audiences.9 By emphasizing the social and political construction of (in)security and the role of the professionals of the management of unease, this volume engages with the discussion surrounding European security studies in the 1990s. It recognizes the important work of Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, especially when they introduce the notion of securitization as a social construct linked with a speech act, its enunciators and its audience. We share the view that the pretence of a fixed normative value of security regardless of the actors enunciating the claim and of the context (referent object, historical trajectory, involvement of practices of violence and coercion in the name of protection) has to be abandoned. Security is not a unified practice, is not about survival, is not a common good, is not a specific right, is not the first form of freedom. Security(zation) has neither a positive connotation nor a negative one, even if institutional narratives tend to insist on the first, and ‘critical’ narratives on the second. The (in)securitization process is then a social and political construction related to speech acts, but these speech acts are not decisive. They are themselves the result of structural competition between actors with different forms of capital

Understanding (in)security 5 and legitimacy over contradictory definitions of security and different interests. They are also dependent on the capacities of the field agents to patrol the boundaries of the field, to open or to restrict the definition of what security is, to block or limit the alternatives. What we call (in)security is then a field effect and not the result of a specific strategy of a dominant actor. It depends on the transformation of the logic of violence and its (il)legitimacy, as well as on the differential capacities of societies to live and accept some forms of violence, to refuse others and to create social change as a form of violence or not. Hence, the key questions are: who is performing an (in)securitization move or countermove, under what conditions, towards whom, and with what consequences? The proximity with Buzan, Wæver and De Wilde’s thesis is then strong, but we resist the idea that international security has a specific agenda, that this agenda is about survival, and that security can be conceptualized as ‘beyond normal politics’ and as a ‘politics of exception’. For us, the existential threat and the politics of terror cannot be distinguished so easily from the simple threat and feeling of unease. The (in)securitization process has not only to do with a successful political speech act transforming the decision making process and generating a politics of exception, often favouring coercive options.10 It has to do also, and above all, with more mundane bureaucratic decisions of everyday politics, with Weberian routines of rationalization, of management of numbers instead of persons, of use of technologies, especially the ones which allow for communication and surveillance at a distance through databases and the speed of exchange of information. As such, the professionals of the management of (in)security, the many public and private agencies of risk management, and the audience of a consumer society are, by their routines, framing the conditions of the possibility of the claims (and speech acts) and their acceptance. More importantly, some (in)securitization moves performed by bureaucracies, the media, or private agents are so embedded in these routines that they are never discussed and presented as an exception but, on the contrary, as the continuation of routines (Bonelli) and logics of freedom (Tsoukala), or as forms of democratization (Olsson). Therefore, the result of the (in)securitization process cannot be assessed from the will of an actor, even a dominant one. The actors never know the final results of the move they are doing, as the result depends on the field effect of many actors engaged in competitions for defining whose security is important, and of different audiences liable to accept or not that definition. It is important to understand this dynamic which can be selfsustained if the answer to insecurity is a new pack of security measures. It is not possible to draw a new boundary between internal and everyday politics on one side, and the international and exceptional politics also called security on the other side. The two are intertwined or more exactly related as if in a Möbius strip. It is then clear that this volume aims at contributing to the debate on

6 D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala what has been called critical security studies11 or critical approaches to security in Europe.12 Critical, here, does not refer to a Habermasian view of critical theory. It refers to a double move. First, to refute an approach in terms of problem solving theory accepting the common sense of a rise in insecurity linked to globalization and the fact that any coercive or preventive move claiming to counter insecurity is by definition a security move, and to open a different agenda for a better understanding of the political realities.13 Second, to refute the narrative of security studies as a ‘branch’ of International Relations, and then to contest that IR has a monopoly on the meanings of security, i.e. that security is international security, in order to exclude from security studies historical, sociological, and criminological bodies of knowledge under the pretext that they are dealing with other questions: law and order, surveillance, punishment. The volume is then interdisciplinary oriented and insists on a specific approach common to both internal and external security. To better study these issues, the book is implicitly divided into a first, broader, and a second, more specific analysis of the present counterterrorism policies in Europe. In an attempt to overview the whole question, the former part seeks to define the key features of the nature and functioning of the security field, and to highlight the stakes lying beneath the current counter-terrorism frames of action. In the first chapter, Didier Bigo shifts our attention to the dynamics of a transnational field of security professionals, and to the impact of its internal mechanisms on the everyday work of various security agents as well as on the definition of security threats in both the political and security realms. In shedding light on the combined effect of the processes and relations developed within the security field, and between the field’s agents and those of other correlated fields, he shows how this leads to the establishment of a new model of governmentality by unease. In her analysis of British political discourses on the definition of the terrorist threat, Anastassia Tsoukala focuses on the discursive framing of the alleged core elements of the threat and on the way these are interrelated to a set of other security issues as well as to some key social values. In so doing, she shows how the ensuing attempts to legitimize restrictions on human rights intermingle with numerous domestic political and security stakes, thus uncovering part of the functioning of the political and security fields, and highlighting the role of the audience. The other three chapters deal with the structuring and functioning of specific security agencies, and with the way these interact with the rest of the security field and/or the political realm. They choose specific loci of the (in)security field to demonstrate the limits of an approach that draws boundaries between internal and external security. The intermediary agencies, which were split as long as national governments were insisting on the difference between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, are now reconfigured and becoming increasingly powerful agents in this transnational field of exper-

Understanding (in)security 7 tise. Actors traditionally located as external agents seek to be involved in law and order questions, inside the territory. Actors traditionally located as internal agents seek to be involved abroad, thereby obliging the other actors to reframe their missions to resist the move. Laurent Bonelli thus offers several insights into the modus operandi of French, British and Spanish intelligence agencies. In shedding light on their definitional patterns of the terrorist threat and way they organize their counter operations, he uncovers their embeddedness in a complex configuration of multilevel relations between them, government officials and members of clandestine organizations – all of them being involved in a permanent struggle to defend their respective political and organizational interests. This further allows him to explain the tendency of military and police intelligence services to work more closely together. Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet shows why and how the army in counterterrorism want to be involved not only externally but also internally. His analysis of the involvement of the French armed forces in counterterrorism operations within the national territory calls into question the allegedly exceptional nature of these missions to see in them the outcome of a broader, ongoing merging of police-related and military-related activities. Christian Olsson also deals with the role of the army in counterterrorism, focusing on their activities abroad, not when they are on military operations but when they are involved in policing. In studying the relation between the political and war, he highlights the struggles for the political (de)legitimization of the military operations carried out in Afghanistan and Iraq to show how the constant (re)introduction of the political in war affairs complicates the interactions between public and private military agencies, Western governments, NGOs, and local societies. In conclusion, in this approach, terror is not the central phenomenon; it is one among many elements which create a politics of unease at all levels of the society, and largely beyond any fear of terrorism. Politics of unease is linked with the situation in a risk society and the development of many diverse mechanisms of surveillance, with global capitalism and unemployment, with urbanism and a planet of slums, with the conditions of late modern society and the roots of uncertainty of life.14 What is central is to understand why and how (in)securitization works at the transnational level and partly succeeds in transforming our way of life. A specific sociology of the professionals of the management of unease at this transnational level is necessary to investigate their capacities and to resist their ‘doxa’ about a world sliding towards Armageddon. The connection between criminological studies, surveillance studies and critical security studies has to be made, and linked with historical accounts as well as ethical and political theory. Many books have focused on terror and have considered that a constructivist and critical agenda was unable to deal with security beyond

8 D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala ‘soft’ or ‘human’ security. We hope that this volume demonstrates the contrary and shows how narrow the realist agenda is in its scope and referencing system. Terror and the politics of terror are ‘plugged’ into these structural conditions of the (in)security field and the political subjectivity of the late modern subject living in a ban-opticon form of governmentality. If a politics of terror is successful, it is not so much through successful communication or propaganda of the governments, but more because it shares common elements with unease and the feeling of the misery of the world. It looks like a structural homology between (in)securitization of management of life and (in)securitization of management of death and punishment is at work. Beyond the existence of a transnational field of professionals of (in)security management coming from coercive visions of security, a large ‘dispositif’ relays and creates the conditions of the ‘plug’ into various national societies and cultures. It is not a contamination of the liberal society or its essence revealed which is at stake; it is a process of consolidation of different insecurities constructed as if they were unified and global. This construction is certainly a construction by language, but it is also and mainly the use of technologies which unifies different objects under the same logic of surveillance and control, and the political use of these technologies as if they were the only possibility to resolve the question and to remove the uncertainty which is at the heart of modern life. The fetishization of some objects as security objects or including security functions into them creates a link with consumerism and desire going beyond traditional visions of surveillance. This process escapes largely from the professionals of politics and their bureaucracies to include the private sector, the NGOs, and the citizens themselves in their will to be free to move and to be indifferent to others. Far from a politics of terror paralyzing the agency of the individual, or a politics of fear where the agency of the individual is passive or reactive, unease is an active agent of (un)freedom(ization) and the ‘ban’.

Notes 1 Anderson and den Boer (eds) Policing across National Boundaries; Ericson and Haggerty, Policing the Risk Society; Nadelmann, Cops across Borders; Lyon, Theorizing Surveillance; Ericson, Crime in an Insecure World. 2 Katzenstein, Cultural Norms and National Security. 3 Ashley and Walker, ‘Reading dissidence/writing the discipline’; Walker, ‘The subject of Security’. 4 Dobson et al. The Politics of Protection. 5 Bigo, Policing (In)Security Today. 6 On the discursive strategies used to legitimize this thesis, see Tsoukala, ‘Democracy against security’, 417–439; Tsoukala, ‘Democracy in the light of security’, 607–627. 7 For bibliographies and articles on these topics, see: www.libertysecurity.org. 8 Bigo, ‘Security and immigration’, 63–92. 9 Dezalay and Garth, The Internationalization of Palace Wars.

Understanding (in)security 9 10 Bigo, Polices en Réseaux; Ceyhan, ‘Analyser la sécurité’; Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity. 11 Krause and Williams, Critical Security Studies. 12 Collective C.A.S.E., ‘Critical approaches to security in Europe’, 443–487. 13 Cox, Production, Power and World Order. 14 Bauman, Liquid Times.

2

Globalized (in)security The field and the ban-opticon1 Didier Bigo

The discourses that the United States and its closest allies2 have put forth asserting the necessity to globalize security have taken on an unprecedented intensity and reach. They justify themselves by propagating the idea of a global ‘(in)security’, attributed to the development of threats of mass destruction, thought to derive from terrorist or other criminal organizations and the governments that support them. This globalization is supposed to make national borders effectively obsolete, and to oblige other actors in the international arena to collaborate. At the same time, it makes obsolete the conventional distinction between the universe of war, defence, international order and strategy, and another universe of crime, internal security, public order and police investigations. Exacerbating this tendency yet further is the fact that, since 11 September 2001, there has been ongoing frenzied speculation throughout the Western political world and among its security ‘experts’ on how the relations between defence and internal security should be aligned in the new context of global (in)security. In my opinion, it is this convergence of defence and internal security into interconnected networks, or into a ‘field’ of professionals of the management of unease that lies at the heart of the transformations concerning global policing. This emergent field of the management of unease explains, on the one hand, the formation of police networks at the global level, as well as the policiarization of military functions of combat and, on the other hand, the transformation, the criminalization and the juridiciarization of the notion of war. Moreover, this field of the management of unease also accounts for how a type of ban-opticon dispositif is established in relation to this state of unease. This form of governmentality of unease, or ban, is characterized by three criteria: practices of exceptionalism, acts of profiling and containing foreigners, and a normative imperative of mobility. Given these terms, is it possible to use the terminologies of a ‘global complicity’ of domination, of the making of an Empire and a drift towards a new ‘soft fascism’, of a ‘farewell to democracy and the advent of a securitized globalized world’ justifying the pre-eminence of a Western white

Globalized (in)security 11 neo-colonial project in the name of exporting freedom and combating evil? Does there, in practice, exist a single strategy that unifies different groups of professionals at the transnational level – whether they be agents of the police, the military, or the intelligence services, with a common policy of policing and sharing the interests of the elite of the different professionals of politics – and seeks to change the existing regime, curtail civil liberties, and put all individuals under its control and surveillance? Did Orwell’s 1984 in fact prefigure 2004? I do not think so. Even if we witness illiberal practices, and even if the temptation to use the argument of an exceptional moment correlated with the advent of transnational political violence of clandestine organizations in order to justify violations of basic human rights and the extension of surveillance is very strong, we are still in liberal regimes. In the following argument, I shall show that we are far from a global complicity as a unified strategy. Heterogeneity, diverse interests, goes hand in hand with globalization. Homogenization, seen as a carefully planned strategy against civil liberties by a global elite, as well as the belief in its success, is certainly a common feature of the discourse of some NGOs and radical academics such as Noam Chomsky. However, they do not give an accurate picture of the ongoing transformations. My analysis differs from theirs in that, for me, the combination of unease and the ban-opticon dispositif does not produce a unified strategy but is rather an effect of anonymous multiple struggles, which nevertheless contribute to a globalization of domination. I shall then develop the two instruments of analysis mentioned above: the field of professionals of unease management and the ban-opticon.

The transnationalization of (in)security: the place of the (in)security professionals in the governmentality of unease beyond the State In the approach to (in)securitization processes that I propose here, it will be important to avoid the reigning tendency (the doxa) of the field, often reproduced by its fiercest opponents. This commonly involves attributing a coherent set of beliefs to the professionals involved in the field, an approach I avoid in order not to gratuitously unify their divergent interests by wrongly analysing them as willing allies or accomplices. The production of a transnational ‘truth’ On the contrary, it is important to differentiate clearly between various parties’ standpoints on how to prioritize threats. These threats may include terrorism, war, organized crime, and the so-called migratory invasion or reverse colonization, while at the same time they indicate the correlation between various professions, which may include professions of urban

12 D. Bigo policing, criminal policing, anti-terrorist policing, customs, immigration control, intelligence, counter-espionage, information technologies, longdistance systems of surveillance and detection of human activities, maintenance of order, re-establishment of order, pacification, protection, urban combat, and psychological action. These professions do not share the same logics of experience or practice and do not converge neatly into a single function under the rubric of security. Rather, they are both heterogeneous and in competition with each other. As we shall see, this is true, even if the differentiations mapped out by the near-mythical idea of the national and impervious state-controlled border tend to disappear, given the effects of transnationalization. Transnationalization differs from homogenization. It, rather, corresponds to the continuation of struggles and differentiation at another level. Three key events are taking place, now that it has taken several centuries for these professions to differentiate in the first place: a dedifferentiation of professional activities as a result of this configuration; a growth in struggles to redefine the systems that classify the social and cultural struggles as security threats; and a practical redefinition of systems of knowledge and know-how that connect the public and private security agencies who claim to possess a ‘truth’ founded on numerical data and statistics, technologies of biometrics and sociological profiles of potential dangerous behaviour, applied to the cases of persons who themselves feel the effects of the (in)securitization, living in a state of unease. Such professional managers of unease then claim, through the ‘authority of the statistics’, that they have the capacity to class and prioritize the threats, to determine what exactly constitutes security. Here, let us note that this so-called enlargement of the concept is in fact reduced to the correlation between war, crime and migration, and does not include the loss of employment, car accidents or good health (itself abruptly made (in)secure as social benefits are dismantled), all elements which are considered on the contrary as normal risks. Security is then, conceptually, reduced to technologies of surveillance, extraction of information, coercion acting against societal and state vulnerabilities, in brief to a kind of generalized ‘survival’ against threats coming from different sectors, but security is disconnected from human, legal and social guarantees and protection of individuals. Finally, this ‘authority’ of statistics that stems from their technological routines of collecting and categorizing data allows such professionals to establish a ‘field’ of security in which they recognize themselves as mutually competent, while finding themselves in competition with each other for the monopoly of the legitimate knowledge on what constitutes a legitimate unease, a ‘real’ risk. Within the production of this regime of truth and the battle to establish the ‘legitimate’ causes of fear, of unease, of doubt and uncertainty, the (in)security professionals have the strategy to overstep national boundaries

Globalized (in)security 13 and form corporatist professional alliances to reinforce the credibility of their assertions and to win the internal struggles in their respective national fields.3 The professionals of these organizations, in particular the intelligence services, draw resources of knowledge and symbolic power from this transnationalization. Eventually, these resources may give them the means to openly criticize the politicians and political strategies of their respective countries.4 This explains how, as we have seen, when the President of the United States invokes a threat, he is only credible as long as he has not been contradicted by the intelligence community. If his claim turns out to be unfounded, the credibility of his refusal to reveal sources for his statement, purportedly based on reasons of national security, is put in grave doubt.5 Should the professionals of politics and the (in)security professionals come to clash directly, keeping this sort of knowledge secret is no longer considered proof of a hidden truth accessible only to politicians. On the contrary, it casts doubt on the possibility that they might even have access to this truth, and can create a belief inside the population that politicians’ truth could very well be a misrepresentation or an outright falsity. Thus, often, the only thing left for the politicians to do is to play the card of charisma to make their opinion more convincing. They must then bank on an inflated level of public confidence and demand that the electorate maintain a quasi-religious faith in their judgment, while citizens’ groups grow still more sceptical over the information to which they do have access.6 Transnational regime of truth and theory of the state The notion of state, as conceived by international relations theory, cannot adapt to the result of these tensions created by transnational bureaucratic links between professionals of politics, judges, police, intelligence agencies, and the military. As opposed to what is claimed by the main stream of cynical-realist writers on international relations, once these differentiated bureaucracies, with their respective positions, exist, it becomes impossible to return to a national interest, or assume a nationalist convergence of interests allowing all parties to rally around a single government. On the contrary, these differentiated bureaucracies are actually forged in the crucible of international networks, and they make different political sectors autonomous expressly for the purpose of ensuring that they exceed the domain of professional politicians. This tendency is particularly acute in the European arena, which has conventionally organized itself primarily within the framework of the nation state. For the past 30 years in Europe, new organizations have emerged, by which I mean networks and informal groups that transcend national frontiers and localize the spaces of political decision-making.7 Only sociological work on the transnationalization of police and military bureaucracies has been able to show that it is no longer tenable to

14 D. Bigo maintain the classical notion of the state. This demise is particularly evident in the privatized segments of these sectors, including professionals of the management of unease and actors whose profession involves risk assessment and accompanying issues of insurance coverage.8 These sociological works identify a transversal field of processes of (in)securitization, whereby a certain number of professionals from public institutions – such as police – the military – occupy the dominant positions. By maintaining these positions, they exclude alternative discourses and make resistance on the part of non-professionals quite impossible. The field is thus established between these ‘professionals’, with specific ‘rules of the game’, and rules that presuppose a particular mode of socialization or habitus. This habitus is inherited from the respective professional trajectories and social positions, but is not strongly defined along the lines of national borders. In very simple terms, we can no longer distinguish between an internal order reigning, thanks to the police, by holding the monopoly on legitimate violence, and an anarchic international order which is maintained by an equilibrium of national powers vis-à-vis the armies and diplomatic alliances. Actually, the state is no longer the double-faced Janus god, familiar to us. Cast into doubt is the relevance of seeing a rigid separation between internal and external scenes that is so fundamental for Raymond Aron’s realist school. The logics of state administrations are completely blurred. The status of state territoriality is under discussion, as well as the state capacities of territorial surveillance and control over that same territory. Even beyond these questions of the state capacity of surveillance and control, the equivalence between society, nation and state is symbolically cast into doubt. Those who govern can no longer rely on the rhetoric of sovereignty, citizenship, and the ‘raison d’état’ with the same performativity. Politicians’ ability to manage is put into question, as is the correspondence between their beliefs and actual situations. This form of political crisis suggests that the state could be out of date, no longer relevant, and that it is in fact more appropriately seen in the realm of ritual. The suspicion, initially applied to politicians in the former Communist regimes, has in fact become a general property of all sorts of arenas of political life in Western democracies. Domination has been de-coupled from the state’s territorial form and its traditional political classes. This means that domination is not less powerful, rather that it now takes on new forms: the transnationalization of bureaucracies of surveillance, and control shifts in systems of accountability between businesses and politicians regarding the definition of work and the forms its redistribution should take, and new transnational lifestyles and professional cultures. But as they encounter the transnational, these forms only add to the untenability of the territorial state as it was classically defined by Hobbes and Max Weber, and this encounter can in fact undermine the bases of legitimacy that the traditional political classes cannot yet effectively abandon.9 In parallel to the ascent of

Globalized (in)security 15 a corporate-based world, once it is admitted that the state is no longer a unitary actor, this transnationalization has impacted upon the entire ensemble of bureaucracies and agents who make up the state. This transnationalization has not simply affected private entities, NGOs and protest movements; it has primarily affected actors commonly considered as public entities. The transnationalization of bureaucracies has created socialization and a set of differentiated professional interests that take priority over national solidarities. They create transnational ‘guilds’.

The field of professionals of the management of unease The stakes of knowledge Given that this field of professionals has long been in existence, it is surprising that it has never become the object of analysis. Why has this blind spot persisted when this field plays such a central role in the relations of domination? This is undoubtedly due in great part to the common perception of the military and police as the obedient executors and zealous servants of the state, a narrative found equally in the internal discourse of these professionals and in the critical discourse on the repressive state apparatus. Moreover, the make-up of disciplinary knowledge in the social sciences – in particular the insistence that political science only concerns domestic issues and that international relations are completely autonomous from domestic issues – has obscured the relations between the professionals. The disciplines have tended to divide the field into two entirely exclusive social universes, envisioned as the world of police and the world of the military. This has the effect of devaluing in one single blow all the ‘intermediary’ institutions such as military police, border guards and customs agents. The structuring of academic knowledge has blocked analysis by reproducing the mapping of state borders onto organizational divisions. The result is that separate bounded entities are created – an internal and external domain, divided so that the former, ruled according to the social contract and a monopoly on violence, is opposed to the latter’s antithetically anarchic international system and a Hobbesian horizon expanded to an international level positing the possibility of war between each state and the others. A corresponding division is maintained between the police and national justice systems, seen as belonging to the internal domain, and the military and diplomacy, considered as belonging to the external domain. The simple fact of describing police actions across borders, as I have done in a previous book, blurs the categories of traditional understanding that depend on the radical separation between the inside and the outside.10 Descriptions of military activities within a domestic context, or the surveillance of the Internet by intelligence agencies, the developments of criminal justice at the international level have the same effect.11 Rob Walker has

16 D. Bigo shown elsewhere how this inside/outside opposition both serves as the limit of the political imagination and the source of its coherence.12 As Ethan Nadelmann underscores in his pioneering analysis of DEA agents who conduct work outside of the US, This book represents the first significant engagement of two scholarly disciplines – US foreign policy and criminal justice – that have had remarkably little to do with one another. The vast majority of criminal justice scholars have extended their attentions no further than their nations’ borders [. . .] Among students of US foreign policy [. . .] almost no one has paid much attention to issues of crime and law enforcement.13 Now, other works including mine have advanced a step further – some would say a step too far – by reconsidering the lines that have been traditionally drawn as the legitimate borders of academic knowledge. We have been particularly concerned to advance a political sociology of international relations that reintroduces international phenomena, by making them normal and banal social facts on a daily basis. When we break down the dichotomy between knowledge of the inside and the outside, the border between the police world and the military world appears to be more permeable. We can thus take account of all the intermediary agencies such as police with military status, border guards, customs agents, or immigration agents, to better understand the links these agents establish among themselves and how the effects of their positions have implications on their respective narratives. Furthermore, breaking down this dichotomy allows us to understand how a semantic continuum is constructed, with the struggle against terrorism at one end and the reception of refugees at the other. The ‘deconstruction’ of the boundaries between different disciplines of knowledge has allowed a coherent field of analysis to emerge, a configuration having its own rules and its own coherence – the field of professionals of the management of unease. The field becomes intelligible where previously one saw only marginal subjects confined by disciplines that mutually ignored one another and constructed themselves in opposition to one another, or at best at the intersection between different areas. Such new fields of intelligibility include police working beyond borders, international justice condemning military crimes, or the construction of the image of the enemy within by intelligence services, such that their profiling applies to certain groups of foreign residents within a country itself. With this theory of the field of the unease management professionals, one can thus cross the habitual line traced by the social sciences between internal and external, between problems couched in terms of defence and problems of the police, and between problems of national security and the problem of public order. This hypothesis indeed reunites the military as well as the police and all the other professionals of the management of threats in its

Globalized (in)security 17 own terms of ‘figuration’ (in the words of Norbert Elias) or field and habitus (to use the terms of Pierre Bourdieu). After having hesitated across the span of several articles on how precisely to state this hypothesis – interpenetration between sectors, merging of different social universes – I now prefer to speak in terms of dedifferentiation of the internal and external security issues.14 This dedifferentiation of internal and external security allows us, indeed, to recall the socially and historically constructed character of the process of differentiation, in terms of the socio-genesis of the Western state as outlined by Norbert Elias or Charles Tilly. It also allows us to think the field of security as a field crossing the internal and external, a new generative space of struggles between security professionals that produces common interests, an identical program of truth and new forms of knowledge. To comprehend this field, as it establishes itself within a transnational space of the management of unease in societies of risk, it is necessary to perform its genealogy, to note the similarities that are consistent throughout the space, and establish what is significant about the differences, which are as much professional as geographic. One benefit of this approach is to show how police cooperation is linked to the questions of border control, immigration, the fight against terrorism, to relations with armed forces and to transatlantic relations; we could even include the relations between public and private management of security under this aspect of police coercion. It is important not to create an ivory-tower academic problem by considering the organizations called national police as self-contained objects determining what defines the police today. These days, doing police work constitutes less and less a national question and consists less and less of an activity restricted to public organizations known by the official names of national police forces.15 Policing in networks, policing at a distance The activities of policing have become more extensive. Police activities are formed of connections between different institutions and function in networks. Their formation also occurs as they take on a large new spectrum of activities and project it well beyond national borders. These geographic implementations of networks deterritorialize police activities in terms of mission and institutions and now include the judiciary itself, with the linkage between Eurojust and Europol. These ‘policing’ activities, in particular those devoted to surveillance and maintenance of public order, now take place at a distance, beyond national borders, as for example with detective experts of hooligans in international football matches, or for anti-globalization protests and demonstrations. But it also occurs beyond traditional police activities and reaches foreign affairs. The bypassing of borders through the policing of internal security also occurs through the dispatch of internal security advisors abroad, in the consulates that issue

18 D. Bigo visas allowing people to enter the Schengen zone. It affects the airline companies that, instead of police, are delegated the task of verifying passports and hire private security guards and train their personnel to these tasks of control. It even transforms the role of the militaries in their tasks of peace building and reconstruction as they now are asked to also oversee potential organized criminal activities that could affect internal security. Finally, it creates links with the intelligence agencies by sharing some of the same databases. All these activities participate in what is called the ‘debriefings of internal security abroad’, where surveillance projects itself on spaces, states, and persons seen as a danger and a threat to national security and public order. This tendency to operate beyond national borders occurs not only through the activities linked to the Schengen system of surveillance and the actions taken in that framework by each member state’s liaison officer. It also exceeds the actual borders of the European Union when it generates demands on EU candidate countries, such as those that were placed on the ten new member countries in 2004, or when it extends to the EU’s ‘circle of friends’, by conditioning economic aid to the permission to have police and immigration activities inside each of these countries. At the same time, these police activities are themselves undergoing a redefinition, the effect of which is to enlarge the spectrum in a particular way. It would be patently misguided to assume that these activities are primarily oriented towards crime or anti-terrorist actions despite rhetoric. The main activity, rather, consists of keeping the poorest foreigners at a distance, through controlling the flux of mobile populations. Some 15 years of intensive rhetoric have created the belief that poverty, crime and mobile populations are inextricably linked, but the correlation between crime, foreignness and poverty is altogether false.16 The term, ‘internal security’, now used to designate security at the European level, is a gauge of these two new kinds of reach. On the one hand, the reach is geographic, with the dimension of European and transatlantic cooperation; on the other, the reach derives from the role and duties of the various agencies of (in)security. The geographic reach, and the redefinition of spheres of competence it implies, have been the object of numerous commentaries. The actual extent of the changes that have taken place at the everyday level, however, has been miscalculated due to the belief in the discourse of the suspension of controls inside the EU and their localization at the external border of the EU, which supposedly creates freedom of circulation for all inside the EU. In fact, it should be emphasized that controls have been delocalized and modernized, but they have in no way been done away with: controls continue inside, albeit in an aleatory fashion, at the external border and even outside. Both (in)security professionals and politicians have remained silent on this issue of how activities linked to the control of the transnational flow of persons have extended their reach. By adding these tasks to the traditional tasks of combating crime, and thus by

Globalized (in)security 19 proceeding through an extension of the definition of security, these actors have strengthened their institutional position. The consequence of this extension of the definition of internal security at the European level is that it puts widely disparate phenomena on the same continuum – the fight on terrorism, drugs, organized crime, cross-border criminality, illegal immigration – and to further control the transnational movement of persons, whether this be in the form of migrants, asylum seekers or other bordercrossers – and even more broadly of any citizen who does not correspond to the a priori social image that one holds of his national identity (e.g. the children of first-generation immigrants, minority groups). Control is thus enlarged beyond the parameters of conventional crime control measures and policing of foreigners, to also include control of persons living in zones labelled ‘at risk’17 where inhabitants are put under surveillance because they correspond to a type of identity or behaviour that is linked to predispositions felt to constitute a risk. This new reach of activities allows for a new, more individualized logic of surveillance. Its new reach privileges the Ministries of Interior and the Ministries of Justice, insofar as these ministries in particular have realized how to combine the new logics of surveillance at the level of European police collaboration through the form of a network of relations among civil servants that permits them to understand the situation beyond national borders. This enables the emergence of a body of expertise on extra-territorial matters, permitting us to see ministers in charge of internal security becoming internationalized. This reach develops in the same way as it does for customs and takes place to the detriment of the social ministers (Minister of Labour, etc.) or specialized ministers (Minister of European affairs, etc.). And this reach of the Ministries of Interior goes so far as to impinge upon the domains of the ministries oriented towards international affairs – foreign affairs and defence. The various ministries of interior then take on initiatives addressing foreign political matters insofar as they may say that it is to prevent repercussions on internal security matters. Several works have recently drawn our attention to ways in which national police systems are structured in differentiated networks and draw on international resources according to their respective professional specialties, including drug trafficking, terrorism, maintenance of order, and football hooliganism. This differentiation of specialty means that the police, therefore, do not form a single, unique and homogenous network. We would be better served by thinking of an ‘archipelago of policing’, or a mosaic that holds together the national police, military police, customs control, immigration, consulates, and even intelligence services and the military, in the way, for instance, that international police currently operate in the Balkans. These archipelagos are structured beyond their ‘common’ activities, along lines of cultural identification (e.g. French, British, German, or Northern and Southern European), profession (e.g.

20 D. Bigo police, police with military status, customs agents), organizational level (e.g. national, local, municipal), mission (e.g. intelligence, border control, criminal police), knowledge (perceptions of threats and of a hierarchy of adversaries) and technological innovation (computer systems, electronic surveillance, police liaison officers who are crucial in the management and the exchange of information between agencies). For quite some time, the field of (in)security has been structured through transnational exchanges of information and the routinization of processes dealing with intelligence information. It would be naive to view this phenomenon as a simple effect of globalization. The national police have been networked ever since they were created as institutions. As opposed to the judiciary and criminal police, the prerogative of the intelligence police has always been conducted irrespective of territorial boundaries and has focused on people’s identities, whether real or fictional, regardless of their origin or place of dwelling. Since the end of the nineteenth century, police collaboration has been quite active against ‘subversives’. But there is no doubt that the idea of Europeanization has caused relations to deepen beyond the former capabilities of Interpol since the end of the 1970s, with the creation of the Berne and Trevi clubs. The ideas of free movement and border control appeared in full force at the European level in the 1980s. The legal categories of border, sovereignty and policing have been compromised by five main transformations: the distinction between the internal and external borders of the EU; the creation of international airport detention zones to immediately send back foreigners who do not have the right documents to enter into the Schengen area; the attempt to impose the term of ‘economic refugee’ and to redefine who is a refugee, with the ensuing lessening of the admissions granted to people seeking the right to asylum; the use of the term ‘immigrant’ instead of the term ‘foreigner’, with the ensuing inclusion of some nationals within the frame of the suspected foreigners; the relativization of the term ‘foreigner’, as opposed to national, in order to strengthen the distinction between community members and third country nationals as non-members. Due to the inability to entrench and maintain borders as advocated by the rhetoric of security, however, each organization, each country, separately, or in collaboration with others, tries to displace the locus of control upstream to block and deter the will to travel in the country of origin, and to displace the burden of controlling movement and crime back onto other police.18 These changes have caused a profound disjunction between the discourse on European internal security and the practices actually carried out. The external borders are indeed sometimes arbitrary places, but in no instance do they represent an effective electronic security barrier. Land borders are very easily breached and often the police allow candidates to enter and, as long as it is clear that they have no intention of remaining in the country, do not check their identity and even explain to them how to reach the neighbouring country (e.g. France and UK concerning Sangatte).

Globalized (in)security 21 In fact, the border controls within Europe are not dismantled as was promised by the rhetoric of free movement and its checks and balances. Control is privatized, delegated to airline companies and airports, which, in turn, subcontract the job to private security companies.19 Control is also sometimes maintained, but simply displaced some kilometres away. The greatest measure of control is exercised through the visas and the controls in the consulates of the passengers’ country of origin. The articulation of the SIS and visa allocation structure practices of control guide the tactical decisions in the war on fraud concerning false documents, and influence the process of making induplicable documents using technologies other than finger-printing, such as numeric photographs, facial or retinal scanning and other biometric techniques. These technologies, permitting the police to discipline and punish beyond borders via the collaboration between security agencies, are multiplying a tendency that polarizes the profession of policing. In general, two types of policing appear within the parameters of the national police institution: the first employs unqualified or minimally qualified personnel, who are however present and visible at the local level as an auxiliary to the municipality, the prefecture, or other police. The second type takes an opposite approach by employing a few, highly qualified people, who are in close contact with other security and social control agencies, characterized by discretion and distance.20 In what they call an osmotic relationship between high-ranking spheres of government and private strategic actors, these individuals take it as their mission to prevent crime by acting upon conditions in a pro-active way, anticipating where crime might occur and who might generate it. Their work then consists of making prospective analyses based on statistical knowledge, hypothetic correlations and supposed trends, anticipating a future in terms of worst case scenario and acting to prevent it. These professionals believe they are more professional and competent than the others, and their ambition is to assemble, on the basis of data generated, openly available information, social-scientific data and the techniques of police intelligence operations. This dream of a common and consensual epistemic community knowing the future and drawing the line of the present from this (reversible) knowledge haunts the imaginary of these professionals, who want to police societal transformations at a distance – both a geographic one and a temporal distance and are piloted by this logic of anticipation merging science and fiction. This perspective places them in a virtual space from which they may oversee everything, while being so discreet that they themselves are no longer seen. We also no longer understand those who actually carry out the actions of the imaginary – the large number of police, judges and prison guards as they are reduced to be the sheepdogs of these shepherds of the future. In addition, population management operates less like a rooted practice of herding than a nomadic practice that follows the seasonal migration of populations, which is created as the effect of such proactive logics.

22 D. Bigo Surveillance at a distance means working to control the ingoing and outgoing movement of populations. It occurs through ‘locks’ and mechanisms of exclusion such as visas, controls put in place by the airline companies, deportations and readmissions. Not only does it restrict freedom of movement but it also creates ‘penitentiary’ spaces, though these may not normally be categorized as such (in France and Greece, for instance, the detention centres and international airport detention areas are called waiting zones).21 Because its delocalized policing function is delegated to the consulates located in the traveller’s country of origin, this mode of control is much less visible than police working on the front lines of border control. Refusal to issue a visa becomes the first weapon of the police and, as such, it becomes the place of greatest arbitrariness in terms of decision-making. Police practice is directed at the surveillance of foreigners or poor ethnic minorities and extends its reach beyond its prior limits of criminal investigation, through pro-active actions that enable the police to pinpoint groups that would be ‘predisposed to criminality’ according to sociological knowledge. The profile of the guilty changes: it no longer derives from a supposed criminality but from a supposed ‘undesirability’. Prisons that confine the guilty are less significant in this dispositif than the new penitentiary spaces such as holding areas that reproduce the same detention conditions as prisons but without the legal judgment of guilt. The relaxation of surveillance on the majority of individuals, seen as too heavy and too totalizing, benefits the global harvest of information and the targeting of the most mobile groups: the diasporas, migrants and, if the argument holds, poor tourists. I have applied the notion of ‘field’ to these professionals engaged in internal security to describe the institutional archipelagos within which they work, whether privatized or public. In the name of security, these professionals manage technologies of control and surveillance, the goal of which is to tell us who and what should inspire unease, as opposed to what is inevitable.

Field and networks As I have analysed in Polices en Réseaux: L’Expérience Européenne, as well as in several articles, a field should be defined in terms of four dimensions. First, the field as a field of force, or a magnetic field, a field of attraction that polarizes around specific stakes, the agents involved; second, the field as a field of struggle, or a battle-field, that enables us to understand the ‘colonizing’ activities of various agents, the defensive retreats of others and the various kinds of tactical algorithms that organize bureaucratic struggles; third, the field as a field of domination vis-à-vis another field, the field as a positioning inside a larger political and social space permitting the possibility of statements making truth claims on the basis of knowledge and know-how; and fourth, the field as a transversal field, the trajec-

Globalized (in)security 23 tory of which reconfigures formerly autonomous social universes and shifts the borders of these former realms to include them totally or partially in the new field. Exemplifying this, in the case of security there is a shift that reconfigures some police and military professions as well as the intermediary professions that follow upon the de-differentiation of internal and external securities through the practices of violence and technologies of identification and surveillance. If we are to attempt a preliminary definition of the field of (in)security professionals, or more generally of the management of unease, we would begin by saying that the field depends less on the real possibility of exerting force, as in the classical sociological accounts of Hobbes or Weber, where the field would be defined purely as a function of coercion. It rather depends on the capacity of the agents to produce statements on unease and present solutions to facilitate the management of unease. It also depends on the capacity of people and techniques to conduct their research into this unfolding body of statements at a routine level, to develop correlations, profiles, and classify those who must be identified and placed under surveillance.22 Unease can raise fears, risks and the perception of nonintentional threats. But, at the same time, agencies use their analytical capabilities to anthropomorphize danger and construct a vision of the enemy, sometimes causing, whether intentionally or not, a social polarization that extends or restructures political alliances. The process of (in)securitization rests then on the routine abilities of agents to ‘manage and control life’, according to Foucault’s words, across the concrete material conditions that they put in place. The field as a field of forces If the field of (in)security functions as a field of forces exerting their pressures on the agents engaged in it, it is because it combines with a certain homogeneity found in these agents’ bureaucratic interests, their similar ways of defining the potential enemy and of gathering knowledge on this enemy through diverse technologies and routines. It tends to homogenize these agents’ ways of looking into a limited array of anthropomorphized types, to define a ‘focalization’ shared by all those who draw on the field.23 To understand the positions and discourses that situate these agents, it is necessary to correlate them with their professional socialization and their positions of authority, in terms of their roles as spokesmen of ‘legitimate’ institutions within the field of (in)security professionals of the management of unease. The field as a field of struggles Field of forces, the (in)security field also functions as a field of struggles within which the agents situate themselves, with the resources and the

24 D. Bigo differentiated goals that structure their positions. In this sense, the field of (in)security is a field of struggles to conserve or transform the configuration of the field’s own forces.24 If such struggles occur between these actors, if these competitions take place, it is because in fact they do have the same interests, the same sense of the game and have the same perception of what is at stake. But in order to avoid stereotypes, it is necessary not to assume an automatic correspondence between positions and certain types of discourses. The perception, within these small groups, of what is at stake can be affected by such dynamics as interpersonal behaviours or multi-positioning strategies. Moreover, the analysis of the differences between positions should not let us forget that the tactics of bureaucratic ‘colonization’ do not advance step by step and locally by incremental enlargement, they may jump to other activities (for example, from the threat of terrorism to natural disasters in the name of speed and discipline). Such is the case even if it is necessary to pragmatically believe in the proximity of these activities by building semantic bridges within the continuum of risks, threats and (in)security.25 The fundamental thing is that any action undertaken by one agent to shift the economy of forces in his favour has repercussions on all the other actors as a whole. These struggles are fundamental to understand the internal economy of the field and the processes of formation and reach that characterize it. In the specific case of the field of (in)security, the ‘field’ is determined by the struggles between police, intermediaries and military agencies about the boundaries and definition of the term ‘security’, and around the prioritization of the different threats, as well as the definition of what is not a threat but only a risk or even an opportunity. The central question relevant to defining security is thus to know who is authorized or to whom is delegated the symbolic power to designate exactly what the threats are. In this respect, it is impossible to evaluate the meaning of threats by judging exclusively on the manifest basis of statements themselves. To qualify this, we have to pay attention to who is in the position of enunciation and to the positions of authority of the enunciators themselves, while keeping in mind their personal, political and institutional interests within the field. Undoubtedly, it is too early to definitively define the centrifugal forces that compel the police and military to share the same interests, the same rules and the same vision of what is at stake, i.e. what are the emerging threats. Despite the current state of the field, one could imagine centripetal forces that would work to cause the field of (in)security to diverge again along the boundary of internal and external activities, or even break it apart in different arrangements, while maintaining the same categories (for instance, a division following the logics of technologies). If the transformations of conflicts did not have a direct and determining impact on the field of security, the chance of a revival of the military threat from Russia or China, however remote, could immediately be interpreted as extremely dangerous and could reintroduce a cleavage which would bring back an

Globalized (in)security 25 earlier police/military division of labour, impairing the tendency to share resources. In fact, the extension of the so-called humanitarian missions or the maintenance of order in the non-Western countries threatens to accelerate the effects of the field by merging even more policing, intelligence and military activities.26 11 September has clearly played a role in producing a convergence between positions taken on internal and international security. But this convergence has also revalorized military efforts and has legitimized the fact that the ‘war’ on terrorism should no longer be conducted under the aegis of the police. Above all, it has underscored how the effects of the field were propagated in both directions, one of enlargement to include new geographies27 and a functional one, with the will to mobilize and extend to all professionals of unease management the role of ‘antiterrorist’ surveillance.28 The field as a field of domination The field of (in)security also functions as a field of domination in relation to other social fields, including sometimes the field of the professionals of politics. It tends to monopolize the power to define the ‘legitimately recognized threats’ (global organized crime, global terrorism, war on terror, etc.). This is to say that the agents of the field fight for the authority to impose their definition of who and what inspires fear. In the competition between the field of the professionals of politics and the field of the professionals of (in)security, indeterminate spaces exist where each agent is ‘obliged to negotiate’ and where ‘collusive transactions’ operate in the strong sense of the term.29 The field, as I have just described it, essentially encompasses the public bureaucracies but also includes private bureaucracies, businesses, political intermediaries and groupings that work to ‘develop a security-oriented mindset’ in the public sphere. Our understanding of these private actors is still incomplete but there is more and more convincing work available that helps us comprehend the complex links between these entities and the public bureaucracies.30 The field of security exercises its ‘force’ or ‘capacity of attraction’ by its power to impose on other agents through the belief that the insiders of the field possess, as ‘experts’, the supplementary knowledge and secrets that only professionals may have. This belief is reaffirmed through everyday routine work, technologies and ‘exchange and sharing of information’, as a certain approach to social change, risk, threats and enemies that is constantly invoked and reconfirmed. The field of (in)security is thus at the heart of the field of power, as a bureaucratic field composed of experts having the capacity to claim that they know better than others, even if others are the professionals of politics, including the head of states. In this field, the agents, be they governmental or non-governmental, enter into struggles with the goal of settling a specific sphere of practices31 through the various institutions of laws, rules, norms and the daily routine knowledge of what rules and reso-

26 D. Bigo lutions of such ‘settlement’ are permitted or forbidden. Even if national professionals of politics still play a key role in structuring security issues, because of their daily involvement in settling security practices, the agencies and bureaus that comprise the world of security are arguably the sole agents able to assert, with some success rate, their definition of what inspires unease. While it is certainly true that all these agencies have an interest in maintaining the terms that political actors use to label and frame the issues, they overlay and invest these definitions with their own significances and practices. In this respect, the ongoing conflicts between agencies work in conjunction with the struggle that each agency undertakes to be recognized by politicians who still retain the power to abolish or reform them (i.e. the homeland security restructuring the bureaucratic balance of power between FBI, CIA, State Department, Defence Department, Pentagon and border guards, or the effort to homogenize the assessment of a list of terrorists and the conflicting relations between second and third pillars with Europol, Frontex, Eurojust, EACPO on one side, and Sitcen and the Antiterrorist coordinator, de Vries, on the other). This struggle also occurs in conjunction with the struggle to exclude other actors (churches, human rights organizations, Red Cross, alternative media) by disqualifying their points of view on the definition of threats and on the public policies aiming to prevent the threats.32 The field’s effects as markers of the boundaries of the field beyond subjective recognitions The following effects of the field of security allow us to identify the field’s boundaries regardless of the agents’ struggles to classify, categorize and self-represent the boundaries of the field of professionals of security in accordance with their own interests. The boundaries of the field are not subjective and they are not solely intersubjective; they are a ‘figuration’, a relational effect structuring the intersubjective ‘agreement’ or doxa. They are always moving and are not framed by the dominant agents. They depend also on the resistance inside and beyond the field. In that sense they are not structural and fixed by objective mechanisms, but they are not fluid and changing along the lines of the transformation of perceptions of the agents either. The boundaries are relational and have a specific consistence or ‘viscosity’. They can be changed and overcome either by struggles inside the field (splitting it or reframing completely the institutional games) or events and struggles outside the field but affecting its coherence. At the everyday level, however, the boundaries of the field are framing the doxa of the agents and, then, tend to reproduce the same figuration and to adjust the habitus of the agents along the previous figuration. It is rare that the anticipation of the agents accelerates the transformations. They often limit the scope of change. We can identify for the field of security eight field-effects that frame the

Globalized (in)security 27 practices of the agents. First, the systems of representation of agents who previously did not share these systems converge, due to their shared interest in entering into the struggle to define and prioritize ‘emerging threats’. Second, professionals in the field of (in)security place all global social transformation that affects society and to which politicians are unable to respond under the heading of threat, the ultimate consequence of which is to define an enemy. This convergence occurs even if the immediate experience of the agents has led them to privilege their own roles, their own specific missions for which they entered into competition to begin with (global organized crime versus global terrorism). Third, security agencies recognize from a practical point of view that any standpoint, even those of different nations or professions, can stabilize or destabilize the whole body of relations that the agency maintains with others. Thus, each agency integrates this practical recognition within its strategies. Fourth, some security agencies that formerly appeared as marginal to the worlds of the police and the military (customs, immigration, national guard, police with military status, etc.) now modify their images and appear, whether rightly or wrongly, to be at the core of the surveillance and control dispositif. Fifth, professionals of politics favour a differentiated allocation of missions and budgets that benefits these ‘intermediary’ agencies and lessens the authority of more traditional agencies. Sixth, contacts and international networks in the economy of national or regional budget struggles become necessary. Seventh, knowledge and know-how in the management of unease have a determining influence on how practices of violence are resolved. Eighth, such management takes place at a distance through technologies targeted to this use. The field of (in)security as a transversal field The problem is not therefore to follow a static conception of borders that we would imagine laid down once and for all, but to adopt a dynamic conception of borders where borders are themselves on the move. In such an approach, the main stake is to state precisely what such a dynamic conception would consist of. Borders are ‘concretions’ of power struggles in a specific space, which is often materialized within a territory. Michel Foucher’s formula goes beyond the exclusive frame of the national border to coin the concept of social borders, where space is not directly correlated with a uni-dimensional vision of the territory.33 Borders are, indeed, sometimes institutions existing in the material world, such as the physical borders of states, or borders adjudicated by the juridical relation that regulates the differentiation between the inside and the outside. Sometimes, however, their property of fluidity is more important than their material existence, if the field is in formation and is not sufficiently established to make the costs of entry prohibitive. The materialization of the borders by law or by professional norms is thus often lagging behind the reality of the

28 D. Bigo borders of a field structured by the struggle and relations of attraction. Materialization of borders legitimates and consecrates a particular moment, at which it was in the interest of all actors to negotiate in the precise way that resulted in this materialization. This temporal gap signifies that it is extremely difficult to empirically trace the borders of the field by examining it solely from the point of view of its institutional characteristics, as they inevitably retrace a moment that is actually anterior to the relations of force that caused that moment to materialize. The transversality of the field is a term that allows us to mark off the space beyond national borders that characterizes the relations between agents (mainly public) of the field, without presupposing the existence of another higher level of enclosure (such as the EU, the idea of Europe in a broader sense, or the Western world).34 Following the notion of transversality, we can integrate the idea of ‘glocality’, introduced by Japanese management companies to brand the same products with different advertisements coined for local people, and that James Rosenau popularized to show that many phenomena connect the global and the local. Glocality and transversality allow us to understand that the field of (in)security is deployed at a level that is reducible neither to the national political field, nor to a level between two nations, or even to the European level. The state, here, is not the space of convertibility, or ‘universal currency’, for different modes of social capital. Bourdieu, at this point, was wrong and was not careful enough to the transnational and transversal characters of the globalization process. Beyond the state, the notion of the transversal field of (in)security makes possible the analysis of a space that is indeed social and political but transcends the division of internal/ external or national/international imposed by the territorial state of mind. This social space, or this field of (in)security, is empirically constructed as a result of the differentiated positions of different security agencies (national police, local police, customs control, border control services, intelligence agencies, armies, etc.) in different European countries (the centrality of the French police, the diversity of the British police, German federalism, Polish specific traditions, etc.). So, it is effectively defined by the place that these agencies occupy as national players, but also by the transnational networks of relations that they have formed in a space larger than their own spaces, the cyclical defining property of which is its tendency to enlarge itself incessantly due to its refusal to recognize boundaries, whether they are geographic or cultural.35 For these reasons, when describing and analysing the field of (in)security, it is not sufficient to merely reconstruct the practical knowledge of the respective actors by means of interviews, or to merely inventory the agencies that make up this know-how. Because, in doing so, it is assumed that by adding the bureaucratic and political actors of the EU member states – supposedly ‘natural’ partners for these relations – we have a ‘logical frame’. This frame is in fact given by the fact that nation-states are naturalized as

Globalized (in)security 29 the arena where all (in)security relations are negotiated and where the effects of (in)security have to be understood by examining the interactions of these members, judging their resemblance and differences to the other member, following a national ‘culture’ or national ‘specificity’ criterion. My method consists, instead, of describing the relations that derive from practices (of surveillance, control, etc.) and not from ‘supposedly national cultures’. These practices that derive their agency from being embedded in (or transversal to) various organizations and institutions are to be determined through professional networks, which are inscribed into a social space beyond the boundaries of the cultures of national states. This field beyond state boundaries then creates forms of collaboration and competition, which are established between agencies previously in little contact with one another (armies, intelligence agencies, military police, border control, customs control, judiciary police, civil security, the justice system). This compels the police to move part of their operations beyond state borders and to remain there, as is shown by the policing in UN missions, Kosovo or even now Afghanistan. Similarly, the field compels the military to become more and more interested in what occurs within national borders, as is shown by the phone tapping, the monitoring of transborder activities and now the detention of ‘enemy aliens’ inside the national territory.36 It is even more compelling for the agencies that mediate between these two realms (intelligence services, police with military status, or customs and immigration offices) by obliging them to restructure their missions along the line of the so-called new global threat, which itself varies in time: global organized crime, failed states or now war on terror. The field effect introduces new systems of interaction between the agencies by restructuring their boundaries with regard to their missions, laying the ground for eventual budgetary competition and playing with their roles within the overall function of coercion, or more precisely, the management of threats. It compels the privatization of certain forms of (in)security (above all, over individuals, but also over local or community matters and sometimes going as far as the privatization of military activities) and compels public agencies to focus on the forms of (in)security that stretch between the internal and external domains. It may change, on rare occasions, the overall sense of priorities. It makes the domain of policing privilege organized crime and terrorism over prevention or community policing, and makes the military world allocate more public discourses and sometimes resources to the so-called ‘transversal threats’37 and their prevention than to the (previous) questions of deterrence and proliferation. The contemporary field of (in)security at the European level can then be described as a certain universe producing a specific knowledge, confronting social agents existing at different institutional positions. In this field we find ‘representatives’ of security issues not only among the territorially-based agents we would expect, such as police or police with military status, customs agents, high-ranking functionaries of the ministries of the Interior, of Foreign Affairs or Defence departments; we

30

D. Bigo

also find politicians who specialize in these issues. Military strategists join this field and enter into struggles modifying the complex economy of relations between the previous agencies of ‘internal’ security (police, police with military status, customs, immigration and asylum services), however tangentially. The new reach of the military correlates with a general tendency to place strategic emphasis on internal security while becoming disinterested in more classically defence-related questions. These (in)security professionals have traditionally come from the realms of police, customs and police with military status, but more recently have tended to come from new fields: the ranks of lawyers, diplomats, military officials and managers of companies working in the production of materials used by these administrations, politicians specializing in defence-related issues, members of groups related to these milieus and, last but not least, academics who specialize in security studies.38 Thus, the agents of the field of (in)security, despite their apparent diversity, can be defined as professionals of the management of threat or unease, producers of power-knowledge on the dualism security/insecurity. Yet, what is essential is not to exhaustively name these agents but to discern and analyse what holds these different constituent parts together, what makes them enter into competition for a set of stakes that they had never previously recognized when they were indifferent to each other. This is why my research dealt with the practices and relations between four previously unconnected conceptual worlds – internal security, external security, war and conflict, and crime and delinquency – in an attempt to rethink the relations between the police and the army, crime and war, ‘upper worlds’ and underworlds, agencies responsible for surveillance and their targets and technologies. Here, it is necessary to tie together earlier works on these issues in order to show how the narrative space of the agents I have just discussed vis-à-vis threats is retranslated, on the one hand, into a space of social positions by the intermediary of their particular social and institutional positions or habitus and, on the other, via a transversal dispositif that connects their practices. But what is immediately at stake here is to understand how practical effects of the field enter into operation. To speak of the field of (in)security requires that we go beyond inventorying the agencies that one suspects of participating in the ‘function’ of coercion. It requires that we immediately question the characteristics, limits, and effects of the field. Empirically, it is necessary to describe the effects of the field by giving examples and showing how they act, whether this occurs in terms of ‘polarization’, ‘differentiation’, ‘folding’, ‘involution’, or even ‘hollowing-out’.39 We need indeed to set the constraints and opportunities that the field gives to the agents – effects that are visible – and to understand their less visible relations both inside and outside the field. These field effects will trace the limits of the field in rough contours – limits that are never given but depend on the particular (con)figuration of a given moment of a struggle within the field and between this specific field

Globalized (in)security 31 and other fields – and will determine the effects of domination between the fields concerning truth of contested norms (i.e. truth about the weapons of mass destruction and the competition for the ‘last word’ between the professionals of politics and the professionals of (in)security).

The ban-opticon dispositif The set of field effects I mentioned above does not stem only from the processes and relations between the agents of the field. It is also the result of their relations with other fields. These relations are formed by the dispositif that crosses between institutions, and are not reducible to the logics of these institutions, or even to the habitus of their agents, in Bourdieu’s sense of the term. Michel Foucault speaks of the dispositif of sexuality and the dispositif of the prison. We know quite well that his thinking on the prison was inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s image of the panopticon, due to the fact that it simultaneously stood for architecture, discourse, field of rationality and strategic project, while it embodied the will to scientific knowledge.40 Many discussions about Foucault’s use of Bentham are twofold: they criticize Foucault’s partial reading of Bentham, while reminding us that the number of prisons actually constructed on Bentham’s model was quite small and that the prison changed function during the classical period, as in the case of the institution of galley slaves, when they were not on ships. But, to answer this criticism, it is central to acknowledge that the dispositif does not manifest itself in a single institution of the prison. It is, rather, transversal. It requires heterogeneity, diversity. It is not the prison’s function as an enclosed punitive space that is crucial but rather the fact that the prison concentrates in one specific space the mechanisms of control and surveillance that are scattered throughout society in institutions such as factories, barracks and schools. In Foucault’s work, the panopticon is useful because not only does it allow us to understand the prison, as it does in Bentham’s work, but it also serves as a way to understand how society functions at large. If the (in)security programme undertaken by some agents is, without a doubt, a programmatic strategy of an escalating generalized surveillance to a level that is both as globalized and as individualized as possible, it is not at all a diagram of the effects of power and resistance. If the panoptic dispositif exists in the Foucaldian sense, it is in a fragmented and heterogeneous way and there is no centralized manifestation of it, quite contrary to the various claims of US imperial domination that have been promulgated since 11 September. If its effects persist, the sense of empire to which it is subject corresponds more to Hardt and Negri’s use of the term Empire, in which the various political processes of state coalitions, manoeuvres of large corporations and the effects of polling that empiricize the ‘unease’ of mass destruction converge towards the strengthening of

32 D. Bigo informatics and biometrics as modes of surveillance that focus on the transborder movements of individuals. This diagram is not a panopticon transposed to a global level; it is what we call – in combining the term ‘ban’ of Jean Luc Nancy, as refigured by Giorgio Agamben, and the term ‘opticon’, as used by Foucault – a ban-opticon.41 This formulation of the ban-opticon allows us to understand how a network of heterogeneous and transversal practices functions and makes sense as a form of (in)security at the transnational level. It allows us to analyse the collection of heterogeneous bodies of discourses (on threats, immigration, enemy within, immigrant fifth column, radical Muslims versus good Muslims, exclusion versus integration, etc.), of institutions (public agencies, governments, international organizations, NGOs, etc.), of architectural structures (detention centres, waiting zones and Schengen traffic lanes in airports, integrated video camera networks in some cities, electronic networks outfitted with security and video-surveillance capacities), of laws (on terrorism, organized crime, immigration, clandestine labour, asylum seekers, or to accelerate justice procedures and to restrict the defendants’ rights), and of administrative measures (regulation of the ‘sans papiers’, negotiated agreements between government agencies vis-à-vis policies of deportation/ repatriation, ‘common’ aeroplanes specially hired for deportation with costs shared by different national polices, etc.). It allows us to understand that the surveillance of everyone is not on the current agenda but that the surveillance of a small number of people, who are trapped into the imperative of mobility while the majority is normalized, is definitely the main tendency of the policing of the global age. I would like to sketch out, here, three dimensions of this ban-opticon to convey how control and surveillance of certain minority groups take place at a distance. This surveillance of the minority profiled as ‘unwelcome’ is, in my opinion, the strategic function of the diagram – a function opposed to the surveillance of the entire population (or the Pan), which is only the dream of a few agents of power, even if the rhetoric after 11 September articulates a ‘total’ information.42 The ban-opticon is then characterized by the exceptionalism of power (rules of emergency and their tendency to become permanent), by the way it excludes certain groups in the name of their future potential behaviour (profiling) and by the way it normalizes the non-excluded through its production of normative imperatives, the most important of which is free movement (the so-called four freedoms of circulation of the EU: concerning goods, capital, information, services and persons). This ban-opticon is deployed at a level that supersedes the nation-state and forces governments to strengthen their collaboration in more or less globalized spaces, both physical and virtual, sometimes global or Westernized, and still more frequently Europeanized. The effects of power and resistance are thus no longer contained by the political matrix of the relation between state and society. They exceed the frame of representations

Globalized (in)security 33 inscribed within the nation-state, disconnect the direct relations between state and individuals inside and between the external of the nation-state in its relation with other states, as a different universe. Exceptionalism inside liberalism To speak of the exceptionalism of power refers to the relation between the juridical production of ‘special’ laws and its symbolic legitimizing effects (state of emergency, exceptional and derogatory measures, administrative routines issued from earlier special legislation), as well as to how the ‘dominated’ of a specific time and place are socialized by their rulers to believe that they are deciding what kind of dominating powers are acceptable or not. This relation, as we know, is far from being stable and far from being given once and for all. The distinction between the governing and the governed is an effect at the macro-level of molecular relations of power (and resistance). Liberalism has tried to legitimate its own domination through the idea of the separation of powers by which power is supposed to limit itself, particularly through checks and balances, with the effect that the population finally actively consents to be an accomplice of its own domination and to rely on ‘justice’ and lawyers for its ‘freedom’. Framed in that way, liberalism is the contrary of exceptionalism. Liberalism is seen as the opposite of a ‘sovereign’ or ‘raison d’état’ thinking. Yet, between the definitions of exceptionalism as suspension of law or break in normality, there is room for other visions of exceptionalism that combine exception both with liberalism and with the routinized dispositif of technologies of control and surveillance. Exception works hand in hand with liberalism and gives the key to understanding its normal functioning, as soon as we avoid seeing exception as a sole matter of special laws. Nevertheless, one of the first questions of the present is about the status of these special laws and the exceptional powers they provide for. It does not seem that they ‘suspend every law’, they just derogate from normalized legislations, some of which are special laws that we have become habituated to live with. But they install at the heart of our present time the idea that we are living in a ‘permanent state of emergency’ or in a permanent state of exception. Does their mere existence not reconfigure the existence of routinized norms? Is it the norm that defines the exception or the exception that defines the norm? Giorgio Agamben, strongly influenced by Carl Schmitt, invokes the possibility that exercising sovereignty means the possibility of being at the same time within and outside of the juridical order, given the possibility that sovereign power can proclaim a state of exception (Ausnahme), thereby suspending the validity of its own juridical order.43 The exception is then more interesting than the norm since it defines the limit that permits the establishment of interiority, which is to say, to ‘enclose the outside’, as Blanchot writes. This process of interiorization allows sovereignty or exception to delimit both the space and the

34 D. Bigo object to which it applies. But, for this to take place, it is necessary for the sovereign to ‘overhang’ this space, to exteriorize himself in order to set the limits of inclusion. The paradox thus resembles Escher’s famous ink-drawn hands as they draw one another. In thinking the contingency of the line drawn, it is necessary to think not only in terms of inside and outside but also in terms of the meta-level that allows the contingency of the drawing of the border between inside and outside. This is what one could call an overlapping hierarchy, or the effect of auto-organization where the institutor and the instituted of the line are mutually constitutive. The topological figure that represents this co-production of the institution, where the instituted depends on the institutor (but this institutor is itself instituted by its instituted), is the same figure as the one that allows us to understand the objective indetermination of the borders and that makes the differentiation between internal and external an intersubjective difference – the figure of the Möbius ribbon or strip.44 This figure suggests a topology that blocks the traced line of a circle from simply cutting the sacred off from the profane, internal from external, institutor from instituted. It is no longer possible for the border to be made objective, forever given and intelligible, simply because it is inscribed in space and time. The border depends on the look given by the observer and his position, while his judgement on what is internal or external will vary according to this position, in the same way as his view of what he institutes, or of what is instituted upon him. From this point of view on what a border is, the relation of exception is not derived from the sovereign relation of exclusion, it is a relation of exclusion that engenders the sense of norm and juridical order in suspending – for a certain time – an object of the juridical order, and that is different than a simple relation of spatial interdiction that would fabricate an outside by enclosing it in a circle. It is this ‘suspension’ of juridical categories and the possibility of inventing new ones at the same time in order to fill the ‘hole’ that create uncertainty and doubt. Uncertainty, from which power can profit in practice, to destabilize the ‘old’ categories (such as the concept of war, of prisoner of war or of asylum seeker) by redefining them against their previous juridical meaning, in shifting their relations by an infusion of a new ‘category’, i.e. the enemy combatant. Thus, as long as the US government continues to invoke the difference between the war on terrorism and the war on what concerns the rules applied to prisoners of war, it plays an extreme form of exceptionalism that suspends juridical order and reconfigures it by putting in place new categories that must be defined and that occupy a space previously filled by another concept. This process persists as long as it continues to redefine the pact of protection, in refusing to apply it to foreigners living on its own soil, as it historically did with Japanese internees during the Second World War, or when its power asserts itself beyond its own proper territory by sending missiles to execute ‘terrorists’ in Yemen, while presenting this action as an international police operation and an executive

Globalized (in)security 35 decision of justice. This particular form of exceptionalism that one can designate as illiberal practices at the heart of liberalism seems to be one of the contemporary features of the ban-opticon. Exclusion and pro-active governmentality The ban-opticon’s second defining trait is its ability to construct categories of excluded people connected to the management of life. The ban is a limit condition of the political relation.45 As one of our informants from an intelligence agency explained, if the media and judicial policy exaggerate the phenomenon in order to reassure good citizens and deter the others, they are in effect operating at the level of tactics, which can be modulated according to public opinion. In contrast, it is strategic to collect information on the part of a society that no longer lives under the same rules, with the same norms as the mainstream. Far from the spotlight, targeting the ‘abnormals’, a re-fashioning of policing and surveillance is taking place, capable of enlarging its scope by the use of intensive technologies of biometrics and shared databases. There, beyond the simulacrum of a politics of proximity designed to reassure the good citizens, and the zero tolerance designed to deter the rest, the knowledge of the ‘others’, which is by far the most significant resource in the management of crowds, is acquired. By mixing files from the public realm (social security, taxes) and the private realm (insurance, credit bureaus, supermarkets) with police files, it is possible to classify and sort among the elements to formulate what and who must be surveyed. According to these police and criminal ‘experts’, these processes keep the repressive machine from getting jammed, while allowing it to avoid conveying a negative image that could invoke a sense of oppression barely being held at bay. The goal of the normalization and management of societal risks should not be seen purely as a police responsibility, these experts say. Its distribution across the whole assembly of risk management systems should be recognized (insurance, private investigators firms, retail superstores, and public welfare institutions). This programme of risk management and normalization is based on the ideals of rational choice and on the using of proactive techniques of management to anticipate individuals’ movements. It is spread throughout society and encourages people to collaborate, as in the case of local security contracts or of collaborations between police and educators, or as it occurs in Italy, where the converging visions of neighbourhood committees, municipal authorities and police combine to put the blame on immigrants.46 The basic units conducting proactive analysis will not be limited to the police but will vary to occasionally include the military and customs officials and to be linked to insurance, social and credit organizations, schools, prefectures, tax organizations and social security organizations, consulates and criminologists, provided that they are action-oriented.

36 D. Bigo All this effort to collect information and to proliferate data that is now technologically possible seeks mainly to substitute the logic of proactivity to the two other logics: repression and prevention.47 The pure repressive logic inevitably intervenes too late and is directed at the individual, while the policemen are the firemen of crime; the other is a preventive structural logic diminishing the roots of violence that, according to the police, is no more effective than a smokescreen, or a reform impossible to implement without also changing political or economic regimes. The logic of proactivity aims to act before an offence is committed, by collecting information oriented towards repressive action and by anticipating the behaviour of dangerous individuals or groups. Prevention is therefore always invested with a virtual coercive dimension. The game is no longer the committing of an act itself, but the ‘signal’ that an offence might possibly be committed by an individual or a group that potentially represents a risk. The priority now is no longer on sanctions but on regulation. The issue is less about condemning an individual than about deterring others, but it consists above all of managing movement and flux, of managing groups of people in advance, analysing their potential future, in order to normalize them. Normalization and the imperative of free movement In contemporary societies, normalization occurs primarily through: a) the imperative of free movement of people, in particular in the European Union or the Schengen area, which is different from the North American area of NAFTA in that it explicitly recognizes this imperative; b) the combination of three elements: a connection between speed and movement, the right to movement, and the freedom to move on a global scale. It is this normalization that Zygmunt Bauman refers to when he invokes the new logics of exclusion between those who are free to circulate and those who are trapped in the local. Actually, as he alerts us in Globalization: the human consequences, globalization can be analysed as a spatio-temporal compression that modifies the modes in which people come and go.48 In contrast to Bauman’s claim, we need to distinguish more precisely between movement and being free and see how a metonymy becomes established through this fusion of circulation/liberty to both diminish the notion of liberty and provoke disequilibrium between the notions of security and liberty. Bauman seems to consider himself to benefit from the liberty of the richest and to propose more mobility for the poorest, seeing neither the way this normative imperative of mobility imposes itself, nor the dispositif that makes mobility desirable. He sees the repressive dimension of the dispositif only for the poor but seems to neglect its considerable normative and productive dimensions, where the two are completely indissociable. Power is not only repressive. It induces and produces modes of behaviour. The discourses on free movement are central. They normalize the majority and allow for the surveillance to be concentrated on a minority.

Globalized (in)security 37

Conclusion In conclusion, this dispositif, the strategic function of which is the control and the surveillance of certain selected groups of people exempted from the majority, and which hinges on the field of professionals of the management of unease, is effectively composed as a dispositif of: (a) discourses, i.e. narratives of police, military, customs and judicial institutions on free movement, the terrorist threat, transnational organized crime, the links between these phenomena and immigration, minorities and now asylum seekers; (b) specific architectural facilities, such as the centres for separating out foreigners, the detention zones within international airports, the retention centres for deporting persons who entered a territory illegally, the intake centres for refugees or asylum centres such as those of Sangatte or Lampedusa, where prisoners waiting administrative action are consigned; (c) regulatory decisions, such as those determining access for lawyers or detainees’ parents to places that in practice invalidate the right to free access; (d) administrative measures, both arbitrary and humanitarian in inspiration, like the fact of having people put in the Charles de Gaulle international airport’s detention zones in a nearby kennel normally used by the gendarmes for their dogs so that they would not appear so numerous in the overcrowded rooms of the hotel in which they are primarily detained; (e) ‘scientific’ discourses on the reasons behind migration and asylum, statements on their relation to the individualization and transnationalization of violence, and philosophical and moral propositions on illegal migrants, fake refugees, or young children of immigrant parents. This dispositif is no longer the panopticon described by Bentham. It is a ban-opticon. It depends no longer on immobilizing bodies under the analytic gaze of the watcher but on profiles that signify differences, on exceptionalism with respect to norms and on the rapidity with which one ‘evacuates’. The dispositif of this new surveillance takes another form, recalling technologies of information and virtual reality. This dispositif appears like a virtual montage (morphing) of all the positions of individuals in the process of flux. From an initial image (the immigrant, the ghetto youth) to a final image (terrorist, drug-runner), all the steps of transformation are re-constituted virtually. In this respect, this dispositif channels flows instead of dissecting bodies. Like the panopticon dispositif, this ban-opticon dispositif of morphing produces a knowledge, as well as statements on threats and on security that reinforce the belief in a capacity to decrypt, even prior to the individual himself, what its trajectories, its itineraries will be. This dispositif depends on the control of movement more than the control of stocks in a territory. It depends on ‘monitoring the future’, as in Philip K. Dick’s novel Minority Report, rather than surveying the present in accordance to the official past. It is management at a distance in space and time of the ‘abnormals’. Where, previously, people had been assigned places of residence, they are now placed in ‘waiting

38 D. Bigo zones’ and assigned identities not even lived as such. A skin colour, an accent, an attitude and one is slotted, extracted from the unmarked masses and, if necessary, evacuated. Policing is thus an affair of the margin, of clean-up, and needs concern itself only minimally with ‘norms’. These new logics of control and surveillance are not necessarily much more effective, or more rational. The advantage for the unmarked masses is that they have the impression of being free, to the benefit of the institution, and since control only bears on a few, it is more economical. Only the control of crime is less effective than before as a consequence of these a priori. Its sphere of application remains fragile and subject to resistance. There is no doubt that we must conduct more detailed research into the connection between the practices of security professionals and the systems of justification of their activities, as we ponder on how procedures of truth-claims are formulated, and how the centres of their production are localized, questions from which academics are by no means excluded. It is also important to understand the relations between transnationalization, globalization of the (in)security agencies’ practices and those of their ‘targets’ to put them in relation with – inasmuch as one can – the specific Europeanization process. This process is conducted more or less in the different political arenas by systems of justification of construction and priority of unease, which correspond to each national and professional culture, but out of which emerges the necessity of an organization like Europol to act as a kind of ‘stock exchange of threats, fears and unease’ and of their management. This institutionalization creates in return a transfiguration of the threats by giving them the quality of being ‘global’ and then ‘more dangerous’. It is finally necessary to reconnect the questions of the constituting of a space of liberty, security and justice with the questions of the construction of a society beyond its status as a national state, posing the problem of how its identity is mapped out, and to understand how the convergence of uneases circling around the figure of the poor extracommunitarian migrant speaks volumes about how liberalism operates in a society of risk. In effect, as Foucault reminds us: [I]f we agree to see in liberalism a new art of governing and governing each other – not a new economic or juridical doctrine – if it really amounts to a technique of governmentality that aims to consume liberties, and by virtue of this, manage and organize them, then the conditions of possibility for acceding to liberty depend on manipulating the interests that engage the security strategies destined to ward off the dangers inherent to the manufacture of liberty, where the constraints, controls, mechanisms or surveillance that play themselves out in disciplinary techniques charged with investing themselves in the behaviour of individuals . . . from that point on the idea that living dangerously must be considered as the very currency of liberalism.49

Customs

Social welfare

Risk analysis, profilers

Euroren Bernes

Secret services

Think tanks

Army

Public legitimacy and technologies

Judges

MODERNS

Navy

Air Force

Special services, marines, paratroopers

Nato

Private military companies

Intelligence services

Specialized teams of gendarmeries

EUROJUST

OLAF, EUROPOL, SitCen

Police in uniform

Civil protection

Community, police, proximity

CLASSICS

Management of life

Private security companies

Neighbourhood watch

Insurances

Private management references

Figure 2.1 Social Space of institutional positions (where they stand).

Appendix

Power to kill

Spying

Deviance

Community policing

Petty crime

Threats targeting territories

Demonstrations with violence

Car thefts ...

War Guerilla, urban warfare

Political violence by clandestine organizations

Cross-border crime

Clash of cultures

Collective security

GLOBALIZATION INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION

Mafias, organized crime, drugs

Network proliferation

Global terrorism

Human trafficking, massive influx

Figure 2.2 Social Space of standpoints concerning (in)security (what they say).

SOVEREIGNITY

Individual security

Enemy within, subversion

Infiltrated enemy

Soccer hooliganism

Feeling of security

Catastrophes, disasters

Asylum seekers

Protest by alterglobalization group and activists

Threats targeting populations

Globalized (in)security 41

Notes 1 This is a modified version of my paper first published in Solomon and Sakai, ‘Translation, philosophy and colonial difference’. I want to thank all the team of Cultures & Conflits, especially Jean-Paul Hanon, for their comments and suggestions which have contributed to the formative ideas of this article. I want also to thank Anastassia Tsoukala and Miriam Perier as well as Diana Davies for their help and comments concerning the editing process. 2 McCarthyism was a purely US phenomenon. The generalization of a permanent state of emergency measures was restricted to Northern Ireland only and did not affect British society. These two logics, however, are now developing at the level of world geography and they are deepening to ‘ideally’ reach and include all individuals. 3 To cite merely one example, the French DST (direction of domestic intelligence and counter-espionage, equivalent to the British MI5) attempted to prove its force against the DGSE (in charge of foreign intelligence, equivalent to the British MI6) regarding information on terrorist groups in Northern Africa, to put into place an exchange of services between agents working on the war on terrorism and those working on counter-espionage. This happened to give it knowledge and capacities to act upon the exterior in ways that it was limited from acting on the interior. The result was to establish links between Tunisian, Moroccan, Algerian and Syrian intelligence services that were opposed to the racial-national/culturalist profiling undertaken by the French agencies with which they had been collaborating. The DST put under surveillance some members of the government opposition of these countries that were living in France, which rumours suggested even led to possible assassination attempts. In compensation, the DST acquired more accurate information than the DGSE and used this transnational network to reinforce its own internal position. In the USA, the rivalries between the FBI, the DEA and the CIA are also well known in this respect. Such intra-national rivalries have impacted upon oppositional politics abroad, as in the case of Afghanistan and clandestine organizations such as al-Qaida in the 1990s. 4 See the contribution of L. Bonelli in this volume. 5 See the statement of the former CIA Director, George Tenet, on 11 February 2003. Testifying in front of Congress, he contradicted George Bush’s television claim of the previous day in Cincinatti regarding information on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He was obliged to resign the year after. 6 In my opinion, this dynamic of the field is a more effective explanation than the theories that stress the ‘fundamentalist’ influence of religious sects, the ‘messianic’ behaviours of Western national leaders such as Tony Blair, George Bush, José Aznar or Silvio Berlusconi. 7 Among the first to note this link, Susan Strange has situated it in two contexts: the political economies of managing credit and even industrial production, and the politics of knowledge. However, she did not extend her claim to security, thinking that in the security sector if nowhere else, by virtue of sovereignty, the professionals of politics were still in the position of making decisions. And if she concurred, along with others, that non-elected banking professionals made decisions in lieu of political professionals, she nonetheless refused to believe that the same was true of the military and the police, whose professional connections she did not see, and which she persisted in imagining as subordinate to national politicians. See Strange, The Retreat of the State. 8 Anderson, Policing the World, Anderson et al. Policing the European Union, Bigo, Polices en Réseaux; Bigo, ‘Liaison officers in Europe’, 67–100; Nogala, ‘Le marché privé de la sécurité’, 65–87; Deflem, ‘Bureaucratization and social control’, 87–109; Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order.

42 D. Bigo 9 Anderson, Frontiers, Bigo, ‘Security, borders, and the State’, pp. 63–79; Walker, ‘European integration and European policing’, pp. 92–114. 10 Bigo, Polices en Réseaux. 11 These studies were conducted by the team of the Centre of Studies of Conflicts and the ELISE network. Online. Available www.conflits.org. 12 R.B.J. Walker’s reading on this point in Inside/Outside is particularly important because it reminds us of the extent to which the analytical grid differentiating between inside and outside that our analyses snap to so ‘intuitively’ is the product of the thought of the state, the logic of academic disciplines, and the symbolic practices and profits established by this differentiation. He shows that a different conception of politics in terms of flux and field allows us both to bring together categories of practices that had been otherwise assigned to a space of inside or outside (to the detriment of analysis) and to differentiate these practices otherwise. My analysis is strongly indebted to his work. See Walker, Inside/Outside. 13 Nadelmann, Cops across Borders. For a more detailed and critical analysis, see Bigo, ‘Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage de Nadelmann’, 167–173. 14 In other contexts, I have explored interpenetration between the respective sectors that overlap across various social universes, the loss of the reference marks and the borders of the actors, the blurring of identities. See, for instance, Bigo, ‘The Möbius ribbon of internal and external security(ies)’, pp. 160–184. 15 Due to space constraints, I do not list the practical collaborations between different police forces at the European level. Many previous works have done this; my priority is rather to suggest how understanding the methodological and theoretical implications of collaboration among European police can benefit our analysis. 16 Tournier, ‘La délinquance des étrangers en France’, pp. 133–162; Tsoukala, ‘Looking at migrants as enemies’, pp. 161–192; Wacquant, ‘Des ennemis commodes’, 63–67; Dal Lago, Non-Persone. 17 For instance, the banlieues (French disadvantaged suburbs), or declining city centres. 18 Bigo, ‘Europe passoire et Europe forteresse’, pp. 80–94. 19 Lahave, ‘Immigration and the State’, 675–694; Guiraudon, ‘De-nationalizing control’, pp. 121–149; Guiraudon, ‘Les compagnies de transport dans le contrôle migratoire à distance’, 124–147. 20 I am indebted to Laurent Bonelli for drawing my attention to the way these two types of control are polarized; once we realize that, it is impossible to see the national police as a unique, stand-alone profession. See Monjardet, Ce que Fait la Police. 21 Cultures & Conflits: ‘Circuler, enfermer, éloigner’. 22 See graphics in the appendix. 23 For instance, if the immigrant tends to exist as the common adversary of police, military and politicians, this is not because he is designated as such by global consensus. This seeming convergence is actually the effect of different modes of insecurity that converge to make him intelligible as a subject of security (for the police, with regard to crime, terrorism, drugs; for the military, with regard to subversion, grey zones; for the press, economically through unemployment, demographically through the birth rate and the fear of racial-ethnic mixing, etc.). The discourse on integration becomes itself a line of security insofar as it is concerned with assimilating people and not developing them, in the interest of precluding future opposition. This change in immigration is not simply a change in perception, discourse or public policy. Above all, it derives from concrete practices, related to transformations of practical knowledge (know-how) and technologies. If we want to analyse such transformations in

Globalized (in)security 43

24 25

26 27 28

knowledge, we need first to re-link them to actual practices rather than turning first to the second-order rationalizations that agents retroactively read into their practices. In other words, we need to observe face-to-face relations where the impact of technologies actually used counts more than the representations, perceptions and discourses that agents attribute to their respective roles. See Dal Lago, Non-Persone; Palidda, Polizia Postmoderna; Palidda, ‘La construction sociale de la déviance et de la criminalité parmi les immigrés’, pp. 231–266; Butterwegge, ‘Mass media, immigrants and racism in Germany’, 203–220; Tsoukala, ‘Le contrôle de l’immigration en Grèce dans les années quatre-vingt-dix’, 51–72; Huysmans, ‘Migrants as a security problem’, pp. 53–72; Wacquant, ‘Des ennemis commodes’; Heisler, ‘The transnational nexus of security and migration’; Bigo, ‘Security and immigration, toward a critique of the governmentality of unease’, Alternatives, 2002, 27, 63–92. Bourdieu and Wacquant, Réponses, p. 78. We could also mention the work of Graham Allison on the second and third models, as well as Bourdieu’s sociological work. Allison’s work is a more detailed analysis of the mechanisms of struggle and allows a better comprehension of the fluidity of subject positions. See Allison and Zelikow, Essence of Decision. In particular, see the competitions that take place around fluid borders and the open-ended missions that characterize the colonizing activities of the agencies. See the contribution of C. Olsson in this volume. Transatlantic collaboration on antiterrorism, new alliances and revival of a different NATO. To give an example at the European level, the exacerbation of struggles at the national level led the actors involved in them to put pressure on international contacts to triumph nationally. In order to understand the Europeanization of this phenomenon and its impact, we have to see how the alliances made beyond national borders to promote a certain conception or style of police within these borders exert force on the more aggregate Europeanization process. The French national police, namely its services involved in counterterrorism, have been able to use Europeanization as an opportunity to reinforce their power and, in some cases, to free themselves from the classical domains of counter-espionage. The connections are passed from central service to central service with an attempt to be the sole interlocutor of the foreign agency. On the other hand, the late arrivals of the gendarmes have formed connections at the local level, thereby profiting from their manpower at the borders, and have played the card of the transborder, working with the police of the Länder, themselves opposed to the BKA (German Federal Criminal Police Office) working with French police. The historicity of this context is important. Contrary to what a quick reading of Allison suggests, these struggles are not maintained in perpetuity by an economy of personal desires or by their being structurally inherent to bureaucracies, but by the dynamic relation that emerges from their reciprocal trajectories and knowledge, practical knowledge and technologies that they employ. The dynamic of struggles takes on the particular configuration of the field that tends to recompose the process of (in)securitization, by reconciling the military and police, and thus the modification of their relative distance. What is necessary is to persuade politicians that struggles over budgets, missions, and legitimacy are the most fruitful areas for managing transnational threats. Here, the determining factors are the trajectories of the agencies, in particular those that form new networks out of formerly unconnected agencies. This is the case with the gendarmeries that bridge the police and military worlds, or the judges, who connect the police and judiciary worlds, or alternatively, the investigative case of customs agents in the war on

44 D. Bigo

29

30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37 38

drugs, who create bridges between the police and the various economic imperatives that privilege the free circulation of goods. The interests of these intermediary agencies in linking these two sorts of universes are opposed to the interests of the most traditional agencies and, inside the latter, to the interests of those who have everything to lose, such as those devoted to deterrence in the military and the public security police within the police. Thus the position of the actors, and still more their trajectories, tend to determine the positions they adopt, the types of discursive registers they will use and the kinds of rhetoric they mobilize for their struggle, making them effectively blind to their actual similarities and common interests. On the idea of the collusive transaction, see Dobry, Sociologie des Crises Politiques. At the national level, the French police in Algeria was subject to these transactions. At the EU level, the conflict between the Council and the Commission in the frame of the third pillar (JHA pillar of the EU) also reflects on occasion these conflicts. For the moment, this approach of relations between the different fields is not sufficiently analysed. Bourdieu’s research on a rate of conversion of the capital via a field of the state is scarcely convincing and is confined by its dependence on the thinking of the nation-state. Dobry’s work is without doubt the most pertinent and appropriate for analyzing these transnational dynamics of domination, but it would be necessary to take the analysis beyond its current domain of multi-sectorial mobilization. Both these analyses contribute to our analysis by showing how untenable is the image of politics conducted by national governments in opposition to one another under a European umbrella. This sort of analysis forces us to question the autonomy of the most powerful actors in the field of security, who are political actors in the same sense as the bankers analysed by Susan Strange. Her analysis, in turn, provokes us to reflect on the limited capacities of the plan of security defined as local and undertaken by professional politicians. Ocqueteau, ‘Polices privées, sécurité privée’, 72–99; Nogala, ‘Le marché privé’. Operations that may consist of classing, sorting, filtering, excluding, profiling or enclosing. See the contribution of A. Tsoukala in this volume. Foucher, Fronts et Frontières. On the relations between the structure of the EU and its ‘stateness’, see Caporaso, The Elusive State; Kleinman, A European Welfare State? Conventionally, each time the border is rethought it is conceived at another level, as a more global entity, enclosing space. In contrast to this, I propose to think of the transversal nature of the border as a state of non-closure, like the topology of the Möbius strip. See Bigo, ‘The Möbius ribbon of internal and external security(ies)’; Balibar, L’Europe, l’Amérique, la Guerre. It is not a question of a series of autonomous, rational fields, but of a field in which, for example, the strategic decisions of the BKA have an impact on the German institutions of the BGS but also on the French PJ or the Italian DIA by a series of mediations such as those I have described. See Bigo, Sécurité Intérieure, Implications pour la Défense. See the contribution of E.-P. Guittet in this volume. Terrorism, organized crime, with the development of biometrics, huge databases of surveillance, change in airports, traditional war, state-building and reconstruction of democracy. Here I acknowledge the critique of Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan. They have argued that the field of security, as I had defined it in Polices en réseaux, was too limited and placed too much stress on the relations between essentially bureaucratic agencies, creating thus a ‘fixed point’. Consequently, they argued, it was necessary to depart from the semantic network created by points of ref-

Globalized (in)security 45 erence explicitly citing security, and extend the analysis to include private actors. 39 The dynamic of the field of security tends to constantly enlarge itself, but it can of course also diminish. It is possible to desecuritize. One problem that results thus is that of ‘holes’ created in space, or the ‘differences in pressure’ that the undertow of these structures creates. Space is not homogenous to the borders of the field. This is both true in terms of activities and in geographic terms. Rather than resembling a sphere, the field resembles the topology of a French gruyère. I owe this idea to the paper presented by John Crowley at the military school of Saint-Cyr Coëtquidan on the forms of contemporary security, and the English terminology itself to Jon Solomon. This topology of the hole, or gruyère, should be connected to the idea of the Möbius ribbon. 40 The idea of transversal field or network has to be connected to the Foucaldian notion of dispositif. As first explained and further repeated by Foucault ‘Le jeu de Michel Foucault’, 10 and Dits et Ecrits III: 299: translated by Grosrichard, A. as ‘The confession of the flesh’, pp. 194–195, a dispositif is: [F]irstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical and moral propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of that apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. Secondly, what I am trying to identify in this apparatus is precisely the nature of the connection that can exist between these heterogeneous elements. Thus, a particular discourse can figure at one time as the program of an institution, and at another it can function as a means of justifying or masking a practice which itself remains silent, or as a secondary reinterpretation of this practice, opening out for it a new field of rationality. In short, between these elements, discursive or non-discursive, there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of function which can also vary very widely. Thirdly, I understand by the term ‘apparatus’ a sort of – shall we say – formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need. The apparatus thus has a dominant strategic function [. . .] there is a first moment which is the prevalent influence of a strategic objective. Next, the apparatus as such is constructed and enabled to continue in existence insofar as it is the site of a double process. On the one hand, there is a process of functional over-determination [. . .] on the other hand, there is a perpetual process of strategic elaboration. I refuse here the translation of dispositif as device or apparatus to avoid an ‘althusserization of Foucault’. 41 This term, ban, which comes from old German, both signifies the exclusion enacted by the community and serves as the insignia of sovereignty. It is what is excluded from sovereignty on top as exception to the rule and what is excluded from below as discrimination, rejection, repulsion, and banishment. René Girard has already called our attention to this twinning effect of the absolute sovereign introduced by the ban. Giorgio Agamben has developed the ‘ban’ at great length in his analysis of the homo sacer but he has continued to insist on the dimension of sovereignty and less on exclusion, and even less on normalization. 42 See the Total Information Awareness Programme renamed Terrorist Information Awareness Programme. 43 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 15. 44 Bigo, ‘When two become one’, pp. 171–205.

46 D. Bigo 45 Agamben suggests that we replace the Marxist schism between man and citizen with a distinction between naked life and multiple forms of life abstractly recodified in juridico-social identities (the elector, the employee, the journalist, etc.). He suggests rethinking politics from the point of view of the experience of the concentration camps, re-linking the two opposing sides of sovereign power and the biopolitical, the fact of adjudicating death and the fact of directing life, which Foucault had opposed. He considers that contemporary power is founded on the disassociation of forms of life and on the will to restore man to his naked life (isolated from his codified form) in radicalizing the exclusion by sovereign exceptionalism. But this thesis departs from a limit situation and, thus, exaggerates the capabilities of power and confuses its programmatic dream with the diagram of forces (and resistances). Forms of life are constantly in the process of re-emerging, even in the most desperate of cases. Forms of resistance always exist, as hidden transcripts that mock power even where it seems to apply itself in a unilateral manner. James Scott has shown the resistance of slaves, and one could demonstrate ongoing resistance on the part of refugees against the will to make them nothing but docile bodies struggling to protect themselves. See Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Their individual will, despite their denudation, cannot be reduced to the will of states, even in spite of these governmental pressures. Examples in international airports’ waiting zones and in detention centres show how the administration is led astray, flummoxed, trapped by its capacities of declining multiple identities. Refugees are only denizens in the eyes of governments and of the professional managers of unease, but in their own eyes they are citizens of multiple states or citizens of the world. See Hammar, European Immigration Policy. The ability to resist, including resistance taking place in a space like a prison or a camp, leads professionals to try to avoid these situations and to manage from a location ‘upstream’ which is not simply anterior in space, but prior in time. The film Minority Report, where the police are able to intervene even before the crime is committed by an anticipatory knowledge of the future, is the dream of this proactive police. (Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report is subtler than the film and raises a ferocious critique of this police vision. The film dilutes the force of this critique somewhat.) 46 Palidda, Délit d’Immigration. 47 To give but one example of technologies operative at the European level, multiple databases are put in place to permit the profiling of risks associated with certain individuals. Concerning crime, other than the already ageing Interpol database, the Sirene system facilitates the rapid circulation of judiciary documents and the exchange of information. Since the Amsterdam Treaty and the Tampere meeting, justice has followed in step with other security agencies and has done the same thing at a distance via networks. The Sirene network, which passes information on criminal procedures and decisions between states, puts in place liaison judges. The creation of Eurojust and the forgetting of corpus juris provoke disequilibrium between the judges of instruction and of accusation, who are able to draw on EU resources, and the suspects’ lawyers, who are confined within a national frame and have no access to this information. Yet, this point is considered secondary to the cause of speed and efficiency. The Schengen information system manages individual dossiers and functions as a file preventing illegal migrants from returning to the EU. It is not very effective at managing criminality. In fact, Schengen constantly enlarges its sphere of application under the obligation of uniform visas that acts like a norm not only in the EU but also at the level of GATT. In the same way, the exceptional possibilities of identity control in border zones up to 20 kilometres from the border generalizes itself in all countries, even in countries where the concept of

Globalized (in)security 47 legitimate suspicion envelops controls very strictly. It is hardly even contested by the police authorities in question that Schengen institutes an immigration police, that this is its priority (even though only five years ago there was a great resistance to using it) and that there is no focus on the relation between crime and disappeared persons. This link that the SIS puts in place between criminal files and foreigners’ files with respect to foreigners reaffirms the suspicion against them and focuses the attention on petty crime or minor illegalities, while making primary police and customs offences. Certainly, these techniques are mutually reinforcing and overlap intelligence bases but scarcely facilitate the elaboration of profiles. In fact, under Schengen, there are more sophisticated databases for analyzing groups that pose a risk, as opposed to keeping their movements under surveillance. The Eurodac database contains digital fingerprints of asylum seekers, as well as an explication of the motives they have given and the reasons for which they have been refused entry. The task is to prevent multiple applications but also to spot the stereotypical narratives of asylum seekers. In parallel with Eurodac, a securitized net is being developed to address FADO (false and authentic documents) that will function on the basis of information exchange concerning false documents. The idea is to invert current practice and place the burden of proof on the person submitting the document. In Northern Europe, the US firm Printrack International is pushing its services that enable tracking and automatic identification of people crossing borders, whether by cards with digitalized fingerprints in ports and airports, or retinal imprints. The goal is to control identities in the most invisible manner possible, due to the fact that this society of individuals does not like to be affected or slowed down when controlled, but as long as they do not register the act of control they do not protest. One can therefore think of generalizing in the future the system in airports. At present, the link between card, credit and information is under research; it will be the same cards containing such information, some of which will be readable only by the police and not the card-holder. Profiling done for Europol files tends to make surveillance more refined and precise rather than extending its general reach. Europol registers people who are capable of following through on their potential to commit a crime. Distinct from the Interpol databases, the entries of which are dependent on criminals who are effectively fugitive from justice, the Europol files contain sought-after criminals, suspects who have not entered yet the system of juridical inquiry, lists of possible informants, possible witnesses who might testify about their neighbour or colleague, victims or persons susceptible to being victims. It amounts here to reconstructing individual or social trajectories, marking territories or borders between populations at risk and others, analyzing and deciding who is dangerous. Here, we are at the heart of the pro-active logic. 48 Globalization divides as much as it unites; it divides as it unites – the causes of division being identical with those which promote the uniformity of the globe. Alongside the emerging planetary dimensions of business, finance, trade and information flow, a ‘localizing’, space-fixing process is set in motion. Between them, the two closely interconnected processes sharply differentiate the existential conditions of entire populations and of various segments of each one of the populations. What appears as globalization for some means localizing for others; signalling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate. Mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost among the coveted values – and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unevenly distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late modern or post-modern times [. . .] All of us are, willy-nilly, by design or default, on the move [. . .]

48 D. Bigo some of us become fully and truly ‘global’; some are fixed in their ‘locality’ – a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world where ‘globals’ set the tone and compose the rules of the life-game [. . .] Being local in a globalized world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation. The discomforts of localized existence are compounded by the fact that with public spaces removed beyond the reaches of localized life, localities are losing their meaning-generating and meaning-negotiating capacity and are increasingly dependent on sense-giving and interpreting actions which they do not control – so much for the communitarianist dreams/ consolations of the globalized intellectuals [. . .] An integral part of the globalizing processes is progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion. (Z. Bauman, Globalization, pp. 2–3) 49 Interview with Deleule and Adorno,: ‘L héritage intellectuel de Foucault’, Cités, 2000, 2, 95–107.

3

Defining the terrorist threat in the post-September 11 era Anastassia Tsoukala

The counter-terrorism policies introduced by most European governments in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks have stirred up many political and academic controversies. In the political realm, their defenders have persistently presented them as vital for the protection of the people and denied any possible jeopardizing of domestic civil rights and liberties, while their opponents have strongly denounced their resulting brisk strengthening of the executive power and the subsequent weakening of human rights and the rule of law.1 In the academic community, several scholars sought to explain this normalization of the exceptional in the Western legal systems and saw in it either a form of ordinary governance2 or, on the contrary, the emergence of a new form of governmentality.3 Others sought to address the issue at the discursive level and focused on the arguments used by the US and/or European political leaders to justify the introduction of emergency measures at domestic level and the recourse to military action at international level.4 However, the way European political actors represented the events and the participants in them has not yet been the object of any in-depth analysis, covering a relatively long period of the post-September 11 era. Most of the abovementioned studies of the (counter-)terrorism-related political discourses have highlighted some of the key features of these political representations that were resting upon a series of membership categorizations connected, for instance, with the themes of war, security, justice, liberty and democracy. On the one hand, these studies have mainly focused on the US political discourses and, on the other hand, they have been usually limited in the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001, thus not allowing insight into the evolution of the framing of these representations and its short and mid-term impact on domestic civil societies. Analysing the political representations of (dis)order in the immediate aftermath of a dramatic event is undeniably interesting but somewhat treacherous for, as Peelo and Soothill have pointed out, ‘public order is best defined at moments of extreme disorder, in which, as a community, there is a wish to make simple sense of complex and threatening events – hence “definitional debates” which follow disorder may well be dangerously over-simplistic’.5

50 A. Tsoukala However clear they may be in their crisis-managing simplification, such definitional debates cannot therefore acquire their full political meaning unless they are inscribed in the political field from which they stem and upon which they wish to impact – and such an inscription cannot be effectively studied unless it runs through a relatively long period of time. Only this kind of analysis can allow us to go beyond the accurate but fragmentary image offered by the abovementioned studies to grasp every phase of the continuous construction of the conceptual framework these public discourses rest upon, to highlight its specificities and to shed light on the dynamics of the interplay between the evolving discursive frame and the functioning of a given political field.6 If then, as it has been often argued, post-September 11 2001 developments have made visible and connected many themes that were invisible or disarticulated before,7 it is of prime importance to highlight both the conceptual frame these developments rest upon and the way in which it interacts with a series of domestic and international political stakes. How is the terrorist threat in EU countries presently defined? What are its core elements and the key themes it is associated with? Whose voice is given prominence in defining an issue? How has the threat assessment evolved since 2001? What stakes lie beneath the emergence and subsequent positioning in the public debate of the framing of the threat elements? This chapter aims to address these issues by analysing the reported in the press statements of domestic politicians, opinion leaders and security experts in one of the leading countries in the fight against terrorism in Europe, i.e. the UK. Focusing on domestic counter-terrorism policies, it seeks to highlight the key arguments used on that matter from 11 September 2001 until 12 March 2005, i.e. when the Prevention of Terrorism Bill was passed by the House of Commons. This unravelling of the key features of the threatdefining process is meant to be, at best, a mere example of the interactions at work between the political framing of a security issue and the various political and security stakes in a given country. Hence, though they rest upon a strictly time-limited frame, the findings of the present analysis aim to acquire a broader, paradigmatic dimension that, by definition, is dissociated from the effective occurrence of a terrorist attack on British territory. The data comes from all relevant articles published in the following nationally distributed upmarket daily newspapers: The Times, the Guardian and the Independent.8 The sample was collected via the electronic database LexisNexis.9 The 636 identified articles have been the object of a quantitative (thematic) and qualitative (contingence) content analysis. Only the statements put in quotation marks have been studied. Each statement has been counted once, regardless of its probable full or partial repetitions by the journalists.10 Apart from the computing of the statements made per year by each definer of the threat, the percentages refer to proportions of total discourses. It should be further specified that, due to rounding errors, percentages may not add to 100 per cent.

Defining the terrorist threat 51 The thematic content analysis uncovered two main themes: the framing of the threat, and the management of anxiety. Due to practical reasons, the presentation of these themes relies on a selection of quotations that are believed to be representative of the whole coverage of each theme.

The framing of the threat The analysis revealed that the framing of the threat spreads out on a multilevel discursive pattern that can be conceived in terms of homocentric circles. The first of these circles includes the core elements of the threat. The second includes a series of correlated themes, which are currently associated with terrorism though initially had no relation to it. The third includes the threatened values, the protection of which justifies the introduction of new counter-terrorism measures. It should be noted, however, that this division is made for purely analytical reasons. In fact, these three circles are frequently overlapping and constantly interacting between them. The core elements of the threat The extreme danger of the modern terrorist threat is highlighted by its inclusion in a warlike context, due to the specificities of its very manifestation (extraordinary, limitless, long-lasting, global and local) and to the ‘otherness’ of its perpetrators (morally and culturally inferior). The extraordinary and long-lasting nature of the threat, the war comparison, the moral inferiority and the cultural inferiority themes appear in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The limitless, global and local nature themes appear later, in 2002. The war comparison The war comparison theme is identified in 15 statements that are made in 2001 (26.6 per cent), 2002 (20 per cent), 2003 (13.3 per cent) and 2004 (40 per cent). In 53.3 per cent of the cases, the statements are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of the statements are made by the Prime Minister (40 per cent), the Foreign Office (20 per cent) and security and intelligence officials or experts (13.3 per cent). The others are made by the Chancellor (6.6 per cent), a Home Office minister (6.6 per cent), the Attorney General (6.6 per cent) and a member of the opposition (6.6 per cent). The Prime Minister is the sole statement maker in 2003 and accounts for 25 per cent of the 2001 statements, 33.3 per cent of the 2002 statements and 33.3 per cent of the statements in 2004. The Foreign Office11 accounts for 75 per cent of the 2001 statements but since then has been absent from the public debate. The security and intelligence officials and experts appear in the public debate in 2004 and account for 25 per cent of the statements made in that year.

52 A. Tsoukala The war comparison theme raised a controversy but the counterdiscourse remained significantly weaker. The comparison of the terrorist attacks with war is called into question in five statements that are made in 2001 (40 per cent) and 2004 (60 per cent). None are the object of further full or partial repetitions by the press. The 2001 statements are made by members of the opposition, while those in 2004 are made by the Labour Party chairman, a former Foreign Secretary and a former security expert. In 80 per cent of the cases, these statements are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. The first comparison of modern terrorism with war is made in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, which are presented as ‘a deliberate act of war by calculating groups who are formally outside states’.12 Some years later, 11 September is still considered as ‘a declaration of war’,13 a war present to all minds after major terrorist attacks (‘what this latest terrorist outrage [i.e. the Istanbul bombings] shows us is that this is a war’14) but also kept in all minds through both the regular reminder that Britain is ‘at war with terrorism’ and the frequent use of the ambiguous metaphor ‘the war on terrorism’.15 The broad diffusion of the war metaphor produces many political effects. As H. Steinert has pointed out, ‘metaphors, models or paradigms are ways of making sense of our experiences; they summarize whole networks of concepts by which we understand the world. In turn, such understandings in terms of a specific metaphor determine how we act in a situation’.16 The double association of terrorism with war, i.e. acts of war leading to a war on them, illustrates in the best possible way the gravity of the threat posed to security and by the same token justifies the introduction of emergency rules in the domestic counter-terrorism policy, insofar as wartime has always led to the adoption of emergency legislation. Moreover, as the war metaphor ‘creates pressure for unity, solidarity, mobilization of people and resources for the common good against the foe’,17 it forges not only the bond of community but also the unreserved acceptance of political leadership. Since wartime is traditionally associated with sacrifices and pain,18 people are expected to accept emergency rules as a necessary sacrifice to be made on the altar of their effective protection. It should be noted however that this association of terrorism with war is limited to the qualification of the acts committed by both sides. It does not cover the terrorists themselves, who are never considered as combatants. At the same time, the comparison of terrorism with war produces a normalization effect insofar as it draws parallels to previous wars and, consequently, includes the present threat in a familiar context of past exceptional situations. While fighting terrorism is more forward-looking and anticipatory than tackling state enemies, with a fundamentally unclear nature of victory (as success will be defined by what does not happen rather than by what does19), the terrorist ‘enemy’ is included in ‘an imaginary world in which armies are victorious or vanquished in battles sealed

Defining the terrorist threat 53 by “armistices” and “peace agreements” ’.20 The most frequent comparison is the one drawn to Nazism in the 1930s and with the subsequent Second World War. As J. Lewis has observed, the Second World War analogy is particularly compelling because, on the one hand, it ‘fits into a “good versus evil” narrative more adroitly than most of the conflicts that followed and, on the other hand, it conveys the failure of a policy of appeasement and the necessity of the use of force to defeat an evil regime’21 in the name of democracy. It is then stated that ‘the values which the terrorist attacked last week were human rights, democracy and the rule of law [. . .] the same values which inspired the British left in the 1930s [to oppose fascism and Nazism]’,22 while university graduates are urged to join ‘this generation’s war against terrorism [for] the tracking of terrorist assets by financial intelligence, by forensic accountants is something that demands the same sort of sophistication as was brought to bear during the Second World War to break the Enigma code’.23 The presence of an enemy and the expected mobilization of the population against this common enemy, another classic feature of wartime, therefore becomes an almost ordinary episode of the national history: ‘[W]e must never be afraid to be at the front of this new war [. . .]. Each generation has its own wars to fight. My father’s generation grew up fighting the Nazis and that is over. My generation grew up in the Cold War and now that is over. This is a new war, not a conventional war, which is being fought by dangerous fanatics’24 but ‘its outcome is as important as any we have fought before’.25 The war comparison theme has been a prevailing feature of the framing of the threat during the whole period studied here. The weakness of the counter-discourse is not only related to its arithmetic inferiority and limited diffusion but also to the content of its arguments. Indeed, very few voices seek to bring forth a counter-definition and to present terrorist attacks as ‘a crime, a massive crime’26 ‘against humanity’,27 ‘one of the grossest violations of humanity that the world has seen since the Second World War’.28 Moreover, the denial of the war comparison does not usually rely on a rationally explained ground. In this respect, the sole argument put forward is related to the inherent limits of the terrorist threat due to its non political, religious-motivated nature. It is thus stated that the threat posed by Islamist terrorism ‘is not comparable to the threat posed by Nazism in the 1930s and 1940s, let alone the prospect of nuclear annihilation during the cold war’, since ‘Al-Qaida’s29 real mission – to establish a pan-Islamic theocracy – is doomed to failure’ because ‘the ideology of Islamism will remain contained by the backwardness it shares with other forms of religious fundamentalism’.30 Finally, the sole comment on the ambiguity of the predominant use of the war metaphor, somewhat akin to the ‘war’ on crime, does not take into account the impact of this semantic

54 A. Tsoukala confusion on the domestic counter-terrorism policy since it refers only to foreign policy, i.e. the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. It is then asserted that [P]art of the problem of the present Western approach on terrorism is the insistence of our leaders in Washington and London on describing it as a war. As a metaphor the language of war may be a forceful means of expressing the priority our security forces should put into defeating terrorism. Unfortunately, too many [. . .] appear to have been misled by their own language into believing that terrorism can be beaten by a real war.31 The specific features of the threat A THE EXTRAORDINARY NATURE

The extraordinary nature of the threat theme is identified in 24 statements that are made in 2001 (29.1 per cent), 2002 (12.5 per cent), 2003 (8.3 per cent), 2004 (37.5 per cent) and 2005 (12.5 per cent). In 16.6 per cent of the cases, these statements are made in the immediate aftermath, i.e. during the following 15 days, of a major terrorist attack.32 Most of these statements are made by the Home Office33 (29.1 per cent), the Prime Minister (20.8 per cent) and police and intelligence officials (16.6 per cent). The others are made by the Foreign Secretary (8.3 per cent), the Attorney General (8.3 per cent), a Labour MP (4.1 per cent), a scholar (4.1 per cent), a member of the opposition (4.1 per cent) and a member of the civil society (4.1 per cent). While the Home Office is practically absent from the public debate in 2001, 2002 and 2003, it accounts for 44.4 per cent of the 2004 statements and for 33.3 per cent of the 2005 statements. The extraordinary nature of the threat theme raised a controversy, but the counter-discourse is very weak. The unpredictable character of modern terrorism is called into question in only two statements, made in 2004 by a Labour MP and a security expert. One of them is made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the newness of the terrorist threat is mentioned as a self-evident, incontestable fact. The 11 September attacks have been represented as ‘an irruption on the surface of history, announcing a break with the taken-for-granted world’.34 It is thus stated that these ‘acts of evil and horror beyond the imagination of any of us’35 are ‘the new evil in our world’.36 The abruptness of the events is further strengthened by the absence of any comments on their probable causes. Their perpetrators are totally dissociated from their historical context. They are represented as people with no past, with no connection whatsoever with a broader context of geopolitical interests and stakes involving the West in general and the UK in particular. Therefore, the newness of the threat is presented

Defining the terrorist threat 55 as so radical that the terrorist attacks are believed to be a turning point in the whole history of the mankind, ‘a tragedy of epoch-making proportions’.37 This utterly new situation obliges the governments of the threatened countries to introduce new counter-terrorism measures, liable to protect the people. It is thus stated that ‘the terrorists rewrote the rule book, and we have to do the same’38 as ‘the world has changed and our security is paramount’.39 In the next years, the newness of the threat is still mentioned occasionally as an obvious fact, but now it is specified that the threat is not limited to the domestic level: ‘there is a new form of global terrorism in our country, in every other European country and most countries around the world’.40 Furthermore, the obviousness of the extraordinary character of the threat, which underlies the introduction of emergency measures in the new British counter-terrorism policy, is not taken for granted anymore. Under the pressure of the opponents to the emergency legislation, many voices seek to specify the changes of the present landscape of terrorism. The newness of the threat is then associated with its unpredictability, its scale and its extension beyond the norms of conflict resolution and even of human behaviour. It is thus stated that ‘we do not know where the enemy is, or its numbers. We have no idea when it is going to attack, or where and how’.41 This global, highly unpredictable, vaguely definable and, consequently, hardly controllable threat is even graver due to its apparently limitless scale: ‘the modern terrorist knows no bounds [. . .] of scale’.42 Hence, it is considered that though ‘it is true we have had to face terrorist acts before, [the threat is new since] the scale now is completely different’.43 Even when it is admitted that ‘9/11 was not the beginning of terrorism’, it is highlighted that ‘what was different was the scale of the attacks’.44 The danger of the threat is further strengthened by the alleged collapse of the previous normative and behavioural patterns applied to, or adopted, by all the actors involved in a conflict. It is then stated that ‘with the new forms of terror, with the suicide bombers, there is no prosecution, there is no punishment, there are not the usual norms of social and human behaviour [that till recently formed part of a pattern where there was hope to] sit down and work out a solution’,45 through the establishment of ‘a negotiable agenda’.46 The counter-discourse seeks to call into question the unpredictable nature and the subsequent uncontrollability of the threat. On one hand, it highlights the political background of modern terrorism. Hence, the idea that ‘Islamist terrorism is mindless and unpredictable’ is denied for it is assumed that modern terrorism ‘is idealistic, bred from a distorted fundamentalist perspective on Islam’ insofar as ‘Al-Qaida’s original “mission” was to expel the communist-atheists from Afghanistan, get the Americans out of Saudi Arabia and return the Palestinians to what is now Israel’.47 On the other hand, it points out that, despite the dominant discourse, modern terrorism remains quite ordinary in its organizational aspects and,

56 A. Tsoukala therefore, can be put under control in exactly the same way as all previous forms of terrorism. It is thus asserted that the terrorist threat is not inevitable: [W]e know where to look. This kind of terrorism has a kind of epidemiology that tends to lead back to various forms of extremist preaching or mentoring. [Terrorists] do not attack out of nowhere. Nearly all attacks are a long time in gestation, and even a suicide terrorist is invariably the final link in a long organisational chain [. . .]. Everyone else within the chain or in support roles falls within the usual rules [. . .]. Target selection usually requires some reconnaissance [. . .] terrorists have to be recruited, [. . .] to get hold of explosives, [. . .] all these activities are difficult to mount without attracting attention.48 B THE LIMITLESS NATURE

The limitless nature of the threat theme is identified in 16 statements that are made in 2002 (18.7 per cent), 2003 (18.7 per cent) and 2004 (62.5 per cent). In 25 per cent of the cases, they are made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of them (56.2 per cent) are made by police and intelligence officials. The others are made by the Prime Minister (18.7 per cent), two scholars (12.5 per cent), a member of the Army (6.2 per cent) and a member of the civil society (6.2 per cent). The police and intelligence officials are absent from the public debate in 2001 and 2002 but account for 66.6 per cent of the 2003 statements and for 70 per cent of the 2004 statements. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. The ‘terrorism without limit’ that threatens the UK49 emerged as a theme in 2002. Modern terrorism is presented as limitless in both spatial and repertoire terms. In the former case, it is pointed out that ‘the sombre reality is that at home and abroad we are at a serious risk of being targeted by terrorists’50 for though ‘many senior al-Qaeda figures have been killed or arrested since 9/11 [and] the organization has been damaged, it retains the capability to mount terrorist attacks on Western interests’.51 In the latter case, it is taken for granted that ‘the threat is shifting and evolving. The terrorists are inventive, adaptable and patient [and] their planning includes a wide range of methods to attack us’.52 Hence, they ‘are looking for ever more dramatic and devastating outrages to inflict upon the people they claim to be their enemy’.53 The fact that the attacks of 11 September 2001 were carried out in civilian planes did not allay fears of terrorists using nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. On the contrary, it fuelled fears of what devastation ‘genuine’ weapons might cause.54 Consequently, one of the most frequently mentioned parts of their potential repertoire is the ‘dirty bomb’ attack. The risk that ‘the next threat could be from a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon’55 is reinforced by the fact that ‘Al-Qaida groups

Defining the terrorist threat 57 would have a growing interest [in acquiring radiological, biological or chemical agents]’56 for ‘chemical warfare has long been part of their repertoire’.57 While the nature of radiological or chemical attacks is never specified, it is pointed out that ‘public health law needs urgent review if we are to control the spread of a disease following the release by a terrorist of an infectious biological agent [such as] anthrax, smallpox, botulism and plague’.58 It is also specified that such an attack would produce immensely disastrous effects because ‘public health has been neglected world-wide for at least a quarter of a century and we are vulnerable to rapid spread of bugs through airline passengers and sea container cargoes’.59 Moreover, the terrorist repertoire is allegedly limitless not only with regard to the methods of action but also with regard to the choice of the potential targets. The attractive targets for terrorists range from the symbols of the political institutions of the country, i.e. Westminster and Whitehall, which ‘are vulnerable as symbolic targets for Al-Qaida’,60 to popular entertainment venues, such as ‘the West End theatres and multiplex cinemas, and the dancing clubs’,61 everyday life venues, such as ‘the railways, the underground [. . .] buses, roads, pubs, nightclubs and the like’,62 and ‘softer targets including economic targets’,63 such as ‘the chemical and food industry’,64 ‘cruise ships’65 or the ‘information infrastructure’.66 In front of such a limitless threat, MI5 decided to issue advice on how companies and the public could protect themselves from terrorism attacks since ‘the threat of global terrorism makes it important for us to extend this advice [till then confined mainly to government] to a wider range of people’67 as it is admitted that ‘there is perhaps an inevitability that some attack will get through’.68 C THE LONG-LASTING NATURE

The long-lasting nature of the threat theme is identified in 13 statements that are made in 2001 (38.4 per cent), 2003 (46.1 per cent) and 2004 (15.3 per cent). Only one of them is made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 69.1 per cent of the cases, they are made by the Home Office69 (38.4 per cent) and security professionals (30.7 per cent). The Prime Minister accounts only for 15.3 per cent of them. The others are made by the Foreign Secretary (7.6 per cent) and a Labour MP (7.6 per cent). The Home Office accounts for 60 per cent of the 2001 statements and is the sole statement maker in 2004, but it is totally absent from the public debate in 2002, 2003 and 2005. The police and intelligence officials are absent from the public debate in 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2005 but account for 66.6 per cent of the 2003 statements. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. Since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the terrorist threat has been presented as part of a henceforth permanent situation, as ‘the security threat of the twenty-first century’.70 The 11 September attacks are thus

58 A. Tsoukala immediately considered as the first sign of an enduring threat, ‘a severe and horrendous warning of what these people are prepared to do’.71 Moreover, due to its alliance with the USA, the UK is believed to be on the top of the list of the future terrorist targets. People are thus warned that ‘Britain must develop its defences against a copycat attack and prepare itself for the next terrorist threat’72 and that they ‘are in this [i.e. the fight against terrorism] for the long haul’.73 When the theme appears again in 2003, people are still warned that ‘for the next 20 years or more we will live with the threat of terrorism on a scale we have not previously imagined’,74 because there is ‘no prospect of a significant reduction in the threat posed to the UK and its interests from Islamist terrorism’.75 But now the self-evidence of the long-lasting character of the threat is no longer taken for granted. Several voices then seek to support this point of view. In most cases, the enduring nature of the threat is linked to its high degree of organization at the global level. It is thus stated that ‘even when al-Qaida is dealt with, the job is not over. The network of international terrorism is not confined to it.’76 [This] network is far more sophisticated and better planned than any of us thought it would be. A lot of the stuff that has been done over the years has been very meticulously planned for the long term rather than the short or medium term. This has gradually worked its way up, so sometimes it is very difficult to detect until you have a real wake-up call like 11 September was.77 Occasionally, the long-lasting nature of the threat is further associated with its conceptual background. Modern terrorist attacks are ideologically-driven and legitimated on religious grounds. This double ascription of terrorism to a highly powerful system of interconnected values is believed to allow terrorist leaders to have at their disposal a potentially endless stock of young religious-motivated idealists. It is thus stated that ‘you cannot fight a war against an “ism”. It is a continuing struggle’.78 In its most pessimistic version, this assumption leads to the statement that ‘we are facing a very high level of threat. It is a long-term threat which will not go away’.79 D THE GLOBAL NATURE

The global nature of the threat theme is identified in ten statements that are made in 2002 (30 per cent), 2003 (40 per cent), 2004 (20 per cent), and 2005 (10 per cent). In 40 per cent of the cases, they are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. The more prominent voices heard in this respect come from the Home Secretary (20 per cent), senior police officers (20 per cent) and scholars (20 per cent). The other statements are made by the Prime Minister (10 per cent), the Foreign Secretary (10 per

Defining the terrorist threat 59 cent), an anonymous official (10 per cent) and a member of the opposition (10 per cent). The Home Secretary accounts for 33.3 per cent of the 2002 statements and for 50 per cent of the 2004 statements. The police officials account for 25 per cent of the 2003 statements and for 50 per cent of the 2004 statements. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. Like its closely associated theme of the limitless nature of the threat, the global nature of modern terrorism emerges as a theme in 2002. Since then, the terrorist threat has been considered as particularly dangerous due to its broad, allegedly worldwide territorial basis. It is thus asserted that ‘the modern terrorist knows no bounds of geography’80 and that, following the present explosion in communications, global terrorist networks can ‘work across national borders and outfox national security and policing services’.81 This insistence on the global nature of modern terrorism reflects the initial interpretation of the causes of the attacks on 11 September 2001. As M.V. Rasmussen has argued, in the absence of a clear statement of purpose, ‘the West constructed the attack in the context of globalization, because only in this context did the attack make sense to the West’, thus transforming its own fear into al-Qaida’s reason.82 The attacks were presented then as a brutal illustration of what the enemies of the West were capable of in an age of strategic globality.83 Yet, as the years went by without finding any hard evidence on the existence of a well structured transnational organization, the recalling of the global nature of the threat relied heavily on a more fragmented vision of the terrorist networks. Hence, it is assumed that ‘across the world the organization is a growing, not a diminishing threat’ due to ‘the rise in its global network of loosely affiliated Islamists’,84 i.e. of a new breed of young, radicalized Muslims, who ‘are more diffuse and dispersed and less easy to characterize as residual al-Qaida’.85 Presently, the threat is doubly limitless insofar as it is deterritorialized and even dissociated from its initial origin, i.e. al-Qaida, to cover potentially all radical Muslims. Boundless threats are uncontrollable or, at best, very hard to control since they have no solid form whatsoever, either in spatial or organizational terms. It is thus stated that ‘the more we investigate, the more we uncover. The networks are fluid, very mobile. They are resilient. When key members are arrested, others will take their place’86 because ‘al-Qaeda cells are self-replicating’.87 The term al-Qaida loses then its initial meaning, referring to a specific terrorist organization, to designate implicitly a vaguely defined constellation of terrorist groups that are presumed to be operational all over the world: [A]s a movement, [al-Qaida] has more actual trained militants with expertise that can be used in terrorist operations than any previous international terrorist movement that we have known. We are talking about 17,000, who can be mobilized in between 50 and 60 countries,88 while ‘intelligence sources think that around 300 of the

60 A. Tsoukala best-trained al-Qaeda operatives – the cream of the organisation – are at large in Europe’.89 Omnipresent, unlimited and elusive, the threat acquires monstrous, lethal dimensions, illustrated by many figures of speech: ‘the tentacles of terrorism are reaching out to every corner of the world’,90 so that ‘nowhere in the world is immune from [its] poison’.91 In front of such a global danger, there is no possible protection. What is left then is a totally insecure world: ‘everybody is now a target. With these ruthless attacks that we now face, everywhere is a target’.92 E THE LOCAL NATURE

The local nature of the threat theme is identified in nine statements that are made in 2002 (33.3 per cent), 2003 (33.3 per cent), 2004 (22.2 per cent) and 2005 (11.1 per cent). None of them is made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 77.7 per cent of the cases, they are made by police and intelligence officials. The rest are made by the Home Secretary (11.1 per cent) and a senior judge (11.1 per cent). The police and intelligence officials, who are absent from the public debate in 2001 and 2002, become the sole statement makers in 2003 and 2004. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. Like the themes related to the limitless and global nature of the threat, the local nature of modern terrorism emerges as a theme in 2002. Though potentially included in the global, the additional local dimension of the threat strengthens its dangerousness insofar as it turns insecurity into an everyday matter. Henceforth, domestic security is threatened by foreign agents operating in the UK but also, and mostly, by apparently ordinary nationals operating as dormant agents. In the former case, i.e. the locally operational networks of foreign agents, what is presented is the high organizational degree of the terrorists involved. It is thus regularly reminded that ‘in Britain, al-Qaeda has the most robust terrorist support infrastructure established by any group in a European country’,93 that ‘collectively, extremists in the UK present a potent force’,94 ‘plotting murder on a mass scale’95 and that ‘the second tier of affiliated, linked groupings across a much broader span of global activity might be – certainly is currently within Western Europe – the most likely sources of the attack’.96 Occasionally, it is pointed out that the threat posed by these networks is not limited to the UK, since ‘extremists in the UK have the skills, opportunity and intent to further and provide material support to al-Qaida’s campaign against the US and its allies’.97 With regard to the operational networks of dormant agents, what is communicated is the extreme difficulty, if not impossibility, of countering the threat posed by the enemy within. The infiltration of the British society by the enemy is taken for granted. It is thus stated that ‘al-Qaeda has

Defining the terrorist threat 61 become the enemy within. By working among ordinary Britons, the terrorist hydra has gained strategic depth at the very heart of our communities’,98 so that now ‘it is quite clear that there are British citizens who are likely to be as dangerous as non-British citizens and who have been involved in al-Qaida or organizations linked to it’.99 As there is no possible evidence on this infiltration, the defenders of this thesis rely solely on intelligence sources. They then assert that ‘Western intelligence sources are convinced that there are layers of deep-penetration al-Qaeda sleeper agents in Britain, Europe and North America awaiting activation’,100 or they specify that it is intelligence officials who have warned about agents ‘who are lying dormant for specific tasking from Bin Laden’.101 Later on, the enemy within thesis is directly supported by senior intelligence officials. What is highlighted now is the limited controllability of the threat due to the invisibility of the enemy. It is stated then that ‘one of the lessons learned from other modern terrorist conflicts is the ability of the terrorist to hide in plain sight, to be seen but not noticed, and to all intents and purposes to live a law-abiding existence’.102 In the present terrorist conflict, it is believed that ‘there is a threat of an attack here in the UK’103 because Western security services have uncovered networks of individuals, sympathetic to the aims of al-Qaeda, that blend into society, individuals who live normal, routine lives until called upon for specific tasks by another part of the network. Some of these individuals are in the UK.104 In the following years, the veracity of the statements made by intelligence officials is confirmed by senior officials involved in anti-terrorist raids. Presently, the thesis of the enemy within is put forward anonymously but its reliance on allegedly clear cases of terrorist activity leaves no ground for doubts. Far from being hypothetical, the threat gets increasingly closer to reality. It can then be stated that ‘this was truly the enemy within [. . .] this is proof that it’s not a question of if, it is the when and the where’.105 The unease produced by this admitting of the inevitability of the attack is further reinforced by a moral judgment, which turns the attack into an intolerable effect of treason: ‘it is one thing having foreigners doing things against us, but to have our own people – born and bred and raised in the UK – allegedly engaged in preparing a terrorist act is pretty shocking’.106 What until then was seen as an increasingly dangerous threat in security terms becomes henceforth a morally condemnable behaviour. The construction of the ‘otherness’ All studies addressing the issue of the social construction of threat have shown that the construction of social enemies is seen as essential to the very defining of the mainstream society and to the further maintenance of

62 A. Tsoukala its cohesion.107 ‘Civilized’ societies can confirm their own sense of unitary consensus by virtue of their contemplation of outcasts:108 ‘flawed beings, scapegoats, the enemy, the unknown and the damned must all be willed into being as foils to our own inherent beauty, virtue, integrity, truth’.109 Yet, these socially constructed outcasts cannot be efficiently excluded from the mainstream society unless they become the object of a rupturing process, liable to draw a clear line between the perpetrator of the allegedly threatening acts and the rest of the world,110 as part of a process of establishing guilt.111 This rupturing process allows, moreover, expulsion of all the moral ambiguity from the coercive measures to be adopted against the wrongdoers and from the values thus defended. Amidst the more frequently used discursive patterns in this respect are the irrationality and the bestiality themes. In the former case, the ‘other’ is seen as dangerous because his/her behaviour is believed to result from an unknown irrational impulse that makes it incomprehensible, unpredictable and, ultimately, uncontrollable.112 In the latter case, the ‘other’ is seen as dangerous insofar as he/she is believed to be closer to animal rather than human norms and behavioural patterns. In both cases, it is the exclusion of the ‘other’ from the mainstream society that allows the unreserved implementation on him/her of a series of coercive measures, going from various control devices to detention, torture and even death.113 The binary logic this exclusion rests upon is also a useful hegemonic device due to its ability to simplify complex issues. In setting up the ‘other’ as a ‘hyper-signifier of all that is bad and immoral’,114 it hushes the complex causes of his/her actions and, hence, avoids putting any possible blame on the mainstream society. However, in the case of modern terrorism the analysis uncovered that the construction of the ‘otherness’ does not have recourse to the usual irrationality and bestiality themes, though the frequent use of the term ‘fanatics’ all over the period studied here115 does suggest an alleged lessening of the terrorists’ reason. Undoubtedly, the use of these themes has been impeded by the religion-driven character of the terrorist attacks. On one hand, the recourse to figures of speech illustrating the bestial, sub-human nature of terrorists would be politically inopportune as liable to stir up the hostility of the worldwide Muslim community. On the other hand, the use of bestial-oriented metaphors would be inappropriate insofar as bestiality is seen as sub-human due to its radical dissociation from any spiritual principle.116 Moreover, the irrationality theme would be inappropriate in that it could not comply with the otherwise dominant discourse on the dangerousness of the threat due to the high degree of organization of the terrorists. It should be also kept in mind that the radical exclusion of Muslim terrorists was hardly expected at all in the current deliberately multicultural British society. As these extreme forms of exclusion are dismissed due to various political reasons, the rupturing process becomes less radical and relies on a double, moral and cultural, ground. It is not structured anymore in terms

Defining the terrorist threat 63 of horizontal exclusion but in terms of vertical classification. The membership categorizations of victims and perpetrators are always operational, the perception of the wrongdoers is always binary but, in this specific case, terrorists are not radically ‘other’ than the rest of humankind. They are simply inferior. A THE MORAL INFERIORITY

The moral inferiority theme is identified in 18 statements that are made in 2001 (50 per cent), 2002 (5.5 per cent), 2003 (11.1 per cent) and 2004 (33.3 per cent). In 72.2 per cent of the cases, they are made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of these statements (55.5 per cent) are made by the Prime Minister. The others are made by the Foreign Secretary (16.6 per cent), the Home Secretary (11.1 per cent), two members of the opposition (11.1 per cent) and the mayor of London (5.5 per cent). The Prime Minister accounts for 33.3 per cent of the 2001 statements and for 66.6 per cent of the 2004 ones, while he is the sole statement maker in 2002 and 2003. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. In the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, the moral inferiority of their perpetrators is brought forth through the frequent use of a Manichean image of the world, where the good lies with the threatened Western countries and the evil with the aggressors. This ‘new evil in our world’117 is thus produced by ‘a group of evil international criminals’,118 who ‘would happily destroy us’.119 The sole evidence of the terrorists’ evilness is their lack of respect for human life. It is thus stated that the terrorists ‘have no respect, however minimal, for human life, not even for their own lives’120 because they ‘have no regard whatever for the sanctity or value of human life’.121 These morally depreciating judgments rely, however, on a double paradox. On one hand, though they go together with the abovementioned broadly admitted comparison of terrorism with war, they do not take into account the fact that wartime implies, by definition, a lack of respect for human life. On the other hand, they fail to explain the difference they make between the unconcern shown by terrorists with regard to their own death and the self-abnegation that characterizes all heroes pursuing what they believe to be a high and noble objective. In the latter case, all positive approaches are right away excluded by the frequent use of the term ‘fanatics’.122 Therefore, the suicides of the attackers are not presented as heroic deeds but as morally condemnable acts stemming from unreason and the lack of tolerance. In this respect, they are utterly opposed to the perennial idea of European belonging, based around the ideals of humanism, respect for reason and tolerance.123 In the following years, the image of the terrorists as ‘people who celebrate death’124 is still opposed to the image of their victims, as aligned with life, but now the terrorists’ evilness is further revealed by the indiscriminate character of their targets. What is denounced henceforth is the

64 A. Tsoukala unconventional nature of a conflict that breaks down the distinction between civilians and combatants to inflict damages on innocent people. It is stated therefore that terrorists have shown themselves to be ‘callous, brutal murderers of the innocent’,125 ‘prepared to kill innocent people without any mercy’.126 The refusal to distinguish between civilians and combatants is even more heinous for it is premeditated. To highlight the intentional character of the terrorists’ acts, terrorists are frequently described as ‘the people who plotted, organized and carried out these attacks’,127 who were ‘prepared to go and kill innocent civilians’,128 or ‘who were prepared to wage that war without limit’.129 To further underpin the dangerousness of the threat, terrorist acts are deprived of any political objective and turned into a goal in itself, as if terrorists were solely aiming to inflict pain and suffering. This alleged affective insensibility, which is essential to the defining of the ‘otherness’ in general,130 facilitates the depoliticization of the conflict as it turns it into more classic patterns of criminal behaviour. Indeed, the denial of any political ground to the conflict allows its definition in strictly criminal terms, as is clearly shown by the regular use of terms such as ‘murderers’ and ‘kill’. While implying that the retaliation will not be a conventional war,131 the depoliticization and subsequent criminalization of the conflict create, by definition, a huge moral gap between the aggressors and the aggressed, and confirm the already established moral superiority of the aggressed against ‘those for whom prosecution and punishment hold no fear’.132 The Prime Minister can then assert, without risking being contested, that ‘you are not going to defeat us because our will to defend what we believe is actually, in the end, stronger, better, more determined than your will to inflict damage on innocent people’.133 This clearly defined moral superiority invokes a moral duty to destroy the evil but is not sufficient to guarantee the victory in a short-term period. Hence, in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, it is admitted that ‘there is a limit to the effectiveness of any strategy when people are prepared to go and kill perfectly innocent civilians in this way’.134 The lack of any moral concern makes modern terrorists all the more dangerous for as they ‘know no bounds of inhumanity’,135 they are only restrained by practical or technological limits. Consequently, it is stated that ‘we know they would if they could go further and use chemical or biological weapons or even nuclear weapons of mass destruction’136 because ‘people who have the fanaticism [to perpetrate the 11 September attacks] will not be deterred by human decency from deploying chemical or biological weapons, missiles or nuclear weapons or other forms of mass destruction, if these are available to them’.137 B THE CULTURAL INFERIORITY

The cultural inferiority theme is identified in 11 statements that are made in 2001 (63.6 per cent), 2002 (9 per cent), 2003 (18.1 per cent) and 2004

Defining the terrorist threat 65 (9 per cent). In 81.8 per cent of the cases, the statements are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of them are made by the Prime Minister (54.5 per cent). The others are made by the Foreign Secretary (27.2 per cent) and two members of the opposition (18.1 per cent). The Prime Minister accounts for 42.8 per cent of the 2001 statements and for 50 per cent of the 2003 statements, while he is the sole statement maker in 2002 and 2004. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. The cultural inferiority theme prolongs the Manichean image underlying the moral inferiority theme, insofar as it reinforces the creation of an outer space in rupture with the rest of the world, to relegate terrorists. The uncivilized nature of this outer space is usually illustrated by the use of two opposed terms, ‘barbaric’ and ‘civilized’. Terrorist attacks are thus qualified as acts of ‘utter barbarism’138 or ‘barbaric murder of innocent people’,139 committed ‘against the rest of the civilized world’,140 and seen as ‘an atrocity against all our civilizations’.141 Of course, it could be assumed that the term ‘barbaric’ designates the fierce and brutal character of the attacks. But, its frequent opposition to the term ‘civilized world’ suggests that ‘barbaric’ is mainly used in its initial meaning, which designates uncivilized foreigners.142 Terrorism is seen as a challenge to the Western perception of civilization, i.e. the belief in an uninterrupted civilizing process which gradually improves the human condition. The establishment of this view relies on a hierarchical classification of civilizations following two principles: the civilized world is synonymous with the Western world, and all non-Western countries are culturally inferior insofar as they do not share the same democratic ideals. Assuming that the terrorists are ‘deeply inimical to all we stand for’143 insofar as they do not ‘accept any of the rules or values that we in the rest of the world would recognize’,144 the counter-terrorism policies are presented as ‘a battle between the free and democratic world and terrorism’.145 As these democratic ideals include some major moral principles, related to the human rights issue, this alleged cultural superiority can easily imply a moral one, thereby discrediting completely the political and philosophical system these terrorists rely on,146 which can be then qualified as ‘wretched and backward’.147 The correlated themes In the post-September 11 era, the framing of the terrorist threat has further relied on a series of themes that, despite their initial irrelevance to terrorism, have ended by being associated with it. These themes serve as reference frames that complete or specify the definition of the threat. The content analysis has uncovered three themes, related respectively to immigration and asylum, crime, and Islam. All of them emerge in 2001.

66 A. Tsoukala Immigration and asylum The immigration and asylum theme is associated with terrorism in 18 statements that are made in 2001 (33.3 per cent), 2002 (16.6 per cent) and 2003 (50 per cent). The terrorism–immigration–asylum nexus disappears completely from the public debate in 2004 and 2005. Furthermore, it seems dissociated from the emotion produced by terrorist attacks, as only one statement is made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of the statements are made by the Home Office148 (33.3 per cent) and by members of the opposition (33.3 per cent). The others are made by the Prime Minister (11.1 per cent), two members of the civil society (11.1 per cent), the Attorney General (5.5 per cent) and a scholar (5.5 per cent). The Home Office accounts for 66.6 per cent of the 2001 statements, for 33.3 per cent of the 2002 statements and for 11.1 per cent of the 2003 statements. The Prime Minister, who is absent from the public debate in 2002, accounts for 16.6 per cent of the 2001 statements and for 11.1 per cent of the 2003 ones. The establishment of a close association between terrorism and the immigration and asylum issue raised an important controversy. The terrorism–immigration–asylum nexus is called into question in 11 statements that are made in 2001 (54.5 per cent) and 2003 (45.4 per cent). Only 18.1 per cent of them are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 36.2 per cent of the cases, these statements are made by members of the opposition. In the other cases, they are made by human rights groups (18.1 per cent), the Home Office, i.e. the Home Secretary and Home Office spokesman, (18.1 per cent), a scholar (9 per cent), a union leader (9 per cent) and a Muslim writer (9 per cent). The members of the opposition account for 50 per cent of the 2001 statements but have not expressed their opinion ever since. The Home Office accounts for 40 per cent of the 2003 statements but is absent from the public debate in 2001 and 2002. The terrorism–immigration–asylum nexus is established in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, when it is stated, with regard to the Afghans that had come to Britain in the previous six months, that ‘we cannot rule out the real possibility that amongst them are terrorists here for a very different purpose and we do need to regain control of that process if we are to protect ourselves from international terrorists’.149 Henceforth, immigrants and especially asylum seekers ‘stand accused of playing a “fifth column” role on behalf of the global terrorist network’.150 The potential threat they pose to domestic security cannot be countered unless the government hardens its immigration and asylum policy. Criticizing the procedural slowness of the law, the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary denounce then ‘a situation in which it takes years to extradite people’,151 considering that ‘that is not justice. That’s plain monkey business with our judicial framework and processes’.152 Following

Defining the terrorist threat 67 the assumption that ‘if the New York hijackers had passed through London and we had arrested them, they could have escaped extradition by claiming asylum’,153 it is generally presumed that the existing law has created ‘a situation in which people come in and abuse our asylum procedures and are then allowed to remain in this country claiming asylum’.154 From now on, the terms asylum and abuse are so closely linked together that there is no explanation given as to why asylum seekers are believed more liable than migrants to be involved in terrorist activities or as to why foreigners are believed more liable than nationals to commit terrorist attacks on the British territory. Far from eluding these questions, the Home Secretary has recourse to familiar, easy to understand metaphors, structured around the notions of home and hospitality. Yet, following his terms, hospitality is not understood as ‘a responsibility for the other, arising as a response to the other’s fragility and suffering’,155 but as an unequal power relation leading to domination. Asylum seekers are thus identified as ordinary guests, whose host can throw out at any moment if they do not behave correctly. It is possible then for the Home Secretary to state that he is ‘determined to protect the community from anyone who is prepared to abuse our hospitality and welcome in order to plan or promote terrorism’156 because [T]his is our home. It’s our country. We have a right to say that if people are abusing the right and seek to abuse rights of asylum in order to plan or promote terrorism we must take steps to do something.157 When the asylum issue rises again, in 2003, the alleged link between asylum seekers and terrorists is presumed to be so solidly established that the defenders of this thesis feel entitled to require further measures. For the first time, these measures are required by both the government and the opposition. While the Prime Minister makes it clear that the perceived ‘rising tide’ of asylum seekers, combined with the renewed terrorist threat, is not acceptable anymore and states that he is prepared to reconsider ‘our obligations under the Convention of Human Rights’,158 the Conservatives call for all new asylum seekers to be locked up whilst the security services investigate whether they have terrorist links. They stress the need to adopt ‘a new regime which reconciles national interests with the interests of genuine refugees, and ensure that Britain take its fair share of refugees whilst allowing us to operate effective controls on general immigration’159 since ‘we are dealing with the possibility that many of our fellow citizens may die [by terrorists posing as asylum seekers] if we do not take appropriate actions’.160 Concluding that ‘a fair and rational asylum policy within the present international system [is] unlikely’,161 the Shadow Home Secretary demands that ‘Britain derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights, to underline the right of Britain to deport failed asylum

68 A. Tsoukala seekers if they represent a threat to national security’.162 This view is shared by the Tory leader, who states that ‘no person should be allowed to enter the country if they pose a risk to our security and those that do should be detained or deported immediately’,163 while warning that ‘a Tory government might unilaterally withdraw from the 1951 Geneva Convention if it could not be suitably adapted’.164 These claims for new measures go together with an enlargement of the populations thus targeted. Henceforth, the suspicion is expanded to cover all foreigners in general, regardless of their legal status. It is then specified that: [T]errorists wouldn’t necessarily come in as asylum seekers; they might come here as a tourist or as a student or get married to a British citizen. There are all sorts of ways of getting in. It’s not just asylum seekers, it could be anyone.165 Therefore, it is not surprising that after a police killing in Manchester, during the arrest of three North Africans suspected for terrorism, one of the elements put forward to explain the drama was that the area where the killing took place was ‘multicultural, the sort of area where anyone could walk down the street without attracting attention’166 as it had ‘a large floating population which had the potential of masking the activities of anyone who wanted to remain unnoticed’.167 The controversy raised by this widely established association between terrorism and immigration and asylum appears in the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001, to denounce the criminalization of immigrants and asylum seekers and to express the concern that this expansion of suspicion will disintegrate community relations and social cohesion. This counterdiscourse follows the general principle that people should ‘stop viewing asylum and immigration as a problem and see them more as a responsibility and opportunity’.168 Social cohesion would be otherwise destroyed. Pointing out that ‘in the immediate situation, the people most likely to be stopped will be Asians or those who look Islamic and black people’,169 many voices affirm resolutely that ‘law-abiding minorities [should not be] made the scapegoats simply because the enemy is invisible’170 since this could lead to ‘an upsurge of racism, intolerance, bigotry and narrow nationalism’171 as ‘xenophobia does not flourish in a vacuum. It occurs within our political system where political leaders receive standing ovations when they downgrade our minorities as bogus and cheats’.172 The impact of the terrorism-immigration-asylum nexus on social cohesion is commented again in 2003, but this time the warning relies on a sheer analysis of facts, as it is stressed that ‘in 2002, only three out of 80,000 asylum seekers were held in connection with terrorism investigations’.173 These facts also produce a change in the public position of the Home Office, according to which ‘it’s wrong to assume that asylum-

Defining the terrorist threat 69 seekers are any more dangerous than anyone else’.174 The modification of the Home Office’s position is further confirmed by the Home Secretary, stating that he is ‘deeply worried because genuine fears and concerns can so easily turn to a desire to find scapegoats’ and expressing his concern ‘about tension and frustration spilling over into the disintegration of community relations and social cohesion [. . .] about people taking the law into their own hands’.175 It is noteworthy that the legal aspects of the issues raised by the terrorism-immigration-asylum nexus and the subsequent introduction of new laws are hardly mentioned at all. The argument that ‘even the worst terrorists must not undermine our international obligation to offer asylum to those in need’176 remains marginal, while only one voice denounces the risk to amalgamate terrorists and freedom fighters, stating that [I]f Nelson Mandela had fled South Africa and come to the UK, his government would have said that he was a terrorist. We might argue that he was fighting for democracy and the rights of people who were being persecuted.177 Crime The establishment of a close association between terrorism and crime is identified in nine statements that are made in 2001 (66.6 per cent), 2002 (11.1 per cent) and 2004 (22.2 per cent). None of them is made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 88.8 per cent of the cases they are made by the Home Secretary, the rest being made by the Prime Minister. The Home Secretary is the sole statement maker in 2001 and 2002 and accounts for 50 per cent of the 2004 statements. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. The links between terrorism and crime, which have been made since the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001, constitute a permanent feature of the public debate on terrorism. The frequent association of the terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘crime’178 relies on the assumption that presently ‘global terrorism and organized crime are inextricably linked. The boundary between terrorist activity and criminal activity has become increasingly blurred’.179 Modern terrorism is seen as part of a broader criminal context, where criminal activities are no longer clearly delimited. Criminals now have multiple operational levels, and threats are increasingly globalized. Consequently, it is asserted that ‘terrorists are not just involved in terrorism; they are also involved in many other types of crime to fund and facilitate their activities’.180 Following this view, any ‘attempt to separate crime from terrorism is naive and impractical’181 as it is precisely ‘by tackling these crimes [that] we can tackle terrorism’.182 The efficiency of the counter-terrorism policy requires then the introduction of new police powers to fight crime in

70 A. Tsoukala general. These claims to strengthen police investigation powers in the name of the fight against terrorism rely on the assumption that ‘links with terrorism may only be established once a criminal investigation is well under way’.183 Hence, new police powers should be granted unreservedly because ‘there is no point asking the police and security services to investigate networks if they are forbidden to look at anything that cannot immediately be proven to be linked to terrorist activity’.184 In the next years, the link between terrorism and crime is extended to cover not only organized crime but also petty crime, urban incivilities and everyday insecurity. Presently, it is firmly believed that: [F]ear of crime and insecurity remain too high, partly because the incidence of crime is moving from the impersonal to the personal, in the antisocial behaviour and drink-driven thuggery on our streets, or in the unseen but ever-present threat from new forms of terrorism.185 What is put forward now is the idea that fears about crime and antisocial behaviour and worries over terrorism are interrelated insofar as they both challenge the government to keep on protecting public safety. If, therefore, the government manages to address domestic insecurity, people will not be as fearful and apprehensive about international threats. The Prime Minister thus states that ‘people do see a link between antisocial behaviour in the area where they live and global terrorism. They feel a general sense of insecurity and we have to take account of it.186 Islam The establishment of a close association between terrorism and Islam is identified in only three statements. None of them is made by politicians involved in the present political life of the country. The first one is made in 2001 by a former Prime Minister, the second in 2002 by a scholar and the third in 2004 by a senior police officer. None of them is made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack. However, the weakness of the statements that seek to link terrorism with Islam does not imply the absence of this theme from the public debate. The theme is present all over the period covered by this study but as the object of a counter-discourse. The denial of the terrorism–Islam nexus is identified in 14 statements that are made in 2001 (21.4 per cent), 2002 (7.1 per cent), 2003 (7.1 per cent), 2004 (57.1 per cent) and 2005 (7.1 per cent). Most of them are made by the Prime Minister (35.7 per cent), senior police officers (28.5 per cent) and the Home Office187 (21.4. per cent). The others are made by a member of the opposition (7.1 per cent) and a security expert (7.1 per cent). The Prime Minister accounts for 75 per cent of the 2001 and 2002 statements, and for 25 per cent of the 2004 ones. The police officials are absent from the public

Defining the terrorist threat 71 debate in 2001, 2002 and 2003 but account for 50 per cent of the 2004 statements. Initially, the terrorism–Islam nexus refers to Muslim people in general. Muslims are believed to be linked with terrorism either because they are actively involved in it or because they passively approve it. In the former case, the threat is directly associated with Islam, which has allegedly been engaged in an anti-Western crusade. What is perceived as a clear example of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis implies that the threat will increasingly grow insofar as ‘the wider Muslim milieu will continue to produce other terrorist groups’, with al-Qaida being ‘only the vanguard of a global Islamist threat posing the likelihood of a long-term, more or less continuous conflict with the West’.188 When Muslims are not seen as dangerous due to their will to ‘compete with and challenge the Western influence in the Muslim world’,189 they are denounced for their moral support to terrorist attacks. It is thus stated that there has not been ‘enough condemnation from Muslim priests [after the 11 September 2001 attacks]. The people who brought down those towers were Muslims, and Muslims must stand up and say that is not the way of Islam’.190 In the following years, the development of the enemy within thesis shifted the threat from Muslims in general to the specific Muslim communities in the UK. This shift is clearly shown by the expression of the belief that ‘the major worry is the radicalism of Muslims brought up in this country’.191 However, as it has been mentioned above, these statements remain marginal. On the contrary, the main discourse seeks to deny any association between terrorism and Islam. Many voices, therefore, seek to establish a clear distinction between terrorists and Muslims. This distinction, which aims to decrease the hostility by Muslim people and nations towards the UK, is made, on one hand, with regard to the objective of the current counter-terrorism policy and, on the other, with regard to the Muslim community itself. In the former case, the dissociation relies mainly on the regular recalling of the fact that ‘we are not waging a war against the people of any country or any faith’.192 Hence, people are not detained at Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons ‘because they are Islamic [but] because they pose a major threat here and across the world. In tackling terrorism, we do not tackle Islam’.193 The diffusion of the message that ‘no one is being targeted by police because of their culture or faith’194 is intensified in 2004, following the conclusions of several opinion polls that many Muslims see the ‘war on terror’ as a war against Islam, believe that British anti-terrorist laws are being used unfairly against the Muslim community,195 and feel that Muslims are ‘demonized’.196 This well-grounded opinion in the Muslim community appears to be confirmed a few months later when it is statistically shown that stop and searches under terrorism legislation from 2001–02 to 2002–03 rose 302 per cent for Asians, 230 per cent for black

72 A. Tsoukala people and 118 per cent for white people.197 The worries expressed by the Muslim community about the criminalization of young Muslim men198 are then eased by the recall that Muslims ‘are arrested because they are terror suspects, not because they are Muslims. We are going after terrorists, not particular races or religions’.199 The same reaction is produced after the publishing of the Report of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Its conclusion that ‘there is mounting evidence the powers under the Terrorism Act 2000 are being used disproportionately against members of the Muslim community’200 is called into question and, once again, it is reminded that the arrests ‘are not aimed at a particular race, religion, or group’.201 The constant recall that counter-terrorism measures are implemented following strict security criteria is grounded on the assumption that terrorism ‘has nothing to do with the true message of Islam’.202 It is noteworthy that Islam is never seen as a major common feature of an important part of the international political scene. Totally depoliticized, it is solely defined in cultural terms203 to be presented as a peaceful and tolerant religion, distorted by people pursuing other, non-specified objectives. Hence, the fight against terrorism does not target Muslims but, on the contrary, the illegitimate appropriators of Islam, ‘those who distort and destroy the name of Islam by using terrorism in a way that was never authorized by the Koran’.204 Furthermore, as A. Lazar and M. Lazar have pointed out, [T]he enemy’s appropriation of religion is thwarted in the discourse by purportedly speaking from the point of view, and on behalf, of the Muslim community at large. This is out-casting done not merely from the position of an ‘outsider’, but also from an ‘insider’s’. In this way, the enemy is alienated from the in-group of Muslim ‘brotherhood’, disowned and cast as evil from within the faith.205 By the same token, this form of discourse homogenizes the Muslim community, eroding the diversity of its religious traditions and political orientations.206 Therefore, far from being generally perceived as potential terrorists, Muslims are constantly presented as members of a community ‘the overwhelming majority of [which] are law-abiding and completely reject all forms of violence’207 since they ‘fully sign up to the values of mainstream society’.208 A clear line is thus drawn between them and the few extremists, who are unable or unwilling to share the dominant values of both the British society and their own community. The fully integrated Muslims should not be distinguished anymore from ordinary Britons insofar as not only do they not approve terrorism but also they are willing to collaborate with the law enforcement agencies to counter the terrorist threat. Already noted in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when the Prime Minister stated that Muslim leaders had

Defining the terrorist threat 73 ‘stood side by side with [him] in Downing Street to deliver not just their condemnation of what happened on 11 September but also their strong support for bringing those responsible to account and ending terrorism’,209 the law-abiding attitude of British Muslims has been regularly confirmed ever since. Their collaboration is thus taken for granted, either as a permanent probability (‘the majority of the UK’s Islamic community condemn terrorism and would alert the authorities to suspicious groups or individuals’210) or as an established reality (‘we have a very good relationship with the Muslim community in London’211). The threatened values The outer of the three homocentric circles forming the framing of the terrorist threat is related to the threatened values. These values to be protected are usually presented to legitimize the introduction of new counter-terrorism measures. The content analysis uncovered four values under threat: public safety and national security, freedom, way of life, and democracy. All these themes appear in 2001. Public safety and national security The public safety and national security value is by far the most important theme as it is identified in 28 statements made in 2001 (35.7 per cent), 2002 (7.1 per cent), 2003 (7.1 per cent), 2004 (21.4 per cent) and 2005 (28.5 per cent). Only one of them is made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of these statements are made by the Home Office212 (50 per cent) and the Prime Minister (32.1 per cent). The others are made by the Treasury213 (3.5 per cent), the Attorney General (3.5 per cent), a senior judge (3.5 per cent), the Foreign Secretary (3.5 per cent) and a senior police officer (3.5 per cent). The Prime Minister, who is absent from the public debate in 2002 and 2003, accounts for 33.3 per cent of the 2001 statements, for 16.6 per cent of the 2004 statements and for 62.5 per cent of the 2005 statements. The Home Office accounts for 60 per cent of the 2001 statements, for 33.3 per cent of the 2002 statements, for 50 per cent of the 2003 statements, for 50 per cent of the 2004 statements and for 37.5 per cent of the 2005 statements. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. The protection of public safety and national security has been frequently presented since the attacks on 11 September 2001 as one of the key justifications of the new counter-terrorism measures. Though the terms ‘public safety’ and ‘national security’ are often mentioned together,214 in most cases they are separated, an emphasis being given to the public safety issue, which alone is mentioned in 14 statements. The introduction in 2001 of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill is thus presented as a necessary step to cover ‘basic things that we need to be able to do to

74 A. Tsoukala protect the security of our own citizens’.215 The obligation of the government to protect the lives and properties of its citizens becomes the most powerful shield against the attacks of the human rights defenders, who claim that the new counter-terrorism measures jeopardize civil rights and liberties. It is thus systematically repeated that: the ‘first duty [of the government is] to protect its citizens’216; that people expect the state ‘to protect them’ in the name of their ‘right to safety’217; that ‘the safety of people is the first concern of any government’218; and that the government cannot ‘gamble with people’s lives’219 as it must ‘put the security of the British people first’.220 In 2005, the introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill gives rise to a new series of similar justificatory arguments, as it is considered that ‘nothing must stand in the way of protecting the security of our people’.221 Facing the critics against the introduction of control orders that would allow ministers to place both foreign nationals and UK citizens accused of terrorism under house arrest, the Prime Minister again stresses that ‘we need this legislation to protect the security of the people in this country’.222 Though less frequently mentioned than the public safety issue,223 the national security issue remains an important justificatory argument for the introduction of new counter-terrorism measures. In 2001, the AntiTerrorism, Crime and Security Bill is thus presented as ‘a vital piece of anti-terrorist legislation which is in the interests of national security’,224 while the restrictions on liberty provided in 2005 by the Prevention of Terrorism Bill are considered as ‘necessary to protect the country’225 since the government should not ‘put at risk the national security of this country’.226 National security, but this time together with public safety, served also as justification for the change of the government’s public position regarding torture. Following the ruling of the Court of Appeal that British courts could use evidence extracted under torture, as long as British agents were not complicit in the abuse,227 the Home Secretary stated that ‘we unreservedly condemn the use of torture [. . .] however, it would be irresponsible not to take appropriate account of any information that could help protect national security and public safety’.228 Usually the protection of public safety and national security is limited at the domestic level. Occasionally though, its scope is extended to cover also foreign countries. Due to the widely admitted global nature of the threat, the introduction of domestic legislation is expected to have effect at both the national and international levels. The measures provided by the AntiTerrorism, Crime and Security Bill are thus believed to be ‘necessary to diminish the risk of terrorist attack in this country and elsewhere’,229 as ‘the important thing is that [terrorists] don’t put our lives at risk or enable others to put people’s lives at risk elsewhere’.230

Defining the terrorist threat 75 Freedom Freedom as a threatened value is identified in 11 statements that are made in 2001 (63.6 per cent), 2002 (9 per cent), 2004 (18.1 per cent) and 2005 (9 per cent). Only two of them are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 72.7 per cent of the cases, these statements are made by the Home Office.231 The others are made by the Foreign Secretary (9 per cent) and the Prime Minister (18.1 per cent). The Home Office is the sole statement maker in 2001 and 2002 but has been absent from the public debate ever since. The Prime Minister accounts for 50 per cent of the 2004 statements and is the only statement maker in 2005. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. In 63.6 per cent of the cases, the notion of ‘freedom’ to which the statements refer is not defined in positive terms, i.e. as a freedom to act, but in negative terms, i.e. as a release from a threat. Terrorism is not perceived as a threat posed on the freedom of people to act in democratic terms but as a threat from which people have to set themselves free. Hence, freedom does not mean freedom of action in a democratic society but protection of one or more threatened rights. The public discourse on freedom becomes a discourse on fear and insecurity in front of the allegedly forthcoming destruction, and the protection of a freedom defined in such a way serves to justify the future counter-terrorism measures. In other words, freedom does not refer anymore to civil rights and liberties, but legitimizes the very restriction of these civil rights and liberties. People should accept these restrictions on their freedom in order to protect their freedom from fear. The initial statement that ‘we will take all necessary steps to secure our freedom from fear and from the threat to life’232 is thus followed by the assertion that the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Bill ensures the protection of ‘the freedom from insecurity, from fear and, of course, from taking of life’.233 Later on, the turning of a positively defined freedom of action into a negatively defined freedom from fear is repeated in a steady, though less frequently, diffused mode. It is thus stated that people have ‘a right to live freely’234 for ‘the most important liberty is the right to life’,235 the protection of which ‘is the most important consideration that we have to have uppermost in our mind’.236 Public discourses on freedom as a positive right are quantitatively and qualitatively weak. On one hand, they are identified in only four statements and, on the other hand, they are mainly diffused in 2001. In all cases, modern terrorism is presented as the enemy of the free, democratic societies. This perception of the threat is clearly revealed by the fact that ‘freedom’ is usually mentioned together with ‘democracy’ or the implicitly democratic ‘way of life’. It is thus asserted that the government is ‘determined to protect our long-won freedoms’237 in order to ‘safeguard our way of life against those who would take our freedom away’,238 i.e. against those who ‘have declared open season on all of us, in terms of organizing

76 A. Tsoukala to destroy our lives, our liberty and way of life’239 because terrorism is an attack on ‘the very principles of freedom and democracy’.240 It should be noted, however, that the notion of ‘freedom’ to which these statements refer contains a very particular politico-economic ideology, characteristic of Western capitalist liberal democracies.241 In other words, what is put forward as a universal, non-ideological value is in fact a specific ideologically constructed definition of freedom. This semantic shift allows the drawing of a clear line between the Western freedom-loving countries and the allegedly freedom-hating terrorists. Yet, this presentation of terrorists as the enemies of freedom rests upon a double silence. On one hand, the notion of ‘freedom’ to which the statements refer is never understood in the present commonly accepted Kantian sense of the term, i.e. as a rationally chosen action. On the other hand, as freedom is implicitly believed to be an exclusive feature of the threatened countries, the attackers are never seen as other men’s freedom fighters. In both cases, these silent aspects of freedom strengthen the image of the backward, undemocratic and illiberal terrorists, thus allowing their categorization as radically external to the commonly shared value of freedom and its democratic corollaries. Way of life The way of life as a threatened value is identified in seven statements that are made in 2001 (42.8 per cent), 2003 (14.2 per cent), 2004 (28.5 per cent) and 2005 (14.2 per cent). Only one of them is made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In most cases, the statements are made by the Home Secretary (42.8 per cent) and the Prime Minister (28.5 per cent). The others are made by the Attorney General (14.2 per cent) and a member of the opposition (14.2 per cent). The Home Secretary is the sole statement maker in 2001 but has been absent from the public debate ever since. The Prime Minister is the sole statement maker in 2002, accounts for 50 per cent of the 2004 statements but has made no statements in 2005. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on 11 September 2001, the British way of life is presented as a value to be protected, but its meaning is still vaguely defined. However, as the term is usually mentioned with the term ‘freedom’ it can be presumed that it refers to a living in a free, democratic society. It is in this respect that it is used to legitimize the introduction of new counter-terrorism measures, liable to ‘ensure and safeguard our way of life against those who would take our freedom away’242 as the terrorists ‘have declared open season on all of us, in terms of organizing to destroy our lives, our liberty and way of life’.243 In the following years, the way of life theme is scarcely mentioned. However, it becomes increasingly evident that it covers both democratic liberties and humanistic values. It is thus stated that ‘Al-Qaeda attacked

Defining the terrorist threat 77 America and in doing so, attacked not just America but the way of life of all people who believe in tolerance and freedom, justice and peace’244 or that ‘in the war on terrorism, we are fighting for the preservation of our democratic way of life, our right to freedom of thought and expression and our commitment to the rule of law’.245 Henceforth, it is the need to protect this ‘British way of life’246 that justifies the introduction of control orders to place both foreign nationals and UK citizens accused of terrorism under house arrest. It seems then that the term ‘way of life’ has been used to implicitly designate ‘the necessary sustaining practices of daily living’ and explicitly ‘the more particularly “cultural” features through which a world is subjectively produced as meaningful’.247 Yet, the term is far from being unambiguous. Relying on the assumption that cultures are homogeneous and unanimously accepted by people, the ‘way of life’ puts forward the image of an unreal community insofar as it denies not only cultural multidimensionality but also politically differentiated positions within one country or, in the specific case, within all Western countries. The discursive construction of this sociopolitical homogeneity allows the perception of the reality in binary terms and, therefore, strengthens the alleged dangerousness of the outcasts, who are presented as opposed to a compact system of values and norms. Furthermore, this allegedly homogeneous community is also represented as immobile. The threatened way of life is not expected to, and should not change. Hence, the outcasts are even more dangerous since they embody difference and uncertainty, i.e. a chaotic force which breaks the order of ordinary living. The recourse to the ‘way of life’ value allows then the reinforcement of the feeling of belonging of the members of this imagined (inter)national community and, consequently, facilitates the acceptance of new measures, liable to protect this threatened community. Last but not least, the ambiguity of the ‘way of life’ value reinforces the legitimizing of a similarly ambiguous counter-terrorism policy, in that the regular reference to an imagined democratic frame to be protected is essential to the alleviating of the contradiction between the protection of this value and the introduction of specific measures that precisely jeopardize it.248 Democracy Democracy as a threatened value is identified in four statements that are made in 2001 (75 per cent) and 2004 (25 per cent). Half of them are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 50 per cent of the cases, the statements are made by the Foreign Office.249 The other two statements are made respectively by the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary. The Foreign Office accounts for 66.6 per cent of the 2001 statements but has been absent from the public debate ever since. The Prime Minister expresses his view only in 2004. The analysis did not reveal any counter-discourse.

78 A. Tsoukala All statements rely on the idea that modern terrorism aims to destroy democracy. This threatened value is either mentioned alone, as the value to be protected, or is coupled with its corollaries, i.e. the rule of law and civil rights. It is then stated that the government has to ‘preserve our democracy against this new type of threat’,250 which constitutes an attack on ‘the very principles of freedom and democracy’,251 an attack on ‘human rights, democracy and the rule of law’.252

The management of anxiety As it has been shown above, the threat is framed as ‘a hybrid of boundaries and boundarylessness, of distinctions and ambiguities’,253 marked in fact by a management of anxiety and certainty. This constant overlapping of specified and unspecified zones in the definition of modern terrorism leads to the apparently reassuring, but in fact contradictory, assertion that the government can and will control what is presented as essentially uncontrollable. Though feigning control over the uncontrollable is a central political issue, vital to the affirming of sovereignty in the current world risk society,254 these reassuring statements remain scarce and are usually made by police officials, who point out, for instance, that ‘we have a record that is second to none in the world on counter-terrorism and we are confident this will continue’255 or that ‘we have massively increased the effort and resources we are devoting to security and counter-terrorist investigations’.256 Far from having recourse to such anxiety-calming statements, the government seeks to provide the public with a degree of reassurance by introducing a series of security measures, presented as liable to counter the terrorist threat. Justified by the fear produced by the threat, these measures have to be accepted, despite their inherent liberty-reducing effect, precisely because they guarantee the protection of the calm-producing security. It is not surprising then that the strong criticism of the introduction of these counter-terrorism measures provoked the implementation of a fear-fuelling strategy, which aimed to reinforce the legitimizing ground of these controversial laws. Therefore, the effect created by the fact that all core elements of the threat are presented as anxiety producers, due to their allegedly uncontrollable nature, is further strengthened by the regular diffusion of fearfuelling statements. The fear-fuelling strategy is identified in 36 statements, made in 2001 (13.8 per cent), 2002 (5.5 per cent), 2003 (13.8 per cent), 2004 (33.0 per cent) and 2005 (33.8 per cent). In 36.1 per cent of the cases, these statements are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of the statements are made by the Home Office257 (40.6 per cent) and by police and intelligence officials (27.0 per cent). The other ones are made by anonymous official sources (10.8 per cent), the Prime Minister (8.3 per cent), senior judges (5.4 per cent), the mayor of

Defining the terrorist threat 79 London (5.4 per cent) and a member of the Army (2.7 per cent). The Home Office, which is absent from the public debate in 2002 and 2003, is the sole statement maker in 2001 and accounts for 38.4 per cent of the 2004 statements and for 38.4 per cent of the 2005 ones. The police and intelligence officials are absent from the public debate in 2001 and 2002 but account for 60 per cent of the 2003 statements, for 23 per cent of the 2004 ones and for 38.4 per cent of the 2005 ones. The Prime Minister appears in the public debate in 2004. He accounts for 7.6 per cent of the 2004 statements and for 15.3 per cent of the 2005 ones. The fear-fuelling strategy raised a controversy but the counter-discourse remains relatively weak. There are only six statements that seek to downplay the threat. Half of them are made in 2001. The others are made in 2004 (33.3 per cent) and 2005 (16.6 per cent). None of them is made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 50 per cent of the cases, they are made by members of the civil society. The other ones are made by a senior judge (33.3 per cent) and a security official (16.6 per cent). The content analysis uncovered that the fear-fuelling strategy has been structured around two themes: the existence of a situation of public emergency and the inevitability of attack. Both of them appear in 2001. The public emergency The existence of a situation of public emergency is by far the more important theme as it is identified in 27 out of 36 fear-fuelling statements. These statements are made in 2001 (11.1 per cent), 2002 (14.8 per cent), 2003 (7.4 per cent), 2004 (40.7 per cent) and 2005 (25.9 per cent). In 25.9 per cent of the cases, they are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Most of them are made by the Home Secretary (40.7 per cent) and police and intelligence officials (29.6 per cent). The others are made by the Prime Minister (11.1 per cent), a senior judge (11.1 per cent) and two anonymous officials (7.4 per cent). The Home Secretary is absent from the public debate in 2003 but is the sole statement maker in 2001. He also accounts for 25 per cent of the 2002 statements, for 27.2 per cent of the 2004 ones and for 57.1 per cent of the 2005 ones. The police and intelligence officials, who are absent from the public debate in 2001 and 2002, are the sole statement makers in 2003 and account for 36.3 per cent of the 2004 statements and for 28.5 per cent of the 2005 ones. The assumption that the terrorist threat is so dangerous that it creates a situation of public emergency relies in the first place on an internationally grounded threat assessment. It is thus stressed that modern terrorism poses a real threat on ‘this country, and every other major country around the world’,258 a threat that ‘has increased dramatically, not merely because people acted as suicide bombers but because they have declared open season on all of us, in terms of organizing to destroy our lives, our liberty

80 A. Tsoukala and way of life’.259 In the current global context, every terrorist attack committed somewhere in the world is seen as a further confirmation of the threat posed on the UK so that it is possible to assert that ‘those who say there is no terrorist threat [in the UK] are living in a dream world in which there is no reality’260 and to consider that ‘the main opposition to [new counter-terrorism measures] is from people who simply haven’t understood the brutal reality of the world we live in’.261 At the domestic level, the public emergency thesis relies on the assumption that the UK is presently a prime target due to its alliance with the USA. It is thus stated that ‘the UK is a prime target, second only to the United States of America’262 and that, in any case, it ‘is a more obvious target than other European states’.263 This particular position of the country creates a state of permanent vulnerability that is not affected anymore by the effective occurring of terrorist attacks abroad. Hence, in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, the Prime Minister can assert that ‘the danger this week is the same as the danger last week, the same as the danger a year ago’.264 The permanent vulnerability of the country is neither affected by the damages inflicted on al-Qaida in general. A senior intelligence official can then affirm that: [T]here is a serious and sustained threat of terrorist attacks against UK interests at home and abroad. [. . .] Be under no illusion. The threat is real and here and affects us all. [. . .] Many senior al-Qaeda figures have been killed or arrested since 9/11, but, although the organization has been damaged, it retains the capability to mount terrorist attacks on Western interests.265 To further establish the belief in the existence of a situation of public emergency, the Home Secretary regularly mentions the presence of ‘extremists in the UK [who] have the skills, opportunity and intent to further and provide material support to al-Qaida’s campaign against the US and its allies’266 and reminds that ‘Al-Qaida and the international network is seen to be, and will be demonstrated through the courts over months to come, actually on our doorstep and threatening our lives’.267 Every police operation against suspected terrorists allows him to confirm his initial assumptions and to specify that ‘we have always been clear with people in the UK that we face a real and serious threat and have never disguised the fact that this threat could manifest itself in a number of ways’.268 When the image of the country threatened by ‘several hundred’ terrorists269 ‘walking [its] streets’270 is not sustained by police operations, the existence of a situation of public emergency is presented as the outcome of intelligence information. The recourse to this information, which is impossible for outsiders to verify, allows the privileged few who have access to assess the threat in an apparently elaborated way. However, as

Defining the terrorist threat 81 they cannot possibly breach the secrecy of intelligence, they limit themselves to diffusing the emotional outcome of this knowledge. While the nature of these emotions confirms the dangerousness of the threat, their stability confirms the permanent character of the public emergency. Therefore, when the Home Secretary affirms that ‘we are in a state of emergency [as he has] been frightened by the things [he has] been told since [he] became Home Secretary’,271 a former Metropolitan Police Commissioner admits that the intelligence reports that had crossed his desk had ‘made [his] hair stand on end’.272 The assumption that the modern terrorist threat created a situation of public emergency in the UK raised a controversy, for it justified the derogation from article 5(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights and the subsequent introduction of emergency measures allowing the detention without trial of foreign suspects for terrorism. The counterdiscourse is identified in five statements, made in 2001 (60 per cent) and 2004 (40 per cent). None of them is made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. In 60 per cent of the cases, they are made by members of the civil society. The others are made by a senior judge (40 per cent). The members of the civil society express their view only in 2001, while the senior judge expresses his own view only in 2004. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on 11 September 2001, the inexistence of a situation of public emergency is taken for granted. There is no explanation as to why ‘there is not a state of emergency that justifies the taking of such powers and the suspending of part of the European convention’273 or as to why ‘the circumstances in which article 5 [of the European convention] can be suspended do not exist’.274 The sole explanation offered on that matter is given in 2004 by one of the law lords who ruled that powers to detain foreign nationals indefinitely under the AntiTerrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 were disproportionate to the threat posed, and discriminatory because they did not apply to British citizens as well. Calling into question the capacity of modern terrorists to destroy the institutional foundations of the UK, this senior judge concludes that they ‘do not threaten the life of the nation’ because ‘whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive al-Qaeda’.275 This utter dismissal of the public emergency thesis is further sustained by the warning that the threat posed by modern terrorism should be associated with its real impact on civil rights and liberties rather than with its probable impact on public safety and security. It is then stated that ‘the real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these [i.e. the AntiTerrorism Crime and Security Act 2001’.276

82 A. Tsoukala The inevitability of the attack The inevitability of the attack theme is identified in 16 out of 36 fearfuelling statements. These statements are made in 2001 (12.5 per cent), 2003 (18.7 per cent), 2004 (43.7 per cent) and 2005 (25 per cent). In 18.7 per cent of the cases, they are made in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. Half of them are made by police and intelligence officials. The others are made by the Home Office277 (31.2 per cent), the mayor of London (12.5 per cent) and an anonymous official (6.3 per cent). The police and intelligence officials are absent from the public debate in 2001 and 2002 but account for 33.3 per cent of the 2003 statements, for 71.4 per cent of the 2004 ones and for 50 per cent of the 2005 ones. The Home Office is the sole statement maker in 2001 and accounts for 14.2 per cent of the 2004 statements and for 50 per cent of those made in 2005. In the aftermath of the attacks on 11 September 2001, the inevitability of an attack in the UK, which is presented as the outcome of intelligence information, is directly linked with the military alliance of the country with the USA. The Home Secretary states then that [A]ll those who tell me we are not [under threat] are the ones who do not have the security and intelligence information which for my sins I carry [. . .] That information tells us that because of our alliance – quite rightly – with the United States and because of our vulnerability we are at risk.278 When the theme emerges again in 2003, the inevitability of a terrorist attack in the UK appears as a probability so high in statistical terms that it can be considered as a certainty. The initial affirmation that ‘for us, in the security services, what we have to do is to see an attack as inevitable’279 leads quickly to the frequently diffused assumption that ‘it’s not a question of if [but a question of] when and where’.280 Yet, as the years go by without any attacks in the UK, the inevitability of the threat is not presented anymore as taken for granted but gives rise to a series of explanations, stemming either from intelligence information or from common sense. In the former case, a senior intelligence officer reminds that [T]he absence of an attack in the UK may lead some to conclude that the threat has reduced or been confined to parts of the world that have little impact on the UK. This is not so. The initiative rests with the terrorists. The timing of any attack is of their choosing.281 In the latter case, every attack committed abroad strengthens in mere statistical terms the inevitability of an attack in the UK. Therefore, in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, a senior police officer considers that a

Defining the terrorist threat 83 terrorist attack in the UK is simply ‘inevitable’,282 while the mayor of London believes that: [I]t would be miraculous if, with all the terrorist resources arranged against us, terrorists did not get through, and given that some are prepared to give their own lives, it would be inconceivable that someone does not get through to London [. . .] we would be fools to assume we will always be able to stop terrorists.283 Despite this ‘normalization of the perceived threat through the portraying of a constantly high level of danger’,284 the credibility of the inevitability of the attack thesis is challenged by the absence of any attacks in the UK. Hence, the veracity of the thesis is indirectly confirmed by many heightened security alerts and, above all, by the mentioning of thwarted attacks. The belief that ‘attacks in Britain have been thwarted in the past three years’285 is thus widely shared by many security officials, who point out that ‘the public do not see the successes [of anti-terrorist officers], the attacks which have been thwarted’,286 and even by the mayor of London, who states that ‘we have intercepted four attempts that were under plan to actually cause mayhem and take life in this city’.287 The inevitability of attack was hardly controversial at all. The counterdiscourse is identified in only one statement, made in 2005 by a security official, who denounces the reasoning followed by intelligence officials. Calling into question the arbitrary links made between fragmented information in order to transform it into coherent and comprehensive intelligence information, he points out that ‘just because they [i.e. some Muslims] have been to training camps does not mean to say they are going to be a suicide bomber’.288

Concluding remarks The findings of the research reveal that the definition of the terrorist threat in the post-September 11 era rests upon a mutually-reinforcing, multilevel framing of the threat (including its core elements, some correlated themes and the threatened values), and a fear-fuelling strategy. In all cases, the presentation of the threat-defining elements highlights the dangerousness of modern terrorism by constantly pointing out, directly or indirectly, its uncontrollability. Though called into question by some politicians and security analysts, this uncontrollability is presented as the result of the alleged omnipresent, unpredictable, enduring and infinite nature of the threat, i.e. of a structurally fear-producing pernicious phenomenon. The fear-fuelling effect thus produced is further reinforced by the establishment of an essentially fear-fuelling strategy that aims to justify the present counter-terrorism policy. It is noteworthy that the fearfulness of modern terrorism does not rest upon any correlated theme as, in spite of their

84 A. Tsoukala initial vigour, the importance of the correlated issues has gradually waned away. On the contrary, it does rely on a construction of the ‘otherness’ process and on an extensive use of war metaphors in order to further stress the extreme dangerousness of the threat and to make acceptable the introduction of any measure allegedly liable to counter the danger. The research reveals also the existence of a series of patterns followed by the definers of the threat while they were framing it, and while they were managing the relevant anxiety. These patterns are closely related to the emergence and further positioning of each theme in the public debate, to the identity of the voices given prominence in the representation of each theme, and to the evolution of the threat assessment. The emergence and further positioning of the themes in the public debate The analysis uncovers that, apart from the public emergency theme, all the themes that appear in 2001 fall sharply or even disappear in 2002. Apart from the war comparison and the extraordinary nature of the threat, all the themes related to the core elements of the threat rise in 2003. In contrast, apart from the immigration, the way of life and the inevitability of attack, all the themes related to the threatened values, to correlated issues, and to the fear-fuelling strategies fall in 2003. Lastly, apart from the global, local and long-lasting nature of the threat and the cultural inferiority, all themes rise significantly in 2004. Though it is not possible to have a comprehensive image of the positioning of the themes in 2005, the peaks reached by the fear-fuelling themes and the public safety value in the beginning of the year suggest that these themes may hold an important place in the 2005 public debate. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that only the war comparison, the moral inferiority, the cultural inferiority, the democracy and the fearfuelling themes are frequently put forward in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack. The voices given prominence in the defining of the issue The findings of the research show that the war comparison, the moral inferiority and the cultural inferiority themes are essentially defined by the Prime Minister and, to a lesser degree, by the Foreign Secretary. The democracy theme is mainly defined by the Foreign Office. All the other themes are primarily defined by the Home Office and, to a lesser degree, by security officials and the Prime Minister.289 The Home Office is a powerful definer in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks of the long-lasting nature of the threat, the immigration-asylum-terrorism nexus, the crime-terrorism nexus, all the threatened values (apart from democracy) and all the fear-

Defining the terrorist threat 85 fuelling themes. Its voice has become prominent again since 2004 but the defined themes have changed. The Home Office now plays an important role in the defining of more core elements of the threat (extraordinary, long-lasting and global nature) but its influence in the defining of the threatened values has been limited to the public safety and national security ones. It remains, however, a powerful definer of the crime–immigration nexus and of all the fear-fuelling themes. The security officials appear in the public debate mainly after 2003. Since then, they have become major definers of all the core elements of the threat that are related to a threat assessment, i.e. the war comparison and the limitless, long-lasting, global and local nature of the threat, and of all the fear-fuelling themes. They are totally absent from the defining of the construction of the ‘otherness’ elements and of the threatened values. The counter-discourse is generally very weak. Among the core elements of the threat, only the war comparison and the extraordinary nature of the threat have raised a controversy. There are no critical comments on the threatened values or the crime-terrorism nexus. Actually, the more controversial issues have been the immigration-asylum-terrorism nexus and the fear-fuelling public emergency theme. These two themes are also the only ones to be criticized by members of human rights groups. The evolution of the definition of the threat The findings of the research show that the definition of the threat has changed since 2001 with regard both to its elements and to their representation. In the former case, three of the core elements of the threat, i.e. the limitless, global and local nature, appear later, in 2002, while one correlated theme, i.e. the immigration-asylum-terrorism issue, has disappeared since 2003. In the latter case, the representation of most of the threat-defining elements has significantly changed since 2001. The more frequently observed change is the presentation of rationally grounded explanations for some of the till then taken-for-granted themes. Thus explained are: the extraordinary and long-lasting nature of the threat; the moral inferiority of the terrorists; the way of life value; and the inevitability of the attack fear-fuelling theme. In some other themes, the lack of any significant correlation between their representation and everyday reality led to a sharp reconfiguration of their meaning. Hence, the initial belief in the existence of a worldwide and highly organized terrorist network structured around al-Qaida, gives way to a more fragmented and eventually locally grounded vision of the threat, structured around some vaguely defined and loosely affiliated groups. A similar transition from the global to the local is also observed in the definition of the public emergency fearfuelling theme, which has been increasingly grounded on the challenge posed by domestic terrorists. Finally, some other themes have changed to, arguably, comply with the needs raised by domestic political stakes. Thus,

86 A. Tsoukala before its disappearance, the immigration-asylum-terrorism nexus was extended to cover all foreigners, while the crime-terrorism nexus was extended to cover also the petty crime and urban incivilities issues. On the contrary, the representation of the war comparison, the limitless nature of the threat, the cultural inferiority of the terrorists and the threatened values of public safety and national security, freedom and democracy has remained essentially the same throughout the period covered by the study. A synthesis of the findings The image thus resulting of the defining of the threat has both expected and unexpected aspects. Indeed, the framing of the threat process follows a classic multilevel pattern, structured around the definition of the core elements of the threat, the underpinning of some correlated issues, and the highlighting of the threatened values. The establishment and broader acceptance of this process is reinforced by the adoption of a fear-fuelling strategy. Generally speaking, this pattern has already been observed in other cases of social construction of threat, related to a variety of security issues from immigration and asylum to football hooliganism and paedophilia. What the analysis reveals as new is the way the construction of the ‘otherness’ is represented. Far from following the classic pattern of the exclusion of the ‘other’ from mainstream society, the us/them dichotomy relies on a classification of the ‘other’ in superiority/inferiority terms. Dismissing of the irrationality and bestiality themes does not only contribute to the construction of a coherent image of the threatening ‘other’, but also allows the definers to avoid or at least to lessen the hostility of the international Muslim community and to continue complying with the dominant domestic multicultural pattern. The present case study shows that the construction of the ‘otherness’ as a necessary condition for accepting the introduction of a coercive policy against the ‘other’ follows strictly rational criteria. The threat definers adapt their arguments to the specificities of the threat to be countered, seeking to strike a balance between the drawing of the necessary exclusion line and the challenges posed by various social and political stakes. The research also confirms the findings of previous studies on ‘call to arms’ discourses, insofar as it identified the ‘appeal to a legitimate power source that is external to the orator and which is presented as inherently good’.290 In the specific case of modern terrorism, this legitimating power source is the nation-state. This is shown by the extensive use of national anthropomorphic figures of speech291 stressing the identity of people and nation, by the importance of the place held by the sovereignty related value of public safety and national security, by the weakness of the place held by the democracy related values, i.e. freedom and democracy and, as discussed below, by the significance of the correlation established between the appearance of some themes and sovereignty related stakes.

Defining the terrorist threat 87 Generally speaking, the analysis offered no surprise as to the identity of the voices given prominence in defining each issue. As one might have reasonably expected, the framing of the situation, i.e. the description of its nature and the grounding of the future actions to be taken, is made by the head of the government. Indeed, the findings of the research show that the framing of the warlike context, into which are included all the other threat-defining elements, and the construction of the ‘otherness’, on which the implementation of coercive measures against the wrongdoers must rely, are made mainly by the Prime Minister. This general framing of the situation is furthermore charged with emotion as it is often made in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on European people and interests. What is less expected, however, is the increasingly strengthened position of the Home Office as a threat definer. It is not surprising at all to see the Home Office becoming the prime definer of all the fear-fuelling themes and of many security (allegedly) related issues, i.e. the long-lasting nature of the threat, the immigration–asylum–terrorism nexus and the crime– terrorism nexus. However, it is surprising to see the Home Office being the prime definer of freedom. It is also surprising to see the Prime Minister becoming the major definer of the threatened values only in 2004 and 2005. The prevailing place held by the Home Office in the defining of the terrorist threat arguably reflects a recent change in the balance of power within government due to the emergence of the terrorist threat, which has turned the Home Office into a much more powerful department. Dealing with terrorism has required different skills and know-how from the everyday functions of the usual personnel working, for instance, on domestic delinquency issues. In order to cope with what was perceived as an exceptional and highly unpredictable security threat, Home Office officials made a distinction between the functions that aim at managing the foreseeable and those that seek to face the unpredictable. The rise of this new category of officials extended the range of action of the Home Office beyond its till then ordinary borders. Moreover, the opposition of the Home Office to the creation of a new ministry to deal with the terrorism issues reinforced its development and consequently strengthened its influence, even in the Cabinet, as is shown by the proliferation of cabinet committees and the higher budgets allowed to its missions. This growing importance of the Home Office within government led also to the weakening of the till recently equal Foreign Office. This change in the balance of power between the two departments is clearly shown by the growing marginalization of the Foreign Office in the threat-defining process and the subsequent strengthening of the Home Office that emerges as the protector of public safety and national security. Furthermore, while MI5 is in full expansion, MI6 has gained in autonomy as it loosened its prior tight links with the Foreign Office to work more closely with the Ministry of Defence and to answer more directly to the Prime Minister. This security-based definition of most of the threatened values can

88 A. Tsoukala easily explain the prominence given to the negative definition of freedom, and the subsequent marginalization of its positive, democracy-related aspects. At the same time, the dominant place held by the Home Office in the defining of this issue can be explained as the inevitable result of the broadly established belief in the existence of a tension between security and democracy.292 If human rights are believed to be opposed to security, if the protection of the former is believed to be operating at the expense of the latter, then they cannot possibly be well classified amongst the values to protect and, even when they are mentioned, they are mainly defined according to a security-oriented vision of the society. It is noteworthy, however, that this notion of security is not broadly enough defined to cover the wider range of economic, social, civil and political rights contained in the notion of human security. Structured around the sovereigntyrelated values of public safety and national security, it cannot possibly include the indivisibility of security and human rights. Hence, its definers refute the very idea that ‘the infringement of fundamental rights signifies the presence of insecurity’.293 The establishment of such a security-oriented definition of the threatened values is further facilitated by the increasingly influential position of the security officials and the extremely weak position of civil society in the public debate. While the security officials have since 2003 sought to play an important role in defining the core elements of the threat and the fearfuelling public emergency theme, civil society is present when it comes to defending civil rights and liberties. The present study does not allow us to understand whether this marginal position of the civil society is due to a rational choice made by its members or to a media-based strategy of shaping the direction and intensity of a controversy. In any case, however, the absence of the civil society from the definition of all the core elements of the threat and of all the threatened values limits, by definition, the range and the impact of its reaction. In other words, the defence of civil rights and liberties cannot possibly be efficient when the defenders of these values are not involved in the definition of the conceptual frame that legitimates the jeopardizing of these freedoms. If their reactions are solely limited to the outcome of the threat-defining process, they cannot but remain fragmented and, regardless of the correctness of their legal grounds, structurally unable to counter the dominant discourse. The findings of the research have also shown a significant correlation between the evolution of the threat-defining process and a series of domestic political stakes. In fact, the emergence and further positioning of each theme in the public debate cannot be understood unless we take into consideration some major stakes lying beneath the present configuration of the domestic political and security fields. The fact that all the threatdefining elements fell sharply or even disappeared in 2002 may then be plausibly associated with the introduction of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, thereby suggesting that the framing of the threat

Defining the terrorist threat 89 and the management of the anxiety strategies have mainly aimed to create a fear-based context in order to justify the introduction of new counterterrorism measures. Domestic and international political stakes seem also to determine the fluctuations of the positioning of the threat-defining themes in 2003. Thus, though the Iraq war was not explicitly associated with terrorism, the perspective of, and the effective involvement of the UK in it have had a strong impact on the strategies followed by the definers of the terrorist threat, who put forward the inevitability of the terrorist attack and most of the core elements of the threat, i.e. all themes potentially related to international issues, while they leave aside almost all the themes related to domestic issues, i.e. crime, the threatened values and public emergency. They also leave aside the core elements of the threat that had no influence on the justification of the involvement in the Iraq war, i.e. the war comparison and the newness of the threat themes, but stress the way of life theme, i.e. a nationally but also internationally threatened value. The 2003 positioning of the threat-defining themes seems also to be influenced by the reorganization of the intelligence services, and the subsequent sharp budget increase of the security and intelligence services, which in turn allowed the recruiting of new staff. Though structural changes of the security and intelligence services were underway before 11 September 2001, their acceleration and extension in the post-September 11 era confirmed the new, strengthened position of these services in the security field and, consequently, led to the adoption of status maintenance strategies. The emergence of the police and intelligence officials as important definers of the public emergency theme and of all the elements related to the domestic presence of the threat, i.e. its long-lasting, limitless, global and local nature, cannot then be dissociated from their need to justify, confirm and further strengthen their newly acquired status.294 The reconfiguration of the domestic security field may further explain the increasingly powerful position of the police and intelligence officials in the 2004 public debate. Arguably, it is their wish to maintain and improve their status that lies beneath their current transformation into major definers of most of the core elements of the threat, and of all the fear-fuelling themes. The same wish may also underlie their attempts to anticipate any critics of non-merited budget granting, due to the lack of any attack in the UK, by obtaining a high-profile media coverage of all anti-terrorist police operations and by regularly evoking cases of foiled attacks. However, despite their importance, these stakes cannot possibly explain all the fluctuations of the 2004 positioning of the threat-defining themes. The nature of these other stakes is clearly shown by the very timing of the 2004 statements, which are made mostly in March, i.e. in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, and in November and December, i.e. at the beginning of the 2005 election campaign, and in view of the introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and of a biometric identity scheme. The

90 A. Tsoukala rise in the war comparison and moral inferiority themes, which are strongly correlated to the occurrence of major terrorist attacks, and the important place held by the global nature of the threat theme may then be plausibly associated with the Madrid bombings. As for the rise in the other elements of the threat, the threatened values and the fear-fuelling themes, it may once again confirm the abovementioned hypothesis that the framing of the threat and the management of the anxiety strategies have mainly aimed to create a fear-based context in order to justify the introduction of new counterterrorism measures and, occasionally, to obtain substantial electoral gains. Indeed, though the electorate usually prefers parties who offer an upbeat message, it is frequently believed that people need to feel secure before they are willing to vote for the politics of hope in the future. Winning votes by trying to scare the electorate into voting for the government can be seen as a potentially efficient electoral strategy. The introduction of such a strategy seems to be confirmed by the partial data gathered on 2005, which show a very sharp rise in the threatened values and the fear-fuelling themes during the first months of the year. This phenomenon of fear-mongering by the government has often been denounced by several members of the opposition and by many human rights groups.295 The government has been thus heavily criticized for using the terrorist threat to increase the executive powers at the expense of the protection of civil rights and liberties. Though widely covered by the press, these critics could not possibly lead, and have not led to a significant questioning of the current counter-terrorism policy since, as noted above, they have never called into question the legitimizing ground of this policy, i.e. the threat-defining elements. It could be plausible to assert that the abovementioned critics have produced an effect in the public representation of the terrorist threat by contributing to the disappearance of the widely criticized immigration– asylum–terrorism nexus. The present study can neither confirm nor refute this hypothesis. However, the timing of the disappearance of this theme, just before the involvement in the Iraq war, the marginal position held by the Islam–terrorism nexus and the insistent denial of this nexus by the government and many security officials suggest that the disappearance of the immigration–asylum theme may result mainly from the government’s will to avoid the weakening of the social cohesion of the country. Admitting that the involvement in the Iraq war is liable to strengthen the hostility of the Muslim communities in the UK and, consequently, to lead to the disintegration of the British society, the government may have decided not only to deny the Islam–terrorism nexus but also to dissociate the terrorist threat from immigrants and asylum seekers. In any case, the disappearance of the immigration–asylum theme and the denial of the Islam–terrorism nexus have not had any significant effect on the defining of the current immigration and asylum policies, nor on the effective implementation of anti-terrorism stop and searches that continue disproportionately targeting young Muslims.

Defining the terrorist threat 91 The prevailing role played by the abovementioned stakes in the present definition of the terrorist threat suggests that the definitional process in fact remains closely linked to sovereignty-related issues. Yet, if we admit that ‘emergency time defines community against its democratic possibilities’,296 the challenge posed by modern terrorism should be primarily defined as ‘the need to establish a vision of society and a global order that safeguards its most basic civil liberties and notions of human rights’.297 Instead of that, the British government has established a close to permanent state of exception that keeps on jeopardizing civil rights and liberties. Based on the promise of security, certainty and safety, this situation of permanent emergency ‘brings us back to disciplinary entrenchment as protection against terror’.298 Once legitimized in that way, the counterterrorism measures tend, however, to go beyond their initial scope to cover a broader range of human actions. Though frequently denounced, this potentially limitless extension of the counter-terrorism measures is already evident with regard to both the introduction of new control and surveillance technologies and the expansion of police powers. The latter is clearly shown not only by the sharp rise in stop and searches but also by the fact that in 2003, for instance, the police twice used powers under the AntiTerrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 against protesters.299 Far from being hypothetical, the transformation of what was meant to be exceptional powers into a routine policing technique has been confirmed by the High Court who ruled in October 2003 that the use of the stop and search powers [against protesters] was not unlawful as it was justified in the light of the threat of terrorism.300

Notes 1 For an overview of the weakening of human rights and the rule of law in the EU, see: EU Network of Independent Experts in Fundamental Rights (CFRCDF), Balance of Freedom versus Security in the Response of the European Union and its Member States to the Terrorist Threat, 2003. 2 Agamben, Homo Sacer; Agamben, Moyens Sans Fins. 3 Bigo, ‘Les nouvelles formes de la gouvernementalité’, 129–161; Bigo, ‘Global (in)security’, 4; Huysmans, ‘A Foucaultian view on spill-over’, 294–318. 4 Graham et al. ‘A call to arms at the end of history’, 199–221; Johnson, ‘Defending ways of life’, 211–231; Kellner, ‘September 11, the media, and war fever’, 143–151; Lazar and Lazar, ‘The discourse of the New World Order’, 223–242; Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil, ‘On membership categorization’, 243–266; Steinert, ‘The indispensable metaphor of war’, 265–291; Tsoukala, ‘Democracy against security’, 417–439; Tsoukala, ‘Democracy in the light of security’, 607–627; Tsoukala, ‘La légitimation des mesures d’exception dans la lutte antiterroriste en Europe’, 35–50. 5 Peelo and Soothill, ‘The place of public narratives in reproducing social order’, 134. 6 The political field is understood here in the Bourdieusian sense of the term. For its first definition, see Bourdieu, ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’, 870. 7 Venn, ‘World dis/order’, 121–136.

92 A. Tsoukala 8 As these issues have been less covered by the conservative press, the left/centre-left newspapers are overrepresented in the sample to guarantee an optimum coverage of the political discourses in question. The link between the political orientation of each newspaper and the coverage of the (counter)terrorism-related political discourses is clearly shown by the fact that of the 636 articles that have been identified and analysed for the needs of this case study 177 have been published by The Times, 244 by the Guardian and 215 by the Independent. 9 Keywords: terrorism and emergency, counter-terrorism and security, antiterrorism law. It is further specified that the LexisNexis database does not supply information on page ranges. 10 The letters sent to the editor are not taken into account. 11 Foreign Secretary and Foreign Office minister. 12 J. Straw (Foreign Secretary), in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. 13 T. Blair (Prime Minister), in ‘Getting high on the oxygen of publicity’. 14 Blair, in ‘This is war, there is no compromise’. 15 See, for instance, Lord Strathclyde (Tory leader in the Lords), in ‘Tory threat over snoop charter’; Lord Goldsmith QC (Attorney General), in ‘How should Britain protect its citizens?’; Baroness Scotland (Home Office minister), in ‘Britain is conniving in torture’. 16 Steinert, ‘The indispensable metaphor of war’, 284. 17 Ibid, 268. 18 Graham et al. ‘A call to arms at the end of history’. 19 Heng, ‘Unravelling the “war” on terrorism’, 229. 20 Beck, ‘The silence of words’, 255. 21 Lewis, ‘Speaking of wars . . .’, 170. 22 P. Hain (Foreign Office minister), in ‘Draconian curbs may include ID cards’. 23 G. Brown (Chancellor), in ‘Brown will call up Enigma geniuses to hunt terror cash’. 24 Blair, in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain must never be afraid’. 25 Blair, in ‘This war is as important as any we have fought before’. 26 D. Heath (Liberal Democrat MP), in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. 27 I. McCartney (Labour Party chairman), in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain must never be afraid’. 28 B. Jenkin (Shadow Defence Secretary), in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. 29 There is no standard writing of the word in the press. The organization is written as al-Qaida in the Guardian, al-Qaeda in The Times and al-Qa’ida in the Independent. 30 D. Clark (former special adviser at the Foreign Office), in ‘The war on terror misfired’. 31 R. Cook (former Foreign Secretary), ‘The invasion of Iraq was Britain’s worst foreign policy blunder since Suez’. 32 I took into consideration the major terrorist attacks on Western people and interests that have taken place during the period studied here, i.e. the attacks on New York and Washington (11 September 2001), Bali (12 October 2002), Istanbul (20 November 2003) and Madrid (11 March 2004). 33 Home Secretary and Home Office minister. 34 Venn, ‘World dis/order’, 121. 35 Straw, in ‘Shaken Blair condemns act of barbarism’. 36 Blair, in ‘Shaken Blair condemns act of barbarism’. 37 Blair, in ‘Blunkett hints at introducing ID cards to Britain’. 38 Lord Rooker (Home Office minister), in ‘Peers warn of terror bill cuts’.

Defining the terrorist threat 93 39 Spokesman of the Police Federation, in ‘Campbell calls for urgent rise in defence spending’. 40 Blair, in ‘Britain sliding into police state’. 41 R. Gunaratna, (St Andrews University), ‘The enemy deep within’. 42 Blair, in ‘The daily threat of terror’. 43 M. Howard (Tory leader), in ‘Howard calls for anti-terror minister’. 44 P. Kilfoyle (Labour MP and former Defence minister), in ‘Tony Blair will not be forgiven’. 45 D. Blunkett (Home Secretary), in ‘Blunkett pledges to defeat new terrorism’. 46 Sir I. Blair (Metropolitan Police Commissioner), in ‘Interview: Sir Ian Blair’. 47 Kilfoyle, in ‘Tony Blair will not be forgiven’. 48 C. Black (former government intelligence analyst), in ‘G2: never say inevitable’. 49 Blair, in ‘Clarke warns of Madrid-style attack’. 50 P. Clarke (Deputy Assistant Commissioner: Metropolitan Police Anti-terrorist Branch), in ‘Police alerts and terrorism threat’. 51 E. Manningham-Buller (director of the MI5), in ‘Don’t delude yourselves about terrorist threat’. 52 Ibid. 53 Blair, in ‘The daily threat of terror’. 54 M.V. Rasmussen, ‘A parallel globalization of terror’, 331. 55 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 56 Sir D. Omand (security and intelligence coordinator), in ‘Al-Qaida is expanding’. 57 M. Ranstorp (St Andrews University), in ‘Chemical bomb targeted shopping centre’. 58 S. Monaghan (senior associate of the Nuffield Trust and deputy director of Public Health & Policy), in ‘An unhealthy defence for the public’. 59 Ibid. 60 Sir Omand, in ‘Getting high on the oxygen of publicity’. 61 B. Tillbrook (Chief Superintendent) and C. Bradford (Superintendent), in ‘Police fear Bali-style club bomb in London’. 62 Sir J. Stevens (Metropolitan Police Commissioner), in ‘Attack on London is inevitable’. 63 Sir Omand, in ‘Your computer could be next terrorist target’. 64 Manningham-Buller, in ‘Terrorists could target food’. 65 Sir A. West (First Sea Lord and chief of the Naval Staff), in ‘Cruise ships are terror targets’. 66 Sir Omand, in ‘Your computer could be next terrorist target’. 67 Manningham-Buller, in ‘Cut back shrubs, install locks: MI5 suggests antiterror measures’. 68 Sir Stevens, in ‘Attack on London is inevitable’. 69 Home Secretary, Home Office minister, spokesmen. 70 Blair, in ‘Now is the moment to stand firm with the US’. 71 Blunkett, in ‘On the brink of war: Civil rights’. 72 Straw, in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. 73 Blair, in ‘We are in this for the long haul’. 74 J. Denham (Labour MP), in ‘First the decision, then the dossier’. 75 Manningham-Buller, in ‘Al-Qaeda sleepers in Britain’. 76 Blair, in ‘We are in this for the long haul’. 77 Sir Stevens, in ‘Al-Qa’ida is far more sophisticated than any of us expected’. 78 Dame S. Rimington (former head of MI5), in ‘Ex-spy chief says war on terror is failing’. 79 B. Hughes (Home Office minister responsible for counter-terrorism), in ‘Blunkett wants expansion of MI5 and new security laws to counter terror threat’.

94 A. Tsoukala 80 Blair, in ‘The daily threat of terror’. 81 Blunkett, in ‘Freedom and security are two essentials that citizens look to the government to provide’. 82 Rasmussen, ‘A parallel globalization of terror’, 324. 83 Ibid, 329. 84 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 85 Official source, in ‘How real is the terrorist threat today?’, the Guardian, 29 January 2005. 86 Clarke, in ‘Terrorists still plotting murder on mass scale’, The Times, 12 December 2003. 87 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 88 P. Wilkinson (St Andrews University), in ‘Al-Qaeda’s 17,000 troops still a threat to Britons’. 89 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 90 Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett pledges to defeat new terrorism’. 91 M. Ancram (shadow Foreign Secretary), in ‘Terror at the Consulate: We see their utter contempt for innocent life’. 92 Straw, in ‘Terror attacks force Britain into retreat’. 93 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 94 A. Collins (Mr Justice), in ‘Right ruling, wrong reason’. 95 Sir D. Veness (head of Scotland Yard’s specialist operations department), in ‘Terrorists still plotting murder on mass scale’. 96 Sir Veness, in ‘How real is the terrorist threat today?’. 97 Blunkett, in ‘One year on: Civil liberties clampdown’. 98 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 99 Collins, in ‘Right ruling, wrong reason’. 100 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 101 Collins, in ‘Right ruling, wrong reason’. 102 Manningham-Buller, in ‘Terrorists could target food’. 103 Ibid. 104 Manningham-Buller, in ‘Al-Qaeda sleepers in Britain’. 105 Senior figure involved in the operation, in ‘How surveillance ensnared enemy within’. 106 A source familiar with an anti-terrorist operation, in ‘Arrests point to radical new threat’. 107 Erikson, Wayward Puritans; Becker, Outsiders. 108 Foucault, Madness and Civilization. 109 Capasso, Terrors and Wonders. Monsters in Contemporary Art, 7 (quoted by R. Kearney, ‘Terror, philosophy and the sublime, 29). 110 Girard, La Violence et le Sacré; Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle. 111 Peelo and Soothill, ‘The place of public narratives’, 134. 112 Tsoukala, ‘La construction médiatique de la figure du hooligan dans la presse Française’, 345–360; Tsoukala, ‘Constructing the threat in a sports context’, 372–379. 113 Foucault, Surveiller et Punir; Hall et al. Policing the Crisis; Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, Moral Panics; Critcher, Moral Panics and the Media. 114 Lazar and Lazar, ‘The discourse of the New World Order’, 239–240. 115 As is shown in the following statements: ‘fanatics capable of killing without discrimination’ (Blair, in ‘Blunkett hints at introducing ID cards to Britain’,); ‘people who have the fanaticism [to perpetrate the September 11 attacks]’ (Straw, in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’); ‘the threat posed in the long term by Muslim fanatics’ (Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’); ‘this

Defining the terrorist threat 95

116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

147 148 149 150 151 152

fanaticism and extremism that is killing innocent people all over our world today’ (Blair, in ‘This is war, there is no compromise’); ‘the fanatics of terror’ (Blair, in ‘This is war, there is no compromise’); ‘this is a new war, which is being fought by dangerous fanatics’ (Blair, in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain must never be afraid’); ‘a barbaric murder of innocent people by fanatics’ (Blair, in ‘Getting high on the oxygen of publicity’). Burgat, ‘La logique de la légitimation de la violence: animalité vs humanité’, 47. Blair, in ‘Shaken Blair condemns act of barbarism’. C. Kennedy (Liberal Democrat leader), in ‘Any curbs on freedom must be kept to a minimum’. Blunkett, ‘I’m not a bully, I’m not a scaremonger-and I’m not giving in to terror’. Straw, in ‘Blunkett hints at introducing ID cards to Britain’. Blair, in ‘The Prime minister responds’. See supra, note 115. Amin, ‘Multi-ethnicity and the idea of Europe’. K. Livingstone (mayor of London), in ‘Attack on London is inevitable’. Blair, in ‘This is war, there is no compromise’. Blair, in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain must never be afraid’. Straw, in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. Blair, in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain steps up security as terrorists aim at soft targets’. Blair, in ‘Getting high on the oxygen of publicity’. Héritier, ‘Les matrices de l’intolérance et de la violence’. Leudar, Marsland and Nekvapil, ‘On membership categorization’, 253. Blunkett, in ‘Being prepared is not the same as being paranoid’. Blair, in ‘Terror at the Consulate: We see their utter contempt for innocent life’. Blair, in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain steps up security as terrorists aim at soft targets’. Blair, in ‘The daily threat of terror’. Straw, in ‘Blunkett hints at introducing ID cards to Britain’. Straw, in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. Blair, in ‘Shaken Blair condemns act of barbarism’. Blair, in ‘Getting high on the oxygen of publicity’. Straw, in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. Straw, in ‘Fear turns to reality as al-Qaida bombers strike at British targets’. The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language. Blair, in ‘The daily threat of terror’. Straw, in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. Blair, in ‘The Prime Minister responds’. On the questions risen by the over-determination of the normative notion of exception by an existential concept of exception in the current politics of insecurity, see Huysmans, ‘International Politics of Insecurity: Unilateralism, Inwardness and Exceptionalism’. Blair, in ‘This is war, there is no compromise’. Home Secretary and Home Office officials. J. Butterfill (Conservative MP and vice-chairman of the Conservative friends of Israel), in ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’. Bauman, ‘Reconnaissance wars of the planetary frontierland’, 84. Blair, in ‘New laws to cripple terrorism’. Blunkett, in ‘Police to monitor e-mails and phone calls’.

96 A. Tsoukala 153 Government source, in ‘What we really need to fight terror is intelligence, intelligence, intelligence’. 154 Blair, in ‘New laws to cripple terrorism’. 155 Venn, ‘Altered states: Post-enlightenment cosmopolitanism and trans-modern socialities’, 76. 156 Blunkett, in ‘Indefinite internment for terrorist suspects’. 157 Blunkett, in ‘Five dissenters as MPs back Bill to allow internment’. 158 Blair, in ‘Human rights in the balance’. 159 O. Letwin (shadow Home Secretary), in ‘Immigration – Tories: Detain all asylum seekers’. 160 Letwin, in ‘Tories might abandon Geneva Convention’. 161 Letwin, in ‘Immigration – Tories: Detain all asylum seekers’. 162 Letwin, in ‘Human rights in the balance’. 163 I. Duncan Smith (Tory leader), in ‘Crackdown on asylum-seekers would do little to lessen threat’. 164 Duncan Smith, in ‘Tories might abandon Geneva Convention’. 165 Immigration official, in ‘Crackdown on asylum-seekers would do little to lessen threat’. 166 A. Saunders (Rabbi), in ‘Manchester police killing: The investigation’. 167 R. Leese (Manchester City Council’s leader), in ‘Manchester police killing: The investigation’. 168 Hughes, in ‘Any curbs on freedom must be kept to a minimum’. 169 M. Levi (University of Wales), in ‘On the brink of war: Identity cards’. 170 Lord Dholakia (Liberal Democrats), in ‘Any curbs on freedom must be kept to a minimum’. 171 Ibid. 172 Hughes, in ‘Any curbs on freedom must be kept to a minimum’. 173 Spokesman for the Refugee Council, in ‘Immigration – Tories: Detain all asylum seekers’. 174 Home Office spokesman, in ‘Crackdown on asylum-seekers would do little to lessen threat’. 175 Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett voices fears of asylum backlash in Britain’. 176 B. Morris (Transport and General Workers Union leader), in ‘Civil liberties: Campaign launched to block scheme’. 177 J. Candler (spokeswoman for the Refugee Council), in ‘Crackdown on asylum-seekers would do little to lessen threat’. 178 See, for instance, Blunkett, in ‘Human rights on trial: Secret courts will not improve our security’; Blunkett, in ‘Freedom and security are two essentials that citizens look to the government to provide’. 179 Duncan Smith, 26 September 2001 (quoted by Blunkett, ‘I’m not a bully, I’m not a scaremonger – and I’m not giving in to terror’). 180 Blunkett, in ‘Peers vote to restrict anti-terror legislation’. 181 Blunkett, in ‘Lords sabotage forces concessions on terror bill’. 182 Blunkett, in ‘Peers vote to restrict anti-terror legislation’. 183 Blunkett, in ‘Labour accuses Lords of wrecking anti-terror bill’. 184 Blunkett, ‘I’m not a bully, I’m not a scaremonger – and I’m not giving in to terror’. 185 Blunkett, in ‘The Queen’s speech: Emphasis on safety and security provokes scaremongering claims’. 186 Blair, in ‘Are ministers whipping up fears over security?’. 187 Home Secretary, Home Office minister and Home Office spokesman. 188 Gunaratna, ‘The enemy deep within’. 189 Ibid.

Defining the terrorist threat 97 190 Lady Thatcher (former Prime Minister), in ‘Thatcher’s words will encourage race attacks’. 191 M. Hedges (chairman of the Association of Chief Police Officers’ terrorism committee), in ‘New police unit to counter terrorists outside London’. 192 Kennedy, in ‘Any curbs on freedom must be kept to a minimum’. 193 Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett defiant after Archbishop’s attack on detention’. 194 Sir Veness, in ‘Muslims: we are the new victims of stop and search’. 195 ‘Desire to integrate on the wane as Muslims resent war on Islam’. 196 See, for instance, the comments made by: M. Shadjarech (chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission), in ‘Terror raids: fears of home-grown radical threat’; Shadjarech, in ‘Muslims face dark age of injustice’; I. Bunglawala (MCB), in ‘Half of terror suspects are freed without any charges’. 197 ‘Police accused of Islamophobic stop and search tactics’. 198 See, for instance, the comments made by Bunglawala, in ‘Young Muslims made scapegoats in stop and search’. 199 Hedges, in ‘New police unit to counter terrorists outside London’. 200 ‘Terror laws used unfairly on Muslims’. 201 Home Office spokesman, in ‘Terror laws used unfairly on Muslims’. 202 Blair, in ‘Britain’s Muslims are urged to fight fanatics’. 203 Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror. 204 Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett defiant after Archbishop’s attack on detention’. 205 Lazar and Lazar, ‘The discourse of the New World Order’, 238. 206 Johnson, ‘Defending ways of life’, 224. 207 Clarke, in ‘Terror raids: Fears of home-grown radical threat’. 208 Hedges, in ‘New police unit to counter terrorists outside London’. 209 Blair, in ‘Thatcher’s words will encourage race attacks’. 210 Black, in ‘G2: Never say inevitable’. 211 Sir Stevens, in ‘Interview: Sir John Stevens’. 212 Home Secretary, Home Office minister and spokesmen. 213 Lord Chancellor and Treasury solicitor. 214 See, for instance, the statements made by: R. Philips (Treasury solicitor), in ‘Judges back terror law detention’; Blunkett, in ‘Judges in row over torture ruling’; C. Clarke (Home Secretary), in ‘Belmarsh suspects to be freed after Clarke gives in to pressure’; C. Clarke, in ‘Release of terror suspect increases pressure on Clarke’. 215 Blair, in ‘Police to get powers to hold terror suspects indefinitely’. 216 Ibid. 217 Blunkett, in ‘Freedom and security are two essentials that citizens look to the government to provide’. 218 Lord Falconer (Lord Chancellor), in ‘Tougher terror law not ruled out’. 219 Blunkett, in ‘Freedom from terrorist attack is also a human right’. 220 Blair, in ‘I will put safety of Britain before liberties’. 221 Blair, in ‘Blair agrees to talks with Howard on terror suspects’. 222 Blair, in ‘Anti-terror laws: Bill turns into battle of wills between Howard and Blair’. 223 It is mentioned alone in five statements. 224 Home Office source, in ‘Blunkett refuses to yield over Terror Bill’. 225 Blair, in ‘Clarke’s U-turn gives judges power over house arrests’. 226 Blair, in ‘Civil liberties: Terror laws: Blair snubs Howard’s offer of time-limit compromise on Bill’. 227 The ruling has been reported in the press in these terms. 228 Blunkett, in ‘Judges in row over torture ruling’. 229 Blair, in ‘MPs quash series of Lords changes to Terrorism Bill’.

98 A. Tsoukala 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272

Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett attacked for invoking emergency powers’. Home Secretary, Home Office minister. Blunkett, in ‘On the brink of war: Civil rights’. Blunkett, in ‘Rights and wrongs of terrorism legislation’. Blunkett, in ‘Freedom and security are two essentials that citizens look to the government to provide’. Straw, in ‘Belmarsh: A new affront to justice’. Blair, in ‘Terror scares, deadlines and election fever make for the worst kind of law-making’. Blunkett, ‘I’m not a bully, I’m not a scaremonger – and I’m not giving in to terror’. Hughes, in ‘Emergency powers – new law on detention faces court challenge’. Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett under fire from all sides on terror bill’. Blair, in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain must never be afraid’. Lazar and Lazar, ‘The discourse of the New World Order’, 228. Blunkett, in ‘Anti-terror bill damned for catch-all powers’. Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett under fire from all sides on terror bill’. Blair, in ‘This is war, there is no compromise’. Lord Goldsmith, in ‘How should Britain protect its citizens?’. Howard, ‘Blair agrees to talks with Howard on terror suspects’. Johnson, ‘Defending ways of life’, 211. On the place of civil liberties as a defining aspect of the Western way of life, see Jürgensen, ‘Terrorism, civil liberties, and preventive approaches to technology’, 55–59. Foreign Secretary and Foreign Office minister. Straw, in ‘On the brink of war: Civil Rights’. Blair, in ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain must never be afraid’. Hain, in ‘Draconian curbs may include ID cards’. ‘Drawing a line in the Fog’, 160. Beck, ‘The terrorist threat. World risk society revisited’, 41. A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman, in ‘Police on alert for imminent alQa’ida terror attack on Britain’. Sir Veness, in ‘Met urges public to use new terror hotline’. Home Secretary, spokesmen. Blair, in ‘The Queen’s speech: Emphasis on safety and security provokes scaremongering claims’. Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett under fire from all sides on terror bill’. C. Clarke, in ‘WMD absence makes public doubt terror threat’. Sir Stevens (former Metropolitan Police Commissioner), in ‘Private firms to police terror orders’. Collins, in ‘Suspects’ win hits terror crackdown’. Collins, in ‘Right ruling, wrong reason’. Blair, in ‘Scotland Yard chief reveals London link to Madrid bombings’. Manningham-Buller, in ‘Don’t delude yourselves about terrorist threat’. Blunkett, in ‘One year on: Civil liberties clampdown’. Blunkett, in ‘A weapon against ourselves’. Blunkett, in ‘MI5 agents foil bomb plot’. Blair, in ‘Anti-terror Bill: Clarke fails to stem revolt as majority collapses to 14’. Sir Stevens, in ‘Private firms to police terror orders’. C. Clarke, in ‘Are we at war? The answer is beyond doubt: We are not’. Sir Stevens, in ‘Former Met commissioners on opposing sides of terror debate’.

Defining the terrorist threat 99 273 J. Wadham (civil rights group Liberty), in ‘Civil liberties lawyers to challenge detentions’. 274 D. Pannick (human rights barrister), in ‘Blunkett firm on terrorism bill’. 275 Lord Hoffmann (Law Lord), in ‘Judges rule that terror suspects are being imprisoned illegally’. 276 Lord Hoffmann, in ‘Day 1: Resignation. Day 2: Humiliation’. 277 Home Secretary and permanent secretary. 278 Blunkett, in ‘Blunkett warns of attack at Christmas’. 279 Sir Stevens, in ‘MET chief says compulsory ID cards essential in war on terrorism’. 280 Senior officer involved in an anti-terrorist raid, in ‘How surveillance ensnared enemy within’. 281 Manningham-Buller, in ‘Threat to Britain rated particularly high’. 282 Sir Stevens, in ‘Police commissioner calls for European anti-terrorist body’. 283 Livingstone, in ‘Attack on London is inevitable’. 284 Flyghed, ‘Normalising the exceptional’, 30. 285 Sir J. Gieve (permanent secretary to Mr Blunkett and Mr Clarke), in ‘Blair agrees to talks with Howard on terror suspects’. 286 G. Smyth (Metropolitan Police federation chairman), in ‘London: Covert build-up to protect UK people and locations on risk list’. 287 Livingstone, in ‘Further terrorism arrests expected’. 288 A senior anti-terrorist official, in ‘Scaremongering: ministers talk about hundreds of would-be bombers’. 289 Apart from the Islam theme that is not defined by people actively involved in the political life of the country. 290 Graham, Keenan and Dowd, ‘A call to arms at the end of history’. 291 Especially the use of the personal pronoun ‘we’ and the possessive adjective ‘our’. 292 Tsoukala, ‘Democracy in the light of security’. 293 Dunne and Wheeler, ‘We the peoples’, 18. 294 On the impact of the present counter-terrorism fight on the positioning of the intelligence services in a given security field, see the contribution of L. Bonelli in this volume. 295 Tsoukala, ‘Democracy in the light of security’. 296 Giroux, ‘Democracy and the politics of terrorism’, 337. 297 Giroux, ‘Terrorism and the fate of democracy after September 11’, 10. 298 Diken and Laustsen, ‘Zones of indistinction’, 302–303. 299 Against anti-war protesters at a Gloucestershire RAF base (in July) and against protesters at an international arms fair in east London (in September). 300 ‘Police can use terror powers on protesters’.

4

‘Hidden in plain sight’ Intelligence, exception and suspicion after 11 September 2001 Laurent Bonelli

The bloody attacks against the United States (11 September 2001), Spain (11 March 2004) and the UK (7 July 2005) have made the anti-terrorist fight a priority for all Western leaders. Since then governments have demonstrated an unswerving determination and have outlined proposals to reorganize security forces that are now called upon to cooperate more efficiently in the fight against radical Islam. At the same time, new structures of cooperation, exchange and prevention have either emerged in the main international institutions (EU, UN) or have intensified their activity. The ‘emergency’ and the ‘magnitude’ of this ‘new threat’ have strengthened the role of intelligence services. They are seen as capable of preventing the consequences of what would be publicly called ‘hyper-terrorism’, ‘new terror networks’ or ‘messianic terrorism’. Numerous legislative measures have been taken to facilitate their work and to weaken the juridical rules framing it. Of course, as early as 1986, it was openly admitted that ‘we must terrorize the terrorists’.1 However, the struggle against terrorism is not as concerted as such pronouncements would lead us to believe. It involves complex dealings between governments, intelligence agencies and clandestine groups, each striving to further its own political or organizational interests and impose its own version of the ‘truth’. In order to understand the modus operandi of this fight, we need to reconstruct the configurations in which it appears. This entails analysing the development and the evolution of interdependent relationships between these social universes. This chapter considers six intelligence services: two French, Renseignements Généraux (RG) and Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST); two British, Security Service (former MI5) and Special Branch of the London Metropolitan Police Service (SO12); two Spanish, Comisaría General de Información (CGI) and Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), which replaced the Centro Superior de Información de la Defensa (CESID) in 2002. It seeks to analyse how their missions and perceptions of radical Islam have evolved since 11 September 2001. It is based on interviews (20), internal documents, and agents’ memoirs as well as on secondary sources such as parliamentary reports.2

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 101 This research does not claim to be complete, as defining the institutions in charge of intelligence tasks is always problematic. The operational nondetermination of their missions, objectives and skills renders any attempt at a definitive clarification impossible. The services’ institutional divisions (civil/military, internal/external, political/criminal, etc.) are often fluid and frequently subject to mutual encroachment. Many security agencies, like the French Gendarmerie Nationale or the Spanish Guardia Civil, for example, dedicate a large part of their activities to information gathering. The same applies to the customs services, or to certain services linked to the army, such as the Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM, military intelligence agency), and the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE, external security agency) in France, or the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) in the UK. For this reason, I shall only retain here the main services deployed in the fight against terrorism both in terms of human means and knowledge. This work is critical of analyses that see 11 September 2001 as a kind of ‘year zero’ in the struggle against terrorism. It is based on Graham T. Allison’s theoretical framework3 that shows that institutional visions of problems are linked to organizational routines that predate them and are reactivated by the fervour of new situations. This research has therefore sought to underline the continuities and the permanence of categories of analysis created to face different issues and redeployed later on. An overly mechanistic vision, which would perceive the transformation of intelligence services as a simple response ‘adapting’ to new threats, should be avoided. We need to analyse both the bureaucratic and political games and the institutional history of intelligence institutions to understand how they frame an emerging problem. As Murray Edelman has argued, bureaucracies tend to construct problems to justify the solutions they propose.4 The nature and the shape of the new anti-terrorist missions are a result of three factors: the transformations within the national and international contexts; the effects of the continuity of intelligence services’ analysis grids; and the perpetual work of re-legitimization that they lead among certain parts of the state apparatus.

Political authorities, intelligence services and the regulation of political violence The reactions of the political authorities to the attacks of 11 September 2001, 11 March 2004 and 7 July 2005 are not only a consequence of these events. They also depend on the particular history of the relationship they maintain with the political violence they have confronted. The choice of ‘political violence’ rather than ‘terrorism’ allows us to avoid the problems entailed by using these politically and morally connoted terms. The word ‘terrorist’ does not denote a universally recognizable, objective reality: the German army applied it to the French resistance,

102 L. Bonelli Russia applied it to Chechen fighters, Colombia employs the same for the FARC, Turkey for the PKK, and so on. In a similar vein, Yasser Arafat had been considered a terrorist until he became the president of the Palestinian Authority, as was the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) before acceding to post-independence power. Clandestine organizations call themselves freedom fighters, nationalists, the avant-garde of the proletariat, or soldiers of Islam. To describe people as terrorists – or as outlaws – is a way to delegitimate movements and their demands, a way to negate the political nature of the conflict.5 This explains the impossibility of agreeing upon a universally acceptable definition of ‘terrorism’, but also upon the different strategies to manage clandestine groups. In this respect, it is interesting to note that under the Spanish presidency, EU’s definitive post-September 11 list ‘of terrorist individuals, groups or entities’ began with a string of individuals suspected of belonging to Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA).6 The stakes are high when this type of list is being negotiated, since it engages all the signatories to combat groups that may not always be a priority for them, or those with whom they may previously have had non-aggressive relations. The French position on the Basque question has long been a source of grievance for the Spanish police,7 while British tolerance of radical Islam had hitherto been rued by the French intelligence services. Each state defines different modalities for regulating political violence, which successively or simultaneously comprise non-intervention, negotiation, pressure, police coercion, and even military action. The responses used by different governments remain profoundly dependent on the history of these relationships, on the evolving political power relations between the opposing parties, and also on the threat that clandestine groups pose to political and social order. In France, the violence of the Corsican nationalist groups – responsible for carrying out several hundred attacks8 against public buildings9 or police and gendarmerie stations10 – is not as roughly repressed by the police and the judiciary as the violence of Islamic groups. The focus on Islamic groups involved in the recent Algerian civil war is also a consequence of the colonial and post-colonial history. It remains very clear in the statement of Pierre de Bousquet de Florian, director of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST) when he explains, in September 2002: France does not seem to be al-Qaeda’s priority. [. . .] The danger now is if there is a real rapprochement between the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) which is active in Algeria, and the people of al-Qaeda. [. . .] This rapprochement could constitute a threat: against the background of an amalgam of an old idea of colonial France and the poor opinion a certain number of young French of North African extraction have of the situation in the Middle East, a war against Iraq is potentially explosive.11

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 103 In the same manner, at least until the attacks of 11 March 2004, the Spanish secret services remained, in practice, largely focused on ETA, which they held responsible for carrying out 817 assassinations – including 478 on the armed forces or police corps – between 1968 and 2003, in addition to several hundred attacks. The repartition of their agents is indicative of these priorities. Of the 500 members of the Comisaría General de Información (CGI), less than 50 were working on ‘international terrorism’. This is also one of the reasons why the Basque organization had been suspected at the beginning. As Ignacio Astarloa, state secretary for security in the Popular Party government, told later, ‘this day, whom we were really afraid of was ETA’.12 The attitudes adopted by the governments facing radical actions can be understood as a fragile compromise between the history of regulating political violence, the analysis of current vulnerabilities and the necessity to reassure public opinion in order to prevent the so-called ‘psychosis’ of terrorism. For intelligence agencies, the timescale of the fight against terrorism is long since it involves reconstituting networks and understanding how they function. As this laboriousness sits rather uncomfortably with the shorter timescales of the political realm, the measures taken are intended to demonstrate to the public that something is being done about terrorism. In France, the activation of the public terrorism vigilance plan (Plan Vigipirate), initially conceived in the mid-1980s and at its highest state of alert after 11 September 2001, operated according to this twofold logic of terrorism prevention and visible political responses. While the increased checks on individuals in subways, train stations and airports were genuinely aimed at making potential attacks more difficult, they were more specifically designed to demonstrate that the state was taking the threat seriously and was deploying the means to respond to it. It was therefore not considered important that the operation resulted in increased arrests of illegal migrants rather than any real success in terms of terrorism prevention. The deployment of tanks at London’s Heathrow airport in February 2003 was the product of a similar dynamic. The anti-terrorist fight can be defined as a strategic interdependence between government and clandestine groups, arbitrated by ‘public opinion’. The firmness of government statements responds in a very visible way to the spectacular violence (bomb attacks for example), when in fact the way to close a crisis is based as much on police activity as the support or reconstruction of a dialogue involving reciprocal engagements. The spectrum of available calm-restoring devices is very broad, ranging from the discreet dispensation of clemency for imprisoned activists to the shifting of a political or diplomatic position. The subtlety of this balancing act and the level at which the political decisions are taken show that beyond voluntary statements on international cooperation national issues continue to hold sway.13 However, this relationship between authorities, clandestine movements and public opinion does not suffice to allow us to

104 L. Bonelli understand the configuration of the struggle. We also need to carefully examine the nature of the exchanges between political authorities and intelligence services, which are not only a simple tool in the government’s hands. The question of the links between the intelligence services and governments occupies an important space in the literature dedicated to the subject.14 Interpretations range between an ‘informer’ branch, which makes the intelligence services something of a state-within-a-state, and an ‘instrumental’ branch in which they are painted as simple tools at the whim of political decision-making. The most interesting attempts to go beyond this opposition and comprehend the historical developments in the role of intelligence services within a single state can be found in the work of authors such as William W. Keller or Peter Gill.15 The latter suggests analysing the relations between state and intelligence services through the notions of autonomy and penetration. Autonomy represents the agencies’ independence from external influences on their policies and practices, while penetration concerns the variety of techniques through which they control and monitor other agencies, and society in general. The interplay between these two axes allows us to define sets of pure relations, ranging from the Independent Security State (strong autonomy and penetration) to the Domestic Intelligence Bureau (weak autonomy and penetration), via the Political Police (medium autonomy and penetration). Nevertheless, while these works allow us to contemplate forms of institutional autonomy, they remain bound to an overly unified vision of the state, so that they do not think of intelligence agencies as groups endowed with special symbolic resources, in competition with each other to act on behalf of, and in the name, of the state. As Bernard Lacroix has remarked, ‘the state does not only exist through struggles within the state, but also around the state in controlling its authority and credibility’.16 It is precisely within these struggles that the work of the intelligence services is inscribed and legitimized. Indeed, the fight against terrorism is not the only source of legitimacy for the intelligence services. It is above all the compensation for producing politically ‘relevant’ information, in light of which its performance and ‘utility’ are evaluated. While the priorities in the spectrum of their activities may vary according to the local context and configurations, intelligence services continually gather all the information they believe may – one day – be useful for the authorities. Their work consists in supplying governments with information allowing them to anticipate the emergence and development of a crisis, or more generally to be aware of what is being said and done in certain specific areas of the social and political life. This output for the domestic political game is equally valid for International Relations, where it can serve as currency or a gauge of diplomatic goodwill. As one of my contacts in the Renseignements Généraux (RG) explained:

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 105 We also look into groups that could endanger France’s diplomatic relations. For example, that was how – under pressure from the Foreign Office, which was itself responding to pressure from the Peruvian authorities – we came to go all out on the Tupac Amaru militants in France during the hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima [December 1996]. We monitored and tapped them, spoke to them, and so on. It was the same thing during the Iranian president’s visit to Paris [October 1999]. We knew perfectly well he was under no risk from terrorists. But that didn’t prevent [. . .] a huge raid on regime opposition elements. These measures have very high political visibility, that’s about it. But they are important nevertheless. (Interview, DCRG police chief, March 2000) While the political authorities are the primary beneficiaries of this data, this also concerns part of the opposition and the press. From this viewpoint, politics by leaks represents an ordinary means of legitimizing the intelligence services among social agents who are not officially recipients of the information. The secretiveness which surrounds this information considerably boosts its importance by conferring upon it a ‘truth value’ which is not necessarily in proportion to its veracity. This information’s authority is mainly grounded on its status as a ‘ring-fenced resource’ within the political field. As Alain Dewerpe has noted, [F]or the public opinion, revealing the secret clarifies the relationship between agents with active participation competence and those, who, devoid of such competence, are reduced to passive participation. And the current state of the field, by organizing these relations, is based on modes of structuring access to political knowledge and secreting this knowledge. In other words, it confirms the historical genesis of the secret as a form and tool of political domination within the regime of contemporary publicity.17 This legitimacy confers upon intelligence agencies an organizational autonomy, which translates itself as abnegation – usually implicit – of the political personnel in day-to-day control of their activities. The weakness of parliamentary monitoring commissions (in France) or the multiple restrictions affecting their actions (in the UK and Spain) show this clearly. A relative autonomy defines the intelligence services’ scope of activity well beyond their ‘official’ missions. Their role as middlemen between the institutional powers and contesting groups is not restricted to that of simple executors – far from it. Their prevention, anticipation and negotiation work (even destabilization work in certain cases) influences the strategies of these groups as much as those of the authorities. Intelligence services do not always limit themselves to information gathering. From the public disqualification of certain groups to the sabotage of their actions or the

106 L. Bonelli moral, symbolic and in some cases physical destruction of their leaders, via the demoralization of militants and the exacerbation of internal tensions, the social and political counter-strategies are numerous.18 In the case of the RG, the latter were actually the exclusive aim of some specific units and other more informal operational cells that use discreet and occasionally illicit methods.19 In Spain, there was the notable example of anti-terrorist liberation groups (GAL), which assassinated, with the complicity of the CESID and the Guardia Civil, Basque refugees in France at the end of the 1980s. In the UK, one might consider the debate on the participation of the intelligence services – notably the Force Research Unit (FRU) – in developing the shoot to kill policy designed to eliminate presumed IRA militants.20 Intelligence services occupy a peculiar place within the structuring and regulation of political exchange at the core of democratic regimes. They are both a vector – partially autonomous – for exercizing state violence, and gatekeepers of political order. They effectively help structure the general economy of contestation, which also makes them agents of the managed negotiation of the rules of disorder.21 Furthermore, in classifying and categorizing the information they collect, they actively participate in ring-fencing the political game. By qualifying or disqualifying certain groups by their own assessment, intelligence services can allow those groups to participate – or not – to this game. To understand the form of the post-September 11 anti-terrorism fight, it is necessary to look closely at the specific histories of intelligence environments as well as at their visions of the social world.

The missions, logics and knowledge of the intelligence services Besides their national and prioritization differences, intelligence services share specific ways of perceiving the social world. This might be somewhat surprising given the heterogeneity of the statuses and spheres of activity of their agents. Some are police officers (the RG and DST in France, the CGI in Spain, and the Special Branch in the UK), while others have university or academic military backgrounds (Security Service in the UK, part of the CNI in Spain). Some have the legal authority to lead coercive operations (DST, Special Branch and CGI), while others generally restrict their activities to information gathering and analysis (RG, Security Service and CNI). The effects of these differences, based on distinct professional socializations suggest the likelihood of a wide variety of registers of perception, appreciation and action. Surprisingly, however, all intelligence service members share a common belief in intelligence, i.e. they believe in fundamental issues linked to the activity itself. This implies a common illusio (i.e. the belief that the game is worth playing) that their colleagues in other services perceive in a negative way.22 It also means that they agree on their disagreements.

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 107 Intelligence is to some extent an autonomous field, which entails the possession of a very specific kind of capital consisting of know-how, techniques and a set of beliefs. These beliefs are historically established in the services and are transmitted to new agents. They constitute a necessary condition to the agents’ participation in the game. This capital gives a central role to political power relations, i.e. the systems of representation and the guiding principles of intelligence services are opposed to the world of the judiciary, for which the relationship with law is primordial. These two activities, criminal and intelligence, are entirely separate, from their tutelage authorities (government/magistrate) to their targets (political/ criminal) via their operational modes (prevention and pro-activity/ coercion). This holds true even when the agents are police officers: it is evident that what distances them from their colleagues in the criminal or urban police services is much more than a simple difference of missions. The work I have undertaken in France on the careers of members of the RG reveals a remarkable internal continuity of the staff and a low rate of migration to other police careers. Its agents thereby internalize methods of practice, administrative routines and representations buried deep within the history of the agency. Their apprenticeship builds anti-subversive mindsets, characterized by an interest in the political game, the practical ability to influence and control it, and an attachment to the legitimate order as well as its preservation.23 The importation of a logic of suspicion, widespread in the police in general,24 into political activity accounts for the recurrent visions of ‘plots’ and ‘manipulation’. One of the clearest manifestations of this mindset is the degree of organization imputed by intelligence services to their adversaries. They tend to see a link to a global political strategy behind the slightest local initiative, and to consider groups or autonomous individuals as agents of an occult and structured organization. Yves Bertrand (director of the RG from 1992 to 2004) has commented on the surveillance of sermons in mosques: We have, for example, been especially vigilant after the attacks of 11 September 2001. Many observers were expecting problems. [. . .] Curiously, the mosque leaders and associations have controlled their troops very well, which, I would add, doesn’t necessarily reassure us. It means that the very dense social fabric is in perfect working order [. . .] that the community is very well controlled by these associations.25 Such analysis posits that calm is worse than the storm, since it may conceal something even more disturbing. Such a paranoid view privileges the hidden over the visible. The almost unanimous condemnation of some specific outrage is a bonus, since it justifies further surveillance. Referring to counter-subversion in the United States, Michael Rogin describes the dual function of its discourse of unease as one that:

108 L. Bonelli [G]ives substance to its own anxieties while giving free rein to forbidden desires. The diabolization of its enemies actually serves to legitimize the use of the same arms it attributes to them, but in the name of the superior need to thwart their subversive plans.26 This mimetic rivalry explains the systematic over-evaluation of the capacities of the intelligence agencies’ opponents, and the continual advocacy for the restriction of individual and collective liberties, considered to favour their enemy. This is how the intelligence services continually confuse what is technically possible and socially probable. For example, the risk of radical groups using WMDs (nuclear, chemical or biological weapons) does not appear in their eyes as a possibility subject to conditions (in particular political ones), but simply as the ‘next stage’. As the former CNI director, Jorge Dezcallar de Mazarredo, has stated, ‘things are no longer the same. We are confronted with another potential Hiroshima, but with the difference that any crazed fanatic can press the button’.27 These visions ensue as much from the specific measures taken by intelligence agents and their administrative routines as from a desire to ‘inflate’ the threat, which helps secure significant symbolic material recompense in passing. This is what the former director of the DST has indicated in the case of Islam: Conventional counter-intelligence was the DST’s reason for being. The agents working in these services were seeking to adapt by finding another threat as global as communism, and this is how we shifted from fundamentalisms to the Islamic threat. (Interview, April 2000) This is not at all a matter of cynicism. In some respect, intelligence agents resemble the magician described by Marcel Mauss, [W]ho cannot be conceived as an individual working through selfinterest, for himself and by his own means, but as a sort of official invested by society with authority to which he is committed to believe himself. [. . .] Naturally, he has the spirit of his function, the gravity of a magistrate; he is serious, because he is taken seriously and he is taken seriously because we need him.28 Intelligence agents are taken even more seriously because they belong to a restricted production field that monopolizes the interpretation of threat. The secrecy covering gathered and produced information constitutes a protected resource, guaranteed by state authority, and only judged by their peers. This explains why their work is inherently located outside the true/false dichotomy and why the frequent factual rebuttal of their apocalyptic worldview does not weaken the public trust with which they are

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 109 invested. Moreover, this trust legitimizes and hardens their modes of interpretation. While intelligence agents share some form of a common conception of the world, they sometimes find themselves in conflict regarding their analyses. Their stands tend to be linked to the space they occupy in the field of security professionals.29 Each new attack of a clandestine group constitutes an occasion to re-evaluate the position and importance of each service. All the services will therefore try to impose their own analysis of the situation. In France, the DST, which has an ever growing number of officials abroad, and which undertakes counter-intelligence missions, has tended to systematically link all terrorist acts to foreign partners, while the RG looks more into France for causes and/or networks. The Khaled Kelkal case was particularly interesting in this respect. This young French national from Vaulx-en-Velin was involved in the 1995 attacks, and was tracked and later shot down by the gendarmes. While the DST described him as an agent of foreign networks (the Algerian GIA) operating in France, the RG attempted to reconstruct the affair within the framework of the suburban housing estate where he was born, to demonstrate the risk of radicalization of French youths of immigrant extraction. Beyond the principles lying behind the production of these analyses, the bureaucratic competitiveness is genuine. This also stands for the legitimacy and even the budgets of the services. In the case of transnational radical Islamist networks, this type of opposition reproduces itself. The DST insists on the ‘international’ character of al-Qaida and the nexuses between groups disseminated across different states, while the RG is more interested in the risks that the French Muslim communities represent. As one of my contacts has emphasized: Simultaneously, there is a geographical proximity and proximity of origin between the groups at risk and young people living on poor estates. The manipulation of such groups is limited, but it exists. It concerns us on several grounds: first, these groups are financed by trafficking, theft and petty crime committed by kids on estates. Then they pick up some of the anti-French Islamist discourse, which in the long term could enable autonomous terrorist groups to develop, although they don’t exist at present. Finally, we are worried by the spreading of terrorist know-how. The training that some kids have gone through, in Bosnia or elsewhere, the publications distributed, and so on, teach them how to make bombs and Molotov cocktails, so more and more youngsters have this know-how. (Interview, DCRG police chief, March 2000) We find other types of oppositions that depend on the affiliations of different services. In the UK, the Security Service, de facto connected to the Prime Minister, is more sensitive to the political discourse on the ‘Islamic

110 L. Bonelli threat’ than the Special Branch, which answers to local powers and remains keen to preserve the social cohesion between communities. Consequently, while the former is prepared to undertake high-visibility missions to ‘break up the networks’, the latter remains more circumspect. The January 2003 raid on the Finsbury Park mosque clearly illustrates this antagonistic relationship. For the Security Service (and the government), it was a matter of setting an example and demonstrating – notably to the tabloids that were particularly virulent on this theme – that there was no place beyond the control of the authorities. The Special Branch, on the other hand, feared that the operation would send a very negative signal to the Muslim community and would have very uncertain legal results. Yet, while the institutional stances and competitiveness among intelligence services lead them to produce differing discourses on the ‘terrorist threat’, they all give substance to the idea of the potential danger of certain strands of Islam and their devotees.

Islam and intelligence services Following 11 September 2001, governments have been careful to dissociate Islam and terrorism, explaining that the fight against the former was not a struggle against the latter. In order to achieve this, they created a distinction between Muslims who are ‘loyal’ towards their host country, and those who are not and seek to contest the social order.30 As Richard Johnson indicates, ‘There are only really two kinds of Muslims in this discourse: there are good loyal Muslims (loyal that is to their states) and bad Muslims who do not salute the flag’.31 This hypothesis fitted almost perfectly with the distinction between the traditionalist (ethnic-national) and fundamentalist (universal pretensions) dimensions. Naturally, it is the latter group that has attracted the attention of intelligence services. The surveillance of Muslim communities and especially of locations of cults, leaders and religious associations does not date from the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. It is one of the routines of counter-intelligence. The intelligence services of some emigration countries have used religious infrastructures to control their own exiles for many years. This is particularly true in the case of the Moroccan and Algerian services in relation to France and Spain. As Jorge Dezcallar de Mazarredo has noted with regard to the sermons in the Spanish mosques: It is something we monitor carefully. [. . .] The mosques are a privileged source of information for third party countries attempting to penetrate them and control immigrant colonies of certain nationalities. We know which ones are more aggressive and which are more religious. Or those who interfere in political matters, because that exists too.32

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 111 This form of surveillance has increased as communities – notably those from former colonial empires – have continued to grow. In France, it is linked to the progressive settling of immigrant workers (partly because of the official end of working immigration in 1974). In the UK, it comes from the influx of Pakistani refugees and Muslim brethren harried out of the former British colonies that gave rise to important communities in the main cities. In Spain, the process is far more recent, although the University of Grenada, which has received students from North Africa for many years, has always been under surveillance. The intelligence services’ interest in Muslim communities took a fairly sharp turn following a number of international events linked to political Islam. In France, the landmarks in the development of specialist branches were the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the situation in the Middle East and the attacks of the Fouad Ali Saleh network between 1985 and 1986. Then there was the Algerian situation after June 1991, which led to another wave of attacks in 1995. These events drew attention to the activities of clandestine Muslim groups (especially the armed Algerian Islamist groups [GIA]), and intelligence agents started working either to counter their violent activities on domestic territory or to unsettle their logistical framework (propaganda, recruitment, financing circuits, etc.). The attacks of 11 September 2001, 11 March 2004 and 7 July 2005 have strongly modified the historically constituted modes of regulating political violence to which intelligence services were accustomed. Those particular attacks represented above all a brutal outbreak of violence in peacetime on the territory of a Western state: mass murders and complete indifference to the victims’ personal status (social, political or even religious). They created a threshold effect unparalleled by previous radical actions. But beyond their sheer amplitude, the attacks subverted the nomos – the primary principle of vision and division which is characteristic of all social spaces33 – of the political field. The groups behind the attacks did not rely on nationalist – or even class – claims. Broadly speaking, these two schematic categories had traditionally given structure to previous political violence in Western democracies, and continue to do so in many hotspots, including some involving radical Muslim movements (Palestine and Chechnya, for example). Movements claiming to belong to al-Qaida seem to have no other desire than to build what Farhad Khosrokhavar calls a ‘néo-umma guerrière’, holy-warriors characterized by ‘the hatred of the West, the mythification of communities of Islamic origin, the desire to restore Islam to its former splendour, and the sponsoring of martyred death in the Jihad’.34 Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director General of the Security Service (2002–2007), summarized its development in these terms: We had entered a new period in the history of terrorism. Less regional and national in focus, this new phase is characterized by suicide terrorism, attacks by terrorists that purposely seek to inflict mass civilian

112 L. Bonelli casualties and who are affiliated to groups which have no interest in negotiation.35 This transformation of clandestine actions’ mental frameworks poses the intelligence services intellectual problems in comprehending and anticipating actions that correspond to different logics than those which they had become accustomed to. Not only do the groups responsible for the attacks seem to show contempt for traditional political negotiation processes, but their tactical and strategic autonomy and lack of territorial or social base seriously complicates the construction of this exchange. In sharp contrast with other clandestine groups that have definable interlocutors linked to the movements themselves, political outlets or supportive governments, this type of radical Islam appears to the intelligence agencies as an ‘invisible, faceless enemy’.36 On this basis, the anti-terrorism struggle tends to be restricted to the coercive dimension, the intelligence agencies perceiving the neutralization of the networks as the only means of preventing them from going through with their missions. This is where the argument for establishing ‘exceptional’ police or judicial powers stems from. It is also the reason for the sustained attention paid to national Muslim communities, continuously suspected of prizing an ‘Islamic’ identity over a national identity and of constituting a ‘fifth column’ of terrorism. Intelligence services first investigated the functioning and the specific locations of those communities. Using undercover working methods (tapping, shadowing, informers, etc.), they monitored mosques, sermons and cultural associations, any location where they thought they may find ‘fundamentalists’. As a police officer has indicated in an interview: Our work consists of operational work on people in the mosques. [. . .] We are criticized for seeing Islam as a security problem. I always say to myself that I’m not a Muslim. I’ve never studied Muslim culture. I know a bit about it, empirically learned from work. So I’m incapable of judging what a good Muslim is. [. . .] That Muslims practise their religion is normal and that’s fine. On the other hand, I am capable of deciding whether people represent a threat to public order. It’s my job. And as a terrorist act has to be commissioned by a Fatwah, delivered by someone qualified to do so, we are interested in people who have that power. (Interview, DCRG police chief, March 2000) This is how intelligence agents come to pay such close attention to Muslim institutions and groups, as well as their internal power dynamics and development. For the intelligence services, as Eliza ManninghamBuller has noted, it is the ability to ‘hide in plain sight, to be seen but not noticed’37 which characterizes the members of these radical groups. The

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 113 challenge is therefore to identify who among the Muslim communities is likely to be enlisted in clandestine groups’ ranks. This task was accomplished by establishing ‘profiles’ from standard ‘types’, a proactive method that relies on ‘statistical correlations established on individual trajectories, to produce data oriented towards coercive action, able to anticipate the probable behaviour of individuals with similar characteristics, well before committing an offence’.38 Based on case studies of individuals involved in clandestine actions, intelligence services draw up modal social trajectories and subject to priority vigilance the activities of those who meet these specifications. Consequently, several factors, such as foreign origin (particularly from a Muslim country), a fairly high level of academic achievement, visits to this association or that mosque (especially ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘Salafist’), frequent travelling, an asymmetric career path and holidays abroad (in London, particularly) trigger the near-automatic attention of the intelligence agencies. The suspicion is even further heightened for ‘converts’. This notional figure of the European called to Islam concentrates all the properties of ‘dangerousness’ so far as they are defined by the intelligence services. As Yves Bertrand, former-DCRG, has stated: Dangerousness [. . .] is the clandestine. The clandestine is the networks. Remember that France was the first country hit by terrorist attacks in the mid-1990s. Back then we discovered [. . .] the convert phenomenon [. . .] and its importance at the core of these networks. The converts played and continue to play the role played by the French in Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN), the ‘porteurs de valise’ [French nationals who aided armed Algerian independence groups] as we used to call them. In fact, they were much more important than simple ‘porteurs de valise’. I’m not making an ideological comparison, simply showing how it works.39 It is not so much the radical potential of the converts – due to their recent conversion and the behaviours that may accompany this – which worries the intelligence services, but rather their belonging to the national community and their ability to melt in it. The image of ‘porteurs de valise’ – besides showing the persistence of social patterns born from colonial struggles – is interesting because it becomes the metaphor for the invisible enemy enjoying all the advantages bestowed upon them by nationhood (free circulation, legal protection, administrative facility, etc.), and turning these against the interests of the state that granted them. At the same time, as they seek to neutralize members of radical groups, intelligence services try to dismantle support networks, allegedly established in areas comprising large immigrant populations arriving from mainly Muslim countries. This is why, for example, they monitor the friends and family of individuals suspected of taking part in radical

114 L. Bonelli actions. DST director Pierre de Bousquet de Florian has explained the situation: We also work a lot on their entourages. Some activists, without ever having lived in France or with few links here, may still have attachments: a cousin or friend, a sister and brother-in-law. Without having organized networks, they can still benefit from fairly voluntary complicity and friendly or family solidarity liable to culminate in logistical aid.40 Here we find the classical figures of a counter-subversion methodology that mechanically deduces attitude systems from social, affective or cultural proximity, and consequently establishes grounds for surveillance.41 We should be very careful at this point. Social disadvantage, which is the condition of many youngsters from working class areas in large Western cities, can lead young people to reconstruct and ‘fabricate’ their identities – especially religious ones – in order to restore some sort of dignity.42 However, their apparent radicalism (notably in their discourse) has nothing to do with that of clandestine groups. In the same way as the surveillance of individuals who have joined violent action insists on the singularity of the trajectories and life stories rather than on a systematic ‘career’,43 profiling and its subsequent interpretations are contemptuous of the differential modalities and groundings of religious commitment and incorporate this heterogeneity into a single ‘threatening’ category. Profiling casts suspicion on a large part of the Muslim community by linking all cultural and religious elements, facts and activities to a terrorist potential. These interpretative schemes create confusion between the radicalism of groups such as al-Qaida, the image of a conquering, homogeneous and threatening warrior-like religion, constructed in some strategist think tanks,44 and the rise in power of the claims made in connection to practising Muslim worship and the renewal of religious organizations in Western countries.45 This transposition simultaneously gives credit to the thesis of the dangerousness of Islam and casts doubt upon the loyalty of immigrant communities, deemed to function as ‘terrorist breeding pools’, thus leading to quick generalizations. Hence, French police chief Richard Bousquet, for example, has insisted that [T]he human breeding pool that can deliver our disaffected city and suburban areas from radical Islam is still swarming with ‘reIslamicized’ Arab kids and converts mixing with delinquency and ready to join the terrorist adventure on the order of a brain in the international Jihad.46 This generalized suspicion of foreigners bears echoes of the fifth column47 and the enemy within, and largely outstrips the framework of terrorism, becoming a threat to national cohesion itself.

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 115 The intelligence service surveillance is not restricted to the fight against the ‘terrorist threat’. In the French case, they also pay particular attention to proselyte Muslim groups, such as the Jama’a at-Tabligh. Through telephone tapping, intelligence services have become aware of the fact that some militants have received injunctions asking them to include in their preaching discussion on the socio-economic exclusion of teenagers in working class urban areas. Their observations confirm this. They also remark the role that certain religious groups or leaders can play in appeasing tensions in urban areas, and the moderating influence they can have on ‘deviant’ behaviours among the younger members of the community. Being unable to measure the direct impact of this discourse on teenagers and young adults in these urban districts, they fall back on the vague notion of ‘communitarism’, a kind of Arab-centrism that exalts a ‘Muslim’ identity, deemed a threat to the Republic. The indistinctness of this category allows the reactivation of the image of the Republican integration, linked to the historic model of the development of the state and characterized by the centralization and the elimination of regional and cultural differences. It also seeks to bring anyone who seems to contest this standard model back into line. Through the prism of the anti-subversive mindsets of intelligence service agents, communitarism gradually appears to constitute a coherent whole, endowed with central organizations advancing in disguise, with a political purpose which must be brought to light. In response to questions asked by French MPs on the ‘Islamic’ headscarf, Yves Bertrand (DCRG) explained: I believe they are testing our ability to respond and looking for other areas. [. . .] I think that orders are given and, beyond the school, the world of work taken in the broadest sense is now the target, aiming at certain professional categories. Obviously, they are not going to turn to executives. Presently, they are approaching more modest categories. I’m thinking, for example, of manual workers [. . .] and young supermarket cashiers.48 Whether a violent threat for society or a danger for the Republic, fundamentalist Islam therefore appears to the eye of the intelligence services as an a priori problematic issue. For them, it combines a transnational dimension, consistent with the foreign manipulation of broad but socially inferior communities established in Western states, and an ideology hostile to the prevalent social and political order. This Islam presents itself as something of a global subversive project liable to take the place of communism, which had been dealt fatal blows by the post-Fordist capitalist restructuring and the collapse of the USSR. It assumes its place within the discourse of power and normalization described by Michel Foucault, according to which society is:

116 L. Bonelli Threatened by a number of heterogeneous elements which are not deemed essential to it and do not divide the social body, the living body of the society, in two parts, which are in some ways accidental. This will be the notion of infiltrated foreigners, the theme of deviant sub-products of this society.49 From these discourses flows the vision of the irreducible ‘otherness’ of Muslims, the focusing on converts and the hardening of the police response. The combination of this generalized suspicion with the means to combat terrorism has had negative effects on civil liberties, further aggravated by 11 September 2001. France passed specific legislation on combating terrorism during the 1986 attacks. These were based on concentrating anti-terrorist measures and tools in the hands of the Paris public prosecutor (14th section), a group of four specialist prosecuting judges and a criminal police unit, the Direction Nationale Anti-terroriste (DNAT). This coherent system, vaunted by the police for its ‘effectiveness’, has already been subject to a good deal of criticism, both from the judiciary and human rights activists.50 Besides the problems linked to centralization, critics particularly denounce the systematic use of two vague incriminations – ‘conspiracy’ and ‘plotting a terrorist act’. These incriminations allow the use of what the professionals call the ‘net’ strategy, or ‘kicking the anthill’. It consists in extensively stopping and searching individuals thought to be possibly linked in one way or another to radical networks, and is founded on the belief in its ability to destabilize networks and disrupt their logistics. Yet, it disregards the fact that a good part of those arrested are subsequently cleared after spending a year or two in detention awaiting trial. Generally with regard to ‘Islamic’ terrorism, the ratio of arrests to guilty verdicts appears completely disproportionate.51 The attacks of 11 September 2001, due to the emotion caused and the ostensible pretext represented, have served to strengthen these procedures. France has passed successive laws on security issues in general that have increased police powers and diminished the role of legal defence.52 Similarly, in the UK, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 has introduced the unlimited detention of foreign people ‘suspected’ of being international terrorists, without their culpability needing to be legally established.53 The Anti-terror, Crime and Security Act 2001 amended the Terrorism Act 2000. It allowed the indefinite detention, without charge or conviction, of any foreigner suspected of terrorism, who refused to leave the country and could not be deported. Under its provisions 17 people were imprisoned; eight out of 11 held until recently in Belmarsh high-security prison in London had been in detention for three years. In December 2004, the High Court declared the act illegal; the Law Lords ruled it was

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 117 ‘antithetical to the instincts and traditions of the people’ of Britain and discriminatory because it only applied to foreigners. In January 2005 the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, abolished the distinction between nationals and foreigners by suggesting that anyone suspected of links to terrorist activities, but against whom there was insufficient legally admissible evidence, should be subject to a renewable 12-month control order that would allow the Home Office to impose a curfew, house arrest, electronic tagging and restrictions on communications. Violation of any constraint would be an imprisonable offence. Strong opposition in parliament forced the government to make the grant of control orders subject to prior approval by a judge. But the MPs’ demands that there should be proof, rather than suspicion, before people could be deprived of basic liberties, were ignored. The authorities justified these attacks upon liberties on the grounds that the threat to society is immediate and extreme. Such legislation is the logical conclusion of a view that equates suspicion with guilt and deprives the accused of the right to defend themselves in court. Taken as a whole, these measures bolster the small world of antiterrorist professionals and collusive transactions,54 linking them together more tightly. In other words, these laws support and legitimize a world of profoundly illiberal – but barely contested – practices beyond the legal context. Referring to this matter, former RG chief Yves Bertrand has explained that: There’s always a conflict between police effectiveness and respect for civil liberties. But then the defence of civil liberties is only invoked when there are lulls in attacks. When there are attacks, everyone is happy to benefit from a police and legal framework [. . .] allowing for calm to be restored.55 That may be the case, but sacrificing civil liberties in the name of combating terrorism does not follow logically. It runs counter to the notion that, whatever acts are committed by an individual, it is precisely the ability to guarantee legal equality and justice which forms the foundation of nation states grounded in law. The use of emergency measures and practices has always had fatal consequences for the societies that have tolerated them. Roy Jenkins, British state secretary and responsible of the Prevention of Terrorism Bill, which set up exceptional powers in Northern Ireland in 1974, said about its consequences: At that moment, as everybody, I considered that these powers were justified, and I still think so. But I thought they were to be temporary and that after the two years foreseen we would come back to normality, I mean, to the protection of liberties. Now I am terrified to know that these exceptional powers are still into effect. If someone had told

118 L. Bonelli this to me, I would not have believed it. And if I had believed it, I would have refused to apply them.56 His Italian homologue Francesco Cossiga, Home Office Minister during the 1970s said: I do a mea culpa. We are in a situation where accusation is a cult, where justice collaborators (repentants) are canonized. And it is partially my fault. Every night I do a contrition act for my contribution, during the 1970s, to this way of making justice. Then I was in a war, but it is a cancer that kills the judicial system. The Italian justice is made of rumours, gossip, accusations. [. . .] I am thinking about presenting a law in order to change this situation: I take the Torquemada Inquisition’s rules and I translate them into modern Italian. There are more guarantees than in our penal procedure code.57 We must meditate on the convergent opinions of instigators of emergency measures justified by the fight against terrorism, they are relevant for our situation today.

Notes 1 Statement made by the then French Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua. 2 For the intelligence sources problems, see Bonelli, ‘Intelligence services, police and antiterrorism’. 3 Allison, Essence of Decision. 4 Edelman, Pièces et Règles du Jeu Politique, p. 53f. 5 Tilly, ‘Terror, terrorism, terrorists’, 5–13. 6 Council Common Position of 27 December 2001 on the application of specific measures to combat terrorism (2001/931/PESC), Official Journal of the European Communities, 95–96. 7 See the contribution of E.-P. Guittet in this volume. 8 1,815 between 1993 and 1998. 9 Customs, tax office, etc. 10 For example, the gendarmerie barracks of Pietrosella was totally destroyed by an attack in 1997. 11 Le Monde, 12 September 2002. 12 Hearing on the 11 March 2004 Parliamentary commission, 18 November 2004. 13 On this process, in relation to the 1986 attacks in France, see Duclos, ‘Les pouvoirs publics et la campagne terroriste moyen-orientale’, 75–109. 14 Bonelli, ‘Intelligence services, police and antiterrorism’. 15 Keller, The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover; P. Gill, Policing Politics. 16 Lacroix, ‘Pour une science politique réflexive’, 195. 17 Dewerpe, Espion, p. 14. 18 See in particular Marx, Undercover. 19 For descriptions by former members of the RG, see Dufourg, Section Manipulation, de l’Antiterrorisme à l’Affaire Doucé; Rougelet, RG, La Machine à Scandales.

‘Hidden in plain sight’ 119 20 For further reading on these issues, see Guittet, ‘Raison et déraison d’Etat’; Bigo et al. ‘La participation des militaires à la sécurité intérieure’, 11–34. 21 Palidda, Polizia Postmoderna. 22 Disagreements on the nature of police activity clearly appear on the comments about other services. An urban police chief criticized his colleagues from the RG for being ‘lazy, as their main activity is to attend to receptions and cocktails’. On the other hand, a criminal police officer criticized the generalization of the reports conveyed by a RG superintendent to his director. He answered these critiques by saying, ‘they do not understand our job. In any case, they are allergic to concepts’. 23 Bonelli, ‘Formation, conservation et reconversion de dispositions antisubversives’, pp. 79–104. 24 Monjardet, Ce que Fait la Police, p. 151. 25 Hearing of Mr. Yves Bertrand, Director general of the RG, 9 July 2003. 26 Rogin, Les Démons de l’Amérique, pp. 17–18. 27 Dezcallar de Mazarredo, ‘Lucha contra el terrorismo internacional’, 13. 28 Mauss, Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 89. 29 See the contribution of D. Bigo in this volume. 30 See the contribution of A. Tsoukala in this volume. 31 Johnson, ‘Defending ways of life’, 211–231. 32 El País, 28 April 2002. 33 Bourdieu, Propos sur le Champ Politique, p. 63. 34 Khosrokhavar, Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah, p. 250. 35 Manningham-Buller, ‘Global terrorism’. 36 Ibid. 37 ‘One of the lessons learned from other modern terrorist conflicts is the ability of the terrorist to hide in plain sight, to be seen but not noticed and to all intents and purposes to live a law-abiding existence’, in Manningham-Buller, ‘Global terrorism’. 38 Bigo, ‘La recherche proactive et la gestion du risque’, 423–429. 39 Hearing of Mr. Yves Bertrand, Director general of the RG, 9 July 2003. 40 Libération, 6 December 2002. 41 Rogin, ‘La répression politique aux Etats-Unis’, 32–44. 42 Césari, Musulmans et Républicains; Sayad, La Double Absence. 43 Beaud and Masclet, ‘Un passage à l’acte improbable?’, 159–170; Khosrokhavar, Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah, p. 271; Leveau, ‘Réflexions sur le non-passage au terrorisme dans l’immigration maghrébine en France’, 141–156. 44 See notably Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order. For a critical analysis of the conditions of drafting and reception of this thesis, see the special issue of Cultures & Conflits, ‘Troubler et inquiéter’. 45 Césari, Musulmans et Républicains. 46 Bousquet, Insécurité, p. 151. 47 For example, the military review Le Casoar (July 1996, 142: 24) describes the situation in deprived areas with a high concentration of populations of immigrant origin as follows: ‘the links preserved by these immigrants with their countries of origin can render them susceptible to calls from them when differences arise with our country. The famous fifth-columns, evoked during many previous conflicts, would then already be in place’. 48 Hearing of Mr. Yves Bertrand, director general of the RG, 9 July 2003. 49 Foucault, Il faut Défendre la Société, p. 70. 50 See notably Syndicat de la magistrature, ‘A quoi peuvent bien servir des juges antiterroristes?’, 3–6; International Federation for Human Rights, ‘France: la Porte ouverte à l’arbitraire’.

120 L. Bonelli 51 International Federation for Human Rights, ‘France: La porte ouverte à l’arbitraire’. 52 Laws passed: Sécurité quotidienne, 31 October 2001 (on day-to-day security); Sécurité intérieure, 12 February 2003 (on domestic security); Adaptation de justice aux évolutions de la criminalité, 11 February 2004 (on the judicial system vis-à-vis evolving criminality); Relative á la lutte contre le terrorisme, 23 January 2006 (on terrorism). 53 Guild, ‘Agamben face aux juges’, 127–156. 54 Dobry, Sociologie des Crises Politiques, p. 110f. 55 Hearing of Mr. Yves Bertrand, Director general of the RG, 29 June 1999, p. 167. 56 Jenkins, A Life at the Centre, p. 397f. 57 La Stampa, 19 April 1995 (quoted by C. Ielmini, Le Léviathan et le Terroriste, Paris: L’esprit frappeur, 2005).

5

Military activities within national boundaries The French case1 Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet

Among the many debates raised by 11 September 2001, some concern the specific issue of military involvement in counter-terrorism. Has the ‘war against terrorism’, the latest of the paradigms derived from the more encompassing theory of ‘asymmetric conflicts’, upset the routine of the modern soldier once focusing on peacekeeping and now involved in more important missions?2 The involvement of the armed forces in counterterrorism, in fact their essential role in the ‘war on terror’, may have changed their political, organizational and even social role as well as their relationship with law enforcement agencies and the judiciary. In the long run, the anti-terrorist fight could trigger a progressive merging of policerelated activities and military ones. A question then arises: what position should the armed forces adopt towards this new fight against terrorism now that they are undeniably already involved in it?3 If terrorism is global, threatening and over-armed, what should the appropriate answer be within the national boundaries? In the face of a global threat, i.e. freed from the constraints of territoriality, is it suitable to establish a global security system in which traditional missions of security agencies (justice, police, intelligence services, and army) become undifferentiated and centralized around the army because of its presumed higher level of alert? Should an army, which is granted important funds, intervene in long-term plans only?4 Is it legitimate for the armed forces to be involved in the surveillance of the national territory and in the building of a new anti-terrorist approach that sometimes includes exceptional measures related to surveillance or detention? Or do we have to insist on the differentiation of the multiple security-related tasks and the specialization of all relevant institutions? Indeed, some senior army officials claim that there should be no link between armies, theoretically specialized in external security, and the agencies specialized in domestic security.5 Under what conditions and with what degree of autonomy can armed forces be involved within the national boundaries? What would the most responsible stance be for military officials when politicians ask them to intervene in counter-terrorism inside the national territory? Should the armed forces remain dumb when politicians are tempted to confound the

122 E.-P. Guittet existential survival of the nation with their own political survival? How should they react when those very politicians send alarming messages that retain a large media attention and create a climate of emergency, as has happened in the UK?6 A key issue that has to be highlighted and accounted for is the fact that the involvement of the armed forces in counter-terrorism inside the national territory cannot be perceived as a mere exceptional practice that would allow for the return to the ex ante state, once the ‘exceptional moment’ is over. On the contrary, it reshuffles professional structures and blurs the boundaries between the domestic and the external fields of security, between the criminal and the enemy, between civil protection in the case of an emergency and civil defence in the case of a threat, between the protection of public order, the defence of the democratic order and the state of war.7 But does this lead to the militarization of issues usually dealt with through civilian channels, i.e. the importation of ‘a warlike atmosphere’ within the national boundaries? Or are we on the contrary witnessing a ‘policiarization’ of the military that progressively becomes the auxiliary of civil intelligence services? How does military involvement inside the national territory transform the way we think of the recourse to force in issues that are normally dealt with by the judiciary, the police and the gendarmerie?8 All these questions show the need to reassess the exceptional character of 11 September 2001, as well as the new threats to be fought against. In other words, one has to re-examine a debate that has been fuelled by traumatic images, official speeches, conflicts of competence, as well as by political and strategic analyses.9 This leads us to a fundamental question that lies at the core of the issue of the military option in the fight against terrorism within the national boundaries: who is the enemy one is fighting against?10 This question is just as much debated in France as in other countries. As a senior French army official has stated, ‘the problem is not to know whether the army has a role, but to know what threat are we talking about’.11 What kind of ‘terrorism’ could justify an increased recourse to the armies inside the national territory?12 Is it violent clandestine organizations with nationalistic or separatist purposes?13 Or are we talking about radicalized religious groups? Not differentiating between different types of violent clandestine organization, and using the threat of Al-Qaeda as an alibi to amend laws and to impose a ‘French Patriot Act’, is a trap that should clearly be avoided. The terrorist threat does not have a clear and homogeneous outlook. Its very definition lies at the heart of legal, policerelated and political conflicts about who is legitimately authorized to tell its truth.14 Currently, the fight against ‘incivilities’ and crime tends to be inscribed too quickly in an inaccurate vision of a continuum of threats and insecurity on which extreme ‘terrorism’ is to be found.15 While listing the actors of anti-terrorism in France,16 I will seek to shed light on all the views and arguments about counter-terrorism. I will also attempt to high-

Military activities within national boundaries 123 light all the shifts in meanings inducing the reference to terrorism, such as the views on violence in the suburbs, sometimes seen as being part of a continuum reaching from petty crime to terrorism.17 This chapter18 is articulated around the limitations and constraints upon military involvement in counter-terrorism. It is important here to note that the traditional involvement of the French gendarmerie in the anti-terrorist fight does not raise the same questions as the one of other armed forces because of the status of the former as a national military police. While the gendarmerie is administratively part of the armed forces (and therefore under the aegis of the Ministry of Defence), it is operationally attached to the Ministry of Interior for its missions within France. Its criminal investigations are run under judiciary supervision. To better understand the antiterrorist military activity inside the French territory, I shall establish parallels with the British and Spanish cases. First, because of the singularity of these two examples; second, because the two cases are under the scrutiny of the French armed forces. The history of the British military intervention in Northern Ireland is a crucial example of how armed forces have participated in the evolution of emergency laws to ‘fight against terrorism’, while adopting the official discourse justifying their intervention by their support to civil powers. The Spanish case obviously remains important due to the persistence of the fight against ETA and the involvement therein of the ‘Spanish gendarmerie’, i.e. the Guardia Civil.

When does terrorism become a military threat? In France, terrorism and violent actions claimed by or attributed to illegal organizations seeking independence have always been dealt with by the police, the gendarmerie and the judiciary. The purpose of this chapter is to determine the necessary degree of threat that would justify the idea that resorting to armed forces in counter-terrorism within the national boundaries is both politically appropriate and efficient. Which terrorist threats are presented as requiring a military involvement because of the incapacity of civil authorities to deal with them? To answer this question, one should ask who tries to promote the idea that soldiers should be involved inside the national territory for anti-terrorist purposes because of their specific know-how and capacities (with regard to NBC, i.e. nuclear, biological and chemical weapons), and of their human resources. Who is opposed to this development within the military structures? Framing the debate on the role of the military in anti-terrorism within the national boundaries The questions raised by military involvement in counter-terrorism became more acute after the September 11th attacks. These attacks re-opened the debate on the participation of soldiers in internal security, an issue that

124 E.-P. Guittet due to political and constitutional provisions had been closed down in most liberal countries.19 After these attacks, the US army ordered a report to the RAND Corporation.20 In this report, the major statement consisted in declaring that, in case of force majeure, the army is the institution of the ‘last chance’, prepared for the worst to happen and ready if the civil authorities fail to react. This reference to a ‘providential institution’ such as the US armed forces, ‘the last stronghold for democracy’, is justified by the US army’s experience in assisting in internal security issues (natural disasters, urban riots especially in Los Angeles, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington). But, according to this report, the first justification for military involvement in counter-terrorism is the fact that the US army has the qualities required to cope with terrorist strikes, i.e. a significant number of competent men and women, and a major organizational competence allowing them, if necessary, to build the basic infrastructures to fill the void created by a massive attack. In the face of a terrorist attack, the solidity and the efficiency of civil authorities could suffer greatly because, following the aforementioned report, civil authorities have not these ‘natural military’ qualities. The means and solutions suggested take the worst-case scenario as the point of departure. And the worst-case scenario here is not only the potential massive attack in itself, but also the fact of being unable to cope, being inefficient because the soldiers would not have been prepared for this threat. This US view that relies on the threat argument and resorts to the idea that contemporary military activities already include practices that could be of interest in the fight against terrorism – ‘urban war’, ‘low intensity conflict’, ‘crowd control’, ‘violence control’, etc.21 – has spread in France as well. Several books and reports from the French Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS) tried to adapt this US way of thinking to the national level in order to be able to counter threats to France and to the NATO level, thus taking the transnationalization of threats into account. Their authors invaded the media, and quoted themselves mutually but did not forward unquestionable arguments to justify this institutional imitation, except for a staunch solidarity with the US leadership. Yet some senior officers of the French army, more cautious and believing in independent strategic thinking, consider that any military involvement within the national boundaries should always be exceptional and in any case stay within the limits of the existing legal framework: One should not forget that the army is employing and preparing soldiers for war; they go to war and come back. Even though the army is prepared for any scenario, it wants to convey its assistance within the legal framework and only do what it is trained to do. The army has no role to play in the anti-terrorist fight and, frankly speaking, when soldiers have to patrol subways and airports, it has nothing to do with counter-terrorism.22

Military activities within national boundaries 125 One has here to highlight how this ‘legalistic view’ is directly linked with a realistic speech on the state of the current threat: Who is the adversary of the Rafale plane? Who is the enemy of the Leclerc tank? There is no Soviet enemy any longer. This is an oldfashioned way of thinking. So, do we have to send armoured raids against terrorists? It is meaningless. We don’t have a hereditary enemy any longer.23 This reluctance of an important part of the military staff to intervene within the national boundaries in the anti-terrorist fight should not, according to some of our interlocutors, be interpreted as the consequence of a hypothetical inability of soldiers to act. They often affirm that the debate in itself is not illegitimate since it is justified by contemporary changes in the threat environment as well as by the transformations undergone by the army in a new European context, where classical wars24 have not only become illegal but also highly unlikely. Some officials told me that soldiers could in some cases become involved in high-intensity operations because of their exclusive competence when a quick response is needed and where one would be forced to engage in high levels of violence. More specific roles requiring the recourse to a military-type of know-how were also mentioned. This is, for example, the case of potentially antiterrorist security systems, such as the one that involved a marine commando,25 AWACS and mountain infantry for the surveillance of a safety zone at the Evian G8 summit in 2003. Another example could be the security system set up in 2004 for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings. No less than 8,000 soldiers from three armies were mobilized by the regional prefect and the maritime prefect for the Channel and the North Sea. This military staff, along with 6,000 gendarmes, 3,000 policemen, and 1,500 firemen mobilized under the antiterrorist Vigipirate alert plan, played an important role in the ‘sanctuarization’ of the zone of ceremonies. Under this exceptional security system,26 the Air Force had to coordinate the whole air safety system based at the Carpiquet aerodrome.27 Several air force fighters and helicopters controlled the air space to prevent any intrusion. This Air Force security mission was supported by a radar network that sought to detect any ‘abnormal behaviour’, if for example the flight ban over the forbidden area was not respected. In that case, a fighter could take off to identify and meet any suspicious plane, and if necessary force it to land. In the extreme case in which the pilot would have to destroy the plane, the decision could be taken only by the President of the French Republic. This security system was in fact a mere reinforcement of the usual air space protection system that covers the whole French air space. Actually, the French air defence is not limited to the situation in which a response to a particular ‘threat’28 would be necessary. The respect of the French

126 E.-P. Guittet sovereignty on the national air space is clearly prioritized, and any aggression against the airspace is considered even worse than any other form of comparable aggression. As far as the French navy is concerned, its role is both to be prepared for a possible war at sea, and to support the other types of action taken by the national government at sea. By virtue of the latter element, the navy carries out police missions in the French territorial waters. In other words, the navy can also play a preventive, defensive or offensive role in counter-terrorism. Nevertheless, according to the French model, as opposed to the US model of coast-guards, this role of the navy implies a coordination of different administrations and ministries.29 A moment of exception, in which the involvement of French armies within the national boundaries would not be questioned, would arise if violent clandestine groups were proved to possess NBC capacities. In this case, the armed forces possess fighting skills and protection facilities that are more adapted and efficient than the ones directly controlled by civil authorities.30 Some special military units can thus contribute to the antiterrorist struggle along with the police with whom they already work closely in times of peace. We can mention the example of three military units (essentially from the army and particularly the military engineers) that are under the authority of the Ministry of Interior in virtue of the latter’s competence in matters of civil defence.31 Beyond the so-called Vigipirate plans and the other alert systems justified in the name of the efficient fight against terrorism, the armed forces also participate in counterterrorism activities implying the involvement of units commanded by the Special Operations Command (COS32). It is important to bear in mind that the military know-how in matters of NBC weapons is the discursive nexus around which all theories adopting a favourable stance towards antiterrorist involvement of the military within the national boundaries revolve. However, confusion is often made here between the concepts of civil protection and civil defence. It is the latter concept that is often highlighted by these theories, thus putting the focus on the military units specialized in NBC while at the same time promoting a military approach to terrorist attacks. Instead, the role of the military in civil protection, just as it has a role to play in natural disasters, should be insisted upon. However, beyond these specific devices, any critical investigation into the role of the army inside the national territory for counter-terrorism purposes should mention the anti-terrorist Vigipirate plans. When asked about the impact of these plans, some army officials underscored their potential role in the prevention of terrorism to insist on the difficulty to assess such a preventive action and to consider that these plans had become a device aimed at the struggle against petty crime and juvenile delinquency.33 The most caustic critics argue that the anti-terrorist justifications of the Vigipirate plans are actually concealing budgetary considerations. According to them, the anti-terrorist label mechanically leads to an increased interest of the political authorities that thus become more prone to allocate

Military activities within national boundaries 127 financial resources to those who can claim to be engaged in ‘antiterrorism’. This would also explain why ‘terrorism’ on the one hand, and ‘incivilities’ and petty crime on the other, are sometimes presented as being part of the same continuum of insecurity in spite of their essentially different nature.34 Thus, some army officers try to make a military issue of insecurity in the suburbs, a claim that is sometimes fuelled by a fear of immigration and a tendency to assimilate terrorism with religious and/or ethnic minorities. In the same way, the discourses on ‘urban war’ increasingly rely on the scenario of a massive upheaval in the suburbs.35 These catastrophic and alerting views should not hide the fact that the risk of political violence in contemporary societies comes above all from highly structured clandestine groups, with a strong political label. Among these groups, only a few are operational. And, even in this case, they usually only possess limited resources, except for groups that would have a NBC capacity.36 Most of these groups try to keep a low profile and adopt a strategy of concealment rather than a maximalistic one. Therefore, a serious threat assessment should not be mixed up with the apocalyptic perspectives mentioned above. Military activity within the national boundaries and the role of police experts All of the abovementioned issues, including that concerning organizations possessing or seeking NBC weapons, raise the question of the identification of the enemy to be defeated and thus require important means to be allocated to the gathering of intelligence. In other words, the concrete modes of anti-terrorist action have to rely more on intelligence and police technologies than on the recourse to an overwhelming military-like concentration of force. In fact, ‘terrorist’ enemies do not represent a military threat because the main difficulty is to identify and locate them whereas, generally speaking, they are easy to defeat once they are located since they rarely possess important resources of coercion. The anti-terrorist actors must expect to be confronted with highly unpredictable forms of violence that do not follow a single temporality such as the one described by Clausewitz referring to the successive phases that lead to the ‘escalatory ascension to extreme violence’.37 The patterns of violence we are considering here are occasional and might even seem aleatory. They are therefore very different from the prolonged massive attacks that one might expect in a military conflict. By definition, violent clandestine groups are part of an asymmetric relation that also involves governmental security agencies. As a consequence, they have to adapt their violent strategies by avoiding direct confrontation or predictability. Anti-terrorism thus becomes a matter of data collection as well as of police intelligence since it requires a mapping of clandestine networks. The moment of coercion is not the most crucial one here. In other words, the competence of the police is more pertinent to

128 E.-P. Guittet this task than the military one: usually the recourse to a limited amount of force should suffice, while the focus has to be put on the collection and analysis of different forms of intelligence. It should however be noted that the military intelligence agency DPSD38 can contribute to counterterrorism due to its competence in matters of protection of critical infrastructures. Even though it does not officially operate within the national boundaries, it has competences in the tracing of cross-border illegal networks suspected of intending to organize attacks against the French territory or against French interests abroad.39 This leads us to the analysis of the point of view and the place of the intelligence community in the French anti-terrorist apparatus. Military activities within the national boundaries and the role of the intelligence services Created in October 1984, the Unit for the coordination of anti-terrorist action (UCLAT) is placed under the authority of the national police chief of the DGPN (Central directorate of the national police) and gathers representatives of all the services competent in counter-terrorism: DNAT (National division for anti-terrorism), DGSE (General directorate for external security – officially linked to the Ministry of Defence), DST (Territorial surveillance directorate), DCRG (Central directorate of general intelligence), DGGN (Central directorate of the national gendarmerie) and DCPJ (Criminal investigation Department40). The military might participate in this structure when they can contribute to intelligence issues. As has already been noted, anti-terrorism requires the order of priority between intelligence and coercion to be reversed, as compared to what applies in a military conflict, in favour of the former. Civil intelligence services usually recognize that the military institution might be helpful thanks to its observation satellites, surveillance planes and the means it allocates to the treatment of sensitive information for the analysis and the mapping of cross-border patterns of violence. The question here is not so much how this information is transmitted from the armed services to the DGSE and the civil intelligence services, but what kind of intelligence it is and what it can be used for. How can military intelligence be exploited by non-military institutions and what is it used for once it reaches the inter-ministerial level? Can analyses of protean forms of violence be made on the basis of military sources of intelligence? Given the characteristics of the transnational networks of clandestine violence, intelligence is undeniably crucial.41 Such intelligence is also possible to obtain since non-governmental actors have not the means necessary to keep their secrets better than states. But, this being said, one has to ask whether there is room left for the DRM (Directorate of military intelligence), the DPSD and the DGSE in the overall effort of the intelligence community to track transnational networks. What role can military means

Military activities within national boundaries 129 of surveillance and control42 play in the struggle against potentially violent clandestine organizations?43 For a large part, these questions still remain unanswered. But they certainly remain pertinent.

Can the army bring any added value to the overall anti-terrorist effort? When considering the last decade, it is obvious that French authorities have managed to deal with the occurrence of transnational violence in an ‘ordinary way’, without resorting to tanks or military infrastructure. But, if the spectrum of issues that must be dealt with by the military was to be widened to include new security issues, there would be a risk of the militarization of many risks, dangers and/or fears. Not all risks must be interpreted as being the expression of a hostile intention. Moreover, a militarization that proceeds from the will to couple the imperatives of internal security with the representation of an infiltrated external enemy might result in undemocratic and illiberal views. Many military officials resist getting caught up in these alarming discourses and are not afraid to highlight these potentially undemocratic consequences: ‘Unstable suburbs are the consequence of social divisions and inequalities. It is perfectly clear that when the social fabric of urban areas is threatened, the problem cannot be dealt with by weapons’.44 However, at the same time, official sources often affirm that the presence of soldiers on the street reassures the population and has a deterrent effect on illegal organizations. There are good reasons to have doubts about this argument.45 It could indeed just as well be the contrary. Clandestine violent organizations could in a way be legitimized when armed forces try to engage them. Such an engagement supposes to recognize these groups as military enemies, as an opponent worth mobilizing resources originally destined to be used in the confrontation with other states. Many army officials are aware of this potentially adverse effect of the military involvement in counter-terrorism.46 Traditional police-type missions against clandestine groups, on the contrary, have the merit of criminalizing, and thus delegitimating political violence by presenting themselves as operations against individuals that do not abide by the law and are treated as such. The police-approach therefore prevents clandestine groups from becoming legitimate competitors of the government. The involvement of armed forces would then imply a reorganization of the capacity of clandestine groups to compete with the state. They do not have this capacity. Their strategy is to create a pervasive feeling of insecurity in the population in order to destabilize a state politically. In this context, is there a reason to believe that armed forces can reassure the population by displaying their readiness and their high level of alert on the street? This is not quite obvious. The very presence of soldiers suggests that a major attack might be imminent: the paradox is that the more we

130 E.-P. Guittet want to secure populations, the more we might unintentionally foster a feeling of insecurity. Nothing proves that military patrols would reassure better than law enforcement agencies. As an army general has stated, ‘It is not three soldiers walking behind policemen, hands in their pockets, who will resolve the problem’.47 Although the Vigipirate alert plan was well received by the French population, it might have radicalized some young people in the suburbs. Instead of deterring them, the plan could encourage some to take action against soldiers since the latter are generally considered as being a more symbolically rewarding target than the ones they usually choose. The discourses claiming that the Palestinian intifada is becoming a model of revolt against authorities in the French suburbs might become more credible if the army deploys units in these areas. This issue of credibility raises the more essential problem of legitimacy. The latter problem was raised again during the discussions throughout the writing and following the publication of the 1994 White Paper on Defence.48 While the issues of transversal threats, new forms of conflict, and ‘guerrilla economies’ had been mentioned several times, the White Paper did not directly establish any link between these issues and the security of the national territory. Any terminology that could have been misinterpreted or could have led to maximalist security strategies or to the designation of an internal enemy was used with utmost caution. The implicit idea was hence that any form of militarization of terrorist threats would cast a shadow of illegitimacy on the anti-terrorist endeavour. Even if it is true that the armed forces have the most performing means in matters of command, communication, control and information, one has to ask if this is reason enough to emulate the US army strategy proposed by the RAND Corporation.49 It is true that the armed forces have obvious know-how when it comes to planning and conducting operations, but they fail to integrate the central legal dimension necessary for the anti-terrorist struggle to be legitimate under the rule of law. Practically speaking, they lack the relation to a legal authority. Everything seems to speak in favour of the legal way of the fight against terrorism for it delegitimizes clandestine groups by criminalizing them. Because the strategy of violent clandestine groups aims at their recognition as a strategic partner, there are good reasons to ask if the visible deployment of armies in the fight against these clandestine groups does not lead to adverse effects that fail to delegitimize the clandestine violent actors. The examples of Spain and Northern Ireland are in this regard edifying. They illustrate how the anti-terrorist strategy has shifted from an approach putting the focus on counter-subversive practices to an approach implying the judicial condemnation of these same practices. The Spanish choice of a counter-subversive and military approach to the violent and radical nationalism of ETA50 has had durable consequences in the Basque country. Yet the conflict is still continuing.51 It therefore seems more judicious, although more complex, to find a political solution

Military activities within national boundaries 131 to it.52 The involvement of the British army in Northern Ireland, following a pattern of re-actualization of the practices developed in the wars of decolonization and seeking to justify its participation along with the police by using the exception-and-emergency argument, contributed highly to the intensification and the complexity of the conflict. In those two cases, the aim was to ‘get rid of terrorism’ through the use of force in order to ‘deter’ illegal organizations. But, in the process, has not the demonization of clandestine organizations (ETA and IRA) loosened the usual constraints limiting the use of force and opened the way for illegal solutions? In both cases, national and European courts harshly sanctioned the abuses that occurred. The famous shadowy ‘death squads’ of the GAL,53 funded and operated by the Spanish socialist government of Felipe Gonzalez between 1983 and 1987, was one of these abuses. Its aim was to deny any safe haven to ETA members by kidnapping and killing them, in Spain and in the French part of the Basque province. One should also mention the many arbitrary detentions and ‘shoot to kill’ practices in Northern Ireland. The question once again is: can an individual guilty of a terrorist offence be seen as a soldier or a combatant? The legal way of the war against terrorism plays, on the contrary, on the symbolic register of delegitimization of groups and individuals who do not abide by the law. One could here argue that some anti-terrorist plans – such as Vigipirate – are not meant to allow a military confrontation between soldiers and presumed terrorists but rather to deter and prevent. But, as has been shown, this idea is naive and forgets the main issue, that is, whether the current restructuring of the armed forces must take account of the questionable hypothesis according to which the military enemy is now located inside the external borders.

The legal framework and constraints: the French apparatus of exception Under normal conditions, counter-terrorism falls under the competence of the police and the judiciary.54 In France, the management of the possibility of ‘regular’ terrorist actions does not generally involve any battle corps or external intelligence services. But, can this anti-terrorist apparatus offer a credible response to the worst possible scenarios of attack(s)? This is an important matter. Indeed, although my previous comments have questioned the relevance of the armies in the anti-terrorist endeavour within the national boundaries, the question of the appropriate solutions in the case of a major attack in France cannot be eluded. The argument goes that when maximal involvement becomes unavoidable, when the worst possible events have to be addressed – several and simultaneous attacks or major NBC attacks on the national territory – military intervention becomes a truly credible political option. Several interviewed people confirmed the pervasiveness of this argument. Neither the police nor the gendarmerie have the capacity to deal with several hours of heavy shooting, such as

132 E.-P. Guittet happened during the Beslan event in Russia, and neither of the two institutions wish to have it.55 According to police and gendarmerie officials, this kind of situation would without any doubt require the assistance of the army. The armed forces are logistically prepared to face these kinds of situations of ‘escalation to the extremes’ and, furthermore, they are trained for them. However, as long as the rule of law prevails, the political institutions function and the action of the state remains within the provisions of the 1959 Ordinance, the situation has to be ranked at the lowest or medium part of the spectrum of violence and, hence, the armed forces have to be placed under the authority of the judiciary and deployed accordingly. France has a legal framework providing for the transfer of exceptional powers to the military. The organization of coercive resources under the regime of exception is based upon the principle of complementarity (of capacities), thus allowing for a non-negligible capacity of action of the political power. Even in the case of a catastrophic worst-case scenario, military involvement must follow the rules regarding the exceptional power apparatus and comply with the legal tools theoretically applicable to the armed forces involved in counter-terrorism inside the national territory. One of the interviewed officials underlined the fact that: The army has no intention to intervene massively within the national boundaries apart from some totally exceptional situations, where democracy would cease to function, where huge parts of the territory would be beyond the reach of the rule of law and the country would have engaged in civil war. But even in this case, it wants to offer its assistance within the legal frame only.56 It is important here to highlight that the possibility of following the rules regarding exceptional powers is conditional on the aptitude to choose the suitable ‘exceptionalizing’ laws (among the different levels of exception that are legally possible) so that the legal system continues to allow for an efficient response in the situation of a major crisis. It is therefore important to present the existing legal regimes of exception. In decreasing order of the legally defined levels of ‘exceptionality’, one should first have to consider the maximal military involvement allowed for by the emergency power article 16 of the French Constitution of 1958,57 continue with the state of siege,58 the state of emergency and the terms of the Ordinance of 1959, and finish with the Vigipirate alert plan. Another possible taxonomy of these ‘exceptional rules’ would consist in their listing following their chronological order, from the state of siege (1848), the state of emergency (1955), article 16 (1958) and the DOT (Operational defence of territory, created in 1959 on the basis of the Ordinance of 1959) to the Vigipirate plan. This chronology might be interesting from the point of view of constitutional history, but it does not meet our requirement of being able to graduate (in one way or another) the different

Military activities within national boundaries 133 scenarios of military involvement. It only sheds light on the fact that French law is continuously adapted to the types of crises that are thought to be susceptible to emerge. One last possible classification could be established following the expected durability of the exceptionalizing effects of the legal rules. In this case, the highest level of durability would be encountered when the ‘exceptional’ practices become a routine or even a triviality over time. Following a decreasing order of the levels of durability, such a classification could give rise to the following presentation: first the Vigipirate plan, then the state of emergency/state of siege/DOT, and finally article 16. Here, I will use the first type of the aforementioned classifications, while trying to specify the events that could justify the recourse to exceptional measures as well as their foreseeable consequences. It is hence important to start with an overview of the terms provided by article 16 of the French Constitution. This will allow us subsequently to present the other exceptional apparatuses existing in French law with regard to the counter-terrorism involvement of the military within the national boundaries. Article 16 allows responding to a physical threat posed on the population living on the French territory:59 If massive attacks occurred on our territory, such as the 9/11 attacks on the US territory, these actions, albeit unable to physically endanger the whole country, could create a state of panic, obliging the executive to take unprecedented actions in order to deal with the crisis and to prevent it from occurring again. Whereas the Belgian Constitution provides in its article 187 that no event, exceptional or major, should ever lead to an infringement of the Constitution, the French Constitution allows this, even in the absence of a threat of invasion or of internal conspiracy. Consequently, this exceptional event, which is plausible, could allow the French President to resort to article 16.60 Article 16 can, for example, be implemented in case of a NBC attack. In this case, the President can declare a state of emergency or a state of siege (although these provisions refer to different legal texts). The conditions allowing for the recourse to the state of emergency provisions are looser than the ones related to the state of siege provisions.61 They are also less related to specifically armed or military threats. Actually, the state of emergency may be declared in case of an imminent danger, massive violations of ‘law and order’ or in case of natural or man-made catastrophes (floods, earthquakes, explosions, etc.62). The fact that ‘law and order’ is mentioned indicates that police considerations shall here be more important than military ones. This would even be the case in exceptional legal scenarios, involving for example a NBC attack, which would invoke article 16 in relation to emergency measures. In this case, the armed services have to remain under the rule of law and must be held accountable for their

134 E.-P. Guittet actions to the political and legal authorities. It must here be recalled that only the state of siege63 provides for the substitution of military authorities to civil police authorities, whereas the state of emergency only allows for the extension of military powers. In the latter state, military officials might have decision-making powers as far as means are concerned, but they have to meet the objectives defined by the Ministry of Interior. In very much the same way, when there are forms of cooperation between the military and civil authorities, the use of armed forces has to remain under the authority of civil police authorities. The concept of global defence is described in the very important Ordinance no. 59–147 of 7 January 1959, introduced in the context of a growing awareness of a possible uproar in Algeria. The specificities of the historical trajectory of French institutions have thus constituted the frame of an extensive interpretation (encompassing both civil and military institutions) of defence. This opposes them, for example, to the Anglo-Saxon ‘model’ in which the difference between police and army is theoretically much more clear-cut.64 The aforementioned Ordinance defines the notions of military defence, civil defence and economic defence. Military defence falls under the competence of the Ministry of Defence, but civil and economic defence are attached to other ministries. Does this suggest that there are mechanisms for inter-ministerial cooperation? In the case of military counter-terrorism involvement within the national boundaries, the terms of the cooperation with the criminal investigation police and the question of the military subordination to civil powers have to be examined through the 1959 Ordinance. Of course, the legal debate on these issues does not depict perfectly the reality of the practices. Moreover, it does not allow for the analysis of the difference between internal security and territorial security. However, while taking these limits into account, one has to analyse the place of civil defence as well as of the already mentioned DOT in the fight against terrorism. The DOT is defined in the 1959 Ordinance as encompassing: [A]ny measure fixing the conditions of military action by armed services on the national ground and the national territory that, together with other forms of defence, civil or military, ensures the upholding of freedom and the continuity of governmental action, the safeguarding of the main institutional bodies that are essential for the defence of the nation. This definition is also inscribed in the inter-ministerial guideline.65 The DOT consists in operations and measures that, in cooperation with other defence forces, aim to counter the action of an infiltrated enemy in a specific area or on the whole territory. The predominance of civil powers in general and of the Ministry of Interior in particular, established through the so-called ‘prefect line’,66 is once again reaffirmed. This ‘republican

Military activities within national boundaries 135 frame’ established by the DOT constrains the armies that are here considered as mere service providers. But, at the same time, it legitimates their intervention within the national boundaries. The DOT rests on the legalist traditions of the armed forces, which furthers the subordination of the military to civil powers. It is also influenced by the historical trajectory of French institutions (both civil and military), which are used to different forms of cooperation between civil and military powers. The DOT is the most codified of the legal tools allowing for the intervention of the military inside the national territory. It is however also the least used of these tools. According to the most common interpretation, it does not really include the possibility of attacks carried out by purely non-state actors or even of punctual attacks disconnected from a global plan aiming at a durable destabilization of the nation and carried out by an enemy state. It nearly always suggests a political fantasy of an enemy that seeks a long-term destabilization, or that plots for a future territorial invasion. It presupposes an internal enemy having contacts with an external enemy. That is why, instead of activating the DOT, French politicians have preferred to resort to and to reactivate ad hoc devices such as the Vigipirate alert plan. The question that has to be asked is therefore why, even though the legislator provides for a large range of solutions, there is not an intermediary level in the graduation of these exceptional powers trying to foresee the unforeseeable and suggesting concrete measures to deal with it. It is true that such an institutionalized intermediary level could have avoided the perpetuation of an ad hoc tool benefiting only from a very loosely defined legal frame, such as the Vigipirate plan. However, the issue of the creation of a new tool again raises the question of the nature of the threat that must be countered and of the terms of the concrete actions that must be taken in this context. Is it not more judicious to choose the means already existing under the rule of law instead of trying to tear at the limits of what the rule of law already allows? It is always tempting to believe that the best way of dealing with a forecasted situation of crisis is to invent and add new terms to an already very complex apparatus. Yet it would be foolish to believe that even the best of the legal provisions could ever allow one to foresee the future.

Exceptionalism and political practice in France: the mechanisms of civil-military relations and the inter-ministerial process As we have seen in the abovementioned legal provisions, armed forces can in some circumstances be used against transnational/non-state political violence in France. In this respect, the military programming law for 2003–0867 takes into account the post-September 11 geopolitical and strategic context, and determines the needs for military equipment. But, as has already been seen, armies are not the best adapted or the most efficient

136 E.-P. Guittet forces in counter-terrorism. Rather than militarizing the struggle against the threats represented by networked forms of political violence, governments would be more efficient if they more consistently chose to delegitimate the enemy by judiciarizing counter-terrorism and thus reducing ‘terrorism’ to its criminal dimension. After years of fighting the illegal separatist Basque organization ETA, Spanish authorities preferred, after the 11 March 2004 attacks claimed by al-Qaida, to opt for a process of judiciarization of the anti-terrorist endeavour rather than, for example, bombing following the US response pattern.68 The cooperation between civil institutions and the military chain of command is already organized in times of peace in order to be prepared should war or other ‘exceptional’ situations of crisis occur. In both cases, armed forces could be requested to get involved internally through the activation of one or several of the already mentioned exceptional legal provisions. This is especially so in the French case, because of the notion of civil defence. Therefore, there is a paradox: the ‘normal’ liberal legal and political order can suspend some of its basic provisions in order to ensure its own survival in case of a major crisis. Indeed, the rule of law, as defined historically in modern liberal regimes, is more or less linked to the distinction between external and internal security, between the military and the police. When this principle of differentiation is radically questioned in order to uphold and preserve the liberal order, one is faced with a paradox. This means that the principle of military involvement within the national boundaries, that is envisioned by the legislator, refers to extralegal dynamics supposing the explicit or implicit proclamation of a ‘state of emergency’ or a ‘state of exception’ in which the logics of war (according to the traditional perspective) could be considered to be ‘imported’ into the national territory. When it comes to cooperation between civil and military powers in peacetime for counter-terrorism purposes, the SGDN (General secretariat for national defence) centralizes and coordinates the means and contributions from the relevant ministries to establish plans of prevention, protection and intervention adapted to the evolving nature of threats. Since 2001, under its impulsion, inter-ministerial meetings aimed at gathering and coordinating all the plans of the ‘pirate family’ (Vigipirate, Piratair, Intrusair and Piratemer), and especially the plans aiming at reacting to NBC attacks (Piratome, Piratox and Biotox). Within the frame of these plans, the decision-making power is held by the Prime Minister and, if involved, armed forces are subordinated to the authority of the prefect.69 In the case of a serious threat, the inter-ministerial Committee for antiterrorism (CILAT) gathers the directors of the relevant administrations and services under the authority of the Ministry of Interior. Even though these civil–military devices exist, many issues have still to be dealt with. Loosely defined ad hoc solutions, such as the Vigipirate plan, have allowed a punctual response to the difficulties created by the

Military activities within national boundaries 137 activation of the civil-military mechanisms. But these solutions do not seem to be fundamentally pertinent. However, due to the confidentiality and discretion of the debates about the Vigipirate plan, the relevance of my view on this topic might be limited. The Vigipirate plan was introduced by the inter-ministerial instruction no. 2800 SGDN of 7 February 1978. At first, it was an alert and prevention plan covering the national territory that had apparently derived from other plans elaborated to be activated in the case of external interventions. It was implemented in 1986–87, 1990–91 and 1995. Then, it was redefined by the 5038 Guideline of 15 June 1995 and became a ‘governmental alert and prevention plan in case of a terrorist threat’.70 Its main objectives, i.e. to inform state representatives of any terrorist threat (via the operational centre of the Ministry of Interior) and to implement general71 and specific surveillance measures,72 have not changed ever since. The Vigipirate plan also aims at coordinating the organization of threat prevention at the central and regional levels, defining the responsibilities of each level (central level, defence zones, regions, départements), and providing for the implementation of more specialized intervention plans (Piratair, Intrusair, Piratome, Piratox, Piratemer). The Vigipirate plan is not so much an active or proactive prevention plan but a ‘passive prevention’ plan that, however, provides for capacities to respond quickly in case of attacks. Its main merit is that it specifies the role of the Prime Minister, who has to activate the plan, as well as the role of the SGDN, that confirms and forwards the decisions to all relevant ministries. The plan also appoints the Minister of Interior as the person in charge of its implementation at the local level – through the prefects or their counterparts from other ministries and especially the Ministry of Justice. Since 8 September 1995, the Vigipirate emergency plan has been oscillating constantly between the ‘reinforced vigilance’ status and the ‘simple vigilance’ status. However, at the same time, many of the means mobilized in the frame of this plan have been strengthened and the plan has never been deactivated onwards.73 Its main changes since 1995 have consisted in the regular change of the different colours used to symbolize the gravity of the ‘threat forecast’.74 Civil authorities do not dare to deactivate the plan, even temporarily – despite the fact that it was originally meant to be activated for short periods – as such a decision could be interpreted as a fatal error if an attack occurred in the meantime. For very much the same reason, politicians usually do not acknowledge publicly the return to a phase managed by ‘second category forces’ (policemen) within the plan. In other words, policy makers feel compelled by electoral considerations to perpetuate this theoretically exceptional plan and consequently do not dare to withdraw the troops from the streets, the train stations or the airports as an attack can indeed happen anytime since the future is unforeseeable. The indefinite prolongation of this artificially created situation of crisis leads to a shift in

138 E.-P. Guittet the implicit objectives for which the means are mobilized within this plan. For example, in this climate it becomes very tempting to use soldiers instead of policemen and gendarmes in the prevention of delinquency since the presence of soldiers is often more visible (but not more efficient). But this tactical choice of the politicians leads to unintentional consequences that may be harmful to the public order in that they contribute to the radicalization of some sectors of the youth that feel as though they are the easiest target of the security agencies involved in counter-terrorism.75 The difference between the proclaimed objective (counter-terrorism) and the real one (the fight against delinquency) also leads to a noxious rhetoric, establishing links between terrorism and petty crime, violent actions carried out from abroad and criminal behaviour adopted by some immigrants. Vigipirate illustrates then how, once implemented, exceptional measures become perennial, although many people, including military officials, denounce the irrelevance of the plan and its purely political nature.76 One should be aware of the implications of the affirmation that military forces should intervene within the national boundaries under the antiterrorist label. Actually, this affirmation suggests that the traditional counter-terrorism services and apparatuses have completely failed or that the threat is so great that they cannot cope with it. This is precisely the kind of rhetoric one has to depart from when analysing the discourses of the RAND Corporation and of the US army seeking to justify a larger involvement of the military forces in internal security.77 Another problem that has been highlighted by the Vigipirate plan is that the relations between the army and the gendarmerie, or the army and the police, are not always harmonious. One of the interviewed military officials confessed: You have to understand that the soldiers patrolling the subway stations in Paris, a FAMAS assault rifle in one hand and under the orders of a police assistant, really do not understand the point of view of the higher military hierarchy. To us the involvement of soldiers along with policemen is above all a disruption of the operational cycle of the military.78 Some however embrace the cooperation between the police and the military and even purposively blur the categories by proposing that the status of criminal investigation officer be given to some soldiers. One could ask oneself why this kind of institutional duplication would be useful. Moreover, as far as the issue of soldiers having legal prerogatives is concerned, the Italian example of the operation Vespri Siciliani against the mafia is very telling. This operation, first conceived as a very short one, lasted in fact six years from 1992 to 1998. During this period, Italian soldiers could act as public security agents notwithstanding the right to exert the functions of the criminal investigation department. This possibility, offered by

Military activities within national boundaries 139 the legislator with the explicit intention of reinforcing the collaboration between civil authorities and the military, led some Italian military officials to claim more autonomy from the civil institutions. The ‘efficiency’ of the operation was eventually disrupted by the legal pretensions of the military that dramatically reinforced pre-existing inter-institutional tensions.79 Another contentious subject affecting civil-military relations is linked to the concrete terms of the requisitioning of military manpower. Very often the armies do not want to be considered as a mere pool of manpower where the necessary means can be requisitioned just because they are lacking somewhere else.80 As one military official said: If the army has to intervene inside the national territory, it should not only be an additional force the role of which is merely to endlessly supply manpower. It wants to bring its own means of command and be granted a CMO [Centre de Mise en Œvre, Implementation Committee] in order to be able to retain control over its own operations. Therefore, additional means have to be granted to the army when asked to intervene within the national boundaries in anti-terrorist operations.81 This argument is problematic because, if pushed to its ultimate consequences, it can call into question the fundamental principle of the predominance of the prefects as well as the very principle of the complementarity of civilian and military authorities. Of course, the predominance of civil authorities and the existence of a military operational command are not incompatible as such. But it is precisely this fact that has to be reminded to the military officials who do not want to see their role reduced to a purely tactical function, but also want to control the definition of the strategy. In this regard, Northern Ireland offers a good example of what should precisely be avoided. It illustrates the temptation to transfer additional powers to the military thus blurring the distinction between the police and the soldier, the military and the judiciary. I have tried to show that military interventions have to remain within the limits fixed by the legal framework; not only for ethical reasons, but also because the imperative of the delegitimization of violent clandestine groups requires anti-terrorist forces to ensure their own legitimacy in the eyes of the public. For precisely this reason, the example of Northern Ireland cannot be considered to be paradigmatic of what the armed forces should or could do in counter-terrorism within the national boundaries.82 As was reported to me, ‘the war against the IRA was a real war. Just look at the price the British soldiers had to pay for their involvement in the fight against the IRA’.83 At the centre of this presumed ‘war’ lies the way the British government reacted to the reappearance of the Irish Republican Army in the 1970s, after having believed during 15 years not only to have ‘settled’ the issue of Northern Ireland

140 E.-P. Guittet but also to have succeeded in the total pacification of the province without having to resort to military intervention. In Northern Ireland, the recourse to the military during the ‘troubles’ was supposed to bring back order quickly and to be a sign of neutrality, but it lasted much longer and involved London as a major, if not the only, stakeholder. Faced with what was named the ‘subversive threat’ and, later on, the ‘terrorist threat’ of the IRA, the British government became one of the first democratic governments to consider that, to justify the practices of its soldiers and intelligence services on the ground, the principle of Habeas Corpus could be suspended in one part of its territory, and exceptional measures that amended the legal warranties of defence could be taken. This allowed the military to arrest, question and even to resort to ‘extraordinary’ judgment procedures, thus eventually blurring the distinction between the licit and the illicit.

Conclusion I do not claim here that the British political leaders initiated the vicious circle of violence in order to increase their power, as some conspiracy theories wish to insinuate. I merely underline the fact that the fear of attacks led them to act precipitately, not so much to resolve the problem, but to prove to the public that they controlled the situation. Yet the premises of these actions were false since they posited an analogy between these ‘troubles’ and war. The harmful consequences of these actions were nonintentional, but this does not question their significance. Efficiency is not served by dubious methods, especially when the fundamental rights and the ethical codes shared by all democracies are jeopardized. Therefore, the responsibility that is incumbent on politicians cannot be underestimated in counter-terrorism. Anti-terrorist policies must of course be coercive as far as the violent adversaries are concerned, but their objectives should not be instrumentalized to serve less official ends such as popular mobilization or identity politics. French army commands, but also the other European army commands, should meditate their past experiences and draw the lessons from the British experience that shows how the British army, that has never been unpopular or considered as useless, eventually came under fierce criticism for its role in Northern Ireland that had originally been thought of as an application of the mere principle of assistance to civil authorities. Ultimately, 30 years later, the British justice system sanctioned the illegal practices involving the British Army.

Notes 1 This chapter would not have been possible without the kind help of Christian Olsson with whom I made most of the interviews with the French military and police officials. I would like also to thank my colleagues at Cultures & Conflits

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2 3 4 5

6

7 8

9

10 11

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for their comments and helpful advice. I remain solely responsible for all errors and omissions. King, ‘Les forces armées et la lutte contre le terrorisme’, pp. 27–42. Hanon, ‘Militaires et lutte contre-terroriste’, 121–140. Interview with a member of the French Centre for Force Employment Doctrine (Centre de Doctrine et d’Emploi des Forces, CDEF), French ministry of Defence, March 2005. On the relation between armies and internal security, see Bigo, Sécurité Intérieure, Implications pour la Défense, interviews with members of the French Department for the conception of force systems (Bureau de Conception des Systèmes Forces, BCSF). Following the charge by Law Lords in December 2004 against the British antiterrorist law authorizing unlimited detention without trial, it is important to await Charles Clarke’s response. See House of Commons, ‘Hansard Debates’. See also President Putin’s speech on special forces after the Beslan assault, talking about a link with international anti-terrorist actions. Bigo, ‘Global (in)security: the field of the professionals of unease management and the ban-opticon’. See also Chevrier et al. ‘Armées et sécurité intérieure, 40. The French Gendarmerie, like the Spanish Guardia Civil, the Italian Carabinieri, the Dutch Maréchaussée or the Austrian Gendarmerie, is a military police force, a police-type of force under the authority of the ministry of Defence. On this issue, one can look at Research Department documents on contemporary criminal threats and especially the paper written by Raufer, ‘Terrorismes, nouvelles menaces’; Heisbourg, Hyperterrorisme: La Nouvelle Guerre; Heisbourg, ‘Hyper-terrorisme: état des lieux’; Delpech, ‘Le terrorisme international et l’Europe’. On these dramatic apocalyptic speeches on September 2001, see Cultures & Conflits ‘Défense et identité: un contexte global’. On ‘discourses of exception’, see Bonditti and Guittet, Les Politiques Antiterroristes Depuis le 11 Septembre 2001. Legault, ‘Vers la globalisation du terrorisme?’, pp. 17–26. Interview with a member of the French CDEF, March 2005. On the threat assessment in the anti-terrorist fight see also the conclusions of the report written by the first Committee of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale, L’action internationale et européenne contre le terrorisme. Chocquet, ‘Le terrorisme est-il une menace de défense?’, 19–64; Bonditti and Guittet, Les Politiques Antiterroristes Depuis le 11 Septembre 2001. For an analysis of the possible forms of illegal organizations: Bigo and Hermant, ‘La relation terroriste revisitée’. Sommier, Le Terrorisme. Tebib, Le Renseignement dans la Lutte Contre le Terrorisme (the author looks at the role of military and police intelligence in counter-terrorism. This highly ideological book proceeds by hiding arguments behind fears and plays on the idea of a continuum of insecurity reaching from suburbs to international terrorism). Most of my interlocutors wished to keep their anonymity. I therefore only mention the institution to which they belong. See, for instance, Francart and Vilboux, Adaptation Nécessaire des Outils de Défense Français et Européens. Leroux, ‘Les armées dans la ville’, 297–312. For a critical view of these justifications for the interplay between internal and external security, see Bigo, Polices en Réseaux; Bigo, Sécurité Intérieure, Implications pour la Défense. This article summarizes some of the outcomes of a research carried out since

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35

36 37 38

39 40

December 2002; it is only a part of a more comprehensive work started in 1998 by the researchers of the Centre of Conflict Studies on the relation between security, defence and the practices of emergency. Guittet, Cercle sur les Nouvelles Perspectives Sécuritaires. Davis et al., Army Forces for Homeland Security. Dufour, La Guerre, la ville et le soldat. Interview with a member of the French BCSF, March 2005. Interview with a member of the French CDEF, March 2005. Except: art. 2 and art. 7 from the UN Charter. Around Lake Leman. French authorities had raised the four-step terror alert Vigipirate plan to the second-highest level, i.e. the red one, for the ceremonies of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Near Caen. The French concept of defence is defined in the Ordinance no. 59–147 of 7 January 1959 on Homeland Operational Defence (Défense Opérationnelle du Territoire, DOT). French navy, maritime gendarmerie, maritime affairs, customs and civil security. B.LAT (Bureau de la Lutte Antiterroriste. French Gendarmerie counterterrorism agency) interview, March 2005; BCSF interview, March 2005. UIISC 1 (Nogent le Rotrou), 5 (Corte) and 7 (Brignoles) belong to the Central inter-ministerial detachment (Détachement Central Interministériel, DCI) under the authority of the RAID. UIISC 1, which is a central DCI element specialized in NBC weapons, is the best tool to use in case of a NBC attack. As a joint service unit, the Special Operations Command (Commandement des Opérations Spéciales, COS) draws on the special operations forces of the three armed services. Currently, COS is composed of different units: the 1st Marine Parachute Infantry Regiment that is the French army’s primary special operations unit; the Army Light Aviation Special Operations Aviation Detachment; the Special Autonomous Group that is a separate subcommand operating within COS; the Naval Rifle Commandos and the Commando Hubert provide the COS with a navy special operations component. The Air Force contributes to the COS through the Special Operations Division; the Special Helicopter Squadron; the Commando Parachute Group No. 10; the 13th Regiment of Dragon Parachutists is the French army’s Long Range Recon Patrol unit and, together with the 11th Parachute Division, may be also tasked with supporting COS during joint operations. BCSF interview, March 2005; CDEF interview, March 2005. Interview with a member of the gendarmerie barracks, March 2005. Many of these books are written by what might be called ‘merchants of fear’ and other self-proclaimed ‘futurologists’ that fuel fears by associating suburbs and extremist Islam with the representation of a ‘fifth column’. See, for instance, Berthemont and Bigot, Le jour où la France tremblera. UCLAT interview, March 2005. Durieux, Relire ‘De la guerre’ de Clausewitz. The Directorate for defence protection and security (formerly Military Security) is responsible for military counterintelligence operations, as well as for the political surveillance of the military, thus ensuring the political reliability of the armed forces. B.LAT interview, March 2005. Many French senior army officials wish the UCLAT to be closer to the Prime Minister (or to the ministry of Interior) because of the presumed importance of

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41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

external and military intelligence in anti-terrorism, including on the national territory. Some of them even want to include DRM and DPSD in the UCLAT in order to unify the different intelligence services at this level. In a more detailed study, it would be interesting to make a deeper analysis of the discourses that argue in favour of a massive use of technology in antiterrorism. It is not clear at all that the massive use of technology is an appropriate response to the problem. Observation satellites, aircrafts, sounding balloons, semaphoric shore networks, radars, etc. See the speech of M. Alliot-Marie, Minister of Defence, at the French Senate, 14 January 2003. CDEF interview, March 2005. This point of view is shared by several senior police officers; DGGN interviews, March 2005; see also the position of General E. de Richoufftz: ‘Le Général des banlieues doit battre en retraite’. Bigo, Sécurité Intérieure, Implications pour la Défense. B.LAT interview, March 2005. Interview with a French army general, March 2005. Ministère de la Défense, Livre Blanc sur la Défense. Davis et al. Army Forces for Homeland Security RAND report. Euskadi (e)Ta Askatasuna, whose name stands for Basque homeland and freedom, first emerged in the 1960s as a student resistance movement bitterly opposed to general Franco’s repressive military dictatorship. It evolved rapidly from a group advocating traditional cultural ways to an armed separatist group. ETA has decided to declare a permanent cease-fire as of 24 March 2006. The news prompted jubilation across Spain, where ordinary citizens say they can hardly believe the end has come for a group blamed for more than 800 deaths since its creation against the Francoist regime in 1959. But, three decades of violence, since the end of the Francoist regime and the beginning of the democratization process, have poisoned the Spanish climate regarding violent actions and political solutions to this violence. See Guittet, ‘Is consensus a genuine democratic value?’. Hanon et al., Etude Comparée des Concepts et Doctrines de Maintien de l’Ordre et d’Intervention Antiterroriste en Europe. Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación (Anti-terrorist liberation groups). In Corsica or in the Basque country. See Necchi, ‘La justice face au terrorisme’, 49–56; Ferret and Wuilleumier, ‘Reconstruire la sécurité après le 11 septembre’, 147–179. Is the Beslan assault, frequently quoted by police and army representatives, a good example of what a maximal involvement of the military should be? How did this tragic event of 3 September 2004, the lack of preparation of civil authorities, the presence of armed civil people next to special forces, and Putin’s speech on the obvious bond between September 2001 and Beslan lead to the refusal of any negotiated solution and to an escalation to the extremes? After the Moscow hostage taking in 2002, Putin’s political speeches, seeking to convince that Russia is a victim of international terrorism, led to a reinforcement of the Russian special forces thought to offer an adequate answer to terrorism. BCSF interview, March 2005. Art. 16 provides that in times of national emergency the President may issue orders that have the force of law. Art. 36 of the 1958 French Constitution. Art. 16 provides: ‘When republican institutions, the nation’s independence, the

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60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68

integrity of its territory or the fulfilment of its international engagements are seriously and directly threatened, and the regular functioning of public constitutional authorities is interrupted, the President of the Republic takes measures adapted to these circumstances, after an official discussion with the Prime Minister, the Assemblies chairmen and the Constitutional Council. Cantegreil, ‘Terrorismes et libertés’, 71. The emergency state was introduced by the law no. 55.385 of 3 April 1955. It is a direct consequence of the conflict in Algeria. On 8 November 2005, President Jacques Chirac declared the state of emergency in order to put an end to the riots in the French suburbs. On 15 November 2005, the Parliament allowed the state of emergency to be prolonged for a maximum length of three months. On 16 November 2005, the Senate approved the Parliament’s decision. The state of emergency was therefore prolonged, while acts of violence ceased. Law amended on 9 August 1849 and art. 36 of the 1958 French Constitution. Bigo, Sécurité Intérieure, Implications pour la Défense; Bigo and Guittet, ‘Vers une Nord-Irlandisation du monde?’, 11–34. Inter-ministerial Guideline 10.1000/SGDN/MPS/CD concerning the set up of general protection plans and operational defence plans of the territory. The chain of command passing through the French prefects. Law no. 2003–73, 27 January 2003, Official Bulletin, 29 January 2003. In his official speech of 11 March 2004 at his Zarzuela Palace, King Juan Carlos was clearly in favour of a judiciarization of the response: Unity, strength and serenity in the fight against terrorism, with the help of all the tools existing under the rule of law, gathering our efforts to fight against this plague, relying on police action and on the work of justice and international cooperation. On the first anniversary of the March 11th attacks, the opening day of the International Seminar on ‘Democracy, terrorism and security’, King Juan Carlos repeats the need to act within the frame of justice and democracy (Opening speech of the Seminar, 10 March 2005, Madrid. Online. Available at: www.libertysecurity.org). Hence, a judge, Baltazor Garzon, was nominated to start the judicial procedure against the perpetrators of the Madrid attacks.

69 The SGDN implemented a Piranet plan to protect networks from threats in the online environment. 70 Title of the 5038 Guideline of 15 June 1995. 71 Reinforced patrols in military areas, surveillance of immediate surroundings, dog squads, enlarged and reinforced surveillance in airports. 72 For weapons and ammunitions dumps, buildings containing nuclear or toxic substances, significant networks and infrastructures (water, electricity, telecommunications), crowded areas, airports, stations, ports, huge stores, schools, etc. 73 Vigipirate has been reinforced in December 1996 following the attack on 4 December at the Port Royal underground station. Afterwards, it was regulated to its simple vigilance status until September 1997 because of the World Youth Days. It has been reinforced again in July 1998 (during the Football World Cup), in February 1999 (after the arrest of the Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan) and in April 1999 (when French troops engaged in Kosovo). The level of protection was kept on its lower intensity until October 2001. 74 Yellow level: security levels are risen to face real yet still uncertain dangers, through measures that are local and minimally disruptive of normal activity, while preparing to switch to ‘orange’ or ‘red’ within a few days; orange level:

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75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

measures are taken against plausible risks of terrorist action, including the use of means that are moderately disruptive of normal public activities, while preparing to switch to ‘red’ or ‘crimson’ on short notice where possible; red level: measures are taken against a proven risk of one or more terrorist actions, including measures to protect public institutions and to put in place appropriate means for rescue and response, authorizing a significant level of disruption of social and economic activity; crimson level: notification of a risk of major attacks, simultaneous or otherwise, using non-conventional means and causing major devastation; preparation of appropriate means of rescue and response, authorization of highly disruptive measures to public life. UCLAT interview, January 2006. BCSF interview, March 2005; CDEF interview, March 2005; B.LAT interview, March 2005. RAND report. BCSF interview, March 2005. On the implementation and the outcome of this operation, see Tsoukala, ‘La lutte contre le crime organisé en Sicile, 51–61. BCSF interview, March 2005; CDEF interview, March 2005. BCSF interview, March 2005. Guittet, ‘City Fight!’. CDEF interview, March 2005.

6

Military interventions and the concept of the political Bringing the political back into the interactions between external forces and local societies Christian Olsson

The ‘global war against terrorism’ is the overarching rationale, if not the main motivation, of two major, international, but US-led, military interventions in Afghanistan since 2001, and in Iraq since 2003. These antiterrorist interventions, although they both have been justified discursively or legally by ‘exceptional circumstances’, have in many ways challenged and changed our common understanding of the place of interventionist behaviour in international politics. But what is less frequently underscored, is that these interventions have seen major developments in military practices on the ground. The shift from ‘wars between states’ to ‘wars within states’ has highlighted the importance of the relation between intervening forces and local populations: the relational dimension of the political seems to prevail over the purely strategic relation of interstate war. One could have asked whether we are talking about wars at all (in the historical sense of the term), if it were not for the justification of these interventions by a ‘global war’, the long-term implications of which are still difficult to assess. Therefore any political analysis of these interventions would have to start with the concept of war. There are two ways of grasping the relation between the political and war. The first consists of analysing the political through the specific field of practices called politics.1 In this case, the central problem is to identify which one of the two fields of practices, politics or war, can be inferred from the other. Several classical insights can be mentioned here. In the Clausewitzian perspective, war as a practical reality – as opposed to war as a theoretical category – ought to be considered as ‘the continuation of politics by other means’. According to this insight, the political dimension of war is to be found in the political ends of which war is a means. In other words, the political refers to the ends, other than the military ends themselves of course that are pursued by war.2 Hence, in interstate wars, which are the ones that interest Clausewitz, the political refers to the state, or rather to the will and the practices of the professionals of politics, who

Military interventions 147 speak and act in the name of the state. Michel Foucault has formulated a more provocative perspective in his analyses of the political theory of Hobbes. He simply reverses the first adage.3 Thus, Mike Dillon and Julian Reid in their analyses of the contemporary liberal form of biopolitics claim: [W]e draw attention, as Foucault consistently does, to the ways in which global biopolitics operates as a strategic game in which the principles of war are assimilated into the weft and warp of the socioeconomic and cultural networks of biopolitical relations. Here Foucault reverses the old Clausewitzian adage concerning the relations between politics and war. Biopolitics is the pursuit of war by other means.4 Of course, should they be used as analytical tools, these insights have to be analysed distinctly and thoroughly, not least because Foucault refers to war as a metaphor and not to a specific historical repertoire of action. This is not, however, what the present paper will seek to do. My aim is not to determine whether ‘war’ is ontologically prior to ‘politics’ or if the reverse is true. Nevertheless, these insights could here be used as metaphors for two analytically distinct, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, positions regarding the current ‘war against terrorism’. The first, Clausewitzian, position consists of analysing the measures related to this ‘war’ in their relation to the political objectives that they are presumed to serve, in order to assess their efficiency or counter-productivity. What is central to this perspective is the equation of means and ends.5 The second, Foucaldian, position consists of showing how the very dynamics of biopolitics, based upon the idea of the promotion of life, manages to hide the violence and excesses that it inevitably fosters or reinforces: restrictions on civil rights, partial suspension of the principle of Habeas Corpus, arbitrary detentions, for example in Guantanamo Bay, etc. One might mention here the critical discourses on the ‘security measures’ that have been reinforced after 11 September 2001, and on their consequences. It is here the equation of means and consequences that is highlighted.6 These insights, where the focus is on politics as the practices of an institutionalized form of the political (mainly the state), inform this chapter. However, this chapter will be much more focused on the concept of the political in the analysis of politics. Actually, in a second different way of analysing the political and its underlying processes of politicization and of depoliticization, it is the concept of the political itself that is central and thus the analytical relation between the two notions (the political and politics) is reversed: politics is analysed through the concept of the political and not the reverse. Of course, such a change in scope in the analyses of the post-September 11th

148 C. Olsson military practices will necessitate questioning and redefining the very concept of the political. Once one has dismissed the simplistic point of view according to which the political is the state and the state is the political, one has to ask a certain number of questions about the political. Is it an essence, a substance, a subjective mode of representation of social reality or a specific kind of relation? According to a first definition, which I would call the essentialist one, the political refers to an essence that is inherent either in the human nature as a zoon politicon that, because of this precise nature, could never exist outside of history or outside of a collectivity (following Aristotle), or in the human condition of a collective life in which our ability to take action and to speak in the public sphere makes us truly human (following Hannah Arendt).7 In these definitions, the political is inherent in humanity as such and is present, regardless of time and space, in specific forms of social organization. But the latter are here only seen as the material manifestation of a superior essence. Although the political refers to a particular sphere, to a particular aspect of humanity among many other (economic, private, legal, aesthetic, etc. – depending on the perspective one has on the political), in this definition it is often considered as the one that makes us human. Therefore, when social actors deny the political, or try to escape from it, they contradict a reality that continues to be structured by it. This might eventually have destructive consequences. This is precisely the criticism Arendt addresses to totalitarianism.8 One might say that in this perspective the political exists regardless of the consciousness one has of its existence. Its imperatives transcend the empirically observable reality as well as, in some cases, the concrete ways in which we think we experience the political. Although very interesting and useful, these definitions – when they are not accompanied by further specifications – are therefore difficult to integrate as intellectual tools into the sociological analysis of the complexity of the social world. According to what one might call the substantialist definition, the metaphysical search for an essentialist definition of the political is not a central preoccupation. It focuses foremost on the empirically identifiable criterion that allows us to distinguish political relations or units from other configurations. Carl Schmitt can be considered as one of the most famous defenders of this perspective, making the polarization between friend and foe the distinguishing criterion of the political, while saying to refuse developing an explicitly metaphysical theory of the political.9 In a more recent period, and writing from a political perspective that Schmitt would castigate as ‘pluralist’, Susan Strange can be considered as a modern representative of this approach. She considers the authoritative allocation of values in the social space to be the main criterion.10 Focusing on the importance of an empirical criterion, these definitions have the merit of being easily usable in sociological inquiry. Moreover, they identify the political as a particular kind of social relation and not as an a-sociological essence (at least in the

Military interventions 149 case of Strange), even if they insist on the specific objective structure of this relation. However, by focusing solely on the objective structure of social relations, they fall into the trap of all positivist sociology: a relation can be considered as political regardless of the perceptions that the actors involved have thereof. In other words, a relation can be political even though all the actors involved in the relation consider it apolitical. This is especially the case in the approach of Strange. In the same way, a relation can be apolitical even when the individuals involved are convinced that they are engaging in political activities. This is especially so in the theoretical framework advanced by Schmitt. Moreover, both of these approaches fall short of a general and explicitly metaphysical theory of the political, while undeniably presupposing such a theory when proposing an empirical criterion. According to the last perspective, which I would call the relational approach, the political refers to a specific kind of social relation in which the concept of the political confers a specific salience to the relation itself, as the actors themselves subjectively represent it. I will here suggest some of the implications of such an approach. Following it, the political refers to a social reality that is not purely objective, in that it is dependent on the representations of the actors involved. However, it is not purely subjective either, since it refers to a relation in which the actors’ subjectivities interact. In other words, the political refers to an inter-subjective relation in which the actors confer a particular salience to the issue that structures this relation. The process through which this particular salience is conferred to the topic is the process of politicization defined as ‘the process of transformation of a societal problem into a political problem’.11 Discourse plays a central role in this process. The political can be said to be a speechact through which a particular salience is conferred to a societal problem. This is the definition of the political implicitly underlying analyses in terms of politicization.12 It would also be the conception of the political indirectly adopted by many authors inspired by Bourdieu when they claim that any attempt to formulate a definitive definition of the political is itself a highly political enterprise.13 For example, when the political or politics is said to refer to the state, this very claim contributes to the legitimization of those who have a vested interest in this specific definition, i.e. the professionals of politics. This means that any attempt to define the political is politically motivated. It is impossible to define the political from an external point of view, while remaining outside of the sphere of the political. In other words, the political is an auto-referential concept: it defines itself.14 As such, the political has many parallels with security as defined and analysed by Ole Wæver.15 Security is indeed a political process.16 Moreover, just as Wæver analyses the processes of securitization and desecuritization, one would have to analyse the processes of politicization and depoliticization when approaching the concept of the political.17 Securitization, i.e. the process of transformation of a societal problem into a

150 C. Olsson security problem (through discourse Wæver would add), may be defined as a specific kind of politicization. Both the politicization and the securitization of an issue confer a particular salience to it. The specificity of securitization lies however, according to Wæver, in the fact that it calls for emergency measures by invoking an existential threat to a particular community. Therefore, security may be defined as the ‘Schmittian realm of the political’.18 I will not here develop this parallel, nor focus on the theoretical implications of this specific perspective on the political. If suffices here to highlight that politicization, as opposed to securitization, does not necessarily imply the recourse to exceptional means (‘all means necessary’) or the polarization between friend and foe. The specific feature of politicization is rather to confer a particular salience to a societal problem thus thought of as essentially linked to the fundamental condition of collective life.19 This also implies that actors other than the state can enter into a political relation and that there is virtually no limit to the societal topics that can be politicized.20 The advantage of this last perspective is that it allows for the sociological analysis of the processes related to the political. This is not to say that other perspectives have to be dismissed, but rather that the latter perspective encompasses the others in the sense that it offers a general perspective on the specific definitions of the political. Its inevitable weakness is, however, that it does not provide a definitive definition of the political. But this weakness is precisely what frees this perspective from any suspicion of having a political agenda itself. Thus, it is this latter perspective that will guide this analysis. The aim of this chapter is to explore and analyse the relation between the political and some of the military practices of the ‘war against terrorism’ in Afghanistan and Iraq. This will imply a focus on the relation between security and the political, between securitization and politicization. However, my intent is neither to present new facts, nor to make a detailed analysis of the facts already available on these military operations. Rather, the idea is to raise some important questions related to the military dimension of the so-called ‘war against terrorism’. These questions concern the general dynamics of the ‘wars’ being waged, but also some of the more specific military and non-military means used. They also concern the potential impact of military interventions on local social systems, as well as the intellectual tools that can be used to analyse these new security practices in terms of international political sociology. The elements of political theory presented here serve the objective of laying the foundation for a more empirically informed sociological analysis of the political interactions between external military forces and local social systems. This chapter is structured in two parts. The first part tries to explain why the analysis of the political interactions between external forces and local social systems is so important. It seeks to argue that the issue of the political and of political relations lies at the core of the raison d’être of contemporary interventions. It also highlights the complexity of the issue.

Military interventions 151 Indeed, the multiplicity of actors involved along with the military (and often in close coordination with it) in these interventions, and the networks that they form, make the political analysis of these interactions complex. The second part tries, therefore, to propose sociological tools for the analysis of the political relations and processes involving external forces and local societies, while applying these tools to approach the social processes induced by the different networked actors (private military companies, humanitarian organizations, etc.) involved in contemporary military interventions.

From the securitization of domestic political orders to the new military interventionism The aim of this first part is to identify some of the elements that are at stake in the recent USA-led military interventions, which claim to have the political at their core, while often depoliticizing the representation of the enemy. These interventions see the military engaging in missions that reach far beyond their primary role ‘to wage and win the nation’s war’, while private actors are simultaneously mobilized in the war effort. Consequently, as it will be shown, the analysis of the political interactions between the intervening forces and the local societies becomes somewhat complex. The securitization of political orders and the logic of military interventionism In order to understand the dynamics underlying the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is necessary to situate them in a broader historical context of external interventions in domestic political orders. As a matter of fact, they share common features with the counter-insurgency operations and the ‘small wars’ of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and in South-East Asia, as well as with the interventions in the so-called low-intensity conflicts (LIC) of the 1980s.21 In these interventions, it is the relation between the civilian population and a specific historical construction of the political – generally the state – that lies at the centre of the securitization process. These interventions have been one of the expressions of a reading of international relations, in which the very nature of the political and constitutional order of other states is considered a security issue. The securitization of the relation between a foreign ‘civil society’ and a foreign state can be traced back to the discourses on counter-insurgency and/or LICs, in which the possibility of political upheavals or internal instability was considered a threat to international security by mainly Western states. It is the weakness of the state, as compared to the social forces it is supposed to contain and control, that is thought of as the main security concern.22 This view, which differs from more traditional security

152 C. Olsson concerns (interstate wars), has led to an interest in ‘unconventional warfare’. It has been the driving factor behind the development of new ‘unconventional’ military practices and concepts during the cold war, such as the US concept of Foreign Internal Defence (FID) that very explicitly illustrates the security concerns that have motivated these interventions.23 The construction of the nature of political orders as a security issue Central to these new security discourses is the concept of ‘failed states’ that since the late-1950s has been the main source of legitimization of external interventions and has put a special emphasis on the need for political reconstruction.24 The CIA and other US security agencies frequently financed research around this topic, thus fuelling the securitization of the issue of the nature and internal structure of foreign states.25 Of course, the very concept of the failed state is questionable. Its main political function is to legitimize interferences in foreign social systems. But, collaterally, it also puts the focus on the restoration of its diametric counterpart, the ‘successful state’.26 During the cold war, this meant that support was given to anti-communist, but often authoritarian, regimes either by keeping them in place in the case of insurgency or guerrilla warfare,27 or by restoring them in case of revolution or coup d’état.28 In some cases, it has even led the USmilitary to engage in pro-insurgency, as in Nicaragua after the Sandinistas came to power. This was one of the tasks of the US military, and particularly of the Special Operation Forces, during the cold war era. These discourses on failed states have prevailed after the end of the cold war and remain a powerful factor in the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the Bush administration it is stated that ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’.29 But the difference with the counter-insurgency and LIC interventions of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is that, in the liberal version of the failed state, it is the absence of democratic decision-making structures, as well as the absence of ‘good governance’ and liberal management that is a justification for interventionism. In this new version of failed states, the explicitly stated objectives of the interventions are not only to build democratic and accountable institutions, but also to build a ‘civil society’. In other words, it is the paradigm of the liberal state that supplies the discursive guidelines of these kinds of interventions. The ‘successful state’ is now an idealized version of the Western state and, since political bodies are no longer considered as preformed, as in the Schmittian or Clausewitzian reading, military interventions are to actively participate in the ‘shaping’ and the transformation of them. The importance of the political, and the way it is thought to be perceived by the potential enemy, is characteristic of the discourses on these

Military interventions 153 interventions. It is the interaction between the political representations of the ‘locals’ and the structure of the foreign state that lies at the centre of the intervention and even more so of the post-conflict phase of the operation. The aim is to install a particular kind of polity and not only to defeat a government. Two reasons are given for this. Either it is considered that the characteristics of the domestic political order will determine the foreign policy of the state (Iraq for example);30 or, the argument goes, if the state fails, terrorist groups might find a safe haven in these countries and destabilize the region or the world (Afghanistan and Iraq).31 But in both cases, the relation between the individual other and the political is placed at the centre of the securitization process. Thus, these kinds of interventions are interesting in the sense that the stake is not to impose a political will on another preformed political will, which is the Clausewitzian perspective, but to transform the political representations of the potential enemy. This is especially the case in the socalled post-conflict phase. In other words, the stake is no longer to ‘win the war’ but to ‘win the peace’. The securitization of the political (as perceived by the potential enemy) implies a radical change in scope as compared to classical interstate wars. The concept of ‘political wars’ might sound tautological from a Clausewitzian perspective, but it makes sense when considering the discourses on these interventions because they place the relation of the enemy to the political at the heart of the operations.32 As a matter of fact, these interventions follow the same logic as psychological operations (PSYOPS) in counter-insurgency: the aim oscillates between the influence on the perception and political will of the ‘actual enemy’ on the field, and the influence on the domestic public opinion, as represented by the Congress for example in the case of the USA, considered as a ‘potential enemy’ of the intervention. The political dimension of these interventions is particularly salient for two reasons. First, the aim is to transform the foreign polity by diffusing liberal norms and politics: the aim of the political and military strategy is to impose a liberal model based upon the principles of ‘good governance’, ‘democracy’, ‘privatization’ and ‘transparency’. Second, and this is the specifically biopolitical dimension, the methods officially used not only imply to govern through the threat of death, but also to impose a specific political model through the management of populations, of their specific properties and dynamics, and finally of life itself.33 However, there is a wide discrepancy between these discourses on the political and some of the military practices on the ground. The latter oscillate between a political approach to the local military resistance, on the one hand, and practices of eradication, in which the enemy is considered as apolitical or at least as outside of the realm of the political, on the other hand.34 One of the reasons for this discrepancy is to be found in the reticence of the US military, as well as of an important part of the current US Administration, to engage the troops in ‘peacekeeping’, ‘peacebuilding’ or,

154 C. Olsson even worse, ‘nation-building’.35 Another reason has to do with the designation and the representation of the enemy as an essentially apolitical entity. But in either case, the result is that the interest in a political approach to crisis-management is said to prevail (once the ‘terrorists’ are eradicated), while the means actually mobilized for this enterprise are limited. It is to the latter element that I now turn. The ‘new enemy’, ‘new wars’ and the twilight of the political Many of the military practices on the fields of Iraq and Afghanistan are radically different from what the discourse on the political dimension of these interventions would imply. The designation of the armed opponent as ‘terrorist’, and the subsequent denial of the political nature of the ‘actual enemy’ (as opposed to the potential enemy, i.e. local populations), often lead these interventions to include practices of eradication against the enemy with whom any form of recognition, and thus of negotiation, must be absent. Indeed, ‘one cannot negotiate with terrorists’: the discrepancy between the position in the first years of Operation Enduring Freedom of the US command in Afghanistan – ‘the Taliban has to be eradicated’ – and of the Afghan government – ‘the Taliban can and must be coopted into the system or at least negotiated with’ – is in this regard revealing. The paradox originates in the fact that the enemy is denied the status of enemy in the Clausewitzian sense. It has become a mere criminal or a terrorist, and as such is named but not identified. The paradox of these kinds of interventions, in which the political dimension is both affirmed and denied, can be read through the distinction made between the abstract categories of the potential enemy, on the one hand, and the actual enemy, on the other. Of course, these categories should not be considered here as descriptive of an objective reality but as constitutive of the representations of the military forces involved in these fields. The potential enemy in these new wars is constituted by the civilian population that does not pose any resistance to the military forces, but that is always suspected of being capable of entering into resistance in case of disagreement with the political options of the external forces. This category is theoretically to be dealt with on the political level by acting preemptively upon its political beliefs and representations: PSYOPS, local consensus building, co-optation, etc. This category is absolutely encompassing. The whole of the local populations, as well one might add the domestic public opinion, are treated as potential or virtual enemies in a pre-emptive way. The actual enemy36 is thought of as a loose category, considered as constituted of criminals and terrorists. Often the latter are not even distinguished. This category is of course distinct from the first in the sense that what is focused upon is no longer what an individual might become (friend or enemy) but what he is and what he will stay (terrorist or criminal). The

Military interventions 155 only treatments are: delegitimization, when the individuals representing this category are not identified; and eradication, when they are. In other words, military pressure is no longer perceived as a way of defeating the enemies’ strategies in order to impose one’s own political will, but rather as a means of eliminating an otherwise irreducible evil. However, the problem lies precisely in the identification of the enemy that is named. By his very nature as a terrorist, he is considered as furtive and stealthy, always hiding in the local population but carrying no distinctive signs, avoiding revealing himself, but always ready to strike. As George W. Bush put it in a speech about the new enemies after the cold war: ‘today we’re not so sure who “they” are, but we know they’re there’.37 Once defined in these confusing terms, the enemy cannot be fought against without identifying him with a specific population group: Talibans, Baathists, Islamists, foreign Arabs, etc. The abstract categories of the potential and the actual enemy are thus to a certain extent conflated in practice. Since military casualties must be avoided at any cost in the US view, suspicion becomes a virtue. In other words, the politics of military confrontation becomes generalized to groups of populations (as opposed to individuals), however restricted they are. What is really at stake is thus the question of the identification of the enemy. A war without identifiable enemies is an interminable war and, hence, even the ‘peace’ following these interventions becomes a continuation of war by other means.38 The war simply changes from a military operation to a vast police operation.39 The police dimension of these interventions is indeed so pervasive that one might call them ‘international police operations’.40 As opposed to many of the counter-insurgency operations of the 1960s and 1970s, many of which were, however, much more lethal than the current interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, these military interventions do not officially deal with the actual enemy on the political level. The question is not how to make the enemy adhere to a certain representation of the political good but how to identify, target and eliminate him. When observing certain practices, it seems that these wars are not even political in the Clausewitzian sense because the aim of the war itself is the elimination of the enemy, and not the achievement of a more advantageous position in the subsequent negotiation of the practical solution to the opposition of political wills.41 The actual military policy on the ground often consists of denying the enemy the privilege of having political motives in order to reduce his action to mere ideological, religious or criminal motivations.42 Thus, the enemy is not perceived of as a political enemy, the hostis in Schmittian terms, which would confer a certain degree of reciprocity and relationality to the conflict, but as an evil to eradicate. The enemy ceases to be a political actor to become a mere political issue. In other words, the terrorist relation in a situation of armed conflict is an apolitical relation in the sense that the political nature of the clandestine groups involved is not

156 C. Olsson recognized. They are not thought of as acting primarily following a particular representation of the ideal form of collective life. This also implies that the means of approaching the ‘security problem’ they create is perceived as apolitical. It is mainly a matter of technologies of surveillance, control and elimination. However, this tension between the political objectives of the intervention, i.e. the [re]construction of a legitimate Iraqi and Afghani state, and the apolitical and even technological approach to the ‘enemy’, has been resolved through a close coordination between a myriad of civilian actors and the military forces. The delegation of non-military activities to civilian actors allows the military to refrain from engaging in activities (humanitarian, rehabilitation, reconstruction) that are seen as a threat to military identity, but that are necessary when considering the humanitarian and political justifications of the interventions. The civil–military objectives pursued by the new interventions have thus reinforced the already prevailing tendency of the networking of warfare analysed by Dillon and Reid.43 This is all the more true as the US army is generally very hostile to non-military functions stigmatized as ‘nation-building activities’ and wants to withdraw as fast as possible in order to avoid ‘mission creep’,44 while passing the ‘civilian’ functions to civilian organizations. Two types of actors, involved in this multifaceted and multidimensional war by proxy and through delegation, will be focused on here: humanitarian organizations and private military companies (PMCs). Both are closely associated to the military operations and both have an apolitical conception of their respective role, in the sense that the political representations of the local populations – and the underlying processes of (de)politicization – are not considered as pertinent to their activities. Network-centric wars and the twilight of the military As seen previously, there is a decentralization of the execution of the political–military plan by delegation to a very diverse set of actors (professional soldiers with civilian status, i.e. PMCs; civilians with military status, i.e. Civil Affairs personnel).45 We are witnessing a transformation of the methods of military control and surveillance that can be observed through the diversification of the means used. The decentralization of the battlefield has emphasized the network-centric dimension of the liberal way of war.46 Amongst other factors, it has been brought about by a change in definition of the enemy. Indeed, by blurring the distinction between friend and foe, these interventions mark the end of war as a limited social field of practice and, thus, of the military as a specific profession linked to a specific identity with fixed frontiers. As a consequence, we are paradoxically seeing in Afghanistan and Iraq military operations that are considered as ‘peace operations’, ‘security and stability operations’, or even as ‘Military Operations Other Than War’ (MOOTW), banning any reference to war. Yet,

Military interventions 157 these operations are simultaneously presented as being part of a ‘global war against terrorism’, thus reinforcing the paradox. Civil–military cooperation and the co-optation of the humanitarians One type of actor involved in these networks of war is represented by the many civilians that intervene on the fields of Afghanistan and Iraq: NGO’s, quasi-NGOs such as the International Red Cross, international organizations with humanitarian preoccupations such as the UN, governmental development agencies, etc. They are very different in nature but often converge in their humanitarian rhetoric. Their activities are often closely coordinated with the military operations through what is called civil-military cooperation. Thus, Colin Powell, when Secretary of State, has described NGOs as ‘force multipliers’ and as members of the ‘combat team’ in the war against terrorism.47 Of course, the private voluntary organizations cannot be analysed as a homogeneous group. They are more or less keen to cooperate with the military on the external operational fields.48 Some of them, especially those working closely with the governmental development agencies such as the American USAID, are however closely coordinating their operations with the military through civilmilitary cooperation. Hence, many authors and NGOs have firmly criticized the militarization of the humanitarian activities.49 Civil–military cooperation could be defined as the operational function aiming at the coordination between the military command and the multiple civilian actors on the operational field: NGOs, local administrations, governmental agencies, UN agencies, etc.50 However, this function often leads the military to engage directly in activities related to humanitarian action and reconstruction. Among these activities are the restoration of infrastructures and public services, the participation in the restoration of the rule of law and the promotion of economic, administrative and social activity. Civil– military cooperation is then the expression of the broadening of the military mandate in external interventions. This function creates networks between the civilian world and the military world through reservists being part of both, and thus capable of straddling the frontier between them. We might both speak of a militarization of humanitarian missions and a very relative civilianization of the military.51 The units in charge of this coordination, Civil Affairs units in the case of the US military, are generally composed of civilians with military status (reservists). These activities are, however, generally undertaken in close coordination with civilian actors, as is for example the case within the framework of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan (PRTs). Yet, in spite of what the political discourses claim, the underlying logic of these practices is often not one of political reconstruction. On the contrary, civil–military cooperation is frequently part of a strategy aiming at

158 C. Olsson the building of a local consensus around the presence of a foreign military, the so-called ‘hearts and minds approach’, in order to avoid local military resistance (doctrine of ‘force protection’). In a context in which the focus of the military still is on the idea that its mission is to ‘fight and win the nation’s war’, the prevailing representation is that the coordination with civilian actors must serve the specific military mission. Hence, the focus is rather on so-called ‘quick impact projects’, for example, the building of schools, roads or wells, than on political reconstruction. This is often the case for the PRTs in Afghanistan,52 that were however, said to be created to support the ‘Bonn process’ and to extend the authority of the ‘central’ government beyond Kabul. From the point of view of the humanitarian actors, the political dimension of the process of (re)construction is also often considered as secondary. Their doctrine of neutrality/impartiality is frequently based on a ‘needs theory’, inspired by authors such as John Burton, in which the aim is to satisfy basic human needs regardless of political considerations.53 These actors consider themselves as exterior to the political struggles of local societies since their main role is to satisfy universal biological needs. As such, their approach of security is apolitical: their focus is on the individual as a biological being and not on the fundamental condition of collective life. In other words, their conception of intervention is founded on the instrumental equation of means and ends. The ends themselves are thought of as being outside of the struggles for political legitimacy since they are universal and founded on a tangible reality, i.e. the body and the psyche. This seemed to be the conception of the UN in Iraq in the first phase, in which it was not yet involved in issues of political (re)construction. In some cases, this conception justifies cooperation between civilian actors and the military as long as it serves the purpose of the former to satisfy biologically founded needs. This is not to say that there has been no resistance to the potential instrumentalization of humanitarian actors by the military. However, this resistance was often resting upon the argument that cooperation could be counter-productive to the humanitarian ends, or that it could represent a threat to the neutrality of these actors.54 Only rarely was it relying on a general disagreement with the political options of the military. The network-centric ways of warfare that challenge the very distinction between the civilian and the military, the private and the public, thus transform and make more complex the field of war. However, the diverse actors involved often widely neglect the (de)politicization processes that characterize the local societies concerned and, hence, contradict the prevailing discourse on the centrality of the political. From this point of view, the case of private military companies (PMCs) seems not to be an exception.

Military interventions 159 The network of PMCs and the privatization of security The second type of actor that will be focused upon to illustrate the diversification of the means used, as well as the strategies of delegation in these wars, is the private military company. One of the important specificities of the military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan is the importance given to private operators in security-related or even traditional military missions. Just as some of the humanitarian missions are considered as relevant to the military, some of the military or security-related missions are outsourced to private operators in order to reduce military casualties, diminish costs and increase the availability of the public professional soldiers. This evolution further confirms the blurring of the traditional boundaries between the civilian and the military, and increases the role of formal and informal networks in the waging of these ‘new’ wars. PMCs might be considered as having penetrated the contemporary way of war, thereby giving a certain credit to the idea of a progressive and partial privatization of warfare. According to a study realized in 2003, PMCs represent the second biggest contingent in Iraq with 20,000 private military contractors, after the US contingent but before the British one.55 According to published figures, 10 per cent of the military personnel in Iraq would be private.56 The biggest contributors are US (e.g. DynCorps, Vinnel), British (e.g. Global Risk International) and South African (e.g. Meteoric Tactical Solutions, Erinys International) ones. Following another study, there would be 1,500 South African private soldiers,57 nationals of a country that officially refused Operation Iraqi Freedom, as compared for example to the 1,100 Dutch troops, nationals of a country that officially participates in the operation. This development offers a powerful insight into the reason for the massive involvement of PMCs in a war that from the beginning was, to say the least, internationally contested. Private agency seems in some cases to be more important than officially statesponsored initiatives, even in the field of military and foreign policy. The international allocation of coercive resources seems progressively to lean towards the private sector, which from the point of view of historical sociology is both a very recent and astonishing trend.58 Of the 87 billion dollars allowed in 2003 by the Congress for the broader ‘war against terrorism’ in Iraq and Central Asia, one third would be spent on contracts with these companies.59 Needless to say, they have become an essential component of the US, and British, way of warfare and even more so of the ‘post-war’ operations. These companies carry out many sophisticated missions as security consultants or advisors. For example, they have guarded the headquarters of Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad,60 as well as pipelines, ministries and official buildings in Iraq, trained the Iraqi security forces61 and the Iraqi police,62 protected President Hamid Kharzaï63 and assessed the security situation for the occupation forces in Iraq.

160 C. Olsson This engagement of PMCs raises many questions relative to the accountability of these firms, their political control by governments and their long-term effects on military planning and decision-making.64 Thus, a debate on PMCs has arisen.65 PMCs are frequently analysed normatively from two perspectives. According to the first, the supposed efficiency of the market, as compared to the state, in the field of security would justify considering them as an alternative to the classical means of military intervention in the case of international crises.66 According to the second perspective, the pre-eminence of the state, perceived as the only responsible and accountable actor in the field of security, would cast a shadow of illegitimacy on PMCs,67 and any intrusion of private actors in the field of security policies would be a crime against sovereignty. Consequently, the very structure of the current debate on PMCs turns every criticism against them into an apology of the state. Moreover, this way of framing the debate makes the case for PMCs particularly easy to make: they are not a threat to the international state system because they are hired by states to defend states: the only criticism addressed to them is therefore invalid. But to put the question in such binary terms inevitably leads to one of the two pitfalls that must be avoided when trying to conceptualize the phenomenon of PMCs. The first consists of considering them as an expression of the end of the capacity of governments to control the means of violence.68 This is only true if one reifies the state to the point of considering it as a unitary actor the frontiers of which, with society, the market and the private sector, are linear and intangible. If this view is correct, everything that is not inside of the frontiers of the state must be outside of it. But this view does not take sufficient account of the porosity of the boundaries between the public and the private, of the transversal fields of security practices that invalidate the distinction between public and private, as well as of the strategies of reciprocal instrumentalization between actors positioning themselves in the private or in the public sector.69 As a consequence, rather than adopting the narrative of the irresistible decline of the state, it is necessary to analyse sociologically the personnel of these firms in order to highlight their relations to the traditional professionals of security: military, police, intelligence services, etc. The practices of PMCs and the international policies of governmental bureaucracies are difficult to distinguish. Rather than private, these firms are ‘para-private’ in the sense that they are part of networks that are transversal to the simple opposition between private and public.70 This notion of the ‘para-private’ sector also allows the second pitfall to be avoided. Indeed, some conclude from the close ties between PMCs and governmental bureaucracies that the former are mere instruments of states and their strategies. But such a neo-realist approach of the phenomenon also falls under the criticism of identifying the state as a unitary and rational actor. It forgets the relative autonomy of the networks of security professionals (both public and private) in relation to the government. The

Military interventions 161 government is not a hierarchical pyramid, but rather a set of interconnected but often distinct networks: networks of power, networks of accumulation, etc. In other words, PMCs proceed neither from the pure market, nor from a reified conception of the state. Hence, the normative debate on them is, as has already been pointed out, biased. However, rather than developing on all the consequences of this bias, the phenomenon of the privatization of the military operations and the subsequent institutionalization of a security-market will here be analysed through what has been said about the political and its underlying processes of (de)politicization. This will allow us to show that alternative criticisms can be addressed to PMCs. Indeed by showing how PMCs are both officially outside of the realm of the institutionalized form of the political that the state often is considered to be, and linked to the policies of governmental security bureaucracies through transversal fields of security, as well as through individuals straddling the frontier between the private and the public, this part inevitably raises the question of how their action and their functions relate to the political. If, as we have posited, security is a political process, and the state claims to have a legitimate monopoly on the political, what will the effects be when private firms claim to offer security to the highest bidder while, by virtue of their non-governmental character, they refute any argument that would tend to assign political intentions or consequences to their action? Does the privatization of security equate to its depoliticization in spite of the close connections between the world of PMCs and that of governments? Does the privatization of security on the contrary imply a delegation of political authority to non-state actors? In other words, when trying to analyse the political implications of complex military interventions, involving both public and private actors, claiming both to take account of the local representations of the political while denying political status to any form of resistance, it is necessary to have sociological tools dealing with the political processes of (de)politicization, and at the same time showing in what way these processes structure social relations. Such tools could help us to conceptualize the political interactions between external forces and local population, while allowing for the analysis of the concrete military practices that characterize these interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Conceptualizing interactions between ‘external’ forces and ‘local societies’: bringing the political back in One way of bringing the political back in to military practices that are selfperceived as apolitical, is to stop focusing on the external forces themselves in order to analyse something less easy to grasp: their relation to the societies with which they inevitably interact once they have ‘won’ the war against a state and are forced to engage in a more difficult ‘war’, i.e. the ‘war’ against local forms of resistance to the political options of the

162 C. Olsson external powers, and the ‘war’ against the adverse political effects that the very presence of external forces inevitably induces. There are several ways of conceptualizing social interactions between external actors and local social systems.71 Following the point of departure of this text, I shall analyse them through the lenses of the processes of (de)politicization. In doing so, I shall focus on the two actors that I have already described here – PMCs and humanitarian organizations. A third kind of actor directly involved along with the military and the humanitarian ones in these operations would be the political actors, not in the broad or analytical sense of the term, but in the sense of actors labelled and self-represented as such.72 These actors will not be analysed here. A framework for the analysis of political processes in external interventions Once the (de)politicization processes are conceived of as embedded in social relations, the question that arises is in what way the representations of the actors involved in this relation interact. Do they agree on the politicization of a particular societal problem or not? Do they all consider this issue to be a political issue, or an apolitical one? The answer to this question is not self-evident. The relational definition of the political also implies that social actors can foster politicization processes without having knowledge thereof. In other words, political processes are not necessarily the outcome of intentional strategies but rather of relations in which no actor can lay a claim on the final outcome.73 Thus, following a Foucaldian methodology, when analysing politicization processes the focus has rather to be put on the effects of power than on its underlying intentions. The objective mechanism producing the outcomes of inter-subjective relations is to a certain extent independent from the intentions of the actors involved in these relations. Hence, there might be a discrepancy between the representation of some actors as compared to that of others, whereas they are all part of the same political relation. This is not to say that the political relation is an objective structure in which some actors could be mistaken about the relation of which they are part; but rather that the interaction does not necessarily tend towards a convergence of representations. Two ideal-typical configurations will be analysed here. First, the one in which there is a general convergence and agreement around the politicization of an issue or of an actor (symmetric relations); second, the configuration in which the (de)politicization processes of specific issues or actors give rise to radically different interpretations (asymmetric relations). In order to introduce the first ideal-type, I shall try to analyse what defines a political actor. A political actor is not only an actor that is part of a political relation structured around a political issue.74 He could be defined by two factors. First, the actor has to perceive himself as political

Military interventions 163 in the sense of perceiving his role and his actions to be essentially linked to the fundamental condition of collective life. Second, this actor and his practices have to be politicized by the other actors involved with him in social relations. In this case, as with the classical and idealized representation of the sovereign nation-state, there is a convergence of the social representations of the different actors involved in the political relation. This relation can be said to be symmetric. This social construction of the political, provided it is institutionalized and legitimized by the field of politics, might structure very strong power relations between the actors, but it also introduces a principle of negotiation into the relation. On the one hand, symmetric relations confer political authority to the actor that is politicized. By definition, authority, as defined for example by Arendt,75 only exists provided it is recognized by the ones on which it is exercised. On the other hand, since the political refers to the notion of collectivity and of collective life, and since the political status has to be bargained collectively, it involves a certain degree of reciprocity. Of course, such reciprocity does not necessarily imply democracy as we understand it. If this were the case, this analysis would inevitably fall into the trap of ethnocentrism. It is therefore important to recognize that there exist other forms of political reciprocity than the one formalized in constitutional Westernstyle democracy. Nevertheless, a general consensus on the political nature of a specific actor does not necessarily imply that this actor is considered as legitimate. Here, the distinction between the political, on the one hand, and politics as a specific field of practice, on the other, must again be insisted upon. The practices of an actor can be politicized without him being considered as a legitimate player in the field of politics. In this case, one might speak of a negative politicization. The actor is considered as exterior to the legitimate game of ordinary politics, and action will be taken to undermine his legitimacy to enter this field.76 But by doing this, this actor is inevitably politicized, not only in the sense that his actions and practices are considered a political issue, but also in the sense that his actions are thought of as primarily motivated by his conception of collective life and not by his individual interests, which would be the case of the criminal for example.77 The actor might even be politicized as a political enemy. In this case, intense struggles for political legitimization, accompanied by attempts to delegitimate the other, might arise. This leads us directly to the second ideal-type. The second ideal-type is the situation in which there is a social uncertainty about what is political, about what issues and/or actors are to be (de)politicized, and in which the political narratives are embattled. In these situations, actors perceiving themselves as being outside of the realm of the political, and hence considering their practices as merely technical for example, might be considered by other actors as having a political reach or even political motivations. The reverse is also true: actors perceiving

164 C. Olsson themselves as political might be denied any political status. The political relations can in this case be said to be asymmetric. This is notably the case when police operations, in which the enemy is defined by the mere technical fact that he does not abide by the law, hit political dissidents.78 Often violent struggles for political legitimacy, as well as for the political delegitimization of the other, become inevitable. But this does not mean that any form of political relation is interrupted, at least if one defines political relations as social relations that are structured by the actors’ postures towards the political. The central question is what are the mechanisms of interaction in situations of uncertainty: do they tend towards convergence, or is there a tendency towards polarization of political representations? There probably is no general answer to this question but certainly both outcomes are possible, depending on a set of social factors that cannot be developed here. Suffice it to say that one of these factors is the existence or not of an institutionalized field of politics that manages to homogenize social representations and thus to establish symmetric relations. If this mechanism does not operate, political uncertainty might foster dynamics of polarization of political representations. Therefore, it should be noted that these questions related to asymmetric political relations, and to embattled narratives on the political, become particularly salient in situations of ‘exception’ in which ordinary politics has been suspended.79 They arise when the institutionalized field of politics is no longer the point of convergence of the greater part of the (de)politicization processes of societal issues and actors.80 It goes without saying that this is precisely the situation prevailing in external military intervention: the violent upheaval caused by the suspension of the ‘ordinary’ political order by foreign soldiers irrupting into the political space causes politics to become an essentially contested field, thus reinforcing struggles for political (de)legitimization as well as for (de)politicization. The asymmetries that might ensue in the subjective representations of the actors involved in political relations might give rise to a set of seemingly irreducible misunderstandings and conflicts, rather than introducing a principle of negotiation. It must here be added that, of course, these two situations are merely ideal-typical. In actual situations there is rather a continuum. The few analytical tools seen in this section will, however, be used to analyse the political processes underlying the massive recourse to PMCs and to civil-military cooperation in the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. These processes will also be analysed through their relation to the processes of securitization. Politicization/depoliticization processes through the example of civil–military cooperation and PMCs Drawing on what has been said in the first part about the paradoxical relation between contemporary military interventions and the concept of the

Military interventions 165 political, I shall try to analyse the implications of private military firms and civil–military cooperation for the interactions between intervening forces and local societies. As I shall seek to show, the recourse to PMCs both reveals and accentuates the depoliticization of the intervening forces’ perception of the local populations. The recourse to PMCs in the phase of ‘stabilization’ rests upon a false assumption (‘the resistance is not motivated by political representations and, therefore, the attempts to crack down on it will not be perceived as political in nature either’) that might produce adverse effects. The military and security practices on these fields are often inherently political to the local populations. Second, and this will be the second part of this section, civil–military cooperation leads paradoxically to a politicization by the local populations of activities that are self-perceived as being external to the realm of the political. This could be a powerful factor, as I shall try to argue, in the growing and sometimes even lethal misunderstandings between humanitarian actors and local populations in conflict-ridden societies. PMCs, the depoliticization of conflict-resolution and its possible adverse effects The recourse to PMCs often rests on a false assumption as far as the political is concerned. Thus, contrary to what is generally assumed, PMCs do not represent the ideal solution to the so-called new international conflicts. It is therefore important to show why the analysis of the supporters of the ‘outsourcing of war’, like David Shearer, is biased. The favourable stance of the latter towards PMCs rests on the general assumption that the latter ‘have to be considered as an arms system’.81 This purely instrumental and technical approach to PMCs supposes that the recourse to coercion produces the same effects regardless of the identity of the coercive actors involved: ‘PMCs are an arms system just like any other arms system’.82 It is based upon the idea that power, for instance military power, is a quantifiable capacity. Consequently, when confronted with particular situations of conflict, it suffices to identify the actor that holds the necessary amount of capacity. However, as shown by Foucault, power is a relational process and not a pure capacity.83 Hence, it does not produce the same effects when the actors involved vary. A social relation will not be same if the identity of the actors entering into this relation varies. A technical conception of the recourse to PMCs, as opposed to a political conception, can thus be defined by the assumption that it is possible to make a distinction between the recourse to violence (and its consequences) and the perception that the local populations have of this recourse and of the actors involved in it. This assumption is false. Conflict resolution is not a mere technical matter in which military capacities are modulated in order to produce a situation of peace, but a political process in which dynamics of political (de)legitimization, and of (de)politicization, play a

166 C. Olsson crucial role. It would be naive to think one can achieve civil peace solely through superior fire-power. Thus, as has been shown by John Crowley, any positivist sociology excluding the dimension of ethics and of political legitimacy from conflict-resolution is also incapable of thinking of a sustainable peace. It is therefore necessary to focus on the social identity (and the way it is perceived) of the actors who claim to keep, enforce or build peace.84 Relying on PMCs to establish security is to postulate that security is a technical problem and that, for this very reason, it can be regulated by market forces. It is precisely because protean forms of violence in the ‘South’ are too often considered as a mere technical problem, or at least as an apolitical problem,85 that the idea of hiring PMCs to solve these problems has been able to emerge. These firms often think of themselves as specialized in ‘low-intensity conflicts’ characterized by ‘deregulated’, ‘irrational’, ‘chaotic’ or merely ‘incomprehensible’ forms of violence. Yet, these conflicts have to be situated within the context of processes of political (de)legitimization.86 Therefore, the mere technical (military) competence in matters of ‘conflict-management’ could not be considered as sufficient. By relying on PMCs, the problem of political legitimacy is overlooked and sacrificed to the sole problem of efficiency. This error, particularly salient in Shearer’s argumentation, induces adverse effects. First, by adopting the posture of apolitical technicians of conflict regulation, these firms are not very prone to take account of the transformations of political relations that their actions induce. Second, as lucrative organizations exogenous to the actual political conflict, they are not always considered by the local population as legitimately authorized to resolve it by force, and thus they are easily politicized negatively, as political enemies or at least as a political problem. In other words, the political relation between local populations and PMCs might become highly asymmetric. The idea of a ‘security market’ fails then to analyse the concept of security through its relation to the political by reducing it to its technical, tactic or strategic dimension. As demonstrated by authors like Ron Lipschutz, the concept of security is however constitutive of the political in the sense that every security discourse also contains implicitly a certain representation of the political community that must be defended, as well as of the enemies against which it must be defended.87 It defines the political community by drawing its symbolic frontiers. Thus, even if the recourse to PMCs can reinforce a government militarily, it often weakens it in terms of political legitimacy. By analysing the PMCs as purely technical, apolitical tools, one necessarily fails to grasp their political and structural effects. This was demonstrated by the intervention of Executive Outcomes in Angola (1993–96) and Sierra Leone (1995–97). Even if the firm managed to reverse the power balance in both cases, the respective wars went on as the peace-negotiations failed. In Angola, the very recourse to Executive Outcomes simultaneously permitted and weakened the peace process: eventually Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA

Military interventions 167 abandoned the 1994 Lusaka agreement once the PMC was gone. In the case of Sierra Leone, the recourse to Executive Outcomes turned the military against the government that had engaged ‘mercenaries’ thus creating an alliance, led by Johnny Paul Koroma, between the military and the rebels. This would eventually lead to the 1997 coup against the democratically elected president Kabbah after the firm had left.88 While most of the analysts thought the South-African PMC was part of the solution, it rather seems it eventually became part of the problem as well. Only a political reading, i.e. a reading that considers the processes of (de)politicization and of political (de)legitimization, can account for this. The same thing might be true as far as the current situation in Iraq is concerned. Indeed, the PMCs are not only engaged in the protection of foreign personalities and businessmen, but also in public security and even in ‘mission critical crisis management’, often with highly sophisticated military means including helicopters and advanced computer systems. This was, for example, shown when firms such as Blackwater became engaged in direct combat in the city of Najaf against the ‘Army of Mehdi’ of the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr during its highly politically motivated clashes with the US army throughout the whole of southern Iraq in 2004. However, there are doubts as to the capacity of PMCs to lower the levels of violence and appease the political tensions in Iraq. The inhabitants of Iraq are not very likely to recognize any political authority to PMCs. A negative politicization of these private companies seems more likely, especially since some companies hiring so-called ‘debriefers’ have been found to be directly involved in the acts of torture committed in the prison of Abu Ghraïb.89 Rather than analysing PMCs as an arms system, one has therefore to analyse them in context, which means analysing them politically, as a political issue having political consequences, even when these companies see themselves asymmetrically as entirely apolitical. This potential criticism of PMCs is much more far-reaching than the one according to which PMCs only play a role on the short term, whereas conflict-resolution necessitates a long-term perspective. It not only questions the temporality of the intervention of PMCs but also the very social identity of the actors, who define conflict-regulation in technical and not in political terms. Moreover, it goes a little further than the traditional criticisms that only focus on the intentions of these firms, for it also accounts for the non-intentional, yet potentially harmful effects of PMCs.90 It is not necessary to believe that PMCs are inherently neo-colonial or warprofiteers to question their capacity to play a positive role in conflicts. Finally, it shows that the argument of efficiency, notably of military efficiency, simply misses the point.

168 C. Olsson Civil–military cooperation and the politicization of humanitarian actors The analysis of political processes and of the way they structure political relations also allows us to interpret particular forms of political violence prevailing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Humanitarian actors seem increasingly to be perceived as political actors in spite of their official apolitical stance. As already mentioned, their self-perception posits that they are involved in conflicts to satisfy basic human needs regardless of political considerations. These human needs are considered universal and unquestionable. The logic of humanitarian actors is then self-perceived as purely technical. Security is counted among these needs. Hence, many humanitarian actors do not see themselves as politically engaged, even when in some cases they ask the military and international police forces to stabilize the situation and to establish more security. The pertinent metaphor would here be the one of a doctor treating his patients on the basis of his scientific knowledge, rather than the one of a negotiator conscientious of the political will of his partners.91 The problem is that this reading of humanitarian practice is not universally shared. The political nature of security seems to complicate the task of making the apolitical stance of humanitarian organizations credible to local populations when they call for more security. Moreover, in a situation in which the local political structures are questioned and transformed, the activities of humanitarian NGOs and governmental agencies might be perceived as participating actively to the political legitimization of the new power-structures. This is all the more true as their cooperation with military forces on the fields of Afghanistan and Iraq,92 although presented as linked to purely functional needs, might associate them with the political options of the military. This is, rather, consistent with the tactics of the military since, as mentioned above, humanitarian actors are partially instrumentalized in order to build consensus around the presence of international military forces. The militarization of humanitarian actors, criticized by many authors and NGOs, could hence also be a powerful factor in the negative politicization of their practices by some individuals or local groups. But these dynamics are largely ignored by many NGOs sticking to their self-perception as apolitical actors engaged in the satisfaction of needs that, because of their unquestionable and individual character, could not be thought of as being essentially linked to the fundamental condition of collective life. By thinking of themselves in this way, they fail to perceive the processes they might induce in local societies. They fail to recognize that their practices inevitably lead to (de)legitimization processes at the core of the social fabric. These processes are, however, easy to politicize by local political actors in a context in which the political structures are being transformed.93 These considerations certainly offer an insight into the cruel bombings that targeted the offices of the UN and the IRC in Baghdad in 2003. The

Military interventions 169 same can be said about the many NGO workers who have been murdered in cold blood in Afghanistan or ruthlessly abducted in Iraq.94 These acts were probably largely misunderstood and misinterpreted because of the neutral and apolitical stance of the actors involved. Moreover, the terrorist label played an important role in the depoliticizing interpretations of these events. Indeed, they were merely considered as criminal acts or desperate attempts on the part of former Baathists, Talibans or ‘foreign Arabs’ to recover their social position regardless of their political beliefs and convictions. However, an analysis in terms of (de)politicization gives us alternative tools to interpret some of the motives underlying these attacks. Even if the humanitarian actors perceived themselves as apolitical, the local actors and clandestine groups probably did not. There was an asymmetric political relation between the humanitarian organizations and parts of the local population. The latter might have considered humanitarian aid a highly political issue because of the unintentional legitimizing effects of humanitarian action on the military interventions. Since many humanitarian NGOs and agencies deny the potential political interpretations of their actions, they failed to adapt their strategies to this possibility by developing forms of technical cooperation with the military. Of course, to say this is in no way to justify the action taken by some militant groups. It might on the contrary help to avoid some of the destructive consequences of asymmetric political relations. To complete this political analysis of the social interactions characterizing military interventions, the specific politicization process of securitization has to be focused upon. Securitization is a politicization process in the sense that it both gives high priority to the social issue that is securitized and links this issue to the very condition of collective life.95 Once this process is mastered by lucrative private organizations that think of themselves in apolitical terms, it might have particularly undesirable effects on local societies. The example of PMCs training local security forces here serves to highlight the importance of looking at political processes in external interventions. From political processes to processes of (in)securitization: the role of PMCs in the training of local security forces As has already been insisted upon, relations founded upon a symmetric politicization of a societal problem, in which the perceptions of the actors converge, might structure very strong power-relations as is the case with the idealized version of the nation-state. This is also what happens when PMCs train foreign security forces; here too, adverse effects might be expected. In order to prove this point, it is however necessary to conceptualize security. This conceptualization will allow us to go beyond a frequent approach to the privatization of military training, that focuses on the impact of this phenomenon on the professional public soldiers of the

170 C. Olsson countries that send the private military trainers, and not on its impact on the processes of (in)securitization that affect the political space of the target societies.96 Security cannot be considered to be a good or a market service because it does not refer to an objective situation that would exist as a security situation prior to it being labelled as such. Wæver, inspired by Derrida’s reading of the linguistic pragmatism of Austin, has shown that security does not refer to an objective environment of threats that would exist independently of the security enunciation.97 On the contrary, security is constructed through an act of discourse that does not refer to a pre-existing object of security but, on the contrary, transforms certain issues (considered for example as mere risks: accidental death, diseases, pollution) into threats to security. Consequently, it is necessary to de-essentialize security and cease to consider it as a ‘thing’ or as a ‘state of affairs’ existing independently of enunciation. Of course, this is not to say that the social issues that are securitized (clandestine groups using violence, killings, disease, economic crises, etc.) do not exist prior to their enunciation. It only means that, in the analysis of these phenomena as a security problem, language is a determining reality. Security is the product of discourses – as well as of social practices one would have to add98 – that confer a particular political salience to certain societal issues and legitimize the recourse to emergency measures. Rather than to speak of ‘security’, as if the term referred to a fixed reality, one would thus have to speak of the process of securitization. In this context, the commodification by private firms of security, considered as a ‘good’ or as a ‘service’, constitutes on the contrary the ultimate objectivation of the concept. This commodification is likely to have very concrete structural consequences. The construction of security as a commodity that can be consumed and exchanged on a market allows the protection supply, provided it simultaneously produces a security-related knowledge, to determine the protection demand. As Anna Leander has highlighted, protection is a ‘service’ that through its underlying process of securitization creates its own demand.99 The security enunciation produces, provided it manages to impose itself as an authorized knowledge, a feeling of insecurity and thus a demand to be met. It now becomes clear that security cannot be considered as a regular commodity that could be exchanged on a market on which an autonomous demand and supply would meet. Through the performative properties of the speech-act that securitizes a phenomenon by insecuritizing the public opinion, supply and demand of security are virtually inseparable. They both proceed from the same process of (in)securitization.100 Thus, if the actor who offers protection also is capable of controlling the process of (in)securitization, he can also determine the demand of protection. To complete this analysis two issues have to be insisted upon. Contrary to the approach of Wæver, the mere performative structure of specific

Military interventions 171 enunciations is not sufficient for an effective securitization. The security discourse also has to be accepted as legitimate and as an expression of an authorized knowledge. Hence, as has been shown by Bourdieu, performative discourses have to be analysed in context. This implies taking account of the social position of those who enounce in the social space.101 From this point of view, the personnel of PMCs in charge of the training and the counselling of foreign security services are ideally positioned to produce an authorized knowledge since they are hired as recognized specialists of security. As recognized security professionals, they are ‘naturally’ considered to benefit from a political authority. Therefore, they can deploy security discourses that produce the demand to which they are supposed to respond. Hence, it is easy for DynCorps training the new Iraqi police or Vinnel training the Iraqi defence forces to promote security readings that justify their lucrative training activity. They have the power to generate the necessary ‘demand ex post’, to use Gunnar Myrdal’s economic terminology. By determining against which threats one has to be able to defend oneself, they also determine what supply is able to respond to the existing demand. It could here be argued that the social position of the PMCs’ personnel does not differ from the public military counsellors directly mandated by their respective departments of defence. However, since these companies are privately owned and acting, among other things, according to the logic of profit, they are more tempted than public officials to extend the environment of threats to security. This is all the more true as the PMCs in Iraq operate outside of the official and hierarchical military chain of command of the troops of the ‘multinational coalition’. Whereas the latter will probably promote their security readings to consolidate their social utility, PMCs have an existential and economic interest in selling the fears to which their expertise in matters of protection ‘responds’. The autoreferential character of the concept of security thus places these firms in a structural position of force on the ‘security market’ by allowing them, to a certain extent, to orient the demand (by distinguishing between real and false threats) and to determine its volume (by a process of extension of the threat environment). In other words, the road is open for many rackets. As highlighted by Charles Tilly: ‘The idea one will have of the word protection essentially depends on the conception one has of the exteriority of the threat. The one who produces both the danger and the lucrative defence against it, is a racketeer’.102 In sum, security cannot be considered as a regular commodity that can be exchanged on a market because the supply and the demand proceed from a same political process of (in)securitization and not from autonomous dynamics. Security supply can create its own demand much more than in other sectors of activity. Hence, the use of PMCs in Iraq and in Afghanistan entails the risk of perpetuating the presence of these firms, as well as their social power and political authority. As mentioned above,

172 C. Olsson social relations structured around political processes – and securitization is a political process – also structure power relations. This is especially the case with symmetric political relations in which there is a convergence of the actors’ perceptions on the issues to be politicized.103 The relation between security providers and security demand is precisely an example of symmetric political relations since there is in principle a common perception of the threat on both sides (otherwise the training programme fails). This does not mean that PMCs consider themselves to be political actors. As security advisors or trainers, they merely politicize (securitize to be exact) social issues for those they advise or train.104 Thus, their approach remains purely technical and the principle of negotiation or reciprocity that characterizes many symmetric political relations is absent. What is important to highlight here is that the power-relations induced by private ‘security-providers’ might increase the potential for hegemony in external military interventions, and therefore also the different forms of political resistance to it.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have sought to analyse some of the military practices related to the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq through the concept of the political. This has implied an attempt to conceptualize the political as a speech-act embedded in social relations. One of the conclusions has been that the non-Clausewitzian character of these wars has paradoxically led to an interest in the political representations of the potential enemy, while simultaneously depoliticizing the relation to any form of military resistance. This paradox is all the more important to highlight as the importance of the relation between intervening forces and local populations has been emphasized by the shift from ‘wars between states’ to ‘wars inside states’. Thus, the second part of the chapter has been an attempt to highlight the importance of (de)politicization processes in interventions in which the confrontation between external forces and local societies has been made complex by the network-centric dimension of war. This has allowed accounting for the role of struggles for political (de)legitimization within the political process. In a context of institutional change and political violence, in which the field of ordinary politics has been suspended, these are indeed crucial questions. However, at its very best, this chapter has only tried to develop a framework for a political analysis of military interventions while leaving much of the empirical work to be done.

Notes 1 Bourdieu, Propos sur le Champ Politique. 2 Clausewitz, On War. 3 Foucault, Society Must be Defended.

Military interventions 173 4 Dillon and Reid, ‘Global liberal governance’, 41–66. 5 Although she would most certainly not consider herself to be Clausewitzian, the perspective here described as Clausewitzian certainly inspires this article: Paddy, ‘The “war on terror” ’. 6 For example: Bonditti, ‘From territorial space to networks’, 465. 7 Arendt, The Human Condition; Aristotle, Politics. 8 Arendt, The Human Condition. 9 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. 10 Strange, The Retreat of the State. Actually, she borrows this criterion from David Easton. 11 Braud, Sociologie Politique, 581. 12 Lagroye (ed.) La Politisation. 13 Voutat, ‘La science politique ou le contournement de l’objet’, 6–15. 14 All definitions of the political refer in a way or another to the fundamental anthropological condition of collective life. However, it is the specifics of a given definition that will give a concrete political content to the political by assimilating it, for example, to the state or to any other form of political communalization. Defining the political is in itself a political endeavour. Of course, I am here inspired by the developments made by the ‘Copenhagen School’ in international relations theory and security studies (Wæver, Buzan) on the concept of security. Actually, both security and the political can be said to be what the language of linguistic pragmatism calls ‘essentially contested concepts’. 15 Wæver, ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, pp. 47–86. 16 The paradox being however that Wæver considers the process of securitization to lead to the suspension of ‘ordinary politics’. I shall not consider this to be a defining feature of security-related processes in this chapter. 17 The process of depoliticization is the transformation of a political issue into an apolitical one: social, private, economic, etc. 18 Williams, ‘Words, images, enemies’, 523. 19 The article establishing the relation between the political and the fundamental human condition of collective life in the clearest terms is: Leca, ‘Le politique comme fondation’, 27–36. 20 Which is also the implication of the theory of securitization (see Williams, ‘Words, images, enemies’). 21 Michael T. Klare has highlighted the continuity and the similarities between the counter-insurgency operations of the 1960s and the still prevailing doctrines of anti-terrorism and peacekeeping in the late 1980s. See Klare and Kornbluh (eds) Low Intensity Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties. See also: Kitson, Low Intensity Operations. 22 This paradigm has been called the ‘huntingtonian formula’ since it has been influenced by Huntington’s ethnocentric approach. See: Huntington, Political Order and Changing Societies. 23 Foreign internal defence and counter-insurgency are two different terms describing the same practices. 24 Bilgin and Morton, ‘Historicising representations of “failed states” ’, 55–80. 25 Ibid. 26 Adler-Nissen, ‘De l’Etat effondré à la reconstruction, les ambiguïtés d’une souveraineté fictive en Bosnie-Herzégovine’. 27 El Salvador under the Duarte regime in the 1980s, for example. 28 This was attempted in Cuba in 1961, for example. 29 Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of the America. 30 This view is, for example, defended by the so-called ‘democratic peace theory’, loose category that would encompass a highly diversified set of

174 C. Olsson

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

authors reaching from Immanuel Kant to Bruce Russett. This view is usually assimilated on the political level with the so-called Washington Consensus. Rotberg (ed.) State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror. I do not consider the notion of war and the concept of intervention to be incompatible. For a slightly different view see: Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention. For a definition of biopolitics see: Foucault, Society must be Defended. This explains probably partially the success of the representation according to which all the major attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been perpetrated by foreigners, terrorists or, even better, foreign terrorists. The idea that troops should not be engaged in ‘nation-building’ operations was one of the important issues in the first election campaign of George W. Bush. The consciousness of the fact that this promise could not be held if the USA got engaged in Iraq was one of the important reasons for which important sectors of the US military were opposed to the intervention in Iraq. See: Hassner, ‘Etats-Unis: Civils belliqueux et militaires réticents’, 20–27. For a general perspective on the engagement of the US military in nation-building, see: Hippel, Democracy by Force. C. Schmitt would say the ‘real enemy’. G.W. Bush, speech at Iowa Western Community College, 21 January 2000. Dal Lago, Polizia Globale, Guerra e Conflitti dopo l’11 Settembre. The similarities between modern interventionary practices and police operations have also been noted in Brodeur, ‘Maintien et imposition de la paix en Somalie (1992–1995)’, 175–229. However, I am not here referring to the distinction made by Moskos between the military and the constabulary ethic when referring to police operations. See: Moskos, ‘UN peacemakers: The constabulary ethic and military professionalism’, 388–401. Rather, I am following the distinction between police operations and military operations made by L. Ferrajoli of the ‘Genoa School’ in legal theory. He insists on the fact that the symbolic asymmetry between actors confronting each other is characteristic of police operations as opposed to the non-hierarchical relation between enemies in classical wars: Ferrajoli, ‘Terrorismo e guerra: L’alternativo del diritto’, 15–21. See also: Balibar, L’Amérique, la Guerre, l’Europe et la Médiation Européenne, pp. 114–125. It has to be noted that these conflicts are not Clausewitzian in any sense. The ‘ascension to the extremes’, the dualization of the conflict and the single temporality of the classical wars as described by Clausewitz are not recognizable features of the political violence that characterizes these operations. This delegitimizing strategy has been analysed by Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. Dillon and Reid, ‘Global liberal governance’. For a very concrete illustration of this point: Priest, The Mission, Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military. Makki, Militarisation de l’Humanitaire et Privatisation du Militaire, pp. 36–37. For an analysis of ‘netwars’, see: Arquilla and Ronfeldt (eds) Networks and Netwars. C. Powell, speech at Yale Law School, 26 October 2001. Braem, Les Relations Armées-ONG. Pugh, ‘Civil-military relations in peace support operations: Hegemony or emancipation’. Makki, Militarisation de l’humanitaire. For a general presentation of what is at stake in civil-military cooperation, see: Gordon, ‘Understanding the priorities of civil-military co-operation’.

Military interventions 175 51 Coker, Human Warfare; Coker, Waging War Without Warriors? 52 Although one has to remember that the different PRTs in Afghanistan are engaged in a highly diversified set of military practices. 53 Burton, Violence Explained. 54 For an overview of this debate: James, ‘Two steps back: Relearning the humanitarian–military lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq’; Torrente, The War on Terror’s Challenge to Humanitarian Action; Braem, Les Relations Armées-ONG; Gordon, ‘Understanding the priorities of civil–military co-operation’; Pugh, ‘Civil–military relations in Kosovo’, 238. 55 Traynor, ‘The privatisation of war’. 56 Singer, Corporate Warriors. 57 LoBaido, ‘White mercenaries in black Africa’. 58 This development is not at all foreseen by Janice E. Thomson in her excellent historical sociology analysis of the role of ‘non-state extra-territorial violence’ in the international allocation of coercive resources: Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, State-building and Extra-territorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. For an analysis of the state-centred bias in Thompson’s study: Rigaud, ‘Janice E. Thompson: Le mercenariat comme forme sociohistorique de coercition privée’, 139–154. 59 Traynor, ‘The privatisation of war’. 60 e.g. Global Risk International. 61 e.g. Vinnel. 62 e.g. DynCorps, Erinys International. 63 e.g. DynCorps. 64 Olsson, ‘PMCs in Iraq, A force for good?’. 65 Coker, ‘Outsourcing war’, 95–113; Leander ‘African states and the market for force: The destabilizing consequences of private military companies’. 66 Thus, in war and counter-war, the self-proclaimed futurologists A. and H. Toffler write: ‘When nations have already lost the monopoly of violence, why not consider to let firms organize and create armies of voluntary mercenaries to wage wars on a contractual basis for the UN?’ (quoted by: de SaintQuentin, ‘Mercenariat et mutations stratégiques’). 67 See the reports on the mercenaries of the special rapporteur of the Human Rights Commission of the UN, Mr Enrique Ballesteros. 68 Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State. 69 For a similar stance, see: Hibou, ‘La privatisation de l’Etat’, 151–168. Writing from another perspective than B. Hibou, the analysis of B. Badie also insists on the necessity to put the focus on the redefinition of the relations between private and public actors, rather than dismissing the state altogether: Badie, La Fin des Territoires. 70 Bigo, ‘Les entreprises de coercition para-privées, de nouveaux mercenaires?’. 71 For a very interesting analysis drawing both from the insights of international relations theory and of political sociology, see: Pouligny, ‘Les missions polyvalentes de maintien de la paix de l’ONU dans leur interaction avec les autres acteurs locaux, sociologie comparative de différentes situations’. 72 For instance, the UN, when engaged in institution-building and electoral processes, local administrations or politicians. 73 Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle. 74 In this sense, one would have to make the distinction between a political actor (politicians, trade-union officials, militants, demonstrators, etc.) and politicizing actors (i.e. virtually everybody). 75 Arendt, La Crise de la Culture. 76 Bourdieu, Propos sur le Champ Politique.

176 C. Olsson 77 Politics is hence only a particular expression of the political. In other words, it is important to distinguish political actors from the professional of politics since many political actors operate outside of the field of politics. Politicization and political legitimization must also be distinguished. 78 According to L. Ferrajoli, police operations are fundamentally asymmetric since they can claim to be the expression of a symbolically ‘superior order’, the legal and political order. If they pursue individuals that also claim to act in the name of a ‘superior order’ a clash between narratives occurs. See: Ferrajoli, ‘Terrorismo e guerra’. 79 Although non-Schmittian, this interpretation might offer an insight into the reason for which the Schmittian tradition defends the idea that situations of ‘exception’ require a radical transformation of political practice, and notably in its relation to the law: the ordinary political order has already been de facto suspended. However, by adding the suspension of the legal order to the suspension of the ordinary political order, such ‘exceptional’ practices are counter-productive in my view since they suppress any possibility for the social actors to refer to a commonly recognized ‘symbolic superior order’ to legitimize their action (other than the very loose notion of ‘national interest’ or ‘raison d’état’) and thus to appease political tensions. 80 In other words, the institutionalized field of politics tends to become the centre of attraction of (de)politicization processes, thereby homogenizing them through a process of diffusion into the ‘social body’. It thus establishes symmetric relations. This can be explained in Bourdieu-inspired terms by the social position of the professionals of politics who enounce in the social space. But this argument only accounts for part of the explanation since these professionals have not the monopoly on political discourses: there are political actors outside the realm of institutional politics (everybody agrees on the fact that militants are political actors and they see themselves as such). But here too, the institutional field of politics tends to remain a centre of attraction. The political processes that occur outside of the field of politics are usually integrated into the ‘official’ political agenda (negatively or positively) if they reach a critical mass, as is currently happening with the topics highlighted by the ‘anti-globalization movement’. This is often consistent with the strategy of the ‘non-official’ political actors: they want their point of view to be integrated into the institutional agenda (which is for example the aim of the demonstrations at the G8 summits). But of course, this is not necessarily the case; and when it is not, we are precisely in a dynamic of suspension of ‘normal politics’, where political readings do not tend towards homogenization anymore. Hence, asymmetric relations become more likely. 81 Shearer, ‘Private military forces and challenges for the future’, 92. 82 Ibid. 83 Foucault, Dits et Écrits IV. 84 Crowley, ‘Introduction’, Cultures & Conflits, 5–15; Crowley, ‘Pacifications et réconciliations’, 75–98. 85 In the sense that the motivations of the actors involved are thought of as having nothing to do with their conception of what is essentially linked to the condition of their collective life. 86 Dorronsoro, ‘Désordre et légitimité du politique en Afghanistan’, 135–157. 87 Lipshutz, ‘On security’, pp. 1–23. 88 A similar argument is made by: Singer, Corporate Warriors, pp. 191–205. 89 This is notably the case for two firms: Titan and CACI6. 90 For a critical review of the traditional criticisms addressed to PMCs: Avant, The Market for Force; Olsson, ‘Vrais procès et faux débats’, 11–48.

Military interventions 177 91 Pupavac, ‘Pathologizing populations and colonizing minds’, 489–511. 92 Makki, Militarisation de l’Humanitaire. 93 Just as securitization processes, politicization is dependent on contextual elements. Hence, some practices are easier to politicize than others. 94 More than 40 humanitarians had been killed in Afghanistan by February 2004. 95 Buzan et al. Security. 96 Avant, ‘Privatising military training’, pp. 179–196; Avant, ‘Privatising military training’. 97 Wæver, ‘Securitization and desecuritization’. 98 Following Jef Huysmans and Didier Bigo. 99 Leander, ‘The commodification of violence, private military companies and African states’. 100 Bigo, ‘La mondialisation de l’ (in)sécurité’, 53–100. 101 Bourdieu, Ce que Parler Veut Dire. 102 Tilly, ‘La guerre et la construction de l’Etat en tant que crime organisé’, 99. 103 The politicization of an issue confers a specific salience to it. Thus, if an actor claims to be able to tackle this issue, he gives a specific salience to himself if this claim is made credible to the other actors in the relation (and this is the symmetric element). 104 The principle of bargain and of reciprocity that often defines the relations between political actors and the actors they represent is not present. PMCs do not consider themselves to be involved in the definition of the ‘collective life’ of political societies and thus they do not bargain for this definition.

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Selected bibliography 179 ‘Are we at war? The answer is beyond doubt: We are not’, Guardian, 29 January 2005. Arendt, H. La Crise de la Culture, Paris: Gallimard, 1972. —— The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Aristotle, Politics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932. Arquilla, J. and Ronfeldt, D. (eds) Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy, Rand Report MR-1382-OSD, 2001. ‘Arrests point to radical new threat’, Guardian, 1 April 2004. Ashley, R.K. and Walker, R.B.J. ‘Reading dissidence/writing the discipline: Crisis and the question of sovereignty in international studies’, International Studies Quarterly, 1991, 34(3), 367–416. ‘Attack on London is inevitable’, Guardian, 17 March 2004. Avant, D.D. ‘Privatising military training: A challenge to US army professionalism’, in. Snider, D.M. and Watkins, G.L. (eds) The Future of the Army Profession, Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002. —— The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatising Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Badie, B. La Fin des Territoires. Essai sur le Désordre International et sur l’Utilité Sociale du Respect, Paris: Fayart, 1995. Balibar, E. L’Amérique, la Guerre: L’Europe et la Médiation Européenne, Paris: La Découverte, 2003. —— L’Europe, l’Amérique, la Guerre: Réflexions sur la Médiation Européenne, Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Bauman, Z. ‘Reconnaissance wars of the planetary frontierland’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2002, 19(4), 84. —— Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Cambridge: Polity, 2007. —— Globalization: The Human Consequences, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. —— ‘On globalization: Or globalization for some, localization for some others’, Thesis Eleven, 1999, 54, 37–49. BCSF interview, March 2005. Beaud, S. and Masclet, O. ‘Un passage à l’acte improbable? Notes de recherche sur la trajectoire sociale de Zacarias Moussaoui’, French Politics, Culture and Society, 2002, 20(2), 159–170. Beck, U. ‘The terrorist threat: World risk society revisited’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2002, 19(4), 39–55. —— ‘The silence of words: On terror and war’, Security Dialogue, 2003, 34(3), 255–267. Becker, H. Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963. ‘Being prepared is not the same as being paranoid’, The Times, 8 April 2004. ‘Belmarsh suspects to be freed after Clarke gives in to pressure’, Independent, 26 January 2005. ‘Belmarsh: A new affront to justice’, Independent, 18 December 2004. Bergrren, E., Likic-Bboric, B., Toksös, G. and Trimikliniotis, N. (eds) Irregular Migration, Informal Labour and Community, Maastricht: Shaker, 2007. Berthemont, S. and Bigot, G. Le Jour Où la France Tremblera. Terrorisme Islamiste: Les Vrais Risques pour l’Hexagone, Paris: Ramsay, 2005.

180 Selected bibliography Bigo, D. ‘Compte-rendu de l’ouvrage de Nadelmann’, Revue Française de Science Politique, 1995, 3, 167–73. —— Polices en Réseaux: L’Expérience Européenne, Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1996. —— ‘Security, borders, and the State’, in Sweedler, J. and Allen, S. (eds) Border Regions in Functional Transition, Berlin: Institute for Regional Studies, 1996. —— ‘La recherche proactive et la gestion du risque’, Déviance et Société, 1997, 21(4), 423–429. —— ‘Europe passoire et Europe forteresse: La sécuritisation/humanitarisation de l’immigration’, in Rea, A. and Balbo, L. (eds) Immigration et Racisme en Europe, Bruxelles: Complexe, 1998. —— Sécurité Intérieure: Implications pour la Défense, Research Report, DAS, French Ministry of Defence, 1998. —— ‘Liaison officers in Europe: New actors in the European security field’, in Sheptycki, J. Issues in Transnational Policing, London: Routledge, 2000. —— ‘When two becomes one: Internal and external securitizations in Europe’, in Kelstrup, M. and Williams, M.C. (eds) International Relations Theory and the Politics of European Integration, London: Routledge, 2000. —— ‘The Möbius ribbon of internal and external security’, in Albert, M., Jacobson, D. and Lapid, Y. (eds) Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 —— ‘Security and immigration: Towards a critique of the governmentality of unease’, Alternatives, 2002, 27, 63–92. —— ‘Les entreprises de coercition para-privées, de nouveaux mercenaires?’, Cultures & Conflits, 2003, 52, 5–10. —— ‘Global (in)security: The field of the professionals of unease management and the ban-opticon’, Traces, 2004, 4; —— ‘Les nouvelles formes de la gouvernementalité: Surveiller et contrôler à distance’, in Ganjon, M.-C. (ed.) Penser avec Foucault, Paris: CERI/Karthala, 2004. —— ‘The Globalisation of (in)security and the ban-opticon’, Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory, 2004, 4, 109–157. —— ‘La mondialisation de l’ (in)sécurité: Réflexion sur le champ des professionnels de la gestion des inquiétudes et analytique de la transnationalisation des processus d’ (in)sécurisation’, Cultures & Conflits, 2005, 58, 53–100. —— ‘Protection: security, territory and population’, in Huysmans, J. (ed.) The Politics of Protection. Sites of insecurity and political agency, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. —— Policing (In)Security Today, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008 (forthcoming). Bigo, D. and Guittet, E.-P. ‘Vers une Nord-Irlandisation du monde?’, Cultures & Conflits, 2004, 56, 11–34. Bigo, D. and Hermant, D. ‘La relation terroriste revisitée’, Etudes Polémologiques, 1986, 47/49. Online. Available at: http://libertysecurity.org. Bigo D., Guittet, E.-P. and A. Smith, ‘La participation des militaires à la sécurité intérieure: Royaume uni, Irlande du Nord’, Cultures & Conflits, 2004, 56, 11–34. Bigo, D., Olsson, C., Chapleau, P. Leverchy, C., Kinsey, C., Perouse de Montclos, M.-A. and Rigaud, E. Les Entreprises de Coercition Para-privées, de Nouveaux Mercenaires? Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003. Bilgin, P. and Morton, A. ‘Historicising representations of ‘failed states’: Beyond

Selected bibliography 181 the cold-war annexation of the social sciences’, Third World Quarterly, 2002, 23(1), 55–80. ‘Blair agrees to talks with Howard on terror suspects’, Guardian, 3 February 2005. B.LAT interview, March 2005. ‘Blunkett attacked for invoking emergency powers’, Independent, 12 November 2001. ‘Blunkett defiant after Archbishop’s attack on detention’, Independent, 22 December 2003. ‘Blunkett firm on terrorism bill’, The Times, 1 December 2001. ‘Blunkett hints at introducing ID cards to Britain’, Independent, 15 September 2001. ‘Blunkett refuses to yield over Terror Bill’, Independent, 3 December 2001. ‘Blunkett under fire from all sides on terror bill’, Guardian, 20 November 2001. ‘Blunkett voices fears of asylum backlash in Britain’, Independent, 24 January 2003. ‘Blunkett wants expansion of MI5 and new security laws to counter terror threat’, Guardian, 23 February 2004. ‘Blunkett warns of attack at Christmas’, Independent, 8 December 2001. Bonditti, P. ‘From territorial space to networks: A Foucaldian approach to the implementation of biometry’, Alternatives, 2005, 29(4), 465. Bonditti, P. and Guittet, E.-P. Les Politiques Antiterroristes Depuis le 11 Septembre 2001: Modalités et Fonctions de l’Exceptionnalisme, Paris: Report for the French ministry of Defence, 2002. Bonelli, L. ‘Intelligence services, police and antiterrorism’. Online. Available at: www.libertysecurity.org/article608.html (accessed 23 November 2005). —— ‘Formation, conservation et reconversion de dispositions anti-subversives: L’exemple des renseignements généraux’, in Tissot, S. (ed.) Reconversions Militantes, Limoges: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2006. Bourdieu, P. Ce que Parler Veut Dire: L’Économie des Échanges Linguistiques, Poitiers: Aubin, 1982. —— ‘Champ intellectuel et projet créateur’, Les Temps Modernes, 1966, n° 246, 870. —— Propos sur le Champ Politique, Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 2000. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. Réponses: Pour Une Anthropologie Réflexive, Paris: Seuil, 1992. Bousquet, R. Insécurité: Les Quartiers de Tous les Dangers, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. Braem, Y. Les Relations Armées-ONG: Des Relations de Pouvoir? Paris: C2SD, 2004. Bratich, J. ‘Drawing a line in the fog’, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 2002, 2, 160. Braud, P. Sociologie Politique, Paris: LGDJ, 1998, 581. ‘Britain is conniving in torture’, Guardian, 14 December 2004. ‘Britain sliding into police state’, Guardian, 28 January 2005. ‘Britain’s Muslims are urged to fight fanatics’, The Times, 1 April 2004. Brodeur, J.-P. ‘Maintien et imposition de la paix en Somalie (1992–1995)’, Cultures & Conflits, 1998, 29/30, 175–229. ‘Brown will call up Enigma geniuses to hunt terror cash’, The Times, 13 April 2002.

182 Selected bibliography Buck-Morss, S. Thinking Past Terror. Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left, London: Verso, 2003. Burgat, F. ‘La logique de la légitimation de la violence: Animalité vs humanité’, in F. Héritier (ed.) De la Violence II, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999. Burton, J. Violence Explained, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Bush, G.W. Speech at Iowa Western Community College, 21 January 2000. —— The National Security Strategy of the United States of the America, Washington: The White House, 2002. Butterwegge, C. ‘Mass media, immigrants and racism in Germany. A Contribution to an ongoing debate’, Communications, 1996, 2, 203–20. Buzan, B., Waever, O. and de Wilde, J. Security: A New Framework of Analysis, London: Lynne Rienner, 1998. ‘Campbell calls for urgent rise in defence spending’, Independent, 27 September 2001. Cantegreil, J. ‘Terrorismes et libertés: La voie Française après le 11 Septembre’, En Temps Réel. Les Cahiers, 2005, 20(1). Capasso, N. Terrors and Wonders: Monsters in Contemporary Art, Lincoln MA: DeCordova Museum Publications, 2001. Caporaso, J.A. The Elusive State: International and Comparative Perspectives, Newbury Park: Sage, 1989. CDEF interview, March 2005. Centre on Conflicts and the ELISE network. Online. Available at: www.conflits.org. Césari, J. Musulmans et républicains. Les jeunes, l’islam et la France, Bruxelles: Complexe, 1998. Ceyhan, A. ‘Analyser la sécurité: Dillon, Waever, Williams et les autres’, Cultures & Conflits 1998, 31/32, 35–56. ‘Chemical bomb targeted shopping centre’, The Times, 7 April 2004. Chevrier, S., Nogues, T. and Sauvage, A. ‘Armées et sécurité intérieure: Perception des acteurs institutionnels civils et militaires’, Les Documents du C2SD, 2001, 24. Chocquet, C. ‘Le terrorisme est-il une menace de défense?’, Cultures & Conflits, 2004, 44, 19–64. ‘Civil liberties lawyers to challenge detentions’, The Times, 20 December 2001. ‘Civil liberties: Campaign launched to block scheme’, Guardian, 1 October 2001. ‘Civil liberties: Terror laws: Blair snubs Howard’s offer of time-limit compromise on Bill’, Independent, 3 March 2005. ‘Clarke warns of Madrid-style attack’, Independent, 24 February 2005. ‘Clarke’s U-turn gives judges power over house arrests’, Independent, 1 March 2005. Clausewitz, C. V. On War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976. Cohen, S. Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London and New York: Routledge, 1972/2002. Coker, C. ‘Outsourcing war’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 1999, 13(1), 95–113. —— Human Warfare, New York: Routledge, 2001. —— Waging War Without Warriors? The Changing Culture of Military Conflict, London: Lynne Rienner, 2002. Collective C.A.S.E. ‘Critical approaches to security in Europe: A networked manifesto’, Security Dialogue, 2007, 37(4), 443–487.

Selected bibliography 183 Committee of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de Défense Nationale, L’action Internationale et Européenne Contre le Terrorisme, Paris: IHEDN, 2004. Council Common Position of 27 December 2001 on the application of specific measures to combat terrorism (2001/931/PESC), Official Journal of the European Communities, 28 December 2001, L 344/95–96. Cox, R.W. Production, Power and World Order: Social Forces in the Making of History (selected chapters), New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. ‘Crackdown on asylum-seekers would do little to lessen threat’, Independent, 17 January 2003. Critcher, C. Moral Panics and the Media, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003. Crowley, J. ‘Introduction’, Cultures & Conflits, 1999, 40, 5–15. —— ‘Pacifications et réconciliations: Quelques réflexions sur les transitions immorales’, Cultures & Conflits, 2000, 41, 75–98. ‘Cruise ships are terror targets’, The Times, 29 November 2003. Cultures & Conflits, ‘Circuler, enfermer, éloigner: Zones d’attente et centres de rétention des démocraties occidentales’, 1996, 23. Online. Available at: www.conflits.org. Cultures & Conflits, ‘Troubler et inquiéter: Les discours du désordre international’, Autumn-winter 1995, 19/20. Cultures & Conflits ‘Défense et identité: Un contexte global’, 2001, 44. ‘Cut back shrubs, install locks: MI5 suggests anti-terror measures’, Independent, 1 May 2004. Dal Lago, A. Non-Persone: L’esclusione dei migranti in una società globale, Milano: Feltrinelli, 1999. —— Polizia Globale, Guerra e Conflitti dopo l’11 Settembre, Verona: Ombra Corte, 2003. Davis, L.E. Mosher, D.E., Brennan R.R. and Greenberg, M. Army Forces for Homeland Security, Santa Monica: RAND, 2004. ‘Day 1: Resignation. Day 2: Humiliation’, Independent, 17 December 2004. De Saint-Quentin, G. ‘Mercenariat et mutations stratégiques’, Défense Nationale, 1998, April-June, 42. Deflem, M. ‘Bureaucratization and social control: Historical Foundations of international police cooperation’, Law and Society Review, 2000, 34(3), 87–109. Delpech, T. ‘Le terrorisme international et l’Europe’, Paris: Institut d’Etudes de Sécurité, Cahiers de Chaillot, 2002, 56. ‘Desire to integrate on the wane as Muslims resent war on Islam’, Guardian, 16 March 2004. Dewerpe, A. Espion: Une Anthropologie Historique du Secret d’Etat Contemporain, Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Dezalay, Y. and Garth, B.G. The Internationalization of Palace Wars. Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002. Dezcallar de Mazarredo, J. ‘Lucha contra el terrorismo internacional’, El Noticiero de las Ideas, 2003, 13. Diken, B. and Laustsen, C.B. ‘Zones of indistinction. security, terror and bare life’, Space & Culture, 2002, 5(3), 290–307. Dillon, M., and Reid, J. ‘Global liberal governance: Biopolitics, security and war’, Millennium, 2001, 30, 41–66

184 Selected bibliography Dobry, M. Sociologie des Crises Politiques, Paris: FNSP, 1992. Dobson, A., Huysmans, J. and Prokhovnik, R. (eds) The Politics of Protection: Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency. London: Routledge, 2006. ‘Don’t delude yourselves about terrorist threat’, The Times, 9 November 2004. Dorronsoro, G. ‘Désordre et légitimité du politique en Afghanistan’, Cultures & Conflits, 1997, 24/25, 135–157. ‘Draconian curbs may include ID cards’, Guardian, 24 September 2001. Duclos, L.J. ‘Les pouvoirs publics et la campagne terroriste moyen-orientale: France 1986’, Etudes Polémologiques, 1989, 49(1), 75–109. Dufour, J.-L. La Guerre, la Ville et le Soldat, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002. Dufourg, J-M., Section Manipulation, de l’Antiterrorisme à l’Affaire Doucé, Paris: Laffont, 1991. Dunne, T. and Wheeler, N.J. ‘We the peoples: Contending discourse of security in human rights theory and practice’, International Relations, 2004, 1, 18. Durieux, B., Relire ‘De la Guerre’ de Clausewitz, Paris: Economica, 2005. Edelman, M. Constructing the Political Spectacle, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. —— Pièces et Règles du Jeu Politique, Paris: Seuil, 1991. El País, 28 April 2002. ‘Emergency powers – new law on detention faces court challenge’, Independent, 14 November 2001. Ericson, R.V., Crime in an Insecure World, Cambridge: Polity, 2007. Ericson, R.V. and Haggerty, K.D. Policing the Risk Society, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Erikson, K.T. Wayward Puritans, New York: John Wiley, 1966. EU Network of Independent Experts in Fundamental Rights (CFR-CDF) Balance of Freedom versus Security in the Response of the European Union and its Member States to the Terrorist Threat, 2003. ‘Ex-spy chief says war on terror is failing’, The Times, 16 September 2003. ‘Fear turns to reality as al-Qaida bombers strike at British targets’, Guardian, 21 November 2003. Ferrajoli, L. ‘Terrorismo e guerra: L’alternativo del diritto’, La Revista del Manifesto, 2001, 23, 15–21. Ferret, J. and Wuilleumier, A. ‘Reconstruire la sécurité après le 11 Septembre: La lutte contre-terroriste entre affichage politique et mobilisation policière’, Les Cahiers de la Sécurité Intérieure, 2004, 55, 147–179. Finnemore, M. The Purpose of Intervention: Changing beliefs about the use of force, London: Cornell University Press, 2003. ‘First the decision, then the dossier’, Guardian, 28 August 2003. ‘Five dissenters as MPs back Bill to allow internment’, Independent, 20 November 2001. Flyghed, J. ‘Normalising the exceptional: The case of political violence’, Policing and Society, 2002, 13(1), 23–41. ‘Former Met commissioners on opposing sides of terror debate’, Guardian, 8 March 2005. Fortmann, M., MacLeod, A. and Roussel, S. (eds) Vers des Périmètres de Sécurité? La Gestion des Espaces Continentaux en Amérique du Nord et en Europe, Outremont: Athéna/CEPES/GERSI, 2003.

Selected bibliography 185 Foucault, M. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, New York: Random House, 1965. —— Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de la Prison, Paris: Gallimard, 1975. —— Dits et Écrits I–IV, Paris: Gallimard, 1994 —— Il Faut Defender la Société: Cours au Collège de France 1976, GallimardSeuil: Paris, 1997. —— Society Must be Defended, New York: The New Press, 1997. Foucault, M. and Gordon, C. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1980. Foucher, M. Fronts et Frontières: Un Tour du Monde Géopolitique, Paris: Fayard, 1991. Francart, L. and Vilboux, N. Adaptation Nécessaire des Outils de Défense Français et Européens pour faire Face aux Menaces Asymétriques, Paris: Eurodécision/DAS, 2002 ‘Freedom and security are two essentials that citizens look to the government to provide’, Guardian, 14 September 2002. ‘Freedom from terrorist attack is also a human right’, Independent, 12 August 2004. ‘Further terrorism arrests expected’, Guardian, 2 December 2003. ‘G2: Never say inevitable’, Guardian, 7 April 2004. Garapon, A. ‘Is there a French advantage in the fight against terrorism?’, ARI – Análisis del Real Instituto, 2005, 110. ‘Getting high on the oxygen of publicity’, Guardian, 5 April 2004. Gill, P. Policing Politics: Security Intelligence and the Liberal Democratic State, London: Frank Cass, 1994. Girard, R. La Violence et le Sacré, Paris: Grasset, 1972; Girard, R. and Williams, J.G. The Girard Reader, New York: Crossroad, 1996. Giroux, H.A. ‘Terrorism and the fate of democracy after September 11’, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 2002, 1, 10. —— ‘Democracy and the politics of terrorism: Community, fear and the suppression of dissent’, Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 2002, 2(3), 334–342. ‘Global Terrorism: Are we meeting the challenge?’ lecture at City of London Police Headquarters, 16 October 2003. Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. Moral Panics: The Social Control of Deviance, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Gordon, S. ‘Understanding the priorities of civil-military co-operation’, The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, 13 July 2001. Online. Available at: www.jha.ac/articles/a068.htm. Graham, P., Keenan T. and Dowd A-M. ‘A call to arms at the end of history: A discourse-historical analysis of George W. Bush’s declaration of war on terror’, Discourse & Society, 2004, 15(2/3), 199–221. Grosrichard, A. ‘The confession of the flesh’, in Gordon, C. (ed.) Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, New York: Harvester Press, 1980. Guild, E. ‘Agamben face aux juges: Souveraineté, exception et antiterrorisme’, Cultures & Conflits, 2003, 51, 127–156. Guiraudon, V. ‘De-nationalizing control: Analysing state responses to constraints on migration control’, in Guiraudon, V. and Joppke, C. Controlling a New Migration World, London: Routledge, 2001.

186 Selected bibliography —— ‘Les compagnies de transport dans le contrôle migratoire à distance’, Cultures & Conflits, 2002, 45, 124–147. Guittet, E.-P. ‘Raison et déraison d’Etat: Les GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion) 1983–1987’, unpublished DEA thesis, University Paris X – Nanterre, 2000. —— Cercle sur les Nouvelles Perspectives Sécuritaires dans les Doctrines Française, Britannique et Allemande, Paris: Report for the French ministry of Defence, 2002. —— ‘City fight! A centre down in the troubled streets of French and British military doctrines regarding the concept of urban warfare’, paper presented at 44th ISA Annual Convention, Portland, February 2003. ‘Half of terror suspects are freed without any charges’, Independent, 30 April 2004. Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T. and Clarke, J. Policing the Crisis, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978; Hammar, T. European Immigration Policy: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Hanon, J.-P., Guittet, E.-P. and Tsoukala, A. Etude Comparée des Concepts et Doctrines de Maintien de l’Ordre et d’Intervention Antiterroriste en Europe: Allemagne, Espagne, Italie, Grèce, Irlande du Nord, Etats-Unis, Paris: Report for the French ministry of Defence, 2002. —— ‘Militaires et lutte contre-terroriste’, Cultures & Conflits, 2004, 56(4), 121–140. Hassner, P. ‘Etats-Unis: Civils belliqueux et militaires réticents’, Critique Internationale, 2003, 21, 20–27. Hearing of Mr. Yves Bertrand, Director general of the RG 29 June 1999, Report by Mr. Raymond Forni, La Sécurité: Un Droit pour les Corses, un Devoir pour l’Etat, (no. 1918), French Parliament, Paris, November 1999. —— 9 July 2003, report by Debré J.-L Sur la Question du Port des Signes Religieux à l’École, (n° 1275), French Parliament, Paris, December 2003. Hearing on the 11 March 2004 Parliamentary commission, 18 November 2004. Heisbourg, F. Hyperterrorisme: La Nouvelle Guerre, Paris: O. Jacob, 2001 —— ‘Hyper-terrorisme: État des lieux’, Politique Internationale, 2003. Online. Available at: www.politiqueinternationale.com/PI_PSO/fram_iex_fh01.htm. Heisler, M.O. ‘The transnational nexus of security and migration’, unpublished paper, 2006. Heng, Y.-K. ‘Unravelling the “war” on terrorism: A Risk-management exercise in war clothing?’, Security Dialogue, 2002, 33(2), 227–242. Héritier, F. (ed.) De la Violence II, Paris: Odile Jacob, 1999. Hibou, B. ‘La privatisation de l’Etat’, Critique Internationale, 1998, 1, 151–168. Hippel, K. V. Democracy by Force: US Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ‘How real is the terrorist threat today?’, Guardian, 29 January 2005. ‘How should Britain protect its citizens?’, The Times, 11 May 2004; ‘How surveillance ensnared enemy within’, The Times, 31 March 2004. ‘Howard calls for anti-terror minister’, The Times, 6 September 2004. House of Commons, ‘Hansard debates’, 26 January 2005. Online. Available at: securityliberty.org>. ‘Human rights in the balance’, Independent, 4 February 2003.

Selected bibliography 187 ‘Human rights on trial: Secret courts will not improve our security’, Guardian, 12 November 2001. Huntington, S.P. Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968. —— The Clash of Civilizations and Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Huysmans, J. ‘Migrants as a security problem: Dangers of securitizing societal issues’, in Miles, R. and Thränhardt D. (eds) Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion, London: Pinter, 1995. —— ‘A Foucaultian view on spill-over: Freedom and security in the EU’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, 294–318. —— The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU, London: Routledge, 2005. ‘I will put safety of Britain before liberties’, The Times, 21 December 2004. ‘I’m not a bully, I’m not a scaremonger – and I’m not giving in to terror’, The Times, 10 December 2001. ‘Immigration – Tories: Detain all asylum seekers’, Independent, 29 January 2003. ‘Indefinite internment for terrorist suspects’, The Times, 12 November 2001. International Federation for Human Rights, ‘France: La porte ouverte à l’arbitraire: Rapport d’une mission internationale d’enquête en France sur l’application de la législation anti-terroriste, concernant particulièrement les conditions de détention provisoire et l’exercice des droits de la défense’, Lettre Bimensuelle de la FIDH, 1999, 271, special issue. ‘Interview: Sir Ian Blair’, Guardian, 2 February 2005. ‘Interview: Sir John Stevens’, Guardian, 24 May 2004. Interview with a French army general, March 2005. Interview with a member of the French BCSF, March 2005. Interview with a member of the French CDEF, March 2005. Interview with a member of the French Centre for Force Employment Doctrine (Centre de Doctrine et d’Emploi des Forces, CDEF), March 2005. Interview with a member of the gendarmerie barracks, March 2005. Interview with D. Deleule and F.P. Adorno: ‘L héritage intellectuel de Foucault’, Cités, 2000, 2, 95–107. Interviews with members of the CDEF, March 2005. Interviews with members of the French Department for the conception of force systems (Bureau de Conception des Systèmes Forces, BCSF). Interviews with members of the French Ministry of Defence. James, E. ‘Two steps back: Relearning the humanitarian-military lessons learned in Afghanistan and Iraq’, The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, October 2003. Online. Available at: www.jha.ac/articles/a125.htm Jenkins, R. A Life at the Centre, London: Macmillan, 1991. Jürgensen, A. ‘Terrorism, civil liberties, and preventive approaches to technology: The difficult choices western societies face in the war on terrorism’, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 2004, 1, 55–59. Johnson, R. ‘Defending Ways of Life’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2002, 4(19), 211–231. ‘Judges back terror law detention’, Guardian, 26 October 2002. ‘Judges in row over torture ruling’, Guardian, 12 August 2004.

188 Selected bibliography ‘Judges rule that terror suspects are being imprisoned illegally’, The Times, 17 December 2004. Katzenstein, P.J. Cultural Norms and National Security: Police and Military in Postwar Japan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Keller, W.W. The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover. Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence state, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Kellner, D. ‘September 11, the media, and war fever’, Television & New Media, 2002, 3(2), 143–151; Khosrokhavar, F. Les Nouveaux Martyrs d’Allah, Paris: Flammarion, 2003. King Juan Carlos, Opening speech of the Seminar, 10 March 2005, Madrid. Online. Available at: www.libertysecurity.org. King, D. ‘Les forces armées et la lutte contre le terrorisme’, in Fortmann, M., MacLeod, A. and Roussel, S. (eds) Vers des Périmètres de Sécurité? La Gestion des Espaces Continentaux en Amérique du Nord et en Europe, Outremont: Athéna/CEPES/GERSI, 2003. Kitson, F. Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping, London: Faber and Faber, 1971. Klare, M.T. and Kornbluh, P. (eds) Low Intensity Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties, New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. Kleinman, M. A European Welfare State? European Union Social Policy in Context, New York: Palgrave, 2002 Krause, K and Williams, M.C. (eds) Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, Mineapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997. La Stampa, 19 April 1995. ‘Labour accuses Lords of wrecking anti-terror bill’, Guardian, 7 December 2001. Lacroix, B. ‘Pour une science politique reflexive: Enjeux et usages de la référence à Norbert Elias’, Tumultes, 2000, 15, 177–202. Lagroye, J. (ed.) La Politisation, Paris: Belin, 2003. Lahave, G. ‘Immigration and the State: The devolution and provision of immigration control in the EU’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1998, 24(4), 675–694. Lazar, A. and Lazar, M. ‘The discourse of the New World Order: “Out-casting” the double face of threat’, Discourse & Society, 2004, 15(2/3), 223–242. Le Casoar, July 1996, 142: 24 ‘Le Général des banlieues doit battre en retraite’, Le Monde, 17 November 2005. Le Monde, 12 September 2002. Leander, A. ‘The commodification of violence, private military companies and African States’ Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, June 2003. Online. Available at: www.copri.dk/publications/workingpapers.htm. —— ‘African States and the market for force: The destabilizing consequences of private military companies’, University of Southern Denmark, Political Science Publication n°6, 2004. Leca, J. ‘Le politique comme fondation’, Espaces-Temps, 2001, 76/77, 27–36. Legault, A. ‘Vers la globalisation du terrorisme?’, in Fortmann, M., MacLeod, A. and Roussel, A. Vers des Périmètres de Sécurité?. Leroux, P. ‘Les armées dans la ville’, Les Champs de Mars, 2002, 11, 297–312. Leudar, I. Marsland, V. and Nekvapil, J., ‘On membership categorization: “Us”, “them” and “doing violence” in political discourse’, Discourse & Society, 2004, 15(2/3), 243–266.

Selected bibliography 189 Leveau, R. ‘Réflexions sur le non-passage au terrorisme dans l’immigration maghrébine en France’, Etudes Polémologiques, 1989, 49(1), 141–156. Libération, 6 December 2002. Lipschutz, R. (ed.) On Security, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. LoBaido, A.C. ‘White mercenaries in black Africa’. Online. Available at: www.worldnetdaily.com. ‘London: Covert build-up to protect UK people and locations on risk list’, Guardian, 4 August 2004. ‘Lords sabotage forces concessions on terror bill’, Guardian, 8 December 2001. Lyon, D. Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2006. Makki, S. Militarisation de l’Humanitaire et Privatisation du Militaire, Paris: CIRPES, Cahier d’Etudes Stratégiques, 2004. ‘Manchester police killing: The investigation’, Independent, 16 January 2003. Marx, G.T. Undercover. Police Surveillance in America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ‘Massacre in Madrid: Britain must never be afraid’, Independent, 13 March 2004. Mauss, M. Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris: PUF, 1999. ‘MET chief says compulsory ID cards essential in war on terrorism’, Independent, 10 November 2003. ‘Met urges public to use new terror hotline’, Guardian, 22 March 2004. ‘MI5 agents foil bomb plot’, Guardian, 31 March 2004. Ministère de la Défense Livre Blanc sur la Défense, Paris: La Documentation française, 2004. Monjardet, D. Ce que Fait la Police: Sociologie de la Force Publique, Paris: La Découverte, 1996. Moskos, C. ‘UN Peacemakers: The Constabulary Ethic and Military Professionalism’, Armed Forces and Society, 1975, 1(4), 388–401. ‘MPs quash series of Lords changes to Terrorism Bill’, Independent, 13 December 2001. ‘Muslims face dark age of injustice’, Guardian, 1 April 2004. ‘Muslims: We are the new victims of stop and search’, Guardian, 29 March 2004. Nadelmann, E.A. Cops across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Necchi, G. ‘La justice face au terrorisme’, Les Conférences des Jeudis du CHEAr – Cycle 2000–2001, Paris: DGA/CHEAr, 2001, 49–56. Neocleous, M. The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, London: Pluto Press, 2000. ‘New laws to cripple terrorism’, The Times, 1 October 2001. ‘New police unit to counter terrorists outside London’, Independent, 12 July 2004. Nogala, D. ‘Le marché privé de la sécurité, analyse d’une évolution internationale’, Cahiers de la Sécurité Intérieure, 1996, 24, 65–87. ‘Now is the moment to stand firm with the US’, Independent, 18 November 2003. Ocqueteau, F. ‘Polices privées, sécurité privée’, Déviance et Société, 1998, 3, 72–99. Olsson, C. ‘Vrais procès et faux débats: Perspectives critiques sur les argumentaires de légitimation des entreprises de coercition para-privées’, Cultures & Conflits, 2003, 52, 11–48.

190 Selected bibliography —— ‘PMCs in Iraq: A force for good?’ Online. Available at: www.libertysecurity. org (accessed 7 February 2005). ‘On the brink of war: Civil rights’, Guardian, 29 September 2001. ‘On the brink of war: Identity cards’, Guardian, 25 September 2001. ‘One year on: Civil liberties clampdown’, Guardian, 9 September 2002. Paddy, H. ‘The ‘war on terror’: Lessons from Ireland’, European Civil Liberties Network: 2005, 1–4. Online. Available at: www.libertysecurity.org>. Palidda, S. Polizia Postmoderna: Etnografia del Nuovo Controllo Sociale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000. —— ‘La construction sociale de la déviance et de la criminalité parmi les immigrés: Le cas Italien’, in Palidda, S. Délit d’Immigration. Peelo, M. and Soothill, K. ‘The place of public narratives in reproducing social order’, Theoretical Criminology, 2000, 4(2), 131–148. ‘Peers vote to restrict anti-terror legislation’, Independent, 7 December 2001. ‘Peers warn of terror bill cuts’, Guardian, 28 November 2001. ‘Police accused of Islamophobic stop and search tactics’, Independent, 3 July 2004. ‘Police alerts and terrorism threat’, The Times, 30 December 2003. ‘Police can use terror powers on protesters’, Guardian, 1 November 2003. ‘Police commissioner calls for European anti-terrorist body’, Independent, 22 March 2004. ‘Police fear Bali-style club bomb in London’, Guardian, 14 January 2005. ‘Police on alert for imminent al-Qa’ida terror attack on Britain’, Independent, 11 August 2003. ‘Police to get powers to hold terror suspects indefinitely’, Independent, 1 October 2001. ‘Police to monitor e-mails and phone calls’, Independent, 16 October 2001. Pouligny, B. ‘Les missions polyvalentes de maintien de la paix de l’ONU dans leur interaction avec les autres acteurs locaux, sociologie comparative de différentes situations: El Salvador, Cambodge, Haïti, Somalie, Mozambique, Bosnie-Herzégovine’, unpublished PhD thesis, Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Paris, 1999. Powell, C. speech at Yale Law School, 26 October 2001. President Putin’s speech on special forces after the Beslan assault, talking about a link with international anti-terrorist actions. Priest, D. The Mission, Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. ‘Private firms to police terror orders’, Guardian, 7 March 2005. Pugh, M. ‘Civil–military relations in Kosovo’, Security Dialogue, 2000, 31(2), 238. —— ‘Civil–military relations in peace support operations: Hegemony or emancipation’, paper presented at Overseas Development Institute, London, February 2001. Online. Available at: www.odi.org.uk/hpg/confpapers/pugh; Makki, Militarisation de l’Humanitaire. Pupavac, V. ‘Pathologizing populations and colonizing minds: International psychosocial programs in Kosovo’, Alternatives, 2002, 27(4), 489–511. Rasmussen, M.V., ‘A parallel globalization of terror: 9–11, Security and globalization’, Cooperation and Conflict: Journal of the Nordic International Studies Association, 2002, 3, 331. ‘Release of terror suspect increases pressure on Clarke’, Independent, 2 February 2005.

Selected bibliography 191 Rigaud, E. ‘Janice E. Thompson: Le mercenariat comme forme socio-historique de coercition privée’, Cultures & Conflits, 2003, 52, 139–154. ‘Right ruling, wrong reason’, Guardian, 1 August 2002. ‘Rights and wrongs of terrorism legislation’, The Times, 2 October 2001. Rogin, M. ‘La répression politique aux Etats-Unis’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 1997, 120, 32–44. —— Les Démons de l’Amérique, Seuil: Paris, 1998. Rotberg, R.I. (ed.) State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2003. Rougelet, P. RG, La Machine à Scandales, Paris: Albin Michel, 1997. Sayad, A. La Double Absence: Des Illusions de l’Émigré aux Souffrances de l’Immigré, Paris: Seuil, 1999. ‘Scaremongering: Ministers talk about hundreds of would-be bombers’, Guardian, 8 March 2005. Schmitt, C. The Concept of the Political, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996. ‘Scotland Yard chief reveals London link to Madrid bombings’, Independent, 19 March 2004. Scott, J.C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. ‘Shaken Blair condemns act of barbarism’, The Times, 12 September 2001. Shearer, D. ‘Private military forces and challenges for the future’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 1999, 13(1), 80–94. Sheptycki, J.W.E. In Search of Transnational Policing: Towards A Sociology of Global Policing, Advances in Criminology, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Singer, P. Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatised Military Industry, London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Snider, D.M. and Watkins, G.L. (eds) The Future of the Army Profession, Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2002. Solomon, J. and Sakai, N. ‘Translation, philosophy and colonial difference’, Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory, 2005, 4. Sommier, I. Le Terrorisme, Paris: Flammarion, 2000. ‘Speaking of wars . . .’, Television & New Media, 2002, 2, 170. Strange, S. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Steinert, H. ‘The indispensable metaphor of war: On populist politics and the contradictions of the state’s monopoly of force’, Theoretical Criminology, 2003, 7(3), 265–291. ‘Suspects’ win hits terror crackdown’, The Times, 31 July 2002. Syndicat de la magistrature, ‘A quoi peuvent bien servir des juges antiterroristes?’, Justice, 1995, 146, 3–6. Tebib, R. Le Renseignement dans la Lutte Contre le Terrorisme: Des Violences Urbaines à la Guerre Masquée, Paris: l’Encre, 2001. ‘Terror at the Consulate: We see their utter contempt for innocent life’, Independent, 21 November 2003. ‘Terror laws used unfairly on Muslims’, Independent, 5 August 2004. ‘Terror raids: Fears of home-grown radical threat’, Independent, 31 March 2004. ‘Terror scares, deadlines and election fever make for the worst kind of lawmaking’, Independent, 10 March 2005. ‘Terrorismes, nouvelles menaces: Évolutions récentes, perspectives’, 2002.

192 Selected bibliography ‘Terrorists could target food’, Guardian, 17 October 2003. ‘Terrorists still plotting murder on mass scale’, The Times, 12 December 2003. ‘Thatcher’s words will encourage race attacks’, Independent, 5 October 2001. ‘The daily threat of terror’, Guardian, 12 November 2002. ‘The enemy deep within’, The Times, 12 June 2002. The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language. ‘The invasion of Iraq was Britain’s worst foreign policy blunder since Suez’, Independent, 19 March 2004. ‘The Prime Minister responds’, The Times, 12 September 2001. ‘The Queen’s speech: Emphasis on safety and security provokes scaremongering claims’, Independent, 24 November 2004. ‘The war on terror misfired’, Guardian, 7 April 2004. Thompson, J.E. Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, State-building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Thuillier, F. ‘La menace terroriste: Essai de typologie’, Revue Politique et Parlementaire, 2004, 1028, 37–47. ‘This is war, there is no compromise’, The Times, 21 November 2003. ‘This war is as important as any we have fought before’, Independent, 16 October 2002. ‘Threat to Britain rated particularly high’, Guardian, 26 February 2004. Tilly, C. ‘La guerre et la construction de l’Etat en tant que crime organisé’, Politix, 2000, 13(49), 99. —— ‘Terror, terrorism, terrorists’, Sociological Theory, 2004, 22(1), 5–13. ‘Tony Blair will not be forgiven’, Guardian, 16 March 2004. ‘Tories might abandon Geneva Convention’, The Times, 29 January 2003. Torrente, N. The War on Terror’s Challenge to Humanitarian Action, London: ODI-HPN Report, 14 January 2003. ‘Tory threat over snoop charter’, Guardian, 17 June 2002. ‘Tougher terror law not ruled out’, Guardian, 18 February 2004. Tournier, P. ‘La délinquance des étrangers en France: Analyse des statistiques pénales’, in Palidda, S. (ed.) Délit d’Immigration, Brussels: European Commission, 1997. Traynor, I. ‘The privatisation of war’, Guardian, 10 December 2003. Tsoukala, A. ‘Le contrôle de l’immigration en Grèce dans les années quatre-vingtdix’, Cultures & Conflits, 1997, 26/27, 51–72. —— ‘La lutte contre le crime organisé en Sicile: L’opération militaire Vespri Siciliani’, Cultures & Conflits, 2004, 56, 51–61. —— ‘Democracy against security: The Debates about counter-terrorism in the European parliament, September 2001–June 2003’, Alternatives, 2004, 29(4), 417–439. —— ‘La construction médiatique de la figure du hooligan dans la presse française’, in Société de Sociologie du Sport de Langue Française (ed.) Dispositions et Pratiques Sportives: Débats Actuels en Sociologie du Sport, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. —— ‘Looking at migrants as enemies’, in Bigo, D. and Guild, E. (eds) Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. —— ‘Democracy in the light of security: British and French political discourses on domestic counterterrorism policies’, Political Studies, 2006, 54(3), 607–627.

Selected bibliography 193 —— ‘La légitimation des mesures d’exception dans la lutte antiterroriste en Europe’, Cultures & Conflits, 2006, 61, 35–50. —— ‘Constructing the threat in a sports context: British press discourses on football hooliganism’, in Aquesolo, J. (ed.) Violence and Sport, Seville: University Pablo de Olavide, 2006. UCLAT interview, January 2006. UCLAT interview, March 2005. Van Creveld, M. The Rise and Decline of the State, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Venn, C. ‘World dis/order’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2002, 4, 121–136. —— ‘Altered states: Post-enlightenment cosmopolitanism and trans-modern socialities’, Theory, Culture & Society, 2002, 1–2, 76. Voutat, B. ‘La science politique ou le contournement de l’objet’, Espace-Temps, 2001, 76/77, 6–15. Waever, O. ‘Securitization and desecuritization’, in Lipschutz, R. (ed.) On Security, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Wacquant, L. ‘Des “ennemis commodes” ’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 1999, 129, 63–67. Walker, N. Sovereignty in Transition, Oxford: Hart, 2002. —— ‘European integration and European policing’, in Anderson, M. and Den Boer, M. (eds) Policing across National Boundaries, London: Pinter Publishers, 1994. Walker, R.B.J. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. —— ‘The subject of security’, in Williams, M.C. and Krause, K. (eds) Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ‘We are in this for the long haul’, The Times, 9 October 2001. ‘We must stop chemical weapon spread’, The Times, 15 September 2001. ‘What we really need to fight terror is intelligence, intelligence, intelligence’, Independent, 26 November 2001. ‘WMD absence makes public doubt terror threat’, Independent, 9 February 2005. ‘Young Muslims made scapegoats in stop and search’, Guardian, 3 July 2004. ‘Your computer could be next terrorist target’, The Times, 23 March 2004. www.libertysecurity.org. Williams, M.C. ‘Words, images, enemies: Securitization and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 2003, 47(4), 511–531.

Index

Abu Ghraïb 167 Adorno, T.W. 48n48, 187 Afghanistan 7, 29, 41n3, 54–5, 146, 150–61, 164, 168, 171–2, 174n34, 175n52, 176n86, 177n94, 184, 187 Agamben, G. 3, 32–3, 45n41, 45n43, 46n45, 91n2, 120n53, 178, 185 agency, agencies i, 5–8, 13, 15–16, 18, 20–1, 23–4, 26–30, 32, 35, 38, 41n3, 43n25, 43n28, 44n38, 46n47, 72, 100–5, 107–8, 112–13, 121, 127–8, 130, 138, 142n30, 152, 157, 159, 168–9, 180, 184 al-Qaeda 56, 59–61, 76, 80–1, 92n29, 93n75, 94n104, 102, 122, 178 Alliot-Marie, M. 143n43, 178 Allison, G. 43n25, 43n28, 118n3, 178 Anderson, M. 1, 8n1, 41n8, 42n9, 178, 193 Angola 166 anti-subversive mindsets 107, 115 anti-terrorist liberation groups (GAL) 106, 131, 143n53, 186 Arendt, H. 148, 163, 173n7, 173n8, 175n75, 179 Aristotle 148, 173n7, 179 armed forces 7, 17, 103, 121–4, 126, 129–32, 134–6, 139, 142n38, 189 ‘Army of Mehdi’ 167 Asia: Central 159; South-East 151 Austin 170 Aznar, J. 41n6 Baathist 155, 169 Baghdad 159, 168 Balibar, E. 44n34, 174n40, 179 ban 8, 10, 32, 35, 45n41, 125 ban-opticon 2, 8, 10–11, 31–2, 35, 37, 141n7, 180 Bauman, Z. 9n14, 36, 48n48, 95n150, 179

BCSF see Bureau de Conception des Systèmes Forces Bentham, J. 31, 37 Berlusconi, S. 41n6 Berthemont, S. 142n35, 179 Bertrand, Y. 107, 113, 115, 117, 119n25, 119n39, 119n48, 120n55, 186 Bigot, G. 142n35, 179 Blackwater 167 Blair, T. 41n6, 92n13, 92n14, 92n24, 92n25, 92n35, 92n36, 92n37, 93n40, 93n42, 93n44, 93n47, 93n49, 93n53, 93n73, 93n76, 94n80, 94n115, 94n117, 94n121, 94n125, 94n126, 94n128, 94n129, 94n133, 94n134, 94n135, 94n138, 94n139, 94n144, 94n145, 94n147, 96n151, 96n154, 96n158, 96n186, 97n202, 97n209, 97n215, 97n220, 97n221, 97n222, 97n225, 97n226, 98n229, 98n236, 98n240, 98n244, 98n246, 98n251, 98n258, 98n264, 98n269, 178, 181–2, 187, 191–2 ‘Bonn process’ 158 border: control 17, 20, 22, 28–9 Bourdieu, P. 17, 28, 43n24, 91n6, 119n33, 149, 171, 172n1, 115n76, 176n80, 117n101, 181 Bousquet de Florian, P. de 102, 114 Bremer, P. 159 Brennan, R.R. 183 Bureau de Conception des Systèmes Forces (BCSF) 141n5, 142n22, 142n30, 142n33, 142n56, 145n76, 145n78, 145n80–1, 179, 187 Burton, J. 158, 175n53, 182 Bush, G. 41n6, 152, 155, 173n29, 174n35, 174n37, 182 Buzan B. 4, 5, 44n38, 173n14, 177n95, 182 calm-restoring devices 103

Index 195 Cantegreil, J. 144n60, 182 Carabinieri 141n8 Carlos, J. 144n68, 188 CDEF see Centre for Force Employment Doctrine Centre for Force Employment Doctrine (CDEF) 141n4, 141n11, 142n23, 142n33, 143n44, 145n76, 145n80, 182, 187 China 24 Chirac, J. 144n42 Chocquet, C. 141n12, 182 Chomsky, N. 11 CIA 26, 41n3, 41n5, 152 CILAT see Inter-ministerial Committee for anti-terrorism civil–military cooperation 157, 164–5, 174n50 Clarke, C. 93n49, 93n50, 94n86, 97n207, 97n214, 98n260, 98n269, 98n271, 99n285, 116, 178–8, 182, 186, 190 Clausewitz, C. von 127, 142n37, 146, 172n3, 174n41, 182, 184; Clausewitzian 146–7, 152–5, 172, 173n5 Coalition Provisional Authority 159 converts 113–14, 116 COS see Special Operations Command counter-subversion 107, 114 counterterrorism, counter-terrorism i, 2–7, 43n28, 49–52, 54–5, 65, 69, 71–8, 80, 83, 89–91, 92n9, 94n79, 99n294, 121–4, 126, 128–9, 131–4, 136, 138–40, 141n15, 142n30, 192 crime 1, 8n1, 10–12, 16, 18–21, 26–7, 29–30, 32, 36–8, 40, 42n23, 44n37, 46n45, 46n47, 53, 65, 68–70, 73–5, 81, 84–9, 91, 109, 116, 122–3, 126–7, 138, 145n79, 160, 177n102, 179, 184, 192 Crowley, J. 45n39, 166, 176n84, 183 Dal Lago, A. 42n16, 43n23, 174n38, 183 Davis, L.E. 142n20, 143n49, 183 defence ix, 10, 16, 19, 26, 29–30, 87–8, 92n28, 93n39, 93n44, 93n58, 101, 116–17, 122–3, 125–6, 128, 130, 132, 134, 136–7, 140, 141n4, 141n8, 142n18, 142n28, 142n38, 143n43, 144n65, 152, 171, 173n23, 178, 180–2, 186–7 Deflem, M. 41n8, 183 Delpech, T. 141n9, 183 democracy 2–4, 8n6, 10, 44n37, 49, 53, 69, 73, 75–8, 84, 86, 88, 91n279, 91n292, 91n295, 91n296, 124,

132, 144n68, 153, 163, 174n35, 185–6, 192 Derrida, J. 170 Dezcallar de Mazarredo, J. 108, 110 DGSE see General directorate for external security Dillon, M. 147, 156, 173n4, 174n43, 182–3 Directorate for defence protection and security (DPSD) 101, 128, 142n38, 143n40 Directorate of military intelligence (DRM) 101, 128, 143n40 distance 5, 17–18, 21, 27, 32, 37, 42n19, 43n28, 46n47, 180, 186 Dobry, M. 44n29, 120n54, 184 DOT see Operational Defence of Territory DPSD see Directorate for defence protection and security DRM see Directorate of military intelligence Dufour, J.-L. 142n21, 184 Durieux, B. 142n37, 184 DynCorps 159, 171, 175n62, 175n63 Elias, N. 17, 188 emergency: measures 2, 41n2, 49, 55, 81, 117–18, 133, 150, 170; public 79–81, 84–5, 88–9; state of 33, 41n2, 81, 132–4, 136, 144n62 enemy 2–3, 23, 27, 29, 34, 52–3, 55–6, 62, 68, 72, 75, 93n41, 93n55, 94n84, 94n87, 94n89, 94n93, 94n98, 94n100, 95n115, 97n188, 108, 112–3, 122, 125, 127, 129, 130–1, 134–6, 151–6, 163–4, 172, 174n36, 192; social enemies 61; within 16, 32, 40, 60–1, 71, 94n105, 99n280, 114, 186 ETA see Euskadi Ta Askatasuna Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) 102–3, 123, 131, 136, 143 Executive Outcomes 166–7 exception, exceptionalism 2, 3, 4–5, 10–11, 32, 34–5, 37, 45n41, 46n45, 46n47, 91, 95n146, 100, 126, 131–2, 135–6, 141n9, 158, 164, 176, 185, 192 exclusion 2, 22, 32, 34–6, 45n41, 46n45, 48n48, 62–3, 86, 115, 187 failed states 29, 152, 173n24, 180 fear 1, 4, 7–8, 12, 25, 42n23, 59, 64, 75, 78–9, 83–7, 89–90, 93n61, 95n141, 127, 140, 142n35, 184–5, 187, 190; fear-fuelling strategies 84 Ferret 143n54, 184

196 Index field 2, 4–6, 8, 10–12, 14–17, 20, 22–31, 37, 41n6, 42n12, 43n28, 44n29, 44n35, 44n38, 45n39–40, 50, 89, 91n6, 99n294, 105, 107–9, 111, 141n7, 146, 153, 156–60, 163–4, 172, 176n77, 176n80, 180 Foucault, M. 23, 31–2, 38, 45n40, 46n45, 48n49, 94n108, 94n113, 115, 119n49, 147, 165, 172n3, 174n33, 176n83, 180, 185, 187 Foucher 44n33, 185 Francart 141n17, 185 freedom 2, 4–5, 8, 11, 18, 22, 33, 36, 47n48, 69, 73, 75–8, 86–88, 91n1, 94n81, 95n118, 96n168, 96n170, 96n172, 96n178, 97n192, 97n217, 97n219, 98n234, 102, 134, 143, 154, 159, 184–5, 187 French Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS) 124 FRS see French Foundation for Strategic Research future 2, 21, 32, 36–7, 42n23, 46n45, 47n47, 58, 75, 87, 90, 135, 137, 176n81, 179, 191 GAL see Anti-terrorist liberation groups Garzon, Baltazor 144n68 General directorate for external security (DGSE) 41n3, 128 General secretariat for national defence (SGDN) 136, 137, 144n65 Gonzalez, F. 131 governmentality 2, 6, 8, 10–11, 35, 38, 41n3, 43n23, 49, 180 GSPC see Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat Guantanamo Bay 147 Guardia Civil 101, 106, 123, 141n8 Guiraudon, V. 42n18, 42n19, 185 Habeas Corpus 140, 147 Hanon, J.-P. 41n1, 141n3, 143n52, 186 Hardt 31 Heisbourg 141n9, 186 Heisler, M.O. 43n23, 193 Hermant, D. 141n13, 180 Hobbes, T. 14–5, 23, 147 Homeland Operational Defence (DOT) 132–5, 142n28 House of Commons 50, 141n6, 186 information gathering 101, 105–6 Inter-ministerial Committee for antiterrorism (CILAT) 136

illiberal, illiberalism 3, 76, 117, 129; illiberal practices 2, 4, 11, 35 immigration ix, 8n8, 12, 16–19, 27, 29, 30, 32, 37, 42n19, 42n23, 43n23, 46n45, 47n47, 65–9, 84–7, 90, 96n159, 96n161, 96n165, 96n173, 111, 127, 180, 186–8 intelligence 4, 12–13, 20–1, 25, 41n3, 51, 53–4, 56–7, 60–1, 74n47, 78–83, 93n48, 93n56, 96n153, 100–1, 104, 106–10, 112, 118n2, 127–8, 141n15, 143n40, 160, 181, 185, 188, 193; agency, agencies 7, 13, 15, 18, 28–9, 35, 100–1, 103–5, 108, 112–13, 128; services 7, 11, 13, 16, 19, 29, 39, 41n3, 89, 99n294, 100–2, 104–8, 110–13, 115, 118n2, 118n14, 121–2, 128, 131, 140, 143n40, 160, 181 International Red Cross (IRC) 157, 168 IRA see Irish Republican Army Iraq 7, 41n5, 54, 89, 90, 92n31, 102, 146, 150–9, 161, 164, 167, 168–9, 171–2, 174n34, 174n35, 175n54, 175n64, 187, 190, 192 IRC see International Red Cross Irish Republican Army (IRA) 106, 131, 139, 140 Islam 55, 65, 70–2, 90, 97n195, 99n289, 100, 102, 108, 110–15, 142n35, 183; Islamist 53, 55, 58–9, 71, 109, 111, 155 Kabul 158 Kharzaï, H. 159 Koroma, J.P. 167 Lahave, G. 42n19, 188 Latin America 151 Leander, A. 170, 175n65, 177n99, 188 Legault, A. 141n10, 188 liberal i, 2, 3, 8, 11, 76, 92n26, 95n118, 96n170, 124, 136, 147, 152–3, 156, 173n4, 174n43, 183, 185; liberalism 33, 35, 38 LIC see low-intensity conflicts Lipschutz, R. 166, 189, 193 Low-Intensity Conflicts (LIC) 151–2, 166 Manningham-Buller, E. 93n51, 93n63, 93n67, 93n75, 94n102, 94n104, 98n265, 99n281, 111–12, 119n35, 119n37 Möbius 5, 34, 42n14, 44n34, 45n39, 180 Montjardet, M. 119n24, 189 Mosher, D.E. 183 Moqtada Sadr 167

Index 197 movement 19–22, 36–7, 59, 143n50, 176n80, 192 Myrdal, G. 171 Nadelmann 1, 8n1, 16, 42n13, 180, 189 Najaf 167 Nancy, J.-L. 32 national: security i, 8n2, 13, 16, 18, 59, 68, 73–4, 85–8, 152, 173n29, 182, 188; territory 7, 29, 121–3, 126, 130–2, 134–7, 139, 143n40 NATO 39, 43n27, 124 NBC see Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons ‘nation-building’ 154, 156, 174n35 Necchi, G. 143n54, 189 Negri, A. 31 Neocleous, M. 41n8, 189 network 3, 19, 32, 40, 41n3, 42n11, 44n38, 45n40, 58–9, 61, 66, 80, 85, 91n1, 111, 125, 156, 158–9, 172, 182, 184, 190 NGO see Non-Governmental Organization Nicaragua 152 Nogues, T. 182 Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) 7, 8, 11, 15, 32, 157,168–9 Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons (NBC) 123, 126–7, 131, 133, 136, 142n31

174n39, 174n40, 176n78, 178, 181, 183,185, 188–90 policing 7, 8n1, 8n5, 10–2, 17, 19–22, 25, 29, 32, 35, 38, 40, 41n8, 41n7, 42n9, 59, 91, 94n113, 118n15, 178, 180, 184, 186, 191, 193 politics of unease 4, 7 Powell, Colin 157 power 9n13, 13, 24–7, 30–4, 36, 39, 43n28, 46n45, 49, 67, 86–7, 97n225, 102, 107, 112, 114–15, 132, 136, 140, 152, 161–3, 165–6, 168–9, 171–2, 178, 182–3, 185, 189, 191 Private Military Company (PMC) 156, 158–62, 164–7, 169, 171–2, 175n64, 176n89, 179n104, 190 pro-active 21–2, 35, 47n47 profiles 2, 12, 23, 37, 47, 113 Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) 157–8, 175n51 PRT see Provincial Reconstruction Teams ‘psychosis’ of terrorism 103 PSYOPS 153–4

OEF see Operation Enduring Freedom Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) 154 Operational Defence of Territory (DOT) 132–5, 142n28 organizational autonomy 105

RAND Corporation 124, 130, 138 Raufer, X. 41n9 Reid, J. 147, 156, 173n4, 174n43, 183 resistance 14, 26, 31–3, 38, 46n45, 47n47, 101, 143n50, 153–4, 158, 161, 165, 172, 191 Richoufftz, E. de 143n44 Rosenau, J. 28 Roussel 184, 188, rules 14, 16, 24–5, 32, 34–5, 48n48, 52, 56, 65, 100, 118, 132–3 Russia 24, 102, 132, 143n55

Palidda, S. 43n23, 46n46, 118n21, 190, 192 peace-building 153 PMC see Private Military Company police 4, 7, 10–11, 13–25, 27–30, 34–7, 39, 41n7, 42n15, 42n20, 42n23, 43–4n28, 43–4n29, 46n45, 47n47, 54, 56–60, 68–71, 73, 78–82, 89, 91, 93n39, 93n40, 93n46, 93n50, 93n61–2, 96n152, 96n166–7, 97n191, 97n197, 97n199, 97n208, 97n215, 98n255, 98n261, 98n270, 99n282, 99n286, 99n300, 100, 102–7, 109, 112, 114, 116–7, 118n2, 118n14, 118n22, 119n24, 121–3, 126–9, 131–4, 136, 138–39, 140n1, 141n8, 141n15, 143n44, 143n55, 144n68, 155, 159–60, 164, 168, 171, 174n39,

Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) 102 Savimbi, J. 166 Sauvage, A. 182 Schengen 18, 20, 32, 36, 46–7n47; Shengen Information System (SIS) 21, 47n47 Schmitt, C. 33, 148–9, 173n9, 174n36, 174n42, 191 Scott, J. 46n45, 191 security: (in)securitization, (in)security 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 91n3, 141n7, 180; ‘experts’ 10; internal 10, 17–20, 22, 30, 123–4, 129, 134, 136, 138, 141n5; securitization 149, 169, 173n15, 177n97, 193

198 Index SGDN see General secretariat for national defence Shearer, D. 165–6, 176n81, 191 Sierra Leone 166–7 SIS see Shengen Information System Sommier, I. 141n14, 191 Special Operation Forces 152 Special Operations Command (COS) 126, 142n32 Strange, S. 41n7, 44n29, 148–9, 173n10, 191 struggle 2, 7, 16, 22, 26–7, 30, 43n25, 44n28, 58, 100–1, 104, 110, 112, 126, 129–30, 136 surveillance 2, 5–8, 8n1, 11–12, 14–15, 17–23, 25–7, 29–33, 35–8, 41n3, 44n37, 47n47, 91, 94n105, 99n280, 100, 102, 107, 110–11, 114–15, 121, 125, 128–9, 137, 142n38, 144n71, 156, 186, 189 Taliban 154–5, 169 Tebib, R.141, 191 Tenet, G. 41n5 terrorist: extraordinary 2, 51, 54–5, 84–5, 140; global 2–4, 7–8, 10–11, 22–5, 27–9, 32, 36, 38, 40, 42n23, 44n34, 48n48, 51, 55–60, 66, 69–71, 74, 80, 84–5, 90–1, 91n3, 107–8, 115, 119n35, 119n37, 121, 134–5, 141n7, 141n9, 146–7, 157, 159, 173n4, 173n43, 175n60, 180, 183, 185, 191; limitless 51, 55–7, 59–60, 85–6, 89, 91; local 3–4, 7, 20–1, 28–9, 35–6, 43n28, 44n29, 48n48, 51, 60, 84–5, 89, 104, 107, 110, 137, 144n74, 146, 150–1, 153–8, 161–2, 165–6, 168–9, 172, 175n72; long-lasting 2, 51, 57–8, 84–5, 87, 89; threat i, ix, 6–7, 37, 49–51, 53–4, 56–9, 65, 67, 72–3, 78–81, 83, 87, 89–91, 91n1, 93n51, 94n85, 94n96, 98n254, 98n265, 110, 115, 122, 137, 140, 179, 184, 186 Tilly, C. 17, 118n5, 171, 177n102, 192 Tournier, P. 42n16, 192 transversal 2, 4, 14, 22, 27–32, 44n34, 45n40, 130, 160–1

truth: regime of 12–13 UCLAT see Unit for the coordination of anti-terrorist action undercover working methods 112 Unit for the coordination of anti-terrorist action (UCLAT) 128, 142n36, 142n40, 140n40, 145n75, 193 UN see United Nations United Nations (UN) 29, 100, 142n24, 157–8, 168, 174n40, 175n66, 175n67, 175n72, 189 USA 41n3, 58, 80, 82, 151, 153, 174n35, USAID 157 Vinnel 159, 171, 175n61 violence: political violence 3, 11, 40, 101–3, 111, 127, 129, 135–6, 168, 172, 174n41, 184 Vigipirate Alert plan 125, 130, 132, 135 visa 18, 21–2, 46n47 Wacquant, L. 42n16, 43n23, 43n24, 181, 193 Wæver, O. 4, 5, 44n38, 149, 150, 170, 173n14, 173n15, 173n16, 177n97, 182, 193 Walker, R.B.J. 1, 8n3, 15, 42n9, 42n12, 178–9, 193 war viii, 1–3, 7, 10–12, 15, 21, 25, 29–30, 34, 40, 41n3, 43n28, 44n37, 49, 51–4, 58, 63–4, 71, 77, 84–6, 89–90, 91n4, 92n14, 92n16, 92n19, 92n25, 92n30, 93n71, 93n78, 95n115, 95n125, 95n147, 96n169, 97n195, 98n232, 98n244, 98n250, 98n271, 99n279, 102, 118, 121–2, 124, 126–7, 131–2, 136, 139–40, 146–7, 150–3, 155–9, 161–2, 172, 172n1, 173n5, 174n32, 174n44, 175n51, 175n54, 175n59, 175n65, 175n66, 179, 181, 182–92; comparison 51–3, 84–6, 89–90 Weber, M. 14, 23 worst case scenario 21, 124, 132 Wuilleumier 126n54, 184