| Unit name | Liberalism, Terror and the Politics of Insecurity |
|---|---|
| Unit code | SPAIM0025 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Dr. Brad Evans |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies |
| Faculty | Faculty of Social Sciences and Law |
Security is meant to make the world safer. Yet despite living in the most secure of times, we see endangerment everywhere. Whether it is the threat of another devastating terrorist attack, a natural disaster or unexpected catastrophe, anxieties and fears define the global political age. While liberal governments and security agencies have responded by advocating a new catastrophic topography of interconnected planetary endangerment, our desire to securitize everything has rendered all things potentially terrifying. This is the fateful paradox of contemporary liberal rule which this course explores. The more we seek to secure, the more our imaginaries of threat proliferate. Nothing can therefore be left to chance. For everything has the potential to be truly catastrophic. Such is the emerging state of terror normality we find ourselves in today. This course provides a critical evaluation of the wide ranging terrors which are deemed threatening to advanced liberal societies. Moving beyond the assumption that liberalism is integral to the realisation of perpetual peace, human progress, and political emancipation on a planetary scale, it exposes how liberal security regimes are shaped by a complex life-centric rationality which directly undermines any claims to universal justice and co-habitation. Through an incisive and philosophically enriched critique of the contemporary liberal practices of making life more secure, the course forces us to confront the question of what it means to live politically as we navigate through the dangerous uncertainty of the 21st Century. Weekly structure to include:
1) Global Imaginaries of Threat 2) The Security Dispositif 3) Complex Emergencies to Emergency Governance 4) All Hazard Spectrum of Threat 5) The Problem of Life 6) Capitalisation of Peace 7) Nomos of the Earth 8) The Politics of Catastrophe 9) The Security of Events 10) Resilient Life & the Subject of Crises
Upon completing the unit, students will: 1) Understand the paradoxical nature of relations between liberalism, security and life 2) Problematize the catastrophic imaginary that characterizes contemporary society 3) Question liberalism’s self-image of peace, development and emancipation 4) Demonstrate the ability to theorize the failures of liberal modernity through the lens of the concept of biopolitics
10x 1 hour lecture + 10x 1 hour Seminar
Plan and draft a 3500-4000 word assessed essay (100% summative assessment) (outcomes learning 1, 2, 3 and 4).
Core readings are likely to include the following: Brad Evans, Liberal Terror (Cambridge, Polity Press: 2013) Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge, Polity Press: 2006) Mark Duffield, Development, Security & Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge, Polity Press: 2007) Michel Foucault, Security, Territory & Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978 (New York, Palgrave Macmillan: 2007)
