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XXX10.1177/0967010611418717Williams: Securitization and the liberalism of fearSecurity Dialogue
Special issue on The Politics of Securitization
Securitization and the liberalism of fear
Security Dialogue 42(4-5) 453–463 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0967010611418717 sdi.sagepub.com
Michael C. Williams
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, Canada
Abstract This article seeks to extend securitization theory conceptually and, to a lesser degree, empirically by further developing the relationship between securitization and the politics of fear. Drawing on Shklar’s notion of the liberalism of fear, it argues that instead of looking at the ways in which fear can facilitate processes of securitization and the extension of security logics throughout society, the liberalism of fear allows us to see how fear can operate in ways that can actually inhibit processes of securitization. This strategy might accurately be termed ‘the securitization of securitization’, and the liberalism of fear calls attention to how the fear of fear can in a specific sense be seen as a desecuritizing resource – a countervailing logic against processes of intensification within both ‘normal’ and ‘security’ politics.
Keywords Copenhagen School, critical theory, securitization, liberalism, fear
Introduction Fear is not a concept (or indeed a word) often found in securitization theory. Instead, the Copenhagen School speaks of security as an existential threat, as emergency measures or as a ‘breaking free of rules’. Security is not an objective condition, but emerges through particular social processes or ‘speech acts’ that elevate an issue above the normal political logic: ‘if we do not tackle this problem, everything else will be irrelevant because we will not be here or will not be free to handle it in our own way’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 24). Yet, even this formulation indicates an intimate relationship between existential threat and fear – the fear of annihilation, loss and alienation. Threats imply the loss of or damage to something (physical survival or well-being, an object, a social order, an identity) that is valued – that is, a fear for its continued possession or existence. People can fear other individuals, other groups, other states (or their own); they can fear economic calamity or environmental degradation. Even exceptional violence or fearless killing – an existential or heroic self-sacrifice, for instance – is tied in complex ways to fear: fear for someone or something else that is being defended, fear of failing to achieve glory or salvation. Fear’s negativity always has positive value. Corresponding author: Michael C. Williams Email:
[email protected]
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This article seeks to extend securitization theory conceptually and, to a lesser degree, empirically by further developing the relationship between securitization and the politics of fear. My suggestion is that by so doing it is possible to enlarge the theoretical framework of the Copenhagen School and to expand its application in understanding the politics of security in liberal societies. At first glance, fear might seem straightforwardly related to securitization: an increase in fear equals an increase in securitization, or at the very least facilitates successful securitization. However, rather than looking at the ways in which fear can facilitate securitization, or adding to the widespread claims about the connections between the politics of fear and the extension of security logics throughout society,1 I want to explore a rather different possibility: that focusing on fear also allows us to see how fear can operate in ways that can actually inhibit processes of securitization, constraining the logic of extremity, making actors reluctant to use securitizing moves and providing resources for opposing such moves. To make this argument, I turn to an examination of the relationship between liberalism and fear. As Jef Huysmans (1998) pointed out in one of the earliest and most perceptive appraisals of the Copenhagen School, liberalism provides an important backdrop to the theory, with a narrowly technocratic liberalism and superficial pluralism serving both as a foil for the idea of securitization as radically creative and socially constructed and as a link to theories of enmity, emergency, and the political identified with Carl Schmitt and with classical political realism more broadly. Fear within liberalism is thus often closely associated with a politics of extremity and enmity, and is seen as having close – and perhaps even constitutive – connections to securitization. Liberal societies, such positions often imply, either need a politics of security and fear in order to overcome the weaknesses of their pluralist foundations or, conversely, are congenitally ill-equipped to respond effectively to the challenges of a politics of extremity and securitization. This understanding of liberalism has in turn become a staple (sometimes an almost unquestioned assumption) for some of the most vibrant controversies over the theoretical and political entailments of securitization theory.2 There is little doubt that these analyses point to crucial issues in the relationship between liberalism and security, and in the politics of securitization in liberal states. Yet, this ‘Schmittian’ or classical ‘realist’ (or, for that matter, Straussian) representation and critique of liberalism is not the only version of liberalism available, and to take it as a given model for liberal thought or practice as a whole – and as an assumed foundation for analysing how ‘security’ operates in liberal societies – may in fact risk being seriously misleading. At least, this is the suspicion I want to explore here, and for help in doing so it is particularly revealing to turn one of the most nuanced and influential expressions of an alternative vision, a vision that Judith Shklar aptly christened the ‘liberalism of fear’.3 Shklar’s conception of liberal politics, I suggest, can help provide a more rounded appreciation of the politics of security in liberal polities, and of how a better understanding of the liberalism of fear can extend the reach of securitization theory both conceptually and empirically, and may – perhaps paradoxically – even provide support for the Copenhagen School’s political project of desecuritization.
I In contrast to the narrowly rationalistic liberalism that is the focus of the critiques alluded to above, the liberalism of fear has a number of affinities with securitization theory.4 It is resolutely antiutopian. It is, in a philosophical sense, non-foundationalist. It is sceptical, seeing a world where violence (actual or potential) is and will remain an ineradicable part of political life. It sides with what Emerson once called the ‘party of memory’ in contrast to the ‘party of hope’ (see Shklar, 1998: 8), insisting on facing up to the worst things that human beings have shown themselves capable of doing to one another, and trying to avoid them. It is suspicious of and generally eschews
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grand moral visions and philosophical or theo-political schemas, which it tends to see as sources of obscurantism and conflict rather than emancipation and progress. It has no ‘strong’ ontology, in either a rationalist or a social constructivist (self–other) sense.5 It rejects the identification of liberalism with an abstract rationalism, a narrow utilitarianism, Kantian formalism, a programme of indisputable natural rights or a flat proceduralism.6 In sum, it is a vision of liberalism that contrasts sharply with the thin version often put forth by both proponents and critics of liberalism in international relations7 – and in many debates over securitization theory. Yet, if the liberalism of fear is sceptical, it is not cynical. Nor is it without a place to stand. In place of essentialist visions of individuals or schemes of indisputable rights, it advocates a focus on cruelty and fear. It is, in Stanley Hoffmann’s (1998: xxii) nice phrase, a vision based on the ‘existential experience of fear and cruelty’, concentrating on humanity’s shared capacity to feel fear and to be victims of cruelty.8 Perhaps most importantly in this context, it turns this focus on fear into a positive principle of liberal politics. As Shklar (1998: 10–11) argues, the liberalism of fear does not, to be sure, offer a summum bonum toward which all political agents should strive, but it certainly does begin with a summum malum which all of us know and would avoid if only we could. That evil is cruelty and the fear that it inspires, and the very fear of fear itself. To that extent, the liberalism of fear makes a universal and especially a cosmopolitan claim, as it historically has always done.
In this vision, fear is central to liberal politics, but in a way very different from those visions that see fear, emergency and ‘security’ as the defining ‘outside’ of liberal societies, as the antithesis of normal politics, or, as suggested in other analyses, as the constitutive realm or radical otherness or enmity that stabilizes and/or energizes otherwise decadent or depoliticized liberal orders.9 For the liberalism of fear, fear cannot and should not be always and in every way avoided. For one thing, it is an inescapable part of life, something that often helps preserve us from danger. More complexly, fear can also be a crucial element in preserving as well as constructing a liberal order, for one of the major things to be feared in social life is the fear of fear itself. As Shklar (1998: 11) puts it in one of her most evocative phrasings: To be alive is to be afraid, and much to our advantage in many cases, since alarm often preserves us from danger. The fear we fear is of pain inflicted by others to kill and maim us, not the natural and healthy fear that merely warns us of avoidable pain. And, when we think politically, we are afraid not only for ourselves but for our fellow citizens as well. We fear a society of fearful people.
This vision of liberal politics fears the politics of fear. It fears above all collective concentrations of power that make possible ‘institutionalized cruelty’, particularly when they are abetted or accompanied by a politics of fear. Thus, while the liberalism of fear fears all concentrations of power, it fears most the concentration of power in that most fearsome of institutions in the modern world – the state; for while cruelty can reflect sadistic urges, ‘public cruelty is not an occasional personal inclination. It is made possible by differences in public power’ (Shklar, 1998: 11). A degree of fear and coercion is doubtless a condition of the operation of all social orders; but, as its first order of concern, the liberalism of fear focuses on restraining fear’s excesses. As Shklar (1998: 11) puts it: A minimal level of fear is implied in any system of law, and the liberalism of fear does not dream of an end to public, coercive government. The fear it does want to prevent is that which is created by arbitrary, unexpected, unnecessary, and unlicensed acts of force and by habitual and pervasive acts of cruelty and torture performed by military, paramilitary and police agents in any regime.
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The liberalism of fear is far from rejecting the state’s role in the provision of social goods, including security. Indeed, these may be essential in overcoming socially derived cruelties of many kinds.10 But, it is continually alert to the state’s potential to do the opposite.11 Here, then, is a vision of politics where fear is not confined to the realm of security; nor is fear wholly negative. Such a vision shares with the Copenhagen School the fear that fear in politics is dangerous. But, Shklar’s multidimensional analysis of fear allows us to see how fear can work as a counter-practice against processes of securitization. Fear operates in normal politics, and the fear of fear – that is, the fear of the power of the politics of security and its consequences – is a core part of liberal theory and practice. Fear is not a one-way street to extremity, nor does it operate only in emergency situations. Instead, the fear of fear can act as a bulwark against such processes. In other words, the fear of fear can within ‘normal’ or even ‘securitized’ politics act to prevent or oppose a movement toward a more intense politics of fear – countering a shift toward ‘security’ in its more extreme manifestations.12
II The liberalism of fear is not a comprehensive description of ‘actually existing’ liberal societies. It is at one and the same time an attempt to elucidate a liberal philosophy – a critical political philosophy with the practical intent of fostering and supporting an understanding of agency and judgement – and an exposition of social and political dynamics that can characterize liberal polities. It is part of a liberal tradition of thought that has had important impacts on the development of liberal political orders, and its effects can often be seen in the security politics of liberal societies. Accordingly, the liberalism of fear can help us discern some of the dynamics of security within those polities, while at the same time suggesting principles for a politics of security. In practice, as I have suggested above, the liberalism of fear links the domains of ‘normal’ and ‘security’ politics that the Copenhagen School tends to separate. Viewing the two as part of a continuum reveals how the fear of fear can counter or restrain securitizing moves in liberal societies. This practical continuity operates at the level of individual mores, social norms, and political and legal institutions. Indeed, it is the relationship between these three – and particularly the ways in which rules and norms operate at the individual and social levels (what the Copenhagen School would call ‘securitizing actors’ and the ‘audience’) as well as in formal institutions – that is crucial for analysing important dimensions of security politics in liberal societies. As Nomi Lazar (2009: 51, 114–33) has argued, if we restrict our understanding of rules – and the breaking free of them – solely to the legal domain, we risk missing the multiple social and institutional practices that may inhibit the politics of emergency. For instance, to the degree that individual and social groups recognize the fear of fear as a key part of their political visions and values, they will exercise a degree of suspicion toward securitizing acts, and can even act to restrain successful securitizations. Similarly, the structure of liberal societies and governments, with plural centres of political and social power, provides potential institutional and societal sites of resistance to securitization. Consider in this light Mark Salter’s recent and revealing analysis of ‘failed securitizations’ in US counter-terrorism policies. Examining the rejection of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) programme that ‘sought to data-mine library records to create profiles of potential terror suspects’, he notes that ‘this limitation on the freedom of speech and invasion of privacy was rejected by librarians, civil libertarians, and others outside the authority of the state. The existential threat of terrorism to the US was accepted by the protestors, but the colonization of this sector of private life was rejected as being outside of the security purview of the state’ (Salter, 2011: 125).13 In this case, the fear of terrorism, and its successful securitization within the technified language and logic of
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certain specialist institutions, was outweighed by the fear of the threat that policies like the TIA could pose to liberal-democratic politics. Fear is here a productive and countervailing power within normal politics, and a means of defending the latter against an intensifying and intrusive politics of fear and securitization. These dynamics can also function as important parts of what Lene Hansen (forthcoming: 16n10) has insightfully called the ‘strategic self-moderation’ of security actors, referring to cases where the language and logic of security is avoided rather than embraced. If we adopt the insights above, we might surmise that such restraint sometimes emerges from multiple sources related to the liberalism of fear, which can arise from the mores of individual actors or can be part of socially and institutionally embedded values and structures of appraisal that set the wider context influencing (and even constraining) their decisions. Consider in this light the Copenhagen School’s account of securitization. As Buzan et al. (1998: 24) put it: If one can argue that something overflows the normal political logic of weighing issues against each other, this must be because it can upset the entire process of weighing as such: ‘if we do not tackle this problem, everything else will be irrelevant because we will not be here or will not be free to handle it in our own way’. Thereby, the actor has claimed a right to handle the issue through extraordinary means, to break the political rules of the game.
This is more than simply the description of a process. Viewed politically, and especially within a context (and context is clearly vital here) influenced by the liberalism of fear, the recourse to securitizing speech acts is not straightforward, cost-free or beyond reflection. It is a political act, the potential consequences of which need to be weighed by any actor. Consequently, attempted securitizations can be constrained by an actor’s own reluctance to mobilize fear in light of the potential consequences for other values, such as those of a liberal political order. Potentially securitizing actors can also be constrained by their knowledge that a decision to attempt to securitize an issue will be judged (both at the time and, possibly, retrospectively). Declarations of the need for a politics of emergency are rarely taken lightly by other actors, and making them can come with significant risks to one’s political credibility and sense of judgement – something that is heightened when the political context is at least partly informed by the fear of fear. In both cases, the politics of fear and the fear of fear co-mingle, cross-cut and even compete with each other, with the result that the fear of fear as a political principle and a mode of judgment plays an important part in the security politics of liberal societies. These dynamics point to a second area where the liberalism of fear can play a restraining role in securitization. Since it sees the abuse of power as a continual possibility, the liberalism of fear seeks its controlled dispersal and stresses the importance of pluralism in combating its potential excesses. Socially, multiple centres of power provide sites from which securitizations can be contested and resisted. Importantly, however, this is a pluralism that is conscious of the limits of the facile political rationalism that so exercised critics of liberalism throughout the first half of the 20th century, and that has had such an important influence on the development of the discipline of international relations as a whole and parts of securitization theory in particular.14 Both in its philosophic foundations and in its historical awareness of past liberal failings, the pluralism of the liberalism of fear is markedly distant from that of its ‘depoliticized’ predecessors. This alternative vision of liberalism provides an intriguingly different connection between the Copenhagen School and classical realism, for while the lion’s share of attention in this area has been devoted to their shared concerns with the nature of ‘the political’ and the role of enmity in
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countering the potentially debilitating effects of liberal pluralism, this has tended to obscure the ways in which classical realists such as Morgenthau sought to counter and restrain the role of fear and enmity in political life rather than embracing it. And, intriguingly, one of the chief instruments that they advocated in this battle was pluralism. In contrast to the idea (all too automatically accepted in some discussions of securitization theory) that liberal pluralism was inescapably atomizing and socially debilitating, and that liberal societies were inevitably forced to call upon a politics of enmity in order to recover and secure their properly ‘political’ foundations, classical realists presented a much more subtle and sophisticated vision of the merits of pluralism and its role in supporting solidarity within a liberal society (Tjalve, 2007). As William Scheuerman has shown in his revealing recovery of this ‘progressive’ dimension of realism, pluralism could help offset the politics of fear and could be valued by citizens for precisely this reason. As he puts it: For Progressive Realists, as for some astute present-day analysts, social integration was at least as much a matter of ‘doing’ as ‘being’: concrete social practices which generated meaningful cooperation and relations of trust could prove even more vital than shared notions of collective destiny.... Progressive Realists underscored the pivotal role of a pluralistic social order in which one could identify a rich variety of cross-cutting social cleavages and loyalties, which they thought most likely to mitigate intense conflict. Under the proper conditions, social pluralism potentially civilized conflict: social actors could learn that a rival in one social arena might be an ally or even a friend in another (Scheuerman, 2011: 174–5).
This concern with the merits of pluralism as a mechanism for limiting fearful power, as well as for restraining the politics of fear, also finds clear expression in liberalism’s stress on institutional pluralism. Here, the rule of law, the division of power between different institutions of government, the desire that they check and balance each other, and the dispersal of power among a wide range of civil society actors also provide important bulwarks against securitization in a liberal society. Consider again in this context Salter’s (2011: 128) treatment of the fate of TIA when, despite the endeavours of George W. Bush’s administration, as a result of initiatives ‘spearheaded by library, privacy, and libertarian groups, funding for the TIA (whether terrorist or total) was halted by the US Senate in July 2003’. Here, social and institutional pluralism combine to render difficult, and potentially even to reverse, emergency decisions characteristic of securitization.15 As Jef Huysmans (2004) has articulately demonstrated, the admonition to ‘mind the gap’, to prevent any of the institutions of a liberal-democratic polity from usurping the roles of the others – something particularly worrisome when the politics of security is involved – is a vital component of a liberal-democratic polity. The importance of the fear that this might happen, the institutional positions, principled resources and public perceptions that actors may be able to draw on, or be constrained by, as a consequence of this fear, and the combined role of these elements in countering the logics of extremity and emergency in liberal societies should not be underestimated. The rule of law provides similar lessons. While the aftermath of 9/11 and the actions of George W. Bush’s administration have led many to see securitized liberal societies as embracing a ‘permanent emergency’ and adopting a generalized politics of exception, it is not at all clear that these appraisals do not reflect a series of a priori claims about the supposed (philosophic) necessity of enmity in (and for) liberal polities more than they do careful and concrete analysis of the actual practices in those polities.16 Despite the rhetoric and, in many ways, the efforts of the Bush administration to ‘break free from rules’, it is at best questionable that it was in fact able completely to do so – and the significant opposition to its policies from social actors as well as in challenges in a variety of legal forums demonstrate the limits of its securitizing acts as clearly as they do their pervasiveness. Securitization theory has shown relatively little interest in the legal dynamics and
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debates surrounding emergency powers, an engagement with them seemingly closed off either by an acceptance that issues like Guantanamo Bay already reside in the domain of ‘security’ or by a preference for claims about the decisionistic nature of law and the exceptionality of Schmittianinspired legal theory and visions of sovereignty.17 But, if we take fear seriously, law – and especially the ‘laws of fear’ (Sunstein, 2005; see also Ackerman, 2006) – becomes a crucial battleground in the politics of securitization. The actors involved in these struggles are not the security professionals of state security institutions and their associates analysed by Didier Bigo and others, but they are professionals of security in the wider sense of the politics of fear – and the fear of fear. Despite the seemingly general acceptance by the political institutions and much of the population of the USA that Al-Qaeda was indeed an existential threat, the use of all extraordinary means was not accepted, nor did the situation resemble a ‘generalized exception’ brought about through the claims of security. Take the use of torture as a policy, for instance. As Salter (2011: 126) points out, and numerous political and legal analyses have gone to great lengths to assess, in the USA ‘the courts and the populace rejected the use of torture for interrogation – even if it was accepted by some part of the military and bureaucratic establishment’. Salter sees this as calling for a new category in securitization theory: the acceptance of existential threat, but the failure to authorize extraordinary powers. I speculate that it might also be assessed in terms of a struggle within and over the politics of fear, and the existence and operation of countervailing practices and powers. The liberalism of fear may thus help explain how these practices function, with both the attitudes of individuals and the institutional pluralism with which they are entwined providing restraints upon the logic of security and significant points of resistance against the powerful (but not allpowerful) actors who attempted to mobilize it.
III Debates over securitization have often centred on the politics of security: on whether to securitize or desecuritize, and on analysis of the sociological, institutional or political conditions and contexts that facilitate or inhibit acts of securitization. For the Copenhagen School, ‘security’ is a highly political act. It is also a potentially dangerous one. As extremity, a breaking free from the rules of normal politics, security is something we are advised to be careful about. Security is not only about identifying threats or dangers, or articulating fears; it is also a political act that we need to approach with caution for fear of the possibility of a politics of extremity, with the unforeseeable and potentially dangerous consequences that it brings. I have tried to suggest here that in order to comprehend more fully the politics of security in liberal societies, securitization theory must come to terms with the role of fear in politics. Too sharp a distinction between the sphere of normal politics and the sphere of security not only risks limiting our understanding of how issues move along a continuum between the two: it may also blind us to how the fear of fear is a part of normal politics, and part of the resources and strategies of resistance against securitizing acts, even within seemingly securitized domains. The Copenhagen School generally reserves the concept of ‘desecuritization’ for practices that shift issues out of the logics of threat (and fear) that it identifies with security (Wæver, 1995). The innovative and often sound argument here is that it is difficult to shift a relationship defined by threats and dangers while staying within its logics: to argue that something is not a threat is still likely to be caught within representations defined by threats. However, the liberalism of fear calls attention to an important alternative dynamic: that the fear of fear can in a specific sense be seen as a desecuritizing move – a countervailing logic against processes of intensification within ‘normal’ politics as well as within ‘security’ politics. At the risk of becoming overly baroque, this strategy
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might accurately be termed ‘the securitization of securitization’, and its impact on desecuritization deserves greater exploration. In this regard, a focus on security as practice, and particularly on the relationship between securitizing acts and their reception, is crucial.18 Fear is not synonymous with security (or insecurity);19 nor is fear a quantitatively defined process of intensification operating within a single modality – it is more than just a temperature gauge of degrees of security logics in both normal and emergency politics. Fear is part of the practice of security, and it is thus susceptible to reversal within its own logics. Indeed, one of the most important consequences of viewing security as part of practices of fear concerns how, paradoxically, fear can itself be mobilized to counter processes of securitization without merely adding to the quantum of fear in a society, as though all of fear’s modalities and the strategies they enable could be reduced to a single logic. None of this is to deny the power of security, the permanent possibility of enmity in politics, its seductions and its dangers, and the worrying place and pervasiveness of security and attempted securitizations in liberal (and almost all other) societies around the globe (Abrahamsen, 2005). What the liberalism of fear does deny, however, is the necessity of such a situation. It is a deeply political endeavour, one that can enrich our understanding of securitization at the same time that securitization theory might provide analytic tools supporting its endeavours. This is not to say that the liberalism of fear does not itself pose challenges for the politics of security that require critical attention;20 however, putting the nature of liberalism into question within securitization theory, instead of allowing a particular vision of it to operate as a background assumption licensing a raft of further assertions about the supposedly necessary nature of the relationship between liberalism, security and ‘the political’, allows us to undertake a more subtle and hopefully revealing examination of the politics of securitization. In the name of not being naive about liberalism and its limits, debates over securitization may well have developed a paradoxical naivety about liberal politics. Too easily adopting Schmittian or other critiques as a basis risks reifying securitization theory’s insights into taken-for-granted assumptions about the necessary relationship between liberalism and security. As I have tried to suggest, the liberalism of fear provides a powerful and potentially fruitful counter to this tendency. The liberalism of fear does not advocate a wider politics of fear. A critically aware fear of fear and its possibility for strategic manipulation in either direction does not equal a further deepening of the politics of fear. It is instead a political stance that constantly questions the claims and decisions that are made in the name of countering fears, and that is constantly cautious about the possibilities created by the politics of fear. In both cases, it seeks to force discussion concerning whether and to what extent such policies or practices can be justified. It is pessimistic in the sense of a hyper-active concern with the potential for cruelty in all human affairs – including, and perhaps especially, in the domain of security. But, it is neither cynical nor despairing. Accordingly, it may also provide a set of previously untapped political and ethical resources that would further increase the salience of securitization theory. Notes 1. For a variety of perspectives, see Altheide (2002, 2006), Massumi (2005) and Robin (2004). It would be foolish to deny the significance of these connections, and that is not my intention here. It is my intention, however, to suggest that the seemingly commonsensical conclusion that fear in politics is necessarily equated with increased securitization may be quite substantially misleading. 2. For various formulations, see Williams (2003), Aradau (2004, 2006), Behnke (2006), Huysmans (2008), Neocleous (2006) and Taurek (2006). The key classical realist text is Morgenthau (1946).
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3. For wider explorations, see the essays in Yack (1996). For an appreciative appraisal of this form of liberalism from someone who certainly could not be accused of naiveté concerning the approach inspired by Schmitt, see Müller (2008). 4. I am thinking here particularly of Wæver’s (2000) characterization of himself as a ‘pessimistic constructivist’. 5. For a superb exploration of the different visions of subjectivity found in the history of liberal thought that contrasts revealingly with the thin version to which it is often reduced by both proponents and critics in International Relations, see Kalyvas and Katznelson (2008), in particular the chapters on Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith. 6. Like Rawls, but in a very different way, it sees liberalism as ‘political, not metaphysical’. 7. Attention to the liberalism of fear has been almost non-existent in these debates; a rare but notably superficial exception is Keohane (2002). An important attempt to recover a broader view of liberalism in international relations is Boucoyannis (2007). 8. Shklar’s thinking here also reflects her respect for Rousseau, taking his ideas in a direction that is very different from that of the Waltzian ‘stag hunt’ analogy so often adopted in International Relations; see also Shklar (1969). 9. The first option seems to characterize some formulations of securitization theory; the second is shared by some Schmittians and postmodernists. 10. See, for example, the analysis in Shklar (1984). Nor, as should be obvious, does its focus on cruelty by governments preclude its application to other agents or organizations. 11. Corey Robin (2004) has insightfully pointed to some of the limits in this vision of fear and politics, though in order to make this worthy point his reading of the liberalism of fear sometimes becomes quite strained. 12. Again, there are interesting possible intersections here with work of the Copenhagen School. Wæver (2000), for instance, has been at pains to stress that threats need not be material and present: they can reside in the memory of past events, as the fear of Europe’s own conflictual past worked in the immediate post-Cold War era. Although these themes have not been explored more fully, the Copenhagen School, too, shows signs of being part of the ‘party of memory’ that grasps the significance of the fear of fear. 13. It has been argued (e.g. in Doty, 2007) that we need to disaggregate securitization away from a ‘sovereign’ voice or position toward multiple institutional or even individual ‘decisions’ and securitizations. This is at one level a good point, but it remains locked within essentially Schmittian categories that severely limit its insights. If, however, we recast it within a liberalism of fear, its political and practical implications might be examined much more widely. Wider ‘sociological’ approaches are explored in Balzacq (2011). 14. On international relations, see particularly Guilhot (2011). 15. For an exploration of some of these issues, see Ferejohn and Pasquino (2004). 16. The extensive and complex legal debates surrounding these issues (see, for example, Ackerman, 2006 and the very useful review in Scheuerman, 2006) have, for instance, been notably absent from much analysis of the ‘permanent exception’, with philosophical debate certainly apparently precluding the need to engage with actual practices. The remarkably narrow vision of liberalism and fear underlying such views is no small part their facilitating condition. 17. For a critique of Schmitt’s understanding, see Lazar (2009); and, for a very different and wide-ranging appraisal, see Kalyvas (2008). 18. For important analyses of some of the themes this raises, see Abrahamsen (2005); Hansen (2006, 2011). 19. Nor, to be clear, is security only about fear. Security has many modalities, even in the Copenhagen School’s formulation, and even if fear is connected to many of them, the two concepts are not identical. This also points to the important, albeit slightly different, question of securitization at levels below those of extremity, where the operation and impact of the fear of fear may be diminished. For a different angle on some of these issues, see Williams (2011). 20. For one attempt, see Robin (2004), though to my eyes his critique of Shklar (Robin, 2004: 149–50) is one of the weakest points in his otherwise worthy analysis. An interesting contrast is provided by Müller (2008).
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