J. Peter Burgess: Few concepts have seized our political imagination in the last decade like security. Few concepts have mobilized us to engage so many extraordinary measures, to dedicate so much money, and to change the lives of so many people as security.
And the concept of security has not at all remained stable. It hasn’t remained at all aloof or untouched by this process. On the contrary it’s mutated, quite significantly. It’s evolved in nearly breathtaking and certainly unexpected ways, impacting our experience of the world, realigning our knowledge of the world, and recasting in many ways our value systems.
In this talk I’ll begin by clarifying some of the primary characteristics of what I would call the new security landscape. Then I’ll point to what I would describe as a transition in our understanding and experience of security since the end of the 20th century. And then finally, I’ll suggest that security as a consequence of these changes can and indeed should be understood as a kind of ethics.
Now, if we start looking at this new security landscape, what is it that characterizes it? Well, primarily and most significantly a certain kind of globalization of security. Globalization of security threats, and globalization of security measures against these threats. Unlike the age of the Cold War, when the threat landscape was relatively simple, the threats that we discuss today, that we’re experiencing today, and which dominate our political discourses are far different. They do not respect national borders, they’re international, intranational, transnational, they’re global. We’re far more in an era of global security today. So the primary threats we talk about in our political discourses are for example climate change, pollution, pandemic health issues, and of course terrorism.
As an illustration, perhaps the first, inaugural, most important experience of this new global insecurity was the Chernobyl disaster in April of 1986. Some will remember that at that time the nuclear reactor melted down, and there was an enormous explosion, sending a cloud of radioactive and poisonous gas up over Ukraine, northwards to Sweden, Norway, and then back down again to Germany and Central Europe. And on a humorous note, last year was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accident and there was a retrospective documentary on Deutsche Welle, the German public radio channel, playing back interviews with people from Europe about their experiences of it. And one was—a bit making fun of the French neighbors of the Germans—was saying well…it was a Frenchman describing his experience of the menace, and saying that he wasn’t entirely concerned because indeed the cloud would most certainly stop at the French border and not cross. This is of course the heritage of an old national understanding of security as a threat against state sovereignty.
Let’s add to this property of the new security landscape a second property, namely what we could call the commercialization of security; the industrialization or commodification of security. Security more than ever before has today become a commodity. A good. Something we can buy, and sell, exchange, and barter for. So the days when the state was the primary security provider are long gone, and the state is now being supplemented or in some places even replaced by a privatized network of security providers. We can look at on the one hand the security services that are a quite globalized, with security personnel manning the positions at the airports and in public places, and in private enterprises as well. And on the other hand we can talk about the industrialization of security technologies, where to a large degree security security challenges are understood as driven by a security technology industry, where the industries of surveillance cameras, of different technologies of protection and barriers characterize the very heart of our thinking about security.
Thirdly, given this perspective of commercialization of security, we can point to a certain differentiation of security. Whereas during the Cold War security was one single thing—it was a national security, East/West perspective—we can now talk about a myriad of forms of insecurities, from health security, climate security, food security, information security, human security. There’s been a complete inflation in our understanding of security and a multiplication of the number of concepts of security that we see.
This finally leads to what we might call the production of insecurity through this differentiation. Here we can remember the Marxist analysis of supply and demand relations in the consumer society. Whereas common sense would say that demand creates supply: it’s cold in the winter, I need a new coat. So that demand through the forces of the market would bring me together with someone who can supply the coat.
Well Marx as we know turned this logic on its head and pointed out the fact that to a large degree, supply creates demand. So the more that we offer goods on the market, the more demand and the need for these goods grows. And if you need any convincing of this we can just look in an American supermarket where should we say that we want to buy a bottle of shampoo to clean our dirty hair, a clear demand that we need to meet with a supply from the market, and we turn the corner and find that in the shampoo section of the supermarket we’ll find 250 different kinds of shampoo, with Vitamin D, Vitamin A, with balsam, with cream, with perfume, whatever we want. And we leave the supermarket knowing that we now know that we didn’t know before that we needed Vitamin D shampoo. A demand is created through the availability of the products.
By the same token, security needs are generated through the industrialized supply of security measures. So the security industry is generously present in our lives, reminding us of the differentiated and multiple ways in which we are insecure, and proposing to sell us services and products in order to help this insecurity, thereby pointing out our own insecurity to us. The logic is the following: tell me who you are, tell me what your identity is, and I’ll tell you just how you’re insecure and what product you need to buy from me to deal with your insecurity. There’s a production of insecurity, in short. That’s essentially the landscape that we’re dealing with when it comes to security and the provision of security.
Now back to the concept of security itself, the concept has a fascinating conceptual history. What’s most remarkable about this the conceptual history is how very short it is. The way we understand security today is very much the product of the post-Second World War period. It’s that young, this concept. We can trace the cousins of this concept way back in Western European intellectual history, but its newest form is really quite young.
If we go back to antiquity, for example, security has a very interesting negative connotation. Security is understood as absence of worry, absence of concern, and thus not presence of any threat but simple absence of any worry. The Middle Ages moralized this absence, this negative connotation, by attaching it to a Christian vision in which if we have no concern it’s because we are not adequately respecting and fearing the almighty God and therefore we’re not being good Christians. So security again is multiplied in a moralizing way to be a negative thing. It’s lack of respect, lack of concern for the almighty God.
In the feudal period, to move quickly forward through history, there was a proto-financialization of security, wherein the European city-states a financial arrangement linked the city state prince as a security provider for those who were willing to pay forth through various primeval taxing arrangements.
Then quickly forward to the post-war period, 1947, and the National Security Act presented to the United States Congress by Harry Truman, in which Truman configured the way that we understand security throughout the Cold War by saying one simple thing. He said that no longer were our interests other than national security. And by formulating security in this way, by marrying it to the concept of the national, Truman did two things in the national security strategy that year. He made it inseparable from the national. So security whenever we talked about it throughout the Cold War was immediately evocative of national security. There’s no other sense to the notion of security except the national throughout the Cold War.
And the second way that it was structured throughout that period was that it was linked to the bipolar geopolitical situation. So security could only be thought along the bipolar West/East axis, and security on other levels and other places was simply not part of the discourse.
All this changed, as we know, in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War bipolar tension was essentially broken. Suddenly the concept of security was exploded into a complex and multilayered, multileveled world of insecurities, and we were suddenly able to conceptualize security as something more and something different than just national and bipolar. For example on the vertical plane we could talk about individual security, group security, sub-state security, supra-state security. On a horizontal plane we could talk about different thematic varieties of security and insecurity such as identity security, religious security, sexual/gender security, and similar things. So all along these two axes there was an immense multiplication of awareness of security challenges, and on a global scale. This is the birth of global security understood in that very sense.
It’s also not by accident the birth of the concept of human security. In the 1994 Human Development Report, the concept was launched and became very powerful in policy circles throughout the 90s and even in the early 2000s before the situation was complicated by both policy and theoretical critiques of this concept. So we have a broadening and we have a widening of the concept of security immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This year, 1989, was far more important for the reconfiguration and the retooling of the security concept than was 11 September 2001.
Now, against that background, we can identify a very clear transition in a way of thinking about security, and certainly the way that we understand and experience security. It’s a transition away from what I would call the prophylactic model of security. Security understood as a barrier. Security understood as a wall, dividing the world into us and them; inside, outside; friend, foe; pure, impure; good, bad; etc. It’s the end of an era where we thought of threats as being out there, and has the aim of security to keep them out there. To put up a barrier between the secure and the insecure—and this barrier need not be a physical barrier, though it often is. It could also be an abstraction, a way of thinking, a way of conceiving of security policy. But nonetheless the idea remains clear that inside it’s somehow secure, and outside it’s insecure, and the task of security is to maintain that distinction. The function of security measures is to hold the bad, the insecurity, outside.
This era ends in 1989, and it’s gradually replaced—not immediately replaced but gradually replaced—by something we could reflexive security. Reflexive security is far more about us, far less about what is not us, what is the other, what is the threat outside our doors, and far more about us. Because if we start from the observation that I started this talk with about the globalization of threats and the new threats, the new globalized threats, these of course cannot be held out by any traditional security measures. Globalized threats like climate change, like pandemic, like terrorism, we’ve come to realize are among us. They’re here. Not only for the obvious reason that they do not respect national borders like the poisonous cloud of the Chernobyl accident but also, if we look at the most famous terrorist attacks taking place on European soil at least, these have been carried out by Europeans. So the threat is here, the threat is among us, the threat cannot be externalized. So security becomes far more a matter of dealing with it, of living with it, of managing our insecurities and not of reducing our insecurity to zero by externalizing the threats that may face us. Security becomes a reflexive matter. It becomes about our societies, about our groups, about our individuals, and how we design our activities and our institutions in order to live with the presence of threat, in order to live with insecurity.
So security becomes far more transformed from being a technological matter in the sort of simple sense of a physical barrier or of an imagined barrier, to far more a matter of humanness, of pathos, of resilience, of robustness (understood in the human sense), of trust and distrust, of community, of belonging, of not belonging. These more organic-type approaches to security have become more present in our lives, and more present in our confrontation of the threats that lie outside.
So this transition towards reflexive security is also accompanied by another concept which has become quite powerful in our time, the concept of risk. There’s been a certain rise in the notion of risk in the sense where risk is understood as a means for managing insecurity, based on the assumption that insecurity is here to stay, that 100% security is not an option. Risk is a kind of logic of management of undesirable things in our society. Management of the fact that something unforeseen may happen—may happen tomorrow, may happen today, may never happen. But how do we organize our lives and our resources so that we can live with that possibility. It’s living with a possibility, an uncertain potential.
Now, risk we know—the discourse of risk—interestingly enough arose in the early 20th century in its strongest forms in the financial management sector. So, those wanting to deal with risk associated with the stock market and other kinds of speculative markets needed to find mathematical solutions and human solutions in order to be able to continue when there was risk present of failing. And this financial and economic dimension of risk and risk management has then become more and more central to a certain liberal way of thinking. To liberalism in general but also the liberal ideology which says that risk itself is not an undesirable, but that risk is a precondition for living in our liberal societies. Not only in order to make money through investment and through different kinds of credit arrangements but also in terms of making advancements in technology and in other forms of development. So risk has become a core idea in our liberal societies and it’s linked closely to this idea that security is a reflexive matter.
Accompanying this we have the growth of what we can call the preemptive impulse, this idea that since we don’t know what is going to happen in the near future, since we don’t know when threats may become realities, it’s important to act beforehand. Before they become real, before they become reality. This is particularly used in the military settings, of course. It was famously used as the justification for the invasion into Iraq at the beginning of the Iraq War. It’s also linked to what’s called the precautionary principle, which is essentially a scientific policy principle which states that when we are unsure of what is going to happen, when we have inadequate knowledge about what might happen in the future, it’s better to avoid negative consequences by acting on the grounds of inadequate knowledge than not acting at all. So not only do we have action, political action, or social action based on inadequate knowledge of the future, it’s the inadequacy of knowledge itself which legitimates and motivates the action. So inadequacy is the rule and not the exception.
Now based on this configuration, first the background of the new security landscape, secondly the end of prophylactic security and the rise of reflexive security, we come to the following observation. Namely that security in the way it’s played out, the way it’s implemented in the kind of security measures we take in our societies, security is an epistemology. Security is a kind of knowledge, a kind of organization of knowledge. It’s a certain relationship to knowledge. And in particular that kind of knowledge which we call the unknown. Because security is about dealing with unknown futures. It’s if you like, and to talk a bit paradoxically, it’s knowledge of the unknown. A very strange kind of knowledge, we’d have to admit. It’s the status of the unknown, in our present where we have to deal with something that is known. It’s a kind of transfiguration of an unknown future into something that we know and can deal with today.
Security is management of the unknown. Unknown threats, unknown possibilities, unknown futures. It’s almost transformed into a science of the unknown. So it’s a counter-epistemology, if you like. And it admits that there’s a certain primacy today in our societies of the unknown over the known. We don’t have time to wait for the known. We don’t have time, and we can’t afford to wait to see what will happen in the future as founded epistemologically-sound knowledge. We have to act now, based on inadequate knowledge. And this is problematic for many reasons, but most prominently it’s problematic because science, as we know, is profoundly poorly equipped to deal with the unknown. It’s much better at dealing with the known.
This brings me then to the final point. That is that if security is a mode of articulating, of dealing with a future which is unknown, if inadequate knowledge is the basis for actions that we take, then we’re really dealing with what we could call a kind of ethics. Security is an ethics.
Well what do we mean by that? Certainly not ethics in the Aristotelian sense where we’re trying to find the rules and the road to the good life. Not at all. If we understand ethics—in a bit of an idiosyncratic way, I would admit—if we understand ethics as meaning of action taken in the absence of adequate knowledge, then security is most profoundly a kind of ethics. Because security is about a motivation, a mobilization, an engagement to action which we must take before we’re ready. Before we know what will happen, and before we even know a given likelihood about what would happen. Security is action based on something other than knowledge. And this space between action based on knowledge and action based on inadequate knowledge is the space of ethics. It’s a space of ethics because it mobilizes not our rationality, not our knowledge in the concrete sense, but other factors like our culture, our social traditions, our experiences, and other foundations which are non-empirically based.
So if we know what’s going to happen, if we know what to do about some event that’s coming along, if the threat is absolutely imminent, then it may be many things, but it’s not security. If we envisage ourselves face-to-face with a stranger in a dark alley and the stranger has a gun in his hand and raises the gun and we see the finger squeezing slowly the trigger as the gun is pointed at us, then it’s hardly an ethical problem we’re faced with. It’s almost a matter of automaticity. The ethical problem arises when we meet the stranger in a dark alley and we see no gun, and we see no ill intention. Where there’s a future of possibilities open before us facing our relationship to this stranger. Where we can imagine something terrible happening, but we have not adequate knowledge in order to know what will happen. So there’s no trigger being squeezed, and yet we can imagine a trigger being squeezed. This is the space of ethics. Ethics is what shapes actions when facts are not enough, and when rational evidence-based prediction is inadequate, and when we have to rely on other forms of experience in order to make our decisions.
As a consequence, and in conclusion, preparing for threats is about connecting the dots today in an entirely different way than we once did connect the dots, and we would be served by understanding the value-based operations, the ethical operations, at the basis of security governance in our time.