Security sector fusions and the remaking of political life in the US and beyond

Abstract

This project centers the social and political impacts of changing security governance paradigms across local, national, and transnational contexts. I contend recent, globalized transitions toward the use by political states of non-state policing and military actors are centrally productive of nation-state entropy and entail the collapse of liberal legal and political norms. I begin with a reading of the political philosopher Wendy Brown's writings on the relationship between neoliberalism and declining nation-state sovereignty and, pace Brown, argue that we cannot understand neoliberalism without first understanding security-sector fusions. Next, I draw on the historical scholarship of Benjamin de Carvalho, Halvard Leira, Andrew Phillips, and others to address the deep history of force contracting models. This history suggests the methodological point that we cannot read the full scope and significance of contemporary security-sector fusions without first locating them on a much longer historical timeline than is sometimes activated within critical security studies. It also helps me to argue that modern legal and political logics took shape with respect to the evolution of coercive powers and authorities. From there, I draw on scholarly and journalistic sources to examine the confluence of liberal law and contemporary security-sector fusions. The causes and manifestations of re-invented security governance regimes, I show, render obsolete the public-private distinction in law and politics and betoken their diachronic eclipse. In my penultimate chapter, I draw on the writings of international relations scholars and political scientists Sean McFate, Michael C. Williams, and Rita Abrahamsen to discuss theoretical frameworks used to explain security-sector fusions in relation to the liberal imaginary. Via Eve Tuck's critique of assemblage theory, I argue that while these theorists accurately link security-sector fusions to the sublation of liberal law and the nation-state system, they struggle to accommodate political values and identities. In my conclusion, I pose a question about the future of emancipatory projects within the more politically heteronomous future this project discloses: what happens to emancipatory projects in American Studies after the liberal-democratic political and legal imaginaries become antiquated?