Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency

Alterrintives 25 (ZOOO), 117-143

Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency Michael Dillon and Julian Reid* If you want to help people in the disaster zone, you have to think

politically. -Johii

Ryle in Ihe Guardian, h~owciiiber23, 199s

Complex emergencies are intimately related LO the liberal peace of global governance.] They are said to occur at the boundaries of liberal peace, where that regime of power encounters institutions, norms, and practices that violently differ from its own. Global liberal governance does not, however, sitnply eiicounter othcr socalled rogue states-such as Iraq, Libya, Serbia, or Iran-at the frontiers of the peace that it celebrates. There has been a widely acknowledged weakening and dissolution of the state form in those regions of Africa and Eurasia where complex emergencies are said to arise. That is among the reasons why liberal peace encounters what it calls ‘‘complex emergencies” there. I-Iere, liberal peace finds itself deeply implicated in a terrain of disorder in which some states are powerful, some states are in radical dissolution, traditional societies are collapsing and civil conflict is endemic, where international corporations and criminal cartels are also deeply involved, and where international organizations and nongovernmental organizations are inextricably committed as well. The authors of this article prefer to call these circumstances “emerging political complexes,” because they are comprised of dynamic power relations that have long, often convoluted, and poorly understood histories that are social and cultural as well as political and economic and that are siniultaneously undergoing significant reformulation and change. The term complex eaergenc)~ tends to elide these dynamics, often simplifying the vexed political :$Department of Politics, University of Lancaster, Lancaster, U K m.dillonOlan-

caster.ac.uk,jreidOglobalnet.co.uk. Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

118

Globnl Goveninrrce, Libernl Pence, arid Corriplcs Errierpicy

character of them. It does SO typically by masking tlie complex implication of global liberal governance in them. The violent conflicts associated with such emerging political complexes are not simply the persistent recurrence, as so many contemporary analysts are inclined to argue, of fixed ancl irresolvable historical hatreds. They are very much a function of the ways in which societies in dissolution, since they are at the turbulent confluence of local and global dynamics excited by the diverse military, political, and economic practices of global liberal gouernance itselJ are in consequence thereby subject to violent disorder and change. It is that change that engenders emerging political complexes. While radically reformulating old identity myths and inventing new ones is a typical feature of such complexes, so giving the appearance of unchanging historical form, these are devices by which political and economic forces are mobilized everywhere in tlie face of change. That is why they are also an active part of tlie political processes by which emerging political complexes coalesce. It is however quite simplistic to think of them as peculiar to those regions where complex emergencies are said to occur or tlie mere recurrence of unchanging historical truths there. These practices are part of tlie common currency of political mobilization in the domain of liberal peace as well. It therefore seems obvious that tlie radical and coil tinuous transformation of societies that global liberal governance so assiduously seeks must constitute a significant contribution to the very violence that it equally also deplores. The disorder of emerging political complexes is of course fueled by local factors. In a world that has always been more or less interdependent, howevei-, it would be grossly naive to think that local factors were ever permanently or totally isolated historically from global developments,* MLICIIless so now, then, in an age of virulent globalization. Global liberal governance is not, of course, a neutral phenomenon, indiferent to local cultures, traditions, and practices. Neither is it benignly disposed toward them. Rather, it has always been virulently disruptive of them and aggressively related to them as much in moral as in economic and military terms. Much of tlie disorder that borders tlie domain of liberal peace is clearly also a hnction, therefore-albeit a fiercely contested function-of its very own normative, political, economic, and military agendas, dynamics, ancl practices, and of tlie reverberations these excite throughout the world. It seems increasingly to be a function, specifically, of the way in which development is now ideologically embraced by all of the diverse institutions of liberal peace as an unrelenting project of modernization.3 The chief Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

Miclznel Dillon b Jtilinrz Reid

119

economist of the World Bank (Joseph Stiglitz) attacks the Washington Consensus on liberalization, stabilization, and privatization in the world economy, for example, as too technical and too narrowly framed a development strategy. Me espouses instead a new intensive as well as extensive policy committed to the unqualified and comprehensive modernization and “transformation o f wadir tional societies.”4 “Honesty, however requires me to add one more word. In calling for a transformation of societies, I have elided a central issue,;” Stiglitz had the candor to conclude, “transformation to what kind of society and for what.ends?”The impact of modernization on modern as well as traditional societies is, of course, as violent as’ the impact on global resources and global ecology. The values, practices, and investments that propel such development nonetheless, however, are precisely what protect it from pursuing the key question, locally as well as globally, that Stiglitz posed in terms other than those that underwrite his very problematization of it. Pursued as a deliberate policy of comprehensive social transformation, and of power projection, development becomes allied in novel ways via global liberal governance with geopolitical military and economic institutions and interests. The transformation is therefore to be effected according to the current efficiency and performance criteria of good governance-economically and politically-set by the varied institutions of global liberal peace. In the process, sovereignty, as the traditional principle of political formation whose science is law, is being supplemented by a network-based account of social organization whose principle of formation is “emergence” and whose science increasingly is that of complex adaptive system^.^ These ensure that the political issue posed by Stiglitz rarely progresses beyond an afterthought. This incendiary brew is currently also fueled by a resurgent liberal moralism. That moralism generates its own peculiar forms of liberal hypocrisy. These include: the calling for intervention by the international community against Indonesian actions in East Timor while liberal states furnished Indonesian armed forces with the very means of carrying out those actions; and seeking to proscribe child soldiers while failing to address the global arms economy that furnishes the children with their weapons. The vexed relation between liberalism and capitalism is also at issue once more since clearly, too, the globalization of markets and of capitalism is intimately involved in the “complex emergencies” that global liberal governance seeks to police, While the formula comn@?x emergency arose in the general context o f the dissolution of the politics of bipolarity and the advent Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

120

Globnl Govenmrice, Libevnl Pence, nlld Co~~zplcx Eliiergericy

of liberal peace, it did so in tlie specific context of the dramatic weakening of state structures and the exaggerated ideals of sovereign statehood, together with the advent of intractable development problems and civil conflicts as well as adaptation to the structural-adjustment programs of the 1980s and 199Os, which impacted on the fringes of liberal internationalism. The conflation of established distinctions between civil and military as well as between tlie humanitarian and the geopolitical that lias taken place as a result lias proved confusing and disturbing to all participants in global governance and liberal peace.6 Liberal humanitarians have, for example, become politicized, geopolitically ambitious, and sometimes warlike in pursuit of liberal peace. They have also found themselves in alliance with the institutions of international political economy and governance as well as with branches of the military. Increasingly, the policies and practices of “political conditionality” are also suborning them. Deals and contracts have inevitably to be struck with local political groupings in order that aid might be delivered to the needful in areas of political turbulence. Political conditionality is, however, more than this local pragmatism. At a policy level, it refers to the ways in which government and international-aid agencies are increasingly making the delivery of aid conditional on tlie recipients meeting the good governance criteria that global liberal politics specifies for them, At a local level, it means calibrating the delivery of aid to effect the internal politics and maneuvering of warring groups so that political settlements sought by internatioiial coalitions-such as the one, for example, that currently manages Bosnia-might be secured. In order both for policy-level practices and local political arm twisting to work, governments and international organizations must secure tlie compliance of tlie large number of nongovernmental organizations that populate tlie zones of “complex emergency.” These of course provide many significant conduits for aid. The vast majority of them are, however, effectively the subcontractors of governmental organizations and of international agencies. Their prized independence is problematic, and their classification as nongovernmental is sometimes equally so. Effecting political conditionality requires their participation. To the extent, however, that they comply-and their very capacity to resource themselves and operate may be intimately dependent upon their good standing with these governmental and international agencies-their “impartiality” and humanitarian ideals are compromised. In such circumstances, they run’ the deadly ,risk of becoming identified as active participants in conflicts rather than impartial ministers to tlie needy and afflicted that are created by them. Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

Michael Dillon b fulian Reid

121

But many NGOs are not mere passive victims of this development, as it were, squeezed by .the demands of political conditionality. They themselves also actively promote political conditionality inasmuch as they, too, pursue a liberal agenda of promoting human rights, accountability, and the formations and practices of civil society. In this, then, they are willing allies of political conditionality rather than suborned humanitarians. The distinction between the political and the humanitarian that has created the space for humanitarian action is often thus conflated by the actions and ambitions of NGOs as much as it is by the good-governance policies and political conditionality pursued by governments. Needless to add, the distinction between civil and military that helps underwrite the category hzimanitarian is one that has also been conflated by the theory and practice of modern war. Much is made of the ways in which the insurgency and counterinsurgency conflicts ,and ethnic violence of the developing world do this. But the process began in the developed world-with the introduction, for example, of total war, strategic bombing, the deployment of weapons of mass destruction, and the adoption of (nuclear) deterrent strategies. Some of these continue to determine the formulation of official defense and strategic policies there. :r , In sum, bipolarity once allowed subscription to the liberal distinc tions of civil/military, humanitarian/political, and governmental/nongovernmental to effect a “humanitarian” position that eschewed the political realism of the ideological conflict of the Cold War. Humanitarianism claimed then to be a space that was itself a kind of zone,of indistinction. That is to say, here relief was on offer irrespective of religious, political, or other distinctions. The advent of global liberal, governance now represents the official propagation, however, of such distinctions, together with their allied governmental practices and institutions. These have become one of the principle means by which global power currently circulates and operates. In doing so, global liberal governance quite literally threatens nongovernmental and humanitarian agencies with recruitment into the very structures and practices of power against which they previously defined themselves. Where once they practiced and enjoyed the space afforded by the claim that they were without power-specifically, .power politics-it is evident now that they are not. Major nongovernmental humanitarian.relief and development agencies are often also structured more like and operate more like multinational corporations than voluntary workers. Their spokesmen and women act and sound like the senior international diplomats and policymakers that they are:As humanitarian NGOs increasingly devote themselves to the promotion ’

Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

122

Globnl Govertinrice, Libernl Pence, ntid Cottipkx Eiiiergeticy

of liberal governmental policies-for example those of transparency and accountability-they, too, have to meet penetrating questions about the legitimacy, accountability, and transparency of their own practices. Doing good, especially by insisting on folloiving the Hippocratic injunction to do no harm-the classic governmental maneuver of effecting power by denying one’s own politicality-is a fiction now increasingly difficult to sustain in the context of global liberal governance. Meanwhile, branches of the military became mediators and pacifiers in attempted resolution of conflicts that continue to defy clear military purpose, the geostrategic character of which also remains equally confused and obscure.’ What are increasingly known as Peace Support Operations (PSOs), or Operations Other Than War (OOTWs), increasingly dominate military agendas and concerns. In the United Kingdom, for example, this form of global liberal policing has taxed the armed forces to the limits of their operational strength. As much attention is paid to civil-military communication and coordination and practices of political negotiation in the development of the novel operational concepts and doctrines that such complex interventions require-quite literally, their very discursive formation at an operational level-as it is to traditional military requirements., Moreover, liberalization has applied to military security in some areas and in some respects as much as it has applied to economics and social welfare. The complexification of conflict has also opened new commercial possibilities for the provision of “security,” and new security discourses, practices, and agencies have flourished as a consequence. Private armies have emerged and transnational security corporations now offer their services. States have contracted alliances with commercial security organizations that offer assistance where formal state intervention, for whatever reason, is eschewed. Even international organizations avail themselves of the security advice and services that commercial security companies offer, for example with respect to protecting food warehouses so that “spontaneous distribution” of food supplies does not occur.* Emerging political complexes in Africa and Eurasia have therefore become the “strange attractors” around which novel security-development alliances of states, international organizations, international nongovernmental organizations, and local nongovernmental organizations have i‘ormed within the domain of liberal peace and at the interface of its turbulent border terrain.9 Global liberal governance thus responds to the turbulence of emerging political complexes by forming its own emerging strategic complexes as a means of dealing with the instances of Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

violence that the densely mediated polities of the West periodically find unacceptable there, or in response to the security threats that they are generally said to pose. The resultant assemblages are often coalitions of the willing, the accidental, and the ready to hand. Their formation and intervention are selective, influenced by media attention, and by economic and geostrategic interests at least as much as by the calculation or anticipation of need. Such diverse multiple intern’ational/interagency networks p’ose novel strategic and political questions not only for their own contingent formations but also to the order of liberal peace as such. Their accounts of the sources of disorder are varied and conflict-, ing, yet they also offer new rationales for ,Western armed forces and their allied arms economies. The outcome can be quite contradictory: military ‘attach& can be committed both to selling arms and to selling “security reform” measures designed to introduce Western-style policing, the rule of law, and demilitarization. Through the advent of such emerging strategic complexes, development analysts have become as interested in conflict, war, and security as,security specialists have become interested in development economics, civil society, and conflict resolution.10 In the process, the liberal peace of global governance exposes its allied face of humanitarian war. An additional feature of these strategic complexes is, however, also a deep and profound confusion about military purpose and military strategy. That in turn promotes a new liberal bull market for strategic ideas in the aftermath of the dissolution of Cold War discourse.1’ Already, then, discourses concerned to elucidate the practices and dynamics of interagency cooperation have emerged, operational concepts and doctrines are formulated and disseminated, and manuals of good practice are officially adopted. Accounts of the bureaucratic politics that characterize the intense interagency competition and rivalry that accompany the formation and operation of such strategic complexes are also emerging. These relish the failure and confusion that abounds in such circumstances, but simultaneously also appeal to it in order to fuel demands for yet better governance, early warning of incipient conflicts, and more adaptive military might to deal with them. No political formulation is therefore innocent, None refers to a truth about the world that preexists that truth’s entry into the world through discourse. Every formula is instead a clue to a truth. Each is crafted in the context of a wider discursive economy of meaning. Tug at the formula, the pull in the fabric begins to disclose the wa!y in which it has been woven. The arte€actual Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

124

Global Goveriiaiice, Liberal Pence, arid Cornplex Eniergericy

design of the truth it proclaims then emerges. We are therefore dealing with something much more than a mere matter of geopolitical fact when encountering the vocabulary of complex emergency in the discourse of global governance and liberal peace. We are not talking about a discrete class. of unproblematic actions. Neither are we discussing certain forms of intractable conflicts. The formula comniblex emergency does of course address certain kinds of violent disorder. That disorder is not our direct concern. Recall with Foucault and many other thinkers that an economy of meaning is no mere idealist speculation. It is a material political production integral to a specific political economy of power. We do not therefore subscribe to the view championed, for example, by Adam Roberts that the formula complex enzergency is merely a way of giving a new name to an old problem.'* We are talking instead about a particular understanding of (inter)national politics that leads to such disorder being bracketed and addressed in terms of complex emergency. For it is only in the context of a certain political rationality, in this instance the global governance of liberal peace, that the formula occurs at all.13 It is in relation to that political rationality and its hybrid practices of power that the formula not only makes sense but also does certain kinds of work. So-called humanitarian emergencies are always therefore profoundly political events concerned above all with the responses to the advent of violent change induced by the constant interplay between the local and the global.

The Political Rationality of Global Governance It is our contention, then, that the liberal peace of global governance has to be distinguished as a certain form of liberal peace comprised in turn of a complex hybrid form of power. The varied use of the term gouernance signals this. In its Kantian variants, it means the rule of law and endorses the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations, associations, and groups at a global level with the ambition of establishing a global civil society, In its technocratic-capitalist variants, it means deregulated processes and practices of enterprise management and accountability. The liberal peace of global governance is therefore one in which the pacifying effects of Kantian cosmopolitan law obeyed by sovereign states, combined with an extension of civil society, are heavily re.liant also on the dissemination globally of practices that are premised upon a conception of order and management that Foucault called governmental. Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

Michael Dillon 8 Jiilinii Reid

125

As Foucault's early accounts of governmentality indicate, and as the extension and application of it subsequently have also shown, the genealogy of global liberal governance is thus much more varied and diverse than:its public claims to a Kantian heritage especially would imply.14 To say that it is capitalist economically as much as it is liberal politically ,and corporately technocratic scientifically, and that this presents a power€ul brew of social, political, economic, and military forces that radically exceed the liberal account of both power and of politics, is to pose more questions than' these phrases answer. Neither capitalism, liberalism, nor science are simply what they proclaim themselves to be, or what they were once said to be. Each has mutated locally and globally in dramatic fashion as studies in, the history oFscience, the history of economics, and the genealogy of governance indicate. Neither are such dynamic enterprises effectively held to account through the application and operation of the classic liberal distinctions between public-private, civil-military, national-international, scientific-industrial, and knowledge-power. Rather, they are obscurely combined in the globally dynamic military-industrial-scientific complexes of the so-called network societies and knowledge-based economies of contemporary liberal societies that problematize the democratizing claims of global civil society as much as they do the pacifying effects of cosmopolitan law.15 . Together, these liberal complexes now comprise an extraordinary regime of powei-Anowledge that has been disseminated a's much globally as it has been intensified locally. It constitutes a regime of global power that significantly exceeds the Kantian heritage ontologically as much as it does epistemologically. To the extent that it does so,.that'tradition is an increasingly unreliable guide to global liberal governance's operation politically and economically. No longer exclusively or even primarily legislative in their form, the politics of the elite, the media, and money also dominate civil institutions in ways that systematically undermine liberalism's standards of disinterestedness: epistemologically, as much as they do its claim to effect representative arid accountable government politically. . ' Just as governari'ce is a specific feature of liberalism, so also liberal peace is therefore 'a specific form of liberal 'governmental power. Hence the peace of global liberal,governance differs from other forms of liberal peace inasmuch as its liberalism differs from earlier and other 'forms of liberalism 'in respect, .specifically, of tlie increasing emphasis placed on-:itsnetworks.of global 'governance. It does not; for example, aspire to the ideal of,%orldgovernment. It does not rely exclusively upon the juridical ,power of international > '

Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

126

Global Governance, Liberal Pence, arid Corriplex Errrergericy

law. Neither does it problematize the foundational question of order by premising it exclusively on the sovereign power of states alone. It is also a combative and heavily armed peace deeply reluctant to forgo its own military advantages in the cause of restraining the dissemination of weapons of mass destruction or the effective control of the conventional-arms economy globally. What is of primary interest here, however, is not the historically well-documented propensity of liberal peace to make war against authoritarian regimes. Nor are its extremely powerful military-industrial-scientific dynamics immediately at issue. We are concerned, for the moment, with exploring theoretically tlie ways in which it problematizes the question of order itself, and with the correlate strategizing of power relations, locally and globally derived from the ways in which it does so. We argue that these depend upon notions of immanent emergency. Specifically, they depend upon its twin cognates, excefition and emergence, to which the phenomenon of complex emergency draws our attention. We argue in addition that each such “emergency” reduces human life to a zone of indistinction in which it becomes mere stuff for the ordering strategies of the hybrid €orm of sovereign and governmental power that distinguishes tlie liberal peace of global governance. Interpreted this way, complex emergencies not only draw attention to the operation of a specific international political rationality-that of global liberal governance-but also to certain key distinguishing features of it as a hybrid order of power, The global governance of liberal peace is a composite order of power that “lies between traditional images of domestic and international politics.”lb Combining the strategic operations of both sovereign and governmental power, this composite order produces manifold differentiations between inside and outside .that are fluid and contingent rather than fixed and permanent. It simultaneously both territorializes and deterritorializes, producing dynamic and adaptive contingent assemblages as much as it does fixed systems and regimes. It thus requires theorizations of power not exclusively bound by the now widely discredited juridical international categories of inside/outside.l7 These theorizations of power have therefore to be ones sensitive to all the different practices by which power assemblages of many distinctive forms are continuously generated and regenerated through various strategic operations of power. Initially, we find a critical approach to the operation of power as a strategic phenomenon in tlie work of Michel Foucault. Where Foucault’s sensibility to the manifold strategic ordering of power nonetheless requires supplementing, specifically in respect of sovereignty, we draw on Giorgio Agamben’s Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

postmetaphysical analytic of sovereignty as itself another strategic ordering of po.cuer.18 By strategy of power we mean with Foucault that power is an active ordering of relations in certain specific ways according to different operational principles of organization. It is a modus operandi. It works its effects by establishing relationalities between units whose very constitution as the units that they are is a function of the principles that govern the strategic dissemination and organization that constitutes the operation of power itself. Moreover, all power as strategy presupposes a certain account of life, one that will in fact bear the ordering work of power itself. It is only inasmuch as it does in fact presuppose such a life that power as strategy institutes itself as a specific and manifest productive ordering of life. The operation of power as strategy is therefore one that reproduces a life that is amenable to its sway. It must do so in order continuously to be instituted as. the strategic ordering of life that it is. Power as a strategi‘c ordering of life therefore always effects its own distinctive kind of biopower. Although we owe this insight to Foucault, we intend to show how its range of reference extends also to the operation of sovereign power as well. However, in order to do that we have to theorize sovereign power in a way that Agamben does, and Foucault never quite did, as a strategic mode of power as well. While drawing attention to the relevance that this Foucauldianinspired account of power has for an analysis OF the global governance of liberal peace, we do not, therefore, intend to add to the chorus of those who insist that we are witnessing the simple demise of sovereignty. Sovereignty remains an important aspect of the organization and operation OF international power, including that of contemporary liberal peace, because liberal states especially, but others to the extent also that they effect structural adjustments economically and sign-up to good governance criteria politically, are deeply implicated as key nodes in the networks of global governance. Hence the state f o r m w h o s e strategic principle of formation is sovereignty-becomes just one form of subjectification upon which global liberal governance relies. It may not enjoy the exclusivity that traditional accounts of international relations once said that it enjoyed, but it nonetheless remains a key mode of subjectification. However, it is now supplemented ‘by many others. “Thus even as the state remains the primary actor in global politics, .the results of interdependence are to create new networks and associations, many of which are attempting to guide the state’s activities in the domestic and international spliere.”*g, Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

128

Globnl Governance, Libernl Pence, nrid Coitiplex Emergency

Our interest here, however, lies in examining how the principle of formation that governs the state form-namely, sovereignty-functions precisely as a principle of formation and to compare that with another principle of formation that we see at work throughout the domain of global liberal governance. For global liberal governance is a hybrid political order in which sovereignty and governmentality are combined. Foucault himself in fact noted that there is a complex relation between different orders of power, including those of sovereignty and governmentality. But he did not explore that relationship in any detail.20 Neither did he engage in retheorizing sovereignty in ways that would allow him to do this. It served him, to accept the traditional account of sovereignty, as power over death, that relied on different metaphysical fictions to underwrite the paternity of the law after the death of God.21 He did so in order to articulate an alternative account of the biopower of governmentality as power over life that reproduces certain life forms: forms of subjectivity that he advised we refuse. Contra Foucault, one might however say with Agamben that sovereignty, too-as a strategy of power with its own peculiar modus operandi-is also a form of power over life. The point will be elaborated below.

The Bare Life of Sovereign Power: Emergency as Exception It is well known, since at least the work of Carl Schmitt, that sovereignty was not the metaphysical origin of state power in the way that its early theorists considered it to be. It is instead a strategic principle of formation peculiar and necessary to the continuous instantiation of a particular sort of power-so-called sovereign state power. Sovereignty’s principle of strategic formation derives from insisting on the persistence of an immanent state of emergency. Specifically, according to Schmitt, this,state,of emergency is the state of the exception. Analyzing the classic accounts of sovereign power, including that offered by Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben shows that sovereign power, in ways similar to but also different from Foucault’s account of the biopower of disciplinary power;/ knowledge and governmentality, is also a principle of formation that institutionalizes itself by summoning a life. amenable to its sway. Here, in Agamben’s account, the metaphysical fiction .that emanates from an intentional consciousness, the location of which always regresses to infinity, is replaced by a material analytics of its formal structure that discloses how it, too, operates as a strategy of Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

. , Miclinel Dillon b Julinn Reid

129

power. Neithel: the epicenter of ‘power nor‘the,terminus of its otherwise infinite regress, it is therefore misleading to ask, What is sovereign power? Rather we should ask, How does sovereign power work? In doing so, we discover that sovereign power institutes emergency in the form of the’exception as a principle of formation that presupposes and works to produce a certain form of life, one capable of bearing the ordering and thereby reproducing the power of sovereignty itself. Classically, in Hobbes for example, as well as in Schmitt, the formal structure of sovereign power comprises an exclusion that is included as excluded. The exclusion is the exception, tliat,wliicl1 is said to be outside the law. In the process, the very’differentiation of inside/outside is instituted. In being excluded, that which is cast out is not, however, severed of all relation with the power that in instituting this reduction thereby institutes itself. On the contrary, that which is excluded enters into a singular relation with the instituting power. Hence, “the state is founded not as the expression of a social contract b u t as an untying”22 of life from’its existing relations that renders life dowsand-out in order to, subjecting it to its power, institute itself as a power. Sovereign state power is a protection racket that de-worlds human beings in order: to’re-world them as sovereign subjects, subject of course to the operation of sovereignty, on the grounds minimally of securing them security. Ask traditional peoples who currently bear the brunt of this principle of formation as it is applied to subject them to the rule of a modern state. . This is not OP course a chronological event or sequence of events, as posed for example by some readings of contract theory. The political order is instead considered as if it were dissolved in order to identify what constitutes and preserves as well as institutes it. The state of nature or exception is therefore “not.a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the city-but’a princip2e [emphasis added] internal to’ the city, which appeacs -at the moment the city is considered tanquam dissoluta.”23 Moreover, the foundation of sovereign power in this maneuver :‘is not:an event achieved once and for all but is continually operative‘in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision.”24 This,ensures the “survival of the’state of nature [or exception] at the very-heart r . of the state.”25 By virtue of its very formal structure, then, the political topologizing of sovereign power tends toward the indistinguishability of the spheres of inside/outside, $hysis/nomos, which it ,claims to establish and preserve. The state of natureyand the state of xlie-exception are simply two aspects of a single topological :political I

,

; . I

Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

. ”,

.

130

Global Governance, Liberal Peace, mid Coinplex Eiiiergency

maneuver in the process of which what was “presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Mobius strip o r a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception).” In its political topologizing, sovereign power in fact becomes a-topic-this “very impossibility of distinguishing between inside and outside, nature and exception, physis and nomos”26which is why the search for the definitive place in which sovereignty ultimately resides is always a mythic or u-topian one. Indeed, it is integral to the way in which sovereignty functions as a strategic principle of formation that it cannot be located in a material place since it is itself the principle that does the locating, differentiating inside from outside. In that way, it specifies the domain of peace, justice, and belonging by simultaneously specifying that of anarchy, lawlessness, and dislocation.27 Precisely speaking, then, the political topology of sovereign power is not a space at all, but a mode of operation. As such it does work. That work is not simply or even exclusively, however, to command and preserve the domain of the inside of law and order, o r to promote the interests of the inside externally with and against other so-called sovereigns outside. Rather, it is to operate as a switching mechanism that effects a passage between inside and outside, law and violence, physis and nomos. In commanding the trafficking that takes place there, sovereign state power thereby continuously reinstitutes itself as the particular mode of power that governs this trafficking. The state of exception and of nature are not so much a spatiotemporal suspension, therefore, as a complex topologizing figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature, exception, and law-outside and inside-pass in and out of phase with one another. Since “there is no rule that is applicable to chaos,” chaos must first be included in the juridical order through the creation of indistinction between inside and outside, chaos and the normal situation.”28 And yet sovereign power is precisely the power that maintains itself as deciding on these binary political distinctions, to the very degree that sovereign power renders them indistinguishable from each other. Sovereign power-as a principle of formation that institutes a strategic ordering of relationships, thereby instituting itself through that very maneuver as the arbitrator of the play of the relations thus established-is simultaneously premised, then, both “on the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it.”29 The point has been well made also by Derrida.30 For our purposes, Agamben’s analysis discloses a certain comparability in the operation of sovereign power and the power/ knowledge that Foucault termed governmentality. Not only are they both a strategic form of power, they each operate by effecting Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

Micknel Dillon b Jirlinn Reid

131

a kind of “phenomenological” reduction. Both claim to reduce life to its bare essentials in order to disclose the truth about it, but in so doing actually reduce it to a format that will bear the programming of power to which it must be subject if the power of sovereignty (or, as we shall see, that of governance as well) is to be inscribed, instituted, and operated. Life here is not of‘ course “natural” life, whatever that may be. It is in every sense the life of power. But since we are talking different operations of power, we are also talking different forms of life; modalities formed by the different exercises of reduction tlirougli which each operation of power institutes and maintains ,itself. Each form of life is the “stuff” of power, but in dissimilar ways. That is what we mean when we say that sovereignty and governmentality reproduce life amenable to their sway. It is not uncommon for a form of life thus reproduced to desire the processes that originate it. Sovereign and governmental powers alike each also therefore work their own particular powers of seduction on the subjects of power that they summon into being. Seduction, as well as imposition, is thus integral also to their very modus operandi.31 Nationalism might be said to be one form of such seduction, consumerism another. In respect of sovereignty, Agamben calls the life of sovereign power “bare life.” Bare life is thus life without context, meaning, or history-the state of nature-so that sovereignty may be installed as the power that orders it. In being abandoned, that which is excluded is cast into a condition that places it at the mercy of the sovereign power that institutes itself through instituting this relation. The formal structure of sovereign power understood as a strategic principle of formation rather than as a metaphysical point of origin is therefore precisely this: “the excluded included as excluded.” By virtue of that inclusion as excluded, bare life is simultaneously both produced by the exercise of sovereign power and subject to it in a particular way. As excluded life, bare life under the strategic ordering of sovereign power is life exposed to death-life available to be killed. Mundanely, it is life that is disposable. In either instance-irrespective of the different rationales advanced €or it-the bare life effected by the strategic ordering of life instituted by the operation of sovereign power is a life-form available ultimately to serve the interest of continuously preserving the institution of sovereign power itself. Consider the classical nature of sovereign warfare, the discourse of political realism that articulates it, and the fictions of political subjectivity and interest that are said to fuel it. Bare life is included in the political order “solelythrough an exclusion”32 and on the basis of the reduction of life that such exclusion effects: “The production of bare life is the originary activity of Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

132

Global Governarlce, Liberal Pence, atid Corrzplex Elnetgeticy

sovereignty,”33In effect, only by effecting a zone of indistinction between nomos and physis-inside and outside-does sovereignty come to power as the power of the command that is capable of making the differentiations for which the specific indistinction it has created calls. The same maneuver is in fact repeated in the governance-related vocabulary of networks and its allied science of complex adaptive systems. The problematization of inside a n d outside-nomos/physis-is repeated there, too, albeit in respect of “systems,” “species,” and “populations” rather than between peoples, nations, and states. Equally, a form of life is presupposed that is capable of bearing the inscription of a correlate form of power. The same maneuver, then, but one effected by a different principle of formation. Similarly, there is a biopower effect, but the form of life presupposed and reproduced is also different.

The Adaptive Life of Governmental Power: Emergency as Emergence As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault!s initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an ,operation of:power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the prodhction of discourse is at once controlled, selected,’organised and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.34

More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and whereathereis expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of r Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

Miclinel Dilloiz b Julinri Reid

133

life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into “problems” that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy “actors” develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called “epistemic entrepreneurs.” Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that FOLIcault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to “sell” these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted “problems,” and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such “paralysis of analysis” is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure-the fate and the fuel of all policy-compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.35 Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science, and policy-and policy science-will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

134

Globnl Gouernnnce, Libernl Pence, niid Complex Eniergency

process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it. In consequence, thinking and acting politically is displaced by the institutional and epistemic rivalries that infuse its power/ knowledge networks, and by the local conditions of application that govern the introduction of their policies. These now threaten to exhaust what “politics,”locally as well as globally, is about.36 It is here that the “emergence” characteristic of governance begins to make its appearance. For it is increasingly recognized that there are no definitive policy solutions to objective, neat, discrete policy problems. The “subjects” of policy increasingly also become a matter of definition as well, since the concept population does not have a stable referent either and has itself also evolved in biophilosophical and biomolecular as well as Foucauldian “biopower”ways. Foucault was preoccupied with populations that were already territorialized within states. It becomes exceptionally difficult to elide the relation between sovereignty and governmentality, as Foucault tended to do, when the “populations” at issue are global rather than loca1.37 The complex relation that has always obtained between governmental and sovereign power becomes freshly posed as a consequence. Global liberal governance begins to differ from the way in which Foucault argued that governmentality took population as its organizing principle, for example, inasmuch as global liberal governance takes global “populations” as its terrain of operation. However, global liberal governance also begins to differ from Foucault’s initial account of governmentality inasmuch as “population” discourse has evolved in consequence of the increasing influence of the biophilosophy disseminated through the evolution of the evolutionary theory of molecular biology.38 This, too, classically, depends upon the concept of “population,” and the evolution of evolutionary talk has begun to generate a novel biophilosophical discourse that informs the allied accounts of complex adaptive systems, knowledge-based societies, and network organizations.39 These increasingly distinguish the discourses of global liberal governance, especially those accounting for its global economic success and those newly conceiving its account of strategy and war.40 At the risk of gross simplification: following the Newtonian revolution, eighteenth-century science was said to develop the Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

Micfinel Dilloiz 8 Jztlinii Reid

135

sciences of organized simplicity. Nineteenth-century science, via statistical mechanics, is said to have focused on disorganized complexity. Twentieth-century science, looking forward also to the twenty-first century, has been said to have addressed the science of organized complexity. Nowhere is this truer than in the work surrounding molecular biology, genetics, and complex adaptive systems. Replacing Platonic typological, or archetypal, thinking with “population” thinking helped to attain the success of biology’s current molecular view of the world.41 Central also to the emergence of population genetics, population thinking in much contemporary evolutionary thinking is premised also on the concept of branching phylogenies converting variations within populations to variations between populations. Within considerable latitudes, the branching mechanisms of phylogenies are conceived in terms either of natural selection or drift acting on myriad mutations, most of which are harmful, such that the more or less rare successes are assimilated in any phylogenetic lineage. Evolution is thus seen as an opportunist remolding hard-won success for novel uses. The results of an evolutionary flow are correspondingly understood to be historically contingent. While the dominance of the molecular view of life continues and seems to be driving biological science to the innermost reaches of the cell’s ultimate mechanisms, however, other developments in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology seem to be disclosing now instead how far-reaching the powers of spontaneous propagation and selEorganization appear to be as well. Developments here seek not to displace but to adapt our current neo-Darwinian synthesis with an account of such self-organizing phenomena. Complex-adaptive-systems thinking therefore conceives of selection as acting on populations that spontaneously exhibit some peculiar form of order that is typical of an entire class of similar systems. These are called enseinbles or assemblages. In sufficiently complex systems, i t is argued, selection cannot avoid the order exhibited by most members of the ensemble. Such order is then present not because of selection but despite it, a function instead of spontaneous propagation and self-organization. Selection however is then thought not only to act upon such order but also to favor certain kinds of ensembles or systems. These are those “poised” on the edge of chaos near the boundary between order and disorder. That is the “state” that is said to encourage optimization both of the complexity of the tasks the system can perform and evolvability. Such systems are then said to have the proper structure to interact and intimately represent other entities in their environment. In other words, they actively come to “know” their Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

136

Global Governnnce, Liberal Pence, and Cornplex Emergency

worlds. Adaptive evolution is thus said to achieve the kind of systems that are best able to adapt.42 Note how population subtly moves from being a mass of individual anits to displaying a kind of collective intelligence as it flows across fitness landscapes, themselves displaying varying degrees of ruggedness.43 As Lily Kay observed, a shift in the molecular vision of life from the protein paradigm to the DNA paradigm occurred with Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix in 1953. Once the representation of heterocatalysis in terms of genetic code had also been completed (which it had by 1965) an intimate cognitive as well as technical affinity between the information and communication sciences and genetics was established.44 Specifically, the discovery of the operon helped introcluce cybernetic phraseology into biology. The image of genes turning themselves on or off is now coupled to the central notion of genetic programming underlying ontogeny.45 Note also, then, that the intelligence exhibited by populations (of whatever form) understood as complex adaptive systems is conceived in cybernetic terms. Hence the molecular and the informational sciences share the mode of code not merely by metaphorical borrowing but because it is intrinsic to the way in which they fundamentally conceive of the world, problematize it, and engineer ways of acting into it. Just as the bioinformational sciences are claimed to be transforming the productive power of the new global capitalism, bioinformational discourse and thinking infuses its account of itself and its success. Governmental power-specifically in the forms increasingly characteristic of global liberal governance-is, like sovereign power, a certain strategic ordering of power relations that derives from insisting on a state of emergency. But the state of emergency that, governs governmental power here differs very significantly from that which governs the operation of sovereign power. To be precise, the emergency of global liberal governance is a continuous state of emergence rather than a continuous state of exception. Although we believe that this argument is consistent in some measure with Foucault’s account of governmentality, it very much extends thinking about the immanent logic of that form of power and the “population” thinking upon which it bases itself. This point is crucial also to the ways in which we ’see contemporary global liberal governance assimilating and applying the new biophilosophical discourses that characterize the network societies and knowledge-based economies of liberal peace. The conception of order at work in the power of governance goes well beyond the tired debates about anarchy and sovereignty, Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

juridical power and nin’eteenth-century geopolitical theorizing, that have distin,guished so much of internationa1,relations and global politics. Specifically, it increasingly transcends the old Newtonian metaphors of mechanical forces, levers, planes, and surfaces as well as of pregiven political subjects transacting mechanical relations of exchange that are a-historical, universal, uniform, and predictable. These are increasingly being replaced by meta. phors drawn from the new form ,of biophilosophy. This in turn has been greatly stimulated b y a wide variety of factors. Notable among them have been the astonishing successes of molecular biology and t h e ‘geneticsciences’.Almost equally important have been the parallel successes of the information and communication sciences. Indeed, the increasing convergence of these sciences, by virtue of the fact that they share’what-wecall the mode of code, provokes new. accounts of the fundamental questions of origin and order. These came in the form%notonly of neoDarwinian accounts ,of evolution via modification combined with molecular biology’s account of genetic inheritance, but also in terms of the self-generating capacities and autopoietic functioning of living assemblages.4G A further factor is however the current.success and.productivity, of global capital itself since this is said to ‘derive,from. the knowledge-based economies and network forms of ,social organization that mimic the complex adaptive systems of these=generative molecular and informational life-forms., Through capillaries too numerous to detail and explore here, such biopliilosophy and its organizing concepts have leached into the discourses of global liberal governance in many ways as well-including not only accounts of current technological and economic development and capital growth but also the discourse of international relations, . - *. strategy, and war.47 , . The life that global liberal governance presupposes i s h o t therefore exclusively confined to “bare life,”.the life exposed to death strategically effected by.sovereign power. There is “adaptive life” as well. Situated in rugged landscapes that it islfree to negotiate, .adaptive life is challenged to prove its fitness, coevolve; and ultimately mutate according to ecological pr,essures specified by the changing environments that it lives to.traverse. ‘Adaptive life is thus a radically relational life form’inasmuch.asit is always al; ready located in a dynamic evolutionary way both with itself and . other life forms that comprise the fitness .landscape ii:inhabits: Comprising a domain of continuous ,nuto$oiesis, adaptive life is characterized.by constant coded couplings, decouplings, arid re-, couplings. Whereas Newton’s universe was fixed, comprised ‘of ’ ’

, I

1

1,

1

Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

138

Global G o v e r ~ a i ~ cLibernl e, Peace, and Coiizplex Eiiiergeiicy

preformed bodies transacting predictable linear exchanges, this molecular universe is comprised of bodies in continuous formation. These consist of shifting ensembles and assemblages whose very relationality ensures unpredictable nonlinear mutation, transformation, and change since information is said to be transferred not only by words but also by particles (of DNA) and each in the same way. Heritage is n o longer thought to be dependent u p o n memory and metaphor, it has gone molecular. ,Albeit on closer inspection there turns out to be a lot of metaphor in the molecule as well, despite the insistence of science to the ,contrary. DNA is said to speak a digital language and is also, it seems, bad at making copies of itself. Evolution is evolution by modification-copies copying copies inevitably evolving new formations-since information gets lost or changed in the very process of transmission. According to popular accounts of the current neo-Darwinian synthesis: “The genome is as complicated, makeshift and imperfect as the creatures it builds.” Genetics is the science of difference. Diversity is renewed by chemical errors-mutations-made as DNA is copied.4* Freedom is integral to adaptive life’s capacity to bear the operation of governmental power since governance requires it to determine for itself how it responds to the demands of the rugged fitness landscapes that constitute its ecology. Adaptive life is free in the sense only however that it is defined in terms of its capacity to adapt. Adaptive capacity is the capacity of emergence. T h e more adaptable the more free, the more free and adaptable the more powerful the emergent life of governance, but so also the governance of emergent life, becomes. Adaptive life is life not simply therefore exposed to death as it is with the operation of sovereign power. But like bare life, it is nonetheless life whose law is a law that fails to signify anything other than the rules of formation that reproduce it. It, too, is a life that is at the disposal of the strategic ordering of power that effects it. Such power also commands the zone of indistinction between nomos and physis, albeit differently since here nomos is conceived in terms of the law of emergence, and physis is conceived in terms of the nature of becoming. Not a life fit for sovereign power alone, but life fit for that endless utility to which sovereign power, too, is now intimately related and for which it increasingly performs its own operations. Adaptive life is life exposed, then, to the changing and continuous fitness tests posed by the rugged landscapes that the global governance of liberal peace set for it. A life that must prove itself by its adaptability to the point of passing out of phase with itself and becoming something other, alienation and alien-ness are Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

thus integral to the, very autopoietic capacity of adaptive life forms. That in turn begins to ef‘kcr. a transformation in the very ways in which danger, securil.y,and “survival”are reproblematized, and such developinelits can be detected in a variety of ways including novel thinking about information and network-centric warfare.49 Political conclitionality, oiic might say by way of illustration, is a device by whicli tlie contending life-forms of emerging political complexes are “persuaded” into assuming that political adaptivity that global liberal governance requires of them in the process of pacifying them so that it is not continually disturbed by them. That way, too, it does no1 have to examine how its very own practices ferment the turbulence t ~ i a itt so iiiucli cleplores.

,

Zones of Indistinction and the Fate of the Political

,

To conclude: This confluence of sovereign and goveriiinental power has no center that might be captured. It has no single source that might be located and cut off. Neither docs it have a defensive curtain wall that might bc Fatally breached. It is subject to no historical law that will g‘uaraniee its succcss or bring about its end. It operates according to no historical tcleology chat will result in a just and equitable order for all. It is ;\ vir:iI, self-reproducing, hybrid strategic operation of power that poses new challenges to political and democratic thought because of the ways in which it threatens to exhausL d i a t politics nncl democracy iniglit be about. “If you want to help people in the disaster zone,”John Ryle advises in the epigraph to this article, “you have to tliilik politically.” The problem is, I-Iow does one t h i n k politically ~ i o win respkct of this novel hybrid terrain or power tliat is radically productive of boclies-in-lbrmatioli rather than comprised of a iised universe of preformed bodies transacting mcchanicaI exchanges of intersubjectivity? Wlierc slates, too, arc nodes in networks of power operating as the switching mechanisms that command tlie zone of indistinction be tween insidc/outside, nomos/pliysis, so that tlie changing fitness criteria of the politics and ccononiics of our current liberal peace may effect the rugged landscapes that populations, as complex aclaptivc life-forms, must negotiate? Here an order that nervly poses the question of the political and all its cognate issues-power, freedoni, cqiiity,justice, and the societ)”’-ol)erates. Uiclding to resolve or replace these ~ i t h the imperatives of performativity chiancling diSpOSabi~ityon ‘behalf of territorialized politicit1 sovereignty, intimately if oftell also Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

140

Globnl Governance, Liberal P e w , and Coiiiplex Eiiiergeiicy

conflictually allied with a more generically utile adaptability, such abiding h u m a n quesiions are i n fact all powerfully r e i n v i g o r a t e d

once more. ’ .

Notes 1. Mark Duffield, Complex Political Emergencies: An Exfiloratory Report for U N I m with Reference to Angola and Bosnia (Birmingham: School of Public Policy, 1994); “Complex Emergencies and the Crisis of Developmen,tism,” Institute of Development Studies bulletin, Lidring Relief and Development, October 25, 1994; E. W. Nafziger, “The Economics of Complex Emergencies: Preliminary Approaches and Findings,” paper presented at “Political Economy of Humanitarian Emergencies” in Helsinki, UNU/ WIDER-Queen Elizabeth House, October 1996; William Reno, “Humanitarian Emergencies and Warlord Politics in Liberia and Sierra Leone,” paper idem. For a review of some aspects of global liberal governance, see Michael Barnett, “Bringing in the New World Order: Liberalism, Legitimacy, and the United Nations,” World Politics 49 (July 1997):,526-551; a n d Richard Falk, “Liberalism at the Global Level: The Last of the Independent Commissions?” Millennium 24, no. 3 (winter 1995): 563-576. 2. See, for example Ferdinand Braudel’s magisterial Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18tli Century, vols. 1-3 (London: Faber, 1985). 3. See, for example, the argument presented by Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Towards a New Paradigm for Development: Strategies, Policies, ‘and Processes” (Geneva: UNCTAD, 1998)-Prebisch Lecture. 4. Ibid. The term Washington Consensus was originally coined by John Williamson to describe reforms undertaken by Latin American economies in the 1980s. It then acquired much wider currency, referring to a set of “neoliberal” policy prescriptions concerning liberalization, stabilization, and privatization. See Williamson, “The Washington Consensus Revisited,” in L. Emmerij, ed., Economic and Social Development into the X X I Century (Washington, D.C.: Inter-American Development Bank, 1997). 5. See, for example, Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vol. l, Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Dirk Messner, Network Society (London: Cass, 1991) ; Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark andntheJaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (New York: Freeman, 1994); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out o j Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984); and Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 6. See, for example, Humanitarianism Unbound? Current Dilemmas Facing Multi-Mandate Relief Operations in Political Emergencies, African Rights Discussion Paper no. 5 (London: African Rights, 1994); L. Minear a n d T. G. Weiss, Humanitarianism Action in Times of War (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994). 7. There is a burgeoning literature now qn the strategic imperatives, political requirements, and logistical and operational demands for socalled operations other than war. See, for the extensive literature produced for the DoD, CUSR Cooperation Research .Program (CCRP) at web site http://www.dodccrp.org. See also, for example, Christopher Dandeker and James G o y “The Future of Peace ,Support Operations,” Armed Forces and Society 25, no. 3 (1997). Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

142

Global Govenmnce, Libernl Pence, niid Complex Eiiiergeiicy

20. See Michael Dillon, “Sovereignty and Governmentality: From the Problematics of the ‘New World Order’ to the Ethical Problematic of the World Order,” Alternatives 20, no. 3 (1995): 323-368. 21. For a deconstruction of the paternity of the law in respect of justice, see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical’Foundation of Authority,” in Drucilla Cornell, et al., eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992). For a deconstruction of the paternity of the law in respect of sovereignty, see Jacques Derrida, Politics ofFriendship (London: Verso, 1996). 22. Agamben, note 18, p. 90. 23. Ibid., p. 105. 24. Ibid., p. 109. 25. Ibid., p. 106. 26. Ibid., p. 37. 27. See the critical discussion of these points, esp. in relation to Michael Walzer’s classic account of justice, in Michael Dillon, “Another Justice,” Political Theory 27, no. 2 (1999): 155-175: 28. Agamben, note 18, p. 19. 29. Ibid., p. 40. 30. Derrida, note 21; “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority,” in Cornell, note 21. 31. See Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990); Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990); and Slav0 Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). 32. Agamben, note 18, p. 11. 33. Ibid., p. 83. 34. Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in Michael Shapiro, ed., Language and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 109. 35. On the serial policy failure of governance, see, for example; Bob Jessop, “The Rise of Government and the Risk of Failure,” International SOcia1 ScienceJournal 155 (March 1998): 29-45. 36. From the security-development context, this point is well illustrated by Thomas Weiss’s insistence on incorporating such “politics”into the activities and operations of humanitarian NGOs: “Principles, Politics and Humanitarian Action,” Ethics and International Affairs 13 (1999). 37. Dillon first analyzed these issues in “Sovereignty and Governmentality,” note 20. 38. E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological TfiougJit (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1982). 39. Ibid. 40. See, for example: David S. Alberts, John J. Gartska, and Frederick P. Stein, Network Centric Warfare: TheFace ofBattle in the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1999); David S. Alberts and Thomas Cerwinski, Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1997); Thomas Cerwinski, Coping with Bounds: Sj!xculation on Nonlinean’ty i n Military Afsaairs (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1998); David G. Gompert, Richard L. Kluger, and Martin Libiski, Mind the Gap: Promoting a Transatlantic Revolution i n Military AJairs (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1999) ; Hayward Alker, “Ontological Reflections on Peace and War,” Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 99-02-011, 1999; B. Bender, “Buying into Networkcentric Warfare,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, May Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015

13, 1998; A. K. Cebrowski, “Sea Change,” Surface Warsare 22 November/ December 1997); A. I(. Cebrowski and John J. Gartska, “Network Centric Warfare: Its Origins and Future,” United States Naval Institute Procecdi?zgs 124,110. I (1998). 41. See Stuart A. Kauffinan, The Oiigiias oJOrder: Self-Org‘aiaizaliola and Selection in EvoZution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Lily E. Kay, TfieMolecular Vision of Life: Caltecfi, the Rocl~efllerFoundation, and the Rise of the New Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press) demonstrates convincillgly how lobbying, grant-giving, and a confluence of social, economic, and political interests contributed substantially to this process. 42. This account relies on Kauffman’s more academic text, but more Popular accounts of chaos and complexity can be found in, for example, James Gleick, Chaos (New York: Sphere, 1987). 43. ParentlieticallJg the idea of landscape is capable of being developed in many directions for the purposes of mapping what happens to PopLiIations as they actively distribute themselves in differeii t environments. 44.Kay, note 41. 45. Ibuffman, note 41, p. 12. 46. Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Pl~ylogmy(Cambridge: Belknap, 1977); Niklas Luhmanii, Essays in SevRcjierence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 47. I n respect of international relations, see, for example, James Rosenau, Governance Without Governlnent: Order and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robert Jervis, System Effeels: complexity i72 Political and Social Lifc (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Hayward Alker, “Ontological Reflections on Peace and war,” Sanla Fe Institute Working Paper 99-02-011, 1999 48. Steve Jones, Allnost Like a Whale: The Origin flSj9ekcs Uj9datd (Lond O 1 x Transworld, 1999), p. 119. 49. We discuss these issues further in Michael DiIlon and Julian Reid, “International Relations, Governance and Security,”unpublished manuscript.

Downloaded from alt.sagepub.com at Lancaster University Library on February 18, 2015