Articulated Security and the Basement of International Law

Abstract

The UN collective security system was improbably ambitious in 1945 and, despite repeated episodes of very public failure and a widely-telegraphed message that it was scaling back and reigning in its operation, remains improbably ambitious today. Anachronistic it may be, but I want to argue that many of the features of disciplinary power that Foucault saw in the workshops, barracks, schools and prisons of 18 and 19C France are visible in certain UN-orchestrated collective security practices taking place today. So much so that I think it makes sense to characterize the logic of the UN’s approach as disciplinary. I want to do two things with this insight. The first is to use discipline as a run-of-the-mill hermeneutic of suspicion that excavates the tangled mass of unequal power relations that proliferate beneath the relatively smooth surface of positive international law. Discipline, Foucault said, is a sort of infra-law; but it is also a counter-law that denies the rights and process (the legitimating elements) notion of (sovereign) law. The second is to use discipline as a way of thinking about the conceptual shape of collective security. Discipline implies a very particular movement of individualization and totalization towards a characteristically mechanistic conception of collective endeavour. This is at once highly ambitious and very old-fashioned. It is almost quaint that the UN has forged a universal programme mechanically in a digital age. Seen from within the collective security system, however, discipline makes much more sense than, say, biopower as a strategy with which to combat threats to international peace and security.