`Biomania' and US Foreign Policy

Abstract

This paper considers the increasing prominence of bioterror as a national security threat in the United States. It highlights the powerful discursive strategies surrounding bioterror — resident in academic and policymaking circles — and relates them to corresponding US practices across the domestic-foreign policy continuum. In this regard, both US multilateral action concerning biological weapons and national public `preparedness' programmes are premised on a powerful threat discourse which is at once highly problematic and conducive to a narrow band of US social interests. Not only does the current quest for `protection' from bioterror form part of a general discursive strategy that demarcates a civilised American way of life from a foreign and deadly intersection of `envy' and `pathology', but it also supplies a material foil with which the state furthers its now well developed social role in bolstering innovation-driven US economic clout.