Introduction: The Social Construction and Control of Danger in Counterterrorism

Abstract

The destruction of the New York City twin towers and a wing of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, marks a turning point in post--Cold War security agendas. The reactions to these events reinforce the language, as well as the imaginary and political credibility, of a new threat. The new dangers have a transnational quality that easily links into discourses and policies of insecurity gaining momentum since the end of the Cold War. Medleys of international organized crime, money laundering, drug trafficking, immigration, and weapons proliferation move to the foreground in transvening security agendas. The new dangers also seem to integrate quite easily with geopolitical and military conceptions of defense. Under the heading global terrorism, they are combined with and bear upon concerns about the military protection of the territory and geopolitical strategies of containing enemies. In this rapidly evolving context, borders blur. The defining borders of key concepts, such as war, threat, or freedom, are being reframed. The operational borders of security agencies merge as police-and military-related activities exceed their traditional field of action, and intermingle with one another. Sectoral borders are discarded as security-related issues are increasingly handed over to private agencies, and security concerns are thought to be of interest even to ostensibly irrelevant sectors, such as business and finance. Even the spatial and temporal borders of human action lose their prior, clearcut contour to sit uncomfortably between reality and unreality, in a dimension made of condensed spatiotemporal elements. To get some critical purchase on these developments one needs to look in more detail at how dangers are actually identified, and the political stakes and effects of strategies seeking to control those dangers. This is also necessary if one is to better understand how the idea of a new threat facilitates the integration of fragmented security practice into a strategy. The analyses in this special issue deal with the programmatic aspects of security strategies, practices, and their wider political rationale and effects. Instead of mapping how discourses structure the specific characteristics of the terrorist threat, the contributions to this special issue address renditions of insecurity by locating in general processes and sites of changing security practice. The articles herein question key aspects of the aforementioned blurred borders in security-related matters. The focus is not on 9/11 as such, but on how its political rendition reflects and feeds into the reconfiguring of security landscapes after the Cold War. These articles address these issues specifically in the context of insurance markets, domestic policing, and US military and foreign-policy strategy and doctrine. Underlying these analyses is a widely defined social-constructivist approach in security studies. The claim is that insecurities are politically and technologically constructed, hence dependent on the political, social, and economic contexts in which they are contested. The political significance and effects of violence depend on the logics, stakes, and methods of securitizing, rather than the act of violence itself. Therefore, the meaning of insecurity and danger is always a question rather than a given. This special issue begins with two contributions that address the evolving interactions between counterterrorism policies and the control of alleged security-threatening groups. These articles demonstrate how insecurity is, to a considerable degree, the product of sociopolitical processes. Processes of defining the threat, and the subsequent targeting of certain social groups according to risk-focused criteria and technologies, cannot be understood without considering the stakes involved in the functioning of domestic political and security fields. The question of identity that lies at the heart of these interactions is raised in both discursive and nondiscursive ways. …