Ungoverned space: Global security and the geopolitics of broken windows

Abstract

Contemporary geopolitical narratives have shifted from a Cold War focus on security attained through effective spatial containment to an emphasis on security won through effective spatial administration. Weak, disorderly, and ungoverned spaces are often scripted as insecure and dangerous, requiring sovereign intervention and harsh discipline as a corrective action. These narratives and practices increasingly borrow from the domestic arena, and serve to blur former binaries such as internal/external and policing and war. This paper investigates the domestic “broken windows policing” language of ungoverned, disorderly space in New York City, and traces its movement and subsequent usage in the occupation of Iraq. The use of language such as broken windows and zero tolerance serves to legitimate state practices, but is also effective as a shaping force for newly articulated positions and subjects. It is argued that broken windows policing, as an imaginative geopolitical scripting of the perils of chaotic and ungoverned space, helps to produce new forms of governance through security. Further, this disciplining process facilitates the formation and entrenchment of neoliberal practices and subjectivities by rendering spaces and populations ‘insecure’ and in need of repositioning—hence opening them up to powerful market forces and technologies of the self such as privatization, entrepreneurialism, and responsibilization.