Preemptive Logic Research Articles

The connections between crisis and war preparedness in Sweden

Contemporary liberal and democratic states have ‘securitized’ a growing number of issues by advancing the notion of societal security. This is coupled with a proactive stance and the conception of building societal resilience in order to withstand future crises and disturbances. The preemptive logic of contemporary security and crisis management calls for a new type of resilient neoliberal subject who is willing to accept uncertainty and shoulder greater individual responsibility for her own security. This article offers a genealogical analysis of this development in Sweden since the end of the Cold War, highlighting the role now assigned to citizens within social and national security planning. I argue that seeking a return to a more traditional notion of ‘total defence’ blurs the previously important war/peace and crisis/security distinctions. While war preparedness in previous eras was an exceptional aspect of human life and citizenship, the conceptions of security now evolving bind together societal and national security such that civil and war preparedness are merged into an ever-present dimension of everyday existence. The analysis also reveals that the responsibilization of individuals introduces a moral dimension into security and generates new forms of citizen–citizen relations. These extricate the sovereign powers of the state and the liberalist social contract between the state and its citizens.

Student success as preemption: Predictive constructions of futures-to-never-come

The student success movement in higher education has shifted the dominant logic of university operations from Astin’s Input-Environment-Output to Massumi’s logic of preemption. Predictive analytics, a key technology of the student success movement, are a manifestation of this qualitative shift in institutional logics. No longer content to prevent student failure, we must now preempt it, and this shift in logic is remaking undergraduate education in ways heretofore unconsidered. In this shift, student success no longer shapes reality through environmental adjustments, but creates its own realities using success as a desired outcome held permanently in the future. This worldmaking is examined through the new empiricisms in two areas: the concept of wasted credits and the subject position of the stealth student. The impasses present at these locations create both futures-to-never-come as well as the space for critical anticipations of speculative futures.

Criminalising protest through the expansion of police ‘move-on’ powers: A case study from Australia

This article analyses the evolution of police ‘move-on’ (dispersal) powers in Australia, with a focus on how this form of statutory police power is being recalibrated as a technique for deterring and closing down public place protests. Using a case study from recent events in the state of New South Wales, we draw attention to the ways in which governments have begun to employ the move-on power as a tool for imposing their own visions of how public places should be used and how protests are allowed to be conducted. We highlight the work done by the ambiguous and malleable concept of ‘public safety’ and the imperative of not permitting protests to interrupt business activities. We argue that the combined effect of the ascendancy of these preferences, and the pre-emptive logic which is at the heart of move-on powers, is to produce a serious challenge to the vision of public places as sites for dissent and democratic mobilisation.

Marianne’s liberty in jeopardy? A French analysis on recent counterterrorism legal developments

ABSTRACTThis article analyses two recent French counterterrorist legislations (Law No. 2016–386 – hereafter OCT&F law and the Law No 2017–1510 – hereafter the OCT&Flaw) through the lens of distinct yet complementary theoretical frameworks. Combining the State of Exception thesis of Giorgio Agamben, the Enemy Penology as framed by Günther Jakobs as well as the more recent scholarship contributions on Pre-Crime, the article seeks to contribute to the scholarly debate on the use and the consequences of the use of criminal and administrative law in the fight against terrorism. In view of the numerous terrorist attacks that France has faced in recent years, the article aims to provide deeper knowledge of the French case by drawing substantially from the unfamiliar French scholarship. The article argues that the measures recently adopted seem to deepen the exceptional and pre-emptive logic in which potentially dangerous subjects have to be identified as “the enemy” as soon as possible in order to then be contained and dealt with.

Countering violent extremism, governmentality and Australian Muslim youth as ‘becoming terrorist’

This article explores how a ‘regime of truth’ about Muslim youth has been historically produced through the underlying logic of Australia’s counter-terrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE) policies and practices. The article is divided into three parts. I first look at how the pre-emptive logic of countering the ‘becoming terrorist’ constitutes young Australian Muslims. I then interrogate the way CVE has constituted Australian Muslims as a self-contained space, a governmental population divided between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’. Lastly, I discuss how CVE operates as a technique of governmentality in the way that it deploys grants programs to foster the ‘conduct of conduct’ of Muslim subjects within this self-contained racialised space. I argue that the central organising logic of community partnership has been the targeting of the conditions of emergence of ‘extremist’ Muslim subjects, thereby guaranteeing the racialisation of Muslim youth as always at-risk, marked with the ‘potential’ of ‘becoming terrorist’.

Criminal Law as Police Power: Serious Crime, Unsafe Protest and Risks to Public Safety

This article considers the deepening of police power in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, criminal law. It analyses the combined effects of four recent criminal law regimes that not only give the NSW Police Force more powers, but also reflect the significant role of institutional police power and the pre-emptive logic of criminal law. We examine: the introduction of serious crime prevention orders; the introduction of public safety orders; investigative detention powers in relation to terrorist acts; and confiscation, forfeiture and search powers, and trespass offences that target protests. Drawing on the work of ‘police power’ theorists, we argue that these new regimes illustrate the centrality of police power to the criminal law rather than a deviation from a putative, ‘normal’ criminal law.

Preemptive Logic and the Necessity of Animal Politics

Preemptive Logic and the Necessity of Animal Politics

Land grievances and the mobilization of electoral violence

Recent studies have asked why elites resort to violence, yet many overlook the process and dynamics of mobilizing violence. How do politicians convince their supporters to fight ? This article argues that in multi-ethnic and democratizing societies where land and property rights are weak and politicized, land grievances can provide leaders with a powerful tool to organize electoral violence. We develop a theory to show how land grievances can give rise to violent mobilization when leaders frame elections as a threat to the land security of supporters or an opportunity to reclaim land or strengthen land rights. Conversely, land grievances are ineffective when citizens do not believe that elections signal a credible threat to their land security or an opportunity to strengthen land rights. We further specify how the type of land grievance shapes the logic and form of violent action. Grievances based on land insecurity shape a pre-emptive logic of violence, while grievances based on competing land claims often shape an opportunistic logic of electoral violence. The article examines the validity of our theory using a comparative case study between zones of escalation and non-escalation of violence during post-electoral crises in Kenya (2007–08) and Côte d’Ivoire (2010–11). By observing the variation between positive and negative cases, the article identifies factors that foment and constrain the mobilization of election violence.

Risky Measures: Digital Technologies and the Governance of Child Obesity

Childhood and the Politics of PreemptionIn neoliberal climate of underfunded and overcrowded public schools, physical education has suffered. With only six states requiring physical education in every grade and only 2 percent of high schools offering it daily, gym class seems destined for the dustbin of history. As part of her campaign against childhood obesity, Michelle Obama's Let's Move! Active Schools initiative aims to reverse this trend by reinvigorating physical education programs across the nation. Although evidence suggests that rates of child obesity are declining, Obama's initiative is among an array of new antiobesity programs at the local, national, and even global level (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2013). Launched in February 2013, Let's Move! Active Schools aims to reach fifty thousand schools in the next five years with six-step program that mobilizes teachers, administrators, and parents to become school champions for their communities in order to once again make being active way of life for our kids (The White House, Office of the First Lady 2013).Central to this effort is the implementation of FitnessGram, software and database platform that tracks body composition, aerobic capacity, and health-related fitness levels, and aims to inspire long-term health by teaching students to monitor their behaviors. Replacing the older President's Challenge Youth Fitness Test dating back to 1966, FitnessGram will be implemented in 90 percent of U.S. schools by 2018 with ten million dollars in funding from General Mills (Let's Move! 2014a). Although the program has come under attack for sending home report cards with information about students' body mass index (dubbed letters), FitnessGram represents growing trend toward using new media and digital technology to promote health and fitness at ever earlier ages (Bindley 2013).1While American cultures have long history of policing body size and weight, it was not until the development of media panic over an of obesity in the early 2000s that overweight became medicalized term (Saguy and Almeling 2008). Yet as fat studies scholars have observed, rather than promoting health, antiobesity discourse often further stigmatizes fatness.2 In neoliberal moral economy in which active citizens are expected to manage their own risk, fatness signifies moral failing on the part of the individual. As scapegoats for larger social anxieties over national fitness and changing patterns of production and consumption, fat bodies have emerged as primary target of a vast network of surveillance, monitoring and regulating strategies and technologies by medical, government, and corporate agencies (Lupton 2012, 32).Yet even as antiobesity programs mark specific populations for social stigmatization and regulation, we need to understand how the discourse of extends new modes of ongoing surveillance and regulation over the entire population. While public health traditionally safeguarded national health through racialized policies of containment and exclusion, I argue that the obesity epidemic has engendered new measures of control that operate through logic of preemption, constituting new populations for intervention according to racialized calculus of risk. Far from metaphorical, the language of indexes the ways in which epidemiological measures of risk have shifted the register from pathologization of fatness to preemptive logic of health.This preemptive logic takes shape around the construction of childhood obesity as site of crisis. Within antiobesity campaigns, children serve as both precarious group in need of protection and symbolic figure for America's moral and physical strength. As Obama puts it, physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake (Let's Move! 2014b). The body of the child emerges as both an object of risk and risky subject: the child both is at risk for the physical and emotional health tolls associated with obesity and is risk to the nation, insofar as these unhealthy bodies constitute security threat unto themselves. …

Who’s Afraid of Virginia’s Nat Turner? Mesmerism, Stowe, and the Terror of Things

When mesmerism first came to this hemisphere by way of St. Domingue, a complex association between radical abolition and the new science was born. Harriet Beecher Stowe takes up that association in her second abolitionist novel Dred. In so doing she charts an emergent trauma theory developing among slaves that deliberately focused on perpetrators rather than victims of New World slavery. Such a reading widens our understanding of early trauma theory by making visible the tension between Stowe’s sentimental strategy famously inscribed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her adaptation of theories by thinkers like Frederick Douglass. If the first strategy depends on familiar but discrete bonds of sympathy between her reader and slaves like Uncle Tom, the second involves recognition of uncontained levels of fear compulsively linking emancipation with slave insurrection. The title Dred deliberately puns on that fear, working to undo what Brian Massumi has called its “preemptive logic.”

Preemption in the Bush Doctrine: A Reappraisal

This article argues that the elevation of preemption to a cardinal status in the Bush Doctrine following September 11, 2001 resulted from a larger strategic consideration—to convince rogue states to discontinue their weapons of mass destruction programs and their sponsorship of terrorism. Dismantling the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq as a demonstration of preemptive action was seen as necessary to ensure the forceful and credible conveyance of this message to other rogue states, especially Iran and North Korea. I call this strategic logic behind publicizing preemption, “demonstrative compellence.” Because the logic of preemption in the Bush Doctrine relied heavily on the Iraq war and its demonstrative force, it has little relevance to the future conduct of U.S. foreign policy and should not be described as revolutionary.

America as risk/securitizing the other

This essay, on the relation between the military strategies of American imperial ambitions and the protocols of finance as a means of managing the affairs of daily life, is meant to advance a cultural Marxism that reads the contemporary discourse and practice of political economy. Specifically, I argue that the embrace of risk and the logic of pre-emption that govern financialization can illuminate the present logic of self-managed imperialism that goes under the name of the war on terror.

North Korea and Northeast Asia. By Samuel S. Kim and Tai Hwan Lee. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. xiii, 278 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Chapter 1 Preface Part 2 Part I: Theory and Practice Chapter 3 North Korea and Northeast Asia in World Politics Part 4 Part II: Interactions Chapter 5 United States-North Korean Relations: From Welfare to Workfare? Chapter 6 Japanese-North Korea Relations: Going in Circles Chapter 7 Chinese-North Korea Relations: Managing Asymmetrical Interdependence Chapter 8 Russian-North Korean Relations: A New Era? Part 9 Part III: Survival Strategy Chapter 10 North Korea's External Economic Relations: Globalization in 'Our Own Style' Chapter 11 North Korea's Security Policy: Swords into Plowshares? Chapter 12 Assessing the North Korean Threat: The Logic of Preemption, Prevention, and Engagement