columba peoples, security after emancipation, 2010.pdf

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Security after emancipation? Critical Theory,violence and resistanceCOLUMBA PEOPLES*

Abstract. Within the current configuration of Critical Security Studies (CSS) the concept ofemancipation is upheld as the keystone of a commitment to transformative change in worldpolitics, but comparatively little is said on the status of violence and resistance within thatcommitment. As a means of highlighting this relative silence, this article examines the natureof the connection between CSS and the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School. Inparticular it disinters the reflections of Herbert Marcuse on the connections betweenemancipatory change, violence and resistance as a means of interrogating and challengingthe definition of security as emancipation. Doing so, it is argued, points towards some ofthe potential limitations of equating security and emancipation, and provides a provocationof contemporary CSS from within its own cited intellectual and normative foundations.

Columba Peoples is Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Sociology, Politicsand International Studies, University of Bristol. His primary research interests are in CriticalSecurity Studies, Critical Theory, and technology and international relations. These aredrawn together and discussed at length in his recent book publication, Justifying BallisticMissile Defence: Technology, Security and Culture (Cambridge University Press 2010).

Introduction

The concept of emancipation has, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse notes, evolved overtime from an association with relationships between individuals (the freeing of ason or wife from the legal authority of the pater familias) to a political flagwordduring the French Revolution and, concurrently, from a description of a formal

legal process to an identifier of the self-liberation of the non-privileged.1

Intandem with this evolution the scope of the application of the concept has alsoexpanded, with understandings of the term having now become central to debatesin international theory, in particular the branch that is now often referred tovariously as critical international theory or critical international relations

* The author would like to thank the following for their conversations and comments in relation toearlier versions of this article: Claudia Aradau, Thomas Diez, Beate Jahn, George Lawson, AndrewNeal, Mark Neocleous, Nicholas J. Rengger, and Rens van Munster; and to Richard Wyn Jones fora detailed response to an early draft. Particular thanks are also due to the two anonymous reviewersof the article for their extensive and constructive comments. Any errors that remain are of course

my own.1 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern, Development and Change, 23:3(1992), pp. 541, 78; on the etymology of emancipation see also: {http://www.etymonline.com/i d h i } d l

Review of International Studies (2011), 37, 11131135 2010 British International Studies Associationdoi:10.1017/S0260210510000884 First published online 26 Aug 2010
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipatehttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipatehttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipatehttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipatehttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipatehttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipatehttp://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=emancipate


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theory.2 Whilst some have questioned the merits of such a move,3 various IRscholars have sought to develop a brand of international theory that has anexplicitly emancipatory intent. For Andrew Linklater, the concept offers apotential normative grounding for a sociology of global morals,4 whilst others,conscious of the particular Western/Enlightenment origins of the term, have

nevertheless sought to offset this with a call for the fuller inclusion of multipleWestern and non-Western perspectives on the meanings of freedom, without givingup the distinctive and attractive appeal to human improvement and emancipatorydevelopment that is so central to [. . .] ethical/global concerns.5

Arguably the most prominent use of the concept of emancipation withininternational studies is associated with the branch of security studies knownvariously as Critical Security Studies, the Welsh School, or the AberystwythSchool.6 Critical Security Studies (or CSS the denotation used hereafter) hasconsciously sought to place emancipation at the heart of its critique of traditionalsecurity studies most notably in the assertion that security and emancipation are

two sides of the same coin7 which, simultaneously, also effectively constitutes anapproach to world politics more generally.8 Here the vision of emancipation thatis employed is self-consciously claimed to build upon the emancipatory intent ofthe Frankfurt School of Critical Theory as the basis of a progressive theory ofsecurity.9 Taking this as its object of inquiry, this article makes three interrelatedarguments: first, that the approach to the study of security adopted by CSS inspite of its claims to take its lead from the critical social theory of the FrankfurtSchool has thus far only interpreted this tradition in a circumscribed manner.This is most evident in the narrow association of CSS with the concept ofemancipation and ensuing debates over its definition, almost to the point of

2 See the special issue on Critical International Theory after 25 years, Review of International Studies,33:S1; Richard Devetak, The Project of Modernity in International Relations Theory, in Steven C.Roach (ed.), Critical Theory and International Relations: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2008), andch. 7 of the same volume, pp. 22765.

3 Most notably Nicholas J. Rengger, who suggests that critical theory has a profound ambiguityabout the question of emancipation, an ambiguity which weakens, possibly fatally, the sense ofemancipation as the possible route out of the problem of order, and, by implication, thatemancipation is thus potentially a worm at the core of critical international theory that constantlythreatens to pollute the whole project International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem ofOrder: Beyond International Relations Theory? (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 159, 151.

4 Andrew Linklater, Toward a sociology of global morals with an emancipatory intent, Review ofInternational Studies, 33 (2007), pp. 13550.

5 Hayward Alker, Emancipation in the Critical Security Studies Project, in Ken Booth (ed.), CriticalSecurity Studies and World Politics (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2005), p. 200. Emphasis inoriginal.

6 Usually this School is taken to be comprised primarily by Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones andtheir respective works on security; see the C. A. S. E. Collective, Critical Approaches to Securityin Europe: A Networked Manifesto, Security Dialogue, 37:4 (2006), pp. 44387, 448. For thepurposes of this article, though, the term Welsh School is generally eschewed (the notion ofSchools, as noted below in relation to the Frankfurt School, is itself inherently problematic) infavour of a specific use of the term Critical Security Studies (CSS), used as shorthand here to referprimarily to the work of Booth and Wyn Jones.

7 Ken Booth, Security and Emancipation, Review of International Studies, 17:4 (1991), pp. 31326;

316. The article was drawn from the plenary address to the British International Studies Association(BISA) annual conference in 1990.8 Booth, Critical Security Studies and World Politics; Theory of World Security.9 h h f ld ( b id b id i i )

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exclusion of consideration of other related concepts and issues. The second strandof the articles argument questions whether the equation of emancipation andsecurity is sustainable in relation to understandings of emancipation withinCritical Theory. With regard to the latter, discussions of emancipation oftenengage issues such as violence and resistance to a much greater degree, some even

to the point of valorising the violent potentialities associated with emancipatorystruggles. This contrasts markedly with the conceptual merging of security andemancipation within CSS, where the equal priority given to security seems topreclude a priori any notion of emancipatory violence.

In part, it is argued here, the failure to flesh out the full implications of linkingthe study of security to the Frankfurt School tradition (and the notion ofemancipation) is due to the way in which that tradition has been interpreted andrevived within CSS. A lacuna in this reconstruction of the Frankfurt Schooltradition within CSS is a lack of substantive consideration of work of HerbertMarcuse, a thinker who, is in many ways potentially closest in spirit to the version

of critical theory embodied within contemporary CSS. This third component of theargument is drawn out through the examination of Marcuses thinking on thesubjects of violence and resistance in comparison with CSS. In short, Marcusedisplays a readiness to grasp conceptual nettles that is currently largely absent fromCSS, a readiness which is perhaps instructive for both Critical Security Studies andcritical international theory even if we do not ultimately buy into Marcuses ownassessments. Marcuse, it is argued, wrestles with many similar questions of concernto proponents of CSS and, indeed, goes much further in fleshing out the contentof the concepts of violence and resistance in his reflections on the prospects foremancipatory change. The analogy is of course imperfect, and the point is not that

Marcuse in any way necessarily offers solutions to the current constitution of CSSor an unproblematic supplement on the issues of violence and/or resistance. Indeed,it may well be that Marcuses definitions of violence and resistance are inherentlyproblematic and troubling (as many of his critics were to point out). But if it isaccepted that many of Marcuses concerns resonate with those of contemporaryCSS, then perhaps its contemporary exponents would do well to reflect upon theradical implications of Marcuses reflections on violence and resistance for thinkingthrough the connections between emancipation and security. At the very least,Marcuses configuration of the relationship between emancipation/liberation andviolent resistance calls any equivalence of security and emancipation into question,

implying as it does an understanding of repressive security as is explored later inthe article. Recognising this might in turn potentially put CSS into conversationwith alternative ways of rendering emancipation within post-Marxist thoughtthat question this equivalence, and in turn with work in security studies thatis already beginning to draw on this wider tradition of thinking throughemancipation.10

10

See in particular Claudia Aradau, Security and the democratic scene: descuritization andemancipation, Journal of International Relations and Development, 7 (2004), pp. 388413; also JefHuysmans, Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy, Contemporary

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CSS, emancipation and Critical Theory

As noted previously, CSS has, as an approach to the study of security, becomevirtually synonymous with the concept of emancipation. This idea that emanci-pation and security are in fact coeval has been promoted as the central defining

feature of CSS by its main proponents,11

interpreters12

and critics13

alike. For themost part this identification has been encouraged (by Ken Booth in particular) anddefended by the main proponents of CSS, Booth and Richard Wyn Jones.14 AsBooth declares, Emancipation is at the controversial heart of critical securitystudies,15 and he has recently restated this nexus at the heart of CSS in terms of:

[. . .] a virtuous circle of security and emancipation. This occurs when the pursuit of security(reducing the threats that impose life-determining conditions of insecurity on individuals andgroups) promotes emancipation (freeing people from oppression and so giving them someopportunity to explore being more fully human), while pursuit of emancipation (reducingstructural oppression) promotes security (opening up space in which people can feel safer).16

Commitment to this idea of a virtuous circle is, in turn, frequently presumedto entail commitment to a Marxian tradition, specifically the Frankfurt Schooltradition of critical social theory. In this regard Booth tips his hat to the methodof immanent critique and proposes a definition of a distinct theory of securityfrom a Frankfurt School critical theory perspective constructed, once again,around the security-emancipation nexus.17

It would, however, be slightly misleading to presume that the Frankfurt Schooltradition has always played a major part in the introduction of the concept ofemancipation into security studies. Booths touchstone definition of the relation-ship between Security and Emancipation,18 which has subsequently become a

referent point for discussion of the concept of emancipation in both internationalrelations and security studies, came in the early 1990s. This was substantiallybefore the term Critical/critical was appended to security studies (generally datedto the late 1990s),19 and Booths original definition of emancipation as security

11 See, for example Ken Booth, Introduction to Part 3, in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studiesand World Politics (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner, 2005), pp. 1812 and Booth, Theory of WorldSecurity, p. 278. Richard Wyn Jones likewise argues that CSS reconceptualises security by virtue ofbeing Focused, crucially, on emancipation as the prism through which both the theory and practiceof security should be viewed, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner,1999), p. 166. Emphasis added.

12 See, for example, Michael Sheehan, Security: An Analytical Survey (Boulder, CO.: Lynne Rienner,

2005), pp. 1648.13 Some of which are discussed in more detail below.14 See references in n. 11 above and, for example, Richard Wyn Jones, On Emancipation: Necessity,

Capacity, and Concrete Utopias, in Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics.15 Booth, Introduction to Part 3, p. 181.16 Booth, Introduction to Part 3, p. 183. See also Ken Booth, Theory of World Security; for example

pp. 1101.17 Booth, Critical Explorations, in Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics.18 Emancipation is the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human

constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and the threatof war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppressionand so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation, not power ororder, produces true security. Emancipation, theoretically is security. Booth, Security and

Emancipation, p. 316.19 With the conference at York University in Toronto that eventually led to Keith Krause and MichaelC. Williams (eds), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (Minneapolis: University of

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makes no explicit reference to any of the key figures generally associated with theFrankfurt School or to the Frankfurt School tradition (insofar as we might speakof one) as a whole.

This fact alone sets Booths more recent direct invocations of the FrankfurtSchool in more stark relief. In these recent allusions to the Frankfurt School,

Booth adopts what we might term as a leaning strategy; that is, his own allusionsrefer not to the Frankfurt School but to the work of others who do.20 This results,by consequence, in the incorporation and adaptation of terminology seen to beassociated with Critical Theory most prominently the concept of emancipationitself, but also the term immanent critique and the distinction between tradi-tional and critical theory without much sustained reference to the origins ofthat terminology.21 In his recent Theory of World Security Booth gives his greatestdegree of attention to the Frankfurt School, but admits that the approach headopts to it is as pragmatic as towards theory in general, and the FrankfurtSchool is but one of many intellectual traditions to be plundered to assist the

development of a theory of world security.22 Booth is, for the most part, simplyhappy to acknowledge the special helpfulness of the Frankfurt School in orientingan emancipatory approach to security and to endorse the interpretation of theFrankfurt School in CSS terms offered by the work of Richard Wyn Jones.23

Whereas Booth alludes to the Frankfurt School primarily to establish anorientation, Richard Wyn Jones explicitly takes his task to be to develop theconceptual foundations of a critical theory approach to the study of security what I call critical security studies; and, moreover, to take seriously the origins ofthe pronominal critical in critical security studies by outlining an understandingbased firmly on the assumptions of critical theory.24 In part this is motivated by

Wyn Jones own sense that, and this is a charge we might equally lay at the doorof Booths own work, one of the striking features of critical international theoryis its rather curious, at times even tenuous, connection with what is usuallyregarded (in social theory circles at least) as critical theory, namely, the work ofthe Frankfurt School.25 In contrast to Booths stated readiness to mix-and-matchconcepts drawn from Frankfurt School theorists with a multiplicity of other ideas justified as an Arendtian strategy of Perlenfischerei26 Wyn Jones argues thatsince the Frankfurt School does not constitute a unified body of thought but atbest a body of thinkers connected by shared theoretical concerns, institutionalaffiliations and personal relations (and is frequently fractured and diverse even

then), then This means that concepts cannot be simply appropriated from thecritical theory literature and applied to issues in the security realm withoutreference to their origins.27

This results in a sustained attempt by Wyn Jones to give reference to theCritical Theory origins of the concept of emancipation following the introductionof the concept into security studies, an attempt most clearly formulated in his 1999

20 Most notably Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory.21 Booth, Beyond Critical Security Studies, pp. 2613.22 Theory of World Security, p. 41.23 Booth, Beyond Critical Security Studies, p. 261; see also Theory of World Security, p. xv.24

Richard Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 2.25 Ibid.26 Booth, Theory of World Security, pp. 3941.27 bid



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text Security, Strategy and Critical Theory. Here Wyn Jones takes his cue from theearly work of Max Horkheimer, and in particular his 1937 essay on Traditionaland Critical Theory.28 Horkheimers early work, Wyn Jones notes, is distinguishedby its relatively optimistic perception of the prospects for social change whichmight result, ultimately, in a more emancipated political order. Emancipation,

for the early Horkheimer, entails the liberation of individual human beingsfrom suffering and the promotion of their happiness29 and Wyn Jones notesHorkheimers contempt for those who would concern themselves with man assuch [rather] than human beings in particular.30 The lesson that Wyn Jones takesfrom Horkheimers early arguments (adumbrated here for the purposes of brevity)is that emancipation does not refer to an idealised end-state that has yet to bereached, but to unfulfilled potentialities extant within the current order. In thisHorkheimer remains true to the broad orientations of Marxian theory, withoutnecessarily committing to a blue-print for emancipation or to an end-point ortelos. Thus Horkheimers initial vision of Critical Theory, as Wyn Jones reads it,

understands emancipation as the more rational and purposeful utilization ofalready existing forces of production in order to bring nature under rationalhuman control, and this as an ongoing and open-ended process.31

In Wyn Jones view contemporary adherents to critical theory should alsorestate their understanding of emancipation as a process rather than an end point,a direction rather than a destination [. . .] Even if a more emancipated order isbrought into existence, the process of emancipation remains incomplete. There isalways room for improvement; there is always unfinished business in the task ofemancipation.32 In terms of security studies, the implication which Wyn Jonestakes from the early Horkheimer is that CSS, if anchored in a broader concern

with human emancipation, should similarly be concerned with the liberation ofindividual human beings from suffering and oppression not only from the militarythreats that have tended to be the traditional focus of security studies, but alsonon-military threats such as environmental threats, poverty and state-basedoppression which, since the individual is the referent object of a concept of securityanchored in emancipation, are equally deserving of consideration. This does notnecessarily, Wyn Jones argues, encourage a form of methodological individualism;he recognises that individual identity is a central aspect of what it means to behuman, and that by consequence the constitutive relationship between identity,security and community requires CSS to engage with the nature of specific

political groupings.33A key problem addressed by Wyn Jones, though, is that this conception of

emancipation, intended to be foundational for CSS, was itself effectively rejectedlatterly by Horkheimer himself: first in Horkheimers Eclipse of Reason;34 and thenmore fundamentally in his collaboration with Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of

28 Max Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans.Matthew J. OConnell and others (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).

29 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 23.30 Horkheimer, cited in ibid., p. 23.31

Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 23.32 Ibid., p. 77.33 See Sheehan, Security: An Analytical Survey, p. 167.34 kh i l f ( k i )



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Enlightenment (hereafter abbreviated as DoE).35 The latter work, Wyn Jonesargues, effectively truncated the project of Critical Theory as Horkheimer hadearlier described it.36 Written in exile from Germany post-WWII and post-Auschwitz, DoE is suffused with a pessimism so thoroughgoing that emancipation,understood in Horkheimers prior sense, is effectively inconceivable.37 According to

Adorno and Horkheimers assessment in DoE, barbarism, not emancipation, waslatent in technological progress, the effort master nature, and, ultimately, reasonitself; hence Adorno and Horkhiemers pronouncement that enlightenment istotalitarian.38

From emancipation to liberation: between Marcuse and CSS

Wyn Jones task then, if emancipation is to function as the anchorage of CSS is,in effect, to save Critical Theory from itself. In this Wyn Jones is in good company

and draws on similar endeavours to redeem the initial promise of Critical Theoryas found in the work of Jrgen Habermas and Axel Honneth in particular.Without suggesting that either of these thinkers are entirely unproblematic in theirown right, Wyn Jones argues that they do nonetheless provide sustained and validcritiques of the account offered by DoE and the impasse it creates with respect toemancipation. He consequently uses these efforts at redeeming the promise ofCritical Theory in order to make the case that it is worthwhile retainingemancipation as an anchoring concept for the study of security.39 Based on thesegrounds, Wyn Jones does not challenge the appropriation of the concept ofemancipation for the study of security, but rather seeks to raise awareness of its

conceptual history, its roots in Critical Theory, and what this might entail inapplication of the concept to international and security studies. In short,proponents of CSS have sought to defend and uphold their use and maintenanceof the concept of emancipation within the study of security and internationalrelations more broadly, even if there are subtle distinctions to be made between thekey proponents of CSS on this issue. Booth has argued that the test of theory isemancipation,40 aiming to rule out Vulgar relativistic thinking [. . .] calculated toreplicate only a dismal and impoverished world. What matters is whether ideasare true or false, with the grain of humanity or against it, emancipatory or

35 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming(London: Verso, 1979).

36 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 35.37 Emancipation, Nicholas J. Rengger argues, was not one of Adornos major concerns, and his

collaboration with Horkheimer is conventionally seen to curtail the thematic of emancipation Rengger, International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order, p. 162. In another sense,though, Adornos later work might be read as an attempt to re-conceive emancipation in a mannerthat is not identitarian/totalitarian and avoids some of the potential pitfalls of subjectivism andviolence that are discussed later in this article see especially Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics(London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1973). More recently Andrew Linklater has sought to grounda sociology of global morals in a reading of Adorno see Andrew Linklater, Toward a sociologyof global morals with an emancipatory intent, Review of International Studies, 33 (2007), pp.13550, 143, and Distant Suffering and Cosmopolitan Obligations, International Relations, 44

(2007), pp. 1936, 23.38 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 134.39 A position subsequently reiterated in Wyn Jones On Emancipation.40 h d i i l i di



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oppressive.41 Wyn Jones has, by contrast sought to rule in many post-structuralist accounts of security on the basis of a more circumscribed notion ofemancipation.42 As discussed previously, if Emancipation with a capital E wereto be taken as the measure of all theory, then this is a measure that a numberof the original critical theorists would themselves fail to meet, and Wyn Jones

claims here can be read, contra both Booth and post-structuralist-oriented criticsof CSS, as an attempt to resist the ghettoisation of security studies, with a WelshSchool fenced off by its commitment to emancipation.

This effort at intellectual grounding has not, however, been sufficient to insulateCSS from criticism regarding its use of emancipation in relation to security farfrom it. Some have accused CSS of encouraging an unhelpful distinction betweenindividual and society (or social grouping), which, they maintain, still potentiallyencourages methodological individualism.43 With varying degrees of intensity,others have argued that the assumed universal applicability of emancipation beliesits origins in a particular (Western) tradition of political philosophy,44 and that the

prioritisation of security (as emancipation and vice versa) as a positive conditionleads to a failure to perceive the political effects of security.45 The latter line ofcriticism, particularly that offered by Claudia Aradau, has more recently made theargument that it is not the concept of emancipation per se that is problematic, butrather the manner in which it has been defined and used within CSS. As Aradaunotes, the invocation of security is frequently accompanied by repressive andexclusionary practices associated with militarisation and securitisation; hence,When equated with security, emancipation becomes problematic as it can nolonger envisage social transformations outside of the logic of security [. . .] Thestruggle for security is re-styled as a struggle for emancipation, without any qualms

about the relationship between emancipation and security.46 In so doing, Aradauargues, this circular definition of emancipation as security deprives the former ofits truly transformative potential, a theme which is returned to later.47 MarkNeocleous takes a similar logic even further: What if at the heart of the logic ofsecurity lies not a vision of freedom or emancipation, but a means of modelling thewhole of human society around a particular vision of order? Against Ken Boothsfamous identification of security and emancipation as two sides of the same coin,Neocleous argues that it is security and oppression [that] are two sides of the samecoin.48

41 Booth, Introduction to Part 3, p. 181.42 As argued at length in Wyn Jones, On Emancipation, p. 219.43 Martin Shaw, There is No Such Thing as Society: Beyond Individualism and Statism in

International Security Studies, Review of International Studies, 19 (1993), pp. 15975, and BarryBuzan, Ole Wver and Jaap De Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder: LynneRienner, 1998). See Sheehan, International Security: An Analytical Survey, pp. 1656 for an overview.

44 See Hayward Alker, Emancipation in the Critical Security Studies Project and Nicholas J. RenggerNegative Dialectic? The Two Modes of Critical Theory in World Politics, in Richard Wyn Jones(ed.), Critical Theory and World Politics (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2001), p. 98.

45 C. A. S. E, Critical Approaches to Security in Europe, p. 456; Claudia Aradau, Security and thedemocratic scene: desecuritization and emancipation, Journal of International Relations andDevelopment, 7 (2004) pp. 388413, 398.

46

Aradau, Security and the democratic scene, p. 398.47 Ibid., p. 390.48 Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 4, 5.

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Once we begin to focus on the relationship between emancipation and security,it is argued here, challenging questions arise about the potential forms of resistancecan take including, even, the question of emancipatory violence. The case madein this article is that it is actually one of the thinkers associated with the FrankfurtSchool, though not one considered extensively by the proponents of CSS, that

offers a telling illustration of the perils of over-emphasising emancipation. HerbertMarcuse, it is argued here, shares several assumptions with CSS, even if he figuresrelatively little as an apparent influence. References to Marcuse in Wyn Jonesinterpretation of the Frankfurt School tradition are spartan; Marcuses support ofstudent activism in 1960s Germany is mentioned to contextualise Adorno andHorkheimers relative disdain for the same events, as is Marcuses influence onlatter day authors on Critical Theory such as Stephen Bronner and DouglasKellner.49 Wyn Jones main concentration in terms of post-DoE Critical Theory,however, focuses on the intellectual trajectories of Adorno and Horkheimer ontheir return to Germany post-World War II and the subsequent directions taken

in Frankfurt School theory by Habermas and Honneth in particular. Likewise inhis considerations of the relationship between technology and security, Wyn Jonesdoes not draw on Marcuses own extensive reflections on the social implications oftechnology,50 but instead on the more recent Critical Theory of Technologyoffered by one of Marcuses modern interpreters in this regard, Andrew Feenberg51

(although Feenberg himself maintains an open indebtedness to Marcuses thinkingon technology).52

Further reasons for this relative lack of consideration of Marcuse are unclear,although the practice is in keeping with the general intellectual climate. As DouglasKellner notes, Marcusian Critical Theory has, after its relative prominence and

influence in social theory and New Left circles up to the 1980s, fallen out offavour in an era that rejects revolutionary thought and grand visions of liberationand social reconstruction.53 This however, one would have thought, would be lessproblematic for CSS, an approach that takes as its ultimate goal emancipatorychange, even when understood as emancipation with a small e. True, MarcusesMarxian-Freudian synthesis is highly idiosyncratic, and the Freudian influence haslittle resonance with contemporary CSS. Furthermore, the question of whether ornot Marcuse can or should be seen as necessary to any discussion of the FrankfurtSchool itself, as weve noted already, an inherently porous term is of course amatter of intellectual preference and debate. Given that the consideration of

Frankfurt School Critical Theory within international relations was notably limiteduntil the publication of Security, Strategy and Critical Theory (notwithstandingcertain works of Andrew Linklater, Mark Hoffman and Richard K. Ashley priorto this, but even here the concentration being firmly on Jrgen Habermas),54 the

49 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 55.50 See ch. 5 of Security, Strategy and Critical Theory.51 Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).52 See, Andrew Feenberg, Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (New

York: Routledge, 2004).53

Douglas Kellner, preface to Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers ofHerbert Marcuse, Vol. 1, edited by Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. xiv.54 For an overview see Beate Jahn, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Critical Theory as the Latest

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attention given to Adorno, Horkheimer and Honneth by Wyn Jones shouldcertainly be regarded as expansive rather than restrictive.

Yet there is arguably much room to consider Marcuse in relation to CSS,particularly if we accept Kellners argument that Marcuses later work forms partof an activist strand (in the sense of maintaining some belief in the virtues of

activism, as a method of achieving social change) of Frankfurt School thinkingwhich developed in the late 1940s, as distinct from Adorno and Horkheimers deeppessimism about the prospects for emancipatory change in Dialectic of Enlighten-ment.55 Though Marcuses work in the 1950s and 1960s is not explicitly set againstor defined in terms of the account given in DoE,56 Marcuses concern withidentifying potentially revolutionary elements of social change (be it in the Hippymovement, Black Militants, anti-Vietnam protests, the Womens liberation move-ment, or anti-colonial struggles)57 is at odds with Adorno and Horkheimerssensibilities, but arguably in keeping with Wyn Jones recommendation thatproponents of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those

social movements that promote emancipatory social change.58 Marcuse was stillvery clearly looking for unfulfilled potentialities extant within the existing order ina manner that is arguably closer to early critical project outlined by Horkheimer(which Wyn Jones wants to rejuvenate and uphold) than is the later Horkheimerhimself. In this sense, it might be said that Marcuse wrestled with a very similarproblem to that revisited by Wyn Jones: that is, what are the prospects foremancipatory change in a context in which the key original proponent of thecritical project (Horkheimer) seems to have pronounced its own impossibility?

Beyond this, there are also a number of other shared concerns that arguablyamount to a certain family resemblance between Marcuses project and that of

CSS even though there is no directly acknowledged relation between them. TheCSS emphasis on the individual as the ultimate referent of security, and apeople-centred59 subject of security has certain echoes of Marcuses call forpolitical action in defence of life.60 Where CSS places emphasis on fulfilment ofbasic human needs as a predicate of broader fulfilment what Booth has recentlytermed as survival-plus Marcuse attempts to develop a biological foundationfor socialism, the conditions for the emergence of concrete individuals and aninstinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings a solidarity which hasbeen effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but whichnow appears as a precondition for liberation.61 Similarly, although Marcuse rarely

uses the term emancipation as liberally as proponents of CSS, instead focusing onliberation defined as that which must precede the construction of a free society,

55 Kellner (ed.), Introduction to Technology, War and Fascism, pp. 125.56 When Marcuse does refer to DoE it is usually in the form a positive endorsement; see, for example,

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 137, 157.

57 See Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (London: Allen Lane, 1972), esp. pp. 767.58 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 161.59 Booth, Security and Emancipation, p. 324.60 Hebert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press,

1966), p. 20.61

Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (London: Allen Lane, 1969), p. 10. Compare Booth:Critical theory escapes the confines of privileged referents [of security] by embracing no staticinterest save that of the primordial human being and the species in nature Critical Explorations,i h ( d ) l d d ld l



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one which necessitates an historical break with the past and the present62 inmuch of his later work, the free society Marcuse hopes will emerge from theprocess of this liberation will result from:

the spectre of a revolution which subordinates the development of productive forces andhigher standards of living to the requirements of creating solidarity for the human species,for abolishing poverty and misery beyond all national frontiers and spheres of interest forthe attainment of peace.63

Liberation, in other words, should have an emancipatory purpose in a recognisablyHorkheimerian sense.64 For all his undoubted failings Marcuse, as much as anyother critical theorist writing in Adorno and Horkheimers wake, measures up toWyn Jones recommendation that: critical theorists must go beyond generalizedexhortations concerning emancipation, empowerment, freedom, and happiness. Ifcritical theory is to have practical relevance, it must reflect on what emancipationmeans in terms of actual institutions and relationships.65

On activism and violence

Marcuse then, it might be said, aims to theorise the conditions for emancipationand it is here that there might be potentially instructive guides (and warnings) forthe future development of CSS. Adhering broadly to the vision of emancipationcomparable to that upheld in CSS, Marcuse attempts to broach thorny questionsabout possibilities and sites of social change to a much greater extent than has arguably yet been undertaken within contemporary CSS. Wyn Jones notes that

Apart from Marcuse, who was briefly active in the revolutionary Soldiers Councilestablished in Berlin after World War I, none [of the early Frankfurt School] hadany direct experience of political practice.66 In the case of Marcuse this is asomewhat restrictive definition of political practice given not only his activities invarious US intelligence agencies during and immediately after World War II67 butparticularly his connection to various forms of social and political activism duringthe 1960s for which he is now more well known. The latter experience causedMarcuse to consider at length two questions which, though arguably implicit in theCSS project and referred to indirectly, have received comparatively little directsustained reflection by its proponents to date: the question of violence; and the

question of resistance.On the question of violence, CSS has placed great emphasis on emancipation

from violence (defined both in terms of physical violence and structural violence),but has remained relatively quiet on or opposed to violence as a legitimate meansof achieving emancipatory change.68 As Booth argues, one should eschew the

62 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. viii.63 Ibid., pp. ixx.64 On the tendency towards interchangeable use of the concepts of emancipation and liberation more

generally, see Pieterse, Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern, p. 11.65 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 76.66

Ibid., p. 13.67 See Kellner, Introduction to Technology, War and Fascism for further historical background.68 As an aside we might note a parallel lack within the Copenhagen School approach with regard to

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powerful tradition of believing that the ends justifies the means. To do otherwiseis to risk corrupting the good ends one seeks by violent or iniquitous means [. . .]The ideals of emancipation must be reflected in the emancipatory politics chosento achieve those goals. There is no other way, if emancipation is to be true toitself.69 Marcuses commitment to social change and the conditions for genuine

security in human solidarity, by contrast, leads him to a very different perspectiveon violence. For Marcuse, it should be noted, violence is a contingent phenomenonto be overcome, and the measure of free society is the extent to which the use ofphysical violence is absent. Such a society would be based, and here Marcuse drawson his Freudian influence, on a new sensibility the demands of the life instinctsand would be made up of human beings who are physiologically and psychologi-cally able to experience things, and each other, outside of the context of violenceand exploitation.70 This assertion that the absence of violence is the measure of afree society is summed up in Marcuses comparison with the aesthetic dimensionin which, quoting Nietzsche:

For the artist, the beautiful is the mastery of opposites without tension, so that violence isno longer needed. . . The beautiful has the biological value of that which is useful,beneficial, enhancing life (Lebensteigernd). By virtue of these qualities, the aestheticdimension can serve as a sort of gauge for a free society.71

Hence we might say that, ostensibly, for Marcuse as for proponents of CSS onlyemancipation equals true security if defined as the freeing of people (asindividuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which wouldstop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do72 in the sense thatviolence and exploitation are minimised as constraints on human beings. Seeminglyin keeping with Booths contention that Emancipation, empirically, is Security,73

Marcuse aspires to a liberated condition in which No longer condemned tocompulsive aggressiveness and repression in the struggle for existence, individualswould be able to create a technical and natural environment which would nolonger perpetuate violence, ugliness, ignorance and brutality.74

Marcuses understanding of emancipation as liberation is, however, in manyways at odds with the idea of emancipation as security. Although he shares thegeneral sense of emancipation as freedom from constraints, Marcuse uses the termsecurity rarely and then only in reference to the state apparatuses that are oftenemployed as tools of repression. Some of us in the developed world may alreadybenefit from something vaguely approaching the kind of freedom associated withemancipation Marcuse argues, as opposed to the wretched of the earth to whomMarcuse frequently refers with obvious allusions to Frantz Fanon.75 However, he

Wver, Securitisation and Desecuritisation, in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York:Columbia University Press), pp. 4686; Aradau, Security and the democratic scene: descuritizationand emancipation, p. 399; Thomas Diez, The Paradoxes of Europes Borders, ComparativeEuropean Politics, 4 (2006), pp. 23552.

69 Booth, Introduction to Part 3, p. 183.70 Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, pp. 19, 25.71 Ibid., p. 27. See also pp. 403, and Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (London: Allen Lane,

1972), pp. 23.72

Booth, Security and Emancipation, p. 316.73 Ibid., p. 323.74 Counterrevolution and Revolt, pp. 23.75 h h d f h h ( d i )



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sees this freedom as only partial and contrasts this growing freedom of (some)individuals with the unfreedom of the whole:76 the artificial and privateliberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation:the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which willaccompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new

aesthetic environment.77 Moreover, the nascent presence of this new sensibility insociety only heightens our awareness of the pervasive presence of violence as anaspect of social life: that is, the extent to which current conditions fail to measureup to the gauge of a free society, evident in the degree that violence is still regardedas a social necessity for the maintenance of social order. Hence Marcuse speaks(again in a manner not wholly anathema to CSS given the latters persistentwariness of the state as guarantor of security,78 but with more radical implications)of dysfunctional states where functioning seems defined rather negatively asabsence of civil war, massive disorder, economic collapse.79 Extrapolating fromthis analysis, it might be said that the Marcusian perspective in contra-distinction

to contemporary CSS foregrounds the issue of repressive security: instanceswhere security is invoked to suppress emancipatory change, often by violentmeans.

Here, as elsewhere, Marcuse reserves the term violence for actual physicalviolence. This is not to say that Marcuse is unconcerned with forms of exploitationthat CSS would group under threats to individual security and for which itfrequently uses the Galtungian concept of structural violence to refer to.80 Quitethe opposite. But Marcuse groups such forms of exploitation under his broaderconcept of domination which is dealt with at length in his One-Dimensional Manand throughout his work as a permanent feature of capitalist societies (in

particular).81 True, Marcuse does see an inherent linkage between this apparatus ofdomination and actual physical manifestations of violence:

For violence is built into the very structure of this society: as the accumulatedaggressiveness which drives the business of life in all branches of corporate capitalism, asthe legal aggression on the highways, and as the national aggression abroad which seems tobecome more brutal the more it takes as its victims the wretched of the earth those who

76 Compare Wyn Jones argument that the relative security of the inhabitants of the North ispurchased at the price of chronic insecurity for the vast majority of the world population [. . .] So,far from being a necessary condition for the good life, statism appears to be one of the main sourcesof insecurity part of the problem rather than the solution; prior to this he argues that When a

broader definition of security that includes non-military threats is applied, it is clear that many statesare deeply implicated in the creation of other forms of insecurity for their own populations, forexample in such issues as food and environmental security. Security, Strategy and Critical Theory,p. 99.

77 Ibid., p. 37.78 [T]o countless millions of people in the world it is their own state, and not the Enemy that is the

primary security threat. Booth, Security and Emancipation, p. 318.79 Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, p. 67.80 Johan Galtung, Violence, Peace and Peace Research, Journal of Peace Research, 3 (1969),

pp. 16791. On CSSs identification with this understanding of violence see Steve Smith, TheContested Concept of Security, in Ken Booth (ed.), Critical Security Studies, p. 54.

81 For Marcuse, domination exists as something of a social fact and a decisive tendency in currentpolitics; indeed, one of the major problems for Marcuses own analysis (given his own search for

elements of resistance and liberation) is that his conception of domination is so all-encompassing to the point that society and domination are essentially one and the same see his Five Lectures:Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (London: Allen

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have not yet been civilized by the capital of the Free World. In the mobilization of thisaggressiveness, ancient physical forces are activated to serve the economic-political needs ofthe system [. . .]82

Yet, in the last instance, Marcuse maintains a very narrow concept of violence. Inresponse to a proposal to consider the concept of extra-economic violence,

Marcuse declares that:We should not overlook the fact that manipulatory tendencies are not violence. [. . .]Violence remains violence [. . .] Violence is when someone beats someone elses head in witha club, or threatens to. It is not violence when I am presented with television programs thatshow the existing state of things transfigured in some way or other.83

Indeed, Marcuse is more concerned with those forms of physical (state) violencenot called by that name: In the established vocabulary, violence is a term whichdoes not apply to the action of the police, the National Guard, the Marshals, theMarines, the bombers.84 In other words, the use of violence by the state in thename of security is actually portrayed as non-violence in official discourse: notas violence, but as something else (today Marcuse would no doubt point to tortureas standard operating procedure, friendly fire, interdiction, precision-strikes,collateral damage as examples of such rhetorical substitution). The stateslegitimate monopoly ensures that its violence is not represented as such to thelatter alone belongs the lawful right to abrogate peace and to organize the killingand beating.85 As Marcuse puts it, one of the most effective rights of theSovereign is the right to establish enforceable definitions of words.86

Where all this becomes potentially unsettling to CSSs rejection of violentmeans is in the fact that Marcuse, as one commentator notes, potentially ends upadvocating violence against the system in order to quash the systems inherentviolence.87 At certain points Marcuse argues with the social movements andprotests of the 60s in mind demands for social change will necessarily contravenethe law, and in doing so will, on occasion, provoke a violent response from thestate as is its wont. On such occasions, Marcuse argues, In the face of the scopeand intensity of this sanctioned aggression, the traditional distinction betweenlegitimate and illegitimate violence becomes questionable.88 This point is devel-oped in most detail in Marcuses (1965) critique of Repressive Tolerance.89 HereMarcuse argues that though the concept of tolerance was initially used to preservedemocratic freedoms, calls for democratic tolerance are increasingly used toconstrain advocates of social change (such as forms of legal street demonstrationsand other forms of protest sanctioned by the state) and uphold the status quo. Inthis sense tolerance has become repressive; as Kahn summarises this position, thecall for tolerance is [used] by the ruling classes to protect themselves from

82 Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, pp. 756.83 Marcuse, The End of Utopia Q&A, in Five Lectures, p. 723.84 Essay on Liberation, pp. 712.85 Essay on Liberation, p. 72.86 Ibid., p. 73.87 Richard Kahn, The Educative Potential of Ecological Militancy in an Age of Big Oil: towards a

Marcusian ecopedagogy, Policy Futures in Education, 4:1 (2006), pp. 3144, 35.88 Essay on Liberation, pp. 767.89 Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jnr. & Herbert

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interventions that seek to limit global violence and suppression, fear, and misery[. . .] it amounts to a perversion of tolerance that works to repress instead ofliberate.90

By consequence Marcuse argues that straightforward commitment to theprinciple of non-violence actually perpetuates a system in which violence is

inherent.91 Marcuse argues that this was the experience of the civil rightsmovement: that the others practice the violence, and that against this violencelegality is problematic from the very beginning.92 The point, for Marcuse, is thatnot all violence is the same, and that forms of violence can be distinguished (bythe ends they serve) between violence of suppression and violence of liberation.93

Movements aimed at liberation (for him anti-establishment forces in thedeveloped world, anti-colonial forces in the developing world), when they employviolence, are ultimately practicing what Marcuse terms as counter-violence: thatis, violence used to destabilise and change forms of institutionalised violence andexploitation. Preaching non-violence on principle, Marcuse argues, only repro-

duces the existing institutionalized violence;94 Non-violence is normally not onlypreached to but extracted from the weak it is a necessity rather than a virtue, andnormally it does not seriously harm the case of the strong.95 Marcuse acknowl-edges that the experience of the anti-colonial movement in India is an exception tohis rule here, but goes on to compare passive resistance and its effect in India toa general strike on the basis of its scale. Ultimately, in Marcuses view, the endof violence has still to be fought for.96

Marcuse on the metaphysics of resistance

So how does all this relate to CSS? In short, the Marcusian perspective raises thetroubling prospect not that commitment to emancipatory change (or the modes ofliberation used to achieve it) necessitates violence, but that it does not necessarilypreclude it and, in some instances, may justify it. In the context of emancipationas liberation, the implications for understanding violence and resistance are fardifferent from that of understanding emancipation as security. This is not to saythat Marcuse himself gives an entirely gung-ho carte blanche for the use of violencein the name of liberation from exploitation and the search for emancipation. Such

violence, Marcuse concedes, is motivated by a hatred of existing conditions of

90 Kahn, The Educative Potential of Ecological Militancy, p. 35.91 No matter how non-violent our demonstrations are or will be, we must expect them to be met with

new institutional violence The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition, in Five Lectures,p. 105.

92 Marcuse, The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition, in Five Lectures, p. 89.93 Ibid.94 Repressive Tolerance, p. 90.95 Ibid., p. 102. Cf. tienne Balibar on Violence, Ideality and Cruelty, in Politics and the Other Scene

(London: Verso, 2002) there are certainly degrees in the amount of violence which goes along withcivilizing ideals; but nothing like a zerodegree. Therefore there is no such thing as non-violence

p. 145.96 Counterrevolution and Revolt, p. 78. Marcuse draws here on Delacroixs painting of liberty leadingthe people as illustrative of a potential female counter-force: She wears no uniform; her breasts areb d h b if l f h f i l h ill h ifl i h h d



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domination and exploitation; in this sense, No liberation is possible withouthatred.97 But how precisely this hatred is to be contained is unclear, and this is,Marcuse admits, a really frightening question:

Naturally in the course of the revolutionary movement itself this hatred can turn intocruelty, brutality, and terror. The boundary between the two is horribly and extraordinarilyin flux. The only thing I can at least say about this is that a part of our work consists inpreventing this development as much as possible, that is to show that brutality and crueltyalso belong necessarily to the system of repression and that a liberation struggle simplydoes not need this transmogrification of hatred into brutality and cruelty. One can hit anopponent, one can vanquish an opponent, without cutting off his ears, without severing hislimbs, without torturing him.98

So why is Marcuse, himself in search of a society in which compulsiveaggressiveness, prepared to allow for situations where the danger of hatred ofexploitation tipping over into barbarity is always present? The reason lies in Marcuses

elevation of another concept (or for him, a right) over that of violence: resistance.

Like the question of violence, the question of resistance, in a broad sense, isembedded within the CSS perspective of security as emancipation. Aradau notes inthis regard that CSS relies on the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt Schooland hence a critical tradition of thinking social change and resistance..99

Consequently CSS has stressed the primacy of praxis and warns against thedanger of either separating theory entirely from political practice, or simplycollapsing one into the other. Here again the question of violence within practicesof resistance remains somewhat implicit in the CSS position, although there is adefinite leaning towards non-violent forms of protest and critique as the main toolof resistance for the proponent of CSS.100 The main recommendation has been that

through their educational activities, proponents of critical security studies shouldaim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatorysocial change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimatingalternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting thestruggles of social movements.101 In this there is a certain homology withMarcuses assertion that there is a period of enlightenment prior to materialchange a period of education; but, for Marcuse, education [then] turns intopraxis: demonstration, confrontation, rebellion.102

Since CSS takes its concern to be contingent threats to individual security,threats which are necessarily context-specific, there has been a general reluctance to

specify exactly what support of social movements might consist of beyond acritical/educative function. There has, however, in keeping with this concern, beenless reticence in identifying the concrete social movements promoting emancipa-tory change which should be supported. The goal of emancipatory change itselfdictates that some alternative visions and social movements are more alternative and preferable than others. Let us consider the ending of apartheid in South

97 Marcuse (ed.), The End of Utopia Q&A, in Five Lectures, p. 78.98 Ibid., pp. 789. Where in a revolution this sort of terror changes into acts of cruelty, brutality and

torture, then we are already talking about a perversion of the revolution Marcuse, The Problemof Violence and the Radical Opposition, p. 103.

99

Aradau, Security and the democratic scene, p. 397.100 As advocated more explicitly in, for example, Booth, Security and Emancipation, p. 321.101 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 161.102 b



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Africa, Wyn Jones offers as an example; Although the citizens of that countrycannot be adjudged to be free after the overthrow of the apartheid system, surelythey are freer. Although the establishment of liberal democracy there offers nopanacea, it is a better system than the totalitarian one it has replaced.103 Boothhas argued that We can begin or continue pursuing emancipation in what we

research, in how we teach, in what we put on conference agendas, in how muchwe support Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxfam and other groups identi-fying with a global community, and in how we deal with each other and withstudents. And in pursuing emancipation, the bases of real security are beingestablished.104 In this sense for Booth, emancipation is itself a practice ofresistance [. . .] a framework for attempting to actualise both nearer-term andlonger-term emancipatory goals through strategic and tactical political action basedon immanent critique.105 This approach is captured in Booths concept ofEmancipatory Realism, where the Marxian origins of the Frankfurt School notionof emancipation are ultimately filtered through Kantian idealism and a focus on

gradual reforms as the only means of approaching the supreme political good.106There is an inherent and unashamed degree of selectivity about all of this; the

collapsing together of emancipation and resistance loads additional weight onto theconcept of emancipation, as surely not all practices of resistance are to beconsidered as equally emancipatory within the CSS framework of security.107 Yetthe question that is left unanswered within CSS is whether emancipation can beat nobodys expense.108 Similarly, in relation to Ken Booths notion of Emanci-patory Realism, Rens van Munster asserts that Freedom, equality, the rule of law,cosmopolitanism and emancipation are all considered as central elements inBooths theory, but the connection between them is not always clear. History

shows that emancipation has not always fitted very well with the liberal principleof the rule of law. Indeed, to what degree can violence be accepted as a means offurthering emancipation?109 Booth avoids both issues, simply warning that Falseemancipation comes in many guises, and as is the case with any political projectthere is the danger of mistakes, excesses, dark sides, and unpleasant things donein its name. The crucial test lies in concrete historical circumstances.110 Conse-quently the process of distinguishing between true and false emancipatorymovements seems to be left as something of a (retrospective) judgment call. In

103 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, p. 43; cf. Ken Booth and Peter Vale, Critical

Security Studies and Regional Insecurity: The Case of Southern Africa, in Keith Krause andMichael C. Williams (eds), Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1997).

104 Booth, Security and Emancipation, p. 326. Booth also considers peaceful anti-nuclear protests atlength in the article.

105 Booth, Theory of World Security, p. 112.106 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals as cited in Booth, Theory of World Security, p. 87.107 As Pieterse notes, The various definitions of emancipation, liberation, participation and empower-

ment show a tendency towards circularity, one being defined in terms of the other. Emancipation isa form of liberation, liberation is a form of emancipation etc. Emancipations, Modern andPostmodern, p. 11.

108 Aradau, Security and the democratic scene, p. 401. Similarly, Ernesto Laclau argues thatemancipation has a necessarily dichotomic dimension: otherness [. . .] is required by the founding

act of emancipation Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 2007), p. 4.109 Rens van Munster, Review of Ken Booth, Theory of World Security in Cambridge Review ofInternational Affairs, 21:3 (2008), pp. 4379, 438.

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response to van Munsters citation of protestors damaging state property aBritish Hawk jet sold to Indonesia, used as an illustration in Booths Theory ofWorld Security as a possible indication of when the rule of law might belegitimately contravened to further emancipatory ends (preventing further repres-sion in East Timor), Booth was at pains in his response to point out that the

protestors actions were ultimately condoned by a progressively minded jury andhence emancipation and the rule of law went hand-in-hand.111

In opting for evolution over revolution, however, van Munster argues thatBooth ultimately fails to fully unpack the relationship between emancipation andresistance, citing Booths views on capitalism as a case in point: The world wouldcertainly benefit from a more humane capitalism, but emancipation cannot happenthrough dialogue and the extension of rights alone. It also involves concretestruggles in the realm of work, production and property relations.112 In a similarvein, Neocleous argues that security is, ultimately, the supreme concept ofbourgeois society (based on Marxs declaration in On the Jewish Question

(1844)) as the real driver behind security is the uncertainty of (private) propertyand protection against future losses.113

Once again, Marcuses encouragement of movements for liberation/emancipation is at odds with the vision of Emancipatory Realism advocated byBooth. Indeed one of the main criticisms of his later work was that it was tooclosely identified with particular political and social movements several of whichactively sought to challenge and contravene the rule of law. Marcuse hasconsequently been accused of romanticising their objectives and action.114 True,Marcuse employs a vocabulary that would strike most readers today as somewhatdated (his use of the term Establishment, capital E, to describe the state in all

its manifestations being only the most obvious example; his commitment tocounter-cultural movements and intellectuals as a new historical Subject of changeanother).115 But this accusation of romanticism is only partially accurate. Marcusedid indeed come to be identified with radical student politics of the 1960s, and didalso cite and refer to it heavily in his own work. As he declares in the opening toEssay on Liberation, The opposition which escapes suppression by the police, thecourts, the representatives of the people, and the people themselves, findsexpression in the diffused rebellion among the youth and the intelligentsia, and inthe daily struggle of the persecuted minorities. The armed class struggle is wagedoutside: by the wretched of the earth who fight the affluent monster.116

Yet, the exact role played by the social and resistance movements Marcusereferred to so frequently within his thinking is arguably somewhat more complexthan this impression. Marcuse was, at times, at pains to distance himself fromspecific causes. On the one hand he could assert that a very real and very

111 Ken Booth, Response to Rens van Munster, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 21:3 (2008),pp. 43941, 440.

112 van Munster, Review of Theory of World Security, p. 439.113 Neocleous, Critique of Security, pp. 7, 269; Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, [1844] in Karl

Marx and Frederick Engels (ed.), Collected Works, Vol. 3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1975),p. 163.

114

See, for example, Douglas Keller, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1984).115 See Essay on Liberation, pp. 502.116 b



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pragmatic opposition is required of us if we are to make ourselves and othersconscious of these possibilities [for liberation/emancipatory change] and the forcesthat hinder and deny them.117 At the same time he declares that All forces ofopposition today are working at preparation and only at preparation but towardnecessary preparation for a possible crisis of the system.118 In other words, the goals

of these forces are in some ways incidental to the fact that they are practicingopposition, which is for him the more important point. Marcuse seems to acknowl-

edge as much when he adds that we must not conceal from ourselves [that] the

question [of] whether such radicalization will be to the left or to the right is an open

one.119 Revolt, Marcuse notes, is not the same as revolution. Acts of resistance

help to illuminate the false liberties of the existing order; hence, they do constitute

a liberation which must precede the construction of a free society.120 But the

emphasis here is on the process of illumination; the construction of a free society does

not necessarily follow from practices of resistance. The very possibility of practicing

opposition is for Marcuse a necessary precondition of emancipatory change.

Marcuse thus shifts from what we might term as a phenomenology of resistance(that is, an identification of points of resistance and liberation movements withinsociety) to what we might term as a metaphysics of resistance (that is, avalorisation of the principle of resistance itself). In part this shift links back intoMarcuses discussion of Repressive Tolerance, his thinking on violence, andquestions on the legality of violence. Against a perceived knee-jerk tendency tocategorise all radical protest as illegal violence, Marcuse points towards recogni-tion of the right of resistance, namely civil disobedience which:

belongs to the oldest and most sanctified elements of Western civilization. The idea thatthere is a right or law higher than positive law is as old as this civilization itself. Here is theconflict of rights before which every opposition that is more than private is placed. For theestablishment has a legal monopoly of violence and the positive right, even the duty, to usethis violence in its self-defence. In contrast, the recognition and exercise of a higher rightand duty of resistance, of civil disobedience, is a motive force in the historical developmentof freedom, a potentially liberating violence. Without this right of resistance, withoutactivation of a higher law against existing law, we would still be today at the level of themost primitive barbarism.121

This right of resistance (elsewhere described as a natural right of resistance)122

gives rise, in Marcuses view to a potentially positive and necessary form ofliberating violence that is a key harbinger of emancipatory social change.123 This

right applies particularly (and here there might be parallels with recent debateswithin security over state of emergency versus normality)124 in his view becauseThe whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger [. . .] Such extremesuspension of the right to free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if

117 Ibid., p. 69.118 Ibid., p. 93.119 Ibid.120 Ibid., p. viii.121 Marcuse, The Problem of Violence and the Radical Opposition, p. 89 Emphasis added.122 Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, p. 116.123 Cf. Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical

Writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). In a similar vein, Slavoj iek has urged a move fromthe rejection of false anti-violence to the endorsement of emancipatory violence Violence (London:Profile, 2009), p. 174.

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the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such anemergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs.125

Neocleous, in terms that again fit with his broader critique of contemporaryCritical Security Studies, argues That this possibility of an necessity for revolu-tionary violence is so often omitted when emergency powers are discussed is

indicative of the extent to which the Left has given up any talk of political violencefor the far more comfortable world of the rule of law, regardless of how little thelatter has achieved in just the last few years.126 Moreover, and perhaps tellingly

when thinking about the normative goals of CSS, Marcuse argues that If we appeal

to humanitys right to peace, to humanitys right to abolish exploitation and

oppression, we are not talking about self-defined, special, group interests, but rather

and in fact interests demonstrable as universal rights. That is why we can and

should lay claim today to the right of resistance as more than a relative right. 127

Whilst both contemporary CSS and Marcuse appeal to a form of security thatis avowedly human, and therefore share some sense of the educative role of

critical intellectuals in this regard, Marcuse ultimately also calls the role of theintellectual into question where he sees it might constrain resistance in the name ofemancipation. Radical protestors, If they use violence, do not start a new chainof violence but try to break an established one. Since they will be punished, theyknow the risk, and when they are willing to take it, no third person, and least ofall the educator and intellectual, has the right to preach them abstention.128 Morerecently, Slavoj iek has engaged similar themes, questioning whether there [is]not something suspicious, indeed symptomatic, about [the] focus on subjectiveviolence that violence which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals,disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds? Doesnt it desperately try to

distract our attention from the true locus of trouble, by obliterating from viewother forms of violence and thus actively participating in them?, and ultimatelyalso endorses the notion of emancipatory violence.129 This elevation of (poten-tially violent) resistance to a good or right in itself is one of the most problematicand heavily criticised aspects of Marcuses thought. Hannah Arendt, for example,criticised Marcuse and the student-leaders he inspired of conflating behaviour(that is, the activity of protest) with true political action through which humansdistinguished themselves from animals.130 As Beatrice Hanssen notes of Arendtscritique in this regard, Inasmuch as the German student leaders aimed to unmaskthe hypocritical practice of state violence, Arendt found them to be the heirs of

Robespierres despotic war on hypocrisy, which led to the Reign of Terror as therevolution began to devour its own children.131

125 Repressive Tolerance, pp. 10910.126 Neocleous, Critique of Security, p. 74.127 Ibid., pp. 1045.128 Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, p. 117.129 iek, Violence, pp. 9, 147.130 Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London:

Routledge, 2000), p. 27.131 Ibid., See, Arendts On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006); see also Douglas Keller, Herbert

Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 283 and, moregenerally, Bhiku Parekh, Marxism and the Problem of Violence, Development and Change, 23:3(1992), pp. 10320. For a recent counter-reading, of The Terror in particular, see Slavoj iek, In

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Once again, the point here is not that CSS necessarily buys into or implies thekind of arguments advanced by Marcuse in relation to violence and resistance.However, in its current framing this could as easily be read into it, and CSS risksrunning into the same dead-ends that Marcuse did. More needs to be said than hasbeen to date from within CSS on this subject if the elevation of emancipation as

the anchoring concept of its approach to security is to continue. Within the currentconfiguration of CSS there is a commitment to transformative change (as impliedin concept of emancipation), but comparatively little is said on violence andresistance, even though these questions are easily conceivable (although not alwaysobligatory) within that commitment. In CSS, the account of the forms of violenceand/or resistance in fostering that transformative change needs to be spelt out inmore detail. Otherwise emancipation risks becoming, as Ernesto Laclau puts it, amere rhetorical ornament of a substantive process which has to be understood inentirely different terms.132 In this sense the disinterring of Marcuse acts as aprovocation to contemporary CSS from within its own intellectual anchorage.

What it may ultimately illustrate, furthermore, is that an over-concentration onemancipation as security within CSS risks rendering it one-dimensional.133 Froma Marcusian perspective processes of emancipation necessarily involve counter-violence, and toleration of security practices is to be rejected. Maintenance ofsecurity, along with the rule of law, is routinely invoked to maintain the statusquo often violently and the inequalities that go with it. Hence it is reasonableto suggest that for Marcuse, security is more often repressive than it isemancipatory.

Moreover, over-emphasis on emancipation as the defining commitment of CSSfosters a tendency to view this branch of security studies through a reductionist

lens. It encourages a temptation to see emancipation as the be-all-and-end-all ofCSS, which is itself contrary to Wyn Jones admonitions to view emancipation asa process rather than endpoint. By consequence the likelihood is that Boothsattempts to develop a Theory of World Security around the ancillary concepts ofcommunity and identity will receive the same attention,134 or that Wyn Jonesencouragement to investigate the question of technology and the relationshipbetween theory and practice in international security will generate the sameamount of intellectual activity.135 In this sense we might go so far as to say thatCSS has itself become prisoner to emancipation, or at least to the equivalence ofemancipation with security.136

Conclusion

So where might CSS go from here? Should it abandon the concept of emancipationaltogether, or would this simply deprive it of its distinctive normative core? Oneoption, following Foucault, is to prioritise the concept of resistance over notions

132 Laclau, Emancipation(s), p. 11.133

Cf. Jahn, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.134 Booth (ed.), Theory of World Security, pp. 13448.135 Wyn Jones, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory, pp. 12560.136 f A d i d h d i



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of emancipation or liberation. As Pieterse notes, For Foucault there is notranscendence, there is only an alteration of discourse: another truth, anotherpower. Struggle produces a new domination. Hence resistance is the appropriatevocabulary, not liberation or emancipation for there is no emancipation from thenexus between truth and power itself: in this sense there is no future which is

different in a radical way.137 Yet it could also be that there are both ways ofthinking through Critical Theory that resist focusing solely on emancipation, andways of thinking about emancipation that dont necessarily equate it with security.As a future agenda for CSS, perhaps, a broader recognition of Critical Theory asa tradition of philosophic, sociological and political analysis that includes, but isnot limited to, a concern with emancipation might be one way to offset such risks a recognition already explicit, but often missed, in Richard Wyn Joness extendedconsideration of Frankfurt School ideas in relation to the material and practices ofsecurity,138 as opposed to Booths more limited plundering of emancipation.

At the same time, CSS might also be expanded, as Claudia Aradau has

suggested, to give greater recognition of the centrality of the concept ofemancipation de-coupled from security as the foundation of critiques ofpost-liberal capitalism in post-Marxist thinking such as that of Jacques Rancire,Alain Badiou and tienne Balibar. Against the Foucauldian impulse, the sugges-tion is that the radical implications of introducing the concept of emancipationare yet to be fully realised in regard to equality and democratic participation, andthat the equation of security and emancipation ultimately constrains this poten-tial.139 Here, it is also assumed that the politics of emancipation needs to bethought through rather than assumed, including the ethical and political complexi-ties of protest and resistance, violence and counter-violence.140 Thus, for instance,

Balibar argues that Civility the condition in which individuals enjoy rightswhich have already been declared is certainly not a politics which suppresses allviolence; but it excludes extremes of violence, so as to create a (public, private)space for politics (emancipation, transformation), and enable violence itself to behistoricized. What interests me [. . .] is not to codify that civility, but to attempt,in conclusion, to outline some of its problems.141 One of those problems, as wassimilarly noted with reticence by Marcuse, is the prevention of extremes ofviolence, which constantly strains the requirement that revolutionaries mustcivilize the notion and practice of revolution.142 Yet by framing the politics ofemancipation as a problematique, questions of violence and resistance are at least

137 Emancipations, Modern and Postmodern, p. 14.138 See, Security, Strategy and Critical Theory.139 Aradau, Security and the democratic scene.140 Briefly, Badious focus on emancipatory events, Rancire conception of emancipation as listening

to the unheard rather than treating the poor/dispossessed as a cog in the philosophers explanatorymachine, Balibar on emancipation as the battle against the denial of citizenship see Nick Hewlett,Badiou, Balibar, Rancire: Rethinking Emancipation (London: Continuum, 2007) for an overview anddiscussion. For applications and more extensive evaluations of such perspectives in relation tointernational studies, see Claudia Aradau, Security and the Democratic Scene, op cit, and herRethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics out of Security (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);and Rens van Munster, Immigration, Security and the Politics of Risk in the EU (London: Palgrave,2009).

141

tienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene (London: Verso, 2002), p. 6. Emphasis in original;p. 30.142 Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancire: Rethinking Emancipation, p. 135. For a further critique of

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engaged directly whereas understanding of emancipation as security (and viceversa) effectively just suppresses these questions. In this sense Critical Theory,inclusive of both the Frankfurt School and a broader post-Marxist tradition, can,be seen as the intellectual other of CSS as currently configured rather than thesometimes cited enemies of the Copenhagen School or post-structuralist

approaches.143 What these traditions of thinking emancipation might ultimatelyillustrate for the future of CSS and Critical International Theory is that the pointis not the introduction of the concept of emancipation into the study of security;the point is about what happens after we introduce it.

143 For a related argument in regard to the relationship between the Frankfurt School and Critical

International Theory more broadly see Nicholas J. Rengger, International Relations, Political Theoryand the Problem of Order: Beyond International Relations Theory? (London: Routledge, 2000): thenotion of emancipation in this context [. . .] creates the problem rather than the project of criticalh



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