The Foundational Masquerade: Security as Sociology of Death

One can no more look steadily at death than at the sun

(La Rochefoucauld, quoted in Mitford 1963: 61).

I was gripped by the extraordinary language used to discuss nuclear war. What hit me first was the

elaborate use of abstraction and euphemism, of words so bland that they never forced the speaker or

enabled the listener to touch the realities of nuclear holocaust (Cohn 1987: 690).

Introducing the Masquerade: Reading Security as Sociology of Death

Death is ignored by international relations. The discipline which makes claim to the conceptual

territories of war and security, to distinguish its remit from that of political theory, does not explore

mortality despite its ‘academic ownership’ of violent terrain. Instead the experience and salience of

death is made silent while the business of international politics is described through abstracting

discourses of ‘collateral damage’, bomb ‘footprints’, ‘coercion’ and ‘shock and awe’. This studied

avoidance of death might come as a surprise, given the fundamental occupation of security practice

and study with issues related to killing and survival. However it is not uncommon. Mortality is

purposely effaced across many spectrums of life, especially within those practices established to

manage bodies which have ceased, or are ceasing, to live. Death industries, for example, function to

mediate and efface the spectre of mortality. In her seminal text from the sociology of death, Jessica

Mitford has excoriated the American funeral industry through an exploration of the multiple ways in

which death industries have externalised the end of life, removing it from view, while making

pretence of life’s altered continuation (through processes, names and sites which give the

appearance of continuation in another form) (Mitford 1963). Funeral industries act upon death to

mediate mortality – effacing the inevitable while, paradoxically, taking death as the referent object

of practice. Similarly, I will argue here that security practices and literatures function to efface

mortality by performing a prospect of ontological immortality juxtaposed contra objects of

insecurity. In reading security as sociology of death, I will explore the practices performed to

alleviate the ontological disruption of death, destruction and mortality. Like the funeral director

performing rituals upon the deceased body, security mediates the incursion of death. It performs

the masquerade that death doesn’t destabilise our rational systems, upset the continuation of

capitalist economy or disrupt the imagination of perpetual communities.

My understanding of masquerade is informed by Cindy Weber’s powerful critique and queering of

post-hegemonic US power. Refusing to be seduced by the performance of power, this queer reading

of American foreign policy instead frames the Caribbean exploits of the US as ‘masquerading’ phallic

power. The book ‘Faking It: Reading U.S. Hegemony in a post-phallic era’ opens with a glance under

the charade of power, categorizing the performance of US foreign policy as ‘a white headless body

of indecipherable sex and gender cloaked in the flag and daggered with a queer dildo harnessed to

its midsection’ (Weber 1999: 1). In an era where its claims to hegemonic status have run aground

amidst humiliation and a changing global order, the U.S. struts with its dildo, masquerading phallic

power in a post-phallic era. This reading of masquerade in International Politics, then, treats

masquerade as a performance of pretence where power elides that which might expose its deceit

through colourful charade. Here I will argue that mortality disrupts claims to political authority and

that politics mediates this problem through the performance of the security masquerade. Like the

U.S. running around strapped to a dildo to distract attention from its emasculation, security offers a

compelling charade whereby mortality no longer threatens the foundations of authority because

ontological completeness and perpetuity are within our grasp – if only we combat the next object of

danger and attain ‘security’.

Much has been written by philosophers on the salience of mortality. Despite differing treatments of

the subject, there is some commonality of opinion between major thinkers of the twentieth century

that mortality is fundamentally connected to the emergence of systems of thought, language,

culture and ethics. These systems respond to the challenge of foreknown death; indeed Heidegger

argued that the unique human awareness of mortality is intimately linked to the unique human

propensity for language (Heidegger 1971; 2000). Language functions to place an illusory stability and

permanence onto our experience of the world; it responds to the nothingness inherent within

mortality. As Oberst interprets Heidegger: ‘The urge ‘simply to tell’ points at intrinsic connections

between language and death… Death’s factical reality drives human’s into speech to overcome the

nothingness […]’ (Oberst 2009: 45). Similarly, with regard to ethics, there are parallels between

Heidegger’s reading of mortality as providing the potential for ‘authenticity’, Derrida’s reading of

death as a ‘gift’ because it confers the radical singularity upon which responsibility and ethics might

emerge (Derrida 1995), and the existentialist discourse on ‘being-for-itself’ as the proper response to

the absurdity of life continued in the face of inevitable death (Sartre 1992; Camus 1955). Mortality

stimulates cultural efforts to produce meaning and ethics, in spite of inevitability. The emergence of

rationalism during the demise of religious mediations of death in ‘Enlightenment’ Europe should be

no surprise to us, given this line of analysis. Where one elixir faded, another remedy was constructed

so that our mortality and impermanence might be obscured once more. Accordingly Bauman,

drawing from Schopenhauer, proclaims that:

Death (more precisely, awareness of mortality) is the ultimate condition of cultural creativity as such.

It makes permanence into a task, into an urgent task, into a paramount task […] The woe of mortality

makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life

(Bauman 1992: 4-6).

Despite our awareness of personal mortality, political and economic systems require the mediation

of death in order to function. They commit themselves to ideological labour which maintains a

performance of ontological security (Huysmans 1998) so that economic and political rule may invoke

foundations. The concept of ‘nation’ is used to bind political rule to territories, despite the effect of

mortality which constantly reconfigures the subject populous. Similarly, capitalism wouldn’t work

without the illusion of perpetuity. Consider1 the Hollywood movie ‘Children of Men’, where social

and economic relations collapse because the human race has become infertile. Despite the existence

of enough people to maintain relations of production, capitalism, politics and society endure a slow

but devastating collapse because the ‘absurdity’ of action in the face of mortality has become

insurmountable.

1 See also Baudrillard 1993.

So, what then of security’s strange silence vis-à-vis mortality? And what could an exploration of the

relationship between death and security offer? Approaching security through the sociology of death

offers an opportunity to see war and security anew – as masquerade contra mortality. As Huysmans

has written, security performs the externalisation of mortality through discourses of enemies and

threats: ‘it is a practice of postponing death by countering enemies’ (Huysmans 1998: 236). Reading

security as sociology of death also offers an opportunity to speak to both rationalist and critical

schools within international relations and related disciplines. The masquerade is pertinent to

varieties of theoretical approach. While a great divide permeates the literatures of security and

strategy, between the objective conceptions of really-existing-threat (Haftendorn 1991; Levy 1995;

Ullman 1983) and security conceived as identity-constituting or discursive practice (Campbell 1992;

Buzan et al. 1998), death actually unites these approaches. The end of physical and/or national life is

the referent taken by security practice, whether one considers dangers to be objectively apparent or

reads their construction as political and discursive. Mortality, then, can be considered to constitute

the anarchic realm and the tragedy of realist theory (Waltz 1979; Morgenthau 1946), the exceptional

threat which underwrites successful security speech acts in securitization theory (Balzacq 2005;

Buzan et al. 1998), and the frame against which performances of identity are enacted through

foreign policy (Campbell 1992; Weldes 1999; Weldes et al. 1999). The importance of mortality is of

course hidden beneath metaphors of anarchy and exceptional threat, but it is the object of the

security practices studied by scholars in International Relations, War Studies and Strategic Studies.

Tellingly, security and war literatures are almost silent on the topic of mortality. Thus it becomes

important to disrupt this apparent masquerade and read them as sociology of death, whereby their

functionality is complicit within the effacement of death - the ‘lack’ which might otherwise disrupt

human cultural and political activity. The strange absence of death from literatures dedicated to the

study of violence and its potential has been highlighted by Carol Cohn in her discussion of the

abstracted language used by nuclear strategists. She refers to the ‘sanitised abstraction’ (Cohn 1987:

697) deployed within discourses which render the potentially catastrophic effects of nuclear

weapons mute. Exploring this phenomenon, she argues that this abstraction, combined with the

gendering of missile technology, is a functional (if subconscious) strategy to efface horror. For

example:

Calling the pattern in which bombs fall a "footprint" almost seems a willful distorting process, a

playful, perverse refusal of accountability - because to be accountable to reality is to be unable to do

this work. These words may also serve to domesticate, to tame the wild and uncontrollable forces of

nuclear destruction. The metaphors minimize; they are a way to make phenomena that are beyond

what the mind can encompass smaller and safer, and thus they are a way of gaining mastery over the

unmasterable (Cohn 1987: 698).

This functionality of ‘mastering the unmasterable’ within security and war discourse, however, goes

far deeper than the exclusion of lived/dying experience from academic/strategic discourse. Where

the language used belies and obscures the horror which happens to bodies made subject to

weaponry, it also effaces the ontological terror associated with mortality and impermanence by

projecting the end-point of security. The goal of security is the counterpoint of mortality. It makes a

performance of perpetuity by deploying, acting upon and resolving images of threat.

Some security literature has recently made reference to the importance of death, if not the security-

mortality dialectic. Achille Mbembe and Libby Meintjes recently coined the term ‘necropolitics’ and

provoked a surge of interest in deathly matters at the intersection of poststructuralist theory and

security studies. These works take the Foucauldian formulation of biopolitics as their departure

point for an exploration of the corollary spaces of living-death, such as camps or architectures within

occupied territories. Here politics produces spaces of bare life (Agamben 1998) and organises the

deployment of thanto/necropolitics through racist logics upon target populations (Mbembe &

Meintjes 2003; Weizmann 2007). These deathly forms of politics are also evident self-sacrificial

resistance to such totalising power, like suicide bombing (Michelson 2013). While these discussions

are important reflections on the interrelation of biopolitics with the deployment of death, they are

not considerations of mortality/security as such. Literatures of necro/thanatopolitics explore the

phenomena of killing by liberal political structures in the biopolitical name of making life live (see

also Dillon & Reid 2009). But this is not the same topic that I present here, where war and security

are read as masquerading performances which efface mortality.

To read war and security as sociology of death, this chapter makes two broad moves. Firstly it

explores the development of security discourse through its twentieth century development from

preventative remit to the contemporary resilience turn, exploring the paradigmatic shift in the

management of mortality. Where mortality was once effaced through preventative technologies

which worked to counter threat and to present a possible state of ‘security’, resilience policy has

now proclaimed the redundancy of prevention in favour of the acceptance and management of

ever-present risk. How should we understand this? This chapter reads the shift in management of

mortality alongside Zygmunt Bauman’s (1992) delineation of modernity and postmodernity

according to strategies for coping with mortality. Secondly, the chapter moves to explore practical

matters of death-effacement, exploring the security masquerade through its deployment in

emergency management practice and the recovery of bombsites. The emergency ruptures the

facade of security through death’s sudden reappearance. The chapter comments on the methods

deployed to re-secure the masquerade through the containment and banishment of the event –

including the performance of receding police cordons, anniversary ceremonies and memorialisation

of destroyed space. Death is tamed through ritual and ceremony. However, bombsites often leave a

lingering excess of death which security practices struggle to expunge. The chapter concludes by

exploring this excess, which reveals the lacunae within the masquerade and offers sight of the

death-effacement which is normally obscured from view.

Mortality/Immortality – Security/Resilience?

Zygmunt Bauman identifies two distinct phases in the significance of mortality for human culture:

that of modernity’s relationship to mortality, and postmodernity’s relationship to immortality

(1992). I will explore this distinction here because it offers an important reading of contemporary

philosophy on mortality while also providing a helpful comparative lens for modelling the shift

undergone in security policies during the resilience era. Bauman explores wide-ranging philosophical

literature on the function of rational, cultural and linguistic systems as effacing death. Drawing from

Schopenhauer, Becker and Freud he argues that a multidirectional relationship of encirclement

connects such systems with mortality. Human cognisance of death provides the impetus for religious

and philosophical systems which then prove incapable of signifying death-in-itself. Death, Bauman

states, ‘is the ultimate defeat of reason, since reason cannot ‘think’ death’ (1992: 12-3). It is a non-

object, a void, both traumatic and absent. As such, mortality gives rise to cultural and philosophical

systems but those systems can only encircle death – they are unable to represent or signify death

because it is beyond their bounds.

Multiple strategies are then developed by societies to mediate the void, or ‘lack’ to use a

psychoanalytic term, of mortality by breaking death into component parts and then acting upon

them, making a pretence and masquerade of life as continuous and un-plagued by absurdity. These

strategies primarily include the development of rituals around the disposal of bodies which function

to expel them from the sight of the living, the development of medical sciences to both postpone

the inevitable and then scientifically explain it when it occurs, and the deployment of religious and

spiritual rituals to efface the existential-horror which confronts the bereaved (Aries 1976; Bauman

1992). These strategies are all aimed at the living – those left behind who are confronted with death,

and its disruption of rational security and mastery. These strategies mediate the sudden

reappearance of mortality from its suppression.

Security, as the object of warfare and policing, is also a compartmentalisation of the mortality

problem (Huysmans 1998). The imagination of a state of security performs a perpetual national

community which counteracts individual mortality through a supposedly collective immortality.

Functionally, security acts to efface the problem of mortality by identifying objects which threaten

the existence of the community, acting against those objects, and offering the prospect of secure

existence as defined against death. Security and warfare exorcise death from political consciousness,

despite their use of its tools, through their performance of threat-mitigation upon objects classified

as dangerous. Death is banished through processes of locating danger and fixing it. So while David

Campbell’s work (1992) has shown how the discourse of danger is functional for the performance of

national identity, rather than representing objective dangers that threaten the community, we might

develop the performative security thesis around philosophy of mortality in two ways. Firstly, by

arguing that the reproduction of identity through foreign policy is an imagination of immortal

political community which effaces the salience of death; and secondly, that the discourse of danger

creates objects which represent mortality and can be acted upon and exorcised – once again,

performing the immortality of political community through ritualised sacrifice.

The conventional approach of modernity to mortality, within the remit of security, has involved the

creation of standing armies which can march against threats and weapons which can be fired to

suppress our mortality by inflicting death upon others. But it is important to note that the

masquerade is kept fully intact during this performance – death is rarely spoken about and security

is an exceptionally serious business which cannot be questioned. It is indeed an exceptionally serious

business – the void which plagues rationality, sovereignty, culture and capital must be plugged at all

costs – but this is kept hidden beneath the performance of really-existing dangers and terminology

which abstracts from what is really at stake in warfare. Mortality is kept silent through the refusal to

discuss war and security in terms of death. Here we should note Carol Cohn’s seminal exploration of

the abstraction in strategic discourse (1987) but also the numerous contemporary critiques

concerning the immortalisation of ‘our’ war-dead relative to the refusal to count ‘their’ war-dead as

anything but estimated collateral damage (Butler 2004; Gregory 2012; Zehfuss 2009). This unsavoury

calculus of mourning goes hand-in-hand with the identification of our violence as morally justified

and abstracted intervention, while others wage deathly terror against us. In both examples,

language sanitises the infliction of death so that our soldiers live on in immortality while their ‘dead’

were never fully entitled to life in the first place. Death never really ‘happened’, as such. Our killing is

abstracted from mortality in its technocratic discussion as intervention or nuclear technology (Cohn

1987) rather than the infliction of searing pain and terrible deaths, whereas the violence inflicted

towards us is called ‘terror’ to objectify it as a ‘danger’ which can be supressed. Effacement of

mortality occurs here through the targeting of such dangerous objects with war: they are ritually

dispatched to perform the immortality of political community vis-à-vis objects of threat.

As such, we might consider the security-mortality relationship to operate through objectification and

silencing in the era of modernity. Objects of danger (‘threats’) are produced with which to invoke

and resolve issues of mortality, whereas the deathly capacity of war-making is silenced within this

process to maintain the illusion of death-effacement. However, much would seem to have changed

in the era of resilience – where security and war discourses have accepted that threat cannot always

be prevented and that our own systems may hold the key to our own destruction. While security has

traditionally made objects of mortality, such as enemies or risks which can be countered (thereby

effacing death and its significance), the resilience era has seen policymakers declare that we must

learn to live with unpreventable risk. Catastrophes, it seems, can no longer be prevented. In the

words of the UK’s National Security Strategy, only an approach focused upon attaining resilience in

the face of inevitable events can provide the ‘radical transformation’ of security policy necessary in

the post-Cold War ‘era of uncertainty’ (Cabinet Office 2010: 3). The US Department of Homeland

Security have provided a similar reading of the contemporary era in their 2007 National Security

Strategy, whereby insecurity is now a fundamental condition which necessitates that we live with

risk rather than against it. For example:

Despite our best efforts, achieving a complete state of […] protection is not possible in the face of the numerous and varied catastrophic possibilities that could challenge the security of America today. Recognizing that […] we cannot envision or prepare for every potential threat, we must understand and accept a certain level of risk as a permanent condition (Department of Homeland Security 2007: 25).

Security is not possible, in the sense that it once was. As such, the resilience era signals the demise

of the era of ‘security as prevention’, and the rise of a security which must be attained despite, and

through, inevitable insecurity. Threat is not just inevitable in this discourse, it has also been

relocated inside the polity. Our own systems potentially hold the potential for collapse in response

to external shocks. The contemporary resilience discourse evolved in part from explorations of the

complex layering and tight coupling of systems which resist linear attempts to prevent collapse

(Perrow 1999; Walker & Cooper 2011). Resilience objectifies threat within the potential for complex

infrastructural systems to collapse when faced with external shocks, and then stresses the

importance of building ‘slack’ and ‘adaptive capability’ into the workings of such systems to mediate

and absorb shock – leading to an assumed return to normality (Lentzos & Rose 2009; Lundborg &

Vaughan-Williams 2011). Resilience brings the objects of danger inside the polity and as such, it

cannot be countered in the traditional way.

The most notable shifts of the resilience era include, then, that danger and insecurity stem primarily

from the inside – even while systemic collapse is often provoked by external shock. Furthermore,

insecurity cannot be fully mediated through preventative strategies or military readiness – instead

we must introduce resilience to critical infrastructures, and ready our responders, for inevitable

unforeseen events. The new formulation of security, vis-à-vis these inevitable risks, takes the shape

of resilient and adaptive continuity within communities and infrastructure. To put it bluntly, life

cannot be anaesthetised to shocks but with the right conditions and preparation it can manifest its

own contingency in evolutionary response, coming out stronger for having been challenged. Here

resilience deploys metaphors from the body to think systems as components of a live being which

can develop immunities and strategies against illness or infection (Lundborg & Vaughan-Williams

2011).

Locating danger inside the polity and rendering it inevitable, rather than preventable, marks a

paradigmatic shift in security logic. What then of the contemporary relationship between security

and the effacement of death? Clearly much has changed. Security no longer makes objects of death

outside the polity which can be resolved through the application of military or political tools. Neither

does security imagine a perfect utopia of safety contra those objects. Now security involves securing

and maintaining the adaptive and vital characteristics of systems so that they might self-heal and

deploy their own evolutionary contingency to work around shocks. Can we still read security as

sociology of death then, where the functionality of security is one of masquerade?

Bauman’s exploration of the shift in mortality-management between the eras of modernity and

post-modernity proves extremely helpful here. Whereas modernity broke the mortality problem

down into fixable objects which were used to exorcise the anxiety of death and absurdity, he argues

that post-modernity acts upon death through utilising and deploying life. The postmodern approach

to mortality displays a different approach to immortality: in the modernist paradigm, immortality

was promised as a remedy for death through memory and the continuity of the nation, however in

the postmodern era it is immortality which has been broken down into component objects and

redistributed – rather than mortality (Bauman 1992). In the era of non-linear fluid time, life is

fragmented, magnified and destroyed at breakneck speed – offering a constant rehearsal and

repetition of the life-death dialectic through high-tech media until its salience no longer grabs us.

Linear time has broken down into the era of fluid time. Here immortality is regularly conferred and

destroyed, rather than assumed to follow the linear life-death-immortality trajectory as it did during

the era of modernity. This objectification and deployment of immortality is used to efface death,

rather than the objectification of threats. Life is now used to defeat death, as it were.

At this point, it becomes possible to reconsider the resilience era as a postmodern strategy of death-

effacement. Security now performs the masquerade of continuity and coherence by thinking life

against death. Utilising the vital metaphors of the resilience era to focus on the adaptive potential of

the systemised ‘body’ of the polity, threat can be alleviated by ensuring the immunity of

infrastructures and communities to shock. The adaptive capacity of life is objectified to efface the

salience of mortality, rather than the deployment of objects of threat against which a state of

security can be imagined. For example, communities are framed as the organic life-systems within

policies of social resilience which can assist the emergency services during an event and self-heal

afterward. The UK Cabinet Office states: ‘Community Resilience is about communities using local

resources and knowledge to help themselves during an emergency in a way that complements the

local emergency services’ (Cabinet Office 2012, cited in Rogers 2013). These framings of

communities as self-aware, self-sustaining entities not only imbue them with characteristics of

organic regeneration, but, as Peter Rogers notes (Rogers 2013), community resilience redeploys

notions of enduring (ever-lasting) national sprit, such as the often-invoked ‘Blitz Spirit’ of British

tenacity, to sustain these articulations.

Here the ‘immortality’, to use Bauman’s phrase, of national spirit and identity is deployed alongside

the immortality associated with vital contingency, where life overcomes obstacles. Death may have

been brought inside the polity through the framing of unpreventable risks in the era of uncertainty,

but the resilience paradigm remakes and rehearses insecurity as the way in which a stronger, more

secure society is achieved. Mortality is still effaced through this masquerade which treats insecurity

as an expected occurrence which can be suppressed and conquered through life’s innate adaptive

continuity. Resilience governs through insecurity (Lentzos & Rose: 2009: 235) and thus still maintains

the façade of ontological continuity and non-absurdity, whereby societal life can find foundation.

Deaths are of no importance, in the postmodern security paradigm, except to inform future training

exercises concerning the mediation of external shocks – because ‘life’ continues to respond and

adapt. This deployment of vitality is the new face of the mortality masquerade.

Reading Practices of Security as Sociology of Death: Emergency Management and Bombsites

Resilience purports to have absorbed mortality within its rendering of adaptive continuity. Yet

destructive events are still subject to practices which mediate and efface the ontological spectre of

death. Death still bursts through and is experienced as disruptive of political systems, despite the

assurances of the resilience discourse that we are secure. This section addresses practices of

emergency management and memorialisation as mediating strategies contra mortality, and argues

that the amount of activity dedicated to managing and recovering bombsites exposes the

masquerade performed by the resilience discourse. It purports to have vanquished death by

recalibrating the tools of security, yet the salience of bombsites generates multiple practices which

function to erase the lingering resonance of death. The appearance of sudden violent deaths in our

midst exposes the myth of security – and practices of emergency management and recovery

function to erase that irruption through the fabric of the masquerade.

Resilience is ambiguous. Policies of resilience profess an interest in the bouncing-back of sites, cities

and systems from disruptive events – yet they are never actually applied to the bombsite. Instead

resilience is practiced through a wealth of anticipatory planning exercises and emergency response

structures designed to mitigate the unpreventable event. But resilience is never used to think the

recovery of destroyed space (for an exception, see Heath-Kelly 2014). Why? Because security

functions to silence death, and giving attention to sites where mortality is plainly visible would

counteract that function. Instead, sites are left to architects and curators – they are left to citizens,

artists, culture and also the whims of capital. Security, it would appear at first glance, is absent from

the bombsite. Or is it? Given that this chapter has attempted to redefine security as the effacement

of mortality, can we find such masquerade upon the sites where death has broken through?

Anticipatory exercises lend salience to the resilience-masquerade’s supposed control of deathly

events, yet practices relating to actually-occurring events reveal a different story. Practices of

emergency management and bombsite reconstruction function to erase the evidence of death and

insecurity. They attempt to clean up the spaces in which our rational and secure foundations have

been blown apart. Here I will briefly explore the contrast between the resilience era’s attempt to

control the era of uncertainty through anticipatory exercises, and the frantic function of post-event

techniques to mop up the salience of mortality when anticipation inevitably fails.

The resilience era uses contingency planning exercises, usually relating to terrorist events, to a high

frequency. The imagination and simulation of future events function as explorations of contingency

and non-linear emergence (Anderson 2010: 227), and for our purposes extend the governance over

death to those future-inevitable happenings. Techniques of enactment are used to improve

personnel response to the mass of bewildering information around them, including their awareness

of particular facts which might appear insignificant until their non-linear connection to the event is

made clear. This contingency flavour is quite distinctive to emergency response training in the

resilience era. As Aradau and Van Munster have noted, the abundance of detail provided for

participants at the outset of contingency scenarios serves to provide clues about the future event. In

the City of Sunderland’s joint response exercise the introductory pre-amble contained a vague

reference to ‘East European political issues’ – which was later revealed to be a crucial detail once the

exercise focused upon a lorry carrying chemicals was found to have Polish registration (Aradau &

Van Munster 2012). The explorations of non-linear emergence are designed to train participants to

pay attention to seemingly meaningless details, which may attain importance in relation to future

developments. Security practitioners must be trained to work with contingency and non-linear

emergence rather than against them, echoing the Revolution in Military Affairs doctrine (Dillon

2007; Dillon & Reid 2009; Massumi 2010). Anticipatory exercises, therefore, train personnel to

secure through insecurity; death and danger are rehearsed, brought inside the polity and their

salience reversed.

However, if anticipatory technologies function to explore contingency in their performances of

ontological security through resilience, then emergency management and response function to

smother it. Emergency responses to major incidents attempt to absorb the ‘emergence/y’ of the

event and consign it to the past as quickly as possible. And whereas anticipatory scenarios and

simulations are figured around the emerging unknown, emergency response protocols tightly bind

the event within conditions of the already-known. This contrast is important because it points to the

sudden switch back to the tools of modernity, where threat is objectified and suppressed once a

bomb has exploded and the masquerade of anticipation and resilience training has failed to efface

mortality.

Emergency response protocols are provided to those responder agencies and civil protection

professionals likely to respond to emergency events. These protocols are manuals for the

objectification and compartmentalisation of mortality, demonstrating the return to the modernist

paradigm during the era of the postmodern. The UK Cabinet Office advises that these protocols are

intended to complement practices of emergency preparedness, where potential catastrophic futures

are imagined and exercised. Yet the emergency event is constituted very differently in ‘recovery’

documentation than it is in pre-emergency preparedness. While the imagination of the future event

is properly postmodern in Bauman’s terms, because it exceeds every boundary in order to explore

contingency and the unknown (for instance, the simulation of dirty bombs in downtown Los

Angeles), emergency response does not constitute the event as unknown nor contingent. It doesn’t

secure through insecurity and contingency, instead it constitutes the event through lexicons of the

already known. Regardless of the context, it is ordained that the event can be effectively shut down

by applying the steps contained within the relevant documentation. Events, and their courses, are

already pre-known in response policy. Once death has broken through the masquerade, the

modernist playbook is reinvoked to resecure the façade of security.

An important step in reclaiming security from the breach imposed upon it by sudden mortality is the

declaration of emergency. Protocols for incident response list features which constitute emergency,

such as overwhelming numbers of casualties, and responders must ‘declare’ this emergency to other

agencies and command structures using the set phrases (usually: ‘initiate major incident procedure’

in the UK) (LESLP 2012). The emergency is thus called into being. This assertion of the event’s

immediacy is intended to enable extraordinary coordination between agencies and the deployment

of resources, but it also performatively invokes the end of the event. It bounds the event within

temporal limits.

Once the declaration of a ‘major incident’ has been made, responding organisational structures are

constituted and protocols for managing the event are activated. The London Emergency Services

Liaison Panel provides a diagram2 which traces the temporal stages by which the emergency can

then be exorcised. The diagram demonstrates how the ‘restoration of normality’ (represented as a

light pink bar in the image) coincides with declaration of an emergency event. So even at this very

early stage of emergency declaration, the end of the event is prophesised and called into being.

Emergency management diagrams of this sort assert the convergence of the beginning of the event

and the beginning-of-its-end, while the formal UK Guidelines for Emergency Response similarly

highlight that the response period ‘is relatively short […] lasting for a matter of hours or days’

(Cabinet Office 2012: 5). Unlike the constitution of the event in anticipatory imagination then, the

duration of the emergency is already fixed and accounted for. So, in profound contrast to the

constitution of the event in terms of its unknowable origin, direction and duration in anticipatory

techniques, emergency response protocols begin by asserting its known immediacy and its imminent

conclusion. This knowledge technique, and others subsequently addressed, represents the return to

modernist tools of mortality suppression in the postmodern era.

Once the declaration of emergency event has occurred, thus implementing temporal boundaries

upon it, the event is then spatially bound by the police through the deployment of ‘inner’ and ‘outer

cordons’. It can no longer grow. It is bounded. The inner cordon functions to ‘provide immediate

security of the hazard and potential crime scene’, while also protecting the public and ‘controlling’

sightseers (LESLP 2012: 16-8). A separate spatial area known as the ‘outer cordon’ is established

beyond the inner cordon so that ‘vetted people’ may have access to the scene. Finally an exterior

orbit cordon is established further back still, so that vehicles may not approach the scene. These

strategies of bounding the event draw limits around its emergence and once these markers are in

place, the event cease to emerge any further.

Subsequently, the management of the manifesting event is undertaken through processes which

gradually shrink the inner and outer cordons, performatively enacting the spatial withdrawal of the

event - while media are simultaneously held at bay through the calculated release of information by

trained spokespeople. Indeed, controlling the reporting of the event is understood as spatial

governance which ‘minimises the wider impacts’ of the event and controls its repercussions upon

2 Which cannot be reproduced here, given copyright restrictions, but can be freely accessed online from LESLP

2012: 8.

public confidence in the emergency services (LESLP 2012: 54). Once again, we see the modernist

playbook at work – mortality is compartmentalised, objectified and suppressed in order that the

sudden appearance of death might be vanished.

Once cordons are in place, the focus of event management then attends to bodies as a priority –

those which are trapped, injured, walking wounded and deceased. Through practices and protocols

of emergency response the event is constituted as manifesting spatially in these bodies, which must

be ushered into holding centres, ambulances, cut free from debris and transported to morgues. This

spatial constitution of the event through bodies also extends to the framing of unwounded survivors

as potential looters in disaster response protocol. Within the remit of the Homeland Security

disaster response framework, for example, individual US state policies discuss the responsibility of

local police and attached military units to initiate ‘anti-looting patrols of evacuated areas’ alongside

their search and rescue tasks (State of Connecticut 2011: 15). Researchers have long contended that

‘looting’ is a disaster myth which is propagated through the media (Constable 2008; Fischer 1998;

Teirney et al. 2006), yet the problematic policy framing of disaster-displaced persons as

embodiments of the disruptive event resembles the trend within risk-based security practices to blur

the line between categories of the at-risk and risky (Aradau 2004; Heath-Kelly 2013). Instead of

dedicating necessary resources to helping those lives made precarious by Hurricane Katrina, disaster

management practitioners and agencies targeted sustenance-foragers (Constable 2008) as

threatening embodiments of the emergency and authorised suppressing force against them. In

Constable’s estimates, rather than helping to alleviate the emergency this misdirection of resources

cost hundreds of lives in New Orleans (2008: 524).

But this is functional, not accidental. Emergency management uses bodies to close the temporal

event of the emergency. The event ceases to be ‘emergent’, and thus mortality is effaced when

bodies return from a state of being unknown. The emergency is closed through processes of ‘looter

policing’, ‘triage’ and ‘reconciliation investigation’. According to shared international protocols,

recovered bodies must be grouped and counted according to their degree of injury (Coppola 2011:

312; LESLP 2012: 34-5) – returning them from the state of being unknown, compartmentalising the

event and its fatal consequences. When the time comes that no new casualties are being presented

to responders, and when victims are being evacuated to hospitals and morgues, the disaster can be

closed through the completion of labelling and identification procedures. Ambulance crews are

instructed to supplement the triage tags attached to victims with personal details. Police responders

are instructed to attach identification labels to deceased bodies, while maintaining an accurate

count of the numbers of bodies dispatched to hospitals and morgues (LESLP 2012: 36). Once the

numbers of bodies ceases to fluctuate (and, it must be added, once the structural condition of the

scene ceases to change), the disaster can be closed through standardised processes of ‘disaster

victim identification’. Trained personnel log the locations of bodies, and body parts, and assign them

unique numbers. Pathologists then implement the stage of ‘reconciliation investigation’ – where the

uncertainty of the event is closed through the reconciliation of deceased bodies (and body parts)

with their displaced living identities (2012: 39).

As such, emergency management practices constitute the event in very different ways to

anticipatory techniques. Rather than exploring the contingency of non-linear emergence and

securing mortality through immortality, emergency management seeks to smother and absorb the

uncertainty of the event. At all stages of response, it contains (and constitutes) the event through

receding cordons – both spatial and relative to knowledge. In sequential order, the declaration of

the emergency begins by invoking its end; then the exceptional space of the event is limited through

media management and reduced through the withdrawal of the cordons placed around it;

subsequently the emergency is spatially constituted through wounded, deceased and risky bodies;

and finally the event is closed through the tagging, relocation and ‘reconciliation’ of these bodies

with their identities. Events are already-known through processes of emergency management – their

conclusions are already foretold, and their impacts are pre-bounded. The constitution of events

through emergency response, then, takes an almost opposite approach to contingency than that of

precautionary and anticipatory security. This contrast is important for understanding security

practice as masquerade because it points to the excess of death which suddenly disrupts the illusion

of perpetuity and continuity within the resilience era and demands an immediate return to the

‘objectification’ techniques of older security – where danger is compartmentalised and suppressed.

This application of absorption practices during emergency response is supposed to close the

emergent event. And yet this rush to smother the emergence and contingency of the event is

unsuccessful. Events are not closed by the ‘reconciliation’ of bodies with their identities nor through

the restoration of critical infrastructure, as security discourses would have us believe. Rather, death

continues to be acted upon through retrospective political practices at bombsites in subsequent

months and years. Its resonance is evident within memorialisation projects, commemorative

ceremonies and disputes over the use of ‘sacred’ post-emergency ground. All respond to the

excesses of mortality which spills over the hurried efforts to close its emergence and to deny its

continued resonance. In essence, the lingering resonance of the event is evident in the range of

practices performed subsequently in its name.

The practice of establishing permanent memorials to emergency is not envisioned within discourses

of resilience and emergency recovery - so what is the significance of this symbolic architectural

redevelopment? Most work in memory studies points to the political function of commemoration,

where the past is renegotiated and remade in the present to assert particular narratives of

victimhood, triumph or nation – or the function of disrupting such narratives in the case of counter-

memorials (Edkins 2003; Hite 2013; Young 1993). Acts of memory accord significance and

reproduce/disrupt established politics. But what of memorials to bombsites? As Lisle has argued, the

memory of terrorist bombings is used to securitise identities as suspect (see also Hutchison 2010)

and to reassert discourses of global cosmopolitan citizenship (Lisle 2013). But can we also

understand them as security practices which work to efface death and to reassert ontological

integrity contra mortality?

To explore the excess of events beyond emergency management practices, it is interesting to

consider the near-ubiquitous construction of memorials upon sites of contemporary urban

destruction. Their function is to mop-up the afterlife of the event and to remake it, or, as Tom

Lundborg explains relative to the architectural designs for the Freedom Tower, to govern the trauma

of an event by ‘folding’ it into an architectural form (Lundborg 2012). These are retroactive, and

sometimes unofficial, security practices which act to contain mortality and to secure it within

discourses of resilience and nation. Within this remit the architectural rendering of the disaster

event into a memorial speaks to the ‘mopping up’ of disruptive resonance and the remaking of

political space. Memorials secure through the failure to secure (Heath-Kelly 2014) – effacing the

horror of mortality through ritual and elaborate stonework.

In reading security as sociology of death, it is important to note that the emergency event exceeds

the imagination and control of the emergency response practices designed to smother it. Emergency

management is meant to stabilise and contain the event – and yet the salience of mortality does not

stop when the fires are put out and the bodies removed. Violent deaths continue to be politically

significant long after the bodies and rubble are hidden from view because such events burst through

the charade of security in spectacular fashion. These evidences of mortality leave marks on the

imagination of political community, as well as bodies and space. This is by no means a novel

statement: the disciplines of memory studies and trauma studies have long explored the continued

resonance of those events which states have tried to silence (Caruth 1995; Edkins 2003; Felman &

Laub 1992; Hite 2013), as have readings of ‘scars’ which haunt politics (Steele 2013).

These hauntings are important for the conceptualisation of security. They speak to the excess of

mortality which escapes the suppression tactics of emergency management and the ontological

security promised by both security discourse and anticipatory planning exercises. Consciousness of

mortality provokes efforts to contain death and imagine continuity: the very essence of security; but

security practices can never quitter achieve their goal. Death always escapes them and eludes them,

ready to make a mockery of carefully laid plans. As such, the security-mortality masquerade will

likely be with us for a very long time – for as long as political structures require the illusion of

foundations which render absurdity (temporarily) mute.

Conclusion

Works of existentialist philosophy, as well as those by Baudrillard, Bauman, Becker and Derrida,

point to the connection between mortality and projects as diverse as reason, culture and ethics. The

salience of death, it is argued, stimulates such intellectual activity while also providing its obscured

referent. Mortality, in these works, might be considered the centrally organising ‘lack’ of reason and

culture – foundational and yet absent from representation. Human societies are organised around

the effacement and mediation of undeniable, and unpreventable, mortality. Given the extensive

philosophical coverage of issues of mortality, it is surprising that studies of security and war have not

engaged with this literature - given their pre-occupation with issues of violence. While Carol Cohn

has pointed to linguistic strategies of nuclear discourse which render death through techno-strategic

abstractions, and studies of thanatopolitics have explored the deployment of death as corollary to

biopolitics, the relationship between mortality and security is definitively under-theorised. Utilising

sociological and philosophical work on the significance of mortality for politics, I have argued here

that security practice exists in a fundamental relationship with death. Security and war function to

efface death, while paradoxically deploying its tools, to perform an illusory perpetuity of nation,

politics and capital. Security and war function as masquerade, imagining an ontological perpetuity

contra the haunting and foundational ‘lack’ of mortality which might otherwise destabilise political

projects. While the modernist paradigm undertook this ontological labour by compartmentalising

mortality into threat objects and then unleashing warfare upon them, the resilience era better

resembles Bauman’s postmodern condition whereby immortality becomes the technique whereby

death is vanquished. Life’s own contingency is deployed to defeat the unpredictability and

inevitability of danger and death. But while the resilience era can theorise ontological security while

allowing danger into the polity, it is not successful in practice and is forced to return to modernist

strategies of objectivising and compartmentalising danger once death irrupts. Even though we are

supposedly prepared for the unpredictable emergency event, resilience discourse gives way to the

previous paradigm at the appearance of death – deploying multiple techniques to absorb and

contain its emergence.

Importantly, the security masquerade undermines itself here in several ways: firstly, the return to

the older style security model involves the framing of the event as known and linear – in complete

contrast to the prevailing resilience discourse and its modelling of contingency and non-linear

emergence; secondly, the work of emergency management fails to contain the event which requires

subsequent ritualised performances of commemoration to exorcise the lingering sense of death.

Both modern and postmodern security masquerades fail, then, to contain mortality. Death always

hovers slightly outside their grasp. The void which stimulates the practice of security also constantly

eludes its containment or effacement. Yet reading security as a sociology of death has enabled us to

consider the ways in which this masquerade plays out. While La Rochefoucauld has stated that ‘one

can no more look steadily at death than at the sun’ (La Rochefoucauld, quoted in Mitford 1963: 61),

this exploration of security’s masquerade has provided a sideways glimpse, at least, of the

significance of mortality for war and security.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University

Press).

Anderson, Ben (2010) ‘Security and the Future: Anticipating the Event of Terror’, Geoforum 41,

pp.227-35.

Aradau, Claudia (2004) ‘The Perverse Politics of Four-Letter Words: Risk and Pity in the Securitisation

of Human Trafficking’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33/2, pp.251-77.

Aradau, Claudia & Rens Van Munster (2012) ‘The Time/Space of Preparedness: Anticipating the

‘Next Terrorist Attack’’, Space and Culture 15/2, pp.98-109.

Aries, Philippe (1976) Western Attitudes Towards Death from the Middle Ages to the Present

(London: Marion Boyars).

Balzacq, Thierry (2005) ‘The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context’,

European Journal of International Relations 11(2), pp.171-201.

Baudrillard, Jean (1993) Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage).

Bauman, Zygmunt (1992) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Butler, Judith (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso).

Buzan, Barry; Ole Waever & Jaap de Wilde (1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis (London:

Lynne Reinner).

Cabinet Office (2010) A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: The National Security Strategy (London: HM Government). Cabinet Office (2012) Emergency Response and Recovery: Non-Statutory Guidance Accompanying the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (London: HM Government). Campbell, David (1992) Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Camus, Albert (1955) The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Hamish Hamilton).

Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press). Cohn, Carol (1987) ‘Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals’, Signs 12(4),

pp.687-718.

Coppola, Damon (2011) Introduction to International Disaster Management (London: Elsevier).

Constable, Mark (2008) ‘Disaster Mythology: Looting in New Orleans’, Disaster Prevention and Management 17/4, pp.519-25. Department of Homeland Security (2007) National Strategy for Homeland Security (Washington:

Homeland Security Council).

Derrida, Jacques (1995) The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Dillon, Michael (2007) ‘Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence’,

International Political Sociology 1, pp.7-28.

Dillon, Michael & Julien Reid (2009) The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (London:

Routledge).

Edkins, Jenny (2003) Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Felman, Shoshana & Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis

and History (New York: Routledge).

Fischer, Henry W. (1998) Response to disaster: Fact versus fiction and its perpetuation: The sociology

of disaster, 2nd edition (New York, University Press of America).

Gregory, Thomas (2012) ‘Potential Lives, Impossible Deaths: Afghanistan, Civilian Casualties and the

Politics of Intelligibility’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 14(3), pp.327-47.

Haftendorn, Helga (1991) ‘The Security Puzzle: Theory Building and Discipline Building in

International Security’, International Studies Quarterly 35(1), pp.3-17.

Heath-Kelly, Charlotte (2013) ‘Counter-Terrorism and the Counterfactual: Producing the

‘Radicalisation’ Discourse and the UK PREVENT Strategy’, British Journal of Politics and International

Relations 15/3, pp.394-415.

Heath-Kelly, Charlotte (2014) ‘Securing through the Failure to Secure: The Ambiguity of Resilience at

the Bombsite’, Security Dialogue (forthcoming).

Heidegger, Martin (1971) On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row).

Heidegger, Martin (2000) Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried (Yale: Yale University

Press).

Hite, Katherine (2013) Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin

America and Spain (Abingdon: Routledge).

Hutchison, Emma (2010) ‘Trauma and the Politics of Emotions: Constituting Identity, Security and

Community after the Bali Bombing’, International Relations 24(1), pp.65-86.

Huysmans, Jeff (1998) ‘Security! What do you mean? From Concept to Thick Signifier’, European

Journal of International Relations 4(2), pp.226-55.

LESLP (London Emergency Services Liaison Panel) (2012) Major Incident LESLP Manual: Eighth Edition

(Norwich: TSO Blackwell).

Lentzos, Filippa & Nikolas Rose (2009) ‘Governing Insecurity: Contingency Planning, Protection,

Resilience’, Economy and Society 38(2), pp.230-54.

Levy, Marc (1995) ‘Is the Environment a National Security Issue?’, International Security 20(2), pp.35-

62.

Lisle, Debbie (2013) ‘Frontline Leisure: Securitizing Tourism in the War on Terror’, Security Dialogue

44(2), pp.127-46.

Lundborg, Tom (2012) ‘The Folding of Trauma: Architecture and the Politics of Rebuilding Ground

Zero’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 37/3, pp.240-52.

Lundborg, Tom & Nick Vaughan-Williams (2011) ‘Resilience, Critical Infrastructure, and Molecular

Security: The Excess of ‘‘Life’’ in Biopolitics’, International Political Sociology 5(4), pp.367-83.

Massumi, Brian (2010) ‘The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat’ in The

Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg & Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press), pp.52-70.

Mbembe, Achille & Libby Meintjes (2003) ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15(1), pp.11-40.

Michelson, Nicholas (2013) ‘Liberalism, Political Theology & Suicide Bombing’, Millennium Journal of

International Studies 42(1), pp.198-223.

Mitford, Jessica (1963) The American Way of Death (New York: Buccaneer Books).

Morgenthau, Hans (1946) Scientific Man versus Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Oberst, Joachim L. (2009) Heidegger on Language and Death (London: Continuum).

Perrow, Charles (1999) Normal Accidents (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Rogers, Peter (2013) ‘Rethinking Resilience: Articulating Community and the UK Riots’, Politics 33(4),

pp.322-33.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1992) Being and Nothingness: The Principal Text of Modern Existentialism (New

York: Washington Square Press).

State of Connecticut (2011) State Response Framework (SRF) Version 2.0 (Department of Emergency

Services and Public Protection).

Steele, Brent J. (2013) Alternative Accountabilities in Global Politics: The Scars of Violence (Abingdon:

Routledge).

Tierney, Kathleen; Christine Bevc & Erica Kuligowski (2006) ‘Metaphors Matter: Disaster Myths,

Media Frames and Their Consequences in Hurricane Katrina’, The Annals of the American Academy

of Political and Social Science 604/1, pp.57-81.

Ullman, Richard (1983) ‘Redefining Security’, International Security 8(1), pp.129-53.

Walker, Jeremy & Melinda Cooper (2011) ‘Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the

Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation’, Security Dialogue 14(2), pp.143-60.

Waltz, Kenneth (1979) Theory of International Politics (Long Grove: Waveland Press).

Weber, Cindy (1999) Faking It: U.S. Hegemony in a Post-Phallic Era (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press).

Weizman, Eyal (2007) Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso).

Weldes, Jutta (1999) ‘The Cultural Production of Crises: U.S. Identity and Missiles in Cuba’ in Cultures

of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, eds. Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey;

Hugh Gusterson & Rayond Duvall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp.35-62.

Weldes, Jutta; Mark Laffey; Hugh Gusterson & Rayond Duvall (1999) ‘Introduction: Constructing

Insecurity’ in Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, eds. Jutta

Weldes, Mark Laffey; Hugh Gusterson & Rayond Duvall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press),

pp.1-33.

Young, James (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (Yale: Yale

University Press).

Zehfuss, Maja (2009) ‘Hierarchies of Grief and the Possibility of War: Remembering UK Fatalities in

Iraq’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 38(2), pp.419-40.