Decentring Security by Mark Bevir

Author:Mark Bevir [Bevir, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351383097
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Warfare to wallfare

As early as the late 1950s, well before the advent of mass air travel and the widespread adoption of the standardised shipping container, let alone the global interconnectedness of media that so impressed McLuhan a decade later, Hannah Arendt perceived a dark side to a world in which ‘every man feels the shock of events which take place at the other end of the globe… Technology, having provided the unity of the world, can just as easily destroy it…’14 Nowadays, images such as the blasted off roof of a London bus, smoke rising from an iconic Mumbai hotel, the blood drenched dance floor of a Paris night club, and even still the ghost shadow cast by New York’s obliterated Twin Towers reinforce the immediate relevance of Arendt’s remarks.

The problem, though, is not simply or specifically one of the effect of connectedness as a sort of supercharger of terrorism15; it is rather a more general and widespread problem of tensions and disjuncture across multiple dimensions of the global cultural economy.16 The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has described the prevailing state of affairs as one of ‘liquid modernity’.17 A societal response to it has been a proliferation of wall building.

Two things, above all, are driving the current revitalisation of fortification in military affairs. The first is the increasing detachment of the mainstream of conflict from the paradigm of all arms, high-intensity, interstate conflict in which unfettered escalation must be assumed. During the Cold War, Soviet plans for the invasion of NATO-defended Europe intended to deal with vital command and control targets within German cities, which could be readily transformed into army-wasting death traps, through the eminently sensible (albeit horrific) tactic of ‘nuke and bypass’.18 By contrast, wars today are predominantly fought within states under conditions in which the use of force is limited, either because powerful belligerents pursuing limited aims restrict their own use of the full means at their disposal, or because weak belligerents pursuing grandiose aims are restricted by their limited means.19

The second is the desire of many states to control population flows, both over and within their own borders as well as in external theatres of conflict where they have intervened as third-party counterinsurgents in support of local regimes.

In situations where the use of the most powerful weapons is restrained, old techniques of positional warfare become viable again. The most widely remarked upon example of this has been the use of barriers within the context of counterinsurgency operations for the purposes of controlling population movements, separating, and pacifying warring sectarian communities. Bing West’s account of ‘The Surge’ in Iraq in 2007–2008 vividly captured this tactic in recent use by the United States:

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