Francois Debrix - Böcker

This edited volume examines the political, social, and cultural insecurities that the United States is faced with in the aftermath of its post-9/11 foreign policy and military ventures. The contributors critically detail the new strategies and ideologies of control, governance, and hegemony America has devised as a response to these new security threats.The essays explore three primary areas. First, they interrogate the responses to 9/11 that resulted in an attempt at geopolitical mastery by the United States. Second, they examine how the US response to 9/11 led to attempts to secure and control populations inside and outside the United States, resulting in situations that quickly started to escape its control, such as Abu Ghraib and Katrina. Lastly, the chapters investigate links between contemporary regimes of state control and recently recognized threats, arguing that the conduct of everyday life is increasingly conditioned by state-mobilized discourses of security. These discourses are, it is argued, ushering in a geopolitical future characterized by new insecurities and inevitable measures of biopolitical control and governance.

This edited volume examines the political, social, and cultural insecurities that the United States is faced with in the aftermath of its post-9/11 foreign policy and military ventures. The contributors critically detail the new strategies and ideologies of control, governance, and hegemony America has devised as a response to these new security threats.The essays explore three primary areas. First, they interrogate the responses to 9/11 that resulted in an attempt at geopolitical mastery by the United States. Second, they examine how the US response to 9/11 led to attempts to secure and control populations inside and outside the United States, resulting in situations that quickly started to escape its control, such as Abu Ghraib and Katrina. Lastly, the chapters investigate links between contemporary regimes of state control and recently recognized threats, arguing that the conduct of everyday life is increasingly conditioned by state-mobilized discourses of security. These discourses are, it is argued, ushering in a geopolitical future characterized by new insecurities and inevitable measures of biopolitical control and governance.

Beyond Biopolitics exposes the conceptual limits of critical biopolitical approaches to violence, war, and terror in the post-9/11-War on Terror era.This volume shows that such popular international political theories rely upon frames of representation that leave out of focus a series of extreme forms of gruesome violence that have no concern for the preservation of life, a crucial biopolitical theme. Debrix and Barder mobilize different concepts—horror, agonal sovereignty, the pulverization of the flesh, or the notion of an inhumanity-to-come—to shed light on past and present ghastly scenes and events of violence that seek to undo the very idea of humanity. To highlight the capacity of horror to be in excess of both violence and the meaning of humanity, Beyond Biopolitics provides a series of engagements with issues much debated in contemporary critical theoretical circles, in particular war and terror, the production of fear, states and spaces of exception, and alterity as enmity.This work will be of great interest to scholars of critical international relations theory, critical security studies and international relations.

Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror’s intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror’s work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror’s production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror’s own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror—faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11—to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today’s often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies.

Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror’s intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror’s work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror’s production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror’s own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror—faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11—to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today’s often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies.

This book analyzes the methods, effects, and mechanisms by which international relations reach the US citizen. Deftly dissecting the interrelationships of national identity formation, corporate ‘news and opinion’ dissemination, and the quasi-academic apparatus of war justification - focusing on the Bush administration's exploitation of the fear and insecurity caused by 9/11 and how this has manifested itself in the US media (especially the tabloid populist media). Debrix explains how all serve to defend and produce state power and develops a model of tabloidized international relations, where responses are both organized by, and supportive of, a strong centralized US government. The field of International Relations sorely needs such analytics, in so far as it explains how people in their everyday lives relate to transnational issues.Tabloid Terror critically covers a wide variety of US popular culture from the Internet to Fox News; analyzes diverse authors as Julia Kristeva, J.G. Ballard and Robert Kaplan and takes into account renowned international relations interlocutors as Don Imus, Bill O’Reilly, and Tommy Franks.

This book analyzes the methods, effects, and mechanisms by which international relations reach the US citizen. Deftly dissecting the interrelationships of national identity formation, corporate ‘news and opinion’ dissemination, and the quasi-academic apparatus of war justification - focusing on the Bush administration's exploitation of the fear and insecurity caused by 9/11 and how this has manifested itself in the US media (especially the tabloid populist media). Debrix explains how all serve to defend and produce state power and develops a model of tabloidized international relations, where responses are both organized by, and supportive of, a strong centralized US government. The field of International Relations sorely needs such analytics, in so far as it explains how people in their everyday lives relate to transnational issues.Tabloid Terror critically covers a wide variety of US popular culture from the Internet to Fox News; analyzes diverse authors as Julia Kristeva, J.G. Ballard and Robert Kaplan and takes into account renowned international relations interlocutors as Don Imus, Bill O’Reilly, and Tommy Franks.

'Beyond Biopolitics constitutes a truly serious attempt to think about the unthinkable.' Guy Lancaster, Political Studies Review: 2014 VOL 12, 93. Beyond Biopolitics exposes the conceptual limits of critical biopolitical approaches to violence, war, and terror in the post-9/11-War on Terror era.This volume shows that such popular international political theories rely upon frames of representation that leave out of focus a series of extreme forms of gruesome violence that have no concern for the preservation of life, a crucial biopolitical theme. Debrix and Barder mobilize different concepts—horror, agonal sovereignty, the pulverization of the flesh, or the notion of an inhumanity-to-come—to shed light on past and present ghastly scenes and events of violence that seek to undo the very idea of humanity. To highlight the capacity of horror to be in excess of both violence and the meaning of humanity, Beyond Biopolitics provides a series of engagements with issues much debated in contemporary critical theoretical circles, in particular war and terror, the production of fear, states and spaces of exception, and alterity as enmity.This work will be of great interest to scholars of critical international relations theory, critical security studies and international relations.

Language matters in international relations. Constructivists have contributed the insight that global politics is shaped by the way agents narrate history and produce discourses about themselves and about the world. This insight has induced a profound reexamination of assumptions in the study of international relations. The contributors to this volume examine (Part I) the critical linguistic/discursive techniques of postmodernists and constructivists, and apply them (Part II) to international relations.

Language matters in international relations. Constructivists have contributed the insight that global politics is shaped by the way agents narrate history and produce discourses about themselves and about the world. This insight has induced a profound reexamination of assumptions in the study of international relations. The contributors to this volume examine (Part I) the critical linguistic/discursive techniques of postmodernists and constructivists, and apply them (Part II) to international relations.

Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations brings together a diverse array of critical IR scholars, political theorists, critical security studies researchers, and critical geographers to provide a series of interventions on the topic of death and death-making in global politics. Contrary to most existing scholarship, this volume does not place the emphasis on traditional sources or large-scale configurations of power/force leading to death in IR. Instead, it details, theorizes, and challenges more mundane, perhaps banal, and often ordinary modalities of violence perpetrated against human lives and bodies, and often contributing to horrific instances of death and destruction. Concepts such as "slow death," "soft killing," "superfluous bodies," or "extra/ordinary" destruction/disappearance are brought to the fore by prominent voices in these fields alongside more junior creative thinkers to rethink the politics of life and death in the global polity away from dominant IR or political theory paradigms about power, force, and violence. The volume features chapters that offer thought-provoking reconsiderations of key concepts, theories, and practices about death and death-making along with other chapters that seek to challenge some of these concepts, theories, or practices in settings that include the Palestinian territories, Brazilian cities, displaced population flows from the Middle East, sites of immigration policing in North America, and spaces of welfare politics in Scandinavian states.