Markus Kienscherf – författare

This book maps the increasing convergence of US domestic and international security regimes, analyzing the trend towards global pacification in the name of 'security'.The dream of liberal world peace after the Cold War is on the verge of collapsing into permanent global pacification – not only in the global south but also in pockets of the ‘Third World’ within the territory of Western states. In this volume, the author explores the ways in which regimes of security have been extended into increasingly large aspects of social life and shows that their expansion has been driven by a constant broadening of the notion of 'war'.Filling a gap in the literature, the book demonstrates how US security agencies have sought to develop indeterminate security capabilities aimed at distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate flows of people and resources. This analysis of regimes of security is tied to a more general discussion about the persistence, or even multiplication, of illiberal forms of power within liberal governmentality. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations in general.

This book maps the increasing convergence of US domestic and international security regimes, analyzing the trend towards global pacification in the name of 'security'.The dream of liberal world peace after the Cold War is on the verge of collapsing into permanent global pacification – not only in the global south but also in pockets of the ‘Third World’ within the territory of Western states. In this volume, the author explores the ways in which regimes of security have been extended into increasingly large aspects of social life and shows that their expansion has been driven by a constant broadening of the notion of 'war'.Filling a gap in the literature, the book demonstrates how US security agencies have sought to develop indeterminate security capabilities aimed at distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate flows of people and resources. This analysis of regimes of security is tied to a more general discussion about the persistence, or even multiplication, of illiberal forms of power within liberal governmentality. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations in general.

Master's Thesis from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: Distinction, University of Newcastle upon Tyne (School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics), language: English, abstract: Gibson's fiction both embraces the potential of technology for undermining traditional categories and, at the same time, encodes a nostalgic longing for the stable identities produced by these very categories. This study will show how William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy blends high-tech and myth in order to articulate an oxymoronic tension between possessed and possessive individualism. This oxymoronic tension is expressed through Gibson's literary production of two particular technologies: the cyborg and the net. This study will interrogate these two literary constructs in Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy in order to show how they impinge on ideas of signification, subjectivity, and identity.

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: Distinction, University of Newcastle upon Tyne (School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics), course: Theorizing the Past, language: English, abstract: "e;How do things stand with the real event, then, if reality is everywhere infiltrated by images, virtuality and fiction?"e;, asks Jean Baudrillard in his The Spirit of Terrorism (Baudrillard 2003:27-28) He already seems to know the answer to this, apparently, purely rhetorical question. Or does he? Baudrillard has become (in)famous for his controversial claim that we are living in an age of simulation and hyperreality, or what he calls the 'third order of simulacra' (Baudrillard 1993:50). The following paper will try to disentangle some of Baudrillard's arguments clustering around ideas of the simulacrum, hyperreality and simulation. Arguing that the last two gulf wars constitute concrete examples of simulation and hyperreality, both in terms of the (hyper)real events on the ground and in terms of the images bombarding our living rooms, it will, then, explore these events in the light of Baudrillard's ideas. In Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard argues that in our current era of simulation the real is preceded by, and generated from, models, in a free play of signifiers which only refer to other signifiers (Baudrillard 1994:1-2). This constitutes the "e;third order of simulacra"e;, in contrast to the 'second order' which was still dominated by production and a market law of value (Baudrillard 1993:50). Baudrillard uses the term value in both its economic and linguistic sense. Drawing on Marx and Sausurre he differentiates between two dimensions of value. First, there is a structural aspect corresponding to Marx's idea of exchange value. Each sign within a signifying system or each commodity within a system of exchange can be related to each other sign or commodity - "e;the structural dimension"e;. The second aspect is functional, relating each term to what it designates (signifier to signified; sign to referent) or each commodity to its potential use (Marx's use-value) - "e;the referential dimension"e; (Baudrillard 1993 :6-9).

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Distinction, University of Newcastle upon Tyne (School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics), course: Reading the Past, language: English, abstract: The semantic field opened up by the term modernity describes a multifaceted body of experiences that are seen as somehow different from earlier, more traditional modes of experience. This modern "e;experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils"e; seems to be marked by a sense of perpetual change brought about by the continuous and relentless application of techno-scientific knowledge (Berman 1983:2). The perpetually shifting paradigms of scientific knowledge and the social consequences of the application of techno-science to the subjugation of nature undermine any notion of stability and continuity. Pierre Nora's use of the phrase "e;acce leration of history"e; to signify "e;an increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good"e; crystallizes the general sense of uncertainty which is often seen as an integral part of modern experience (Nora 1989:7). In the following passage Nora introduces a distinction between memory and history:On the hand, we find an integrated, dictatorial memory unself-conscious, commanding, allpowerful, spontaneously actualizing, a memory without a past that ceaselessly reinvents tradition, linking the history of its ancestors to the undifferentiated time of heroes, origins, and myth and on the other hand, our memory, nothing more in fact than sifted and sorted historical traces (Nora 1989:8) . In order to critique how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change, organize the past Nora juxtaposes an archaic, undifferentiated, mythical form of memory, which ties a community organically to its past with modern historiography, which produces simulacra of a memory that has been destroyed by modern history (Nora 1989:8). Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno locate the source of modernization and its vicissitudes in the enlightenment conception of knowledge as a tool to conquer[] superstition, [and] to rule over a disenchanted nature (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:2). By exorcizing myths the Enlightenment becomes through a dialectical twist its own myth.

Essay from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Distinctio, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, course: Novelists in History, language: English, abstract:

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: Distinctio, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, course: Cultural Responses to Slavery and the Holocaust, language: English, abstract:

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: Distinctio, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, course: The Gothic Novel, language: English, abstract:

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: Distinctio, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, course: Extended Study, language: English, abstract: Accordingly, we have to resist two extreme poles and their respective inherent dangers: on the one hand we are confronted with a potential reproduction and perpetuation of imperial patterns through universalizing discourses, whereas, on the other hand, narratives of cultural separatism, which are sometimes based on notions of cultural purity and essentialist forms of identity, often tend to ignore the dynamics of cross-cultural contact and exchange and may even turn unwittingly into forms of cultural racism. We should, however, bear in mind that processes of cross-cultural contact (the examples of colonialism itself and the practices it gave rise to, such as for instance the transatlantic slave trade, immediately spring to mind) more often than not involve stark asymmetries of power.