Alterity, social order, and the meaning(s) to security.

Abstract

This thesis provides a genealogy of security. The first two chapters situate it in relation to the discipline of International Relations and present the approach to develop the genealogy. It is argued that what has enabled the lack of problematization of the concept of security within the discipline is precisely the security project of the discipline itself: the securing of an ontological ground through the deployment of epistemological precepts that pervade the way the discipline is predominantly understood and its evolution is retroactively (re)written. I argue that the discipline itself is enabled by, and is a manifestation of, "sovereign thought"---i.e. a form of knowledge inextricably related to the articulation of the sovereign State as the predominant form of social order in modernity. What is revealed is how the structure of sovereign thought occults its generative principles and enables a framing of issues and problems via objective knowledge while simultaneously masking its role as a frame. It is this deployment of knowledge that enables the naturalization of "security." These first two chapters provide the groundwork and the rationale for the genealogical investigation found in the second part of the thesis. The three following chapters apply this approach to the relationship between the meaning(s) to security and the production of social order. This genealogy is developed by tracing the intimate complicity between the meaning to security and the articulation of social order via alterity. These chapters are constructed around three interregna : the shift from Roman Republic to Empire and the advent of Christianity; the shift from Christendom to sovereign State in the classical age; and the advent of the modern sovereign State and the present mutations of sovereign order. Through this genealogy it is argued that our present articulation of "security" serves as a mechanism of depoliticization in the service of sovereign order increasingly deployed throughout the social above and below statal space. Finally, I argue that it is within the context of modernity and its intimate relation with the advent of democracy that a new horizon of possibility to articulate a counter-discourse to security is opened up.