6 - Permanent Security in History

Summary

Imperial formations of one kind or another have been the political form in which most humans have lived for thousands of years. Permanent security practices enabled imperial expansion and consolidation through the ages. To tease out its function since the Spanish and Portuguese conquests of the Americas in sixteenth century, it is necessary to distinguish between empires of exploitation and settler colonies. The language of transgression developed to simultaneously conceal and expose permanent security in the process of state formation and originary accumulation: first by justifying settler colonial warfare against indigenous resistance, and second by condemning the illiberal permanent security practices of imperial rivals, whether the Iberian powers in the early modern period or the fascist and communist ones in the twentieth century. Liberal permanent security in the form of settler colonialism normalized its modality of settlement, state-formation, and originary accumulation as a theodicy, a story of civilizational progress that benefitted humanity.