‘To save succeeding generations from the scourge of war’: the US, UN and the violence of security

Abstract

This investigation explores the ways in which discourses of security functioned to allow military intervention in Iraq to become ‘thinkable’, and how these actions serve to reconfigure not only the identities of states – the US and Iraq – but also the characteristics of the international as a spatial and conceptual domain. In the weeks preceding the military intervention in Iraq, significant negotiations were conducted between the US government and the UN that were commented on extensively in press statements and other documents released by both parties. Drawing on UNSC Resolutions, public debates and academic analyses, in this article I analyse the relations between the US and the UN in the build-up to the Iraq war, making two related claims.

First, I argue that each discourse is organised around a particular logic of security. By ‘logics of security’, I mean the ways in which various concepts are organised within specific discourses of security. That is, each competing conceptualisation of security has a distinct primary focus, referent object and perspective on the arrangement of the international system. The ways in which these claims are made, the assumptions that inform them, and the policy prescriptions that issue from them, are what I refer to as ‘logics of security’. Second, I argue that the intervention in Iraq, a violence undertaken in the name of ‘security’, has functioned to reproduce the international as a spatial and conceptual domain according to the logic of a highly conventional narrative of sovereigneity, and, ultimately, of state identity.