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Imagining (in)security: NATO's collective self-defence and post-9/11 military policing in the Mediterranean Sea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2021

Julien Pomarède Open the ORCID record for Julien Pomarède [Opens in a new window]
Julien Pomarède*
Affiliation:
Recherche et Etudes en Politique Internationale (REPI), Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

How do scenarios of dangerous futures imagined in the framework of the post-9/11 counterterrorism shape security institutions? Critical Security Studies (CSS)'s dominant answer is that state apparatus are significantly transformed by the use of new technologies of prediction that are very prolific in imagining potential risks. The present article questions this technologically determinist thesis. Introducing the notion of weak field in the study of pre-emption, it argues that the political sociology of transnational fields of power can help us in historicise and assess more precisely the impact of imagination over power and control in the pre-emptive era. The article analyses NATO's reaction to 9/11 as a case study. It shows how the fabrication of potential terrorist threats by NATO's practitioners, that served to justify the pre-emptive use of the collective self-defence clause of the Washington Treaty (Article 5), evolved into an ambiguous support for NATO's military policing of the Mediterranean basin and into its involvement in migration control.

Keywords

Pre-emptionImaginationCritical Security StudiesNATOCounterterrorismTransnational Fields
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 192 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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