Isobel Roele talks to us about her new book Articulating Security: The United Nations and its Infra-Law published by CUP.
Articulating Security is about how the UN (tries to) organize the swarm of counter-terrorism entities, initiatives, and issue-areas that have sprung up in the last twenty years or so. The first part of the book tells a story about how the UN’s managerial technologies (like strategic planning and performance review) fail to achieve much coordination or coherence, let alone to ‘eliminate international terrorism’. The second part of the book explains that this failure does not render such managerial governance harmless and that it is having a deleterious and disarticulating effect on juridico-political modes of governing.
I argue that international lawyers’ attempts to tame or rebrand managerial technologies using juridical categories give rise to ‘infra-law’, which is both like and unlike that which Foucault identified in Discipline and Punish. Infra-law is uncanny in its inarticulateness and unresponsive to injustices perpetrated in the name of counter-terrorism. A form of law responsive to injustice cannot be achieved, the book concludes, by expelling managerial elements from juridico-political practices, imaginaries, or systems in order to reinstate constitutional authority. Instead, a law that can respond to injustice rests on advocacy not authority – in articulating the anger of those harmed in the name of counter-terrorism.
I wrote this book so I could be promoted! (Kidding not kidding.) I’m long in the tooth to be publishing my first monograph – it’s been a long time in the making – and in large part the argument and shape of this particular book is the product of exigency. I (quite rightly) had to give up the luxuries of reading and thinking and produce something REF-able. The result is far from perfect. Every time I open a book, attend a conference, or chat to a colleague I discover another indispensable concept, reference, or insight I ought to have included. The last chapter, moreover, is written in the manner of a 100-yard dash, when the ideas it contains really need working out slowly – a marathon not a sprint. To make an ungainly shift in metaphor, the best way I can describe is this: if doing research is like the party game of musical statues, then shape I was throwing when the music stopped is not the most graceful of forms.
I write to think. Those who are able to write up a fully formed idea have my utmost admiration, but I find that my ideas get worked out (sometimes overworked) through syntax, paragraphing, and word choices. Kind colleagues who read early versions of chapters (massive thank yous to Eva, Leila, Lizzie, Maks, and Tanzil!) will attest to the jumble of material and tangled trains of thought this approach to writing generated. But on the other hand, I treated my writing as a work-in-progress, so wasn’t too precious about taking readers’ patient and insightful comments on board in a rolling process of rewrites.
Things were less enjoyable in the last leg, when the anxiety of submitting the manuscript shook hands with the anxiety induced by the first lockdown in Spring 2020. My poor family and friends – I was unbearable! As is the case for many people, I think, the monograph was freighted with my anxieties about professional success and institutional recognition. As this particular monograph concerns the way law responds to terrorism - a ‘threat without boundaries’, as the UN puts it - I also felt like I was (or ought to have been) writing about the pandemic, too. I lived and breathed the book for a super-intense 4-month stretch – I was redrafting in my sleep! It was a huge relief to submit the manuscript in May 2020.
Articulating Security set several trains of thought running and I want, in particular, to return to some of the ideas blithely strewn in the final chapter. One of these, which looks to psychoanalysis to analyse symptomatically various kinds of security ordering, will be another monograph called Security Disorders. I also plan to return to the distinction I posit between law as a practice of advocacy and as an assertion of authority, which is under-baked in the book, but feels like an idea worth dwelling on.
One equally gratifying and annoying thing about getting a book off your desk is that you get lots of invitations to contribute papers on the same topics or using the same concepts. Just when you never want to utter the words ‘counter-terrorism’ or ‘managerial governance’ again, it’s all anyone wants to hear! As an antidote to this, I’m also working on a completely different project, on the UN’s use of visual artwork in its public information work and its attempt to constitution a global public thereby. It’s changed tack a few times, but at the moment I’m calling it Training the Global Public Eye.