Theorizing the social foundations of exceptional security politics: Rights,emotions and community

Introduction

The last 20 years have seen an intensified focus in security studies on how liberal democratic states enact exceptional security politics in times of perceived crisis and how exceptional measures shape the societies which enact them. This focus was given additional impetus by the political developments after 9/11 in the US and in many western European states. Discussions on exceptional security measures during this period focused on, among other things, increasingly intrusive surveillance techniques, the legally sanctioned use of torture and indefinite internment of terrorist suspects (Dunne, 2007; Guild, 2003; Scheuerman, 2006). More recently, in the wake of several highly-publicized terror attacks in European cities discussions on exceptional measures have regained their salience. For instance, the French government’s decision to enact a prolonged state of emergency have been criticized for being associated with rights abuses, specifically against ethnic and religious minorities (Human Rights Watch, 2016a). Similar criticisms have been directed towards recently enacted practices in the wake of the 2016 terror attacks in Brussels (Human Rights Watch, 2016b).

Related to these types of measures and in contrast to traditional assertions that security is exclusively a ‘good’ that society should strive to maintain and reproduce, many have argued that security practices, somewhat paradoxically, seem to have a recursive relationship with perceived insecurity. ¹ Rather than diminishing fear these practices seem to contribute to its social distribution. Fear, it is argued, is at the foundation of the social mechanisms that enable purportedly liberal democracies to compromise fundamental rights and principles in the name of security (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau and Van Munster, 2009, 2011, Huysmans, 2006, 2014; Mythen and Walklate, 2008, 2016; Van Rythoven, 2015).

This article argues however that the overemphasis on fear in its various guises comes with the risk of misrepresenting the social and political processes that condition the imposition of excessively violent and repressive security practices. This problem is instead considered through a renewed focus on rights, as both formal rules and carriers of social meanings intimately connected to collective emotions of belonging. The exception from this perspective transgresses fundamental rights, but is also often legitimized as a response to perceived transgressions, such as terrorist attacks. The compromising of rights, and the often-broad popular acceptance of such breaches are explored here as efforts to regain a collective sense of self-worth. Such efforts, it is argued, rather than exclusively being motored by fear, unease and anxiety are also couched in a broader set of emotional states. Here positive feelings of belonging, and enthusiasm are considered as central. Building on recent work in International Relations on the importance of collective emotions as an analytical category to understand security politics the article offers less explored ways to theorize the social processes that condition the enactment of exceptional security politics as a recurrent feature of liberal democracies.

The article proceeds by discussing recent additions to the field of security studies that have theorized the social foundations of exceptional security politics. It is argued that while this field has made crucial contributions to our understanding of exceptional security politics, its emphasis on fear as the motor of such policies supplies an incomplete picture of why liberal democracies often respond to crises by restricting and violating fundamental rights. In the following section an argument for refocusing the discussion on how rights are associated with collective emotions is fleshed out. The empirical implications of this move are subsequently defined by drawing together studies that illustrate the specifics of the social mechanism through which rights, emotions and community feed into the enactment of exceptional security politics. Finally, the article highlights the analytical implications of this re-theorization of the social foundations of exceptional security politics pointing to new avenues of research that flow from this argument.

Fear and exceptional security politics

The history of exceptional security politics is littered with examples of how political elites have compromised fundamental rights in response to perceived emergencies but also how willing publics have gone along with such exceptional measures, often participating actively in their implementation. In public and scholarly debate alike, such processes have often been accounted for with reference to how political elites or security professionals have worked to justify policies by pandering to public fears of existential threats. These themes have been explored, in particular, in works by scholars in the so-called Copenhagen school of securitization, placing primary analytical focus on elite political discourse to understand how particular issues are moved from the realm of normal politics to that of exceptional politics (Buzan et al., 1998). At times criticized for their lack of attendance to social context and narrow focus on the speech acts of political elites, recent contributions have sought to theorize such acts in relation to a range of social factors (Balzacq, 2015; McDonald, 2008). These efforts have also included making securitization theory’s reliance on emotions, and fear in particular, explicit (Van Rythoven, 2015). Here the ‘success’ of securitizing moves is fundamentally dependent on the collective emotions of an audience accepting a specific threat as something to be feared (Van Rythoven, 2015: 465). For others, rather than amending securitization theory’s initially narrow focus on elite political discourse, the social aspects of exceptional politics have been placed front and centre from the start.

Here, focus is placed on the less visible micro-processes through which a preoccupation with security comes to shape social and political life (Amoore and De Goede, 2008; Aradau and Van Munster, 2007; Huysmans, 2006, 2014; Mythen and Walklate, 2008, 2016; Salter, 2008). Similar to the securitization literature, while not always explicitly theorized, the role of emotions has also been an important aspect of these accounts. In particular, in relation to the issue of terrorism, scholars have tended to point to the recursive relation between fear and ever more intrusive security measures (Bigo, 1996; Huysmans, 2006, 2014). From this perspective ‘security is a practice, not of responding to enemies and fear, but of creating them’ (Huysmans, 2014: 3) with fear of the ‘outsider’ being both the political currency and the organizational principle of security politics (Huysmans, 2006: 52). Fear undeniably plays an important role in the processes through which emergency security measures are justified. Political discourse as well as material manifestations of insecurity and risk such as heightened security checks and visible surveillance technologies can serve as reminders of the presence of danger rather than acting to placate such concerns.

In line with this notion, Huysmans (2004) investigates the relationship between ‘fear of the enemy’ as promoted through the politics of insecurity and exceptional politics. When fear dominates politics, it poses a fundamental challenge to values such as equality and freedom as restraints on exceptional politics (Huysmans, 2004: 338). Similarly, others have argued that exceptionalism effectively, ‘turns fear of the enemy into the constitutive principle of the social order’ (Aradau and Van Munster, 2009: 689; cf. Aradau and Van Munster, 2011). The social distribution of fear has fundamental implications for society and politics as it tends to pacify and lead to acquiescence, in the sense of limiting political debate and the possibility to articulate dissenting views (cf. Pearlman, 2013). In particular, post 9/11 events have served as illustrative examples of how fear leads to moral certainty and swift agreements on principles and actions (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008: 119). Campbell’s seminal account of foreign policy, maps less rapid processes but treats fear as deeply implicated in the construction of identities bound up with the state. He argues that the process through which such identities are forged are intimately related to the ‘institutionalization of fear’ (Campbell, 1998: 58).

Relatedly, the work that fear and anxiety does for the social acceptance of increasingly repressive security measures is also at the centre of the significant body of theorization in security studies building on the work of Foucault. Here insecurity and risk are treated as techniques of government intimately associated with the modern state. This follows Agamben’s assertion that the state of exception is a paradigmatic form of government in the modern era where the boundaries between law and exception are increasingly extinguished (Agamben, 2003). That is, contrary to the idea of the exception as a derogation from law, or even as existing outside of law, the exception dissolves boundaries between these categories. These notions applied in contemporary security studies, have resulted in perspectives where the exception shapes social life to an increasing degree by producing a situation where security measures, such as generalized surveillance technologies, enlist us all in the category of suspicion (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007: 108) or where practices such as enhanced border controls induce a sense of insecurity for all that passes through them (Salter, 2008: 377–378). For recent contributions to security studies, the political preoccupation with security and risk and, by implication, the social distribution of fear and anxiety is becoming an integral part of ever new domains of human life. Liberal modes of governing are from this perspective regarded as a biopolitical technique of government primarily geared towards normalization and control (cf. Dean, 2007: 97–98). Among these techniques, it is argued that fear, anxiety and unease play a prominent role.

While undoubtedly valuable this literature has also been criticized for supplying overly generalized characterizations of the social processes conditioning exceptional politics. The notion that exceptional security is conditioned by a general ‘culture of fear’ or should be understood in terms of Foucauldian concepts like dispositifs, of security and risk may conceal more nuanced and varied understandings of these processes (Furedi, 2002; Lund Petersen, 2012: 696). One way to provide nuance and specificity has been to highlight that exceptional measures which compromise fundamental rights are often directed at already socially and legally marginalized sections of society, such as ethnic and religious minorities. For instance, Aradau and Van Munster (2011), in discussing increasingly intrusive and far-reaching exceptional measures, acknowledge that repression is often unevenly distributed in society. They point to how such measures while often presented in general terms, are also informed by racial and cultural biases (Aradau and Van Munster, 2011: 111). Despite this, few have worked to draw the broader conclusions of such observations for theorizing how exceptional security measures are often tolerated, if not explicitly supported. Instead, the implications for marginalized groups have more often been conceptualized as secondary effects of the general regime of self-regulation and surveillance that is said to characterize contemporary security practices (Mythen and Walklate, 2008: 229; cf. Dillon, 2007). However, the uneven distribution of rights, made explicit through exceptional politics, implies the need to rethink parts of these social dynamics implied by the focus on a generalized state of fear. In particular, such a retheorization of the social processes underlying exceptional measures needs to consider how a broader range of collectively articulated emotions, beyond fear, unease and anxiety, might play in to how popular acceptance and support emerges for the violation of rights in the name of security.

Building on this point I argue in the following for a theorization of the social processes involved in exceptional security politics focused on how fundamental rights, and their violation, are associated with collective emotions in particular ways. While fear might indeed play a role for legitimizing security practices and for bending and breaching fundamental rights, it is not enough to explain these dynamics. I suggest a renewed focus on the duality of rights, as both a set of codified rules and as social institutions intrinsically connected to the emotional integrity of imagined communities (Anderson, 1983). Theorizing the links between rights and their violation on the one hand and a broader set of collective emotions on the other is central to this effort.

Rights and collective emotions

Exceptional security measures are intimately associated with the violation of fundamental rights. Addressing questions of what drives exceptional security politics requires a clear conceptualization of what rights are, and equally important what rights mean in particular social settings (cf. Somers and Roberts, 2008). Here rights are conceptualized provisionally as the codified set of rules that both regulate and to some extent constitute social relations in the context of a society. This conceptualization straddles the line between two notions, one associated with the universal aspect of rights underlying liberal democracy, and the other symbolic and performative aspect of rights associated with recognition, status, belonging and collective emotions. The link between rights and emotions relies on the idea that emotions are shaped by culturally produced meanings and embedded in specific social and political contexts (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008, 2014; Crawford, 2000, 2014; Hall and Ross, 2015; Löwenheim and Heimann, 2008; Mercer, 2010, 2014; Ross, 2014, 2016). ² Here, rights are associated with collective emotions by the way that they help delineate the boundaries of political communities in terms of who belongs and who does not. While not denying how emotions emerge from particular bodies, emotions are also ‘formed and structured by particular social and cultural environments [and] constituted in relation to culturally specific traditions’ (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2014: 504). This is not to say that social context determines how individuals feel, nor that emotional states are fixed and unchangeable (Ross, 2014). Rather the argument here is that social context conditions which emotions are reinforced and reproduced in particular settings. ³ Following Mercer, collective identities and emotions depend on each other (Mercer, 2014: 522). Strong collective identities constructed around pervasive shared understandings condition the emergence of ‘emotional’ consensus, also by reinforcing confidence in the appropriateness of particular emotional responses (Mercer, 2014: 526). The link between identity and emotion supplies the basis for understanding how compromising rights in the name of security is made possible (Ross, 2016). Exceptional politics are ultimately defined in relation to a specific body of legally codified rights and procedures. The symbolic aspect of rights helps explain why exceptional security politics often garner such broad public support despite their apparent contradictions to liberal democratic rights.

Two central aspects of rights can be highlighted. Firstly, rights in liberal political theory are primarily treated as a question of formal guarantees to enjoy protection and the ability to realize individual goals. Right to due process, equality before the law, property and privacy rights are central pillars of liberal democracy. The codification of these rights in primary or secondary law is a defining characteristic of such political orders. The very strength of this conception of rights resides in the fact that it does not make them dependent on particular contexts. Instead, rights are conceptualized as universal. They supply the limits within which politics needs to remain, even in times of crisis (Dyzenhaus, 2008). ⁴ Hence, rights are not thought of in terms of the meanings that are imputed on them by agents or the emotions they might induce. The second aspect of rights instead highlights their concrete application in social and political settings. Sociologists of rights have shown, how legal rights become intelligible also by attending to how they are bound up with particularist institutions, such as that of citizenship and more informal cultural membership (Morris, 2006; Somers and Roberts, 2008: 406). Thus, apart from the civic–juridical aspect of rights there are also a second layer here associated to the ‘right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1949; Somers and Roberts, 2008: 413). It is this aspect of boundary-drawing that connects rights to identity and political subjectivity and, in doing so, to collective emotions.

The access to rights thus has an important symbolic aspect, and is intrinsically related to belonging (Calhoun, 1994: 9. See also Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008). Such access can be regarded as a formalization of social hierarchies and status and affirms individuals’ sense of self-worth (Morris, 2006: 250; cf. Löwenheim and Heimann, 2008). Rights from this perspective serve as the link between private and collective emotions and are part of the ‘processes that render emotions political’ (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2014: 499). This perspective on rights helps conceptualize how exceptional measures are underpinned by processes of positive reinforcement, in contrast to perspectives awarding a primary role to fear for the production of political subjectivities. Without discounting the possibility that fear plays a role, ‘positive’ emotions become important as rights are associated with recognition of status and a sense of belonging (cf. Migdal, 2004). ⁵ Mercer (2014) has referred to such emotional dynamics as ‘social emotions’, emotions that involve relationships with, for instance, a group or community involving things that agents deem intrinsically important, such as ‘status, power, justice, or feelings of attachment’ (Mercer, 2014: 516). In times of perceived crisis links between feelings of belonging and a system of codified rights are made explicit as exceptional security measures often entail changes in the very distribution of rights.

To unpack these claims further, a body of rights can partly be seen as a system for recognition of the individual agents belonging to a social entity, such as a political community. Rights are always rights for someone. The distribution of access to rights reproduces the underlying and often tacit reasons for why the access to rights is distributed the way it is. It is a constant reminder of the substance and the limits of the community as a whole. Rights thus have a performative aspect, as they serve as the formalized expressions of specific communities that are bound by a set of collective self-understandings and emotional attachments. The distribution of rights serves as a reference point for collective emotional attachments. Exceptional security politics highlights the relation between rights and collective emotions, by redefining the access to rights.

The dual concept of rights is central for understanding the social processes involved in the enactment and implementation of exceptional security practices. This does not mean that the distribution of rights is the only, or necessarily the primary way in which, ‘social emotions’ are produced. However, the compromising of rights which is at the heart of exceptional security politics bring such emotions to the surface, by making explicit who belongs and who does not.

Exceptional security and the violation of fundamental rights

The connection between rights and emotions as delineated above, serves as the basis for addressing questions regarding the violation of rights in the name of security as a recurring feature of liberal democracy. Building further on these insights, exceptional politics is conceptualized here as involving a dual violation of rights. The first concerns the way in which emergencies such as acts of terrorism are often treated as violations of the rights attached to the community as a whole. As attacks on the integrity of imagined communities rather than on the state, they tend to be associated with a collective sense of humiliation and perceived loss of self-worth. The second occurs as rights are compromised through the imposition of exceptional measures to respond to such events.

Several studies on reactions to violent attacks, and terrorist attacks in particular, point in this direction. Saurette (2006) has argued that the US response to 9/11 was marked less by fear and more by moral outrage and an expressed sense of humiliation (Saurette, 2006). Fatah and Fierke, while focusing on conflicts in the Middle East, makes a crucial point in tying a perceived loss of dignity, and self-worth, a sense of humiliation to efforts to regain dignity through the use of violence (Fatah and Fierke, 2009: 85). Others added to this that different emotions may dominate at different stages related to specific events, and might feed into one another in various ways (Ross, 2014). In relation to the post-9/11 US political environment Hall and Ross argue that initial feelings of fear and anger eventually fed into strong positive feelings of collective attachment (Hall and Ross, 2015: 24). While much in the contemporary security studies literature has focused on terrorism there are also important parallels between the US response to 9/11 and the response to the attacks by Japan on Pearl Harbor in 1941 which to a great extent legitimized the widespread internment of Americans of Japanese descent (Muller, 2002; Robinson, 2009), and subsequently became part of the justifications of the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Hook, 1985; White, 1997).

The dynamics through which perceived external threats may contribute to popular mobilization are certainly not new. However, to tie back to the analytical focus on rights, the central point here is rather how exceptional measures are legitimized with references to emergencies and crises that are, themselves, often perceived as violations of fundamental norms and rules, and in that sense, rights associated with the community as a whole. Both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor were depicted in political speech and public debate as cowardly attacks, as stabs in the back, and represented as fundamental breaches of the norms and rules that govern the international sphere, even in times of war (Connor, 2012). Starkly similar, the French political response to the 2015 Paris terror attacks reiterated themes from the US 9/11 response, branding the attacks as ‘acts of war’ and as a fundamental attack on ‘who we are’ (Hollande, 2015). The immediate political response also focused on the fundamental rights of attackers. Not only was a formal state of emergency enacted, but the attacks immediately provoked suggestions from the French President to reform the constitution so that condemned terrorists could be stripped of their French citizenship (The Economist, 2016). While eventually not finding support in the French parliament, the notion that terrorists have forfeited their rights as citizens indicates the centrality of rights for the understanding of emergency security politics and more specifically to the emotional content of such rights. The attacks themselves were in some measure understood in terms of a violation of rights, and as such as a violation of the community’s sense of self-worth. This fed into the collective sense of trauma and humiliation that they produced, and helped legitimize policies that would otherwise have been deemed unacceptable. ⁶ This was also demonstrated by the wide-ranging support among French citizens in the wake of the 2015 attack to curb liberal rights (Institut français d’opinion publique (IFOP), 2015). ⁷ The US response to 9/11 similarly involved the notion that involvement in and support for acts like the 9/11 attacks by definition made certain fundamental rights such as the protection from torture inapplicable (McKeown, 2009: 12–13). The dominating figure here is thus one of mirroring, and of reinstating a sense of balance and order.

In this regard, exceptional security measures, through the violation of rights and the imposition of violent excess, share many of the characteristics of revenge. Such measures, be it in the form of compromising rules of extradition and internment and fair trial, or the putting into force of intrusive surveillance schemes, inhumane treatment of prisoners or outright violent conflict, resemble revenge in the way that they are often legitimized by the sense of balance they invoke. Löwenheim and Heimann, focusing on the case of Israeli use of military retaliation, conceptualize a central aspect of revenge as ‘the desire to restore one’s assumptive world and violated rights- to reinstate self-worth, dignity and identity’ (Löwenheim and Heimann, 2008: 695). This position resounds with Pearlman’s work where feelings of indignation are identified as a strong emotional driver for extraordinary actions (Pearlman, 2013). Exceptional security politics as analogous to revenge points to how the use of violence is importantly directed at attaining symbolic gains of emotional satisfaction and balance, tied to feelings of indignation and loss of self-worth, rather than primarily material ones (Löwenheim and Heimann, 2008: 697, see also Lebow, 2006). The exception is from this perspective, not primarily a functional category as it is most often depicted in legal theory, but a symbolic one that facilitates the reassertion of the status of the body politic. From this point of view the enactment of extraordinary measures is not exclusively about the perceived effectiveness of such measures but also about the emotional satisfaction they produce (cf. Connor, 2012: 11). Contemplation and critical self-reflection becomes a secondary concern for the simple reason that the collective sense of self-worth is what needs to be reasserted, not further questioned. The dominating discourse defining the meaning of 9/11, similar to the initial French response to the 2015 attacks, focused on precisely this: the attacks were an attack on ‘who we are’ (Krebs and Lobasz, 2007: 423) and as such an attack on the national essence rather than on the state, and its strategic capabilities. In that context, exceptional politics serves as a site in which emotions, and by consequence actions, can be played out that go beyond what is accepted within prevalent laws, rules and norms of a society. Exceptional security measures are, just as the practice of revenge, a way in which insult and humiliation can be transformed into a restoration and even a celebration of the self.

As previous research on emotions and social relations has demonstrated, emotional attachments that are produced by being recognized as belonging to a certain group tend to shape our interpretations of the social world and the behaviours of others (Jones, 1996; Mercer, 2010). That is, one’s socially defined position shapes how security practices are perceived. Exceptional security practices manifestly communicate the presence of insecurity and risk, but they are also accompanied by a shared understanding regarding who is likely to be subjected to such measures. As Loader suggests (2006) the police, customs officer, soldier or security guard all produce ‘significant messages about the kind of place that community is and aspires to be’ (Loader, 2006: 211; see also Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008). The reception of specific security measures, may instil a range of emotions that can be grouped under the general heading of ‘positive’ emotional states such as ‘reassurance’, ‘enjoyment’, ‘relief’, and ‘enthusiasm’. ⁸ The perhaps more unsettling point in this context is that these emotions also seem to make groups discount the importance of substantive rights of others. Exceptional security politics relies on and reinforces the affective relationship between individual members of the collective and between the collective and the state, and conditions the way in which rights and their violation acquire specific meanings.

This does not mean that the specific ways in which crises or attacks are interpreted and politicized are in any way predetermined. Particular reactions are clearly dependent on a range of different factors, situational as well as structural. In particular, specific brands of nationalism and institutionalized national security discourses, or ‘security imaginaries’ (cf. Guzzini, 2012; Van Rythoven, 2015; Weldes, 1999) can plausibly be said to condition whether events like major terrorist attacks trigger processes for self-reflection or if they trigger a perceived need to restore the international standing of the nation through the imposition of exceptional measures. As Mansbach and Rhodes (2007) have argued, different ‘markers’ of national identity, in terms of the stories told about what binds members of a community together, condition to some extent how a community behaves internally as well as how it behaves towards others. If nation-states are indeed imagined communities, the contextually specific way in which the community is imagined conditions the way in which the emotional ties shape political action. What both the US and the French examples seem to indicate is, however, the extent to which the turn to exceptional politics seems more motivated by emotional redress than fear.

Exceptional security and community

To concretize the theoretical move towards rights, emotions and community in studying exceptional security this section highlights the specifics of how rights’ violations may be associated with broader social processes driven by a collective desire for emotional satisfaction. It thus concretizes the mechanisms of how exceptional politics, rather than affecting societies in uniform ways, tend to be aimed at already marginalized social groups.

While not confined to the issue of exceptional security politics, several studies have considered the micro-processes through which individual identities are conflated with that of the nation-state. Importantly, these processes do not always involve direct participation of agents of the state. Furthermore, these studies indicate the way in which the violation of rights, rather than centring on fear, have community building and the strengthening of emotional attachments as their main themes. Lawson’s (2004) study of the life of a small Canadian town during the First World War, vividly illustrates how emotional attachment to the state can work to reconfigure and give new meanings to social boundaries and create the impetus to implement exceptional measures on the micro-level. Participation in associations of all sorts designed to help the war effort became a way in which affective ties within the community were strengthened but also served to identify those that did not participate and cast these parts of the community as unpatriotic and alien. Networks of civic activity channel emotional ties and help legitimize exceptional state action as well as imposing violent excess on the micro-level. In Lawson’s case this included violent practices but also social sanctions implemented in everyday life by teachers, colleagues, customers and employers (Lawson, 2004: 195). Illustrating the tensions between the majority the population and those groups on the margin in situations of perceived emergency, he argues that such practices

generate a heightened sense of civic spirit throughout the centers of civil society to advance the national cause. Yet the emotional character of the civic engagement is often expressed through violence and directed against those who are perceived to fall outside prominent conceptions of who belongs to the nation (Lawson, 2004: 180).

In parallel, Nagler’s study, in the US context, of how German fugitives were cast as ‘enemy aliens’ during the First World War highlights the widespread public support for the exceptional measures that were directed at this group. It also demonstrates the importance of popular participation in their implementation. Nagler points to the voluntary engagement in informal vigilance groups with the mission to gather intelligence on members of this particular section of society (Nagler, 1993: 193). The meaning making and the emotional satisfaction of participating actively in the imposition of exceptional measures also emerges in a study with a more recent focus by Doty (2007). In contrast to Lawson and Nagler, Doty engages explicitly with the concept of the exception and presents an account of popular mobilization in present day vigilante groups patrolling the US–Mexican border to prevent ‘illegal immigrants/terrorists’ to enter US soil. The study shows, similar to Lawson’s, that the violation of rights relies on, and becomes channeled through society by way of processes that do not necessarily involve the state directly. Doty does not mainly focus on these groups in terms of emotional significance for those involved. However, she states that ‘in the anti-immigration movement, the grassroots base is equally significant and arguably exerts as much, if not more emotion and energy than the elite and political leaders’ (Doty, 2007: 130). Fear, Doty argues, plays an important role for the mobilization of these groups. However, while not explicitly developed in her study, what emerges is that these associations are also rather crucially driven by a joint sense of purpose, community and a reinforcement of strong and highly exclusionary identities. This indicates that rather than just fear, other sets of collectively articulated emotions are at work.

The mechanisms that tie these studies together are strikingly similar to those highlighted in Berman’s seminal (1997) account of civil associations, in her case in the Weimar Republic. Civil associations have the potential to strengthen broader civic virtues and dissolve social boundaries. However, these associations may just as well serve to affirm such boundaries and polarize social relations, preparing the ground for both acceptance and for active participation in the violation of fundamental rights. The German case also ties more clearly into the theme of humiliation and restoration of self-worth as a central aspect of exceptional politics. The surge in popular mobilization studied by Berman associated with the rise of National Socialism in Germany in the 1930s, was a movement that importantly fed on widespread feelings of the injustices of the past (Kühne, 2010). From this point of view the drive towards emotional redress and the pressure to ‘do something’ is concretized on the micro level as parts of the citizenry is mobilized, and take part in the implementation of exceptional measures. The broad willingness to compromise the rights of minorities, or the unwillingness to protect them, runs through these accounts and illustrates how rights and emotions are intimately connected to exceptional security politics.

The underlying assumption regarding the targets of exceptional measures comes out more clearly nowhere than in the debates in the US context which followed 9/11 on the use of torture as an interrogation technique, and specifically Alan Dershowitz’s (2002) suggestions regarding the regulation through law of the use of torture in exceptional circumstances. McKeown (2009) has also pointed to how the norm against the use of torture has been fundamentally eroded after 9/11. Crucially, the ethnic identity of counter-terrorism targets shaped public support for policies that entailed serious rights violations (Hall and Ross, 2015: 21). Brooks and Manza’s public opinion studies on counter-terrorism measures in the US have also shown that support for harsher measures increases when directed towards minority groups, such as people with ‘Middle Eastern background’, as opposed to when suspects are identified as ‘American’, irrespective of formal citizenship status (Brooks and Manza, 2013: 121). This highlights the general point that identity and feelings of belonging condition our capacity for empathy (or lack thereof) (Crawford, 2014: 542). Many have since expressed their repugnance against the very idea of living in a society that uses torture. Some have also argued that the Bush administration was unable to radically alter the strong international norms against torture (Barnes, 2016). Similarly, others have shown that the actual public support for torture in the US after 9/11 was recurrently overestimated (Gronke et al., 2010). However, it is indicative that few have criticized the use of torture out of the fear of being themselves the target of such a treatment. Indeed, the very possibility to introduce torture in a democratic society will be hard to grasp if we disregard the deep knowledge of the many that the ‘core’ populations are not the primary targets of these measures and that in most cases they need not worry about being subjected to them at all. Both Barnes (2016) and Gronke et al. (2010) focus on the fact that the surveys indicate that, through the years 2001–2009, a majority of US citizens actually opposed torture. However, the fact that more than 40% of those asked defended such practices, practices subjected to among the strongest normative taboos in international society, is significant. In particular, it points to how less controversial exceptional measures involving the serious breach of fundamental rights could easily engender far more support. Counterfactually, we can only begin to imagine the political difficulties that would be connected to the enforcement of security measures that would entail the suspension of procedural and substantive rights of members of the majority of the population. Again, the broad public support for the emergency measures enacted by the Bush administration following 9/11, as well as for similar measures in France as a response to the 2015 terrorist attacks, serve as indications that these assumptions might have some bearing for our understanding of exceptional security politics. ⁹

The examples highlighted here are by no means an exhaustive account of the empirical implications that might be drawn from the focus on rights, emotions and community. However, they serve to illustrate the possibilities that this analytical redirection might hold for further developing the study of exceptional security. What connects these examples, taken from different social and political settings, is that the rights violations are intimately connected to processes of emotional redress and community building.

Concluding remarks

Placing rights, emotions and community at the centre of the study of exceptional security politics opens up far less explored avenues of research in security studies. Inevitably, the ways in which exceptional security measures are framed, legitimized and implemented are complex, involving both political elites as well as broader processes unfolding in various social settings. They actualize different types of emotional responses that will condition the extent to which perceived crises lead to violations of fundamental rights for certain groups, or to other forms of political action.

A focus on the dual character of rights and their violation might enable a balance to be struck between perspectives that have either emphasized the importance of political elites or broader social processes in the enactment of exceptional security politics. The radical transgression of fundamental rights will be difficult to understand without reference to specific contexts, shaped by broader social processes through which institutionalized conceptions of history and belonging have emerged. Political elites both draw upon and reproduce such conceptions and shape interpretations of events and the emotional response that such interpretations are likely to elicit across broader publics. Here close attention should be paid to how institutionalized identities and security imaginaries shape the collective emotions that are triggered by particular events, also looking closer at the specific mechanisms through which such emotions are disseminated and altered in particular societies. Further studies along those lines would help nuance and supply contextual depth for our understanding of how multiple identities in particular societies are associated with social hierarchies that feed into levels of acceptance for exceptional measures.

A critique against the imposition of exceptional security politics might also be helped by highlighting its social foundations. The focus on the meaning of rights brings out how exceptional politics is a self-referential celebration of a specific configuration of the community and its limits. This actualizes the uncomfortable implications, highlighted by the long history of exceptional security politics in liberal democracies, that the joys of belonging and the affections it brings with it make us discount the excesses that are brought onto others in terms of the violation of fundamental rights.

Drawn to its conclusion, the strong emphasis placed on fear in security studies yields an overly narrow conception of society, in which feelings of insecurity, and the fear of unmanageable threats and risks are placed at the core of the constitution of political subjectivities. Such a perspective tends towards a view of society where we are all represented as more or less passive victims to these security regimes rather than, perhaps more accurately, accomplices in them. Questioning such a perspective opens for the assignment of responsibility to ourselves as self-reflexive subjects for the broad but often tacit agreement on which the operation of exceptional security politics rely.