Imagined futures and exceptional presents: a conceptual critique of ‘pre-emptive security’

This article critically considers what is at stake with the emergence of a ‘pre-emptive’ politics of security based upon governing the future through anticipatory interventions in the present. It begins by developing a detailed account of how the idea of pre-emption has come to inform the global governance of (in)security in the post-9/11 era. It then turns to a discussion of the logic of pre-emptive security itself. Here it is argued that its focus upon the future implies a prioritization of the imagination in its decisional logic, which has the effect of enhancing the degree of discretionary subjectivity granted to state authorities under a pre-emptive approach. The article then expands upon this claim by considering how it suggests an important conceptual link between a politics of pre-emption and political exceptionalism. It then concludes that the very notion of pre-emptive security can be seen as conceptually incoherent, since this link serves to compromise its capacity to produce a condition congruent with the understanding of ‘security’ presupposed by its own normative framework. Accordingly, the practical viability and political legitimacy of pre-emption as a rationality for (in)security governance can be seriously called into question.