Securocratic wars of public safety

New strategies for the reproduction of American state sovereignty have emerged in the last decade or so which can be characterized as de-territorialized campaigns of public safety. These wars are not exclusively focused on territorial conquest, or on an easily locatable or identifiable enemy with its own respective goals of territorial conquest. Rather, they are focused on countering imputed territorial contamination and transgression – ‘terrorist’ demographic and biological infiltration. They are not solely geo-strategic instruments – a means to a political end but function as cultural imaginaries. In this essay, I shall outline several provisional and obviously contingent characteristics of the emerging forms of warfare and sovereignty: the ‘police concept of history’; the emerging ‘treatment state’; the new visual culture of warfare; the sacrificial and the actuarial structure of political violence.