Session Description: In 2008 two edited books revealed the interdisciplinary extent of critical thought on the problematic of the war on terror. Cowen and Gilbert's War, Citizenship, Territory and Amoore and de Goede's Risk and the War on Terror brought together the insights of geographers, philosophers, international relations theorists, sociologists, legal theorists, and media scholars. The debates illustrate a shared concern to open critique of the practices deployed under the rubric of threat or risk and in the name of the war on terror. From pre-emptive security strategies to homeland security citizenship, it is not that such techniques exceed sovereign authority but rather that they become the very basis of the authorization of mobile contemporary modes of sovereign power.
This panel analyses and discusses the space of security after the war on terror. The ways of governing populations and the modes of life and lived resistances that have emerged in the war on terror significantly exceed a specific temporal period that we might define in its terms. For example, the closure of Guantanamo Bay, the ceasing of rendition, and the disavowal of the very term 'war on terrorism' by various authorities, while they signal a security programme beyond war on terror, simultaneously conceal the prosaic sovereign practices in the spatiotemporal fabric of life itself. This panel will reflect on the continuing everyday security practices and the extent to which they are fashioned after a war on terror deployed by other means.
