Abstract
In the wake of 9/11 the Bush administration has called upon established foreign policy discourses to cement the idea of a nation at war.1 Given the amorphous and often virtual nature of the “war on terror,” in which the adversary is by definition largely unseen, the association of other resistant elements with terrorism has become a mechanism for materializing the threat. Notorious in this regard was the Bush administration’s linking of internal and external threats by aligning individual drug use at home with support for terrorism abroad. In itself, this is not a new argument, with alleged links to terrorism having been featured in previous episodes of the U.S. “war on drugs.”2 However, the Bush administration went one step further by making a causal connection between individual behavior and international danger. The Office for National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) launched hard-hitting advertisements in which the social choices of hedonistic youngsters were said to directly enrich and enable terrorists threatening the United States.3
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Notes
David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998)
John Urry, “The’ system’ of Automobility,” Theory, Culture and Society, 21: 4 (2004): 27.
Ibid., p. 28; Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Michael Klare, Blood and Oil: How America’s Thirst for Petrol is Killing Us (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004)
For an argument that does see domestic oil consumption as the reason for the war, see Ian Rutledge, Addicted to Oil: America’s Relentless Drive for Energy Security (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. xii–xiii.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003)
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
William J. Mitchell, Me+ +: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 5.
Mimi Sheller, “Mobile Publics: Beyond the Network Perspective,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22 (2004): 39–52.
Julian Reid, “War, Liberalism, and Modernity: The Biopolitical Provocations of ‘Empire,’” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 17: 1 (April 2004): 74.
Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30: 1 (2001): 42.
Lieven De Cauter, The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2004), p. 85.
See Marieke de Goede, “Beyond Economism in International Political Economy,” Review of International Studies, 29: 1 (2003): 79–97.
Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack, “Moving Cities: Rethinking the Materialities of Urban Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography, 28: 6 (2004): 701.
David Miller, ed. Car Cultures (London: Berg, 2001).
Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001)
Jack Doyle, Taken for a Ride: Detroit’s Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001), p. 406.
Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty: SUVs—the World’s Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got That Way (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), pp. 29–30.
James William Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994)
Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
Tim Edensor, “Automobility and National Identity: Representation, Geography and Driving Practice,” Theory, Culture and Society, 21: 4/5 (2004): 101–120.
Bradsher (2002), p. 51. Similar valences are evident in other locales; for the way four wheel drive vehicles have played a part in Australian national identity, see Peter Bishop, “Off Road: Four Wheel Drive and the Sense of Place,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14 (1996): 257–271.
Ibid., pp. 95 and 97. For a compelling analysis of gated communities, see Setha Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Robert Cervero, The Transit Metropolis: A Global Inquiry (Washington, DC and Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1998), p. 35.
George Martin, “Grounding Social Ecology: Landscape, Settlement, and Right of Way,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 13: 1 (March 2002): 3–30
Matthew Patterson, “Car Culture and Global Environmental Politics,” Review of International Studies, 26: 2 (April 2000): 253–270
Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 144–145.
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: the Experience of Modernity (Penguin: New York, 1988), pp. 290–312.
Roland Marchand, “The Designers go to the Fair II: Norman Bel Geddes, The General Motors ‘Futurama,’ and the Visit to the Factory Transformed,” Design Issues, 8: 2 (Spring 1992): 29
Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Viking, 1997).
Jay Wickersham, “Jane Jacob’s Critique of Zoning: From Euclid to Portland and Beyond,” Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, 28: 4 (2001): 547–564.
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© 2007 Elizabeth Dauphinee and Cristina Masters
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Campbell, D. (2007). The Biopolitics of Security: Oil, Empire, and the Sports Utility Vehicle. In: Dauphinee, E., Masters, C. (eds) The Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04379-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-04379-5_7
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