Violence and the Modern International: An Archaeology of Terrorism

Abstract

This chapter proposes to reengage with the problem of government by reappropriating Michel Foucault’s investigation of security, but examining it from the more particular standpoint of its relationship to the general problem of violence. This chapter shows that contemporary changes in security, conceived from the standpoint of the radical heterogeneity of its constitutive practices, are closely connected with, and even made possible by, a new problematization of violence since the 1950s. Finally, this chapter shows how this new problematization of violence is accompanied by a profound transformation in the art of governing with the advent of traceability as a technology of government, betraying the emergence of “societies of traceability.”