CSS, ‘emancipation’ and Critical Theory

As noted previously, CSS has, as an approach to the study of security, become virtually synonymous with the concept of ‘emancipation’. This idea that emancipation and security are in fact coeval has been promoted as the central defining feature of CSS by its main proponents,Footnote ¹¹ interpretersFootnote ¹² and criticsFootnote ¹³ alike. For the most part this identification has been encouraged (by Ken Booth in particular) and defended by the main proponents of CSS, Booth and Richard Wyn Jones.Footnote ¹⁴ As Booth declares, ‘Emancipation is at the controversial heart of critical security studies’,Footnote ¹⁵ and he has recently restated this nexus at the heart of CSS in terms of:

Commitment to this idea of a ‘virtuous circle’ is, in turn, frequently presumed to entail commitment to a Marxian tradition, specifically the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory. In this regard Booth tips his hat to the method of ‘immanent critique’ and proposes ‘a definition of a distinct theory of security from a Frankfurt School critical theory perspective’ constructed, once again, around the security-emancipation nexus.Footnote ¹⁷

It would, however, be slightly misleading to presume that the Frankfurt School tradition has always played a major part in the introduction of the concept of emancipation into security studies. Booth's touchstone definition of the relationship between ‘Security and Emancipation’,Footnote ¹⁸ which has subsequently become a referent point for discussion of the concept of emancipation in both international relations and security studies, came in the early 1990s. This was substantially before the term ‘Critical/critical’ was appended to security studies (generally dated to the late 1990s),Footnote ¹⁹ and Booth's original definition of emancipation as security makes no explicit reference to any of the key figures generally associated with the Frankfurt School or to the Frankfurt School tradition (insofar as we might speak of one) as a whole.

This fact alone sets Booth's more recent direct invocations of the Frankfurt School in more stark relief. In these recent allusions to the Frankfurt School, Booth adopts what we might term as a ‘leaning’ strategy; that is, his own allusions refer not to the Frankfurt School but to the work of others who do.Footnote ²⁰ This results, by consequence, in the incorporation and adaptation of terminology seen to be associated with Critical Theory – most prominently the concept of emancipation itself, but also the term ‘immanent critique’ and the distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ theory – without much sustained reference to the origins of that terminology.Footnote ²¹ In his recent Theory of World Security Booth gives his greatest degree of attention to the Frankfurt School, but admits that the approach he adopts to it is ‘as pragmatic as towards theory in general’, and the Frankfurt School is but one of many intellectual traditions to be ‘plundered to assist the development of a theory of world security.’Footnote ²² Booth is, for the most part, simply happy to acknowledge ‘the special helpfulness of the Frankfurt School’ in orienting an emancipatory approach to security and to ‘endorse’ the interpretation of the Frankfurt School in CSS terms offered by the work of Richard Wyn Jones.Footnote ²³

Whereas Booth alludes to the Frankfurt School primarily to establish an orientation, Richard Wyn Jones explicitly takes his task to be ‘to develop the conceptual foundations of a critical theory approach to the study of security – what I call critical security studies’; and, moreover, ‘to take seriously the origins of the pronominal “critical” in critical security studies by outlining an understanding based firmly on the assumptions of critical theory.’Footnote ²⁴ In part this is motivated by Wyn Jones' own sense that, and this is a charge we might equally lay at the door of Booth's own work, ‘one of the striking features of critical international theory is its rather curious, at times even tenuous, connection with what is usually regarded (in social theory circles at least) as critical theory, namely, the work of the Frankfurt School.’Footnote ²⁵ In contrast to Booth's stated readiness to mix-and-match concepts drawn from Frankfurt School theorists with a multiplicity of other ideas – justified as an Arendtian strategy of Perlenfischerei Footnote ²⁶ – Wyn Jones argues that since the Frankfurt School does not constitute a unified body of thought but at best a body of thinkers connected by shared theoretical concerns, institutional affiliations and personal relations (and is frequently fractured and diverse even then), then ‘This means that concepts cannot be simply appropriated from the critical theory literature and applied to issues in the security realm without reference to their origins.’Footnote ²⁷

This results in a sustained attempt by Wyn Jones to give reference to the Critical Theory origins of the concept of emancipation following the introduction of the concept into security studies, an attempt most clearly formulated in his 1999 text Security, Strategy and Critical Theory. Here Wyn Jones takes his cue from the early work of Max Horkheimer, and in particular his 1937 essay on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’.Footnote ²⁸ Horkheimer's early work, Wyn Jones notes, is distinguished by its relatively optimistic perception of the prospects for social change which might result, ultimately, in a more ‘emancipated’ political order. Emancipation, for the early Horkheimer, entails the ‘liberation of individual human beings from suffering and the promotion of their happiness’Footnote ²⁹ and Wyn Jones notes Horkheimer's contempt for those who would ‘concern themselves with “man as such” [rather] than human beings in particular.’Footnote ³⁰ The lesson that Wyn Jones takes from Horkheimer's early arguments (adumbrated here for the purposes of brevity) is that emancipation does not refer to an idealised end-state that has yet to be reached, but to unfulfilled potentialities extant within the current order. In this Horkheimer remains true to the broad orientations of Marxian theory, without necessarily committing to a ‘blue-print’ for emancipation or to an end-point or telos. Thus Horkheimer's initial vision of Critical Theory, as Wyn Jones reads it, ‘understands emancipation as the more rational and purposeful utilization of already existing forces of production in order to bring nature under rational human control’, and this as an ongoing and open-ended process.Footnote ³¹

In Wyn Jones' view contemporary adherents to critical theory should ‘also restate their understanding of emancipation as a process rather than an end point, a direction rather than a destination […] Even if a more emancipated order is brought into existence, the process of emancipation remains incomplete. There is always room for improvement; there is always unfinished business in the task of emancipation.’Footnote ³² In terms of security studies, the implication which Wyn Jones takes from the early Horkheimer is that CSS, if anchored in a broader concern with human emancipation, should similarly be concerned with the liberation of individual human beings from suffering and oppression not only from the military threats that have tended to be the ‘traditional’ focus of security studies, but also non-military threats such as environmental threats, poverty and state-based oppression which, since the individual is the referent object of a concept of security anchored in emancipation, are equally deserving of consideration. This does not necessarily, Wyn Jones argues, encourage a form of methodological individualism; he recognises that individual identity is a central aspect of what it means to be human, and that by consequence the constitutive relationship between ‘identity, security and community’ requires CSS to engage with the nature of specific political groupings.Footnote ³³

A key problem addressed by Wyn Jones, though, is that this conception of emancipation, intended to be foundational for CSS, was itself effectively rejected latterly by Horkheimer himself: first in Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason;Footnote ³⁴ and then more fundamentally in his collaboration with Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (hereafter abbreviated as DoE).Footnote ³⁵ The latter work, Wyn Jones argues, effectively truncated the project of Critical Theory as Horkheimer had earlier described it.Footnote ³⁶ Written in exile from Germany post-WWII and post-Auschwitz, DoE is suffused with a pessimism so thoroughgoing that emancipation, understood in Horkheimer's prior sense, is effectively inconceivable.Footnote ³⁷ According to Adorno and Horkheimer's assessment in DoE, barbarism, not emancipation, was latent in technological progress, the effort master nature, and, ultimately, reason itself; hence Adorno and Horkhiemer's pronouncement that ‘enlightenment is totalitarian’.Footnote ³⁸

From emancipation to liberation: between Marcuse and CSS

Wyn Jones' task then, if emancipation is to function as the anchorage of CSS is, in effect, to save Critical Theory from itself. In this Wyn Jones is in good company and draws on similar endeavours to redeem the initial promise of Critical Theory as found in the work of Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth in particular. Without suggesting that either of these thinkers are entirely unproblematic in their own right, Wyn Jones argues that they do nonetheless provide sustained and valid critiques of the account offered by DoE and the impasse it creates with respect to emancipation. He consequently uses these efforts at redeeming the promise of Critical Theory in order to make the case that it is worthwhile retaining emancipation as an anchoring concept for the study of security.Footnote ³⁹ Based on these grounds, Wyn Jones does not challenge the appropriation of the concept of emancipation for the study of security, but rather seeks to raise awareness of its conceptual history, its roots in Critical Theory, and what this might entail in application of the concept to international and security studies. In short, proponents of CSS have sought to defend and uphold their use and maintenance of the concept of emancipation within the study of security and international relations more broadly, even if there are subtle distinctions to be made between the key proponents of CSS on this issue. Booth has argued that ‘the test of theory is emancipation’,Footnote ⁴⁰ aiming to rule out ‘Vulgar relativistic thinking […] calculated to replicate only a dismal and impoverished world. What matters is whether ideas are true or false, with the grain of humanity or against it, emancipatory or oppressive’.Footnote ⁴¹ Wyn Jones has, by contrast sought to rule ‘in’ many post-structuralist accounts of security on the basis of ‘a more circumscribed notion of emancipation’.Footnote ⁴² As discussed previously, if Emancipation with a capital ‘E’ were to be taken as ‘the measure of all theory’, then this is a measure that a number of the original critical theorists would themselves fail to meet, and Wyn Jones' claims here can be read, contra both Booth and post-structuralist-oriented critics of CSS, as an attempt to resist the ghettoisation of security studies, with a ‘Welsh School’ fenced off by its commitment to ‘emancipation’.

This effort at intellectual grounding has not, however, been sufficient to insulate CSS from criticism regarding its use of emancipation in relation to security – far from it. Some have accused CSS of encouraging an unhelpful distinction between individual and society (or social grouping), which, they maintain, still potentially encourages methodological individualism.Footnote ⁴³ With varying degrees of intensity, others have argued that the assumed universal applicability of emancipation belies its origins in a particular (Western) tradition of political philosophy,Footnote ⁴⁴ and that the prioritisation of security (as emancipation and vice versa) as a positive condition leads to a failure to perceive the ‘political effects of security’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The latter line of criticism, particularly that offered by Claudia Aradau, has more recently made the argument that it is not the concept of emancipation per se that is problematic, but rather the manner in which it has been defined and used within CSS. As Aradau notes, the invocation of security is frequently accompanied by repressive and exclusionary practices associated with militarisation and ‘securitisation’; hence, ‘When equated with security, emancipation becomes problematic as it can no longer envisage social transformations outside of the logic of security […] The struggle for security is re-styled as a struggle for emancipation, without any qualms about the relationship between emancipation and security.’Footnote ⁴⁶ In so doing, Aradau argues, this ‘circular definition of emancipation as security deprives the former of its truly transformative potential,’ a theme which is returned to later.Footnote ⁴⁷ Mark Neocleous takes a similar logic even further: ‘What if at the heart of the logic of security lies not a vision of freedom or emancipation, but a means of modelling the whole of human society around a particular vision of order?’ Against Ken Booth's famous identification of security and emancipation as ‘two sides of the same coin’, Neocleous argues that it is ‘security and oppression [that] are two sides of the same coin.’Footnote ⁴⁸

Once we begin to focus on the relationship between emancipation and security, it is argued here, challenging questions arise about the potential forms of resistance can take including, even, the question of ‘emancipatory violence’. The case made in this article is that it is actually one of the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, though not one considered extensively by the proponents of CSS, that offers a telling illustration of the perils of over-emphasising emancipation. Herbert Marcuse, it is argued here, shares several assumptions with CSS, even if he figures relatively little as an apparent influence. References to Marcuse in Wyn Jones' interpretation of the Frankfurt School tradition are spartan; Marcuse's support of student activism in 1960s Germany is mentioned to contextualise Adorno and Horkheimer's relative disdain for the same events, as is Marcuse's influence on latter day authors on Critical Theory such as Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner.Footnote ⁴⁹ Wyn Jones' main concentration in terms of post-DoE Critical Theory, however, focuses on the intellectual trajectories of Adorno and Horkheimer on their return to Germany post-World War II and the subsequent directions taken in Frankfurt School theory by Habermas and Honneth in particular. Likewise in his considerations of the relationship between technology and security, Wyn Jones does not draw on Marcuse's own extensive reflections on the social implications of technology,Footnote ⁵⁰ but instead on the more recent ‘Critical Theory of Technology’ offered by one of Marcuse's modern interpreters in this regard, Andrew FeenbergFootnote ⁵¹ (although Feenberg himself maintains an open indebtedness to Marcuse's thinking on technology).Footnote ⁵²

Further reasons for this relative lack of consideration of Marcuse are unclear, although the practice is in keeping with the general intellectual climate. As Douglas Kellner notes, Marcusian Critical Theory has, after its relative prominence and influence in social theory and New Left circles up to the 1980s, ‘fallen out of favour in an era that rejects revolutionary thought and grand visions of liberation and social reconstruction.’Footnote ⁵³ This however, one would have thought, would be less problematic for CSS, an approach that takes as its ultimate goal emancipatory change, even when understood as emancipation with a small ‘e’. True, Marcuse's Marxian-Freudian synthesis is highly idiosyncratic, and the Freudian influence has little resonance with contemporary CSS. Furthermore, the question of whether or not Marcuse can or should be seen as necessary to any discussion of the Frankfurt School – itself, as we've noted already, an inherently porous term – is of course a matter of intellectual preference and debate. Given that the consideration of Frankfurt School Critical Theory within international relations was notably limited until the publication of Security, Strategy and Critical Theory (notwithstanding certain works of Andrew Linklater, Mark Hoffman and Richard K. Ashley prior to this, but even here the concentration being firmly on Jürgen Habermas),Footnote ⁵⁴ the attention given to Adorno, Horkheimer and Honneth by Wyn Jones should certainly be regarded as expansive rather than restrictive.

Yet there is arguably much room to consider Marcuse in relation to CSS, particularly if we accept Kellner's argument that Marcuse's later work forms part of an ‘activist’ strand (in the sense of maintaining some belief in the virtues of activism, as a method of achieving social change) of Frankfurt School thinking which developed in the late 1940s, as distinct from Adorno and Horkheimer's deep pessimism about the prospects for emancipatory change in Dialectic of Enlightenment.Footnote ⁵⁵ Though Marcuse's work in the 1950s and 1960s is not explicitly set against or defined in terms of the account given in DoE,Footnote ⁵⁶ Marcuse's concern with identifying potentially revolutionary elements of social change (be it in the Hippy movement, Black Militants, anti-Vietnam protests, the Women's liberation movement, or anti-colonial struggles)Footnote ⁵⁷ is at odds with Adorno and Horkheimer's sensibilities, but arguably in keeping with Wyn Jones' recommendation that ‘proponents of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Marcuse was still very clearly looking for unfulfilled potentialities extant within the existing order in a manner that is arguably closer to early critical project outlined by Horkheimer (which Wyn Jones wants to rejuvenate and uphold) than is the later Horkheimer himself. In this sense, it might be said that Marcuse wrestled with a very similar problem to that revisited by Wyn Jones: that is, what are the prospects for emancipatory change in a context in which the key original proponent of the critical project (Horkheimer) seems to have pronounced its own impossibility?

Beyond this, there are also a number of other shared concerns that arguably amount to a certain ‘family resemblance’ between Marcuse's project and that of CSS even though there is no directly acknowledged relation between them. The CSS emphasis on the individual as the ultimate referent of security, and a ‘people-centred’Footnote ⁵⁹ subject of security has certain echoes of Marcuse's call for political action ‘in defence of life’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Where CSS places emphasis on fulfilment of basic human needs as a predicate of broader fulfilment – what Booth has recently termed as ‘survival-plus’ – Marcuse attempts to develop a ‘biological foundation for socialism’, the conditions for the emergence of ‘concrete individuals’ and ‘an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings – a solidarity which has been effectively repressed in line with the requirements of class society but which now appears as a precondition for liberation.’Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, although Marcuse rarely uses the term ‘emancipation’ as liberally as proponents of CSS, instead focusing on ‘liberation’ – defined as that ‘which must precede the construction of a free society, one which necessitates an historical break with the past and the present’Footnote ⁶² – in much of his later work, the ‘free society’ Marcuse hopes will emerge from the process of this liberation will result from:

Liberation, in other words, should have an emancipatory purpose in a recognisably Horkheimerian sense.Footnote ⁶⁴ For all his undoubted failings Marcuse, as much as any other critical theorist writing in Adorno and Horkheimer's wake, measures up to Wyn Jones' recommendation that: ‘critical theorists must go beyond generalized exhortations concerning emancipation, empowerment, freedom, and happiness. If critical theory is to have practical relevance, it must reflect on what emancipation means in terms of actual institutions and relationships.’Footnote ⁶⁵

On activism and violence

Marcuse then, it might be said, aims to theorise the conditions for emancipation and it is here that there might be potentially instructive guides (and warnings) for the future development of CSS. Adhering broadly to the vision of emancipation comparable to that upheld in CSS, Marcuse attempts to broach thorny questions about possibilities and sites of social change to a much greater extent than has – arguably – yet been undertaken within contemporary CSS. Wyn Jones notes that ‘Apart from Marcuse, who was briefly active in the revolutionary Soldier's Council established in Berlin after World War I, none [of the early Frankfurt School] had any direct experience of political practice.’Footnote ⁶⁶ In the case of Marcuse this is a somewhat restrictive definition of political practice given not only his activities in various US intelligence agencies during and immediately after World War IIFootnote ⁶⁷ but particularly his connection to various forms of social and political activism during the 1960s for which he is now more well known. The latter experience caused Marcuse to consider at length two questions which, though arguably implicit in the CSS project and referred to indirectly, have received comparatively little direct sustained reflection by its proponents to date: the question of violence; and the question of resistance.

On the question of violence, CSS has placed great emphasis on emancipation from violence (defined both in terms of physical violence and structural violence), but has remained relatively quiet on or opposed to violence as a legitimate means of achieving emancipatory change.Footnote ⁶⁸ As Booth argues, ‘one should eschew the powerful tradition of believing that the ends justifies the means. To do otherwise is to risk corrupting the good ends one seeks by violent or iniquitous means […] The ideals of emancipation must be reflected in the emancipatory politics chosen to achieve those goals. There is no other way, if emancipation is to be true to itself.’Footnote ⁶⁹ Marcuse's commitment to social change and the conditions for genuine security in human solidarity, by contrast, leads him to a very different perspective on violence. For Marcuse, it should be noted, violence is a contingent phenomenon to be overcome, and the measure of free society is the extent to which the use of physical violence is absent. Such a society would be based, and here Marcuse draws on his Freudian influence, on ‘a new sensibility – the demands of the life instincts’ and would be made up of human beings who ‘are physiologically and psychologically able to experience things, and each other, outside of the context of violence and exploitation.’Footnote ⁷⁰ This assertion that the absence of violence is the measure of a free society is summed up in Marcuse's comparison with the aesthetic dimension in which, quoting Nietzsche:

Hence we might say that, ostensibly, for Marcuse as for proponents of CSS only emancipation equals true ‘security’ – if defined as the ‘freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which would stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do’Footnote ⁷² – in the sense that violence and exploitation are minimised as constraints on human beings. Seemingly in keeping with Booth's contention that ‘Emancipation, empirically, is Security’,Footnote ⁷³ Marcuse aspires to a liberated condition in which ‘No longer condemned to compulsive aggressiveness and repression in the struggle for existence, individuals would be able to create a technical and natural environment which would no longer perpetuate violence, ugliness, ignorance and brutality.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Marcuse's understanding of emancipation as liberation is, however, in many ways at odds with the idea of emancipation as security. Although he shares the general sense of emancipation as freedom from constraints, Marcuse uses the term ‘security’ rarely and then only in reference to the state apparatuses that are often employed as tools of repression. Some of us in the developed world may already benefit from something vaguely approaching the kind of freedom associated with emancipation Marcuse argues, as opposed to the ‘wretched of the earth’ to whom Marcuse frequently refers with obvious allusions to Frantz Fanon.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, he sees this freedom as only partial and contrasts this growing freedom of (some) individuals with the unfreedom of the whole:Footnote ⁷⁶ ‘the artificial and “private” liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment.’Footnote ⁷⁷ Moreover, the nascent presence of this ‘new sensibility’ in society only heightens our awareness of the pervasive presence of violence as an aspect of social life: that is, the extent to which current conditions fail to measure up to the gauge of a free society, evident in the degree that violence is still regarded as a social necessity for the maintenance of social order. Hence Marcuse speaks (again in a manner not wholly anathema to CSS given the latter's persistent wariness of the state as guarantor of security,Footnote ⁷⁸ but with more radical implications) of dysfunctional states where ‘“functioning” seems defined rather negatively as absence of civil war, massive disorder, economic collapse.’Footnote ⁷⁹ Extrapolating from this analysis, it might be said that the Marcusian perspective – in contra-distinction to contemporary CSS – foregrounds the issue of ‘repressive security’: instances where ‘security’ is invoked to suppress emancipatory change, often by violent means.

Here, as elsewhere, Marcuse reserves the term violence for actual physical violence. This is not to say that Marcuse is unconcerned with forms of exploitation that CSS would group under threats to individual security and for which it frequently uses the Galtungian concept of ‘structural violence’ to refer to.Footnote ⁸⁰ Quite the opposite. But Marcuse groups such forms of exploitation under his broader concept of ‘domination’ which is dealt with at length in his One-Dimensional Man and throughout his work as a permanent feature of capitalist societies (in particular).Footnote ⁸¹ True, Marcuse does see an inherent linkage between this apparatus of domination and actual physical manifestations of violence:

Yet, in the last instance, Marcuse maintains a very narrow concept of violence. In response to a proposal to consider the concept of ‘extra-economic’ violence, Marcuse declares that:

Indeed, Marcuse is more concerned with those forms of physical (state) violence not called by that name: ‘In the established vocabulary, “violence” is a term which does not apply to the action of the police, the National Guard, the Marshals, the Marines, the bombers.’Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, the use of violence by the state – in the name of security – is actually portrayed as non-violence in official discourse: not as violence, but as something else (today Marcuse would no doubt point to torture as ‘standard operating procedure’, friendly fire, interdiction, precision-strikes, collateral damage as examples of such rhetorical substitution). The state's legitimate monopoly ensures that its violence is not represented as such – ‘to the latter alone belongs the lawful right to abrogate peace and to organize the killing and beating’.Footnote ⁸⁵ As Marcuse puts it, ‘one of the most effective rights of the Sovereign is the right to establish enforceable definitions of words’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Where all this becomes potentially unsettling to CSS's rejection of violent means is in the fact that Marcuse, as one commentator notes, potentially ends up ‘advocating violence against the system in order to quash the system's inherent violence’.Footnote ⁸⁷ At certain points – Marcuse argues with the social movements and protests of the 60s in mind – demands for social change will necessarily contravene the law, and in doing so will, on occasion, provoke a violent response from the state as is its wont. On such occasions, Marcuse argues, ‘In the face of the scope and intensity of this sanctioned aggression, the traditional distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence becomes questionable.’Footnote ⁸⁸ This point is developed in most detail in Marcuse's (1965) critique of ‘Repressive Tolerance’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Here Marcuse argues that though the concept of tolerance was initially used to preserve democratic freedoms, calls for democratic tolerance are increasingly used to constrain advocates of social change (such as forms of legal street demonstrations and other forms of protest sanctioned by the state) and uphold the status quo. In this sense tolerance has become ‘repressive’; as Kahn summarises this position, ‘the call for tolerance is [used] by the ruling classes to protect themselves from interventions that seek to limit global violence and suppression, fear, and misery […] it amounts to a perversion of tolerance that works to repress instead of liberate.’Footnote ⁹⁰

By consequence Marcuse argues that straightforward commitment to the principle of non-violence actually perpetuates a system in which violence is inherent.Footnote ⁹¹ Marcuse argues that this ‘was the experience of the civil rights movement: that the others practice the violence, and that against this violence legality is problematic from the very beginning.’Footnote ⁹² The point, for Marcuse, is that not all violence is the same, and that forms of violence can be distinguished (by the ends they serve) between ‘violence of suppression’ and ‘violence of liberation’.Footnote ⁹³ Movements aimed at liberation (for him anti-‘establishment’ forces in the developed world, anti-colonial forces in the developing world), when they employ violence, are ultimately practicing what Marcuse terms as ‘counter-violence’: that is, violence used to destabilise and change forms of institutionalised violence and exploitation. ‘Preaching non-violence on principle’, Marcuse argues, only ‘reproduces the existing institutionalized violence’;Footnote ⁹⁴ ‘Non-violence is normally not only preached to but extracted from the weak – it is a necessity rather than a virtue, and normally it does not seriously harm the case of the strong.’Footnote ⁹⁵ Marcuse acknowledges that the experience of the anti-colonial movement in India is an exception to his rule here, but goes on to compare passive resistance and its effect in India to a general strike on the basis of its scale. Ultimately, in Marcuse's view, ‘the end of violence has still to be fought for.’Footnote ⁹⁶

Marcuse on the metaphysics of resistance

So how does all this relate to CSS? In short, the Marcusian perspective raises the troubling prospect not that commitment to emancipatory change (or the modes of liberation used to achieve it) necessitates violence, but that it does not necessarily preclude it and, in some instances, may justify it. In the context of emancipation as liberation, the implications for understanding violence and resistance are far different from that of understanding emancipation as security. This is not to say that Marcuse himself gives an entirely gung-ho carte blanche for the use of violence in the name of liberation from exploitation and the search for emancipation. Such violence, Marcuse concedes, is motivated by a ‘hatred’ of existing conditions of domination and exploitation; in this sense, ‘No liberation is possible without hatred’.Footnote ⁹⁷ But how precisely this hatred is to be contained is unclear, and this is, Marcuse admits, ‘a really frightening question’:

So why is Marcuse, himself in search of a society in which ‘compulsive aggressiveness’, prepared to allow for situations where the danger of hatred of exploitation tipping over into barbarity is always present? The reason lies in Marcuse's elevation of another concept (or for him, a right) over that of violence: resistance.

Like the question of violence, the question of resistance, in a broad sense, is embedded within the CSS perspective of security as emancipation. Aradau notes in this regard that CSS ‘relies on the intellectual tradition of the Frankfurt School’ and hence ‘a critical tradition of thinking social change and resistance.’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Consequently CSS has stressed the primacy of ‘praxis’ and warns against the danger of either separating theory entirely from political practice, or simply collapsing one into the other. Here again the question of violence within practices of resistance remains somewhat implicit in the CSS position, although there is a definite leaning towards non-violent forms of protest and critique as the main tool of resistance for the proponent of CSS.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The main recommendation has been that ‘through their educational activities, proponents of critical security studies should aim to provide support for those social movements that promote emancipatory social change. By providing a critique of the prevailing order and legitimating alternative views, critical theorists can perform a valuable role in supporting the struggles of social movements.’Footnote ¹⁰¹ In this there is a certain homology with Marcuse's assertion that there is a ‘period of enlightenment prior to material change – a period of education’; but, for Marcuse, ‘education [then] turns into praxis: demonstration, confrontation, rebellion.’Footnote ¹⁰²

Since CSS takes its concern to be contingent threats to individual security, threats which are necessarily context-specific, there has been a general reluctance to specify exactly what ‘support’ of social movements might consist of beyond a critical/educative function. There has, however, in keeping with this concern, been less reticence in identifying the concrete social movements promoting ‘emancipatory change’ which should be supported. The goal of emancipatory change itself dictates that some alternative visions and social movements are more alternative – and preferable – than others. ‘Let us consider the ending of apartheid in South Africa’, Wyn Jones offers as an example; ‘Although the citizens of that country cannot be adjudged to be free after the overthrow of the apartheid system, surely they are freer. Although the establishment of liberal democracy there offers no panacea, it is a better system than the totalitarian one it has replaced.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Booth has argued that ‘We can begin or continue pursuing emancipation in what we research, in how we teach, in what we put on conference agendas, in how much we support Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxfam and other groups identifying with a global community, and in how we deal with each other and with students. And in pursuing emancipation, the bases of real security are being established.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In this sense for Booth, emancipation is itself ‘a practice of resistance […] a framework for attempting to actualise both nearer-term and longer-term emancipatory goals through strategic and tactical political action based on immanent critique.’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ This approach is captured in Booth's concept of ‘Emancipatory Realism’, where the Marxian origins of the Frankfurt School notion of emancipation are ultimately filtered through Kantian idealism and a focus on ‘gradual reforms’ as ‘the only means of approaching the supreme political good.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

There is an inherent and unashamed degree of selectivity about all of this; the collapsing together of emancipation and resistance loads additional weight onto the concept of emancipation, as surely not all practices of resistance are to be considered as equally ‘emancipatory’ within the CSS framework of security.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet the question that is left unanswered within CSS is ‘whether emancipation can be at nobody's expense.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Similarly, in relation to Ken Booth's notion of ‘Emancipatory Realism’, Rens van Munster asserts that ‘Freedom, equality, the rule of law, cosmopolitanism and emancipation are all considered as central elements in Booth's theory, but the connection between them is not always clear. History shows that emancipation has not always fitted very well with the liberal principle of the rule of law. Indeed, to what degree can violence be accepted as a means of furthering emancipation?’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Booth avoids both issues, simply warning that ‘False emancipation comes in many guises, and as is the case with any political project there is the danger of mistakes, excesses, “dark sides”, and unpleasant things done in its name. The crucial test lies in concrete historical circumstances.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ Consequently the process of distinguishing between ‘true’ and ‘false’ emancipatory movements seems to be left as something of a (retrospective) judgment call. In response to van Munster's citation of protestors damaging state property – a British Hawk jet sold to Indonesia, used as an illustration in Booth's Theory of World Security – as a possible indication of when the rule of law might be legitimately contravened to further emancipatory ends (preventing further repression in East Timor), Booth was at pains in his response to point out that the protestors' actions were ultimately condoned by a ‘progressively minded jury’ and hence ‘emancipation and the rule of law went hand-in-hand’.Footnote ¹¹¹

In opting for ‘evolution’ over ‘revolution’, however, van Munster argues that Booth ultimately fails to fully unpack the relationship between emancipation and resistance, citing Booth's views on capitalism as a case in point: ‘The world would certainly benefit from a more humane capitalism, but emancipation cannot happen through dialogue and the extension of rights alone. It also involves concrete struggles in the realm of work, production and property relations.’Footnote ¹¹² In a similar vein, Neocleous argues that security is, ultimately, ‘the supreme concept of bourgeois society’ (based on Marx's declaration in ‘On the Jewish Question’ (1844)) as the ‘real driver’ behind security is the uncertainty of (private) property and protection against future losses.Footnote ¹¹³

Once again, Marcuse's encouragement of movements for liberation/emancipation is at odds with the vision of ‘Emancipatory Realism’ advocated by Booth. Indeed one of the main criticisms of his later work was that it was too closely identified with particular political and social movements several of which actively sought to challenge and contravene the rule of law. Marcuse has consequently been accused of romanticising their objectives and action.Footnote ¹¹⁴ True, Marcuse employs a vocabulary that would strike most readers today as somewhat dated (his use of the term ‘Establishment’, capital ‘E’, to describe the state in all its manifestations being only the most obvious example; his commitment to counter-cultural movements and intellectuals as a ‘new historical Subject of change’ another).Footnote ¹¹⁵ But this accusation of romanticism is only partially accurate. Marcuse did indeed come to be identified with radical student politics of the 1960s, and did also cite and refer to it heavily in his own work. As he declares in the opening to Essay on Liberation, ‘The opposition which escapes suppression by the police, the courts, the representatives of the people, and the people themselves, finds expression in the diffused rebellion among the youth and the intelligentsia, and in the daily struggle of the persecuted minorities. The armed class struggle is waged outside: by the wretched of the earth who fight the affluent monster.’Footnote ¹¹⁶

Yet, the exact role played by the social and resistance movements Marcuse referred to so frequently within his thinking is arguably somewhat more complex than this impression. Marcuse was, at times, at pains to distance himself from specific causes. On the one hand he could assert that ‘a very real and very pragmatic opposition is required of us if we are to make ourselves and others conscious of these possibilities [for liberation/emancipatory change] and the forces that hinder and deny them.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ At the same time he declares that ‘All forces of opposition today are working at preparation and only at preparation – but toward necessary preparation for a possible crisis of the system.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ In other words, the goals of these forces are in some ways incidental to the fact that they are practicing opposition, which is for him the more important point. Marcuse seems to acknowledge as much when he adds that ‘we must not conceal from ourselves [that] the question [of] whether such radicalization will be to the left or to the right is an open one.’Footnote ¹¹⁹ ‘Revolt’, Marcuse notes, is not the same as ‘revolution’. Acts of resistance help to illuminate the ‘false liberties’ of the existing order; hence, they do constitute a ‘liberation which must precede the construction of a free society.’Footnote ¹²⁰ But the emphasis here is on the process of illumination; the construction of a free society does not necessarily follow from practices of resistance. The very possibility of practicing opposition is for Marcuse a necessary precondition of emancipatory change.

Marcuse thus shifts from what we might term as a phenomenology of resistance (that is, an identification of points of resistance and liberation movements within society) to what we might term as a metaphysics of resistance (that is, a valorisation of the principle of resistance itself). In part this shift links back into Marcuse's discussion of Repressive Tolerance, his thinking on violence, and questions on the legality of violence. Against a perceived knee-jerk tendency to categorise all radical protest as illegal violence, Marcuse points towards ‘recognition of the right of resistance, namely civil disobedience’ which:

This ‘right of resistance’ (elsewhere described as a ‘natural right’ of resistance)Footnote ¹²² gives rise, in Marcuse's view to a potentially positive and necessary form of ‘liberating violence’ that is a key harbinger of emancipatory social change.Footnote ¹²³ This right applies particularly (and here there might be parallels with recent debates within security over ‘state of emergency’ versus ‘normality’)Footnote ¹²⁴ in his view because ‘The whole post-fascist period is one of clear and present danger […] Such extreme suspension of the right to free speech and free assembly is indeed justified only if the whole of society is in extreme danger. I maintain that our society is in such an emergency situation, and that it has become the normal state of affairs.’Footnote ¹²⁵ Neocleous, in terms that again fit with his broader critique of contemporary Critical Security Studies, argues ‘That this possibility of an necessity for revolutionary violence is so often omitted when emergency powers are discussed is indicative of the extent to which the Left has given up any talk of political violence for the far more comfortable world of the rule of law, regardless of how little the latter has achieved in just the last few years.’Footnote ¹²⁶ Moreover, and perhaps tellingly when thinking about the normative goals of CSS, Marcuse argues that ‘If we appeal to humanity's right to peace, to humanity's right to abolish exploitation and oppression, we are not talking about self-defined, special, group interests, but rather and in fact interests demonstrable as universal rights. That is why we can and should lay claim today to the right of resistance as more than a relative right.’Footnote ¹²⁷

Whilst both contemporary CSS and Marcuse appeal to a form of security that is avowedly ‘human’, and therefore share some sense of the educative role of critical intellectuals in this regard, Marcuse ultimately also calls the role of the intellectual into question where he sees it might constrain resistance in the name of emancipation. Radical protestors, ‘If they use violence’, do not ‘start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one. Since they will be punished, they know the risk, and when they are willing to take it, no third person, and least of all the educator and intellectual, has the right to preach them abstention.’Footnote ¹²⁸ More recently, Slavoj Žižek has engaged similar themes, questioning whether ‘there [is] not something suspicious, indeed symptomatic, about [the] focus on subjective violence – that violence which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds? Doesn't it desperately try to distract our attention from the true locus of trouble, by obliterating from view other forms of violence and thus actively participating in them?’, and ultimately also endorses the notion of ‘emancipatory violence’.Footnote ¹²⁹ This elevation of (potentially violent) resistance to a good or right in itself is one of the most problematic and heavily criticised aspects of Marcuse's thought. Hannah Arendt, for example, criticised Marcuse and the student-leaders he inspired of conflating ‘behaviour’ (that is, the activity of protest) with true political action ‘through which human's distinguished themselves from animals’.Footnote ¹³⁰ As Beatrice Hanssen notes of Arendt's critique in this regard, ‘Inasmuch as the German student leaders aimed to unmask the hypocritical practice of state violence, Arendt found them to be the heirs of Robespierre's despotic “war on hypocrisy”, which led to the Reign of Terror as the revolution began to devour its own children.’Footnote ¹³¹

Once again, the point here is not that CSS necessarily buys into or implies the kind of arguments advanced by Marcuse in relation to violence and resistance. However, in its current framing this could as easily be read into it, and CSS risks running into the same dead-ends that Marcuse did. More needs to be said than has been to date from within CSS on this subject if the elevation of emancipation as the anchoring concept of its approach to security is to continue. Within the current configuration of CSS there is a commitment to transformative change (as implied in concept of emancipation), but comparatively little is said on violence and resistance, even though these questions are easily conceivable (although not always obligatory) within that commitment. In CSS, the account of the forms of violence and/or resistance in fostering that transformative change needs to be spelt out in more detail. Otherwise emancipation risks becoming, as Ernesto Laclau puts it, ‘a mere rhetorical ornament of a substantive process which has to be understood in entirely different terms.’Footnote ¹³² In this sense the disinterring of Marcuse acts as a provocation to contemporary CSS from within its own intellectual anchorage. What it may ultimately illustrate, furthermore, is that an over-concentration on ‘emancipation’ as security within CSS risks rendering it ‘one-dimensional’.Footnote ¹³³ From a Marcusian perspective processes of emancipation necessarily involve counter-violence, and ‘toleration’ of security practices is to be rejected. Maintenance of ‘security’, along with the rule of law, is routinely invoked to maintain the status quo – often violently – and the inequalities that go with it. Hence it is reasonable to suggest that for Marcuse, ‘security’ is more often repressive than it is emancipatory.

Moreover, over-emphasis on emancipation as the defining commitment of CSS fosters a tendency to view this branch of security studies through a reductionist lens. It encourages a temptation to see emancipation as the be-all-and-end-all of CSS, which is itself contrary to Wyn Jones' admonitions to view emancipation as a ‘process’ rather than ‘endpoint’. By consequence the likelihood is that Booth's attempts to develop a ‘Theory of World Security’ around the ancillary concepts of community and identity will receive the same attention,Footnote ¹³⁴ or that Wyn Jones' encouragement to investigate the question of technology and the relationship between theory and practice in international security will generate the same amount of intellectual activity.Footnote ¹³⁵ In this sense we might go so far as to say that CSS has itself become prisoner to emancipation, or at least to the equivalence of emancipation with security.Footnote ¹³⁶