The Ethical Subject of Security

Introduction: The return of ethics

Ethics is on the rise in the field of international relations theory. In the last decade a large number of new works have contributed to debate about the norms and codes that can be and should be involved in international politics. [1]

The traditional absence of ethical reflection in the field is understandable since it is consistent with the predominant orientation of the field: political-and thus ethical-realism. A basic tenet of political realism is that politics supplants ethics. To assume the realist standpoint in the analysis of international relations is to adopt the posture that the political dynamics of security national interests on the international playing field contains no moral dimensions. It is neither moral nor immoral. Instead, it is a-moral (Campbell and Shapiro, 1999; Donnelly, 1992; Hutchings, 1992; McElroy, 1992). Based upon a Weberian-inspired understanding of interest in international politics, the realist and neorealist branches of IR theory have built upon the more or less coherent conclusion that differences between opposed international entities are to be resolved based upon questions of power understood as a strategic, military and technological dimension and connected to the security of a given nation state. Indeed international politics is considered an adept device for translating the perilous metaphysics of values-be they religious, cultural, ethnic, etc.-into the universal language of military power. In other words, the essential differences between states may derive from metaphysical value differences, but they are negotiated on the secular field of international politics.

This paper focuses less on the debate concerning ethics of international relations understood as a question of the consequences of adding ethical reflection to the theoretical debate. Rather it seeks to develop the argument that international relations theory-and security-is already an ethics, already profoundly linked to an ethical position and an ethical debate.

Ethics: exogenous or endogenous?

Already some ten years ago, R.B.J Walker reflected upon the growing canon of literature on ‘ethics and international relations’, affirming its importance while at the same to making a crucial observation about its constitution. ‘I am concerned primarily’, he noted, ‘with the extent to which so much of the literature is informed by the highly problematic assumption that ‘ethics and international relations’ is the name of intersection, a junction between two separate areas of disciplinary inquiry’ (Walker, 1993). ‘Ethics and international relations’ is indeed a meeting place, but one where two completely heterogeneous field of though come together and interact in a way which does not disturb or problematize either one. ‘Ethics’ remains a codified set of principles and norms to be applied to any given object. ‘International relations’ remains crystallized set of assumptions and methods about the makeup of the relation between two or several states. Neither is any sense in a situation of mutation or development based upon interaction with the other. The various narratives of the one are simply applied to the narratives of the other, only to withdraw to their stable and entirely incongruous domains.

Walker responds ingeniously by questioning and re-construing both the concept of international relations as something distinct from ethics. Instead he develops an analysis considering the degree to which claims of ethics are compatible with claims of international relations, ‘the spatio-temporal articulation of political identity and community’ (1993: 51). In order to do so he proposes three innovative readings of international relations as embodiments of ethics. The first reading concerns the parallel trajectories of the ethics and international relations as they emerge from similar parallel states of modernity. According to this reading, the dichotomy announced in Weber’s version of modernity between instrumental rationality and value-based rationality is problematic and troublesome, though certainly not unwarranted. The second reading of the connection between ethics and international relations, criticizes the identification of political sovereignty and thereby political community with conventional territoriality. The questions of ethical relations are, according to this model, inevitably framed in terms of the differentiation of political space. In his final reading, Walker questions the classical conception of international relations as a negotiation of the opposition between state and anarchy advanced in the 1970’s by Hedly Bull (Bull, 1977). An international relation in this optic is one form or another of ‘exclusion’ of the anarchical and ‘inclusion’ of the sovereign. This two dimensional schema resists any supple ethical configuration.

In each of these three models, Walker locates a ground for the incongruity of ethics and international relations on the side of international relations. The following analysis supplements Walkers project of re-launching international relations as an ethical practice, by focusing on the political nature of ethics. In particular it will focuses on ethics a political practice involved with security. An analysis of the ethical subject of security will begin with the already classical definitions of security, community and political agency, but will depart from

The concept of security

A certain concept of security plays a role in every aspect of life. Security is thus a fundamental notion in human affairs. Accordingly it can be analyzed across a myriad of discourses, from psychology to biology, to economics, to physics, and on. Within the field of international relations the concept has had a slow but persistent development. Until the publication of Buzan’s People, States and Fear in 1983 the concept was relatively underdeveloped. In his survey of extant literature, he points out that, at the time, most of the work on security came from the field of empirical strategic studies for which ‘security’ is the core concept. Discussions are by and large limited to measuring the limits and stability of national security (Buzan, 1991: 3). Since ‘security’ is the tacit foundation of security studies, it is rarely problematized. More general studies on security institutions and their role in international relations hardly scratch the surface of this central concept.

Buzan’s book is a milestone in the sense that it opens the concept of security to a more penetrating analysis of the nature, structure, and extension of the concept. It was also the first in a long line of increasingly sophisticated literature on the nature of security, generally taking its point of departure on the over strict interpretation of security as ‘military’ security. The productive problematization of the concept of security has become a field unto itself. Yet the most innovative contributions to understanding the concept of security has come, on the hand, from the constructivist ‘Copenhagen School’ of security analysis, itself building upon and enveloping Buzan’s earlier work (Buzan, Waever et al., 1998; Waever, 1996; Waever, Buzan et al., 1993) and, on the other hand, the post-structuralist critique of traditional security thought (Campbell, 1993; 1998a; 1998b; Campbell and Dillon, 1993; Campbell and Shapiro, 1999; Connolly, 1991; Der Derian, 1987; 1992; 2001; Der Derian and Shapiro, 1989; Walker, 1993; Weber, 1995).

The fundamental originality of the Copenhagen School is double: first, and in general, it has developed and systematized the notion of security as a system of reference, based in part by the semiotic theory of Greimas. According to this approach, the meaning of security lies in the use of its concept, in the act of securitization, whereby, ‘the exact definition a criteria of securitization is constituted by the intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political effects’ (Buzan, Waever et al., 1998: 25). This methodology of analyzing security discourse as a extended strategies of securitization redefines the concept security as a pragmatic function, as the transitive act, of ‘securitization’. Indeed in the latter years it has become more strongly construed as a ‘speech act’ carried out by a ‘security actor’ (1998: 40) inspired by Austin’s speech act theory.

The semiotic structure of securitization differentiates between ‘referent objects’, ‘securitizing actors’ and ‘functional actors’. A ‘referent object’ of securitization is something that is considered to be existentially threatened. In the vast majority of cases the security referent is the state, though Waever et al. recognize that this is not necessarily the case: The makeup of the semiotic system of analysis opens for a much broader set of referent objects than is covered by conventional security analysis. A ‘securitizing actor’ is the actor who actually performs the speech act of securitization, by declaring the referent object ‘existentially threatened’ (1998: 36). A ‘functional actor’ is a participant in carrying out the pragmatic consequences of securitization.

The most important theoretical innovation of the securitization approach of the Copenhagen School is its differentiation between subject and object of security. The subject of securitization carries out an act ascribing security valence to the referent object. Security is never objectively given. According to the suppositions of constructivism there is no implicit, objective or given relation between the subject-the security actor-and the object of securitization. Rather this relation is constructed intersubjectivelythrough social relations and processes (1998: 30-31).

Waever et al. underscore that the constitution of the ‘securitizing actor’ is problematic. By isolating or ‘identifying’ any given actor as the unique securitizing actor runs the risk of rendering invisible the social or institutional setting from which that actor ‘securitizes’: ‘How to identify the securitizing actor is in the last instance less a question of who performs the the speech than of what logic shapes the action. It is an action according to individual logic or organizational logic, and is the individual or the organization generally held responsible by other actors? Focusing on the organizational logic of the speech act is probably the best way to identify who or what is the securitizing actor’ (1998: 40).

The main axis for identifying the subject of security is fundamentally intersubjective. It is based on the movement of meaning and perception between the individual and the social setting. But the identity of the securitizing subject, securitizing actor, the author speech act lies in the ‘organizational logic’ of the speech act. I firmly believe that Waever et al. have correctly identified the locus of the ethical subject of security in the logic of the speech act. Yet in what follows I wish to pursue the hypothesis that this level of constructivist approach is ultimately too narrow, precisely because this ‘organizational logic’, like the subject itself, is not neutral, not objectively given. Rather it is itself organized and structured by the uneven relations of power implicit in the categories of individual, group, state and society. By taken the individual embedded in itself organizational logic as a given, we miss the ethical nature of the subject.

To reiterate the assumption with which I started this paper: the ethical is not some endogenous property of the subject. On the contrary it contributes to constituting the subject. Therefore the speech act theory of securitization needs to be supplemented by attention to an analysis of the subjectof security. The actor of security is not the same as the subject of security. What does their difference mean?

The history of the subject

What is a subject? What does it mean to say that the subject is ethical? Michel Foucault (1926-1984) would certainly agree that a securitizing actor is the subject of its securitizing speech acts. The environment in which the securitizing actor acts is however much more complex, multi-layered and composite then that theorized by the speech act theory of security. The lacuna in the speech act theory revealed by a Foucault-inspired history of subjectivity is that, while the actor of the speech act is characterized by its ability to deploy power-military, social, economic, environmental, etc.-in the name of the security of its object referent, that actor is itself the effector product of power and the result of its ethical constitution.

Foucault’s general project is to return the traditional philosophical question: ‘what is thinking?’ He does so by asking what the conditions of a possible relation between the subject of thought and the object of thought actually are.

The question is to determine what the subject must be, to what conditions it is submitted, what statute it should have, what position it should occupy in the real or the imaginary in order to become a legitimate subject of any given knowledge. In short, it is a matter of determining its mode of ‘subjugation’, for this is obviously not the same depending on whether the knowledge in question takes the form of a sacred text, an observation of natural history or the analysis of the behavior a mental ill individual (Foucault, 1994a: 633).

The history of the subject is the history of its experience of itself as subject. Experience-be it the experience of insecurity and security-must also be understood in a relatively broad sense as ‘the correlation, in a culture, between domains of knowledge, types of normativity and forms of subjectivity’ (Foucault, 1994e: 540). Foucault’s work allows us to ask the question What are the conditions under which a subject of security relates to itself. What are the procedures by which the subject can observe itself, analyze and understand itself? (Foucault, 1994a: 633) The speech act theory of security, valuable in its own right, brackets the entire question of the way in which the very subjectivity of the securitizing subject is constituted by its relation to power and to the ethical.

Foucault’s project can be divided into three simultaneous genealogies of the subject, separate but interrelated. The first is a historical ontology of humans in relation to the truth, which permits us to constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge. The second is a historical ontology of humans in relation to a field of power, permitting us to constitute ourselves as actors in relation to others. This is the genealogy we have been considering so far, as it relates to the political subject of security. The third genealogy is a historical ontology of our relation to morality, which permits to constitute ourselves as ethical agents (Foucault, 1994b: 393).

Foucault draws our attention to the fact that power circulates in all aspects of our lives. In particular he draws our attention to the fact that power also circulates in our conceptualizations of power. Parallel to the re-insertion of power in the analysis of the subject of security, Foucault gives us the means to understand the implicit ethical nature of the subject in general and the subject of security, in particular. Whereas Kant opened our eyes to the relation between rationality and power, Foucault makes possible the insight that the organizational logic of securitization is, by its very rationality, already caught up in a power struggle. For Foucault, the essential questions of the subject precede from the determinations of power, knowledge and ethics. It is a question that concerns implicitly and explicitly all theories of international relations: What is power?

The concept of power and the security subject

Cleary, this question of power is operative in virtually all of Foucault’s writing. In his late work, however, he begins to engage a more direct analysis of the notion of power in terms of the history of the institutions that make up the modern state. In The Will to Knowledge (1976) describes how he understands power as resisting common political institutions, in particular those that characterize more or less completely the concept of power used by IR theory. Power, he suggests, should not at all be understood as the institutionalized rules that are commonly called state power. Nor should it be understood as a systematized domination of one group against another. For this reason one must not begin, as do the vast majority of theories of international relations, by postulating the state, or the general juridical ‘forms of law’ or ‘general domination’ as the basis for the analysis of power (Foucault, 1976: 121). Instead, power should be understood as:

The multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent in the domain in which they are exerted and are constitutive of their organization; the play which by the way of struggles and incessant confrontations transforms them, reinforces the, inverses them, the supports that these relations finds in such a way as to form chains or systems or, on the contrary, the gaps and contradictions which isolate them from each other, and finally, the strategies in which they take affect and whose general design or institutional crystallization forms a body within the state apparatuses, in the formation of law, in the social hegemonies (Foucault, 1976: 121-122).

According to Foucault it makes no sense to search for the key to power in a central, sovereign anchoring point, one which organizes some hegemonic set of sub-powers. There is no radiating center of power, which could be seized and analyzed. There no base of power, or rather the base is a moving set of relations, from which emerge, local, heterogeneous, indefinite powers.

Power is everywhere. It is not that englobes everything. It is that it comes from everywhere. And ‘the’ power, in the sense that it is permanent, repetitive, inert, self-producing is merely the effect the ensemble (Foucault, 1976: 122).

In Foucault’s eyes, power thus resists all forms of categorization, compartmentalization, instrumentalization, institutionalization, etc. Power is not a thing, nor a substance. It is a matrix of domination. It is not something, which can simply be seized or taken, shared and transmitted along the channels of objective communication.

More importantly for the question of security and the subject of security, power is never exteriorto other forms of relations, not even to those that are customarily taken as the objects of the social, human and political sciences. Power, in other words, is intrinsic to economic processes, to knowledge, to social and cultural associations and to sexual relations. All these objects of study, of cognition of understanding are, according to Foucault, alreadyeffects of power. The conundrum of all human subjects is that power precedes all objects of human experience. By the same token, all power arises from the ‘grass roots’. Power is not simply applied from a central source. Indeed the opposition between oppressor and oppressor is, in Foucault’s optic, a false one, since power cannot simply be directed from one ‘place’ to another. Instead, multiple relations of force form and play themselves out in different mechanisms of production, in families, groups, and cultural organizations. Power relations can thus never be entirely intentional, never entirely objective (Foucault, 1976: 123).

Security and the ethical

Foucault’s conception of the ethical is closely connected with his general project of working through the history of the Western subject. As we have seen above the subject is constituted through its relation to power. Similarly the ethical nature of the individual, collectivity or organization is constituted by its ethical understanding of itself. When we say ‘ethical subject’ we refer to not to a traditional system of morality, ready-made norms and principles of right and wrong, suited for application to any arbitrary situation. Foucault differentiates between ethics understood as the deployment of moral codes and rules, which are imposed externally, and the attitude one has toward oneself. It is the relation to oneself which determines the ethical nature of the subject. Thus, when asked in an interview whether his History of Sexualitycontained an ‘ethical concern’, whether it was trying to tell people how to act, he responded:

No. If you understand by ‘ethical’ a code, which would tell us in what manner we should act, then of course the History of Sexuality is not an ethics. But if by ‘ethical’, you understand an individual’s relation to itself when it acts, then I would say what it tends to be an ethics, or at least, or to show what could be an ethics of sexual behavior. It would be an ethics that would not be dominated by the problem of the profound truth that governs the reality of our sexual relations (Foucault, 1994d: 536).

According to Foucault, the ethical nature of the subject was a key to its relation to truth about the world. Access to experience and knowledge were ethically determined. To be immoral was implicitly understood as a hindrance to true experience and true knowledge. Before Descartes one could not be impure or immoral and possess truth about the world. Descartes’ contribution was to show that demonstrate that immorality was not relevant, that the ethical nature of the subject-the relation to self in view of moral norms-did not determine knowledge. The rationality of proof was sufficient (Foucault, 1994b: 410). This rational proof however remained a phenomenological one, an individual experience of rationality. Kant took the ethical subject further, postulating a kind of universal subject, or rather, defining knowledge as a universal aspect of rationality, detached from ethical consideration.

Foucault develops his thinking on the ethical nature of the subject toward the end of his life, in his lectures and writings surrounding the publication of the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality. [2]

The word of the Delphic oracle: «Know thyself» is, despite its force in traditional histories of philosophy, not the real guiding key to Western self-consciousness. The more relevant question is not how to know oneself, but rather what to do with oneself, what actions are relevant in order to maintains one’s identity (Foucault, 1994c: 213). It is not the fact that espionage against one’s homeland is generally considered to be wrong, which constitutes the ethical subject, it is one’s one relation to oneself which is ethical. The ethical subject understood as relation to self has evolved vastly through Western culture.

This ambiguity lies closer to the surface in the term ‘ethics’ (‘la morale’). By ‘ethics we understand, on the one hand, a set of values and rules of action, given to individuals or a group by different kinds of prescriptive mechanisms like the family, schools, the Church. On the other hand, however, we understand the actual behavior or reaction of individuals or groups to the values and rules given. Foucault continues:

One is thus designating the way in which they submit more or less completely to au principle of behavior, in which the obey or resist an interdiction or a prescription, in which they respect or neglect un set of values. The study of this aspect of ethics must determine comment and with which margins of variation or transgression, individuals or groups behave in reference to a prescriptive system which is explicitly or implicitly given in their culture and of which they are more or less clearly conscious (Foucault, 1994e: 555-556).

In Foucault’s understanding of the ethical and the subject, the ethical subject constitutes itself not by precisely carrying out the code of conduct prescribed by one authority or another. The subject constitutes itself, becomes itself through its reaction to the code of conduct, through its particular adhesion, partial resistance, variation and mutation. Given a code of conduct, there is clearly a multiplicity of possible ethical reactions to it, a multiplicity of modes of ethically experiencing it, through sympathy, aversion, etc. Foucault calls these differences the ‘determination of ethical substance’, that is, ‘the way in which the individual constitutes one part or another of itself as the basis, as the ‘raw material’ of its ethical conduct (Foucault, 1994e: 556).

The panoply of difference also determines the ‘mode of subjugation’ of the ethical subject. The degree of harmonization between the code and the subject is the measure of the dimension of power in necessarily in place in order to subjugate the subject. It is the measure of the resistance of the subject to conformity to the code, the degree of contrariety to the will collective or individual of the subject. It is thus in this sense also the measure of the ‘ethical labor’ which the subject is forced to perform on itself in order to render its conduct in conformity with the code (Foucault, 1994e: 556-557).

Lastly, this difference, this space of variation between a given set of codes or values concerns what Foucault calls the ‘teleology of the moral subject’. Any given ethically determined act may seem singular, but it is in effect inserted into the ensemble of values and rules that constitute the code. A single ethically determined act is also an element in the evolution of the ethical code. It marks the continuity and duréeof the ethical subject. It tends toward its own fulfillment in the sense that through its fulfillment the constitution of the ethical conduct, which leads the subject to behave in one way or another, also contributes to the future determination of the essence of that subject-to its always new constitution (Foucault, 1994e: 557).

The traditional meaning of power and state sovereignty

The relation between power and state sovereignty is the object of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France during the academic year 1975-76, approximately simultaneous with the publication of the first volume of the History of Sexuality, which we cited above. The lectures are edited as ‘One Must Defend Society’. In his ‘Résumé of the lectures, Foucault, poses the central question of his teaching and research of that year: ‘How has war (and its different aspects, invasion, battle, conquest, victory, relations of victors to vanquished, pillage and appropriation, upheavals) been used as an analyzer of history and, in a general way, of social relations?’ (Foucault, 1997: 243).

The starting point and red thread of the entire analysis of ‘One Must Defend Society’is a questioning of the conventional notion of what he calls the juridical model of sovereignty. The implicit assumption of this model is canonical and well-known: the individual is regarded as the subject of natural rights and a primitive empowerment. This basic power is the seed of the power of the modern state such as it is conceived in the Renaissance. According to the classic concept the state is the repository of law, and law is the fundamental manifestation of law. Standard analyses and histories of the state take the concept of power as a given. Foucault’s project is to open the concept of power, to explore and draw out the consequences of its many facets, layers and aspects. Foucault’s genealogyof the state thus takes up the analysis of the tacit relationship between power and the subject outlined above:

One must try to study power, not by starting with the primitive terms of relation, but with relation itself, since that is what determines the elements for which it carries consequences: rather than asking of ideal subjects what they have renounced of themselves or their powers in order to be subjected, on must seek out who relations of subjection can create subjects (1997: 239).

This way of analyzing the state is in conformity of Foucault’s general strategy for studying the subject and subjectivity in general. The political subject of the state is not taken as an a priori. Rather the subject is seen as an effect of an effect of power, a byproduct of the relations of power. Power always precedes the subject. Power is never simply a creation of the political subject, much less its political instrument. There was never a power-free subject that served as the origin of power, the creator or even the first user of power. However just such a conception of the state dominates political history and political philosophy, exemplified by the Hobbesian model of state sovereignty. It is Foucault’s intention, in ‘One Must Defend Society’, to retell the history of the state in terms of the history of the subject.

‘Politics is war continued by other means’: The alternative reading of the history of the subject

Sovereignty, law and power

In Foucault’s eyes, political history and political philosophy are centered upon a presumed identity between sovereignty and power. This theoretical assumption dates to the Middles Ages when, in Western societies the development of legal thought was naturally attached to the monarch. By the same token, power is essentially royal power. This constellation of power, law and monarchy was, according to Foucault the consequence of the ‘reactivation of Roman law’ in the mid-Middle Ages (1997: 23). Accordingly, legal theory has since that time had one central aim, namely to secure the legitimacy of power. Law and sovereignty work at the service of each other. Theory of law works out the theoretical legitimacy of the state and, inversely, the sovereign legitimates legal theory. The consequence is a kind of categorical stronghold or paradigm: the only legitimate form of legal reflection is that which reduces all forms of force or domination to the logic of sovereign power, either in terms of sustenance of the status quo or in adversary form. Consequentially all forms of domination are inevitably reduced to one form or another of sovereign power. As we shall see, it is precisely Foucault’s project to separate these two domains, to rediscover the concept of power as domination not centered in the circle of legitimacy and sovereignty.

Ascending-descending power

The exemplification of this model of sovereignty is, of course, the Leviathan. The theoretical motif of the Hobbesian state, which has essentially dominated political realism to this very envisages the sovereign as an idealized concentration of power equated with lgitimacy. Through the philosophical support of juridical systems of the type just mentioned, all power, and all conceptions of power are conceived as referents of the sovereign. All power is channeled into a closed economy with the sovereign, either flowing to it or from it. Foucault’s project resists this closed and bi-directional model of power. The ‘body’ of which Leviathan represents the concentration is, according to Foucault’s reading a polymorphic composite of Power does not flow in linear ways through the state. Rather it circulates through and around different groups and individuals, not simply aligning them with the sovereigns logic of unified power. As Foucault puts it, ‘Power transits through individuals. It is not applied to them’ (1997: 26).

The subject-subject cycle

According to the theory of sovereignty that dominates European political history the political subject, the subject of sovereignty-and thereby the subject of security-is part of a cycle of subjectivity. A political subject is, in line with the norms and values of the European Renaissance and the European Enlightenment an individual is naturally endowed with certain rights and principles, yet these rights and principles are only coherently understandable within the framework of power linked to the unified sovereign. The state, in turn, is organized in a vast multiplicity of political powers. Such powers are, however not properly political, but rather what Foucault calls ‘capacities, possibilities, an authorities’ all integrated as moments in the general unity of power. This unity takes the form of the sovereignty within the original framework of legitimacy. The constitutions of the political subject is therefore a kind of cycle: from sovereign subject to individual subject, all as part of one and the same legitimization of law and legalization of power. This cycle itself is considered by Foucault as ‘primitive’. It seems impossible conceive of any organization of power that precedes it, that is more fundamental or more original.

Oddly enough, Foucault’s opposition to the Hobbesian model is not base on a theoretical reason, but rather an empirical effort. In his archival work Foucault uncovers a fundamental political sub-culture in the late 17th and early 18th, what he calls a ‘new mechanics of power’ (1997: 32), featuring a social organization, which circumvents the traditional conception of sovereignty. While this is not the place to present this material, it makes for extraordinary reading Foucault’s theory of subjectivity is thus based on a largely empirical demonstration of the failure of the Hobbesian model of sovereignty. Foucault is clearly of the conviction that this conception of power and subjectivity is incorrect. However the remarkable rigor of his project lies in the fact that he uncovers a mutation in the model which would ordinarily empirically disprove the theory of sovereignty.

In sum, one must get rid of the model of the Leviathan, the model of an artificial man, who is at the same time an automaton, equally artificial and unitary, who envelopes all real individuals and whose citizens would be its body, but whose soul would be sovereignty. One must study power beyond the model of the Leviathan, beyond the field delimited by legal sovereignty and the institution of the state. It is a, rather, a matter of analyzing it starting from the techniques and tactics of domination (1997: 30).

Conclusion: The state and the ethical subject of security

While the speech act theory of security teaches attentiveness to the object of security and to the dynamics of reference that connect security actors with objects of securitization, the Foucault-inspired approach underscores the multivalent nature of the security actor as an ethical subject.

The approach to security has been widened along two axes, adapted from Foucault’s history of the subject: power and the ethical.

The analysis of the subject of security in terms of power shows that security subject is not a simple agent of power, that power is not simply an instrument of the subject. The subject of security is already the effect of power, already involved in a flux over power, which precedes it and determines it even while it is trying to manipulate the field of power for its own protection. This understanding of the subject of security rejects the notion of state sovereignty as the fundamental category of security concerns. There is little innovation in the claim that the sovereign state as the most relevant objectof security has been weakened. This analysis has suggested that state sovereignty is not the most relevant subject position from which to securitize.

The analysis of the subject of security in terms of the ethical has confirmed the relevance of ethics to security studies, but in an unexpected manner. By innovating the understanding of the concept of ethics according to the model proposed by Foucault, we can see that there was never a question of that the ‘new ethics’ in international relations is only ‘new’ if one accepts the notion they were never intrinsically related. Yet we have shown that the ethical is deeply constitutive of the subject in general and the subject of security in particular. Understanding the ethical subject of security as a function which resists fixed categories of ethics and of power in an age when these categories are more complex than ever, helps us to have gain a clearly picture of the dynamics of security in our age.

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