Huysmans Jef

This author's articles

• The politics of protection : sites of insecurity and political agency

  20 December 2006
  This book poses the question of political agency in relation to some of the most significant questions raised in relation to the governance of insecurity and protection in the contemporary world. The authors have identify and explore five issues that challenge or raise a number of questions about the traditional notion that states are to protect their citizens through retaining a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence

• International Politics of Exception

  18 October 2005
  What does it mean to debate exceptional international politics? These debates are not simply a quarrel about the extra-ordinary nature of events, such as 9/11. They are traversed by a more fundamental ‘quarrel’ about different accounts of exceptional use of power. International politics of exception is ultimately a disagreement about different ways of understanding the conditions and modalities of international political power as such. I introduce three ways of thinking the question of exceptional exercise of international political power. Normativism frames the question of exceptional political power first of all in relation to the principle of legality. It refers to approaches that prioritise international rule of law and only accept deviation from it under exceptional circumstances. Decisionism ‘thinks’ exceptional international power first of all in terms of universal sovereignty. It makes the presence of a universal sovereign that can make a decision on when an exception exists and on how to deal with it a continuously present condition of any international rule of law. Finally, institutionalism frames the modalities of international power in terms of an objective socio-political order. Here exceptionality is not a suspension of the rule of law but a suspension of normality. I introduce and illustrate the competitive relation between these frameworks by drafting a debate between Annan, Kagan and Waltz.

• The Politics of Fear

  18 October 2005
  The paper introduces two approaches which help us to understand the processes through which a politics of fear slips into a politics of integrating a political system on the basis of fear of an enemy. Each of them focuses on different processes that are central to the modern political system. The first approach focuses on how fear plays out in the context of mass politics and how it can be a significant political force changing democratic political systems into authoritarian ones. The key process is one of mobilising masses in support of an authoritarian political leadership. This process is driven by particular combinations of fear and alienation. This interpretation of the politics of fear is developed on the basis of Neumann’s essay Angst und Politik. His analysis relates psychological understandings of the behaviour of masses and crowds to socio-economic and political processes of alienation. The second approach focuses on how the administration of insurance and risks, which includes both prevention of and compensation in case of accidents and which is central to political economy and the governance of welfare renders particular risks and dangers into enemies. Administrative processes and technologies transfiguring control of probabilities of accidents into managing fear of enemies are central to this understanding of the politics of fear. The logic of practice is one of policing the future.

• Mirror Mirror on the Wall, which is the most Fashionable Insecurity of All?

  6 September 2005
  Jef Huysmans focused his intervention on the Politics of Insecurity, aiming at describing certain crystallizations of the insecurity discourse. Huysmans stressed how the duet diplomacy-military has fallen apart after the events of 9/11, and how the blow has already started with the fall of the Berlin wall.

• Huysmans Jef : curriculum vitae

  19 April 2005
  Jef Huysmans (Licentiate (University of Leuven), MA (University of Hull), Ph.D. (University of Leuven)) is Lecturer at the Open University (UK). He is currently working on the securitisation of migration and asylum in Europe, the political significance of fear, and the international politics of exception after 9/11.

• WP1: The New State of Exception: The Political and Social Implications of Globalized Insecurities

  19 April 2005
  This workpackage draws on political and cultural theory, international relations, and criminology to develop an innovative theorisation of the nexus between security and liberty and its application to the European context. It specifically responds to characterisations of contemporary security practices in terms of «the state of exception», the spatio-temporal re-articulation of the exception in political practice, and the political and social implications of this re-articulation.