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general interest
The Theater of Operations
National Security Affect from
the Cold War to the War on Terror
joseph masco
How did the most powerful nation on
earth come to embrace terror as the
organizing principle of its security policy
THE
In The Theater of Operations, Joseph
Masco locates the origins of the presentday
U.S. counterterrorism apparatus
THEATER
in the Cold War’s “balance of terror.”
OF
He shows how, after the attacks of 9/11,
the U.S. Global War on Terror mobilized
OPERATIONS
a wide range of affective, conceptual,
and institutional resources established
during the Cold War to enable a new
planetary theater of operations. Tracing
NATIONAL SECURITY AFFECT FROM THE COLD WAR
how specific aspects of emotional
TO THE WAR ON TERROR
JOSEPH MASCO
management, existential danger, state
secrecy, and threat awareness have evolved as core aspects of the American
social contract, he draws on archival, media, and ethnographic resources to
offer a new portrait of American national security culture. Undemocratic and
unrelenting, this counterterror state prioritizes speculative practices over facts,
and ignores everyday forms of violence across climate, capital, and health in an
unprecedented effort to anticipate and eliminate terror threats—real, imagined,
and emergent.
Joseph Masco is Professor of
Anthropology at the University of
Chicago. He is the author of The Nuclear
Borderlands: The Manhattan Project
in Post–Cold War New Mexico, winner
of the J. I. Staley Prize from the School
for Advanced Research and the Rachel
Carson Prize from the Society for the
Social Studies of Science.
“What Joseph Masco shows us in The Theater of Operations
is an entire affective structure—the management of anxiety,
resilience, steadfastness, sacrifice—that is demanded of every
citizen. Alert to liquid containers above 2.4 ounces, hypervigilant
about abandoned bags, suspicious of loitering, and
prepared for the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon—
we learn to live our lives aware of tiny and apocalyptic things.
With an anthropologist’s eye long attuned to life in the parawartime
state, Masco is the perfect guide to the theater of
the security state.”—PETER GALISON, author of Einstein’s
Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time
“Joseph Masco’s brilliance lies in his ability to make visible the complex affective and
discursive technologies that emerged from the long history of the Cold War, and to illuminate
their effects on our everyday perceptions of security and harm. This much-anticipated
book will be read widely in cultural anthropology and cultural studies. It is beautifully
written and argued. That one leaves The Theater of Operations a bit paranoid is a
tribute to Masco’s rhetorical skill.”—ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI, author of Economies
of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism
ANTHROPOLOGY/AMERICAN STUDIES/CULTURAL STUDIES
November 288 pages, 57 illustrations paper, 978–0–8223–5806–0, $23.95/£15.99 cloth, 978–0–8223–5793–3, $84.95/£55.00
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