the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

248 responding to 9/11: a return to national security?not as humiliating, torturing or gloating in the pain of others. A similarconcern with women who transgressed traditional feminine constructionsarose with the advent and increase in the number of female suicidebombers, in the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Turkeyand Iraq (Alison, 2004; Brunner, 2005; Gonzalez-Perez, 2007; Ness, 2007).Information technology, bio-security and riskOne group of widening scholars linked the politics of identity at the heartof the discursive, Constructivist, Feminist and Poststructuralist agendato an explicit concern with technology (Der Derian, 2004: 92; 2005).Technology came into the picture through the RMA, particularly the USuse of ‘global surveillance, networked communication, smart weapons,robotic aircraft, real-time simulation, and rapid deployment of specialforces’, a form of warfare that was ‘low-casualty, long-distance, goodvisuals’ (Der Derian, 2004: 92). Other studies examined terrorist use ofnetworked technologies, and how the Internet became a site for antiwar/peacemovements as well as targeted by government surveillance.The significance of cyberspace for critical infrastructures as well as forbuilding communities – including groups fighting totalitarian regimes –predated 9/11 in that the Clinton administration had recognised ‘cybersecurity’as an issue in the 1990s, but the GWoT took this concern to anew, more complex and heightened level (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1993,1996, 1997, 2001; C. H. Gray, 1997; Deibert, 2000, 2003; Bendrath, 2003;Der Derian, 2003; Latham, 2003; Nissenbaum, 2005; Hansen and Nissenbaum,forthcoming). What set Poststructuralists and those workingin a critical sociological vein apart from more traditional analyses ofRMA was a stronger concern with how networked technologies changethe ways in which non-territorial communities and referent objects canbe constructed.A particular concern was the way in which information technologyand securitisations were linked in the discourses and practices of Westerngovernments. The securitisation of ‘terrorism’ at the heart of the GWoTdiscourses worked, argued Critical scholars, to legitimise the transgressionof a host of civil and human rights, most noticeably perhaps in the treatmentof prisoners at Guantanamo and in the clandestine programmesof so-called extraordinary rendition through which suspected terroristswere believed to be transferred to regimes suspected of using torture.One group of scholars drew upon the Classical work on the exception byCarl Schmitt, as well as the more recent and influential Italian political