6 - Anti-law

Summary

Chapter 6 explores the anti-law quality of the UN’s managerial governance of security threats. Foucault explained that disciplinary power is incompatible with juridico-political commitments to rights and equality. Such critiques are often made of global governance, especially when it takes security as its object, but they often assume that managerial technologies can be redeemed by making them more juridico-political. This chapter shows that they cannot be redeemed. It discusses the UN's redemption strategy of imbuing its counter-terrorism strategy with human rights. The second redemption strategy is the Global Administrative Law project which, taking managerial technologies of accountability and transparency as imperfect juridical forms, sees them as ripe for improvement along juridico-political lines. The third redemptions strategy discussed is the Global Experimental Governance project, which affirms constellations of governance that valorize participation, especially by civil society, as a step in a democratic direction. The chapter concludes that none of these redemption strategies can succeed because, as Foucault foresaw, articulating juridico-political forms into management’s mechanics of power supresses radical structural criticism. The best law can do is mitigate the harm caused by security management.