TIMOTHY W.
LUKE
“The Discipline of Security Studies and the
Codes of Containment: Learning From Kuwait”
From Alternatives: Social Transformation and
Humane Governance (1991)
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE END OF
HISTORY?
For nearly five decades, the various disciplines of
national security studies have been dedicated to
defining and applying the complex codes of
containment at the various economic, military,
political, social, and strategic fronts of the
struggle between capitalism and communism, the
West and the East, democracy and
totalitarianism, the United States and the Soviet
Union.
The frozen tundras of bloc politics provided a
peculiarly fixed terrain, which the disciplinary
readings of national security studies could
somewhat reliably map with their anti-
Communist/antitotalitarian codes of containment.
During 1989-1991, there’s a tremendous change
happened - with the velvet and violent revolutions
in Eastern Europe as well as perestroika in the
Soviet Union, these frozen terrains of Cold War
combat are melting into far more mushy, if not
totally fluid, expanses of almost inchoate
confusion.
Now "anticommunism," as a discourse of danger,
largely has run out of gas. Some see this as "the
end of history." Actually, it merely appears to be
the end of Cold War history.
Cold War-style reasoning continues to dominate
US strategic thought inasmuch as the premise of
containment - In the Kuwaiti conflict, one might
find traces of new models of containment, new
types of alliance, and new kinds of conflict to
legitimate the disciplinary demands of
contemporary national security
FROM THE FLOW OF POWER IN SPACE TO
THE POWER OF FLOWS APACE?
Beginning with technological society" or
"postindustrial society," seem to be altering the
social structures, political institutions,
environmental politics, and the nature of
geopolitics
 Informationalization" when the global
impact of mass telecommunications,
electronic computerization, cybernetic
automation, rapid transportation, and
flexible accumulation began to be
experienced more broadly.
The organizational logic of preinformational
society is anchored to places. The stability,
security, and sovereignty of state power, then,
most often have been stated and comprehended
in essentially spatial terms.
As Campbell claims: “The presence of sovereign
states in an anarchic realm is a spatial conception
that privileges a geopolitical reading of global
politics.”
As Walker noted: “The principle of state
sovereignty suggests a spatial demarcation
between those places in which the attainment of
universal principles might be possible and those
in which they are not.”
Informationalization alters the power dynamics by
generating new organizational logics nested in
flexible accumulation's rapid and intense flows of
ideas, goods, symbols, people, images, and
money on a global scale that developed with jet
transportation, electronic telecommunication,
massive decolonization, and extensive
computerization.
Power today also often flows more placelessly
beneath, behind, between, and beyond
boundaries set into space as new senses of
artificial location become very fluid or more
mobile, defined by shifting connections into the
networks of information carrying these flows =
channeled through transnational corporations,
scientific communities, banks, and
telecommunication networks = setting its own
terms of access.
SOVEREIGNTY IN CYBERSPACE:
NATION-NESS AS HYPERREAL ESTATE?
Kuwait is a uniquely suggestive case for
discussing the nature of nation-states in
contemporary informational world-systems. The
combination of great wealth, fixed incomes from
oil resources, large remittances from foreign
investments, a relatively small number of national
constituents, a patrimonial ruling elite, and an
aristocratic state = these developments helped
remake Kuwait into an unusual new series of
cyberspatial portfolios, electronically variable
capital masses, or hyperreal estates
accumulated in a massive informational cross
section from its commercial interoperations within
various streams of the transnational flow.
Saddam Hussein, by invading and holding
Kuwait's territories, also hoped to gain and keep
its electronically accumulated wealth = Iraq took
Kuwait's real estate, however, failed to capture its
hyperreal estate.
POST WAR AS RETRO WAR
Various spectacular treatments of social relations
can be continuously coded and recoded in
streams of images, which constitute a peculiar
political discourse about, but also within, the
regime of transnational corporate society.
One of the most fundamental and long-lasting
scripts for these transnational discourses in the
twentieth century is the mythology of World War
II.
Whenever and wherever a small, weak nation is
threatened by a larger, stronger nation, or a
militaristic authoritarian dictator challenges a
relatively peaceful neighboring society, the
discursive work-ups of World War I1 can be
flexibly deployed to interpret, explain, and
legitimate elite and mass responses in readily
accessible and virtually uncontestable rhetorical
terms.
Any present conflict to events, persons, or
organizations in World War can generate
tremendous symbolic energies to direct against
the opponent as well as to fuel domestic support.
From the invasion’s beginnings in August 1990,
Saddam Hussein and Iraq provided a
hermeneutic field day for US and global
discourses to recharge these potent engines of
World War II mythology.
- Saddam Hussein immediately became
Adolf Hitler.
- Iraq, then, became today’s expansionistic
equivalent of Nazi Germany, and Kuwait
assumed the role of the totalitarian
empire’s weak helpless victim, like
Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway,
Denmark, Belgium, or the Netherlands.
FROM GEOPOLITICAL REALISM TO
CHRONOPOLITICAL HYPERREALISM?
The Westphalian system of autonomous nation-
states, organized around spatial logics of
domination and development on the basis of
geopolitical agendas, is not yet dead, although it
does seem to be dying. Yet, a post-Westphalian
system of global networks, transnational flows, and
informational communities, tied into a fluid logic of
influence and interaction set into the code of
chronopolitical programs.
The flow reduces their differences to basic
equivalents, corrodes their borders as meaningful
barriers, and eliminates older geopolitical divisions
of "them" and "US," "inside" and "outside,"
"foreign" and "domestic."
In hyperrealism today, the simulation of reality, like
President Bush's new world order as a spectacular
resurrection of World War II's grand alliance,
becomes "real," but real only within the image7
known to be readily accessible and comprehensible
to the flow's mass clienteles in the ever-flexible
World War II scripts.
As we might learn from Kuwait, the actual
transnationality of the United States perhaps is
becoming much more significant. The codes of
containment and discourse of security, once
pounded out in a metallurgic/technicurgic era of
geopolitical realism, are being recoded to boot into
the semiurgic hegemony of informational power,
responding to the political possibilities intrinsic to
chronopolitical hyperrealism.
-JUN REX V. SALO-
Reporter