When Foucault met security studies: A critique of the ‘Paris school’ of security

studies

Paper presented at the 2006 BISA annual conference 18-20 December at the
University of Cork, Ireland

By Rita Floyd

Abstract
With the arrival of the so-called Paris school of security studies, security studies has
recently gained a new member. This article offers the first comprehensive and critical
engagement with that school, in particular with the works of its most prominent
member Didier Bigo. The key criticism of this article is that the school relies
excessively on the philosophical writings of Michel Foucault, without actually
engaging with what the latter’s intentions in writing. Since Foucault’s intentions were
of a profoundly personal and partisan nature this is considered to be deeply
problematic. Indeed, the problem is such that the Paris school - with their world view
heavily influenced by the writings of Foucault, and their analytical framework derived
from the same writings – themselves fail to offer anything much beyond the
propagation of Foucault’s cause. It is this dependence which ultimately limits their
contribution to the study of security.

1
Introduction

Partly as an inspiration to, and partly as a result of the rise of the fourth debate 1 in
International Relations theory the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault
(1926 -†1984) have enjoyed much attention within the discipline of International
Relations (IR), and in the sub-discipline security studies. Whilst some scholars make
use of Foucault’s ideas and concepts only in passing, others owe the majority of their
work to the inspiration of the French thinker. More specifically, this article is about
the works of the so-called Paris school of security studies that, as will be argued, rely
heavily on observations about the nature of society and social/political relations made
by Foucault without any consideration given to the intentions that informed the
latter’s claims, and therefore no evaluation of their correspondence to reality. Since, in
Foucault’s case intentions in writing were very strong and, importantly, very
subjective, this is a problematic development. Problematic, because by not accounting
for Foucault’s intentions and uncritically adopting Foucault’s view of the world, the
Paris school adopts a view of the world that is deliberately inflated, in part
conspiratorial and on occasion far from reality. This article argues that whilst such a
skewed portrayal of reality served Foucault’s own purposes well, it does not serve
well as a basis for security analysis, exactly because it does not always correspond to
reality.
For purposes of structure, the argument of this article is developed in three
parts. The first part is concerned with Foucault’s intentions in writing what he did and
with his work more generally. To focus on Foucault’s ‘intentions in writing’ as
opposed to his ‘motives for writing’ follows Quentin Skinner, who, very much in an
effort to address the postmodernist charge of the impossibility of recovering meaning
in a sense of what an author may have meant (made by especially Derrida, but also by
Foucault and Roland Barthes), focuses instead on the illocutionary force of texts. That
is, instead of focusing on what an author may have meant by writing what he or she
did (his/her motives), Skinner focuses on what an author may have intended by what
he or she wrote.2
To say that we cannot uncover an author’s motives, however, does not prohibit
us from considering the motives an author him or herself gives for writing. In
Foucault’s case – as he himself has argued - none of his writings can be separated
from who he was as a person and what he stood for. In other words, we cannot hope to
understand Foucault’s writings without at least some insight of what kind of ideas and
experiences informed his writings. As Foucault once put it:

Someone who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books, in what he
publishes …his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his
books. The private life of an individual, his sexual preference, and his work
are interrelated not because his work translates his sexual life, but his
work includes the whole life as well as the text. The work is more than the
work; the subject who is writing is part of the work.3
1
This follows Ole Wæver, who argues that the fourth debate is the debate between rationalist and
reflectivist IR theory. Wæver, Ole (1997) “Figures of international thought: introducing persons instead
of paradigms” In Wæver, Ole & Neumann Iver, B. (Eds.) The Future of International Relations.
Masters in the Making (London: Routledge) p.1ff
2
Skinner, Quentin (2002) Visions of Politics Volume I. Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press) pp.100-101
3
Michel Foucault cited in David Macey (1993) The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon
Books) p. xiii

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Indeed, for Foucault both his motives for writing and his intentions in writing lie with
who he was as a person and, as he himself time and again argued, it is his
‘experiences’ that informed his ‘theory’:

Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work, it has been on
the basis of my own experience, always in relation to processes I saw taking
place around me. It is because I thought I could recognize things I saw, in the
institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent
shocks, malfunctionings… that I undertook a particular piece of work, a few
fragments of autobiography. 4

The second part of this article is the introduction of the reader to the Paris school. As
in the first part (with Foucault), the aim hereby is not to evaluate the arguments of the
Paris school, but rather aim is to show where exactly Foucault’s ideas are joined up
with the security equation. In other words, I aim to highlight in what way Foucault’s
thought is important for the Paris school. Before the analysis of section two can take
place, it is now necessary to explain who exactly the Paris school is. The most
prominent member of the Paris school is the French sociologist Didier Bigo. Bigo,
most of whose work written in the English language has only been published after the
turn of the millennium is a relatively new figure within security studies. Despite this,
Bigo has been joined by a number of likeminded scholars5, all of which place great
emphasis on the utility of Foucault for the study of security. 6 This group of scholars
has rightly or wrongly been called the ‘Paris school of security studies’, a label which
is in this article used solely as an ordering tool, derived from the geographical
location of the key members of the school, notably Bigo. To date, the school’s most
important statements regarding the study of security are a series of articles and
chapters in edited books by Bigo, as well as the 2005 edited volume by Bigo and
Elspeth Guild called Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe.
Since this collection of essays makes much reference to the work of Bigo, indeed it
takes Bigo’s ideas as its theoretical framework; Bigo’s work is the key to the ‘Paris
school’. In addition to Bigo, the recent work of Jef Huysmans is also of interest to this
paper. Whilst Huysmans has not contributed to the above mentioned collection of
essays, he too, in his recently published The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration
and Asylum in the EU (2006), develops a rigorously Foucauldian approach to the
study of security. Moreover, large parts of Huysmans analysis make reference to
Bigo’s work and his approach to Foucault matches that of Bigo. Undoubtedly in part
the reason why some within the security studies community have grouped Huysmans
to the Paris school.7
4
Michel Foucault cited in Didier Eribon (1989) Michel Foucault (London: Faber and Faber) p. 29
5
Besides Guild and Bigo the contributors of the book are as follows: Laurent Bonelli, Ayse Ceyhan,
John Crowley, Anastassia Tsoukala
6
Indeed, in the introduction to Controlling Frontiers Bigo writes “The underpinning reference of all
contributors, independently of their discipline, is the work of Michel Foucault.” Bigo, Didier (2005)
Policing in the Name of Freedom In Didier Bigo & Elspeth Guild (eds.) Controlling Frontiers
(Aldershot: Ashgate) p.2
7
Ole Wæver, for example, sees Huysmans as being a sometimes member of the Paris school. Wæver,
Ole (2003) “Securitisation: Taking stock of a research programme in Security Studies” Unpublished
Manuscript p.30 Whilst Huysmans situates himself midway between the Copenhagen and Paris
approaches. In the opening chapter of his 2006 book he explains: “This book is located in the wake of
the linguistic turn in security studies. It accepts and works in line with the idea that language plays a
central role in the modulation of security domains. But it also moves beyond this agenda by

3
 The first two sections of this article are followed by a third section that
develops the key critique of this article. Based on the joint arguments developed in the
first two sections that: a) who Foucault was as a person and his work are deeply and
inseparably entangled; and, b) that the Paris school excessively relies on Foucauldian
ideas, in the third section I criticise the Paris school’s unquestioning 8 adoption of
Foucault’s ideas as both ill-advised and irresponsible. I argue that because the school
fails to account for what Foucault indented to achieve with his writings they overlook
his questionable research ethos and, indeed, make it their own. At the heart of this
criticism lies the idea that Foucault, informed by his own personal intentions, in
writing deliberately offers an inflated and at times fictitious account of reality.
Although an in depths discussion of the ethics of Foucault’s work ethos are outside of
the realm of this article, the important point for this analysis is that anyone who
adopts Foucault’s ideas unquestioningly, consequently adopts a doubtful account of
reality. Based on this, I argue that the Paris school - who see their work as an
‘extension of Michel Foucault’s work’9 – too falls in this trap. Given Foucault’s
intentions in writing and his motto of theory equalling practice, this article argues that
Foucault’s work constitutes little but political activism of a certain cause. It does not
offer a generalisable body of thought for, amongst other things, the study of security.
Given that Foucault has become increasingly important for (critical) security studies
such a critical evaluation is seen to be a much needed and timely contribution to the
existing literature, one that concerns all those that freely adopt a diversity of thinkers
into IR, without so much as critical reflection upon the thinkers’ works and their
intentions in writing.

Section one: Michel Foucault - Theory as Practice

Michel Foucault’s work and the person Michel Foucault are inseparably connected.
As shown by the above quotations, Foucault’s deepest personal concerns and his
experiences played an important role in his work. Indeed, as one scholar puts it, ‘his
care for himself, informed his intellectual work.’10 Because the two sides of Foucault
are seen as indivisible, to understand his work it is imperative to understand who he
was as a person. This section introduces both the work and the person behind the
work. For purposes of structure this is done in chronological order, meaning the work
is analysed in light of the relevant experiences in Foucault’s life. It should be noted
that the aim of this section is not to evaluate the content of Foucault’s argument per
se, but rather aim is to highlight the connection between his personal experiences with
what he actually wrote.
Paul-Michel Foucault was born on the 15th October 1926 as the second of
three children. After a studious childhood in pre-war France he gained admission to
the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in 1946 at the age of twenty. The ENS is the
most prestigious of all French elite schools, where – at least at the time – the country’s
future elite was educated. Whilst at the ENS (again, at least at the time) many suffered
mentally from the pressure exerted upon them by the school system, Foucault’s

emphasising that the modulation of insecurity domains [….] crucially depends on technological and
technocratic processes. (2006, 8) Be that as it may, for the purposes of this article Huysmans is counted
as a member.
8
See Bigo, Didier (2002) ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of
Unease’ Alternatives 27 supplement Feb. 2002 p.81 & Bigo, Didier; Guild Elspeth, ‘Introduction –
Policing in the name of Freedom’ p.2
9
Bigo, Didier (2002) ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’
p.81
10
Simons, Jon (1995) Foucault & The Political (London: Routledge) p.9

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mental condition in particular was very bad. Unlike his fellow students, however,
most of his troubles did not so much result from the pressures inherent to the school
system, but rather from ‘an extreme difficulty in experiencing and accepting
homosexuality’11, deemed completely unacceptable in 1940s/50s France. All three
major Foucault biographies12 agree that Foucault’s sense of shame and this non-
acceptance of homosexuality led to such severe depression that he attempted suicide
in 1948 and again in 1950. Following these, his father placed him in the care of a
prominent psychiatrist at the Hôspital Sainte-Anne, where Foucault subsequently
experienced institutional psychiatry first hand. Therapy, however, was cut short by
Foucault disassociating himself from the therapist after only a short time of treatment.
Whilst the immediate reason for Foucault’s quick disassociation from institutional
psychiatry was a holiday taken by his resident psychiatrist, it is important to note that
Foucault neither endeavoured to commence treatment with a different specialist, nor
did he resume treatment after the initial consultant had returned from holiday. Whilst
the exact reasons for this may never be known, what is clear is that this was ‘the first
time he had come so close to that elusive line dividing […] the ‘madmen” from
someone who is “well”, the mentally ill from the mentally sound.’ 13 An experience he
clearly did not enjoy and one (as explained below) that came to influence all of his
work, especially his first two books. Having turned his back on institutional
psychiatry, according to his American biographer James Miller, Foucault opted for
self-help by way of immersing himself in the works of Friederich Nietzsche, whom he
read on a holiday in 195314. From evidence found in his personal library, as well as
from statements made over the years, Miller concludes that Foucault internalised two
of Nietzsche’s thoughts especially, both of which were to influence his ‘experiences’
and therefore his work. The first was Nietzsche’s view that no human being can be
judged or held responsible for his moral sentiment, as this rests upon the erroneous
assumption that the human will is free 15. This follows that ‘no one is accountable for
his deeds, no one for his nature; to judge is the same thing as to be unjust’. 16 The
second was Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘higher necessity’, which, so Nietzsche, can only be
found through knowing who one is. This can be achieved as follows:

But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? […] It is
a painful and dangerous mission to tunnel into oneself and make a forced
descent into the shaft of one's being by the nearest path. […] Let the youthful
soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now,
what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time
delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps
they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the
fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one
complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a
11
Eribon, Michel Foucault p.26
12
It should be noted that all three major biographies (Didier Eribon’s Michel Foucault, David Macey’s
The Lives of Michel Foucault and James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault) were written in
close consultation with Foucault’s family and friends. Moreover, Eribon’s account – from which most
of this information is taken – was personally acquainted with Foucault, during the years 1979 up until
the latter’s death in 1984.
13
Eribon, Michael Foucault P.26
14
In a 1982 interview Foucault commented on the reading of that summer as follows: ‘Nietzsche was a
revelation […]. I read him with great passion and broke with my life…I had the feeling I had been
trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.’ Cited in Miller, James (1993) p.67
15
Nietzsche, Friederich (2005) Gesammelte Werke (Bindlach: Gondrom Verlag) section 39, p. 210/211
16
Friederich Nietzsche cited in Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault p.283

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 stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now; for
your true nature lies, not hidden deep within you, but immeasurably high
above you, or at least above that which you normally take to be yourself. Your
true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material
of your being is, something quite ineducable, yet in any case accessible only
with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators.17

With Nietzsche adopted as his ‘educator’, Foucault not only freed himself from shame
(before himself), he further had found purpose; purpose that came to inform all his
life and work. No longer was Foucault to be conforming for the fear of his neighbour,
instead an obsession with dissidence and ‘a revolt against the powers of
normalisation’18 became his own ‘higher necessity’. Foucault’s quest began in earnest
with his first book – that was also his doctoral thesis – Madness and Civilisation, first
published in France in 1961. In the book Foucault traces society’s approach to
madness from the 17th century onwards. His central thesis was that the mad have been
treated differently in different historical time periods. Based upon this finding he
concluded that madness is not a given thing, but rather a product of society. More
specifically, madness is a product of the enlightenment, as only its opposite ‘unreason’
makes reason - the motto of the enlightenment - reality 19. Given Foucault’s own
personal history with madness, the link between his experiences and his work could
not be much clearer. In fact, ‘when [Madness and Civilisation] came out, everyone
who knew him saw immediately that it was concerned with his personal history.’ 20
Foucault had found his own higher necessity by giving a voice to those normally
silent, and as he would argue, to those silenced. Or put differently, to the “deviants” of
society. Madness and Civilisation was followed by Foucault’s second book, The
Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. Whilst very similar to the
first book, Foucault here developed a history of the medical profession and its
institutions. The book is famous for the concept of the ‘medical gaze’, whereby the
figure of the doctor is inhumanly set apart from the patient on the basis of her
scientific knowledge. Amongst other human sciences, the aspects of the medical
profession (specifically the figure of the doctor), was subject to debate also in
Foucault’s next two books The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge.
The first of these books was concerned with what becomes acceptable knowledge in
the human sciences, and was at that it is very close to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure
of Scientific Revolutions.21 Whilst at first sight it is perhaps difficult to see the link
between these two books and Foucault’s other work, the link was made perfectly clear
by Foucault already in the preface to The Order of Things.

The history of madness would be the history of the Other – of that which, for a
given culture, is at once interior and foreign, therefore to be excluded (in
order to reduce otherness); whereas the history of the order imposed on
things would be the history of the Same – of that which, for a given culture,

17
Nietzsche, Friederich (1983 [1874] ) Untimely Meditations – Schopenhauer as Educator
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p.129
18
Eribon, Michel Foucault p.x
19
Foucault, Michel (1984) ‘What is enlightenment?’ In Paul Rabinow (ed) The Foucault Reader
(London: Penguin Books) pp.32-50
20
A not by name identified old schoolmate at ENS cited in Eribon, Michel Foucault p.27
21
Taureck, Bernhard (1997) Michel Foucault (Reinbeck: Rowohlt) p.75

6
 is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be
collected together by identities.22

In other words, his previous books and these two (The Archaeology of Knowledge is
but a methodological elaboration on The Order of Things), were two sides of the same
coin. One analyzed the history of the ‘Other’, whilst the other offered a history of the
‘Same’ - the two are mutually constitutive; they prove each other’s existence.
Until the student revolts from 1968 Foucault had little interest in politics. A
brief spell in the French communist party during his ENS years was more a product of
peer pressure than a result of series political conviction. 23 With the events of 1968 this
apathy changed with, according to Foucault, politics suddenly tantamount to what he
had been concerned with all along.

The boundary of politics has changed, and subjects like psychiatry,

confinement and the medicalisation of a population, have become political
problems. With what has been happening over the last few years, political
groups have been obliged to integrate these domains into their action, and
they and I have come together, not because I’ve changed – I’m boasting; I’d
like to change – but because I think I can say with some pride in this case that
it is politics that has come to me.24

Foucault lived out his new found interest to a maximum. From 1968 onwards he was
involved in uncountable political activities including many violent demonstrations
and street fights with the police, earning him the title ‘the Professor Militant’ by more
than one of his biographers.25 In 1970 Foucault and his longtime partner Daniel Defert
created the Prison Information Group (PIG). Foucault’s speech from the 8 th February
1971, which launched the PIG, already entailed many of the ideas that would become
central to Foucault’s most famous work Discipline and Punish – The birth of the
Prison, published four years later in 1975. It is this book, alongside a lecture series on
‘Security, Territory and Population’ (better known as governmentality) that is most
central to the ‘Paris school’s’ view of security and consequently to their notion of ‘the
political’. Why, according to Foucault, the book’s subject matter concerns all of us,
Foucault tried to make clear already in the aforementioned speech. In it he states,

None of us can be sure of avoiding prison. Less so than ever, today. Police
control over our day-to-day lives is becoming tighter: in the streets and on the
roads; over foreigners and young people; it is once more an offence to express
an opinion; anti-drug measures are leading to increasingly arbitrary arrests.
We are living under the sign of la garde á vue. They tell us that the courts are
swamped. We can see that. But what if it were the police who swamped them?
They tell us that the prisons are overpopulated. But what if it were the
population that were being overimprisoned? Little information is published
about the prisons; this is the one of the hidden regions of our social system,
one of the dark areas in our lives. This is why, together with a number of
magistrats, lawyers, journalists, doctors and psychologists, we have founded
a Groupe d’Information sur les prisons. 26
22
Foucault, Michel (1994[1970]) The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books) p.xxiv
23
Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault p.39
24
Foucault cited in Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault p.217
25
Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault p.290
26
Foucault 1971 cited in Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault p.257 -258

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This shows that in Discipline and Punish Foucault returned to his old format of
writing histories of ‘the other.’ This time the aim was to write a history of disciplines,
and how discipline is and has been used to control populations, and especially again
societies ‘deviants’. Like in his earlier book on madness he established that
punishment was not always practiced in the same way. According to him, change to
the penal system occurred at ‘the moment [when] it became understood that it was
more efficient and profitable in terms of the economy of power to place people under
surveillance than to subject them to some exemplary penalty.’27As a result of this,
society had become a disciplinary society informed by a garde á vue (omnipresent
surveillance) resembling Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. ‘Panopticism’ is enshrined by
means of the connection between power and knowledge; Foucault’s idea that power
and knowledge are mutually constitutive. With power/knowledge, Foucault picked up
loose treads in his two earlier books, where discourses and their truth claims were
seen as being dependent on power relations. And, with panopticism described as
producing ‘homogenous effects of power’28 this book too, was primarily concerned
with the normalisation of society and its dissidents, the joint driving forces that inform
all of Foucault’s works. In the late 1970s, based on his idea of power/knowledge, and
touching on issues already raised in Discipline and Punish Foucault developed the
concept of ‘governmentality’. Governmentality is an ill-defined term that refers to the
art of government we experience in our own time, which according to Foucault rests
on two poles ‘the disciplines of the self and the regulations of population’.29 In a
series of lectures given at the Collège de France in 1978 Foucault outlined a history of
the present (what he calls genealogy) of governmentality. In these he aimed to show
how the focus of government developed away from the governance of territory in the
17th century, to the governance of populations in our own time.

Population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of

government.[…] The population now represents more the end of government
than the power of the sovereign, but it is also the object in the hands of the
government , aware, vis a vis the government, of what it wants, but ignorant of
what is being done with it. Interest at the level of the consciousness of
each individual who goes to make up the population, and the interest of the
population regardless of what the particular interests and aspirations may be of
the individuals who compose it, this is the new target and the fundamental
instrument of the government of population: the birth of a new art, or at any
range of absolutely new tactics and techniques. 30

Governmentality also played a major role in Foucault’s last three books The History
of Sexuality (1976), The Use of Pleasure (1984) and The Care of the Self (1984), all of
which are concerned with sexuality. Already in the first book (initially written as an
introduction to the entire series) Foucault set out the main argument of his thinking,
by refuting ‘the repressive hypothesis’, the idea that sexuality is a taboo subject, and
argued instead that sexuality has long been subject of extensive discourse. A fact that
27
Michel Foucault (1980 [1975]) ‘Prison Talk’ In Colin Gorden (ed.) Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books) p. 38
28
Smart, Barry (1985) Michel Foucault (Chichester: Ellis Horwood Limited) p. 88
29
Foucault, Michel (1984) ‘Right of Death and Power Over Life’ in Paul Rabinow (ed) The Foucault
Reader p.262
30
Foucault, Michel (1991 [1978]) ‘Governmentality’ in Graham Burchell; Colin Gordon, Peter Miller
(eds.) The Foucault Effect – Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf) p. 100

8
helped create minority sexualities, as it fostered a division between what is normal
and desirable (heterosexuality, monogamy) and that which is abnormal
(homosexuality, fetishism, sodomy). Even more so than his other books, these three
volumes are layered with Foucault’s experiences and informed by his own
convictions. That this is so becomes clear when considering that Foucault was a
homosexual as well as an avid practitioner of sadomasochism 31 - both practices,
according to Foucault, deemed abnormal by society. Like in his other books Foucault
views abnormality/ sexual deviance not as a given reality, but rather as something that
is a product of society, a product of the power/knowledge relations inherent to the
prevalent discourse, whereby, ‘sex was not something one simply judged; it was a
thing one administered.’32 As with the disciplinary society and madness, to change
this state of being, it is not enough to merely offer alternative narratives as these too
would produce distinctions between ‘self’ and ‘other’. 33 What is needed instead is the
creation of a new culture, one inspired by homosexual (gay) lifestyle that promotes
‘new ways of relating, types of values [and] types of existence’ 34. A culture that
ultimately moves away from the idea that ‘bodily pleasure should always come from
sexual pleasure’35 towards, what Foucault called, ‘desexualisation’. Therefore, a
society where practices such as S&M, which was for Foucault a great example of
desexualisation – as for him the practice of S&M engages all parts of mind and body
into pleasure, and thus supersedes ordinary sexual intercourse - become part of human
relations. A culture where people ‘experience drugs’, where people ‘do good drugs
that can produce very intense pleasure’36. A culture where everyone is free to enjoy
whatever they deem pleasurable, without being judged by (false) morality, both freed
from fear of their neighbour and/or of shame. One, where the distinction between that
which is normal/abnormal, mad/sane is no longer given, one where deviance has
become a thing of the past. In short, a culture that, so it would appear, comes close to
what Foucault adopted from his ‘educator’ Nietzsche, where no one is judged or held
responsible for his moral sentience.37 I will return to Foucault’s ideas and importantly
his research ethos in the third section. For now, it is time to introduce the Paris school
of security studies.

Section two: ‘The Paris school’ of security studies and the importance of Michel
Foucault

When reading the works by the ‘Paris school’ there is no getting away from Michel
Foucault38. Whilst his work is sometimes explicitly cited, for example, when Bigo

31
See in particular James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault on this issue.
32
Foucault, Michel (1984) ‘The repressive Hypothesis’ in Paul Rabinow (ed) The Foucault Reader
p.307
33
Foucault, ‘What is enlightenment?’p.46
34
Foucault, Michel (2000) ‘The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will’ In Paul Rabinow (ed.) Michel
Foucault ethics Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984 volume one. (London: Penguin Books) p. 157-
158
35
Foucault, Michel (2000) ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’ In Paul Rabinow (ed.) Michel
Foucault ethics Essential works of Foucault 1954-1984 volume one p. 165
36
Ibid. p.165
37
Compare above
38
The second biggest intellectual influence on the work of Bigo et.al is the French sociologist Pierre
Bourdieu, in particular his concepts of the ‘political field’ and the ‘habitus’.

9
argues that his work is an extension of Foucault’s work 39; frequently, Foucault’s view
of the world is used without references, which suggest that they accept Foucault’s
interpretation of the world as corresponding to reality without any critical evaluation
of Foucault’s intentions in writings. Examples of this are offered in the following
quotes, where Bigo uses key insights from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish without
so much as a reference, treating them as historical40 evidence.

The differentiation between security inside and outside state borders, linked
with the primacy and exclusive usage of the notion of security for the outside,
is contemporaneous with the effective capacity of the central power of
government to completely connect all the mechanisms of discipline
throughout society, which began seriously in the nineteenth century.41

The state wants to take charge of individual security and widen the notion of
public order. It aims to realise the truth programme, that it has been trying to
assert for a long time with contract theories, but lacked the means to carry out.
Control and surveillance technologies and new knowledge in the social
sciences reinforce this push towards maximising security, to implement the
body politics, to have a ‘life’ policy where the production of life is more
important for the government than to deliver death.42

Besides taking Foucault’s writings as face value, Foucault is ubiquitous in all the most
important areas of the Paris school’s analysis namely, in what they understand by
security, in their research questions/aims, in their methodology and in what they
perceive of as the role of the analyst. This section aims to elaborate on all these areas,
sticking to that same order. As before with section one, in this section I do not aim to
pass judgement on the claims and/or research methods of the Paris school. Instead I
solely seeks to highlight the relevance of Foucault for the ‘Paris school’ and all
critical evaluation is reserved for part three.
Like some other non-traditional approaches to security, the Paris school treats
security as a social construction as opposed to an objective reality. Different and new
to their analysis is, however, what they understand by security. Thus, whilst, for
example, the so-called Copenhagen school of security studies theorises that security is
what is done with it (or better, security is what it does)43, Bigo turns this argument on
its head and argues that ‘what is done with it [how security is practiced] determines
security’.44 To understand what Bigo means by this it is necessary to dig a little
deeper. All of Bigo’s (and by extension the Paris school’s) works are informed by the
same key assumption, namely that there is a merger of - what he calls - ‘internal’ and
‘external’ security into a ‘field of security’, whereby the border between the two
39
Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration”p.81
40
Indeed, in the introduction to the 2005 edited book Controlling Frontiers Bigo stresses that
Foucault’s work is ‘rooted in history and sociology, not literature.’ (p.2)
41
Bigo, Didier (2001) ‘The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies)’ In Albert, Mathias;
Jacobsen, David; Lapid, Yosef (eds.) Identities, Borders, Orders – Rethinking International Relations
Theory (London: University of Minnesota Press) p. 102
42
Bigo, Didier (2000) ‘When two become one: Internal and External Securitisations in Europe’, in
Kelstrup, Morten; Williams Michael C. International Relations Theory and the Politics of European
Integration (London: Routledge) p.179
43
Buzan, Barry; Wæver, Ole; de Wilde, Jaap (1998) Security - A New Framework for Analysis
(London: Lynne Rienner)
44
Bigo, ‘The Möbius Ribbon of Internal and External Security(ies)’ p.99

10
ceases to exist. The border between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ here is tantamount to the
borders of sovereign nation states. According to Bigo, the end of bipolarity and the
rise of the European Union, both have contributed to the undoing of this distinction.
Thus, the lapse of the more traditional threats to security have left both internal and
external security agents desperate for a reason d’être.

The [security] agencies themselves are in trouble; the evidence of crime they
have constituted for years is in process of degradation. Police are afraid of the
globalisation of networks of criminals and cannot continue with the
traditional discourse about sovereignty; military people are afraid of
legitimacy questions, after the loss of the Soviet enemy and they try to find
new tasks after the end of bipolarity45.

Whilst, institutions and mechanisms of the European Union, specifically the 1985
Schengen Agreement on free movement within the EU, offer the political space in
which internal and external security practitioners can interact to the effect that:

External security agencies (the army, the secret service) are looking inside the
borders in search of an enemy from the outside. They analyse ‘transversal
threats’ (supposedly coming from immigrants, second generation citizens of
foreign origin, people from some inner cities or from the populous and
disadvantaged suburbs).
Internal security agencies (national police forces, police with military status,
border guards, customs) are looking to find their internal enemies beyond the
borders and speak of networks of crime (migrants, asylum seekers, diasporas,
Islamic people who supposedly have links with crime, terrorism, drug
trafficking, transnational organised crime).46

According to the Paris school, taken together these developments have allowed for the
emergence of new forms of ‘governmentality’, the interface between ‘sovereignty’,
‘discipline’ and ‘government’ as envisaged by Foucault already in the late 1970s.
Governmentality, as Huysmans has put it, ‘is the art of governing a population rather
than a territory. It shapes the conduct of freedom for the purpose of a stable, balanced
development of population as a whole’47. It does not refer to, ‘the replacement of a
society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a
disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle,
sovereignty – discipline – government, which has as its primary target the population
and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security.’48 Security therefore
should neither be understood as ‘an anthropological need’ nor as a ‘speech act’ 49, but
rather security must be understood as a deliberate ‘process of
securitisation/insecuritisation of the borders, of the identities and of the conception of
orders’.50 Or more explicitly: ‘Security is in no sense a reflection of an increase of
threats in the contemporary epoch – it is a lowering of the level of acceptability of

45
Ibid, 93
46
Bigo, ‘When two become one[…]’ p.171
47
Huysmans, Jef (2006) p.98
48
Foucault, Michel (1991 [1978]) ‘Governmentality’ in Graham Burchell; Colin Gordon, Peter Miller
(eds.) The Foucault Effect – Studies in Governmentality (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf) p. 102
49
Bigo, ‘When two become one’p.177 & Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity p. 101
50
Bigo, ‘When two become one’ p.173

11
the other; it is an attempt at insecuritisation of daily life by the security professionals
and an increase in the strengths of police potential for action. 51 To put this differently
yet again, without ‘security’ (understood in this way) there would be no insecurity.
Whilst Bigo opts here to cite the historian Paul Veyne as follows, ‘the doing,
or practice, can be explained based on what is done, as on the contrary, what is done is
explained by what the doing was at any point in history. Things, objects, are simply
the correlate of practices.52’ Here, a reference to Foucault would perhaps have been
more fitting, particularly given that Bigo’s understanding of security owes much more
to Foucault than it does to Veyne. After all for Foucault madness is but a product of
society, whilst delinquency is a product of the penal system. Therefore, a treatment of
security as a product of fear and insecurity is Foucauldian par excellence.
Moreover, the Paris school is inspired by the strong Foucauldian concern for
those groups (‘the other’) that are allegedly marginalised by the practices of society,
or rather governmentality. As Bigo explains, ‘sometimes security creates unwanted
side effects towards other groups of people’53. In today’s European Union this ‘other
group’ is made up most explicitly by the figure of the migrant, because migrants are
seen as endangering ‘the population dynamic of which they are part’ 54, which, as
argued earlier, for the Paris school - in line with Foucault - is at the heart of all
security concerns. The Paris school refutes the claim that migrants are a danger to
society as a ‘truth’ creation on part of security practitioners that emerged as a result of
the interplay of, on the one hand, ‘the fears of politicians about losing their symbolic
control over boundary territories’. And, on the other, ‘the ‘unease’ that some citizens
who feel discarded suffer because they cannot cope with the uncertainty of everyday
life’.55 To make this more clear yet again: ‘The securitisation of migration is […] a
transversal political technology, used as a mode of governmentality by diverse
institutions to play with the unease, or to encourage it if it does not yet exist, so as to
affirm their role as providers of protection and security and to mask some of their
failures.’56
In a further allusion to Foucault, Bigo describes the
securitisation/insecuritisation of migration as a ‘ban-opticon’. Unlike the permanent
and continuous surveillance of all offered by Foucault’s panopticism, however, the
ban-opticon offers select surveillance according to society’s need. ‘The technologies
of surveillance sort out who needs to be under surveillance and who is free of
surveillance, [according to their] profile.’57 Obviously, this very different and new
understanding of ‘security as securitisation/ insecuritisation’ has led the Paris school
to propose an altogether different research project in security studies, one that is
informed by a set of research questions/aims that have formerly not been part of
security analysis. This framework is notably different from other critical security
theories. No longer is it the aim to ‘reflect on the right definition of security and the
diverse forms that it takes according to the sectors’58, nor to focus on an emancipatory
ideal, rather aim is to focus on ‘the securitisation/insecuritisation practices that run
51
Bigo, ‘The Möbius Ribbon’p.111
52
Paul Veyne cited in Bigo, ‘When two become one’p.177
53
Ibid, p.174
54
Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity p.100
55
Bigo, Didier (2002) ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’
p.65 & Ceyhan, Ayse & Tsoukala, Anastassia (2002) ‘The Securitisation of Migration in Western
Discourses: Ambivalent Discourses and Policies’ Alternatives 27 p 21-39
56
Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration’ p.65
57
Ibid.p. 82
58
Ibid, p.99

12
across the internal sphere as much as the external sphere’ 59. The decisive difference to
all other security analysis hereby lies with the role ascribed to ‘the political’ in
security analysis. Security is seen as political in at least three ways. It ‘sustains
security policies’, it is an instrument of competition between political opponents and
finally, security framing ‘upholds particular concepts of the political, i.e. of what
political community is about.’60 This linking of the political and security in and of
itself is not a new thing. The Copenhagen School, for example, argues that both
securitisation and desecuritisation are by definition political processes 61, whilst, for
example, Rob Walker has previously emphasised the constitutive relationship between
security and the political. 62 What is new to the Paris school, however, is their wanting
to unravel the political logic behind security framing and security knowledge. For
them, the passive co-constitution of social reality as so inescapably done by other
security analysts, through - what Huysmans has called - the ‘normative dilemma of
speaking and writing security’, is completely unacceptable.63 Given that they view
security as a deliberate insecuritisation of the other, with securitisation ‘not about
survival, but rather about intolerance towards differences’, none of this should come
as a surprise.64 This being said, the questions arise, how is this unravelling to be done?
And, what is the ultimate goal of such an analysis? The first question in particular is
easily answered. Thus, the security/political relations can best be unravelled through
the application of a ‘Foucauldian lens’ to the given situation. Whereby the
Foucauldian lens ‘seeks to embed discourse in technologies of government that are
practically realising […] security modalities of governing free movement.’65 Or in
other words, the security/political relations can best be unravelled by analysing (in the
case of migration and the EU) European security discourses along the lines suggested
in Foucault’s studies of governmentality. Whilst this has been suggested by Huysmans
in The Politics of Insecurity, it is also exactly what Bigo et al have done in
Controlling Frontiers. Indeed, in this analysis Bigo et.al not only used a Foucauldian
lens, they also utilised some of Foucault’s methods in their analysis. Thus, like
Foucault in Discipline and Punish, they do not quote the allegedly hundreds of
interviews with security practitioners on which their analysis is built, but rather they
follow Foucault’s conviction of giving them [the prisoners/the silent/the silenced/the
marginalised] a voice and not speaking for them. 66 The result being - to paraphrase
David Macey - that their own voices fade, making way for the creation of a collective
discourse.67 For the Paris school, the security analyst functions not so much as an
analyst as we know it, but rather as a politically motivated critic. He no longer focuses
on either widened and/or deepened notions of security (as this does not tackle the
alleged underlying problems), but rather the main objective is to struggle against
security framing as understood by the Paris school. In other words, they ultimately
wish to achieve a different kind of understanding/framing of ‘the political’.
59
Ibid, p.99
60
Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity p.31 (emphasis in the original)
61
Buzan et.al Security: A new Framework for Analysis
62
Walker, R.B.J. (1997) ‘The Subject of Security’ In Michael C. Williams, Keith Krause (eds.) Critical
Security Studies (London: UCL Press) p.61-81
63
Huysmans, Jef (1999) ‘Language and the Mobilization of Security Expectations: The Normative
Dilemma of Speaking and Writing Security’, Article presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions, Mannheim,
26–31 March.
64
Bigo, ‘The Möbius Ribbon’ p.100
65
Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity p.93
66
Bigo, Didier (2005) Policing in the Name of Freedom In Didier Bigo & Elspeth Guild (eds.)
Controlling Frontiers (Aldershot: Ashgate) p.4
67
Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault p.257

13
Something again taken from Foucault who argued that, ‘if politicisation means falling
back on ready-made choices and institutions, then the effort of analysis involved in
uncovering relations of force and mechanisms of power is not worthwhile’. 68 In short
what we understand by ‘the political’, is what needs to change.
As this section has aimed to show, Foucault’s work is immensely important for
the Paris school. Foucauldian ideas can be found in their understanding of what
security is, in their research aims, in their methodology and in the role of the security
analyst. Whilst this section has simply analysed the extent of Foucault’s influence on
the Paris school, the task of the next section is to engage with the role of Foucault for
security studies critically. Can we really, as the Paris school does, take Foucault’s
views of the world as face value and make it the basis of security analysis? – is the
central question that informs this final section.

Section three: Foucault’s world - Reality or Fiction

For the Paris school of security studies, the purpose of security analysis is to unravel
the existing security/political dynamics responsible for the insecuritisation of the
‘other’, for them at present and in the European Union made up by the figure of the
migrant. They seek to achieve this unravelling process, by the application of a
‘Foucauldian lens’, which they believe enables them to go beyond discourses and
reach the ‘deeper technologies’ at play in the securitisation/insecuritisation process. In
short, by building their framework of analysis on Foucault’s idea of governmentality,
they seek to gain a Foucauldian understanding of security/securitisation as
insecuritisation. Deciphered in this way it becomes clear that this part of the Paris
school’s analysis is informed by a simple, as well as, infallible 69 circular logic, one
whereby the methodology allows for only one conclusion, which in turn confirms the
methodology and so on. In more detail, the Paris school’s analysis aims at finding
something (security as insecuritisation) that is not only already enshrined into the
methodology they use, but in fact constituted by it. That is to say, only by means of
Foucault’s view of governmentality (the art of government of governing populations)
does one perceive of security/securitisation solely in terms of insecuritisation. Figure
one below aims to capture this circular logic.

Figure one: Circular Logic of the Paris school’s usage of Foucault

68
Michel Foucault (1980 [1975]) ‘The History of Sexuality’ In Colin Gorden (ed.) Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books) p. 190
69
In so far as the different elements confirm one another indefinitely

14
 Research
World view: Belief
methodology:
that Foucault’s ideas
Application of a
are valid and, indeed,
Foucauldian lens to
the best basis for
analyse the world as
contemporary
conceived by
security analysis
Foucault

Research Finding:
Following Foucault,
security and
securitisation are
conceived of as
insecuritisation only

Whilst this circular logic is infallible in its own terms, for someone not informed by
Foucault’s views neither security nor securitisation, are de facto what they are for the
Foucauldian. This is why, when using other tools of security analysis (other than a
Foucauldian lens applied to a world viewed in Foucauldian terms) the analyst will not
arrive at a Foucauldian reading of security – evinced by the innumerable works on
security (critical or otherwise) that conceive of security very differently indeed. Other
approaches or not, the Paris school might very well argue that there is no problem
with the circular nature of their framework for analysis, because Foucault’s view of
the world - on which their analysis is based - was and remains accurate. Given that
this second argument could be made, and that a belief in Foucault’s world is at the
heart of the Paris school’s work, it will be necessary to analyse the validity of
Foucault’s claims and what their adoption means for the Paris school here in the some
detail. Such an analysis is the overriding purpose of this third section.
In the first section of this article I argued that Foucault’s work was deeply tied
to his personal experiences. I showed how Foucault’s work was sustained and
influenced by his experiences as someone with mental problems in his younger years,
and specifically as someone who was a homosexual, therefore, in his own words, a
‘social/medical/political problem’ for society.70 Whilst it should be noted that Foucault
is not unique in that his experiences impacted upon his writings he is - or was at the
time - unique in so far as his own personal experiences became the sole subject of his
writing. Given that Foucault’s work is so indivisibly tied to Foucault the person, it is
in his personal experiences and beliefs, where the intentions for his work can be
found. In section one, Foucault’s intentions in writing where – following James Miller
– seen to lie in the Nietzschean quest of finding a higher necessity. And, it was argued
that Foucault found his own higher necessity in giving a voice to the ‘deviants’ of
society, with his ultimate goal having been to motivate the creation of a culture where
deviancy no longer exists. Given Foucault’s strong personal interest in the issues he
made the subject of his analysis, the question becomes in how far do the claims he
70
Foucault, ‘Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity’ p. 171

15
makes correspond to reality? Or, put differently, is it true what Foucault claims or are
his works, works of fiction, designed to deepen his own personal cause? In order to
answer these important questions it is necessary to take a close look at both Foucault’s
work ethos and to a lesser extent at his methods.
Sympathetic secondary literature on Foucault usually stresses Foucault’s
erudition, his use of language and the rich amount of sources he utilised at great
lengths, whilst more critical pieces paint a rather different picture of Foucault’s work
ethos. Amongst other things, the latter routinely stress his tendency to hyperbole 71, the
provincial nature of his empirical data72 and the absence of any kind of method in
Foucault’s work73. It is important to note that criticism such as this is not simply an
outgrowth of a general dislike of Foucault or of his work on the part of these writers.
To be sure, some of the here cited critics are very sympathetic to Foucault, most
notably Paul Rabinow and Hubert L. Dreyfus. Rather, such criticism is well
established and has accompanied Foucault from the start of his academic career. Thus,
already in the evaluation of his doctoral thesis he was criticised in this way, as evinced
by the written report prepared by Henri Gouhier following his viva voce. Extracts of
which read as follows:

M. Foucault is certainly a writer, but M. Canguilhem speaks of rhetoric in

relation to some passages and the chairman finds him overanxious to create an
‘impression’. The erudition is not in doubt, but the chairman cites cases which
stem from a spontaneous tendency to go beyond the facts themselves; one has
the feeling that there would have been more criticisms of this type, had the
jury included an art-historian, a literary historian or an institutional historian
[…] his information on psychiatry is a little limited and the pages on Freud are
a little cursory. The more one thinks about it, the more one realises that both
theses gave rise to many series criticisms.74

A typical example of both Foucault’s propensity to create an impression, as well as of

his tendency to overstate the facts can be found in his vivid account of the so-called
‘ship of fools’, which is central to his argument in Madness and Civilisation. The ship
of fools is the image whereby the mad were deported by sea.

[T]hese boats that conveyed their insane cargo from town to town. Madmen
then led a wandering existence. The towns drove them outside their limits;
they were allowed to wander in the open countryside, when not entrusted to a
group of merchants and pilgrims. […] Frequently they were handed over to
boatmen: in Frankfort, in 1399, seamen were instructed to rid the city of a
madmen who walked about the streets naked; in the first year of the
fifteenth century, a criminal madmen was expelled in the same manner from
Mainz. […] Often the cities of Europe must have seen these ‘ships of fools’
approaching their harbours.75

71
For example: Walzer, Michael (1986) ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’ In David Couzens Hoy (ed)
Foucault – A Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell LtD) p. 53
72
Dreyfus, Hubert L. & Rabinow, Paul (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester Press Limited) p.127
73
Rorty, Richard (1986) ‘Foucault and Epistemology’ In David Couzens Hoy (ed) Foucault – A
Critical Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell LtD) p. 47
74
Henri Gouhier cited in Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault p.112-113 (emphasis added)
75
Foucault, Michel (2001[1967]) Madness and Civilisation (London: Routledge) p.6

16
Whilst this is a powerful account of the ‘ship of fools’ that seemingly makes a strong
point well, what Foucault fails to mention is that this vessel never actually existed, but
was a ‘purely literary phenomenon’76. Indeed, he argues that: ‘the ship of fools is the
only one [on a previous page Foucault talks about a number of different ships such as
the ‘ship of health’ and the ‘ship of virtuous ladies’] that had a real existence – for
they did exist.’77 The ‘ship of fools’ is therefore a work of fiction, portrayed by
Foucault as though as it really happened, as if it was part of ‘reality’. Given
postmodernism’s disregard for the importance of material constraints on ideas, for
postmodernists at least, what Foucault does here is perfectly in order. From a
‘moderate’ constructivist ontological standpoint, however, it is not. Thus, for
‘moderate’ constructivists such as Alexander Wendt it is not, and it cannot be ‘ideas
all the way down because […] ideas are based on and are regulated by an
independently existing physical reality’ 78. Or as John Searle put it: ‘All sorts of things
can be money, but there has to be some physical realisation, some brute fact – even if
it is only a bit of article or a blip on a computer disk – on which we can impose our
institutional form of status function. Thus there are no institutional facts without
brute facts.’79
In short, ‘brute facts’ (or in Wendt’s terminology ‘rump materialism’) have an
independent reality to social meaning. And, whilst social meaning gives meaning to
material effects and in turn is affected (e.g. constrained/enabled) by the same,
imagination and ideas alone cannot bring about material reality. The ‘ship of fools’ is
therefore just as unreal (untrue) now, as it was before Foucault made it his own.
Writing, like Wendt, from a scientific realist position Colin Wight 80 argues
convincingly why a commitment to epistemological relativism (the idea that ‘all
beliefs are socially produced, so that knowledge is transient, and neither truth values
nor criteria of rationality exist outside of historical time’) 81 does not translate into
poststructuralist’s ontological relativism. And, indeed why, what he calls, judgemental
rationalism (the idea that ‘despite epistemological relativism, it is still possible, in
principle, to choose between competing theories)’82 is not only feasible, but rather
desirable. To understand Wight’s complex argument it is worthwhile to cite him here
at length.

[T]hat we can only know things under certain descriptions does not negate the
ontological status of that to which we refer. Rather, it makes it imperative that
we clearly distinguish between ‘things’ and the ‘way we talk about things’.
Any coherent account of being and knowledge of being must take seriously
the proposition that ‘to be’ is more than ‘to be perceived’. If there is a
76
David Macey The Lives of Michel Foucault p.432
77
Foucault, Madness and Civilisation p.6 (emphasis in original)
78
Wendt, Alexander (1999) Social Theory of International Politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press) p.110 (first emphasis in the original, second emphasis added)
79
Searle, John R. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press) p.56
(emphasis added)
80
Whilst there is some overlap between Wendt’s and Wight’s approaches to scientific realism, there are
also important differences. Amongst other things, whilst both have a strong commitment to science,
Wendt equates this commitment with positivism, whilst for Wight ‘science and positivism are not
synonyms for one another’. Colin Wight (2006) Agents, Structures and International Relations –
Politics as Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p. 17. For a critique of Wendt’s alleged
positivism see also Stefano Guzzini &Anna Leander (2006) Constructivism and International
Relations: Alexander Wendt and his critics (London: Routledge), especially 78ff.
81
Wight, Agents, Structures and International Relations p. 39
82
ibid, p.26

17
 distinction we can draw between that which is and that which is perceived, and
between the real and the imaginary, it hardly seems credible, except in
extreme circumstances, that we should knowingly prefer the latter to the
former. Our ability to survive in the world relies upon our ability to distinguish
between the real and the imaginary. [….] [Cotemporary linguistic/ conceptual
realists’] error consists in the belief that the possibility of being experienced or
the possibility of being conceptualised, and/or talked about is an essential
feature of reality itself.83

Foucault, however, does not simply advocate ontological relativism; he goes further
than this and argues that:

I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to
say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility
exists for fiction to function as truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects
of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or
‘manufactures’ something that does not yet exist, that is, ‘fictions’ it. One
‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one
‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth84.

At first sight, what Foucault asserts here seems utterly impossible. How can
something that is not true possibly bring about truth, or better, make something true?
Surely, this question must be rejected as illogical. Leaving the only logical
explanation to be that Foucault must have meant something else by ‘truth’ altogether.
The literary theorist Leonard Jackson argues this point well. He states that:

Truth is a property of statements; namely the property of corresponding

semantically with the fact they assert. The standard example is the statement
‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. […] In principle, the truth
of a statement does not depend on the person who makes it [….] If I say ‘It is
raining’. I tacitly sign the statement and issue a date-stamp: I convey that it is
raining here and now; and it is this statement which is true or false. But it is
paradoxical to suggest that anybody short of God can have any power to make
the statement true or untrue. The suggestion that it is ‘power’ that makes it
rain is, literally, a belief in magic85.

Jackson, however, does not stop by simply pointing out the paradoxical usage of
Foucault’s concept of truth, rather he goes on to suggest that we can only understand
what Foucault means when we replace the word ‘truth’ with the word ‘ideology’,
which, so he argues, is exactly what Foucault has done.86 Whilst this is an interesting
argument in and of itself, it is Jackson’s reasons for arguing as such that are of
significance for this article. Thus, by way of Foucault’s reasons for replacing the
meaning of the word ‘truth’ with that of ‘ideology’ this article returns to square one:
Foucault’s personal cause.

83
Ibid p. 27/28 (all emphasis in the original)
84
Michel Foucault (1980 [1975]) ‘The History of Sexuality’ In Colin Gorden (ed.) Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Writings 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books) p. 193
85
Jackson, Leonard (1994) The dematerialisation of Karl Marx: Literature and Marxist Theory
(London: Longman) p.196
86
Ibid. p.197

18
 This terminological change is in fact a rhetorical device, adopted in order to
give the concept of truth all the dependency, and all the relativism-to-power of
the usual concept of ideology. No doubt this has a political purpose, and a very
personal meaning for Foucault himself. It removes from him the nightmare
whereby he might be judged, and those victims with whom he has identified
might be judged, against the standard of an objective impersonal truth, and
judged to be insane, or ill, or criminal, or sexually deviant87.

Given that Foucault approaches the meaning of the word ‘truth’ in a completely
different way than how it is conventionally used, plus his belief that fiction can bring
about such ‘truth’ and his disregard for a ‘rump materialism’, it is no surprise that the
use of the fictional ‘ship of fools’ is no singular incident of the use of fiction in
Foucault’s writings. Discipline and Punish and Foucault’s works on governmentality
in particular offer strikingly inflated accounts of reality that verge on the
conspiratorial. Everything from government, to the police, schools, the armed forces
and hospitals is seen as being part of what Foucault calls ‘the carceral society’. All of
these institutions are described as though as if their sole purpose is to control and
discipline human beings, with all practices – such as, for example, patient care in a
hospital – interpreted to that end. Indeed, Jackson once more has a point when he
argues that, ‘For Foucault, those with power (and responsibility) can never do
anything right.’88 Whilst the necessity of the close monitoring of critically ill hospital
patients, or the need of assessment exercises in schools to determine individual pupil’s
abilities are overlooked. In other words, the trick Foucault uses here to create his
desired effect is to read familiar and sometimes necessary means of institutions – such
as patient care in hospitals – through his one-sided lens of discipline and interpret
everything that constitutes the institution in a negative way. Along very similar lines,
Michael Walzer has argued that it is Foucault’s specific ploy to build his analysis on
‘a sense of recognition’89, whereby he means Foucault’s strategy to build his analysis
on familiar things to the reader – discipline in schools, army and hospital – whilst
supplementing them by fictitious accounts. It is for this reason that in all of
Foucault’s, and more generally in all Foucauldian style analysis, there is always a
grain of truth (truth here in its common understanding), and therefore a sense of that
which is familiar. In the Paris school’s writings, familiarity clearly springs from the
idea that security is relational, and that one’s security inevitably leads to someone
else’s insecurity (EU citizen versus migrants), after all this is the epitome of the
security dilemma. Here, it is important to note that the Paris school does not only take
Foucault’s description of the world and society as face value, but furthermore their
own readings of the European Union’s security practices - their main subject of
analysis - are just as one-sided as any of Foucault’s accounts of the world. Thus, when
reading the various Paris schools’ writings on the matter, two things in particular are
striking. First, all practices are read through the eyes of those disadvantaged only;
and, second, as a consequence of such a one-sided reading, none of the EU’s security
87
Ibid. p.197
88
Ibid p.195 On this point see also Peter Zima who argues that it is pointless to denounce power
completely. Only the denunciation of individuals that abuse power is a feasible endeavour. (Zima, Peter
(2001) Moderne/Postmoderne (Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag) p.145 And/or Simon Caney who argues
that : ‘Some moral judgements are perhaps nothing more than masked attempts to dominate others but
it is incredible to claim of each and every moral judgement made (a) that it is an attempt to exercise
power and (b) that it is nothing more than that.’ Caney, Simon (2005) Justice Beyond Borders (Oxford:
Oxford University Press) p.53
89
Walzer, ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’ p. 57

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practices are considered to be remotely good, necessary or indeed, lawful. Something
that only goes to show that the post-structuralist critique of modernity’s metanarrative
of the preference of one sign over another (for example: self/other), applies to them
more than to anyone, the only difference being that they always favour the second
over the first sign. A good example of this one sided and negative reading of the EU’s
security practices can be found in the Paris school’s reading of the EU’s visa policies.
Thus, all such analysis is informed by the idea that the EU’s visa policies (especially
the Schengen agreement) are ‘techniques of border controls and surveillance of
people crossing borders’90, which true to Foucault, are regarded as negative
developments. Negative because, first, they set apart the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’,
as only the former have the money to pass as tourists, and are in fact welcomed by the
EU, unlike the ‘vagabonds, nomads without money’ 91 from third world countries.
Second, it inhibits the desire of people from third world countries ‘to visit Europe and
the world’92, and their desire to better their economical position by finding work
elsewhere. And, third and most importantly, such technologies ultimately create a fear
of foreigners, a fear of those outside ‘fortress Europe’. Indeed, Bigo goes further than
this and asserts that: ‘The European Union is in danger of being built solely on fears
of imaginary enemies: the immigrants.’93 Whilst most Europhiles may be astounded
by this assertion, they may be even more so when considering the Paris school’s
implication that the maintenance of external borders is at odds with the norm of
internal free movement.94 Other than perhaps from an ethical point of view this logic –
especially from a legal point of view – does not hold. Free movement within Europe
simply does not translate into free movement of all into and out of Europe. If
anything, it could be argued that the opposite logic holds for with Schengen individual
member states have directed the protection of their external borders to the
supranational level, and therefore Europe has both a right to protect its borders
(entrusted by its member states) and a duty (to its member states) to do so. Moreover,
it is doubtful that such border controls are worse today than they were before the
Schengen agreement, when individual countries controlled their borders. Besides, and
although the writings of the Paris school appear to suggest differently, other countries
(this includes third world countries) have strict border controls and expensive, as well
as extensive visa policies too. This brief extrapolation of the Paris school’s reading of
the EU’s visa policies shows their account is completely one-sided in favour of those
disadvantaged (who are always described with exclusively positive adjectives), whilst
the EU is singled out as the villain. That things are never quite as clear cut, the Paris
school should know. After all, they criticise, for example, the tabloid media for their
‘immigration bad’ metanarrative. Doing the same with the argument in reverse
(immigration good, EU bad) is no more helpful. Moreover, because of their own
metanarrative they tend to ignore that visa policies are part and parcel of all countries
policies, and that they have an actual function and a lawful function in protecting a
common internal good.95

90
Bigo et.al, Policing in the Name of Freedom p.4
91
Ibid. p.63
92
Ibid, p.63
93
Ibid, 62.
94
Ibid. p.64
95
On a community’s ‘right to control immigration’ see, for example, Michael Walzer (1983) Spheres of
Justice (New York: Basic Books) Chapter II. ‘Membership’, especially p.39 where Walzer argues that
a) ‘the distinctiveness on cultures and groups depends upon closure’ and b) that this ‘distinctiveness is a
value’ to be protected.

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 Whilst a work ethos whereby it is permissible to mix fictitious accounts with
reality and pass the result as true, all in order to create a desired effect was helpful for
Foucault’s cause, it can be argued that it is more difficult to incorporate work sprung
from such an ethos into security studies, especially not without any kind of
acknowledgement of this fact. Thus, when thinking of Foucault we should never
forget that we are not always dealing with facts and reality in Foucault’s writings, but
rather with a man who referred to himself as ‘anti-disciplinarian’ 96; someone who was
‘at war with the established intellectual disciplines’97; and, someone whose entire
oeuvre was informed by his personal experiences and beliefs. Whilst many of
Foucault’s disciples do not account for the intentions informing Foucault’s work, it
should be noted that Foucault himself was not. This is why he so adamantly distanced
himself from political theory and its methodologies. 98 A cunning strategy in part
almost certainly designed to leave him less vulnerable to criticism, especially from
within the discipline of political theory. It is again Walzer, who sees behind this logic
and argues that Foucault can and must still be criticised. He argues that whilst
Foucault claims not to offer a political theory, he, by analysing ‘the specificity of the
mechanism of power [and by building] little by little a strategic knowledge’ 99, still
offers something that for Walzer ‘implies […] a coherent view of reality and a sense
of purpose’100. Put differently, political theory or not, Foucault is still responsible for
what he has written and for what he has said, especially given that he dresses his work
up as corresponding to reality. Once responsibility becomes a factor, Foucault’s
approach to reality becomes increasingly problematic, again particularly given that
some analysts conflate Foucault’s world with reality. Foucault, however, would never
accept that there is a problem. First of all, it must be remembered that for him writing
fiction did not mean that he was not telling the truth (see above). And, secondly by
doing what he did, he only lived what he saw as being the appropriate role for the
intellectual, which is one whereby the intellectual no longer is the ‘bearer of universal
moral, theoretical and political values’101, but rather ‘speaks out against the intolerable
on the basis of his/her sectoral knowledge’.102 Barry Smart in citing Foucault has
summed this up powerfully as follows:
[A]ccording to Foucault, [the role of the modern intellectual is] ‘no longer to
place himself ‘somewhat ahead and to the side’ in order to express the stifled
truth of the collectivity; rather it is to struggle against the forms of power that
transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge’,
‘truth’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘discourse’. In this sense theory does not
express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. 103

To put this differently, for the ‘specific intellectual’ there was no longer any
distinction between theory and practice – he had become a practitioner. That is to say,
Foucault had become a political activist of a certain, personal cause and it is this cause
that justified the methods used in his analysis, whatever their nature. This follows that
anyone who adopts Foucault’s world unquestionably, and regardless of whether they
96
Walzer, ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’ p 52
97
Ibid.p.52
98
Foucault cited in Dreyfus &Rabinow, Michel Foucault beyond structuralism and hermeneutics
p.208
99
Foucault cited in Walzer, ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’ p.51
100
Ibid p.51
101
Smart, Michel Foucault p. 67
102
Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault p.269 (emphasis added)
103
Smart, Michel Foucault p, 17 (both emphasises added)

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practice what they preach in the way Foucault did e.g. on the streets, deepens the
latter’s cause and offers nothing but political activism of a certain cause him/herself,
irrespective of whether or not they actually notice this. To see that this claim is true
for the Paris school we need but remind ourselves of the circular logic of their
framework of analysis, whereby a Foucauldian interpretation of security as
insecuritisation, is uncovered by means of a Foucauldian lens to the subject of
security, a tool of analysis that is already informed by this interpretation of security
(see Figure one above). Therefore, all that such an analysis can possibly achieve is a
Foucauldian interpretation of the world. Given that the Paris school ultimately wishes
to achieve a different kind of understanding/framing of ‘the political’, but that they
are entrapped by their own circular logic of their framework of analysis, their framing
of ‘the political’ is always and necessarily Foucauldian, and therefore limited. Put
differently Bigo, for whom political scientists who use ‘the terminology of frontiers
and controls are prisoners of the state’104, is himself nothing but a prisoner of
Foucault, with all the important questions he raises about the practice of security lost
in partisanship.
Given all that has been said here it should have become clear that for security
studies the usage of Foucault is deeply problematic. Even if the Paris school does not
believe in the possibility of value free analysis in the social sciences 105, Max Weber’s
insight whereby ‘only the adequacy of the data describes the question, which is
wholly factual, and not a matter of principle’ 106 still stands. Meaning, in order to be
able to offer genuine security analysis the object of analysis must correspond to
reality, and not to a part fictitious account, or as Walzer has put it, to ‘an invented past
for some future present’107. The point is that a security studies that takes its facts from
Foucault’s inflated accounts of reality and constructs such accounts itself does not do
so. In short, such writings risk being simply an account of the security analyst’s’
political views, which are in the main taken from Foucault, and which is why the
Paris school offers activism instead of analysis.

Conclusion
This article aimed to problematise the unreflected importation of Michel Foucault’s
ideas and concepts into the discipline of security studies. The so-called Paris school of
security studies has been singled out as their framework for analysis mirrors
Foucault’s work to a large degree. Whilst they do not discuss, or indeed give any
thought to the question of whether Foucault was actually correct in what he claimed.
The absence of such a critical engagement with Foucault’s work on part of the Paris
school is rather problematic, as all of Foucault’s writing grew out of his very own
personal political cause. A cause that, for Foucault at least, was strong enough to
legitimise his mixing reality with fiction and providing a one sided portrayal of the
world. The unreflected adoption of Foucault’s ideas is not only problematic, it further
is irresponsible. This is because by means of such work, those that are not well versed
in the writings of Foucault and indeed his intentions in writing are let to believe that
what they are reading conforms to the truth, as opposed to the political agenda of one
man. If worst comes to the worst they then adopt these views as their own, without
even knowing the reasons that drive these claims.

104
Bigo et al, ‘Policing in the Name of Freedom’, p.50
105
Compare with Jef Huysmans (2006) The Politics of Insecurity 156ff.
106
Keat, Russell; Urry, John (1982) Social Theory as Science 2nd edition London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul p.199
107
Walzer, ‘The Politics of Michel Foucault’ p.65

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 Given the argument made in this article, it should have become clear that
irrespective of the discipline, the work of Michel Foucault should be treated with
great caution. Political scientists in particular, should be wary of Foucault. Whilst
Foucault’s vivid accounts might seem impressive, logical and perhaps even truthful,
one should not forget that he offers an inflated and at that misleading account of
reality, suitable only for political activism of a certain cause. It is therefore concluded
that the sooner the fad of Foucault fades from security studies, the more fruitful,
though admittedly less fashionable, our discipline will be.

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