War machines par excellence
The Discrepancy Between Threat and Control in the Weaponisation of Infectious Agents
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5682571 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gretchen Du Plessis (0000-0003-1292-4342, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, corresponding author), Gitte Du Plessis |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 45-61 |
| Publication date | 2017-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Studies on Security (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2162-4887 • E-ISSN: 2162-4909 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/21624887.2017.1329473 |
| OpenAlex | W2617287747 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 41 |
Accounts of security threats and deadly potentials of biological weapons abound while examples of biological weapons in use are rare. Why has a weapon with such great potentials been used so little? Explanations that hinge on technical capabilities, deterrence or diplomatic disarmament successes are insufficient as answers to this question – something else is going on. This article extends Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a war machine to explain the discrepancy between the threat of biological weapons and the ability to leverage that threat geopolitically. Microbes resist control and instrumentality despite the best efforts of synthetic biology and the biosecurity state, and this, the article argues, makes them a war machine par excellence. Taking pathogenic microbes seriously as a security threat while also taking seriously how they resist being weaponised according to state desires highlights the political leverage of non-human actors in international relations and maps an assemblage stretching from lab to battlefield that humans struggle to manage, much less control. Through its analysis, the article offers a generative amendment to conventional framings of biological warfare as both a conceptual and a security issue and offers a new perspective on entanglements of war and public health
Biological warfare · Computer security · Disarmament · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Excellence · International security · Law and economics · Mindset · Political science · Sociology · Bacillus and Francisella bacterial research · Computer Science · Global Security and Public Health · Law · Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research
The Theater of Operations
The Universe of Things
Ontopower
The War Machines
Securing circulation pharmaceutically
Governing dual-use knowledge
Conceptualizing Biorisk
The virtualization of security
From Verification to Strengthening Compliance
Deleuze's War Machine
New Materialisms, discourse analysis, and International Relations
Barriers to Bioweapons
Biosecurity Reconsidered
The posthuman way of war
A thousand plateaus
HIV/Aids and securitization theory
Is IR going extinct
Security in the anthropocene
Security That Matters
Ecology as critical security method
Predicting Peril or the Peril of Prediction? Assessing the Risk of CBRN Terrorism
Total War as Environmental Terror
The New Geopolitics of Disease
Vibrant Matter
Pre-empting Emergence
Resilience, Critical Infrastructure, and Molecular Security
The Generic Biothreat, Or, How We Became Unprepared
An Insurgency of Things
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |