Book review: Mark Neocleous, The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and “The Enemies of All Mankind”
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480618756207 |
| Published date | 01 May 2018 |
| Date | 01 May 2018 |
| Author | Travis Linnemann |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews 289
Mark Neocleous, The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and “The Enemies of All Mankind”,
Routledge: London, 2016; 180 pp.: 9781138955165, $47.96 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky University, USA
Enemy. With contemporary politics bound up in ceaseless debates over migrants and
refugees, terrorists from within and without, the tyranny of both Right and Left, we
might finally admit that if there is ever to be a language spoken by all, the first words
agreed upon and uttered will be those used to name the enemy. In his most recent book,
The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and “The Enemies of All Mankind” Mark
Neocleous demonstrates just this, disassembling liberal modernity’s politics of enmity,
locating a group of fascinating components—the disgruntled Worker, the Zombie, the
Devil and the Pirate—to offer a theoretical schematic with which to confront the most
intractable problems of our time. Here Neocleous shows his readers how they come to
know, or rather how they are made to know the monster, terrorist, criminal and perhaps
the nature of evil itself. As with his previous books, Neocleous’ most recent offering is a
rigorous work of political theory, stitched together by a rich and lively collection of case
studies, historical evidence and anecdotes drawn from across the cultural register. As the
title implies, the book concerns the force that animates bourgeois modernity—security.
Remaining faithful to the arguments he outlined previously in War Power, Police Power
(2014), Critique of Security (2008) and farther back still in Fabrication of Social Order
(2000) Neocleous does not for a minute entertain the liberal dream of security as a public
good and argues rather forcefully that security, realized through the perpetual imagina-
tion of an enemy and mobilized in defense of capital, forms the bedrock upon which an
unequal social order rests. To do so, Neocleous introduces his readers to the Universal
Adversary Program, a fascinating, yet little-known project of the United States
Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Not unlike the related Analytic Red Cell Program which emerged post-9/11, employing
Hollywood script writers, novelists and other creatives to help the security state imagine
the unimaginable and “know its unknowns”, the Universal Adversary Program is
intended to “build a complex fictional picture of potential terrorists based on their moti-
vations, capabilities, and intent—as well as their tactics, techniques, and procedures” (p.
15). In other words, by imagining the range of possible security threats the program
assembles an all encompassing, totalizing adversary—a many headed-hydra for this the
age of terror. Yet this is not simply the inspiration of a catchy title, rather the Universal
Adversary Program perfectly illustrates the book’s key assertion, the ghostly, ambigu-
ous, universal enemy, is always twinned by a similarly ghostly, if not universal police
power, that has come to pervade nearly every facet of social life. It is here that the mantra
of emergency and endless war is normalized through the ceaseless preparation for the
inevitable attack of an unknown and unknowable enemy.
The book consists of four chapters, each of which presents a case study of a particular
adversarial figure meant to embody a particular emergency and threat, which in turn
accommodates the exhibition of sovereign power and the fabrication of social order—the
stagecraft of statecraft. Chapter 1 outlines the Universal Adversary Program and takes up
the figure of the disgruntled worker, which was specifically named alongside “foreign
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