Low-key Leviathan: Counterterrorism, Invisibility and the Disposal Assemblage

Facing an elusive threat of terrorism, European governments have increasing taken to preventive CVE-measures—disengagement and counter-radicalization—to supplement regular law enforcement. Yet, alongside of such liberal governmentalities, a host of discreet, executive counterterrorist measures, that manage dangerous bodies, is increasingly applied: targeted killings, operations of kill and capture, revocation of citizenship, expulsion. The fact that European states now kill and remove dangerous bodies—including those of their own citizens—is a recent evolution that has gone largely unnoticed. Such executive removal techniques—decided in opaque bureaucracies—can no longer be apprehended through the analytical prism of governmentality: they no longer set out to discipline, control or transform radical subjectivities, but merely to remove or “neutralize” them. In this paper, I argue that these executive practices currently coalesce into a “disappearance assemblage”. This expanding, yet largely invisible security assemblage reanimates a neo-sovereign power that—underpinned by secret intelligence—increasingly sidetracks the judiciary.