The Politics of Virtual Security

As one of the first attempts in critical international relations (IR) scholarship to explore the political and ideological intent of visual simulations, François Debrix’s Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping has a lot to offer critical IR studies and critical security studies. More than twenty years after its publication, Debrix’s theoretical and methodological insights into the study of global (dis)order and the virtualization of security still remain relevant in many ways. In this essay, I will first focus on Debrix’s deployment of the virtual in relation to reality, security, and ideology, and I will argue that his understanding of virtual reality taps well into and transgresses the ongoing divide/debate between positivist and post-positivist approaches to reality in IR and security studies. Second, I will briefly touch upon the recent local turn in peacekeeping studies vis-à-vis Debrix’s critical world order project. By doing so, I will highlight that Debrix’s project provides novel insights also into the study of the local with its call for an anti-imperialist spirit by stressing the oscillation of discipline and ideology in reordering and recolonizing the subjects of international politics in the guise of the “New World Order” vision mobilized through techniques of simulations.