»Geheimdienste mit Scheuklappen: Das Dispositiv der Massenvernichtungswaffen als Legitimation für Nationale Sicherheit nach 9/11«. The claim that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the US army. For the George W. Bush administration, the likely presence of WMD in Iraq was the major justification for going to war. However, Bush' opponents suspected he used the WMD-dispositive as a legitimation for an invasion that was already set in motion for different reasons. The Iraq invasion and the underlying ideas about the presence of WMD thus provide a tangible case for the analysis of theories of conspiracy and security. The development of the WMD-dispositive will be contextualized using the toolkit of securitization theory. The article explores the notions of security and conspiracy that were used to build the dispositive and shows how it ultimately failed and turned into a counter-narrative in which the Bush administration itself became the Great Conspirator.
Historical Social Research – Historische Sozialforschung (HSR) is a peer-reviewed international journal for the application of formal methods to history. Formal methods can be defined as all methods which are sufficiently intersubjective to be realized as an information science algorithm. Formalization means a variety of procedures that match descriptions of events, structures, and processes with explicit models of those events, structures, and processes. The applications of formal methods to history extend from quantitative and computer-assisted qualitative social research, historical sociology and social scientific history up to cliometrical research and historical information science. In a broader sense the field of Historical Social Research can be described as an inter-/ transdisciplinary paradigm.
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