SOURCE https://landmarksmag.substack.com/p/the-return-of-the-bunker-state-an?triedRedirect=true
LANDMARKS: Welcome to Landmarks; it’s great to be having this extended conversation with you. In your essay, Administrative Warfare & The End of the Political (Landmarks, Jan. 27, 2026), you argued – convincingly, to my mind – that governance as it exists today in the West has drastically changed the relation between state and citizen compared with the prior, liberal order. From being a protector of a sphere where citizen-subjects had their private lives and experienced freedoms of various sorts, the state has become a technocratic body oriented to the engineering and sanitation of persons-as-objects in a system whose purpose is to ensure security. But this is not the security of bona fide human subjects, but the security of something closer to what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben termed ‘bare life.’ The result, you note, is the de facto disappearance of the political, its replacement with an impersonal technocratic management. It is a frightening, and to my mind also a quite convincing diagnosis of the present moment. I am not sure that this summary is altogether accurate, so please explain what it gets wrong.
NEL BONILLA: This summary is exactly right. I would also add two things: First, the nation-state here is reduced to a mere territorial entity with resources for maintaining “security.” It is a functional container within a transatlantic security architecture. Its sovereignty is wholly repurposed. The state’s territory, infrastructure, laws, and population become “dual-use” assets: simultaneously civilian in form but increasingly designed or assessed for their utility in permanent strategic competition and war-preparation. The citizen becomes a “node” or “human resource” precisely because the state itself has become a managed node in a larger, anti-entropic network. Second, this security is, in essence, anti-entropic management (i.e., the effort to prevent the dissipation of concentrated Western power in the face of multipolarity), meaning it seeks to maintain the current status quo of multipolar competition while still aiming to revert to a “Global West” world order, similar to that of the 1990s. Since this is a transatlantic ruling strata-imposed dynamic, operating with varying degrees of awareness across elite strata, the different resources available for this aim of anti-entropic management are no longer the task of a sovereign country; rather, their use is determined by what the current iteration of this transatlantic anti-entropic management needs. The state’s technocratic management, therefore, is not an end in itself. It is the internal governance correlate of an external project of hegemony maintenance. The ‘disappearance of the political’ domestically (the replacement of debate with hygiene) mirrors and enables the ‘end of politics’ internationally (the replacement of diplomacy with coercive statecraft).
"The ‘disappearance of the political’ domestically (the replacement of debate with hygiene) mirrors and enables the ‘end of politics’ internationally (the replacement of diplomacy with coercive statecraft).
Crucially, this technocratic management is not actually impersonal in the sense of being non-violent. What disappears is not violence, but its political visibility and contestability. The citizen can no longer meaningfully oppose these decisions because they are presented as technical necessities (national security, supply chain resilience, interoperability standards) rather than political choices.
This anti-entropic management also operates under a temporal imperative: the US military’s Multi-Domain Operations readiness by 2030, critical mineral independence by 2035, and other doctrine-driven deadlines create a speed requirement that is structurally incompatible with democratic deliberation. When material imperatives (rare earth access, Arctic control) are presented as existential and time-bound, the political sphere, where citizens could contest ends and means, is bypassed in favor of technocratic emergency governance. The “end of the political” is thus also temporal: politics requires time that the Bunker State logic cannot afford.
Thus, the relationship you describe, from citizen-subject to sanitized object, is orchestrated by a transnational securotocracy for whom individual nation-states are zones for resource extraction (material, financial, and human) in service of this systemic preservation. The political vanishes because its foundational unit, the sovereign citizen in a sovereign polity, has been subsumed by this larger, amoral engineering project.
LANDMARKS: Do you have a theory as to what caused or inspired this shift in the meaning of the political? How did Europe’s ‘Open Society’ inspired by the likes of Karl Popper, Alexandre Kojève, and Jurgen Habermas degrade into what is now the Closed Society, this ‘bunker’?
NEL BONILLA: Yes, I have a theory. But it is still under construction. First, the ‘Open Society’ was not a spontaneous intellectual evolution but a deliberate US-led Cold War project. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Marshall Plan educational conditions, and active suppression of Communist movements, US intelligence and foundation networks systematically funded and promoted anti-Marxist intellectuals across Europe, especially in Germany, where postwar reconstruction was tightly controlled. Thinkers like Popper, Aron, and later Habermas were structurally advantaged by US-backed academic, media, and publishing infrastructure. Meanwhile, Communist parties were banned in West Germany (1956), and radicals were barred from public employment (Berufsverbot, 1972). The Open Society was open only to those who accepted capitalist hegemony and US leadership. Historically and in consequence, the dominance of Popperian and Atlanticist thought in post-war Europe was heavily subsidized by US functional elites specifically to dismantle the European “Social” and “Marxist” traditions.
[T]he ‘Open Society’ was not a spontaneous intellectual evolution but a deliberate US-led Cold War project.
Also, the goal was to delegitimize teleological planning or the idea that a society can collectively plan for a higher common good. By labeling all such planning as ‘totalitarian,’ they cleared the board for a society run by market signals and technocratic management. Therefore, the degradation into the “Bunker” is actually a logical continuation since a society that is forbidden to plan for a distinct future can only obsessively secure its present.
Furthermore, one could say that the societal visions of Popper and Habermas in their most positive forms presupposed a world that could only flourish when the West was the undisputed hegemon. As the West entered a phase of relative decline (entropy) and multipolar competition, its elites realized that ‘Openness’ was now a vulnerability (allowing ‘disinformation’ or ‘foreign influence’). Thus, they actively dismantled the Open Society to build the Bunker.
Since 1945 (maybe even before that, starting around 1917), and accelerating after 1990, the US elite structure, which lacks the European historical memory of the “Common Good” or the “Social State”, has culturally, materially, and institutionally integrated the European elites. This transatlantic caste, then, gradually, as the tides turned, needed the “Bunker” as an architectural form of society since they fear their own decline more than they value their own values.
In essence, the Open Society rhetoric masked what was actually a period of concentrated Western power projection through NATO expansion, financial globalization, structural adjustment, and the Washington Consensus. Communities were atomized and fragmented into market actors and identity groups, which simultaneously destroyed older forms of solidarity (labor unions, class politics) and created new manageable categories for technocratic governance. Capitalism became an ordering principle of society, reducing citizens to consumers in the first step.
Finally, I think there were several other steps in normalizing this gradual closing. For example, the War on Terror of the 2000s gradually normalized the “state of exception” (Agamben) through emergency powers, surveillance, and extrajudicial violence as permanent features of governance. The financial crisis of 2008 also normalized undemocratic forms of governance such as the imposition of austerity. Lastly, amid the emergence of multipolar development and a legitimacy crisis, the bunker is a response to all of these shifts. When material access (resources, markets, hegemony) is threatened, and domestic as well as global legitimacy erodes, technocratic emergency governance becomes permanent.
Sovereignty is replaced by anti-entropic management: the effort to freeze or reverse the diffusion of Western power. Democracy is replaced by speed imperatives: military timelines (Multi-Domain Operations by 2030, critical mineral independence by 2035) that cannot wait for deliberation. Law is replaced by selective enforcement: “our” annexations (Greenland) are strategic necessities; “theirs” (Crimea) are violations. Politics is replaced by technocracy: decisions are presented as technical necessities. The shift from Open Society to Bunker is simply the revelation of its limits when the material conditions (unipolar power, resource access, domestic acquiescence) that sustained it dissolve.
LANDMARKS: Do you view the present moment as a radical departure from liberalism/modernity, as something that has happened after the collapse of the former liberal regime? Or do you view it as a development of something already implicit within the liberal idea that has now ‘unfolded’?
In this same connection, I’m also interested in your point about the new social contract as a sort of protection racket. It’s a theme I took up in a recent essay on Landmarks. Some view this as a long-standing feature of modern states. And yet the distinctions you draw between the former order and the new are recognizable, and point to something distinctive about this Bunker reality.
NEL BONILLA: I view the present moment as both an unfolding and a radicalization. The Bunker State is pre-Enlightenment modernity returning after a brief interlude of metropolitan liberalism. Where the witch hunts served a nascent capitalism, and conquest & colonialism served imperial mercantilism, the Bunker State serves the Klepto-Securitocracy’s project of permanent systemic preservation. The tools have evolved, but the core logic, the use of a dichotomous logic to break communal bonds, destroy historical memory, and enforce a new, exploitative order, is consistent. Thus, the Bunker State is not a novel anomaly, but the reactivation of the deepest, most violent layers of the modern project since its inception. In other words, this is a return to its most savage, foundational impulses, now charged with 21st-century technology and global reach.
[T]he Bunker State is … the reactivation of the deepest, most violent layers of the modern project … now charged with 21st-century technology and global reach.
As articulated by Enrique Dussel and Silvia Federici, modernity was born through a sacralizing, dichotomous framework applied both internally (the witch hunts) and externally (the conquest of the Americas). This logic sought not merely to control resources, but to annihilate and replace entire worldviews, dividing reality into superior/inferior, order/chaos, to sanctify its extreme violence. Today, the Bunker State’s ostensibly amoral, technocratic management is guided by this same Manichean orientation framework, which now sanctifies coercion under a new secular absolute: existential security. The dismantling of the common good and the targeting of dissent are justified as hygienic necessities for the survival of the system itself, reframing class struggle as a metaphysical battle against chaos (or the “jungle”).
While
thinkers like Charles Tilly correctly identify the “protection racket”
as a longstanding feature, where the state monopolizes violence and
“sells” security back to the population, the Bunker State transforms
this logic into something historically distinct. The distinction lies
not in the existence of a coercive bargain (a coercive social contract),
but in its purpose, totality, and metaphysical emptiness. The classic
social contract, however imperfect, traded some liberty for the positive
goods of order, rights, and the possibility of prosperity. The Bunker
contract is a negative bargain: it demands the surrender of political
autonomy and cognitive sovereignty in exchange for only the chance of
survival within a secured perimeter. Its sole purpose is anti-entropic
management, the preservation of a decaying system against multipolar
entropy, offering no vision of a future good life.
[T]echnocratic management … now sanctifies coercion under a new secular absolute: existential security.
Importantly, this shift is operationalized through a new totality. Where past mobilization was partial and episodic, the Bunker demands “whole-of-society” permanent mobilization. Every domain, infrastructure, cognition, biology, is a battlespace. Consequently, the relationship to law and truth sheds all pretense. Law becomes a pure instrument to be weaponized through coercion or bypassed, while the patina of legitimacy is discarded as a strategic liability. Additionally, social contracts (Hobbes, Rousseau, even Tilly’s “war made the state”) maintained the fiction that emergency powers were temporary, that the goal was to restore normalcy. However, the Bunker State operates under permanent exception: multipolarity is a permanent threat, material constraints are permanent, the “crisis” never ends. Agamben showed that exception becomes the rule; I would add that elites now openly acknowledge this. There is no horizon of normalcy because anti-entropic management, preventing the diffusion of Western power, is an endless task.
Finally, this is enabled by a transformed elite configuration: a transnational Klepto-Securitocracy. This fusion of amoral strategists and personalist kleptocrats manages populations as assets and liabilities within a global security architecture. The state becomes a functional container, and the citizen is re-engineered from a subject of rights into a node in the grid: the final, logical destination of a modern instrumental rationality severed from all emancipatory promise. This severance from emancipatory promise is, ultimately, out in the open (Mark Carney (2026): “We knew the rules-based order was partially false”), taking the mask off liberalism with all the consequences it entails.
Nel Bonilla is a geographer, sociologist, and the author of the publication Worldlines. With a background in Human Geography and Urban Development, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the sociology of migration and organized violence. Her work investigates the intersection of geopolitics, transatlantic networks, and the social dynamics of conflict.
