What sort of political actors are international migrants? This article approaches this question by studying how migrants move between legality and illegality. We have struggled to understand the political content of this behaviour, because they have viewed it as either an attempt to gain the state’s acceptance as quasi-citizens or an attempt to autonomously subvert the state. However, migrants are

How can we think about modes of martial operability that are responsive to the transformative conditions engendered by the information age? This article assumes an exploratory stance and reconsiders the theory of network-centric warfare (NCW) in concert with some elements of Gilbert Simondon’s work. It suggests that the Simondonian concepts of individuation, transduction and information, coupled with

This article explores in empirical detail the air-bound expectations, imaginations and practices arising from the acquisition of a new police drone in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel. The study shows how drones are transforming the ways in which the aerial realm is lived as a context, object and perspective of policing. This tripartite structure is taken as a prism through which to advance novel understandings

Critical prison studies have demonstrated how states use imprisonment and detention not only to punish individuals, but also to quell dissent and disrupt opposition movements. In protracted conflicts, however, the use of mass incarceration and unlawful detention often backfires on states as politically motivated prisoners exert their relevance by making imprisonment itself a central issue in the wider

The search for security has become an almost permanent feature of the contemporary lived experience and what Brian Massumi has called an ‘operative logic’ for states across the globe. The modern study – and practice – of security has, nonetheless, been largely concerned with the protection, preservation and sustaining of the material, the tangible and the visible. For many people around the world,

The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck’s history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th

The inhabitants of the squatted settlements in the border city of Arica, mostly indigenous migrants from the Peruvian–Bolivian highlands, feel the effects of the racialized geography of northern Chile through social discrimination, economic exploitation and deprivation of political rights. In these settlements, their migrant residents make palpable the pervasive tension between a mode of visibility

This article conceptualizes resilience as an emergent and contingent practice that shapes societal relationships in unexpected ways. It focuses on the case of the 2013 floods in Dresden, a city that witnessed three major floods within 11 years. Emergent volunteer activities on the ground and on social media played a significant role during the flood emergency response efforts. Drawing on Philippe Bourbeau’s

Villains need to be de-villainized for talking to begin; this is a cornerstone of negotiation literature. But what happens when villains are proscribed, or listed as terrorists? While an emerging body of work has started to explore the effects of proscription by emphasizing aspects of demonization and banishment, it has not so far explored how banishment ends. This article offers a theoretical and

This article examines how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones as they are more popularly known, have changed practices of Israeli warfare. In order to do so, the article proceeds in three steps. First, it traces the emergence and development of the Israeli UAV programme. Second, it examines the main factors that have enabled its expansion. Third, it turns to some of the main implications of

Contemporary liberal and democratic states have ‘securitized’ a growing number of issues by advancing the notion of societal security. This is coupled with a proactive stance and the conception of building societal resilience in order to withstand future crises and disturbances. The preemptive logic of contemporary security and crisis management calls for a new type of resilient neoliberal subject

This article explores the maintenance of large-scale information systems that are used for, among other purposes, border security in the European Union. My argument is that information systems do not always operate according to their design scripts. They materialize as unruly, unstable and failing infrastructures that are governed through maintenance in order to correct any identified functional anomalies

This article aims to contribute toward transcending the dichotomy between deconstruction and reconstruction in critical security studies. In the first part, I review dominant (Western/liberal) logics of security and the main strands of critical security studies to argue that there is a need to overcome the liberal framework of the balance between rights and freedom, with its inherent imbrication with

We tend to see border walls as stable concrete fortifications. This article seeks to offer an alternative understanding of walls by suggesting a shift in border studies from network thinking to meshwork thinking. Despite references to multiplicity, concepts of networks and assemblages in border studies continue to provide neat narratives of walls. This article reimagines the border beyond sovereig

Quantum physics is being positioned as a new archive for addressing major theoretical problems in the field of international relations. Two of the major proponents of engaging quantum thinking within international relations, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt, have argued that quantum thinking offers the possibility of a major paradigm shift in the field. Before we determine quantum’s revolutionary

Building on new trends in neuroscience and philosophy of mind, this article provides a roadmap for incorporating consciousness into social research. Drawing upon Alexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science, it is argued that one of the greatest obstacles encountered by social research when approaching social reality is that it provides neither an epistemological nor an ontological place for consciousness

This article contributes to emergent debates in critical security studies that consider the processes and effects that arise where new forms of automated technology begin to guide security practices. It does so through research into public Wi-Fi infrastructure that has started to appear across the globe and its mobilization as a device for warning the public about emergencies. I focus specifically

The African Sahel is a region whose geopolitical dimensions are constantly changing and evolving as a result of new intersections of international, regional and local security dynamics. In this context, various actors have initiated different regional projects in an attempt to reframe the area according to their interests and specific interpretations of security and to impose the form of order that

The notions that military violence engenders security and that military service is a selfless and necessary act are orthodoxies in political, military and scholarly debate. The UK Army Reserve’s recent expansion prompts reconsideration of this orthodoxy, particularly in relation to the suggestion that reservists serve selflessly. Drawing on fieldwork with British Army reservists and their spouses/partners

In dominant global conceptions of conflict-related sexual violence, the experiences of male survivors, if attended to at all, have thus far almost exclusively been analysed in terms of vulnerabilities. Drawing on empirical evidence from two different cases (Uganda and Croatia), in this article we argue that essentializing and static generalizations of ‘emasculation’ fail to do justice to the complexity

In the past decade, food security and nutrition practices have become central in the promotion of resilience in protracted crises. Such approaches have been welcomed by the aid community because of their potential for linking relief and development. Social and political analysts, however, have criticized resilience approaches for failing to consider power relations and because they entail an acceptance

This article explores how the United States (US) has redefined the concept of ‘imminent threat’ in order to relax the rules for anticipatory use of armed force against insurgents. The article focuses on how two new definitions of imminent threat have changed the conduct of specific combat activities, namely, drone strikes and ground combat operations. The central part of the article is divided into

While resistance has been increasingly studied in critical security studies, its role has been mainly understood as either a deconstructive or a reconstructive force in processes of securitization owing to the perceived externality of resistance to domination. By contributing to the governmentality approach to security with Foucault’s concept of counter-conduct, this article aims to explicate a particular

International relations scholarship has paid insufficient attention to security providers’ tendency to emulate the visual attributes of other actors in an attempt to (re)construct their identities ...

The article analyzes the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV) as a specific security technology created to deal with the ecological threat of biodiversity loss. Built in 2008 inside the Arctic Circle,...

The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about the gendered dimensions of Israel’s convoluted permit system and checkpoint security infrastructure. ...

On 4 June 2017, Qatar was suddenly put under an embargo by its regional neighbors – an effort spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who cut off most of its existing land, sea, and air traffic ro...

Secrecy, especially state secrecy, has taken on increasing interest for scholars of international relations and security studies. However, even with interest in secrecy on the rise, there has been little explicit attention paid to exposure. The breaking of secrecy has generally been relegated to the role of a mere ‘switch’, whose internal workings and variations are of little consequence. This article

Security Dialogue has published an article ‘Is securitization theory racist? Civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack thought in the Copenhagen School’ by Alison Howell and Melanie Richter-Montpetit (2020; first published online 7 August 2019), hereafter ‘H&RM’. This article makes strong claims about the ‘foundational role of racist thought in securitization theory’, claiming that it

Technology hype is an important concept in business, marketing, and science and technology studies, but it is rarely related to security studies. What is technology hype? How does it relate to national security? And to what effect? This article examines rational and performative perspectives on technology hype as either a kind of exaggeration or expectant discourse. Adopting the latter view, I compare

This article argues that feminist technoscience studies can enrich our understanding of biopolitics by challenging the body’s boundaries and focusing on mundane practices of security. To do so, thi...

This article seeks to explore the quantum notion that to ‘see’ an entanglement is to break it in the context of an ‘experiment’ regarding the ongoing impact of traumatic political memory on the present. The analysis is a product of collaboration over the past four years between the two authors, one a scholar of international relations, the other a therapeutic practitioner with training in medical physics

This article examines how the growing complexity of peacebuilding settings is transforming the classic notion of purposeful agency into a non-purposeful, adaptive form of being in such contexts. Th...

This is an essay about the personhood of militant violence, the phenomenological underpinnings of political evil and the friendship between two men. It begins by recounting the author’s street-side meeting with several Islamist militants in Tripoli, Lebanon, one of whom later described his preparations to become a ‘martyr’ in Syria. The essay takes my conversations with this man and his friends as

In the early 1980s, the East German Ministry for State Security systematically recruited Arab students as covert informers. Analysis of this historical case contributes to discussions about surveil...

Since your article ‘Is securitization theory racist?’ was published five months ago, we have had numerous conversations. Imaginary ones so far. I have responded to your claim that my 2000 article ‘The Little Mermaid’ provides a reaffirmation of racist thought, and to the moves you make to get there. I have tried to envision how you might reply, how I would then respond, and so on. I am happy that we

Histories of the Arab–Israeli War of 1967 have advanced a curious commonplace. As they have sought to account for the decisive factors in what they treat as a decisive war, soldiers and interpreters of their arguments have tacitly resorted to what Adolf Loos once referred to as a ‘principle of cladding’, or bekleidungsprinzip, in order to explain the successes of Israel’s armored corps. The bekleidungsprinzip

Because women are assumed to be nonviolent, their participation in militant groups can humanize organizations and legitimize rebellion. But gender beliefs are deeply engrained, and consequently wom...

This article provides a sympathetic, yet also somewhat critical, engagement with the notion of ‘quantizing’ by exploring substantive overlaps between quantum and systems theory. It is based on the observation that while quantum theory is ‘non-classical’ in its entire world-view, there is a danger that when it comes to the social world it is simply laid on a world-view of that world, which remains at

Money objects, from coins to bitcoins, are used in economic exchange as a way of putting a number on the fuzzy concept of worth or value. They are inherently dualistic in that they combine the properties of abstract numbers with the properties of owned objects. As a result of this duality at its core, the money system exhibits the properties of a macroscopic quantum system, including entanglement,

Approximately 8,000 boys and men were killed in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. The victims were disappeared, killed and buried in secret mass graves. In this article, I examine how forensic anthropologists, demographers and forensic geneticists produced technolegal knowledge about the number of victims in the wake of the genocide; how those numbers were validated in legal proceedings against those held

In this article, I explore sleep specifically as a weapon of war, as a logistic of war, and as a metaphor for conscience in war. In proposing the capacity to sleep as a measure of the effects of strategies of war, and to recalibrate understandings of intimacy and vulnerability in war, I highlight the distinct effects of war on all its denizens. I make no claim for sameness among their experiences –

Under the banner of martial empiricism, we advance a distinctive set of theoretical and methodological commitments for the study of war. Previous efforts to wrestle with this most recalcitrant of phenomena have sought to ground research upon primary definitions or foundational ontologies of war. By contrast, we propose to embrace war’s incessant becoming, making its creativity, mutability and polyvalence

This special issue is conceived out of the proposition that recent developments in quantum theory as well as innovations in quantum technology have profound implications for international relations, especially in the field of international security. Interaction with quantum theory outside the circle of physics has been limited; our goal is to catalyse an informed debate on the virtues of quantum theory

This article traces the historical foundations of current security legislation as the matrix of citizenship. Examining Israel’s new Counter-Terrorism Law against the backdrop of security legislation in India, its main proposition is that these laws and their effects are rooted in colonial emergency regulations and the bureaucratic mechanisms for population control developed therein, rather than in

‘Inclusion’ has emerged as a prominent theme in peacemaking. However, its exact meaning remains vague, as do assumptions about the relationship between inclusion and peace. This article seeks to problematize the research, policy and practice of inclusion. Focusing on United Nations (UN) peacemaking, we ask how the object of inclusion has been framed, and based on what strategies and underlying rationales

Military service members have been taking and circulating illicit images for decades, and soldier-produced illicit images are a regular and coherent category of international images. Focusing on two case studies – Abu Ghraib images and images of hazing – the argument put forward in this article is that soldier-generated illicit images are not simply photographic evidence, or accidental by-products

It is today common to argue that rape is a weapon, tool or instrument of warfare. One implication is that armed groups marshal body parts for tactical and strategic ends. In this article, I interrogate this discourse of embodied mobilization to explore how body weaponry has been made intelligible as a medium for sexual violence. First, I show that, despite wide rejection of essentialist models, the

Recently, public debates have questioned whether or not the American government responds differently to terrorism by white, right-wing, Americans. This article examines a historical period in which similar dynamics were on display in state responses to the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan (KKK), Irish-American Fenians, and anarchists from 1860 to 1920. This history suggests that political officials

The term ‘political ethnography’ has been used to describe a recent trend whereby political scientists, including scholars of security studies and international relations, increasingly deploy fieldwork to explore a variety of political arenas. This article challenges a one-dimensional understanding of political ethnography that sidelines the politics activated in an ethnographic research process and

This article posits an analytic of mobilization–demobilization that attends to the instrumentalization and fungibility of military lives as both a primary source of embodied war-related harm and an undertheorized logic of the US war-making apparatus. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among post-9/11 military veterans in a US military community, the article explores mobilization–demobilization across

This article explores the fabrication of ‘sensate regimes of war’, concentrating on the typically under-analysed sense of smell. Smell is a sensory mode capable of apprehending potential threat and enmity in ways that are orthogonal to other ways of sensing. Accordingly, the organization and interpretation of olfactory sensation occupies a distinctive place in war. The article details a particular

This article analyzes how contemporary military training and exercises shape and reify specific modalities of war. Historically, military training has shifted from being individual- and experience-oriented, towards becoming modelled into exercise environments and practices. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with military officers, exercise controllers, and war-game designers, the article distinguishes

Fortification calls to mind images of high walls establishing clear lines between inside and outside and immobilizing enemies. However, even the most seemingly inert fortifications rely on subtle forms of mobility and more elaborate spatial relations. This article examines fortification as a technique of power in which warfare, the design of the built environment, and the organization of space are

The Nasa indigenous group’s Guardia Indígena, whose primary goal is to protect indigenous people and their territories from all types of armed groups, is a nonviolent self-protection organization in Northern Cauca, Colombia. On 5 November 2014, while peace talks were ongoing between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government, two Guardia Indígena members were shot

In the Ulster Museum’s new gallery The Troubles and Beyond, the central display showcases a Wheelbarrow bomb disposal robot. This machine was invented by the British Army in Northern Ireland in 1972 and used by officers of the 321 Explosive Ordinance Disposal Squadron (321EOD) to defuse car bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). This article offers an alternative history of that machine

Both classical and critical studies of warfare often comment on the relationship between war and excess. However, even in richly theoretical work, this connection is unanalyzed. This article focuses on the link between excess and war, and seeks to deepen our understanding of why excess reappears so frequently in the study of armed conflict and security studies. Specifically, the article turns to the

Despite the welcome turn within security studies towards a more material- and practice-oriented understanding of state secrecy, the ways in which security actors experience, practise and negotiate secrecy in their everyday work lives has been rather overlooked. To counter this neglect the article calls for attention to everyday secrecy. Focusing on a former top-secret weapons research facility in the

Understandings of the nature or inherent workings of molecular life in the field of biopolitical security studies have today been characterized predominantly in terms of contingency. This article challenges this characterization. It does so by identifying a particular logic of operation that organizes political action and intervention at both the level of the population and the molecular in response

Contrary to our understanding of when states act on women’s rights, Jordan adopted a policy on violence against women at the same time as it faced a number of external and internal security threats. In this article, I query the relationship between militarism and the gender policymaking process in Jordan to make sense of this puzzle. I specifically consider the ways in which a feminist conceptualization