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Vital encounters: Violence, multiple (in)securities and the reproduction of ordinary life in Colombia Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 María Ximena Dávila
This article examines the relationship between violence, (in)security, and the reproduction of ordinary life, focusing on the significance of mundane survival practices and their connection to the emergence of scenarios of collective action and politicization. Based on the experiences of women from the Colombian Caribbean region, this article explores how ordinary interactions aimed at satisfying individual
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Deadly ambiguities: NATO and the politics of counter-terrorism in international organizations after 9/11 Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-07-26 Julien Pomarede
The article investigates the social making of counter-terrorism in international organizations (IOs). Discussing the literatures that emphasize the (in)coherence of multilateral counter-terrorism and the diversity of interests that interact and converge in these policies, the article highlights the determinants by which an object as vague and dissensual as post-9/11 counter-terrorism is ordered and
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Non-lethal weapons and the sensory repression of dissent in democracies Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-31 Nitasha Kaul, Shala Cachelin
This article examines the use of ‘non-lethal’ weapons (NLWs) by liberal democracies to govern dissent in non-war contexts. We argue that NLWs can enable sensorial governance, specifically through sensory repression of dissent. Although accented as non-lethal, NLWs are better conceived of as what we term ‘Weapons of Sensory Repression’ (WSRs). From tear gas to sound cannons to skunk bombs and more,
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Do the right thing: Vigilant citizenship and the surveillance of race in Miami Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-25 Thijs Jeursen
Public vigilance campaigns and lateral surveillance programs in the USA have mobilized citizens for a broad range of security concerns: from post-9/11 perceived terrorist threats to more domestic forms of crime. Scholars have explained such efforts as an extension of state and police power, while others have shown that state surveillance reifies a broad range of historically racist and violent practices
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Governing ‘ordinary’ uncertainty: Circulating information and everyday insecurity in Karachi Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-23 Sobia Ahmad Kaker
The governing of uncertainty has been studied extensively within the interdisciplinary field of security studies. However, existing scholarship on security-related uncertainty focuses on the problem of its governance from the standpoint of Western-political macro-governmental regulatory regimes. To both rescale as well as decolonize existing scholarship on governing security-related uncertainty, this
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#ResisteGozando (joy as resistance): On the healing power of dance at the US–Mexico border Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Leslie Meyer, Abigail Andrews, Paulina Olvera Cañez
This article explores the personal and political significance of dancing for migrants trapped at the US–Mexico border, waiting to apply for asylum in the United States. Past research has often framed waiting as empty, static, boring, or even violent. Nevertheless, an emergent literature shows how people in contexts of violence also exercise creativity and care as embodied paths to collective healing
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Extermination and excess: Martial economies of poison Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-09 Gitte du Plessis
Engaging the thinking of Georges Bataille, this article examines the international politics of poison as a category of death-dealing that defies distinctions between war/not war and weapon/not weapon. Refraining from splitting poison into pesticides and chemical weapons, the article analyses political ecologies and affective economies of poison both historically and today, to illuminate which desires
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The biopolitics of algorithmic governmentality: How the US military imagines war in the age of neurobiology and artificial intelligence Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-09 Claes Tängh Wrangel
With the objective to predict and pre-empt the emergence of political violence, the US Department of Defence (DoD) has devoted increasing attention to the intersection between neurobiology and artificial intelligence. Concepts such as ‘cognitive biotechnologies’, ‘digital biosecurity’ and large-scale collection of ‘neurodata’ herald a future in which neurobiological intervention on a global scale is
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Multi-agency counter-terrorism in Britain and Norway: Intelligence agencies and the administration of welfare Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-05-02 Charlotte Heath-Kelly
This article explores the emergence of new counter-terrorism programmes in the Britain and Norway through which intelligence and security agencies administer welfare. Support and resources are covertly allocated to persons identified as potential threats, through multi-agency structures led by intelligence and security agencies. Unlike Countering Violent Extremism programmes, this multi-agency management
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Transformative incrementalism: Palestinian women’s strategies of resistance and resilience amid gendered insecurity and neoliberal co-optation Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-26 Liyana Kayali
Palestinian women have envisioned and enacted resistance and resilience in different ways throughout the long-running Palestinian resistance movement. Strategies have ranged from direct collective actions to the resolute maintenance of everyday life in the face of ongoing occupation, settler-colonialism, displacement and violence. Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank have begun to develop tactics
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Contesting colonial beachheads: Settler colonial (in)security professionals and Indigenous peoples’ energy infrastructure Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Liam Midzain-Gobin, Joshua K McEvoy
In April 2020, the British Columbia Utilities Commission released the Final Report of its Indigenous Utilities Regulation Inquiry. The Inquiry was tasked with determining the regulatory environment for Indigenous utility providers across the Canadian province. We analyse the Inquiry as a colonial encounter between Indigenous nations and the settler state, arguing that technical bodies like the Commission
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Singing truth to power: Transformative (gender) justice, musical spatialities and creative performance in periods of transition from violence Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-10 María Martín de Almagro, Priscyll Anctil Avoine, Yira Miranda Montero
Feminist security studies have demonstrated that transitional justice processes worldwide have largely fallen short in providing actual transformative justice for women and that many gendered war experiences remain largely unaccounted for. Through an activist-academic collaboration and mobilizing feminist scholarship on war, embodiment and emotions together with literature on transitional justice and
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Accepting responsibility? Institutions and the security implications of climate change Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-06 Matt McDonald
Who has responsibility for addressing the security implications of climate change? States and the United Nations justify their existence on the promise of providing security. Yet, although the national and international security implications of climate change are increasingly acknowledged, incorporation of climate change in national security planning or institutional arrangements is far from universal
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Police work and the politics of expendability in India Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-06 Beatrice Jauregui
This article examines how rank-and-file police in contemporary India express work-related grievances regarding official neglect of their well-being, systemic exploitation by government authorities and other elites, and routinized threats of bodily harm and death. It analyzes these experiences as manifestations of a ‘politics of expendability’ through which police, conceived as security laborers, are
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The undersecuritization of COVID-19 in Japan: Voluntary behavioral change as self-defense? Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Kenki Adachi
Facing the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), leaders of many countries attempted to securitize the COVID-19 issue. The Japanese government, however, neither attempted to securitize it nor implemented strong measures to control its circulation. Yet the behavior of Japanese citizens changed significantly to prevent the spread of COVID-19. What were the mechanisms that drove them to voluntarily
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Audience agency in a curious instance of failed securitization: Public resistance to the Singapore government’s eugenics program Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Pradeep Krishnan
Securitization theory posits that security threats are socially constructed. Yet, how audiences influence the failure and success of securitization attempts is still not well understood. In this article, I argue that audiences bring their normative perspectives to bear upon the interpretation of securitization attempts. This theoretical addendum, I hold, permits a fuller appreciation of how audiences
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A self-fulfilling prophecy? Constructions of youth-as-troublemakers in UN DDR processes Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Jacqui Cho
Youth as a category that informs international interventions in conflict-affected settings has gained currency in the past decade. This article traces the rising rhetoric of youth in UN Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) discourse and demonstrates how changes in its dominant representations have implications beyond the matter of semantics. Drawing on post-structuralist traditions,
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Registers of security: The concept of tryghed in Danish politics Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Laust Lund Elbek, Peter Starke
On the face of it, existing theoretical and empirical work on the politics of (in)security takes language and speech acts seriously, yet often actually fails to problematize how the very meaning of ‘security’ and related terms can differ across social, political, and linguistic contexts. This article demonstrates the consequences of context-specific registers of security for the dynamics of political
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Towards theorizing from the Arab non-periphery: Hyphenated identities and the boundless security field Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Asmaa Elgamal
Across the Middle East, military professionals, private militias, and other security actors often play a central role in the management of urban planning, public administration, and other state affairs. However, security studies scholarship offers few theoretical tools for understanding this deep and overt intertwinement of security and governance, framing it as an outcome of authoritarian practices
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Migrant deaths in the name of law Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Shoshana Fine, Thomas Lindemann
While many studies have investigated the problem of migration deaths, to our knowledge attention has never focused on how political actors appeal to law to legitimize these deaths. In our empirical enquiry, we interrogated how the European Commission legitimizes its role in migrant deaths in the Mediterranean through appeals to law. One compelling function of law in this legitimization process is that
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Red-zoning: Spatial logics, the prototype and colour-coded cartographies of insecurity Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Ari Jerrems, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert
Red-zoning emerged as a key security practice in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with colour-coded security zones defining the spatial dimensions of diverse restrictions. However, red-zoning, understood as the cartographic practice of ascribing the colour red to a geographically defined area, has a long history. Prior to the pandemic, red zones were already being established and delimited
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Insurmountable enemies or easy targets? Military-themed videogame ‘translations’ of weaponized artificial intelligence Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Guangyu Qiao-Franco, Paolo Franco
International relations scholarship has long emphasized that popular culture can impact public understandings and political realities. In this article, we explore these potentials in the context of military-themed videogames and their portrayals of weaponized artificial intelligence (AI). Within paradoxical videogame representations of AI weapons both as ‘insurmountable enemies’ that pose existential
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Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Aggie Hirst, Larry N George
This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life
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Peace needs constant reproduction: The temporality of the diplomatic system Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher
If a diplomatic cocktail party lasts two hours, does it equal the duration of peace? Or are there less simplistic conceptualizations of ‘peace’ and ‘time’ for the theorization of diplomatic practices? This article draws on a concept of temporality based on an irreversible before/after distinction, and combines it with the modern systems theoretical premise that every event within the diplomatic system
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The everydayness of spectacle violence under the Islamic Republic: ‘Fire at will’ Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-05-08 Kamal Soleimani, Ahmad Mohammadpour
On 17 June 2017, Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, called on pro-regime vigilantes to ‘fire at will’ or to act on their own discretion in putting the state’s Islamic...
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Settler colonial counterinsurgency: Indigenous resistance and the more-than-state policing of #NoDAPL Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Bruno Seraphin
In 2016, the US-based private military contractor TigerSwan was denied a license to operate in North Dakota. Nonetheless, it coordinated a counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign employing war-on-terror ...
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Rebel spirits at sea: Disrupting EUrope’s weaponizing of time in maritime migration governance Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-23 Maurice Stierl
In August 2020, a motor yacht formerly owned by French customs authorities set sail in the Mediterranean Sea in search of migrant boats in distress. Funded by the street artist Banksy, the search a...
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Porous bunker: Private security contractors and the plasticity of Mogadishu’s international ‘green zone’ Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Jethro Norman
From Baghdad’s ‘Emerald City’ to Kabul’s ‘Kabubble’, international green zones have been characterized as ‘bunkerized’ and temporary. Despite efforts to make these spaces appear sealed, they are mo...
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Dreaming biometrics in Niger: The security techniques of migration control in West Africa Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Alizée Dauchy
Since 2015, Niger has been actively committed to migration control in West Africa in the context of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. To enable better comprehension of the making ...
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The intersectionality of health (in)security: Healthcare, disposable workers, and exposure within Brazil’s pandemic politics Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 José O Pérez, Vinícius Mendes
Brazil has suffered severe consequences from the Covid-19 pandemic, currently ranking second globally in terms of total fatalities, with more than 682,000 lives lost. This article critically outlin...
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The triangle of security governance: Sovereignty, discipline and the ‘government of things’ in Olympic Rio de Janeiro Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Dennis Pauschinger
This article reconsiders contemporary urban security governance. Conceptually, it revisits Foucault’s governmentality lectures to comprehend how security governance is carried out in places where t...
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Security technology, urban prototyping, and the politics of failure Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Rivke Jaffe, Francesca Pilo’
In response to broader political and corporate tendencies towards ‘techno-solutionism’, critical studies of security technology highlight the threat that security technologies pose to civil rights ...
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Networked security in the colonial present: Mapping infrastructures of digital surveillance and control in São Paulo Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Claudio Altenhain
The saturation of urban space with all kinds of information and communication technology–driven security devices has long since turned into a recurrent topic of both human geography and critical se...
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Global silences as privilege: The international community’s white silence on far-right terrorism Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Alice Martini
Silences are not only absences in the spoken discourse or gaps in the discursive texture of international politics. They are important nodes of this texture and, as such, they constitute the politi...
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Indigenous environmental perspectives: Challenging the oceanic security state Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Tiara R Na’puti, Sylvia C Frain
This article centers Indigenous epistemologies to critique the United States oceanic security state, a modality of militarization and blue-washing conservation that extends beyond land borders to e...
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Insurance technopolitics: Car theft, recovery, and tracking systems in São Paulo Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-01-27 Deborah Fromm
In response to high levels of car theft, insurance companies in São Paulo have developed new systems and technologies for tracking and recovering stolen vehicles. These interventions are driven by ...
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The technopolitics of security: Agency, temporality, sovereignty Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Frank I Müller, Matthew Aaron Richmond
This introduction to the special issue on ‘the technopolitics of security’ outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance a...
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Assembling prevention: Technology, expertise and control in postwar Guatemala Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-01-23 Markus Hochmüller
This article examines the technopolitics of prevention in postwar Guatemala. In the 2010s, experts and policymakers shifted security governance in Central America’s most populous country towards an...
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Securitizing mobility: Profiling ‘non-core’ Europeans Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Maartje van der Woude
By combining securitization literature and literature from the field of border criminologies, this article reflects upon the ongoing securitization of intra-EU East–West mobility. The European Unio...
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Assessing threatening uncertainties: Counterterrorism and everyday practices of preemptive policing in Ghana Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Maya Mynster Christensen
The preemptive turn in counterterrorism has turned future uncertainties into key objects of contemporary security governance. From an empirically grounded perspective, this article contributes with...
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‘My body is my piece of land’: Indebted deportation among undocumented migrant sex workers from Thailand and Nigeria in Europe Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-12-02 Sine Plambech
Set at the intersection of debt and deportability, this article analyses how undocumented migrant sex workers in Europe navigate deportability and its effects. While sex trafficking into the EU has...
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Qualifying deportation: How police translation of ‘dangerous foreign criminals’ led to expansive deportation practices in Spain Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-11-02 Barak Kalir
In 2009, in a move to improve the situation regarding the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain, a left-wing government led by the Socialist Workers’ Party drafted a new policy aimed at fo...
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Eco-war tourism: Affective geographies, colonial durabilities and the militarization of conservation Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-14 Esther Marijnen
This article introduces ‘eco-war tourism’, a growing niche in which tourists venture into war zones to seek adventure and ‘save’ nature from its violent surroundings. In Virunga National Park in ea...
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Eyes on the ground and eyes in the sky: Security narratives, participatory visual methods and knowledge production in ‘danger zones’ Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-10-07 Peter Chonka, Abdirahman Edle Ali, Kirsti Stuvøy
This article reflects on the use of narrative interviews alongside participatory and remote-access visual methods to produce knowledge on and in conflict-affected settings. It details our iterative...
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The militarization of digital surveillance in post-coup Zimbabwe: ‘Just don’t tell them what we do’ Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-09-30 Allen Munoriyarwa
While a large body of research has documented and theorized digital surveillance practices in various political contexts, little has been done to investigate the growing trend of military-driven di...
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Protective exclusion as a postcolonial strategy: Rethinking deportations and sovereignty in the Gambia Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-09-29 Franzisca Zanker, Judith Altrogge
In 2019, the tiny West African country of the Gambia imposed a moratorium on all deportation flights from the EU. Though West African countries are notoriously reluctant to cooperate on forced retu...
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Framing collective violence as war time: Temporality, circulation, resistance Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Christopher McIntosh
Writing on the US war on terrorism, Judith Butler identified how discursive frames are produced and reproduced in ways that make certain forms of violence discernable as war. These frames that make...
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Agents, structures, and the moral basis of deportability Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-08-25 Andrew S Rosenberg
Deportability is the omnipresent possibility of deportation, which gives rise to constant fear among migrants. In this article, I argue that a focus on deportability’s structural causes – such as g...
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Making war safe for capitalism: The World Bank and its evolving interventions in conflict Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-08-19 Elliot Dolan-Evans
The World Bank has asserted a dominant role in post-conflict peacebuilding and during war itself. This article critiques the World Bank’s evolving approach to war and peace through both a qualitati...
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Cybersecurity, race, and the politics of truth Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-08-16 Jeffrey Whyte
This article explores the racial politics underwriting cybersecurity’s recent human turn toward the issues of online disinformation and ‘foreign influence’ in US politics. Through a case study of t...
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Trauma to self and other: Reflections on field research and conflict Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-08-16 Kimberly Howe
Researchers who wish to engage with survivors of conflict and violence face a range of complex ethical issues – including psychological dimensions of research – often with few resources or little s...
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Memory as vulnerability: Reinhabiting sites of violence and the politics of triumphalist amnesia in Kenya’s war on terror Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Andrea Purdeková
Rectification as the return of sites of violence to prior use is little studied even as governments often defiantly reconstruct such sites and urge citizens to visit them as a way to combat ‘terror...
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‘How dare she?!’: Parrhesiastic resistance and the logics of protection of/in international security Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-07-18 Béatrice Châteauvert-Gagnon
Malalai Joya, Greta Thunberg, Idle No More leaders – what do these figures have in common? They each decided to act/speak out against the failures, lacks, exclusions, violence and injustices in the...
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Peace that antagonizes: Reading Colombia’s peace process as hegemonic crisis Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-05-24 Richard Georgi
This article explores how disruptive political conflicts evolve in peace processes by studying Colombian human rights defenders’ discourses about the peace process with the FARC-EP. While post-conf...
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Archiving as embodied research and security practice Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-04-23 Kodili Henry Chukwuma
This article explores the importance of embodiment in (research on) archival practices on state counter-terrorism policy in Nigeria. In doing so, the article seeks to contribute to the ongoing disc...
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Security, sexuality, and the Gay Clown Putin meme: Queer theory and international responses to Russian political homophobia Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-04-10 Dean Cooper-Cunningham
Focusing on the case of ‘Gay Clown Putin’, this article theorizes memes as visual interventions in international politics. While not all memes are political interventions, Gay Clown Putin is an ico...
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‘Yeah, this one will be a good one’, or Tacit knowledge, prophylaxis and the border: Exploring everyday health security decisionmaking Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-03-03 Adam J Ferhani
Approaching health security from a practice-theoretical perspective, this article advances our understanding of the everyday and locality in health security decisionmaking, and is guided by the following two questions: How is it determined when a health security threat is likely to be present at a point of entry? What knowledge informs everyday health security decisions at borders? Markedly little
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Memoirs of women-in-conflict: Ugandan ex-combatants and the production of knowledge on security and peacebuilding Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-02-23 Devon EA Curtis, Florence Ebila, Maria Martin de Almagro
The limitations of conventional accounts of security and peacebuilding drawing upon the ‘expert’ knowledge of military elites, policymakers and civil society representatives have been widely recognized. This has led security and peacebuilding policymakers, including through the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda, to search for alternative forms of knowledge, such as memoirs, photographs
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Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-02-16 John M Hobson
This article emerges out of the racism debate in Security Dialogue (May 2020). It takes its cue from the passing claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is different from racism and that the former is deemed to be relatively innocuous while the latter is viewed as egregious. Here I reveal how Eurocentrism is equivalent to cultural racism. I show how racism has outwardly shapeshifted through time in everyday
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The impact of (counter-)terrorism on public (in)security in Nigeria: A vernacular analysis Security Dialogue (IF 2.8) Pub Date : 2022-01-27 Akinyemi Oyawale
This article examines the impact of (counter-)terrorism on public (in)security in Nigeria through engaging with non-elite understandings of ongoing conflicts in the northeast. Through 41 in-depth interviews carried out during a four-month fieldwork exercise with internally displaced persons in Nigeria, the article contributes to current (counter-)terrorism research on Nigeria and Africa by examining