Pub Date : 2023-09-12DOI: 10.1177/09670106231194908
Wen Liu
The concept of war has always been taken for granted in the study of Taiwan vis-a-vis the People’s Republic of China. Under the dominant international narrative, Taiwan is often framed as a contested territory, where its land and sovereignty are up for competition. While recent escalating geopolitical tension has brought increasing international attention to Taiwan, international discourse on Taiwanese sovereignty has been largely limited to a traditional conception of war that views Taiwan as a geopolitical pawn in a ‘new Cold War’ between the United States and the People’s Republic of China or, under the banner of ‘geopolitical realism’, treats the rise of Taiwanese national identity as war-making. Both approaches minimize the significance of Taiwanese sovereignty and subjectivity in the struggle between superpowers. This article intervenes in both of these views by applying the framework of martial empiricism with an analysis of the subjectivity of war preparedness in Taiwanese civil society to demonstrate that war has become a normative and liberal mode of politics in Taiwan. From my ethnographic fieldwork on the grass-roots mobilization of civil defense in the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I illustrate how civil defense rearticulates war not as a distant, spectacular event but as a mundane scenario that can be prepared for through daily practices and communal planning in Taiwan.
{"title":"The mundane politics of war in Taiwan: Psychological preparedness, civil defense, and permanent war","authors":"Wen Liu","doi":"10.1177/09670106231194908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231194908","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of war has always been taken for granted in the study of Taiwan vis-a-vis the People’s Republic of China. Under the dominant international narrative, Taiwan is often framed as a contested territory, where its land and sovereignty are up for competition. While recent escalating geopolitical tension has brought increasing international attention to Taiwan, international discourse on Taiwanese sovereignty has been largely limited to a traditional conception of war that views Taiwan as a geopolitical pawn in a ‘new Cold War’ between the United States and the People’s Republic of China or, under the banner of ‘geopolitical realism’, treats the rise of Taiwanese national identity as war-making. Both approaches minimize the significance of Taiwanese sovereignty and subjectivity in the struggle between superpowers. This article intervenes in both of these views by applying the framework of martial empiricism with an analysis of the subjectivity of war preparedness in Taiwanese civil society to demonstrate that war has become a normative and liberal mode of politics in Taiwan. From my ethnographic fieldwork on the grass-roots mobilization of civil defense in the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I illustrate how civil defense rearticulates war not as a distant, spectacular event but as a mundane scenario that can be prepared for through daily practices and communal planning in Taiwan.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135884344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-12DOI: 10.1177/09670106231189389
Georgios Glouftsios
In early 2021, the European Parliament established the Frontex Scrutiny Working Group (FSWG) to monitor all aspects of the functioning of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). The FSWG organized a series of public hearings and carried out a ‘fact-finding’ investigation to gather information and evidence about pushbacks of refugees in the Aegean Sea. By unpacking some of the controversies that emerged during the hearings of the FSWG, I explore how secrecy was practised and strategically employed to obscure the responsibility of Frontex for the reported pushbacks, and how it was contested through the presentation of related evidence. I explain how secrecy and related controversies and struggles over making pushbacks public involve a variety of actors that enrol and interact with a heterogeneous set of objects, including digital, visual and archival traces of violence at sea, as well as databases used to record information about maritime incidents. I argue that secrecy regarding pushbacks is not just about keeping information about people and objects involved in security operations hidden. Secrecy is also produced through the selective recording, (mis)categorization and circulation of information in the name of transparency.
{"title":"Making pushbacks public: Secrecy, material witnesses and devices of dis/appearance","authors":"Georgios Glouftsios","doi":"10.1177/09670106231189389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231189389","url":null,"abstract":"In early 2021, the European Parliament established the Frontex Scrutiny Working Group (FSWG) to monitor all aspects of the functioning of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). The FSWG organized a series of public hearings and carried out a ‘fact-finding’ investigation to gather information and evidence about pushbacks of refugees in the Aegean Sea. By unpacking some of the controversies that emerged during the hearings of the FSWG, I explore how secrecy was practised and strategically employed to obscure the responsibility of Frontex for the reported pushbacks, and how it was contested through the presentation of related evidence. I explain how secrecy and related controversies and struggles over making pushbacks public involve a variety of actors that enrol and interact with a heterogeneous set of objects, including digital, visual and archival traces of violence at sea, as well as databases used to record information about maritime incidents. I argue that secrecy regarding pushbacks is not just about keeping information about people and objects involved in security operations hidden. Secrecy is also produced through the selective recording, (mis)categorization and circulation of information in the name of transparency.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135884530","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-12DOI: 10.1177/09670106231187528
Stefan Elbe
Countries all around the world are increasingly coordinating their strategic responses to global health emergencies inside specialized new command centres called emergency operations centres (EOCs). Those bunker-like EOCs are meticulously designed to function as the global health equivalent of war rooms and are rapidly emerging as the internationally preferred sites for ‘making’ global health security in the 21st century. This article advances an in-depth site-ontological investigation into those burgeoning EOC sites. It develops a three-step methodological analytics to reveal the specific economy of prefigurative power that EOCs exude in international relations and names this oligoptical power. The article further shows how this oligoptical power is fundamentally different from the more familiar Foucauldian notion of panoptical power and has very different ramifications as it circulates throughout contemporary international relations. Yet, precisely because the EOC exemplifies this global operation of oligoptical power, the article concludes, it can be considered as one of its international signal institutions – similarly to how the prison was once a critical institutional site for revealing the circulation of disciplinary power, the laboratory for performing the sociological examination of science, and the concentration camp for deepening the analysis of biopower.
{"title":"Viral sites: The oligoptical power of emergency operations centres (EOCs)","authors":"Stefan Elbe","doi":"10.1177/09670106231187528","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231187528","url":null,"abstract":"Countries all around the world are increasingly coordinating their strategic responses to global health emergencies inside specialized new command centres called emergency operations centres (EOCs). Those bunker-like EOCs are meticulously designed to function as the global health equivalent of war rooms and are rapidly emerging as the internationally preferred sites for ‘making’ global health security in the 21st century. This article advances an in-depth site-ontological investigation into those burgeoning EOC sites. It develops a three-step methodological analytics to reveal the specific economy of prefigurative power that EOCs exude in international relations and names this oligoptical power. The article further shows how this oligoptical power is fundamentally different from the more familiar Foucauldian notion of panoptical power and has very different ramifications as it circulates throughout contemporary international relations. Yet, precisely because the EOC exemplifies this global operation of oligoptical power, the article concludes, it can be considered as one of its international signal institutions – similarly to how the prison was once a critical institutional site for revealing the circulation of disciplinary power, the laboratory for performing the sociological examination of science, and the concentration camp for deepening the analysis of biopower.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"122 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135884209","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1177/09670106231186942
Eva Magdalena Stambøl, Tobias Berger
Contemporary security interventions in Africa are characterized by an increasing pluralization of external actors, bringing with them new security rationalities, practices, and technologies, sometimes with profound influences on local security dynamics. While studies have focused empirically on East and South Africa, this article explores the roles of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey in the Sahel region of West Africa. To make sense of their engagement, we develop the notion of ‘transnational security entanglements’ by bringing the literature on (in)security assemblages into productive dialogue with scholarship on transnational entanglements in the fields of global history and law. Both literatures depart from relational ontologies, eschew methodological nationalism, and emphasize the interplay between the human and the non-human in the making of the social world. At the same time, we argue, the focus on entanglements adds a specific analytic of South–South connections and transregional circulations to extant scholarship on (in)security assemblages. To illustrate the importance of these transregional connections beyond the North Atlantic, we draw on interviews and media reports about the myriad ways in which connections between the UAE and Turkey with various actors in the Sahel shape current transformations of political orders in the region.
{"title":"Transnationally entangled (in)securities: The UAE, Turkey, and the Saharan political economy of danger","authors":"Eva Magdalena Stambøl, Tobias Berger","doi":"10.1177/09670106231186942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231186942","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary security interventions in Africa are characterized by an increasing pluralization of external actors, bringing with them new security rationalities, practices, and technologies, sometimes with profound influences on local security dynamics. While studies have focused empirically on East and South Africa, this article explores the roles of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey in the Sahel region of West Africa. To make sense of their engagement, we develop the notion of ‘transnational security entanglements’ by bringing the literature on (in)security assemblages into productive dialogue with scholarship on transnational entanglements in the fields of global history and law. Both literatures depart from relational ontologies, eschew methodological nationalism, and emphasize the interplay between the human and the non-human in the making of the social world. At the same time, we argue, the focus on entanglements adds a specific analytic of South–South connections and transregional circulations to extant scholarship on (in)security assemblages. To illustrate the importance of these transregional connections beyond the North Atlantic, we draw on interviews and media reports about the myriad ways in which connections between the UAE and Turkey with various actors in the Sahel shape current transformations of political orders in the region.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"107 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135981400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-31DOI: 10.1177/09670106231187267
Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Moritz Hütten
How can we make sense of tensions and contradictions in digitally mediated practices of anonymity and identification? This article calls for foregrounding computer protocols as key sites for locating how agency amongst increasingly complex sets of relations between human and non-human actors is impacting contemporary (in)security. We distinguish agency within and between contemporary finance/security infrastructures by tracing the development, application and updating of a particular set of computer protocols – blockchains. Locating agency at the site of these and other computer protocols, we argue, exposes security politics that have largely remained overlooked in the ongoing engagement of critical security studies with science and technology studies. Widening engagements with security devices, this article also broadens the interdisciplinary engagements of critical security studies with new media and software studies.
{"title":"Locating infrastructural agency: Computer protocols at the finance/security nexus","authors":"Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Moritz Hütten","doi":"10.1177/09670106231187267","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231187267","url":null,"abstract":"How can we make sense of tensions and contradictions in digitally mediated practices of anonymity and identification? This article calls for foregrounding computer protocols as key sites for locating how agency amongst increasingly complex sets of relations between human and non-human actors is impacting contemporary (in)security. We distinguish agency within and between contemporary finance/security infrastructures by tracing the development, application and updating of a particular set of computer protocols – blockchains. Locating agency at the site of these and other computer protocols, we argue, exposes security politics that have largely remained overlooked in the ongoing engagement of critical security studies with science and technology studies. Widening engagements with security devices, this article also broadens the interdisciplinary engagements of critical security studies with new media and software studies.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"54 1","pages":"455 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48336355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-08-01DOI: 10.1177/09670106231182314
Columba Achilleos-Sarll, Julia Sachseder, Saskia Stachowitsch
Visuals, including photographs and data visualizations, play a crucial role in the politics of EU border security, both as an internal governance tool (e.g. in surveillance) and as an external means of communication/representation (e.g. in photojournalism). Combining scholarship on photographic representations of migration with literature on surveillance technologies and data visualizations, we argue that these visuals interact to reproduce gendered and racialized meanings of migration and border security. Using a feminist postcolonial lens, we develop an intervisual framework for studying how processes of gendering and racialization render subjects, practices and spaces knowable at the intersection between these visuals. We apply this framework to a case study of Frontex's Risk Analysis Reports (2010-2021) and demonstrate how it is applicable to other security institutions. The intervisual analysis reveals how the migrant Other and (white) European are visually reproduced through: 1) the (in)visibilization of bodies; 2) the ascription and denial of agency; and 3) the spatialization of borders as 'frontier imaginings' that oscillate between fortification and expansionism. The intersectional co-constitution of gender and race, we conclude, is central to the visual politics of Frontex, contributing to problematizing migrants and migration and legitimizing violent border practices.
{"title":"The (inter)visual politics of border security: Co-constituting gender and race through Frontex's Risk Analysis.","authors":"Columba Achilleos-Sarll, Julia Sachseder, Saskia Stachowitsch","doi":"10.1177/09670106231182314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231182314","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Visuals, including photographs and data visualizations, play a crucial role in the politics of EU border security, both as an internal governance tool (e.g. in surveillance) and as an external means of communication/representation (e.g. in photojournalism). Combining scholarship on photographic representations of migration with literature on surveillance technologies and data visualizations, we argue that these visuals interact to reproduce gendered and racialized meanings of migration and border security. Using a feminist postcolonial lens, we develop an intervisual framework for studying how processes of gendering and racialization render subjects, practices and spaces knowable at the intersection between these visuals. We apply this framework to a case study of Frontex's Risk Analysis Reports (2010-2021) and demonstrate how it is applicable to other security institutions. The intervisual analysis reveals how the migrant Other and (white) European are visually reproduced through: 1) the (in)visibilization of bodies; 2) the ascription and denial of agency; and 3) the spatialization of borders as 'frontier imaginings' that oscillate between fortification and expansionism. The intersectional co-constitution of gender and race, we conclude, is central to the visual politics of Frontex, contributing to problematizing migrants and migration and legitimizing violent border practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"54 4","pages":"374-394"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10425278/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10303700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-25DOI: 10.1177/09670106231182800
Alison Howell, Melanie Richter-Montpetit
This article examines the #SdScandal: the backroom and public fracas surrounding an article on epistemic racism in classic securitization theory that we authored. It argues that what the #SdScandal illustrates is that disciplinary whiteness in international relations has been upheld not despite, but in part through, the ‘critical turn’. Using textual analysis as well as cyber-ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methods, it details how post-positivist knowledge-frames sometimes become vehicles for the rehabilitation of racial-colonial concepts, and how white femininities and novel tender masculinities can be evoked in the defence of institutional hierarchies. That such gendered shifts in disciplinary whiteness (seem to) depart from old-guard ‘white man’s IR’ (per Lake, 2016) only increases their efficacy in securing the status quo. The article further contextualizes this argument about international relations within the broad backlash against resurgent claims for racial justice both inside and outside the academy. It identifies political-intellectual convergences, not only between orthodox and some critical thought, but between right-wing and some self-identified liberal, leftist and/or feminist scholars, especially around the supposed threat of ‘cancellation’ of scholars and scholarship. Examining what critics of the #SdScandal called threats of retribution against this journal, it argues that at stake are issues of editorial independence and academic freedom, and, more broadly, contending visions of how to pursue anti-racism.
{"title":"Upholding disciplinary whiteness: The #SdScandal, gender and international relations’ critical turn","authors":"Alison Howell, Melanie Richter-Montpetit","doi":"10.1177/09670106231182800","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231182800","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the #SdScandal: the backroom and public fracas surrounding an article on epistemic racism in classic securitization theory that we authored. It argues that what the #SdScandal illustrates is that disciplinary whiteness in international relations has been upheld not despite, but in part through, the ‘critical turn’. Using textual analysis as well as cyber-ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methods, it details how post-positivist knowledge-frames sometimes become vehicles for the rehabilitation of racial-colonial concepts, and how white femininities and novel tender masculinities can be evoked in the defence of institutional hierarchies. That such gendered shifts in disciplinary whiteness (seem to) depart from old-guard ‘white man’s IR’ (per Lake, 2016) only increases their efficacy in securing the status quo. The article further contextualizes this argument about international relations within the broad backlash against resurgent claims for racial justice both inside and outside the academy. It identifies political-intellectual convergences, not only between orthodox and some critical thought, but between right-wing and some self-identified liberal, leftist and/or feminist scholars, especially around the supposed threat of ‘cancellation’ of scholars and scholarship. Examining what critics of the #SdScandal called threats of retribution against this journal, it argues that at stake are issues of editorial independence and academic freedom, and, more broadly, contending visions of how to pursue anti-racism.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"54 1","pages":"313 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42664979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-22DOI: 10.1177/09670106231182833
C. Boswell, James Besse
The UK government’s e-Borders project presents an intriguing anomaly: despite repeated and acknowledged failings of the project over two decades, it has remained a core part of border strategy across successive administrations. This article seeks to explain the surprising resilience of this programme by developing the concept of political lock-in. We combine insights from critical security studies with science and technology studies concepts of ‘tech hype’ and lock-in. We apply these insights to trace how e-Borders was constructed as a compelling technological solution to pressing security issues. This created a form of political lock-in, whereby the project became impossible to abandon because of its political urgency, despite increasing awareness of its unfeasibility. With the project caught in a liminal state of non-completion, successive governments expanded the scope of the programme by attaching new security problems to it, thereby rendering it even more unviable. Our analysis thus throws up a paradox: rather than mobilizing resources to accomplish its tech vision, securitization created forms of lock-in and paralysis that made the programme more difficult to accomplish.
{"title":"The strange resilience of the UK e-Borders programme: Technology hype, failure and lock-in in border control","authors":"C. Boswell, James Besse","doi":"10.1177/09670106231182833","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231182833","url":null,"abstract":"The UK government’s e-Borders project presents an intriguing anomaly: despite repeated and acknowledged failings of the project over two decades, it has remained a core part of border strategy across successive administrations. This article seeks to explain the surprising resilience of this programme by developing the concept of political lock-in. We combine insights from critical security studies with science and technology studies concepts of ‘tech hype’ and lock-in. We apply these insights to trace how e-Borders was constructed as a compelling technological solution to pressing security issues. This created a form of political lock-in, whereby the project became impossible to abandon because of its political urgency, despite increasing awareness of its unfeasibility. With the project caught in a liminal state of non-completion, successive governments expanded the scope of the programme by attaching new security problems to it, thereby rendering it even more unviable. Our analysis thus throws up a paradox: rather than mobilizing resources to accomplish its tech vision, securitization created forms of lock-in and paralysis that made the programme more difficult to accomplish.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"54 1","pages":"395 - 413"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45600498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-16DOI: 10.1177/09670106231165660
F. Sajjad
In this article, I, as a subaltern, offer a reverse gaze on White security plans to rescue the world from the tide of violent extremism. Violent extremism has been identified as a global security threat by the United Nations, which announced a Plan of Action to combat the threat in 2016. Education has been considered a valuable tool for preventing violent extremism. In 2017, UNESCO published a policy guide explaining how education can be used to prevent violent extremism. This article offers a critique of the UNESCO policy guide, using the construct of White ignorance as explained by Charles Mills and Jennifer Mueller’s Theory of Racial Ignorance. This critique, coming from a location (Pakistan) where education has been under intense White scrutiny since 9/11, owing to its alleged link with violent ideologies, provides an inverse perspective on the problem of violent extremism. Using Mills’s concept of the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that international security policies view security as maintenance of White hegemony and refuse to listen to the people labelled as a security problem by White epistemic authorities. I contend that it is the White security policy that needs to be educated to prevent violence and maintain durable security.
{"title":"A subaltern gaze on White ignorance, (in)security and the possibility of educating the White rescue plans","authors":"F. Sajjad","doi":"10.1177/09670106231165660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231165660","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I, as a subaltern, offer a reverse gaze on White security plans to rescue the world from the tide of violent extremism. Violent extremism has been identified as a global security threat by the United Nations, which announced a Plan of Action to combat the threat in 2016. Education has been considered a valuable tool for preventing violent extremism. In 2017, UNESCO published a policy guide explaining how education can be used to prevent violent extremism. This article offers a critique of the UNESCO policy guide, using the construct of White ignorance as explained by Charles Mills and Jennifer Mueller’s Theory of Racial Ignorance. This critique, coming from a location (Pakistan) where education has been under intense White scrutiny since 9/11, owing to its alleged link with violent ideologies, provides an inverse perspective on the problem of violent extremism. Using Mills’s concept of the epistemology of ignorance, I argue that international security policies view security as maintenance of White hegemony and refuse to listen to the people labelled as a security problem by White epistemic authorities. I contend that it is the White security policy that needs to be educated to prevent violence and maintain durable security.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"54 1","pages":"337 - 355"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45259338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-08DOI: 10.1177/09670106231156694
K. Soleimani, A. 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 teaching into practice without the need to consult either their superiors or the relevant authorities. Our article argues that, since 1979, the policy of ‘firing at will’ has been the defining feature of the Islamic Republic’s model of governance and corresponds to the spirit of its constitution. Inspired by the scholarship on disciplinary policies, this article seeks to contextualize the ‘firing at will’ policy within the ethno-religious and racial discourse embodied in and warranted by the Islamic Republic’s constitution. Finally, by discussing the state’s violent treatment of Kurdish kolbers (cross-border laborers), we will show how the Iranian state’s internal colonial policies have engendered a state of exception and normalized the daily spectacle of violence in Eastern Kurdistan.
{"title":"The everydayness of spectacle violence under the Islamic Republic: ‘Fire at will’","authors":"K. Soleimani, A. Mohammadpour","doi":"10.1177/09670106231156694","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231156694","url":null,"abstract":"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 teaching into practice without the need to consult either their superiors or the relevant authorities. Our article argues that, since 1979, the policy of ‘firing at will’ has been the defining feature of the Islamic Republic’s model of governance and corresponds to the spirit of its constitution. Inspired by the scholarship on disciplinary policies, this article seeks to contextualize the ‘firing at will’ policy within the ethno-religious and racial discourse embodied in and warranted by the Islamic Republic’s constitution. Finally, by discussing the state’s violent treatment of Kurdish kolbers (cross-border laborers), we will show how the Iranian state’s internal colonial policies have engendered a state of exception and normalized the daily spectacle of violence in Eastern Kurdistan.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"54 1","pages":"231 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48541458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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