Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2023.2208942
A. Dwyer, A. Langenohl, Philipp Lottholz
ABSTRACT Postcolonial and postsocialist thought has critiqued Critical Security Studies (CSS) on its Eurocentric orientation in terms of its concepts, categories, and concerns of security. In this introductory text, we discuss a concept in tension – topology/scene – to deepen a dialogue between postcolonial and postsocialist scholarship alongside insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Drawing on various contributions, we demonstrate how topology/scene enables critical reflections on how the ‘networked’, material approaches to security exemplified by STS can be put into a productive conversation with critiques grounded in postcolonial and postsocialist theory and praxis. Topologies and scenes of security are thus offered as a method to reflect, interrogate, and question existing relationalities of in/security as well as the power of different materials, discourses, organisations, and people in various times and places. We seek to move beyond the scalar hierarchies of ‘local’ and ‘global’ to question and investigate uneven power relations. Along with contributions in this special issue, it is possible to point towards the potential to situate inquiry across thus-far ‘peripheral’ places and societal milieus to offer insights into the experiences and understandings of in/security which have been rendered invisible or marginal.
{"title":"Topologies of security: inquiring in/security across postcolonial and postsocialist scenes","authors":"A. Dwyer, A. Langenohl, Philipp Lottholz","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2023.2208942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2023.2208942","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Postcolonial and postsocialist thought has critiqued Critical Security Studies (CSS) on its Eurocentric orientation in terms of its concepts, categories, and concerns of security. In this introductory text, we discuss a concept in tension – topology/scene – to deepen a dialogue between postcolonial and postsocialist scholarship alongside insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Drawing on various contributions, we demonstrate how topology/scene enables critical reflections on how the ‘networked’, material approaches to security exemplified by STS can be put into a productive conversation with critiques grounded in postcolonial and postsocialist theory and praxis. Topologies and scenes of security are thus offered as a method to reflect, interrogate, and question existing relationalities of in/security as well as the power of different materials, discourses, organisations, and people in various times and places. We seek to move beyond the scalar hierarchies of ‘local’ and ‘global’ to question and investigate uneven power relations. Along with contributions in this special issue, it is possible to point towards the potential to situate inquiry across thus-far ‘peripheral’ places and societal milieus to offer insights into the experiences and understandings of in/security which have been rendered invisible or marginal.","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46427515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2147328
Danijela Majstorovic
When the small gatherings of concerned citizens started at the main Krajina square in Banja Luka, following the disappearance of the 21-year-old electrical engineering student, David Dragičević, on 18 March 2018, nobody could have predicted that they would evolve into large-scale and the longest-lasting protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with the Justice for David (JFD) and Justice for Dženan movements crossing BiH’s administrative and ethnic borders. David’s case, allegedly at the hand of some of the Republika Srpska police members, was brought into connection with another unresolved murder case, the one of the 22year-old Dženan Memić who died in February 2016 in Sarajevo under suspicious circumstances, allegedly at the hand of people close to the ruling Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Both cases faced attempted silencing, tampering with evidence and altogether lacked proper police investigation or prosecution by the judiciary for months on end, spurring the social protests against the current state structures. As the constitutional design plays a crucial role within the ongoing crisis of the country, it is important to give the contours of BiH setup. After the 1992–1995 war, the country has been divided into the two entities and Brčko district and has since Dayton Peace Agreement (Dayton) been ruled by ethnonationalist political elites, most notably the SDA and the SNSD. The two fathers organising the protests, Davor Dragičević and Muriz Memić, blamed the dominant political parties in the two entities, SDA in the Federation of BiH and SNSD in the Republika Srpska (RS), including the entity police and judiciary for what happened to their children. Amidst negligence and lack of due procedure necessary to resolve the cases, citizens of Banja Luka and Sarajevo joined the protests, symbolically and organically uniting Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for the first time. These two cases also forged new relationships and forms of affective sociality within which security-related stakes and concerns rearticulated security as care but also the meaning social justice in this European periphery. Photo 1 by Aleksandar Trifunović, Buka magazine
{"title":"‘The state killed my child’: security, justice and affective sociality in the European periphery","authors":"Danijela Majstorovic","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2022.2147328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2022.2147328","url":null,"abstract":"When the small gatherings of concerned citizens started at the main Krajina square in Banja Luka, following the disappearance of the 21-year-old electrical engineering student, David Dragičević, on 18 March 2018, nobody could have predicted that they would evolve into large-scale and the longest-lasting protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with the Justice for David (JFD) and Justice for Dženan movements crossing BiH’s administrative and ethnic borders. David’s case, allegedly at the hand of some of the Republika Srpska police members, was brought into connection with another unresolved murder case, the one of the 22year-old Dženan Memić who died in February 2016 in Sarajevo under suspicious circumstances, allegedly at the hand of people close to the ruling Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Both cases faced attempted silencing, tampering with evidence and altogether lacked proper police investigation or prosecution by the judiciary for months on end, spurring the social protests against the current state structures. As the constitutional design plays a crucial role within the ongoing crisis of the country, it is important to give the contours of BiH setup. After the 1992–1995 war, the country has been divided into the two entities and Brčko district and has since Dayton Peace Agreement (Dayton) been ruled by ethnonationalist political elites, most notably the SDA and the SNSD. The two fathers organising the protests, Davor Dragičević and Muriz Memić, blamed the dominant political parties in the two entities, SDA in the Federation of BiH and SNSD in the Republika Srpska (RS), including the entity police and judiciary for what happened to their children. Amidst negligence and lack of due procedure necessary to resolve the cases, citizens of Banja Luka and Sarajevo joined the protests, symbolically and organically uniting Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for the first time. These two cases also forged new relationships and forms of affective sociality within which security-related stakes and concerns rearticulated security as care but also the meaning social justice in this European periphery. Photo 1 by Aleksandar Trifunović, Buka magazine","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45285919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-15DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2134699
Alexandra Gheciu
In early 2020, as many parts of the world went into unprecedented lockdowns, senior EU officials stated that only a united approach would enable Europe to address a pandemic that was endangering the security of individuals and societies. In the words of the European Commission President, ‘in this crisis, and in our Union more generally, it is only by helping each other that we can help ourselves’ (Von der 2020). In this context, it is important to ask: how has the European (in)security environment evolved in the context of the COVID pandemic? This article addresses that question by drawing on insights from the field of Critical Security Studies (CSS) and post-colonial/postsocialist perspectives. Those insights help us understand how, contrary to statements of solidarity issued by senior EU politicians, the pandemic has accentuated structural inequalities and the condition of (in)security experienced by many vulnerable individuals across Europe. The focus in this article is on developments concerning Central Europe, in an attempt to advance understanding of the important – yet still under-studied – role played by post-socialist spaces in the redefinition of the (in)security environment in Europe and, more broadly, in the (re)construction of the EU (see also Mälksoo 2021; Lovec, Kočí, and Šabič et al. 2021). Understanding developments in postsocialist spaces enables us to shed light on similarities between the dehumanising practices enacted by Central European governments and by their West European counterparts, and deepens knowledge of the conflicts and contradictions that lie at the heart of European politics. Central to these contradictions is the growing clash between liberal/illiberal ideas and political forces that has profoundly affected EU politics in recent years, and that has become particularly acute in the context of the COVID pandemic.
{"title":"Changing scenes of security in the time of the coronavirus pandemic","authors":"Alexandra Gheciu","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2022.2134699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2022.2134699","url":null,"abstract":"In early 2020, as many parts of the world went into unprecedented lockdowns, senior EU officials stated that only a united approach would enable Europe to address a pandemic that was endangering the security of individuals and societies. In the words of the European Commission President, ‘in this crisis, and in our Union more generally, it is only by helping each other that we can help ourselves’ (Von der 2020). In this context, it is important to ask: how has the European (in)security environment evolved in the context of the COVID pandemic? This article addresses that question by drawing on insights from the field of Critical Security Studies (CSS) and post-colonial/postsocialist perspectives. Those insights help us understand how, contrary to statements of solidarity issued by senior EU politicians, the pandemic has accentuated structural inequalities and the condition of (in)security experienced by many vulnerable individuals across Europe. The focus in this article is on developments concerning Central Europe, in an attempt to advance understanding of the important – yet still under-studied – role played by post-socialist spaces in the redefinition of the (in)security environment in Europe and, more broadly, in the (re)construction of the EU (see also Mälksoo 2021; Lovec, Kočí, and Šabič et al. 2021). Understanding developments in postsocialist spaces enables us to shed light on similarities between the dehumanising practices enacted by Central European governments and by their West European counterparts, and deepens knowledge of the conflicts and contradictions that lie at the heart of European politics. Central to these contradictions is the growing clash between liberal/illiberal ideas and political forces that has profoundly affected EU politics in recent years, and that has become particularly acute in the context of the COVID pandemic.","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46150985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2023.2167773
Rens van Munster, Casper Sylvest
ABSTRACT Since the late 1990s, the critical study of security has crystallised into a professional field of study – Critical Security Studies (CSS) – complete with theoretical schools, journals, and disciplinary narratives that recount its birth and development. The establishment of CSS as a separate field of inquiry distinct from conventional approaches to security is a remarkable achievement but has also come at a price. We argue that this is especially apparent in relation to the limited role Cold War history plays in CSS. Disciplinary narratives of the field tend to conflate the Cold War period with conventional security theory or strategic studies, thus downplaying the originality and importance of critical perspectives articulated during this protracted conflict. Emphasising the deep entanglements of the Cold War nuclear arms race with questions of ecological contamination, democracy, race, and decolonisation, we argue that these intersections are worth revisiting as intellectual precursors and foundations for CSS. We briefly illustrate this argument by highlighting important challenges to conventional security thinking that were formulated at three interconnected sites during the early Cold War: the 1955 Bandung Conference, Pan-African resistance to French nuclear testing in Algeria, and African-American anti-nuclear activism.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2185856
Tina Managhan, Dan Bulley
This special issue starts from some simple questions, questions that are periodically raised throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences, including in Critical Security Studies (CSS) and critical International Relations (IR). Yet they are important enough to be repeatedly re-posed at key moments. What is an author? What role does the ‘author’ figure perform in contemporary CSS? How do claims made alongside or against an author undergird or undercut the authority of research, arguments, claims and statements in the field? What does it do to a field that sought to challenge, disrupt and overturn authority claims when its own reliance on foundational authors and their gendered, racialised assumptions is called into question? Michel Foucault famously claimed that in Western culture, the author serves as an ‘ideological figure’ insofar as it is via reference to ‘the author’ that the proliferation of meanings inherent to an author’s work, inherent to language, stops (Foucault 1984, 118–119). The cultural function of the author is to provide coherence, to individualise and to neutralise contradictions and slippages within and between texts. This is evident, for example, when we debate what is most representative of an author’s work and what is not, or what ‘turns’ an author’s work may have taken, such as a ‘political’, ‘aesthetic’ or ‘ethical turn’. It is also evident in what is presupposed in our citational practices when we invoke an author’s ‘authority’ and, in turn, signify our own and/or others belonging to a particular intellectual community or ‘school’. While such insights speak to the importance of questioning authors and authority, they also point to the acute problems that can arise when, as a result of this work, one or more of the canonical figures of an intellectual community is reread against the grain of contemporary sensibilities, if not the ethical commitments of that community. This has been well evidenced by contemporary controversies in CSS – including those resulting from accusations of sexual misconduct against Foucault and those of racism against the Copenhagen School, the latter of which have been interpreted by some as an assault on the authors and intellectual authority of that School. Both controversies have reinvigorated debates about whose voices have been privileged and whose have been marginalised not only in CSS but in the production of knowledge more generally – in short, in the authorship of our world. Foucault, of course, variously resisted the imposition of these and other ordering practices – tirelessly illustrating the imbrication of truth claims and knowledge with power, whilst provoking controversy with his conduct and ideas. This is beautifully illustrated by Erzsebet Strausz’s contribution to this special issue, as it explores the inconsistency and slipperiness of Foucault as an author. And perhaps this resistance to ordering practices also provides Foucault’s most vital contribution to CSS. Alongside po
{"title":"‘What is an author?’: critical reflections on authors and authority in critical security studies – introduction","authors":"Tina Managhan, Dan Bulley","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2022.2185856","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2022.2185856","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue starts from some simple questions, questions that are periodically raised throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences, including in Critical Security Studies (CSS) and critical International Relations (IR). Yet they are important enough to be repeatedly re-posed at key moments. What is an author? What role does the ‘author’ figure perform in contemporary CSS? How do claims made alongside or against an author undergird or undercut the authority of research, arguments, claims and statements in the field? What does it do to a field that sought to challenge, disrupt and overturn authority claims when its own reliance on foundational authors and their gendered, racialised assumptions is called into question? Michel Foucault famously claimed that in Western culture, the author serves as an ‘ideological figure’ insofar as it is via reference to ‘the author’ that the proliferation of meanings inherent to an author’s work, inherent to language, stops (Foucault 1984, 118–119). The cultural function of the author is to provide coherence, to individualise and to neutralise contradictions and slippages within and between texts. This is evident, for example, when we debate what is most representative of an author’s work and what is not, or what ‘turns’ an author’s work may have taken, such as a ‘political’, ‘aesthetic’ or ‘ethical turn’. It is also evident in what is presupposed in our citational practices when we invoke an author’s ‘authority’ and, in turn, signify our own and/or others belonging to a particular intellectual community or ‘school’. While such insights speak to the importance of questioning authors and authority, they also point to the acute problems that can arise when, as a result of this work, one or more of the canonical figures of an intellectual community is reread against the grain of contemporary sensibilities, if not the ethical commitments of that community. This has been well evidenced by contemporary controversies in CSS – including those resulting from accusations of sexual misconduct against Foucault and those of racism against the Copenhagen School, the latter of which have been interpreted by some as an assault on the authors and intellectual authority of that School. Both controversies have reinvigorated debates about whose voices have been privileged and whose have been marginalised not only in CSS but in the production of knowledge more generally – in short, in the authorship of our world. Foucault, of course, variously resisted the imposition of these and other ordering practices – tirelessly illustrating the imbrication of truth claims and knowledge with power, whilst provoking controversy with his conduct and ideas. This is beautifully illustrated by Erzsebet Strausz’s contribution to this special issue, as it explores the inconsistency and slipperiness of Foucault as an author. And perhaps this resistance to ordering practices also provides Foucault’s most vital contribution to CSS. Alongside po","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42051939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2134698
Erzsébet Strausz
ABSTRACT This article engages questions of authority and authorship in the discipline and the IR classroom, driven by a search for affirmative horizons within critical scholarship and academic practice. Prompted by a series of ‘failures’ attached to the social and disciplinary performance of ‘expertise’ in the context of violent conflict, I explore the practice of writing as it unfolds from Michel Foucault’s lesser cited essays and interviews as a generative, creative resource. I follow Foucault in breaking down the normalised perceptions of the ‘author function,’ revealing writing as an act that diagnoses, discovers, and potentially transforms writer, reader and the social structures that the writing addresses. Foucault’s experimental ethos brings to light the complex life worlds of sense-making through the vehicle of writing. It also invites us to embrace the transgenerational heritage that quietly structures our relationships to knowledge together with the multiple selves that arise and are co-present in the text. I enter such processes of negotiation and transgression in Foucault’s work and my own writing through a series of vignettes, which aim to actualise the ‘method’ these gestures may harbour for making ‘uncommon sense’ and re-inhabiting research and pedagogical practice as continuous, self-reflexive and self-authori(zi)ng journeys.
{"title":"Writing with Foucault: openings to transformational knowledge practices in and beyond the classroom","authors":"Erzsébet Strausz","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2022.2134698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2022.2134698","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article engages questions of authority and authorship in the discipline and the IR classroom, driven by a search for affirmative horizons within critical scholarship and academic practice. Prompted by a series of ‘failures’ attached to the social and disciplinary performance of ‘expertise’ in the context of violent conflict, I explore the practice of writing as it unfolds from Michel Foucault’s lesser cited essays and interviews as a generative, creative resource. I follow Foucault in breaking down the normalised perceptions of the ‘author function,’ revealing writing as an act that diagnoses, discovers, and potentially transforms writer, reader and the social structures that the writing addresses. Foucault’s experimental ethos brings to light the complex life worlds of sense-making through the vehicle of writing. It also invites us to embrace the transgenerational heritage that quietly structures our relationships to knowledge together with the multiple selves that arise and are co-present in the text. I enter such processes of negotiation and transgression in Foucault’s work and my own writing through a series of vignettes, which aim to actualise the ‘method’ these gestures may harbour for making ‘uncommon sense’ and re-inhabiting research and pedagogical practice as continuous, self-reflexive and self-authori(zi)ng journeys.","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48041121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2023.2184100
Tina Managhan
ABSTRACT Thirty-two years after the publication of Ashley and Walker’s (1990) article, ‘Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies’, critical IR still fails to de-centre structures of white, male authority. This essay will consider the charge of patricide (and related imputations) directed at those who have arguably done precisely this – insofar as they have explicitly, and without apology, illuminated the racist underpinnings of Foucauldian and Copenhagen School ontologies and, hence, the very foundations of a great deal of scholarship in Critical Security Studies (CSS). Far from just another barb in a fractious debate, this essay will argue that the charge of patricide deserves our attention. It reveals a great deal about what is at stake – not only in terms of what can be said, what can be heard, and who can speak, but also in terms of what drives these delimitations: our emotional attachments to authors in general and white, male authority structures in particular.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-22DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2104517
Cian O’Driscoll
ABSTRACT Can war ever be justified? And what, if any, limits should bear on the waging of war? These questions are the stock-in-trade of scholars of just war theory. Hailing from a wide variety of academic disciplines, scholars of just war theory have historically been inclusive when it comes to the kinds of texts that they consider legitimate source-material. Legal treatises, biblical commentaries, political speeches, and military codeshave all been embraced, alongside academic writings on the ethics of war . It comes as some surprise, then, to observe the reticence that some just war theorists have displayed when invited to consider the novels of the Vietnam veteran and celebrated war writer Tim O’Brien as a body of work worthy of their analysis. Why, this article asks, are just war theorists so afraid of Tim O’Brien? And what does this tell us about the direction in which contemporary just war theory is moving? The article will argue that the reason just war theorists have been apprehensive about engaging O’Brien’s work is also the reason why they should read it. This alerts us, it concludes, to the case for (re-)envisioning just war theory in existentialist terms.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-11DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2099207
M. Murphy
ABSTRACT The conventional author-driven summary of the Stern–Gerlach experiment omits the fact that their famous measurements only appeared when the smoke of a poor graduate student’s cheap cigar produced a reaction with the silver atoms. Indeed, this crucial experiment in the history of quantum physics would have been impossible if not for the fortuitous intersection of behavioural norms for white male elite – cigar smoking at the laboratory bench – and the material conditions of the junior scientist – a socioeconomic status that left him unable to afford higher-quality cigars. While the simplistic narrative of authorship may conveniently reduce this experiment to Stern and Gerlach, a quantum reading of this quantum experiment reveals the ontological entanglement of identity, materiality, social norms and the experimental apparatus itself with the authors – and, just with other entangled phenomena, our apparently simple description is woefully incomplete without acknowledging its entangled reality. Intervening into a decades-long debate on the nature of authorship, observation and rigour in critical security studies, I argue that the quantum model of ontologically entangled observation offers a powerful model for problematising authority in critical security studies .
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Pub Date : 2022-06-26DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2091913
Ana Ivasiuc
ABSTRACT Security has come to embody a self-evident and much sought-after kind of good, and has come to colonise imaginaries, debates, policies, and large swathes of what social life means in various corners of the world. Echoing postcolonial calls for decentring that which is taken for granted, my essay seeks to provincialise security in three distinct ways. Drawing on my research on the securitisation of the Roma in Italy, first, I trace the transformation of the term sicurezza from safety to security in a recent-historical perspective, showing how the notion morphed from bodily integrity to a much more blurred – though taken for granted – concept. Second, using a non-representational approach grounded in new materialism, I show that what hides beneath the ubiquitous talk of sicurezza surrounding the Roma nowadays are dimensions of materiality and sensoriality that construct insecurity in a relational and ever-shifting manner. Third, I privilege the perspective of the Roma in a decolonising move that questions their securitisation and the overall framing of Roma-related concerns as a security problem. Finally, I show the productivity of the topology framework in provincialising both security, and the western-centric theory production around it.
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