Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2097440
Ana Soares
ABSTRACT This paper stems from two problematic topics encountered in the Copenhagen School’s securitisation theory (ST) scholarship and its developments. The first is the clash of ontologies among the different approaches to the theory, being two of them the political and sociological approaches. The second arises not only from the questioned role of the audience within the theory but also from its imprecise definition even after the advent of what can be called the ‘audience turn’. As some authors have paved the road for a more rigorous definition of the audience, there is still a cognitive gap between the securitising move and its acceptance that needs to be understood in its fullness. Given these points, this work offers a solution for the above conundrums by asking ‘what does securitisation do?’ instead of ‘what is securitisation?’. This shift results in the recognition of the audience’s agency in the form of accountability for accepting the securitising move. Moreover, this new focus stresses the constant motion needed to construct reality, resulting in two more properties credited to the audience’s definition: fluidity and multiplicity. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to emphasise the relevance of securitisation’s transformational power by revising and criticising the polarisation of the current literature, and at the same time to address not only the ‘problem of the audience’ but the cognitive gap within the securitisation process.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2111839
H. T. Furtado
ABSTRACT This contribution builds on my current research in exploring alternative ways of understanding the phenomenon of violence, traditionally conceived of as either a destructive force or a system of injustice. By exploring my personal position navigating between the borders of different versions of Europe (the Swedish border and the walls of gated communities in Brazil) the contribution explains how, in the modern colonial world, violence adopts a (re)creative or (re)creational aspect, fundamentally tying it to a whole economy of playfulness and pleasure. This economy is neither destructive nor necessarily unjust, in the sense that it complicates the liberal duality of inclusion/exclusion, structuring the pursuance of the easy life (a mode of living that maximises convenience) in different levels of (post)colonial racialised ‘enclaves’. The reflection ends with an invitation to take the concept of (re)creative violence seriously and to rethink the specific role of death and insecurity in the making of the international order.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2128596
Håvard Rustad Markussen
ABSTRACT This article contributes to our understanding of security devices by engaging with the distinctiveness of one particular and especially important device: the smartphone. Drawing from Barad’s understanding of posthumanist performativity and turning to the smartphone literature outside of security studies, it develops a conceptual account of the smartphone as a security device. The article suggests that the smartphone stands out from other comparable devices because humans have come to embody its connective features. Using the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as an illustration, the article shows how the smartphone’s intra-action with users enable the crafting of new security practices through appropriations of embodied connectivity, especially when such appropriations are carried out on the streets. The police appropriated the smartphone to monitor social media activity and for geofencing, while the protesters appropriated it to obfuscate data and for livestreaming. By (re)locating the negotiation of competing security interests in the (extended) bodies of the protesters through the affordance of these practices, the smartphone contributed to the acceleration and intensification of a racialised spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2111836
Guillaume Lacombe-Kishibe
‘A Secret Heliotropism’ is a short choose-your-own-adventure game story loosely inspired by Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History, particularly theses 12, 13 and 14. Players choose the path of a series of revolutionary movements throughout a (very) abstract history of class struggle. The game is meant to evoke Benjamin’s criticism of the progressive politics (namely ‘Social Democratic theory’) facing down fascism in his time that saw historical progress as the boundless perfectibility of humankind moving unerringly through a ‘homogenous, empty time.’ For Benjamin, however, progress as understood from a historical materialist perspective focuses on the struggles of the oppressed class es in their attempts to interrupt the historical continuum. This is hopefully reflected in the player’s repeated struggles for liberation, which ultimately culminate in Benjamin’s reflections on the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus. ‘A Secret Heliotropism’ can be played here https://bit.ly/3aHcCdG. To play, download the .html file and open it in your browser.
《A Secret Heliotropism》是一款简短的选择冒险游戏故事，灵感来自Walter Benjamin的《On the Concept of History》，特别是第12、13和14条。玩家可以在(非常)抽象的阶级斗争历史中选择一系列革命运动的道路。这款游戏旨在唤起本雅明对当时对抗法西斯主义的进步政治(即“社会民主主义理论”)的批评，他认为历史进步是人类在“同质的、空洞的时间”中准确无误地前进的无限完美性。然而，对本雅明来说，从历史唯物主义的角度理解的进步集中在被压迫阶级的斗争上，他们试图打断历史的连续性。希望这能反映在玩家为解放而反复的斗争中，最终在Benjamin对Paul Klee的画作Angelus Novus的反思中达到高潮。“A Secret Heliotropism”可以在这里玩https://bit.ly/3aHcCdG。要播放，请下载.html文件并在浏览器中打开它。
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2111835
Aggie Hirst, Chris Rossdale
In the current ludic century, both academic and popular discussions have examined the politics, pitfalls and possibilities of games. Yet play, the force that drives games and many activities besides, has received scant attention. This elision is in part explained by the assumption that play is singularly unserious – it is assumed to be the preserve of animals, children and down-time. Often considered the opposite of work and reason, a ‘malediction of play’ is in evidence across both Western philosophy and culture. Yet play is everywhere at work across both institutional and everyday global politics. And it is serious business. Play provides relief and respite from the exhaustion of working life. It features across leisure activities far beyond games, in theatre, literature, sex, food and clubbing/rave cultures. Play is seriously at work in resistance movements from Emma Goldman’s dancing revolution to the absurdism of the Situationists. Play is central to processes of subjectification, identity and community formation, from childhood to old age. As such, play is a vital force, the opposite of depression: play is what makes life ‘lifey’. At the same time, play is central to reactionary politics and culture, integral to the formation and maintenance of exclusionary and supremacist political communities. Play is thus implicated in forms of hierarchy and exclusion as much as our search for new realities, renewal and release. This special section of Interventions reflects on experiences of play within and beyond academic life. Contributions explore topics including the self at/in play, the politics of childish play, play and the stage, play and friendship, play and resistance/revolution, play on/at borders and play in the flux of identity. The authors draw from a number of critical and reflexive IR traditions and interrogate the politics of play, but also situate play as an embodied, affective and lived experience across these including gender, sexuality, migration, performance and interpellation. We hope this issue sparks further debate about, and engagement with, the hitherto underexplored theme of play in IR and related fields.
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2111837
Graham M. Smith
I. In one retelling of creation, God creates humans not once, but twice. In the first story of creation, these humans (both male and female) are said to be conjured in God’s image. They are told to fill the earth and subdue it. In contrast, having finished His work, God rests. In the second story of creation, God forms man from dust and breathes life into what He fashions. Later, God subdivides His creation to save the man from being alone. The two humans are thus both a part of each other, but separate from one another: ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’. They are an excess or luxury in an otherwise economic and purposeful system. Everything is in its place and nothing could be elsewhere. There is divine order. Childlike and innocent, these second humans are left to be together and to play in the Garden. We all know they were heading for a fall – there is trickery in the Garden . . . II. In one of the stories about the beginning, the fruit of two trees are forbidden to the humans: ‘the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. The serpent ‘more crafty than any beast of the field’ isn’t lying when it speaks about the nature of the fruit of the first tree. Having eaten from it, the humans are banished lest they eat from the second tree that would give them immortality. God can bear no equals – and He sets a hierarchy between himself and humans, and between the man and woman. After the Garden, humans are thrown back on to each other. Friendship with God does not seem possible. God is unitary and complete; the humans are multiple and forever unfinished. No longer childlike and innocent, they are to toil and suffer. They are left to contemplate each other and their own lack of purpose and necessity (it is their pathway to friendship and play). III. Abraham is an exceptional human being as he is said to be the friend of God. Outside of monotheism, humans find themselves as both the playthings and the playmates of the gods. Friendship is found in invention, transgression, trickery, and treachery. It is found in the interplay of humans and gods, and every creature and being both mythical and mundane. Such a world is open and dynamic. It is a woven patchwork of disparate pieces and contradictions (ontologically, spatially, temporally). In such a world that is both unfinished and unfinishable, friendship and play, in all their myriad varieties, can flourish. IV. Exposing humans as the murderers of God, Nietzsche’s Madman exhorts us to contemplate the sacred games we shall have to invent to be worthy of the deed. He asks whether we shall have to become gods even to seem worthy of the deed. The crime precipitates nihilism: this condition is kaleidoscopic. Once again humans are free to play; humans are free to forge new forms of
{"title":"Sixteen fragments on friendship and play","authors":"Graham M. Smith","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2022.2111837","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2022.2111837","url":null,"abstract":"I. In one retelling of creation, God creates humans not once, but twice. In the first story of creation, these humans (both male and female) are said to be conjured in God’s image. They are told to fill the earth and subdue it. In contrast, having finished His work, God rests. In the second story of creation, God forms man from dust and breathes life into what He fashions. Later, God subdivides His creation to save the man from being alone. The two humans are thus both a part of each other, but separate from one another: ‘bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh’. They are an excess or luxury in an otherwise economic and purposeful system. Everything is in its place and nothing could be elsewhere. There is divine order. Childlike and innocent, these second humans are left to be together and to play in the Garden. We all know they were heading for a fall – there is trickery in the Garden . . . II. In one of the stories about the beginning, the fruit of two trees are forbidden to the humans: ‘the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. The serpent ‘more crafty than any beast of the field’ isn’t lying when it speaks about the nature of the fruit of the first tree. Having eaten from it, the humans are banished lest they eat from the second tree that would give them immortality. God can bear no equals – and He sets a hierarchy between himself and humans, and between the man and woman. After the Garden, humans are thrown back on to each other. Friendship with God does not seem possible. God is unitary and complete; the humans are multiple and forever unfinished. No longer childlike and innocent, they are to toil and suffer. They are left to contemplate each other and their own lack of purpose and necessity (it is their pathway to friendship and play). III. Abraham is an exceptional human being as he is said to be the friend of God. Outside of monotheism, humans find themselves as both the playthings and the playmates of the gods. Friendship is found in invention, transgression, trickery, and treachery. It is found in the interplay of humans and gods, and every creature and being both mythical and mundane. Such a world is open and dynamic. It is a woven patchwork of disparate pieces and contradictions (ontologically, spatially, temporally). In such a world that is both unfinished and unfinishable, friendship and play, in all their myriad varieties, can flourish. IV. Exposing humans as the murderers of God, Nietzsche’s Madman exhorts us to contemplate the sacred games we shall have to invent to be worthy of the deed. He asks whether we shall have to become gods even to seem worthy of the deed. The crime precipitates nihilism: this condition is kaleidoscopic. Once again humans are free to play; humans are free to forge new forms of","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":"10 1","pages":"102 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44243532","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 : 2022-04-18DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2060062
Gideon van Riet
ABSTRACT This paper builds on the notions of topology, scene and relationality in this special edition by highlighting asymmetries following from overdependence on private security companies (PSCs) in a settler colonial context. The locus is the JB Marks Municipality in South Africa. This municipality includes the historically white and middleclass town of Potchefstroom and the historically black township of Ikageng. These two scenes differentially address the gap left by an under-resourced state police. In Potchefstroom, PSCs, social media platforms and other infrastructures are intertwined with the sociality of daily life. In Ikageng, a ‘vigilante group’, the Peri Peri, has attempted to fill a similar gap. While reliance on racist and classist state policing has been pointed out as problematic globally, this paper suggests that reliance on non-state policing may not be any less problematic. The paper argues that tacit and provisional acceptance, which can be withdrawn, of the technically extra-legal activities by non-state security providers, might, in the interim, be a pragmatic way to allow effective security provision by non-state actors. However, tacit approval is no substitute for addressing a broader topology of inequality and insecurity through macroeconomic and spatial transformation.
{"title":"Topology, scene and asymmetries in security provision in a small South African city","authors":"Gideon van Riet","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2022.2060062","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2022.2060062","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper builds on the notions of topology, scene and relationality in this special edition by highlighting asymmetries following from overdependence on private security companies (PSCs) in a settler colonial context. The locus is the JB Marks Municipality in South Africa. This municipality includes the historically white and middleclass town of Potchefstroom and the historically black township of Ikageng. These two scenes differentially address the gap left by an under-resourced state police. In Potchefstroom, PSCs, social media platforms and other infrastructures are intertwined with the sociality of daily life. In Ikageng, a ‘vigilante group’, the Peri Peri, has attempted to fill a similar gap. While reliance on racist and classist state policing has been pointed out as problematic globally, this paper suggests that reliance on non-state policing may not be any less problematic. The paper argues that tacit and provisional acceptance, which can be withdrawn, of the technically extra-legal activities by non-state security providers, might, in the interim, be a pragmatic way to allow effective security provision by non-state actors. However, tacit approval is no substitute for addressing a broader topology of inequality and insecurity through macroeconomic and spatial transformation.","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":"62 S11","pages":"14 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2022-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41258349","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 : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2073740
Mai Anh Nguyen
ABSTRACT Children have comprised a significant part of past and present military conflicts; however, attempts to understand their motivations have generally focused on coerced recruitment. When children join military groups without physical coercion, they are portrayed as being driven by economic and social deprivations. This article investigates factors that have been disproportionately overlooked as motivators for child soldiers – social contexts, relationships, and personal histories. To this end, I use a relational approach to analyse life histories of former Viet Cong child soldiers. I explore their lives prior to joining the Viet Cong guerrillas and trace how their choice to do so had been shaped by societal factors including family, perceptions of a good childhood, and previous war exposure. My interviews further indicate that children actively reproduced and appropriated the same practices that predisposed them to take up arms. Evaluated against the backdrop of their social and internal lives, the decision of child soldiers to participate in the Vietnam War is understood to be a product of their personal and social histories. These findings challenge the stereotypical image of the passive child soldier. Such historisation of children’s recruitment helps to destigmatise child soldiers’ experience and allow for a more nuanced understanding of their decisions.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2022.2062926
Mathias Ericson, Misse Wester
ABSTRACT Critical security studies examine how everyday life is affected or transformed by practices that militarise civil society. This article addresses one such area: qualitative changes in the openness and transparency of public administration, instating a mode of suspicion and secrecy. The article is based on interviews and observations in the area of the total defence in Sweden, where we during three years encountered challenges in gaining access to authorities that initially welcomed participation of researchers, but progressively became inaccessible. We use these experiences to reflect on both methodological issues and wider implications for the securitisation of civil society. The article concludes that difficulties in gaining access to the field may itself serve as valuable data in understanding the changing condition of public administration in a time of militarisation.
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