Pub Date : 2021-12-08DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2012395
R. G. Emerson
ABSTRACT Written 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of violence’ offers an escape from the biopolitical spiral into death. It confronts the violent underside to a politics of life by refusing to justify force on set political-legal grounds, and, by offering readings that continually undermine any official position. First, critique is mindful of the spurious ends and means of biopower: the violence deployed to protect life that requires evermore force against anything threatening, and, the violence said to optimise life that eliminates anything debilitating. Second, critique moves beyond such justifications. It does so in reference to Benjamin’s concept of the divine that appreciates violence through criteria irreducible to official foundations. An understanding of violence is not mediated by government, but continually extended in how individuals live such violence in novel ways. A critique of biopolitical violence accordingly moves from a deadly productivity coincident with political-legal authority (the violence of bio-power), to how such violence generates new ways of thinking and acting (a bio-politics of violence).
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Pub Date : 2021-12-01DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2012394
Jiayi Zhou
ABSTRACT This paper addresses an analytical gap in critical security studies related to the social construction, legitimation, and institutionalisation of referents objects, or the ‘for whom’ of security. As it lays out, referent objects tend to be assessed based on pre-theoretical commitments that themselves fall outside of the scope of critical security analysis. This has important analytical and ethical consequences, which I heuristically illustrate in relation to ‘the individual’ in both Copenhagen School securitisation theory and human-centred security. In one case, the individual is understood as an atomised Hobbesian figure at odds with the collective, and in the other, as a socially embedded figure representative of humanity. Incommensurate ontological baselines have on the one hand stymied fruitful dialogue between these two influential approaches. More importantly, however, fixed perspectives on ‘the individual’ have also served to limit each approach’s purview, even on their own terms. In highlighting the value of de-naturalising ‘the individual,’ I lay out a broader argument for problematising referent objects more generally, as a more productive way of thinking about security that moves the conversation beyond practically endless articulations of potential danger. Overall, I argue that the intersubjective processes by which any referent object is constituted as a legitimate claimant to security, is as central to the critical study and ethical practice of security, as that of putative threats to it.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.1985695
Arita Holmberg
ABSTRACT National security discourses have entered teacher’s classrooms. A strand of largely critical literature in education studies have noted that new security tasks clash with the roles of teachers. However, few studies have yet approached this audience about their views on security. This article analyses how Swedish teachers conceive of security in relation to the school system. Data consists of semi-structured interviews with teachers and principals, conducted in medium-sized municipalities in Sweden. The analysis finds that teachers maintain a conceptualisation of security that focuses on the individual. Simultaneously, teachers rarely adopt national security discourses (except regarding school violence) and several argue against emphasising the concept of security in relation to schools. The results offer an opportunity to analyse the views of teachers as audiences in relation to the extension of the security field into the educational domain.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2008375
M. Younis
‘Tel Aviv Pride is supposed to be amazing,’ a tourist in Marseille told me recently, and when I said it might not be amazing for Palestinians, he advised me to ‘leave politics out of it’. Leaving politics out of it might be a good slogan for Pride in general. It certainly says something about why I have avoided it for so long. I still remember how horrified I was at my first ever Pride, in Brighton a decade ago, to see not only the police and the Conservative Party represented, but even the most dreary and provincial instantiations of capital, including a local gardening centre, which, if anything, I found even more anti-queer than the almost comically reactionary representatives of state authority. But if the relationship between many Black and Brown queers and the hegemonic LGBT culture industry is – at best – fraught, is there a politics to be articulated beyond either an uneasy embrace or a recoiling defensiveness? In Out of Time, Rahul Rao pushes back against what he aptly calls homoromanticism – the argument that homophobia is merely a Western import in places like Uganda and India – while remaining sympathetic to the underlying reasons for its articulation. Uncomfortable with the defensive idea that homophobia simply comes from ‘outside’ Africa and Asia, Rao is also attuned to the ways in which the language of LGBT rights has been recruited by powerful states and institutions of global capitalism for their own ends. Non-Western queers therefore find themselves in a temporal double-bind: between nativist romanticism and neoliberal modernisation. Part of Rao’s solution is to suggest that both options are unacceptable because both rely on a narrow and empty understanding of place:
{"title":"Queer Antinomies","authors":"M. Younis","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2021.2008375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2021.2008375","url":null,"abstract":"‘Tel Aviv Pride is supposed to be amazing,’ a tourist in Marseille told me recently, and when I said it might not be amazing for Palestinians, he advised me to ‘leave politics out of it’. Leaving politics out of it might be a good slogan for Pride in general. It certainly says something about why I have avoided it for so long. I still remember how horrified I was at my first ever Pride, in Brighton a decade ago, to see not only the police and the Conservative Party represented, but even the most dreary and provincial instantiations of capital, including a local gardening centre, which, if anything, I found even more anti-queer than the almost comically reactionary representatives of state authority. But if the relationship between many Black and Brown queers and the hegemonic LGBT culture industry is – at best – fraught, is there a politics to be articulated beyond either an uneasy embrace or a recoiling defensiveness? In Out of Time, Rahul Rao pushes back against what he aptly calls homoromanticism – the argument that homophobia is merely a Western import in places like Uganda and India – while remaining sympathetic to the underlying reasons for its articulation. Uncomfortable with the defensive idea that homophobia simply comes from ‘outside’ Africa and Asia, Rao is also attuned to the ways in which the language of LGBT rights has been recruited by powerful states and institutions of global capitalism for their own ends. Non-Western queers therefore find themselves in a temporal double-bind: between nativist romanticism and neoliberal modernisation. Part of Rao’s solution is to suggest that both options are unacceptable because both rely on a narrow and empty understanding of place:","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":"9 1","pages":"258 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46621098","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 : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2009105
A. Jjuuko
Rahul Rao’s book ‘Out of Time: The queer politics of postcoloniality’ (Rao 2020) starkly shows how Ugandan struggles for LGBT equality have taken on international lenses. Perhaps more than any other country in recent times, Uganda has become synonymous with anti-gay rhetoric and persecution and for this reason, different actors including other states (read those from western Europe and the United States of America), the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations have all found ways to intervene in trying to reverse this trend. The internationalisation of the struggle has certainly resulted in legal and formal gains for the Ugandan LGBT movement, but at what cost for the average LGBT person in Uganda do these gains come? This article discusses the main concepts highlighted in the book including ‘homonationalism’ and ‘homocapitalism’ in the sense of what they mean for the average Ugandan LGBT person.
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2008396
C. Charrett
In an interview entitled, ‘Rituals of Exclusion’, Michel Foucault (1989) describes the University as a transformative societal ritual. At University, students are put out of society’s circulation during which they are taught the values of society to prepare them for reabsorption and reintegration. In this liminal phase, university educators I contend have a responsibility to be inspired by the sense of community, diversity and care with which our students arrive, while imparting upon them the skills and knowledge to address the pressures of the adult world. Jack Halberstam offers an account of the creativity and sense of community with which our students may enter University. ‘Children are not coupled, they are not romantic, they do not have a religious mentality, they are not afraid of death or failure, they are collective creatures[and] they are in a constant state of rebellion against their parents,’ (Halberstam 2011, 47). (Rao 2020) text Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality offers a meticulous and compelling guide to help our students navigate the potentially deceptive strategies of the adult world, which redirect youthful queer desires for radically different futures, fixating them instead to the postcolonial syllogisms Byrd’s epigraph alerts us to. ‘In contexts where queerness is criminalised, homocapitalism offers a persuasive strategy for queer inclusion operative in a moment in which homonationalism has not (yet?) succeeded in drawing recalcitrant societies into its embrace or, worse, has aroused their antipathy,’ (Rao 2020, 151). Through the concept of homocapitalism, Rao cautions against a politics of inclusion that co-opts queer cultures and queer activisms in order to preserve a racialised capitalist order. Rao encourages our students to be mindful of a non-redistributive recognition politics (Duggan cited in Rao 2020, 153), and shares a savviness against the potential instrumentalization of queer inclusion by financial institutions and political elites. Global financial institutions (GFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) claim to be increasingly inclusive of LGBT rights agendas. Rao places these shifts within the context of the Global Financial Crisis and a longer history of using sex and gender to manage the crises of capital. The concept of homocapitalism provides students with a cautionary manual for what is at stake in the kinds of concessions inclusion through capitalism entails. LGBT activist networks in Uganda and India, where much of the research for this text is conducted, negotiate moves from the global development industry to pacify their struggles. This pacification means that rebellious parts of social identities are abandoned, and only those fungible parts of social identities are awarded a future (Agathangelou 2013), and inclusion through homocapitalism re-work queer
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Pub Date : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2008384
B. Camminga
Rahul Rao’s Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Post-Coloniality was one of my lockdown reads. As such I arrived at its pages in the same way I think many have since the moment of its publication: with a desperate desire for distraction and engagement. And it delivered. As many other readers and respondents have already noted, this book is written with immense care, generous thinking, and intellectual curiosity. It does the incredible theoretical melding and mixing that many scholars who are working from and thinking with projects in the Global South (myself included) prize. That is, centring the Global South while deftly tacking from the local to the global and back again. In doing so, one of the critical offerings Out of Time makes is troubling the narrative that has, seemingly, so easily become the hill on which debates and political organising regarding African sexualities have come to sacrifice themselves. A narrative that hinges on the question: what is unAfrican? Homophobia or homosexuality? Which of these is the culturally inauthentic interloper? Drawing on Uganda to provide a crucial example of the discursive constructions of homophobia and how this debate about so-called ‘unAfricaness’ unfolds in myriad directions, Out of Time not only notes the inconsistencies in this debate, but also does some hefty lifting in linking this debate to a global flow of people, capital, ideas and terms between fonrmer colonies and the colonial metropole. As part of this global flow, I write this response, in South Africa, on a public holiday – Freedom Day. It is a cruel reminder of how far we have yet to go that on the day before Freedom Day, queer and trans South Africans, across the country and despite COVID-19, felt it deeply necessary to march and gather publicly for two reasons. The first, a call to end what is being termed a ‘wave of hate crimes’ targeting queer and trans people after the brutal murders of Bonang Gaelae, Nonhlanhla Kunene, Lonwabo Jack, Lulu Ntuthela, Nathaniel Spokgoane Mbele, Khulekani Gomazi and Sphamandla Khoza. There will be three more names added to this list in the days to come. The second was to show solidarity with queer and trans refugees, predominantly from Uganda, a group who are quite clearly the outcome of some of the developments Out of Time sketches, living in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. This is in the wake of an arson attack that left one member of that community dead and several others severely injured. Unfortunately, much like in South Africa, there will be more violence, neglect and abjection in the days to come. Both of these events read to me as indicative of the ways that the underpinnings of the debate regarding ‘unAfricaness’ continue to inform conditions of life and death for those living on the African continent recognised or cast as queer. In this way, these events are very much linked to this discussion about what kinds of queer politics become possible in the aftermath of colonialism. Out of Time points
拉胡尔·拉奥(Rahul Rao)的《不合时宜:后殖民主义的酷儿政治》(Out of Time:The Queer Politics of Post Coloniality)是我在封锁期间阅读的一本书。因此,我对它的阅读方式与我认为自它出版以来许多人的阅读方式相同:渴望分心和参与。它实现了。正如许多其他读者和受访者已经注意到的那样,这本书是以极大的谨慎、慷慨的思考和求知欲写成的。它实现了令人难以置信的理论融合和融合,许多正在全球南方研究和思考项目的学者(包括我自己)都获得了该奖项。也就是说,以全球南方为中心,同时巧妙地从当地转移到全球,然后再返回。在这样做的过程中,《不合时宜》的一个关键贡献是让叙事变得不安,这种叙事似乎很容易成为关于非洲性取向的辩论和政治组织牺牲自己的山。一种基于以下问题的叙述:什么是非非洲人?恐同还是同性恋?以下哪一个是文化上不真实的闯入者?《不合时宜》利用乌干达提供了一个重要的例子,说明恐同症的话语结构,以及这场关于所谓“非非洲性”的辩论是如何向无数方向展开的,它不仅注意到了这场辩论中的不一致之处,而且在将这场辩论与全球人口、资本、,殖民地和殖民地大都市之间的思想和术语。作为这一全球流动的一部分,我在南非的一个公共假日——自由日写下了这篇回应。这残酷地提醒我们,在自由日的前一天,尽管新冠肺炎肆虐,但全国各地的酷儿和跨性别南非人都觉得有必要公开游行和集会,原因有两个。第一,在博南·盖莱、农赫拉·库内内、朗瓦博·杰克、卢鲁·恩图塞拉、纳撒尼尔·斯波戈恩·姆贝莱、胡莱卡尼·戈马齐和斯曼德拉·科扎被残忍谋杀后,呼吁结束针对酷儿和跨性别者的所谓“仇恨犯罪浪潮”。在未来的日子里,这个名单还会增加三个名字。第二个是声援酷儿和跨性别难民,他们主要来自乌干达,这一群体显然是一些发展的结果,他们生活在肯尼亚的卡库马难民营。这是在一次纵火袭击之后发生的,该袭击导致该社区一名成员死亡,数人重伤。不幸的是,就像在南非一样,在未来的日子里,将会有更多的暴力、忽视和唾弃。在我看来,这两件事都表明,关于“非非洲性”的辩论的基础继续为生活在非洲大陆的人们的生死状况提供信息。通过这种方式,这些事件与关于殖民主义之后什么样的酷儿政治成为可能的讨论有很大联系。《不合时宜》指出了后殖民时代非洲国家的殖民主义,他们不仅强烈支持将酷儿和跨性别者定为犯罪的法律,而且在某些情况下,就像乌干达的例子一样,用比以前严厉得多的措辞重新制定和改写了这些法律。拉奥认为,在争相说“恐同症是殖民输入”的过程中
{"title":"Towards a trans politics of post-coloniality","authors":"B. Camminga","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2021.2008384","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2021.2008384","url":null,"abstract":"Rahul Rao’s Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Post-Coloniality was one of my lockdown reads. As such I arrived at its pages in the same way I think many have since the moment of its publication: with a desperate desire for distraction and engagement. And it delivered. As many other readers and respondents have already noted, this book is written with immense care, generous thinking, and intellectual curiosity. It does the incredible theoretical melding and mixing that many scholars who are working from and thinking with projects in the Global South (myself included) prize. That is, centring the Global South while deftly tacking from the local to the global and back again. In doing so, one of the critical offerings Out of Time makes is troubling the narrative that has, seemingly, so easily become the hill on which debates and political organising regarding African sexualities have come to sacrifice themselves. A narrative that hinges on the question: what is unAfrican? Homophobia or homosexuality? Which of these is the culturally inauthentic interloper? Drawing on Uganda to provide a crucial example of the discursive constructions of homophobia and how this debate about so-called ‘unAfricaness’ unfolds in myriad directions, Out of Time not only notes the inconsistencies in this debate, but also does some hefty lifting in linking this debate to a global flow of people, capital, ideas and terms between fonrmer colonies and the colonial metropole. As part of this global flow, I write this response, in South Africa, on a public holiday – Freedom Day. It is a cruel reminder of how far we have yet to go that on the day before Freedom Day, queer and trans South Africans, across the country and despite COVID-19, felt it deeply necessary to march and gather publicly for two reasons. The first, a call to end what is being termed a ‘wave of hate crimes’ targeting queer and trans people after the brutal murders of Bonang Gaelae, Nonhlanhla Kunene, Lonwabo Jack, Lulu Ntuthela, Nathaniel Spokgoane Mbele, Khulekani Gomazi and Sphamandla Khoza. There will be three more names added to this list in the days to come. The second was to show solidarity with queer and trans refugees, predominantly from Uganda, a group who are quite clearly the outcome of some of the developments Out of Time sketches, living in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. This is in the wake of an arson attack that left one member of that community dead and several others severely injured. Unfortunately, much like in South Africa, there will be more violence, neglect and abjection in the days to come. Both of these events read to me as indicative of the ways that the underpinnings of the debate regarding ‘unAfricaness’ continue to inform conditions of life and death for those living on the African continent recognised or cast as queer. In this way, these events are very much linked to this discussion about what kinds of queer politics become possible in the aftermath of colonialism. Out of Time points ","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":"9 1","pages":"246 - 249"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47317491","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 : 2021-09-02DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2008389
Eddie Bruce-Jones
To my graduate students, You are going to enjoy reading this book, for its clarity and linguistic flare, but also because of the challenges it will offer as you grapple with colonial history and with the possibilities afforded you by the concept of queerness. You will find it an invaluable part of your library. Read it slowly and mark the margins liberally. Rahul Rao offers three major disruptions you should study, for content and approach. First, the book parses through conventional postures for understanding the potted histories of colonialism and, by extension, contemporary politics of struggle. Second, the book offers a particularly sharp innovation in its conception of the temporal, disrupting linearity in order to make room for the full potential of historicity and futurity. Finally, the book offers an expansive possibility for how queer, conceived as a form of becoming, might reconfigure our sensibilities of time, history, critique, and struggle.
{"title":"The queer demands of postcoloniality","authors":"Eddie Bruce-Jones","doi":"10.1080/21624887.2021.2008389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2021.2008389","url":null,"abstract":"To my graduate students, You are going to enjoy reading this book, for its clarity and linguistic flare, but also because of the challenges it will offer as you grapple with colonial history and with the possibilities afforded you by the concept of queerness. You will find it an invaluable part of your library. Read it slowly and mark the margins liberally. Rahul Rao offers three major disruptions you should study, for content and approach. First, the book parses through conventional postures for understanding the potted histories of colonialism and, by extension, contemporary politics of struggle. Second, the book offers a particularly sharp innovation in its conception of the temporal, disrupting linearity in order to make room for the full potential of historicity and futurity. Finally, the book offers an expansive possibility for how queer, conceived as a form of becoming, might reconfigure our sensibilities of time, history, critique, and struggle.","PeriodicalId":29930,"journal":{"name":"Critical Studies on Security","volume":"9 1","pages":"241 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48537292","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 : 2021-06-10DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.1934640
Daniel R. McCarthy
ABSTRACT In US national security policy the protection of technological innovation is of signal importance. US policy stresses, on the one hand, the need to protect technological innovation to ensure its global economic and military predominance. This reflects the classic view of innovation articulated in security studies: technological innovation is the foundation of economic and military power. Yet this account captures only one aspect of technological innovation in US national security thinking. Drawing on a combination of socio-technical imaginaries frameworks and critical theories of technology, this article argues that technological innovation is not merely a means to the end of American national security. Rather, a series of sociological and normative ideas disclosed by US policy frame market-led innovation as necessary, just, and central to the reproduction of American national identity. A specific way of creating technological systems and artefacts is the object of security in American national security policy. The security of technological innovation is central to securing the American way of life.
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Pub Date : 2021-06-08DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.1936834
Liam Midzain-Gobin
ABSTRACT Understood as a practice, citizenship can bring benefits across affective and material registers; however, its possibility also rests on logics of exclusion. This is especially the case in Anglosphere settler colonial contexts in which citizenship is both a function of settler state authority while simultaneously reproducing that very authority. Using Canada as an illustration, the paper reads citizenship through the concepts of implicated subjecthood and colonial liberalism. In doing so it puts forward a phenomenon described as ‘settler insecurity’ to underscore one aspect of how this reproduction occurs. Relating this insecurity to mythologies of the settler geographic imaginary and the affective and material benefits of citizenship, the paper argues the comforts of settler colonial citizenship and this insecurity are co-constitutive. When understood in relation to the un-realised nature of settler coloniality as a genocidal project, the paper outlines how these interconnected phenomena represent important logics in ongoing processes of remaking settler sovereignty through the domestication of Indigenous nationhood and erasure of colonial relations.
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