Pub Date : 2024-07-26DOI: 10.1177/09670106241240426
Julien Pomarède
The article investigates the social making of counter-terrorism in international organizations (IOs). Discussing the literatures that emphasize the (in)coherence of multilateral counter-terrorism and the diversity of interests that interact and converge in these policies, the article highlights the determinants by which an object as vague and dissensual as post-9/11 counter-terrorism is ordered and stabilized within IOs. Therefore, the article provides an alternative sociological exploration of counter-terrorism in IOs by delving into the dynamics of frictions and power. Multilateral counter-terrorism is conceptualized as a socially grounded ‘constructive ambiguity’; the catch-all category of counter-terrorism is both a patent source of conflict among IOs’ players, who fight over its meaning, and a catalyser of minimal consensus. The article isolates two types of power structures in IOs that the ambiguity of counter-terrorism supports: domination and fragmentation. Additionally, the article demonstrates how ambiguities condition the conduct and evolution of IOs’ risk management security agenda. To do so, the article takes NATO’s post-9/11 trajectory as a case study and explores two different counter-terrorism policies related to counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan and maritime surveillance in the Mediterranean Sea.
{"title":"Deadly ambiguities: NATO and the politics of counter-terrorism in international organizations after 9/11","authors":"Julien Pomarède","doi":"10.1177/09670106241240426","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106241240426","url":null,"abstract":"The article investigates the social making of counter-terrorism in international organizations (IOs). Discussing the literatures that emphasize the (in)coherence of multilateral counter-terrorism and the diversity of interests that interact and converge in these policies, the article highlights the determinants by which an object as vague and dissensual as post-9/11 counter-terrorism is ordered and stabilized within IOs. Therefore, the article provides an alternative sociological exploration of counter-terrorism in IOs by delving into the dynamics of frictions and power. Multilateral counter-terrorism is conceptualized as a socially grounded ‘constructive ambiguity’; the catch-all category of counter-terrorism is both a patent source of conflict among IOs’ players, who fight over its meaning, and a catalyser of minimal consensus. The article isolates two types of power structures in IOs that the ambiguity of counter-terrorism supports: domination and fragmentation. Additionally, the article demonstrates how ambiguities condition the conduct and evolution of IOs’ risk management security agenda. To do so, the article takes NATO’s post-9/11 trajectory as a case study and explores two different counter-terrorism policies related to counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan and maritime surveillance in the Mediterranean Sea.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141799997","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 : 2024-05-23DOI: 10.1177/09670106231212142
S. A. Kaker
The governing of uncertainty has been studied extensively within the interdisciplinary field of security studies. However, existing scholarship on security-related uncertainty focuses on the problem of its governance from the standpoint of Western-political macro-governmental regulatory regimes. To both rescale as well as decolonize existing scholarship on governing security-related uncertainty, this article brings security studies scholarship in conversation with ethnographic accounts of everyday uncertainty in Global South contexts. As a concept tied to unpredictable security futures, it introduces ‘ordinary’ uncertainty as a routinized experiential terrain of insecurity. One that is anticipatorily navigated by social actors operating at the micro-social scale. Drawing on fieldwork on ordinary uncertainty in Karachi, this article calls attention to the incredible amount of time and energy spent by urban residents who try to ‘stay updated’ with the ever-shifting security situation in the Pakistani megacity. They do this by gathering, exchanging and making sense of information circulating in their social circles, on the street, news channels and/or on social media platforms. By critical practices of information production and exchange this article reveals the politics of governing ordinary uncertainty in an unequal sociopolitical context.
{"title":"Governing ‘ordinary’ uncertainty: Circulating information and everyday insecurity in Karachi","authors":"S. A. Kaker","doi":"10.1177/09670106231212142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231212142","url":null,"abstract":"The governing of uncertainty has been studied extensively within the interdisciplinary field of security studies. However, existing scholarship on security-related uncertainty focuses on the problem of its governance from the standpoint of Western-political macro-governmental regulatory regimes. To both rescale as well as decolonize existing scholarship on governing security-related uncertainty, this article brings security studies scholarship in conversation with ethnographic accounts of everyday uncertainty in Global South contexts. As a concept tied to unpredictable security futures, it introduces ‘ordinary’ uncertainty as a routinized experiential terrain of insecurity. One that is anticipatorily navigated by social actors operating at the micro-social scale. Drawing on fieldwork on ordinary uncertainty in Karachi, this article calls attention to the incredible amount of time and energy spent by urban residents who try to ‘stay updated’ with the ever-shifting security situation in the Pakistani megacity. They do this by gathering, exchanging and making sense of information circulating in their social circles, on the street, news channels and/or on social media platforms. By critical practices of information production and exchange this article reveals the politics of governing ordinary uncertainty in an unequal sociopolitical context.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141104469","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 : 2024-03-07DOI: 10.1177/09670106241228066
Pradeep Krishnan
Securitization theory posits that security threats are socially constructed. Yet, how audiences influence the failure and success of securitization attempts is still not well understood. In this article, I argue that audiences bring their normative perspectives to bear upon the interpretation of securitization attempts. This theoretical addendum, I hold, permits a fuller appreciation of how audiences express their agency when receiving securitization attempts. I examine the Singaporean context, where the discursive backdrop favours the construction of security threats. While the Singaporean government has successfully securitized many issues, Lee Kuan Yew’s attempt to securitize the country’s declining birth rates failed dramatically. This occurred, I contend, as the Singaporean public was deeply offended by the normative premises of Lee’s eugenicist argument, thus refusing to engage with the issue on the government’s terms. These objections were only fuelled by the eugenics programme the government later introduced, ultimately causing the government to discontinue its pronatalist policies and significantly revise its rhetoric. This article develops the understanding of how securitization unfolds by expanding on the conceptualization of audience behaviour. By examining Singapore, which has failed to inspire many analyses of securitization, it also diversifies securitization theory’s empirical reach, highlighting its intelligibility within non-democratic contexts.
{"title":"Audience agency in a curious instance of failed securitization: Public resistance to the Singapore government’s eugenics program","authors":"Pradeep Krishnan","doi":"10.1177/09670106241228066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106241228066","url":null,"abstract":"Securitization theory posits that security threats are socially constructed. Yet, how audiences influence the failure and success of securitization attempts is still not well understood. In this article, I argue that audiences bring their normative perspectives to bear upon the interpretation of securitization attempts. This theoretical addendum, I hold, permits a fuller appreciation of how audiences express their agency when receiving securitization attempts. I examine the Singaporean context, where the discursive backdrop favours the construction of security threats. While the Singaporean government has successfully securitized many issues, Lee Kuan Yew’s attempt to securitize the country’s declining birth rates failed dramatically. This occurred, I contend, as the Singaporean public was deeply offended by the normative premises of Lee’s eugenicist argument, thus refusing to engage with the issue on the government’s terms. These objections were only fuelled by the eugenics programme the government later introduced, ultimately causing the government to discontinue its pronatalist policies and significantly revise its rhetoric. This article develops the understanding of how securitization unfolds by expanding on the conceptualization of audience behaviour. By examining Singapore, which has failed to inspire many analyses of securitization, it also diversifies securitization theory’s empirical reach, highlighting its intelligibility within non-democratic contexts.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140077513","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 : 2024-02-29DOI: 10.1177/09670106231220117
Jacqui Cho
Youth as a category that informs international interventions in conflict-affected settings has gained currency in the past decade. This article traces the rising rhetoric of youth in UN Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) discourse and demonstrates how changes in its dominant representations have implications beyond the matter of semantics. Drawing on post-structuralist traditions, the article highlights how the DDR discourse delineates problems through particular framings that call forth certain solutions, which in turn reinforce the very (mis)understandings that underlie the interventions. A case study from the Central African Republic illustrates how the hegemonic representation of youth-as-troublemakers in UN documents, together with a compelling narrative that naturalized the link between youth, unemployment and violence, made possible and conferred legitimacy to the proliferation of projects with an overwhelming economic focus. The article discusses how the resource landscape, such as opportunities to unlock earmarked funding, incentivizes the reproduction of certain constructions of youth that align with today’s policy panic around violent extremism. In so doing, it puts into question the instrumental approach towards discourse by pointing to surprising ways in which discourses become appropriated by both international peacebuilders and the ‘subjects’ of these interventions.
{"title":"A self-fulfilling prophecy? Constructions of youth-as-troublemakers in UN DDR processes","authors":"Jacqui Cho","doi":"10.1177/09670106231220117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231220117","url":null,"abstract":"Youth as a category that informs international interventions in conflict-affected settings has gained currency in the past decade. This article traces the rising rhetoric of youth in UN Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) discourse and demonstrates how changes in its dominant representations have implications beyond the matter of semantics. Drawing on post-structuralist traditions, the article highlights how the DDR discourse delineates problems through particular framings that call forth certain solutions, which in turn reinforce the very (mis)understandings that underlie the interventions. A case study from the Central African Republic illustrates how the hegemonic representation of youth-as-troublemakers in UN documents, together with a compelling narrative that naturalized the link between youth, unemployment and violence, made possible and conferred legitimacy to the proliferation of projects with an overwhelming economic focus. The article discusses how the resource landscape, such as opportunities to unlock earmarked funding, incentivizes the reproduction of certain constructions of youth that align with today’s policy panic around violent extremism. In so doing, it puts into question the instrumental approach towards discourse by pointing to surprising ways in which discourses become appropriated by both international peacebuilders and the ‘subjects’ of these interventions.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140414388","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 : 2024-02-28DOI: 10.1177/09670106231223121
Laust Lund Elbek, Peter Starke
On the face of it, existing theoretical and empirical work on the politics of (in)security takes language and speech acts seriously, yet often actually fails to problematize how the very meaning of ‘security’ and related terms can differ across social, political, and linguistic contexts. This article demonstrates the consequences of context-specific registers of security for the dynamics of political debate and policymaking. Such registers of security combine the local meanings and specific emotional connotations of security terms. In this article, we focus on the role of the term tryghed in Danish politics, especially its use by the Danish Social Democratic Party since 2019. Ostensibly just another word for ‘security’, we argue that, in contrast to sikkerhed (security/safety), tryghed evokes a very different emotional register, centered around warmth, motherliness, and the home. Based on official documents, speeches, and interviews with key politicians, the article shows how this rhetoric allowed the Danish government to put forth a policy mix of welfare expansion, immigration restrictions, and tough law-and-order policies, often effectively targeting male immigrant youths. Tryghed has been the term that binds these different elements together, supporting both welfare nostalgia and insider bias. While this formula has led to electoral success, the article also discusses its inherent limitations. The case highlights the blind spots of a certain Anglocentrism in security studies.
{"title":"Registers of security: The concept of tryghed in Danish politics","authors":"Laust Lund Elbek, Peter Starke","doi":"10.1177/09670106231223121","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231223121","url":null,"abstract":"On the face of it, existing theoretical and empirical work on the politics of (in)security takes language and speech acts seriously, yet often actually fails to problematize how the very meaning of ‘security’ and related terms can differ across social, political, and linguistic contexts. This article demonstrates the consequences of context-specific registers of security for the dynamics of political debate and policymaking. Such registers of security combine the local meanings and specific emotional connotations of security terms. In this article, we focus on the role of the term tryghed in Danish politics, especially its use by the Danish Social Democratic Party since 2019. Ostensibly just another word for ‘security’, we argue that, in contrast to sikkerhed (security/safety), tryghed evokes a very different emotional register, centered around warmth, motherliness, and the home. Based on official documents, speeches, and interviews with key politicians, the article shows how this rhetoric allowed the Danish government to put forth a policy mix of welfare expansion, immigration restrictions, and tough law-and-order policies, often effectively targeting male immigrant youths. Tryghed has been the term that binds these different elements together, supporting both welfare nostalgia and insider bias. While this formula has led to electoral success, the article also discusses its inherent limitations. The case highlights the blind spots of a certain Anglocentrism in security studies.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140423555","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 : 2024-02-28DOI: 10.1177/09670106231218852
A. Elgamal
Across the Middle East, military professionals, private militias, and other security actors often play a central role in the management of urban planning, public administration, and other state affairs. However, security studies scholarship offers few theoretical tools for understanding this deep and overt intertwinement of security and governance, framing it as an outcome of authoritarian practices of coup-proofing or a symptom of ‘weak’ states. This article analyzes spatial planning and land management practices in Egypt and Lebanon to propose two concepts, ‘hyphenated identities’ and the ‘boundless security field’, as alternative theoretical tools for thinking about security. I argue that security logics are deeply enmeshed with the identity of the nation, its histories of conflict, and its experiences of state formation, creating a security field that is boundless and non-discrete. Within this field are a set of ‘hyphenated identities’, or categories of actors who perform dual roles as managers of security and managers of other governance matters. The influence of these actors on governance practices illustrates the extent to which security logics can be imbedded in the structures of the state and its modus operandi, thereby reinforcing the boundlessness of the security field.
{"title":"Towards theorizing from the Arab non-periphery: Hyphenated identities and the boundless security field","authors":"A. Elgamal","doi":"10.1177/09670106231218852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231218852","url":null,"abstract":"Across the Middle East, military professionals, private militias, and other security actors often play a central role in the management of urban planning, public administration, and other state affairs. However, security studies scholarship offers few theoretical tools for understanding this deep and overt intertwinement of security and governance, framing it as an outcome of authoritarian practices of coup-proofing or a symptom of ‘weak’ states. This article analyzes spatial planning and land management practices in Egypt and Lebanon to propose two concepts, ‘hyphenated identities’ and the ‘boundless security field’, as alternative theoretical tools for thinking about security. I argue that security logics are deeply enmeshed with the identity of the nation, its histories of conflict, and its experiences of state formation, creating a security field that is boundless and non-discrete. Within this field are a set of ‘hyphenated identities’, or categories of actors who perform dual roles as managers of security and managers of other governance matters. The influence of these actors on governance practices illustrates the extent to which security logics can be imbedded in the structures of the state and its modus operandi, thereby reinforcing the boundlessness of the security field.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140419472","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 : 2024-02-13DOI: 10.1177/09670106231212147
Ari Jerrems, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert
Red-zoning emerged as a key security practice in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with colour-coded security zones defining the spatial dimensions of diverse restrictions. However, red-zoning, understood as the cartographic practice of ascribing the colour red to a geographically defined area, has a long history. Prior to the pandemic, red zones were already being established and delimited in diverse locations around the globe. The spatial form of the red zone has recently been taken as paradigmatic of specific conceptions of security and insecurity in the present. However, as we demonstrate in this article, red zones operate in diverse ways across a wide array of fields including policing, military intervention and hazard and disaster risk analysis. This article seeks to make sense of the contemporary use of red zones and analyse the logics of security and politics underpinning them, without reducing the rationality of red zones to a singular overarching narrative or wallowing in their irreconcilable complexity. Rather than encountering the logics of red-zoning fully formed, we suggest that it is more fruitful to track their formulation through transversal connections and contested situations. We provide a conceptual framework for doing so through the notion of the prototype. In contrast to accounts that take spatial forms as paradigms of the security logics of the present, the prototype allows us to explore how ideas and practices develop through dispersed and contested interventions.
{"title":"Red-zoning: Spatial logics, the prototype and colour-coded cartographies of insecurity","authors":"Ari Jerrems, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert","doi":"10.1177/09670106231212147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231212147","url":null,"abstract":"Red-zoning emerged as a key security practice in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with colour-coded security zones defining the spatial dimensions of diverse restrictions. However, red-zoning, understood as the cartographic practice of ascribing the colour red to a geographically defined area, has a long history. Prior to the pandemic, red zones were already being established and delimited in diverse locations around the globe. The spatial form of the red zone has recently been taken as paradigmatic of specific conceptions of security and insecurity in the present. However, as we demonstrate in this article, red zones operate in diverse ways across a wide array of fields including policing, military intervention and hazard and disaster risk analysis. This article seeks to make sense of the contemporary use of red zones and analyse the logics of security and politics underpinning them, without reducing the rationality of red zones to a singular overarching narrative or wallowing in their irreconcilable complexity. Rather than encountering the logics of red-zoning fully formed, we suggest that it is more fruitful to track their formulation through transversal connections and contested situations. We provide a conceptual framework for doing so through the notion of the prototype. In contrast to accounts that take spatial forms as paradigms of the security logics of the present, the prototype allows us to explore how ideas and practices develop through dispersed and contested interventions.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139840460","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 : 2024-02-13DOI: 10.1177/09670106231212147
Ari Jerrems, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert
Red-zoning emerged as a key security practice in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with colour-coded security zones defining the spatial dimensions of diverse restrictions. However, red-zoning, understood as the cartographic practice of ascribing the colour red to a geographically defined area, has a long history. Prior to the pandemic, red zones were already being established and delimited in diverse locations around the globe. The spatial form of the red zone has recently been taken as paradigmatic of specific conceptions of security and insecurity in the present. However, as we demonstrate in this article, red zones operate in diverse ways across a wide array of fields including policing, military intervention and hazard and disaster risk analysis. This article seeks to make sense of the contemporary use of red zones and analyse the logics of security and politics underpinning them, without reducing the rationality of red zones to a singular overarching narrative or wallowing in their irreconcilable complexity. Rather than encountering the logics of red-zoning fully formed, we suggest that it is more fruitful to track their formulation through transversal connections and contested situations. We provide a conceptual framework for doing so through the notion of the prototype. In contrast to accounts that take spatial forms as paradigms of the security logics of the present, the prototype allows us to explore how ideas and practices develop through dispersed and contested interventions.
{"title":"Red-zoning: Spatial logics, the prototype and colour-coded cartographies of insecurity","authors":"Ari Jerrems, Nicolas Lemay-Hébert","doi":"10.1177/09670106231212147","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231212147","url":null,"abstract":"Red-zoning emerged as a key security practice in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with colour-coded security zones defining the spatial dimensions of diverse restrictions. However, red-zoning, understood as the cartographic practice of ascribing the colour red to a geographically defined area, has a long history. Prior to the pandemic, red zones were already being established and delimited in diverse locations around the globe. The spatial form of the red zone has recently been taken as paradigmatic of specific conceptions of security and insecurity in the present. However, as we demonstrate in this article, red zones operate in diverse ways across a wide array of fields including policing, military intervention and hazard and disaster risk analysis. This article seeks to make sense of the contemporary use of red zones and analyse the logics of security and politics underpinning them, without reducing the rationality of red zones to a singular overarching narrative or wallowing in their irreconcilable complexity. Rather than encountering the logics of red-zoning fully formed, we suggest that it is more fruitful to track their formulation through transversal connections and contested situations. We provide a conceptual framework for doing so through the notion of the prototype. In contrast to accounts that take spatial forms as paradigms of the security logics of the present, the prototype allows us to explore how ideas and practices develop through dispersed and contested interventions.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139780528","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 : 2024-01-31DOI: 10.1177/09670106231218829
Guangyu Qiao-Franco, Paolo Franco
International relations scholarship has long emphasized that popular culture can impact public understandings and political realities. In this article, we explore these potentials in the context of military-themed videogames and their portrayals of weaponized artificial intelligence (AI). Within paradoxical videogame representations of AI weapons both as ‘insurmountable enemies’ that pose existential threats to humankind in narratives and as ‘easy targets’ that human protagonists routinely overcome in gameplay, we identify distortions of human–machine interaction that contradict real-world scenarios. These distortions revolve around videogames affording players enhanced human agency to dominate AI weapons to offer enjoyable gameplay, contradicting the same weapons being intended to diminish human agency on real-world battlefields. By leveraging the Actor-Network Theory concept of ‘translation’, we explain how these distorted portrayals of AI weapons are produced by entanglements between heterogeneous human and non-human actors that aim to make videogames mass-marketable and profitable. In so doing, we echo game studies research that calls for greater attention to the commercial and ludic dimensions of videogames so that international relations scholarship can better account for pop culture’s bounded abilities to impact public understandings and political realities.
{"title":"Insurmountable enemies or easy targets? Military-themed videogame ‘translations’ of weaponized artificial intelligence","authors":"Guangyu Qiao-Franco, Paolo Franco","doi":"10.1177/09670106231218829","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231218829","url":null,"abstract":"International relations scholarship has long emphasized that popular culture can impact public understandings and political realities. In this article, we explore these potentials in the context of military-themed videogames and their portrayals of weaponized artificial intelligence (AI). Within paradoxical videogame representations of AI weapons both as ‘insurmountable enemies’ that pose existential threats to humankind in narratives and as ‘easy targets’ that human protagonists routinely overcome in gameplay, we identify distortions of human–machine interaction that contradict real-world scenarios. These distortions revolve around videogames affording players enhanced human agency to dominate AI weapons to offer enjoyable gameplay, contradicting the same weapons being intended to diminish human agency on real-world battlefields. By leveraging the Actor-Network Theory concept of ‘translation’, we explain how these distorted portrayals of AI weapons are produced by entanglements between heterogeneous human and non-human actors that aim to make videogames mass-marketable and profitable. In so doing, we echo game studies research that calls for greater attention to the commercial and ludic dimensions of videogames so that international relations scholarship can better account for pop culture’s bounded abilities to impact public understandings and political realities.","PeriodicalId":506765,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140478273","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 : 2024-01-31DOI: 10.1177/09670106231212041
Aggie Hirst, Larry N George
This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus.
本文认为，对药剂战争的分析可以揭示美国军方利用游戏吸引、生产和回收战斗人员的仪式牺牲逻辑。文章确定了古代 "药剂"（pharmakon）--一种同时具有药物、毒药和解药功能的物质或过程--的框架，展示了游戏是如何以自相矛盾的方式吸引、生产和改造军事生活的。文章通过追溯肯尼思-麦克利什（Kenneth MacLeish）的 "动员与复员"（churn of mobilization and demobilization）的根源，超越了军队机构自我延续的工具性计算，证明了这种 "动员与复员 "是根据药剂牺牲的逻辑运作的，而这种逻辑并不是偶然的，而是内置于军队的日常运作之中。该书认为，（前）作战人员在当代的作用相当于古代的 "药师"（pharmakoi），是被当作替罪羊和牺牲品的人物，政体在净化仪式中将其罪恶感和功能障碍注入其中。该书摒弃了任何线性谱系或跨历史的西方战争方式，指出了古代pharmakoi与当今（前）战士之间的强烈共鸣。文章通过对美国军事游戏玩家和退伍军人的广泛访谈，揭示了游戏对 21 世纪（前）战争战士的吸引、生产和再利用所产生的日益增长的影响。同时，通过追溯对战斗人员的净化性驱逐，文章对美军战争机器的药理学逻辑进行了新颖的理论阐述。
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