Suchergebnisse

What should be done about trafficking in women? Aradau shows that the problematization of trafficking as a security issue limits what can be done. Exploring the complex relationship between security, politics and subjectivity, this book suggests new forms of action which transcend security practices

AbstractWhile postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to understand the global legacies of socialism in the present, this article proposes to unpack dimensions of postsocialism as method and critique. Postsocialism as method attends to how socialist legacies endure and are transformed in the present while holding together contradictions and ambivalences. Postsocialism as critique is oriented to transversal solidarities and the epistemic vocabularies that can undergird these struggles. To trace these dimensions of method and critique, the article is situated empirically within debates about borders and migration. Postsocialism is not intended to replace or displace other critical approaches but to pluralise our vocabularies and multiply political interventions.

The 'new mobilities paradigm' and critical security studies share vocabularies of mobility, circulation and security. Yet, there have been only limited intersections between these approaches. This article explores the relation between mobility and security by developing a series of epistemic-political distinctions between motion, circulation and mobility. It argues that different political grammars of mobility have emerged historically and that we need to attend to the particular articulations of these grammars today, which conjugate mobility to security and subjectivity. The article starts by placing the semantics of motion and circulation, on the one hand, and of mobility, on the other, in historical context. It shows that motion, circulation and mobility are entwined with the production of particular governmental subjects and objects of (in)security. Finally, it explores how grammars of mobility shape political responses in contemporary site of intense securitisation – the UK-French borderzone at Calais.

'Crowded places' have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that several subtle reconfigurations take place. First, counter-terrorism governance derives the knowledge of crowds from 'generic events' as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. This move activates 19th-century knowledge about crowds as pathological, while the spatial referent of 'crowded places' reconfigures workplaces as crowded places and workers as crowds. Second, new guidance for emergency planning and policing deploys a more rational approach to crowds, put forward in recent psychosocial approaches. These modes of knowledge derive 'generic crowds' from normal social relations rather than extraordinary events. Generic events and generic crowds effectively depoliticize crowds, as they exclude a more radical generic politics, in which crowds are not derivable, but negate determination.

Tarak Barkawi has recently enjoined International Relations and security studies scholars to embark upon a critical study of the phenomenon of war. There is much to agree with in his argument and the idea of 'critical war studies' seems particularly apposite in a world where war and other forms of organised or dispersed violence have become increasingly constitutive of daily life. However, the turn to 'critical war studies' works by silencing disagreements and homogenising the heterogeneity of critical security studies. Instead, I propose a dialogue that brings to the fore the political stakes of a critique of war, security and violence. Not only have security and war been entwined in complex ways, but I argue that they need to be analysed within a continuum of violence that includes insurrections, revolts, revolutions, insurgencies, rebellions, seditions, disobediences, riots and uprisings.