Suchergebnisse

This book builds a theoretical perspective for explaining what security remains after the security event. It studies in detail the evolution of security thinking before, during and after the 2011 terrorist attack in Utøya and Oslo, Norway, tracking the political discourse and the institutional reactions in order to form a theory of 'terror and disenchantment'. It develops a general theory of security that contributes to ongoing debates on non-military security, asymmetric warfare, ontological security and human security. It revisits the nature of terrorism, the sense of its practice and re-conceptualises the way practice of counter- and anti-terrorism are embedded in social, cultural and national consciousness.

While critical security studies largely concentrates on objects of security, this book focuses on the subject position from which 'securitization' and other security practices take place. First, it argues that the modern subject itself emerges and is sustained as a function of security and insecurity. It suggests, consequently, that no analytic frame can produce or reproduce the subject in some original or primordial form that does not already reproduce a fundamental or structural insecurity. It critically returns, through a variety of studies, to traditionally held conceptions of security and insecurity as simple predicates or properties that can be associated or not to some more essential, more primeval, more true or real subject. It thus opens and explores the question of the security of the subject itself, locating, through a reconstruction of the foundations of the concept of security in the modern conception of the subject, an irreducible insecurity. Second, it argues that practices of security can only be carried out as a certain kind of negotiation about values. The analyses in this book find security expressed again and again as a function of value cast in terms of an explicit or implicit philosophy of life, of culture, of individual and collective anxieties and aspirations, of expectations about what may be sacrificed and what is worth preserving. By way of a critical examination of the value function of security, this book discovers the foundation of values as dependent on a certain management of their own vulnerability, continuously under threat, and thus fundamentally and necessarily insecure. --Book Jacket.

Gathers together the theoretical reflection and empirical research by a group of international scholars in the subdiscipline of Critical Security Studies.

Abstract
A public debate has raged in Europe and the Americas for the last year, almost as predictable in its substance as in its form: Has the suppression of individual liberties, in the form of lockdowns, curfews, imposed mask-wearing, and vaccination justified by and indeed legitimated by the sanitary crisis? On virtually all levels of public debate, positions have been formulated on the right (or responsibility) of public authorities to require citizens to take measures in the name of their own personal health and the health of others. In International Studies, biopolitics has become the go-to concept for both analyzing and politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic. Three variants of biopolitical analysis dominate, overlapping, and mutually dependent: those stemming the insights of Foucault's late work, those inspired by Agamben's Homo Sacer, and those that extended the global analysis of Hardt and Negri. In a recently published book, The Inverse of Biopolitics, Laurent interprets biopolitics in an alternative vein, finding in the final phase of Lacan's teaching, beginning around 1970, a preoccupation with the "speaking body," condensed in the hybrid term parlêtre, both speaking-being and being-speaking. This article draws out the implications of this alternative conceptualization of biopolitics for the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic.

'Security' is a uniquely rich object for critique. It rests on a long and noble conceptual history in Western thought. And yet the provision of security most often consists of a shoring up, through the discourses of nationality, ethnicity, political economy or even science, of what is assumed to be solid at its core but weakened through the contingencies of politics, society, ideology, and so on. The article argues that the critical force of critique stems from the fact that critique itself is a practice inescapably bound up with insecurity, and thus that the critique of security exercised since around 1997 as 'critical security studies' is self-replicating. By introducing concepts from Husserlian phenomenology, it attempts to show that insecurity is not a simple feature of an otherwise secure state of life, ripe for critical analysis that promises to expose its false premises. Rather, insecurity lies at the very foundation of critical thought. Building upon the bare and basic question, 'What does it mean to mean?', a phenomenology of security asks the straightforward question: 'What is the security-ness of security?' It permits one to ask what remains of security when all else is stripped away, what essential minimum must be retained in order for security to be security.