Suchergebnisse

1. Security unbound and democracy -- 2. Political reading of security -- 3. Insecurity as exception -- 4. Diffusing insecurities -- 5. Assembling suspicion -- 6. Surveillance, democracy, privacy -- 7. Security technology and democratic limits -- 8. Insecurity, democracy, political.

"Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life"--

"In this volume, Jef Huysmans critically engages with theoretical developments in international relations and security studies to develop a fresh conceptual framework for studying security." "Huysmans argues that security policies and responses do not appear out of the blue, but are part of a continuous and gradual process, pre-structured by previous developments. Huysmans examines the processes of securitization and explores how an issue, on the basis of the distribution and administration of fear, becomes a security policy. Applying this theory, he then provides a detailed analysis of migration, asylum and refuge in the European Union."--Jacket.

Abstract
This article starts from the observation of intense political mobilisations of existential endings. One of the defining challenges for critical engagements with such mobilisations remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics seriously without making existential end-times the conditions that define the present. The article proposes to move beyond critical knowledge that makes security contingent and engage with the conception of life inscribed in the mobilisations of existential endings. It puts forward a concept of life that emphasises continuous movement rather than defining it from the perspective of its inevitable end in death. This point of view challenges traditional existential notions of life and death, highlighting instead the dynamic and transformative nature of life itself.

The article explores challenges that giving conceptual primacy to movement poses for thinking the politics of security. In security studies, there has been an intense interest in mobile phenomena and the nature of security techniques that seek to control, contain or steer them. However, when exploring how these mobile phenomena bear upon conceptions of politics and their contestation, the analytics tend to turn back to more static or sedentary categories and reference points. Against this background, the article develops an analytical framework for security and its politics that gives conceptual primacy to movement. Giving conceptual primacy to movement implies three key moves: (a) changing lines from enclosures and connectors to pathways; (b) shifting from understanding movement through positions and nodes to the continuity of movement; and (c) displacing architectural and infrastructural readings of the relations between movements with readings of continuously unfolding confluences of movements moving in relation to one another. Applying these three moves displaces conceptions of movement as border crossings and networked connections with the notion of entangling movements moving in relation to one another. One of the implications for security studies is that taking such a point of view challenges the use of 'the subject of security', understood in terms of state sovereignty and the positioning of differential security claims hooked into group identity, as a key device for making security politically meaningful and contested. The article concludes that giving conceptual primacy to movement invites security studies not to limit itself to studying the politics of movement but to also incorporate a motioning of politics.

AbstractTaking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I am proposing 'democratic curiosity' as a tool for revisiting the question of democracy in times of extitutional surveillance. Democratic curiosity seeks to bring into analytical play the social and political power of little nothings – the power of subjects, things, practices, and relations that are rendered trivial – and the uncoordinated disputes they enact. Revisiting democracy from this angle is particularly pertinent in extitutional situations in which the organisation and practices of surveillance are spilling beyond their panoptic configurations. Extitutional surveillance is strongly embedded in diffusing arrangements of power and ever more extensively enveloped in everyday life and banal devices. To a considerable degree these modes of surveillance escape democratic institutional repertoires that seek to bring broader societal concerns to bear upon surveillance. Extitutional enactments of democracy then become an important question for both security and surveillance studies.

This article makes a claim for re-engaging the concept of 'act' in the study of securitization. While much has been written about the discursive and communicative aspects of securitizing, the concept of 'act' that contains much of the politicality of the speech-act approach to security has been relatively ignored. The task of re-engaging 'acts' is particularly pertinent in the contemporary context, in which politically salient speech acts are heavily displaced by securitizing practices and devices that appear as banal, little security nothings. The main purpose of the article is to begin the framing of a research agenda that asks what political acts can be in diffuse security processes that efface securitizing speech acts.

Both political leaders and academics often claim exceptional times. But what does it mean to speak of exceptional politics in international relations? In one sense exceptionality is a descriptive category referring to a radical change in the systemic conditions of international politics. In this article a different notion of exception is examined. It refers to a particular method of conceptualizing the nature of international political order. The exception defines political order by means of constitutional-legal reasoning in which different understandings of the nature and status of international law and its political transgressions describe competing visions of international political order. The focal point of this international politics of exception is not the traditional distinction between liberal and realist views of international politics but the constitutionalist triad of normativism, decisionism, and institutionalism.

This article seeks (a) to show the complexities of the concept of exception in international politics, (b) to suggest that the current politics of insecurity are not limited to a clash over the status and limits of normativity in international politics, and (c) to introduce conceptual groundwork for theorizing international politics of insecurity as a contest of the exception. By combining normative and existential concepts of exception, a conceptual matrix is introduced that distinguishes between political liberalism and realism, on the one hand, and anti-diplomatic ultrapolitical realism and liberalism, on the other. While the focus in discussions of exception is often on the tension between realist assertions of the limited validity of international norms and liberal assertions of the real capacity of international norms to constrain political power, something more complex may be going on in current international politics of insecurity. The conceptual matrix draws attention to an additional tension between those realists and liberals willing to retain common grounds for symbolic mediation in international politics and those seeking to intensify antidiplomatic inwardness.