Critical Studies on Security

✨ Congratulations to Håvard Rustad Markussen of the Nordic Institute for the Study of Innovation, Research and Education, 's 2022 Winner of the ECR Outstanding Research Article Award, for his piece "Conceptualising the smartphone as a security device: Appropriations of embodied connectivity at the Black Lives Matter protests."

“Markussen makes a strong argument for the importance of objects to the formation of new repertoires of security, offering a high level of conceptual sophistication concerning the extended embodiment of the smartphone and the potential for its (re)appropriation by a range of actors. By applying philosophical insights on the agentic capacity of objects, Markussen theorises smart phones as newly embodied devices of connectivity that are both racialised and post-human. These insights are stretched to analyse the surveillance of Black Lives Matters protests and protesters strategies of countersurveillance. The committee found that the article presents a valuable and illustrative case study of police power and resistance to it, illuminating the racialisation of surveillance through smart phone technology. It is exemplary critical work in the field. This was a unanimous decision.“

You can read the full article @ bit.ly/ConTheSmartphone or at the link in our bio, and check out our original post about his award winning article from January 2023 @ https://bit.ly/ConTheSmartphoneOGPost



*Edited: The award year was originally mislabeled as '2023'

👏 Congratulations to Mai Anh Nguyen, ’s 2022 Honourable Mention for the ECR Outstanding Research Article Award, for her piece “‘Little people do little things’: The motivation and recruitment of Viet Cong child soldiers”.

Read the full article @ https://bit.ly/DoLittleThings 📖

SOAS University of London

*Edited: The year was originally mislabeled as '2023'

Do you have a sole author research article accepted by ? Then the time has come to apply for our annual

✨Early Career Outstanding Research Article Award✨

Tell your friends 🏆



In 2021, Critical Studies on Security, with Taylor & Francis, established the Early Career Outstanding Research Article Award to recognize and celebrate outstanding research within the journal's aims and scope produced by early career researchers.

One recipient is selected annually by a panel convened by the editors. All applicants receive written feedback. The Award recipient receives a prize in the amount of £400 and is recognized at the journal's annual meeting as well as by special announcement in Critical Studies on Security.

Eligibility: Open to doctoral students nearing the completion of their degree and researchers with five years or less of active research experience (recognizing some applicants might have experienced career interruptions) since the awarding of their PhD. Recipients must be sole author of a regular research article accepted for publication through the journal's regular submission and review process. Please see instructions for authors at: https:// www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcss

Applications: After submitting through the journal's regular submission portal, eligible authors may apply for the award by email to [email protected] confirming eligibility as outlined above, including, if relevant, the date of awarding of PhD and declaration of career interruption. Please indicate 'ECR Award' in subject
line.

⏰ Since tomorrow has been delayed 24h, you should check out Benjamin T. Johnson’s new piece: “This world of tomorrow: Sociotechnical imaginaries of security in the Canadian Arctic” ❄️ Full article @ https://bit.ly/ThisWorldOfTomorrow

From the abstract: “This paper considers how sociotechnical imaginaries structure the development and use of sensing technology in the Canadian Arctic. The central claim is that these technological developments are grounded in a particular sociotechnical imaginary centred on risk, vulnerability, and probability, which frames the Arctic as a space threatened by myriad future dangers. Within this sociotechnical imaginary, the Canadian state’s security and sovereignty are threatened by the potential for competing expressions of power enabled by climate change, technological diffusion, and other trends stemming from the international scale. Consequently, sensing is envisioned as a mode of sovereign power to protect Canada’s Arctic territory and manage threats in their indeterminate and potential form.”

Find the full article at the link in our bio

New year, new list 📚 Be sure to include "Combatting insecurity in the everyday: the global anti-street harassment movement as everyday security practitioners" by Karen Desborough & Jutta Weldes ⚠️ Find the full article @ https://bit.ly/combat_insec_evrydy

From the abstract: "In this paper, we focus on the global anti-street harassment movement, conceptualising its activists as ‘everyday security practitioners’ who, like privileged security practitioners in the state or the academy, theorise street harassment and devise and implement strategies to tackle it. In so doing we argue that Security Studies should pay more attention to the everyday, to insecurities like street harassment, and to such ‘everyday security practitioners’... we explicate the diverse insecurities produced by street harassment, conceptualise 'everyday security practitioners’, and provide some illustrations of strategies deployed by the global anti-street harassment movement both to bring street harassment to wider public attention as a pervasive everyday insecurity and to combat it..."

Article available @ the link in our bio

In their recently published piece, "Naming the city: On the governing forces of narratives in the formation of security dispositifs," León von dear Burg and Susanne Krasmann explain: "As we aim to show in our analysis of scenario exercises, narratives, rather than helping to calm or stabilize chaotic situations, sensitize trainees to read the situation and literally feel what happens. In other words, narratives open a path for trainees to embrace complexities rather than disallowing them."

Read more at https://bit.ly/namingthecity

From the abstract: "Narratives, it is often said, help us make sense of the world. They structure reality and reduce complexity. Yet narratives, we argue, are also visionary. They open up worlds, they allow us to imagine alternative realities and render a matter urgent. In our study of counterterrorism exercises for the German police we examine the ‘governing forces’ of narratives: Narratives help to connect the dots and create a sense of how new forms of terrorism have entered urban life, thus making new forms of security responses seem indispensable. They also help bring the police trainees close to the realness of a threat as well as of the training situation."

We’re all in on the (public) secret: check out Natalie Jester and Emma Dolan’s exploration in “Arms, aviation, and apologies: mapping the Boeing social media response to the 2019 Ethiopian Airlines crash” @ https://bit.ly/AAandA

From the abstract: “Boeing is famous for aviation but also produces arms, making $29.2 billion from the latter in 2018. The role of the arms trade in facilitating death can be considered a ‘public secret’ - known, but socially unacknowledged. This allows Boeing to represent its role as one of ‘neutral’ technological advancement, obscuring violence engendered by certain products. This paper builds on works on public secrecy, which investigate how (un)acknowledgement obscures everyday security arrangements. How can we know the public secret? We argue that public apology and scandal are boundary-delineating practices, locating certain issues within the public secret and rendering others knowable and sayable...Within the wider political contexts of the arms trade and responsibility for safety in commercial aviation, we explain Boeing’s Twitter navigation of apology/scandal not as simply corporate face-saving, but as a practice of (re)confirming the public secret, positioning aviation deaths as knowable/grievable, and those lost to the arms industry as neither.”

Read the article in full at the link in our bio

✨ Welcome back to all who are starting a new academic year! Before your 'to read' list gets too long, make sure you add "Viral bodies: racialised and gendered logics in the securitisation of migration during COVID-19 in Italy" by Agnese Pacciardi 📚

From the abstract: "Since the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants’ mobility has been increasingly securitised as governments have been adopting extraordinary measures to close both external and internal borders. Similarly, the presence of migrants within countries has often been met with lower levels of acceptance, leading to the implementation of discriminatory and xenophobic measures. Although debates on the securitisation of migration are well established in the literature, this article demonstrates how the securitisation of migration during the COVID-19 pandemic has relied on gendered and racialised notions deeply entrenched in the legacy of colonial modernity."

Read more @ the link in our bio or go to https://bit.ly/viralbodies

👀 Eyes on your search bar, and check out Anneroos Planqué-van Hardeveld's new piece, "Securing the platform: how Google appropriates security" 💻

From the abstract: "Google is increasingly developing a manifold of security products for its users, businesses, and national security actors like the US Department of Defence. However, the company and its employees struggle with whether, and how, it should be involved in practices of security, war or weaponry. To unpack how Google emerges as a security actor, I bring new media studies perspectives regarding the socio-political roles Google plays in today’s society to critical security studies... The article illustrates that Google’s first and foremost objective is to secure its platform by carefully balancing between being perceived as both neutral and progressive. Google thus appropriates (in)security by developing seemingly mundane and neutral security products, services and projects that align with its platform logic..."

Click the link in our bio to read more or visit https://bit.ly/securingtheplatform

📚 An engaging collection of perspectives on “Learning to say ‘no’: privilege, entitlement and refusal in peace, (post)conflict and security research” 🚫 Check out this from Jaime J. Hagen, Ilaria Michelis, Jennifer Philippa Eggert & Lewis Turner @ bit.ly/refusalinresearch

From the abstract: “In this forum, we focus on the possibility and necessity for active refusal in research, and the complexities of refusal…Drawing on feminist, q***r, indigenous, anti-racist and decolonial literatures and interventions, we seek to further a practice of refusal as an essential component of researcher reflexivity. Our various positionalities and privileges, and the research entitlement they can bring, necessitate grappling with refusal: we must do better at saying ‘no’. We must also be careful about the ethics of refusal itself: Who gets to say ‘no’ to whom? What comes after the refusal?”

Link in bio for more

📣 New Special Issue alert 📣 Check out the intro by Tina Managhan & Dan Bulley @ https://bit.ly/whatisan_author, and then check out the rest of the issue 👏👏👏

From the intro: “This special issue starts from some simple questions, questions that are periodically raised throughout the arts, humanities and social sciences, including in Critical Security Studies (CSS) and critical International Relations (IR). Yet they are important enough to be repeatedly re-posed at key moments. What is an author? What role does the ‘author’ figure perform in contemporary CSS? How do claims made alongside or against an author undergird or undercut the authority of research, arguments, claims and statements in the field? What does it do to a field that sought to challenge, disrupt and overturn authority claims when its own reliance on foundational authors and their gendered, racialised assumptions is called into question?”

Link in bio for more

✨New Article Alert ✨ Check out “Remaining ‘in-between’ the divides? Conceptual, methodological, and ethical political dilemmas of engaged research in Critical Military Studies” ➗ by Rachel Massey and Thom Tyerman

From the abstract: “Critical Military Studies (CMS) has emerged as an important subdiscipline in international security studies and an interdisciplinary field in its own right. In this article, we offer a close reading of foundational CMS literature to reveal its distinct approach to the critical study of military power. We argue this foundational literature is characterised by a commitment to a series of ‘in-between’ and 'engaged' positions on conceptual binaries between civilian and military spheres, questions of methodological proximity to or distance from military actors, and ethical political support for or opposition to militarism.”

Link in bio for more

🎯 Revisiting 2020, Lucy Suchman explores “Algorithmic warfare and the reinvention of accuracy” 💻 and so can you! Free for a limited time @ https://bit.ly/AlgWar

From the abstract: “This article aims to integrate two interrelated strands in critical security studies. The first is mounting evidence for the fallacy of claims for precision and accuracy in the United States ‘counterterrorism’ programme, particularly as it involves expanding aerial surveillance in support of operations of extrajudicial assasination. The second line of critical analysis concerns growing investment in the further automation of these operations, more specifically in the form of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven. Building upon generative intersections of critical security studies and science and technology studies (STS), I argue that the promotion of automated data analysis under the sign of artificial intelligence can only serve to exacerbate military operations that are at once discriminatory and indiscriminate in their targeting, while remaining politically and legally unaccountable.”

Link in bio for more

From our 2017 special issue Becoming Weapon 📖 check out “Weapons, desire, and the making of war” by Benjamin Meiches, free this month 🗓️ available at https://bit.ly/WeaponsDesire

From the abstract: “Weapons have been traditionally understood as tools of violence subject to human intentions. This article challenges this view of weaponry in favour of thinking of weapons as agentic entities with formative influence over human desires. It builds this account by using contemporary materialist theories to reconceptualise weapons as pluripotential entities that act in ways that exceed human intentions. The article argues this understanding of weaponry can be usefully applied to reinterpret debates over the nature of war, insecurity and technological development. It shows how minimising the political efficacy of weapons limits contemporary understanding of these events.”

🫵 From 2015, check out Caron E. Gentry’s piece, “Anxiety and the creation of the scapegoated other”👤 Free access this month ⏳ @ bit.ly/Anxiety_Scapegoat

From the abstract: “This article examines how anxiety saturates the neo-Orientalist-driven thesis of new terrorism, especially how both anxiety and new terrorism are related to the unknown. Of particular importance is the description of al Qaeda as an amorphous and thus unknowable threat by Western academics and the media, which reifies the discursive neo-Orientalist binary of the West versus Islam. Scholars of international relations are increasingly engaging with emotions and their impact on binary and hierarchical structures. Emotions operate relationally as they are the articulation of affect. The emotions discursively constitute identity and community structures, helping to inform ideas of self and other.”

📺 Free this month, Jessica Auchter’s 2017 piece “Imag(in)ing the severed head: ISIS beheadings and the absent spectacle”🚫 Read for free @ https://bit.ly/AbsentSpectacle

From the abstract: “This paper examines how fear of ISIS beheadings comes to be taken for granted. It uses the framing of the Bilderverbot, the secularised image ban of biblical origin, to examine how beheadings are represented as unrepresentable, and how this paradox enters into normalcy. It demonstrates the relation between the image ban and the naturalisation of fear by telling the story of two beheadings: one of an Iraqi head and one of a Western one. The first is shown but not seen, and the latter is seen but not shown.”

Read more @ https://bit.ly/AbsentSpectacle

📱From 2022, check out Håvard Rustad Markussen’s () new piece, “Conceptualising the smartphone as a security device: appropriations of embodied connectivity at the Black Lives Matter protests” 💬 Find the full piece @ bit.ly/ConTheSmartphone

From the abstract: “This article contributes to our understanding of security devices by engaging with the distinctiveness of one particular and especially important device: the smartphone. Drawing from Barad’s understanding of posthumanist performativity and turning to the smartphone literature outside of security studies, it develops a conceptual account of the smartphone as a security device. The article suggests that the smartphone stands out from other comparable devices because humans have come to embody its connective features. Using the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as an illustration, the article shows how the smartphone’s intra-action with users enable the crafting of new security practices through appropriations of embodied connectivity, especially when such appropriations are carried out on the streets.”

Link in bio for more.

✏️ Welcome back! 🛝Did you find any opportunities to play over your break? Consider Uygar Baspehlivan’s () new piece “‘Repeat after me!’: child’s play, immaturity and resistance” 🚸

From the abstract: ““Children are our future”. This is the dominant understanding of childhood we have today. The child, is an investment in the future. The investment that will yield the nation, the economy and the world with the continuity that it wants and requires. The future is secured by the child. This investment, however, is never secure. In fact, the investment in the child is often also a cause of debilitating insecurity. The child is feared, worried about and paranoically obsessed about. Is this all there is to the child? Whatever happens to “play” – the quintessential activity of the modern child- in this in/secure investment? In this intervention, I critique these investments by gesturing towards a disentanglement of the child away from such spectacles of crisis towards novel associations with the child as a site of political possibility.”

Link in bio or read more @ bit.ly/immaturityandresistance

Unsure what to read during your end-of-term break? 📚 Be sure to add Jiayi Zhou’s “The (universal) human and beyond: constituting security objects in theory and practice” to the top of your list 👤

From the abstract: “…[R]eferent 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.”

Read the full piece @ bit.ly/Human_Beyond or find the link in our bio!

📖 Reflect on “Playing the refugee: aesthetics of trauma in mainstream refugeehood dramaturgy” in Myriam Fotou’s piece published this summer 🎭

From the abstract: “There can hardly be a more commonplace way to start talking about playing on stage than stating the social and political character that theatre has had since its inception. Even when it is not self-defined as ‘political’, the aesthetic and the educational value of theatre is considered self-evident while its engagement with issues of the day is very common. Refugeehood could not escape stage representation, and this is what I consider in the following few pages. How should refugeehood be represented on stage beyond aestheticisation of trauma?”

Read the full piece @ bit.ly/aestheticsoftrauma

Link in bio

📓 Follow along with Erzsébet Strausz as they consider “Writing with Foucault: openings to transformational knowledge practices in and beyond the classroom” 📖

From the abstract: “Prompted by a series of ‘failures’ attached to the social and disciplinary performance of ‘expertise’ in the context of violent conflict, I explore the practice of writings as it unfolds from Michel Foucault’s lesser cited essays and interviews as a generative, creative resource. I follow Foucault in breaking down the normalized perceptions of the ‘author function,’ revealing writing as an act that diagnoses, discovers, and potentially transforms writer, reader and the social structures that the writing addresses. Foucault’s experimental ethos brings to light the complex life worlds of sense-making through the vehicle of writing. It also invites us to embrace the transgenerational heritage that quietly structures our relationships to knowledge together with the multiple selves that arise and are co-present in the text.”

Read the full piece today @ https://bit.ly/WriteWFoucault

🔗 in bio

Very excited to welcome Rhys Machold, another of our new Associate Editors! Rhys is at the as a Lecturer in International Relations, in the School of Social and Political Sciences.

His current work explores how security knowledge moves geographically by examining transnational circuits of police expertise and training.

A warm welcome to Somdeep Sen (), one of the new Associate Editors! Somdeep is an Associate Prof at & Head of Studies for Global & Development Studies.

His research focuses on race and racism in International Relations, liberation movements, spatial politics, settler colonialism and postcolonial studies.

From this spring, check out Mai Anh Nguyen’s piece “‘Little people do little things’: The motivation and recruitment of Viet Cong child soldiers” @ https://bit.ly/DoLittleThings.

From the abstract: “Children have comprised a significant part of past and present military conflicts; however, attempts to understand their motivations have generally focused on coerced recruitment. When children join military groups without physical coercion, they are portrayed as being driven by economic and social deprivations. This article investigates factors that have been disproportionately overlooked as motivators for child soldiers – social contexts, relationships, and personal histories. To this end, I use a relational approach to analyse life histories of former Viet Cong child soldiers. I explore their lives prior to joining the Viet Cong guerrillas and trace how their choice to do so had been shaped by societal factors including family, perceptions of a good childhood, and previous war exposure.”

Find full piece at the link in bio.

As many of us prepare for the new school year, it’s time to refresh our to-read piles! Check out Ana Ivasiuc’s “Provincialising security: Materiality and sensoriality” published this summer, @ https://bit.ly/ProvincialisingSec

From the abstract: “Security has come to embody a self-evident and much sought-after kind of good, and has come to colonise imaginaries, debates, policies, and large swathes of what social life means in various corners of the world. Echoing postcolonial calls for decentring that which is taken for granted, my essay seeks to provincialise security in three distinct ways. Drawing on my research on the securitisation of the Roma in Italy, first, I trace the transformation of the term sicurezza from safety to security in a recent-historical perspective, showing how the notion morphed from bodily integrity to a much more blurred – though taken for granted – concept. Second, using a non-representational approach grounded in new materialism, I show that what hides beneath the ubiquitous talk of sicurezza surrounding the Roma nowadays are dimensions of materiality and sensoriality that construct insecurity in a relational and ever-shifting manner. Third, I privilege the perspective of the Roma in a decolonising move that questions their securitisation and the overall framing of Roma-related concerns as a security problem. Finally, I show the productivity of the topology framework in provincialising both security, and the western-centric theory production around it.”

Link in bio 🔗

A fascinating piece with a great title, from our most recent issue - check out Mathias Ericsson & Misse Wester’s piece “If I tell you I will have to kill you: secrecy in public administration in a time of securitization and militarization” @ https://bit.ly/SecrecyPA

From the abstract: “Critical security studies examine how everyday life is affected or transformed by practices that militarise civil society. This article addresses one such area: qualitative changes in the openness and transparency of public administration, instating a mode of suspicion and secrecy. The article is based on interviews and observations in the area of the total defence in Sweden, where we during three years encountered challenges in gaining access to authorities that initially welcomed participation of researchers, but progressively became inaccessible. We use these experiences to reflect on both methodological issues and wider implications for the securitisation of civil society. The article concludes that difficulties in gaining access to the field may itself serve as valuable data in understanding the changing condition of public administration in a time of militarisation.”

Read it in full @ https://bit.ly/SecrecyPA

From 10(1), be sure to add R. Guy Emerson’s “Critique of biopolitical violence” to your weekend reading list. Find it @ https://bit.ly/Crit_BPV or at the link in our bio.

From the 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.”