Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/09670106231210472
D. Vigneswaran, Philippe Bourbeau
{"title":"Insecurity, deportability and authority","authors":"D. Vigneswaran, Philippe Bourbeau","doi":"10.1177/09670106231210472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231210472","url":null,"abstract":"Security is more than ever a central theme in the study of international migration. For the past twenty years, research on the securitization of migration has burgeoned. While these initiatives are to be applauded, we believe they may also have misdiagnosed the problem. For example, it may not be that the concept of ‘security’ needs to be ‘humanized’ in order to be more in tune with migrants’ concerns. Rather, the problem may lie in the use of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category. The ‘migrant’ remains an inherently statist construct. The starting premise for the collection of articles in this special issue is that it is the tendency of academic research to mistake the statist category of the ‘migrant’ as an analytical category that has prevented the literature on the migration–security nexus from meaningfully reflecting the lived experience and aspirations of its human respondents, particularly as regards their encounters with forms of institutional authority, practices, resistance and resilience. We use the rubric of deportability to open up a variety of ways of thinking and talking about migration and security that do not fall back upon statist tropes. The authors in this collection take up this challenge by framing and employing concepts such as statelessness, sedentariness and expulsion to redefine our understanding of the relationship between movement and order. They take inspiration from multiple brands of social and political theorizing where conditions of violence and forced removal qualitatively differentiate the experiences and encounters of a particular group.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"37 4","pages":"517 - 528"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139017642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-12-01Epub Date: 2022-11-02DOI: 10.1177/09670106221118798
Barak Kalir
{"title":"Qualifying deportation: How police translation of 'dangerous foreign criminals' led to expansive deportation practices in Spain.","authors":"Barak Kalir","doi":"10.1177/09670106221118798","DOIUrl":"10.1177/09670106221118798","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 2009, in a move to improve the situation regarding the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain, a left-wing government led by the Socialist Workers' Party drafted a new policy aimed at focusing police efforts exclusively on the deportation of 'foreign criminals'. Ethnographically tracing the enforcement of deportation by a central police unit in Madrid, this article shows how the practical implementation of a policy that seemingly sought to limit the use of deportation in fact allowed for continuous and even reinvigorated deportation practices aimed at all categories of illegalized migrants. Operating under the idea that they were now fighting 'dangerous criminals', many police agents felt increasingly motivated about carrying out deportations and reassured about the morality of doing so. Rather than focusing on illegalized migrants who had been indicted for serious crimes, most police agents considered anyone with a police record to fit their target group. As a result of the specific police interpretation of the new policy, the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain was not only increased but also left to be enforced according to the racialized and racist ideas of police agents. The article argues for the need to scrutinize all new deportation policies within Western liberal states in terms of their effect on deportability by highlighting entrenched and institutionalized forms of racism against illegalized migrants within the police force.</p>","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"1 1","pages":"548-567"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10721453/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42904612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-12-01DOI: 10.1177/09670106221127844
Sine Plambech
{"title":"‘My body is my piece of land’: Indebted deportation among undocumented migrant sex workers from Thailand and Nigeria in Europe","authors":"Sine Plambech","doi":"10.1177/09670106221127844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106221127844","url":null,"abstract":"Set at the intersection of debt and deportability, this article analyses how undocumented migrant sex workers in Europe navigate deportability and its effects. While sex trafficking into the EU has received mounting attention as part of global migration dynamics, the role of debt in the lives of migrant women has been overlooked. The migrant women in this study arrive in Europe heavily indebted after traveling through the Sahara Desert and across the Mediterranean, or via migration facilitators in Southeast Asia, to find work in the European sex industry. Their deportation might therefore entail returning to their home countries still indebted. The article draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the home areas of two of the largest groups of undocumented migrant sex workers in Europe –Thailand’s Isaan province and Benin City in Nigeria’s Edo State – where women’s migration has become a familiar social phenomenon. Moving away from either a criminalizing or a victimizing framework for understanding sex-work migration, I argue for the concept of ‘indentured sex-work migration’ as a meaningful corrective to the narrative on sex trafficking and that the situation of ‘indebted deportation’ need to be better understood within the study of contemporary border control and security.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"26 11","pages":"586 - 601"},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139018482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-11-23DOI: 10.1177/09670106231203839
Naomi Head
{"title":"‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan","authors":"Naomi Head","doi":"10.1177/09670106231203839","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231203839","url":null,"abstract":"Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2,"publicationDate":"2023-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139246092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-11-09DOI: 10.1177/09670106231201243
Lee Jarvis, Andrew Whiting
{"title":"Everyday security and the newspaper obituary: Reproducing and contesting terrorism discourse","authors":"Lee Jarvis, Andrew Whiting","doi":"10.1177/09670106231201243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231201243","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the obituary as an important, yet neglected, site of everyday security discourse. Through an original analysis of 86 published obituaries of 11 prominent ‘terrorists’, we offer three arguments. First, obituaries play an important constitutive role in shaping public understanding of terrorism and terrorists. Second, in so doing, terrorist obituaries frequently draw upon and reproduce established constructions of terrorism. Especially important here, we argue, are claims associated with the influential, yet heavily contested, ‘new terrorism’ thesis that posits profound transformations in the motives, organization and violences of terrorist groups from the late 20th century onwards. Third, notwithstanding the above, the (terrorist) obituary also offers important resources for nuancing and problematizing dominant constructions – such as of ‘new terrorism’ – in part because of the opportunity for sociopolitical critique afforded by this mnemonic genre. In making these arguments, the article therefore offers new empirical and conceptual insight into the obituary as a genre of everyday security knowledge, and into the mobility and resilience of established security discourses.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":" 39","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135292120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-09-21DOI: 10.1177/09670106231194917
Asees Gabriel-Puri
{"title":"To/for Syrialism: Towards an ‘embodied’ kind of war story","authors":"Asees Gabriel-Puri","doi":"10.1177/09670106231194917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231194917","url":null,"abstract":"How would what we know about war change if we took seriously the ‘embodied experience’ of its violences? How do we write ‘war’ and ‘violence’ in such a way that we can capture the complexity of what Bousquet, Grove and Shah refer to as ‘war’s incessant becoming’? How do we, as Sylvester puts it, ‘pull the bodies and experiences of war out of entombments created by [international relations] theories . . . into the open as crucial elements of war’? In other words, how do we write ‘war’ as if people, lives, suffering, pain, anger, cruelty, hope, resilience, survival and the creativity of it all – the embodied experience – mattered in international relations? In this essay, I wrestle with these questions by re-creating my encounter with Omar Imam, a Syrian artist whose conceptual photography forms the backbone of this piece, and by fleshing out a conceptual framework through which to explore this ‘embodied experience’: Syrialism. Here, Syrialism, imagined as a ‘machine’ (borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari) declares that war is experienced as an embodied process that is consistently, though not constantly, partially connected to other violence/violent processes, and this refiguration brings the actual machinations of the injuries of war and the particulars of how it is sensed and made sensible into focus.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136154367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-09-20DOI: 10.1177/09670106231194911
Beste İşleyen, Sibel Karadağ
{"title":"Engineered migration at the Greek–Turkish border: A spectacle of violence and humanitarian space","authors":"Beste İşleyen, Sibel Karadağ","doi":"10.1177/09670106231194911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231194911","url":null,"abstract":"In February 2020, Turkey announced that the country would no longer prevent refugees and migrants from crossing into the European Union. The announcement resulted in mass human mobility heading to the Turkish border city of Edirne. Relying on freshly collected data through interviews and field visits, this article argues that the 2020 events were part of a state-led execution of ‘engineered migration’ through a constellation of actors, technologies and practices. Turkey’s performative act of engineered migration created a spectacle in ways that differ from the spectacle’s usual materialization at the EU’s external borders. By breaking from its earlier role as a partner, the Turkish state engaged in a countermove fundamentally altering the dyadic process through which the spectacle routinely materializes at EU external borders around the hypervisibilization of migrant illegality. Reconceptualizing the spectacle through engineered migration, the article identifies two complementary acts by Turkish actors: the spectacularization of European (Greek) violence and the creation of a humanitarian space to showcase Turkey as the ‘benevolent’ actor. The article also discusses how the sort of hypervisibility achieved through the spectacle has displaced violence from its points of emergence and creation and becomes the routinized form of border security in Turkey.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"111 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136313993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-09-16DOI: 10.1177/09670106231194918
Vic Castro
{"title":"Mechanical sex, science, security: Intersex medical violence, Thomas Hobbes and John Money’s invention of gender","authors":"Vic Castro","doi":"10.1177/09670106231194918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231194918","url":null,"abstract":"According to a widespread contemporary medical discourse, intersex people’s well-being is threatened by their own bodily features, which must be ‘corrected’ through emergency surgical measures. Yet intersex people and activists have abundantly documented how these measures enact precisely the suffering that they were framed as countering. This article asks how the presence of such exceptionalist security logic in mundane hospital settings highlights particular intersections of security, bodies and materiality in Western modernity. It puts 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes in dialogue with 20th-century sexologist John Money, and shows how both struggled to construct social order in spite of the disorderly materiality of human bodies. Hobbes ‘invented’ a universal abstracted body, a machine in which matter is subsumed to the fiction of a social will. As science provided mechanistic understandings of sex, race and deviance, the messy materiality of concrete bodies eventually failed to substantiate a biological grounding for the sex binary. Money then ‘invented’ the concept of gender – a social category to which physiological sex is subservient, which feminists later borrowed – to justify violent interventions that physically cut that disorderly materiality out of intersex people’s bodies.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135307304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-09-16DOI: 10.1177/09670106231194919
Håvard Rustad Markussen
{"title":"Covid-19 contact-tracing apps and the public/private co-production of security","authors":"Håvard Rustad Markussen","doi":"10.1177/09670106231194919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231194919","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines how the smartphone contributes to the co-production of security through an analysis of Covid-19 contact-tracing apps. Building on existing research in security studies that mobilizes the science and technology concept of co-production, the article proposes the notion of ‘appropriation’ as a concrete way of extending our understanding of the public/private co-production of security. Appropriation highlights how consumer technology may be repurposed for security and shows how private-sector actors that own consumer technology not only influence, but actively condition the co-production of security. Bringing new, typically commercial, concerns to bear on security practices, appropriation also has the effect of complicating conventional understandings of the relationship between liberty and security. Focusing on the NHS Covid-19 app and its contentious relationship with Google/Apple’s framework for digital contact-tracing, the article demonstrates how the smartphone enables private-sector actors to gain influence in the security domain. Google and Apple used their control over smartphone technology to compel the British health authorities to adopt a less effective but more privacy-preserving approach than they originally intended, and thus enforced a seemingly liberal response to an exceptional political situation.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135307726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Security DialoguePub Date : 2023-09-12DOI: 10.1177/09670106231194908
Wen Liu
{"title":"The mundane politics of war in Taiwan: Psychological preparedness, civil defense, and permanent war","authors":"Wen Liu","doi":"10.1177/09670106231194908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106231194908","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of war has always been taken for granted in the study of Taiwan vis-a-vis the People’s Republic of China. Under the dominant international narrative, Taiwan is often framed as a contested territory, where its land and sovereignty are up for competition. While recent escalating geopolitical tension has brought increasing international attention to Taiwan, international discourse on Taiwanese sovereignty has been largely limited to a traditional conception of war that views Taiwan as a geopolitical pawn in a ‘new Cold War’ between the United States and the People’s Republic of China or, under the banner of ‘geopolitical realism’, treats the rise of Taiwanese national identity as war-making. Both approaches minimize the significance of Taiwanese sovereignty and subjectivity in the struggle between superpowers. This article intervenes in both of these views by applying the framework of martial empiricism with an analysis of the subjectivity of war preparedness in Taiwanese civil society to demonstrate that war has become a normative and liberal mode of politics in Taiwan. From my ethnographic fieldwork on the grass-roots mobilization of civil defense in the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I illustrate how civil defense rearticulates war not as a distant, spectacular event but as a mundane scenario that can be prepared for through daily practices and communal planning in Taiwan.","PeriodicalId":21670,"journal":{"name":"Security Dialogue","volume":"121 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135884344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}