Securing the human in critical security studies: the insecurity of a secure ethics

This article argues that Critical Security Studies (CSS), exemplified by Ken Booth’s Theory of World Security, has outlined an ethics of security as emancipation of the ‘human’, but also a highly problematic security of ethics. After drawing out how the ethics of CSS operates, we examine the security of this ethics by examining it against a hard case, that of the 199899 Kosovo crisis. Confronting this concrete situation, we draw out three possibilities for action used at the time to secure the human: ‘humanitarian containment’, military intervention and hospitality. Assessing each against Booth’s requirements for ethical security action, we counter that, in fact, no option was without risks, pitfalls and ambiguities. Ultimately, if any action to promote the security and the emancipation of the human is possible, it must embrace and prioritise the fundamental insecurity of ethics, or else find itself paralysed through a fear of making situations worse.

Limits of Dissent, Perils of Activism: Spaces of Resistance and the New Security Logic

On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army while he was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW) in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bullets at a Jewish-Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, the enveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similar shootings that soon followed, possible. Situating the actions of AAtW within a much wider context of securitization—of identities, movements, and bodies—we examine strategies of resistance which are deployed in highly securitized public spaces. We claim that an unexpected matrix of identity in which abnormality is configured as security threat render the bodies of activists especially precarious. The paper thus provides an account of the new rationales of security technologies and tactics which increasingly govern public spaces.

Guns don’t kill people, cyborgs do::a Latourian provocation for transformatory arms control and disarmament

This article seeks to provoke a deeper engagement of Critical Security Studies with security's relations to technology and weapons. It explores existing assumptions about these relations in mainstream arms control and disarmament theory, and the way such assumptions are deployed and distributed in the current settlement of arms control and disarmament practice. It then draws on recent social and philosophical discussions of materiality, particularly on the thought of Bruno Latour, to propose a different set of concepts for exploring the aims and limits of arms control and disarmament. These concepts emphasise the mediating roles of material things in social relations and they may offer a richer view of the object of arms control (weapons and violence) and of the practices of arms limitation and reduction; one that may ultimately gesture towards a different understanding of arms politics, and that may be used to explore the transformatory potentials of arms control and disarmament.

Youth in Contexts of Political Violence: A Developmental Approach to the Study of Youth Identity and Emotional Security in Their Communities

Going beyond the association between youth exposure to political violence and psychopathology, the current article examines within-person change in youth strength of identity with their ethno-political group and youth reports of the insecurity in their communities. Conceptually related but growing out of different paradigms, both group identity and emotional insecurity have been examined as key variables impacting youth responses to threats from other group members. The goal of the current study is to review previous studies examining these two key variables and to contribute new analyses, modeling within-person change in both variables and examining covariation in their growth. The current article uses data from 823 Belfast adolescents over 4 years. The results suggest youth are changing linearly over age in both constructs and that there are ethno-political group differences in how youth are changing. The results also indicate that change in insecurity is related to strength of identity at age 18, and strength of identity and emotional insecurity are related at age 18. Implications and directions for future work in the area of youth and political violence are discussed. © 2014 American Psychological Association.

Who Knows What's Going On? Mapping New Security Landscapes in Contemporary Espionage Fiction

This article explores whether or to what extent the contemporary espionage novel is able to map and interrogate transformations in the post-9/11security environment. It asks how well a form or genre of writing, typically handcuffed to the machinations and demands of the Cold War and state sovereignty, is able to adapt to a new security environment characterized by strategies of “risk assessment” and “resilience-building” and by modes or regimes of power not reducible to, or wholly controlled by, the state. In doing so, it thinks about the capacities of this type of fiction for “resisting” the formations of power it wants to make visible and is partly complicit with.