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This book argues that catastrophe is a particular way of governing future events – such as terrorism, climate change or pandemics – which we cannot predict but which may strike suddenly, without warning, and cause irreversible damage. At a time where catastrophe increasingly functions as a signifier of our future, imaginaries of pending doom have fostered new modes of anticipatory knowledge and redeployed existing ones. Although it shares many similarities with crises, disasters, risks and other disruptive incidents, this book claims that catastrophes also bring out the very limits of knowledge and management. The politics of catastrophe is turned towards an unknown future, which must be imagined and inhabited in order to be made palpable, knowable and actionable. Politics of Catastrophe critically assesses the effects of these new practices of knowing and governing catastrophes to come and challenges the reader to think about the possibility of an alternative politics of catastrophe. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, risk theory, political theory and International Relations in general.

While the Copenhagen School has provided security analysts with important tools for illuminating processes of threat construction, the reverse processes of un-making security or desecuritization have remained seriously underspecified. Informed by a critical sensibility, this article asks the question ‘how can desecuritization be thought’ and argues, contra the Copenhagen School, that desecuritization has to be tackled first politically and not analytically. I show that the dynamics of securitization/desecuritization raise questions about the type of politics we want, whether that is democratic politics of universal norms and slow procedures or the exceptional politics of speed and enemy exclusion. I subsequently propose a different concept of emancipation, which is informed by the principles of universality and recognition. This concept distances itself from both desecuritization and the equation of emancipation with security by Critical Security Studies since it has a different logic from the non-democratic and exclusionary logic of security and it engages more thoroughly with both democratic politics and the ‘conditions’ in which securitization becomes possible.

In 2020, the European Union announced the award of the contract for the biometric part of the new database for border control, the Entry Exit System, to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of publicly available documents that show what kind of technologies are being implemented, for how much money, and by whom, there has been limited engagement with digital methods in this field. Moreover, critical border and security scholarship has largely focused on qualitative and ethnographic methods. Building on a data feminist approach, we propose a transdisciplinary methodology that goes beyond binaries of qualitative/quantitative and opacity/transparency, examines power asymmetries and makes the labour of coding visible. Empirically, we build and analyse a dataset of the contracts awarded by two European Union agencies key to its border management policies – the European Agency for Large-Scale Information Systems (eu-LISA) and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). We supplement the digital analysis and visualisation of networks of companies with close reading of tender documents. In so doing, we show how a transdisciplinary methodology can be a device for making datafication ‘intelligible’ at the European Union borders.

Critical infrastructure protection is prominently concerned with objects that appear indispensable for the functioning of social and political life. However, the analysis of material objects in discussions of critical infrastructure protection has remained largely within the remit of managerial responses, which see matter as simply passive, a blank slate. In security studies, critical approaches have focused on social and cultural values, forms of life, technologies of risk or structures of neoliberal globalization. This article engages with the role of 'things' or of materiality for theories of securitization. Drawing on the materialist feminism of Karen Barad, it shows how critical infrastructure in Europe neither is an empty receptacle of discourse nor has 'essential' characteristics; rather, it emerges out of material-discursive practices. Understanding the securitization of critical infrastructure protection as a process of materialization allows for a reconceptualization of how security matters and its effects.

While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy or the geopolitical space of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Building on literature that has connected postsocialism and postcolonialism analytically and politically, particularly feminist work that has reclaimed postsocialism to understand the global legacies of socialism in the present, this article proposes to unpack dimensions of postsocialism as method and critique. Postsocialism as method attends to how socialist legacies endure and are transformed in the present while holding together contradictions and ambivalences. Postsocialism as critique is oriented to transversal solidarities and the epistemic vocabularies that can undergird these struggles. To trace these dimensions of method and critique, the article is situated empirically within debates about borders and migration. Postsocialism is not intended to replace or displace other critical approaches but to pluralise our vocabularies and multiply political interventions.

Critical analyses of security have focused on the production of knowledge, techniques, and devices that tame unknowns and render social problems actionable. Drawing on insights from, science and technology studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of “ignorance studies,” this article proposes to explore the enactment of non-knowledge in security and legal practices. Starting with legal challenges brought against the NSA and other intelligence agencies after the Snowden revelations about mass surveillance, it shows how different modes of non-knowledge are enacted and not just “tamed”: uncertainty, ignorance, secrecy, ambiguity, and error. The enactment of non-knowledge has important implications for how we understand security practices, the relation between security and law, and public challenges to mass surveillance in a digital world. On the one hand, the enactment of non-knowledge by security and legal professionals limits activist and NGO resistance to mass surveillance, when these are focused on claims to knowledge, disclosure, and transparency. On the other, reassembling non-knowledge and knowledge differently has generative political effects and opens new possibilities for intervention and resistance.

From statistical calculations to psychological knowledge, from profiling to scenario planning, and from biometric data to predictive algorithms, International Relations scholars have shed light on the multiple forms of knowledge deployed in the governing of populations and their political effects. Recent scholarship in critical border and security studies has drawn attention to ‘the other side of knowledge’ and has developed a vibrant conversation with the emergent interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies. This article proposes to advance these conversations on governing through non-knowledge by nuancing the analysis of power/(non-)knowledge/subjectivity relations. Firstly, we expand the analysis of non-knowledge by attending to the problematisation of errors and fakes in controversies at Europe's borders. Errors have emerged in relation to border actors’ practices and technologies, while migrant practices, documentation, and narratives are deemed to be potentially ‘fake’, ‘fraudulent’, or ‘false’. Secondly, we explore how different subjectivities are produced through regimes of error/truth and fake/authenticity. We argue that there are important epistemic differences between ‘fake’ and ‘error’, that they are entangled with different techniques of power and produce highly differentiated subjectivities. Finally, we attend to how these subjectivities are enacted within racialised hierarchies and ask whether non-knowledge can be mobilised to challenge these hierarchies.

Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards internal to knowledge practice to validate their knowledge claims. This quest for scientific standards now also operates against the background of debates on ‘post-truth’, which raise pressing and perplexing questions for critical lines of thought. We propose a different approach by conceptualizing validity as practices of assembling credibility in which the transversal formation and circulation of credits and credentials combine with disputes over credence and credulity. This conceptualization of the validity of (critical) security knowledge shifts the focus from epistemic and methodological standards to transepistemic practices and relations. It allows us to mediate validity critically as a sociopolitical rather than strictly scientific accomplishment. Developing such an understanding of validity makes it possible for critical security studies and international relations to displace epistemic disputes about ‘post-truth’ with transversal practices of knowledge creation, circulation and accreditation.

As digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data and how the boundary between self and other is drawn algorithmically. It argues that algorithmic security practices and Big Data technologies have transformed self/other relations. Rather than the enemy or the risky abnormal, the ‘other’ is algorithmically produced as anomaly. Although anomaly has often been used interchangeably with abnormality and pathology, a brief genealogical reading of the concept shows that it works as a supplementary term, which reconfigures the dichotomies of normality/abnormality, friend/enemy, and identity/difference. By engaging with key practices of anomaly detection by intelligence and security agencies, the article analyses the materialisation of anomalies as specific spatial ‘dots’, temporal ‘spikes’, and topological ‘nodes’. We argue that anomaly is not simply indicative of more heterogeneous modes of othering in times of Big Data, but represents a mutation in the logics of security that challenge our extant analytical and critical vocabularies.