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"Vaughan-Williams, Nick"
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Everyday security threats
Everyday security threats explores public perceptions of security threats in contemporary Britain, using data from extensive fieldwork and drawing on perspectives from International Relations, security studies and political psychology.
eBook
Europe's border crisis : biopolitical security and beyond
The European Union (EU) Commission champions a 'migrant-centred' approach to border security and 'irregular' migration management: it claims not only to observe human rights, but also to use surveillance to enhance the humanitarian protection of 'endangered' lives on land and at sea. Yet research presented by Non-Governmental Organizations and 'irregular' migrants' own testimonies reveal systemic border violence, dehumanization in spaces of detention, and exposure to death via abandonment in hostile environments. This book turns to conceptual resources found in biopolitical theory in order to move diagnoses of Europe's border crisis beyond that of a 'gap' between the policy 'rhetoric' of humanitarianism and the 'reality' of 'irregular' migrants' embodied experiences. It argues that both 'positive' and 'negative' dimensions of EU border security are symptomatic of tensions within biopolitical techniques of government and what Roberto Esposito refers to as the paradigm of immunization. While bordering practices are designed to play a defensive role they contain the potential for excessive and often lethal security mechanisms that end up threatening the very values and lives they purport to protect. Each chapter draws on a different biopolitical key to identify and interrogate diverse technologies of power at a range of border sites. Must border security always result in dehumanization and death? Are humanitarian discourses sufficient for critiquing contemporary forms of border violence? Is a more affirmative approach to border politics possible? 'Europe's border crisis' addresses these pressing questions and advances new research agendas for critical border and migration studies beyond existing debates about 'control' versus 'escape'.
Book
Border Politics
Presents a distinctive theoretical approach to the problem of borders in the study of International Relations. It turns from the current debate regarding the presence or absence of borders to consider the fundamental change that is occurring in the concept of the border in contemporary political life.
eBook
From Security-Space to Time-Race: Reimagining Borders and Migration in Global Politics
In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 “migration” crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of “migrants” reveals about the dominant system of thought that assigns people to place and how it might it be possible to think beyond its limits. It starts by demonstrating that the “security-space” imaginary both excludes and relies upon highly problematic, concealed assumptions about time and race. It shows how questions of time and race continually haunt and disrupt the seemingly coherent and indomitable “security-space” way of thinking. Following a strategy of deconstruction, the article arrives at the counter-intuitive conclusion that this dominant problematization of migration is temporal and structured by a relation to the future. Building on existing critical literature produced by scholars of Geopolitics, International Relations, and International Political Sociology, it offers an alternative imaginary, “time-race,” which opens up new ground for reimagining borders and migration to overcome reproducing the never-ending cycle of “migration crises,” to which there is apparently no alternative.
Journal Article
New Materialisms, discourse analysis, and International Relations: a radical intertextual approach
This article investigates the recent ‘New Materialisms’ turn in social and political thought and asks what the potential theoretical and methodological significance might be for the study of International Relations (IR). To do so we return to debates about the theoretical status of discourse in IR as it is in this context that the question of materiality – particularly as it relates to language – has featured prominently in recent years. While the concept of discourse is increasingly narrow in IR, the ‘New Materialisms’ literature emphasises the political force of materiality beyond language and representation. However, a move to reprioritise the politics of materiality over that of language and representation is equally problematic since it perpetuates rather than challenges the notion of a prior distinction between language and materiality. In response, we draw on earlier poststructural thought in order to displace this dichotomy and articulate an extended understanding of what analysing ‘discourse’ might mean in the study of IR.
Journal Article
Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security
Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies, and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritized do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus-group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate (1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct and narrate ‘security threats’, and (2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalizations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes and stories reproduce the police order, in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticize the grounds on which national security agendas are authorized, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease.
Journal Article
Fit for purpose? Fitting ontological security studies ‘into’ the discipline of International Relations
The performance of International Relations (IR) scholarship–as in all scholarship–acts to close and police the boundaries of the discipline in ways that reflect power–knowledge relations. This has led to the development of two strands of work in ontological security studies in IR, which divide on questions of ontological choice and the nature of the deployment of the concept of dread. Neither strand is intellectually superior to the other and both are internally heterogeneous. That there are two strands, however, is the product of the performance of IR scholarship, and the two strands themselves perform distinct roles. One allows ontological security studies to engage with the ‘mainstream’in IR; the other allows ‘international’elements of ontological security to engage with the social sciences more generally. Ironically, both can be read as symptoms of the discipline’s issues with its own ontological (in) security. We reflect on these intellectual dynamics and their implications and prompt a new departure by connecting ontological security studies in IR with the emerging interdisciplinary fields of the ‘vernacular’and ‘everyday’via the mutual interest in biographical narratives of the self and the work that they do politically.
Journal Article