Members

Here you can find information about the members' research interests.

Christopher Alderson

Claudia Aradau

My research engages with the effects of (in)security practices and possibilities of political agency and resistance. More recently, I have grown particularly interested how worst case scenarios of unexpected catastrophic events reshape ontologies and epistemologies of security. As part of this collaborative project, I would like to explore methods of analysing objects of security, materialities that are invoked, constructed and reconstructed for the purposes of preventing or responding to catastrophic events: buildings, infrastructure, public spaces, access routes and so on. Particularly the emergence of ‘crowded spaces’ as an object of counter-terrorism governance raises questions about methods to analyse subjects (crowds) and objects (spaces) of security.

Philippe Bonditti

I am interested in the contemporary mutations of the modern states' security apparatuses and their connections with the transformative process of the art of governing people. I am mainly drawing on Foucault's and Deleuze's seminal works, trying to deploy a genealogical perspective from and within an ontology of the becoming. On the empirical level, I am trying to focus on three of the multiple levels at which these mutations seem to operate simultaneously: the reconfigurations of the security apparatuses (with a major focus on the US, Brazil and the EU), the computarization of the tools and techniques through which "security" is said to be achieved, and the redefinition of the criteria of radical otherness in so called "globalized times". At a more theoretical level, this research aims at comprehending the spatio-temporal rearticulations these mutations imply in terms of the art of governing people.

Youri Cormier

While my overarching PhD research deals with the history and significance of dialectical reasoning in war theory as well as contradictions in the foundational works of Hegel and Clausewitz; as a member of the ICCM, I will be contributing research on technologically-enhanced perception in the battlefield and the benefits of framing research using phenomenological and existentialist methodologies rather than traditional empiricist notions of a static, objective world observed by passive subjects.

Stefan Elbe

My research interests are broadly in the areas of international security, health security, pandemic preparedness, the global politics of disease, human security, national security, securitization theory, HIV/AIDS and international security, risk, biopolitics, and the International Political Thought of Nietzsche. I have recently completed a book-length reseach project on security and governmentality that used the securitization of HIV/AIDS as an extensive case study. Currently, I am working more generally on issues of health security, with a specific project focusing on what I call the medicalization of insecurity. I am particularly interested in the ways in which insecurity is becoming increasingly defined in medical terms, and how this is facilitating an expansion in the social influence of a range of medical professionals and experts. The empirical elements of my research focuses on health security policies, global infectious disease surveillance systems, and the rise of medical 'countermeasures' such as Tamiflu.

Jef Huysmans

Currently my security research focuses on how global insecurities are embedded in everyday life and on the political significance of everyday practice rupturing these securitising processes. Conceptually, I look at notions of proliferation, mobility, act, and appropriation, the creation of insecurity densities, and the everyday as a political category. Methodologically, I work on how to study situated knowledge and complexity. Empirically, I work on the securitising of mobility, how technologies work global insecurities into everyday life, and rupturing practices in securitised sites.

Xavier Guillaume

I am currently concentrating on questions relating to political agency, resistance, everyday practices and processes to reflect on security practices and the possibilities of the political within such practices. I am more particularly focusing my research on the place of silence and humour in security practices. In order to approach empirically these questions and themes, working on situated knowledge is an imperative as they are not only theoretical and conceptual questions but also raise important methodological questions: how to study practices? how to identify silence as a practice? how to situate non-volitional practices within processes pertaining to the political? 

Axel Heck

My research focuses on theoretical, methodological and empirical questions regarding the constitution of political power in international relations. Classical and contemporary approaches to hegemonic and imperial power-relations are at the core of my research interests. Beside material factors, language, and especially images and visualizations have an enormous impact on the construction of social power relations. Therefore, the analysis of “visual” justifications of military action and security meassures is a central element of my research.

Eva Herschinger

My current research focuses on subjectivity and security practices, in particular on the relationship between agency, discourse and practices and the role of power/hegemony played in these relations. How are subjects constituted through security practices? What role for the subject in these processes? Furthermore, I am working on normative questions of critical approaches in general and in the field of security in particular. Empirically my research focuses on the issues of international terrorism, drug prohibition and international/European police cooperation.

Hannah Hughes

I am currently researching how climate change is being conceptualised as a social and political issue by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am interested in the processes by which environmental issues like climate change come to be problematised by science and operated on by society and the interaction between the two. I investigate these processes with a theoretical and empirical approach informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. My interest in security studies is also centred around climate change and comes from researching the British government's attempt to securitise climate change, which culminated in the government raising it for debate at the UN Security Council in 2007. Using the methodological insights of Bourdieu, and combining them with those that emerge from the readings of the situated cluster, I want to explore the possibility of situating security in broader scholarly and worldly practices.

Manuel Mireanu

In my Phd research I am interested in how groups of organized citizens manage to successfully securitize social issues. The success of this securitization depends first on an emergency type of discourse whereby parts of the population ‘take the law in their own hands’; and second, on establishing a relationship of legitimacy with the general population and with the state, as audiences of a security speech act. My research looks at groups of vigilantes and citizens’ patrols from Italy, and asks what makes their securitizing discourses successful and legitimate. Methodologically, I combine participatory observation fieldwork with the analysis of security discourses, in order to understand the interaction between situated practices of security and wider structures of threat narratives and exceptionalisms. In the ICCM, I am also interested in how can security studies be ‘critical’, as well as in questions about everyday practices of security in urban spaces.

Can E. Mutlu

I am a PhD candidate at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa working on a dissertation on the external borders of the European Union. My main research interests are: Political Geography - Borders, Space and Territoriality, critical security studies - securitization theory and affect, and European Integration Theories - external relations of the EU. Rather ambitiously, I am trying to develop a theory called “dysfunctionalism” that combines securitization theory and European integration. For the purposes of the collaboratory I am working with the visuality/perception cluster as well as following the works of the mapping cluster.

Andrew Neal

Christian Olsson

I am interested in the question of the legitimization (and the correlative claim to the monopolization) of violence, mainly drawing on a Bourdieu-inspired perspective but also very much inspired by political theory and historical sociology. On the empirical level, I am trying to problematize the military (and private military) "counter-insurgency" practices resorted to in the context of overseas military "pacification operations" , mainly in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the methodological level, I am interested in the mapping of security professionals (through a project supervised by Didier Bigo and focusing on the European/ EU as well as on the transatlantic levels), the genealogy and socio-genisis of counter-insurgency doctrines (small wars, imperial policing, "pacification coloniale") as well as in the question of how to carry out empirical research on political symbols and symbolism (focusing on the issue of physical and symbolical violence). 

Sven Opitz

My research is concerned with analyzing the intersections of security and law. In my PhD (completed in July 2010), I have developed a deconstructive reading of Niklas Luhmann's Law as a Social System. My aim is to show how rationalities of security invert the legal system through re-inscribing forms of counter-law into law. For example, I try to understand the exception not from the figure of the sovereign, but as an effect of interfering temporalities: the temporality of law and the temporality of security. In the near future, I want to explore how regimes of security correspond with legal processes of de- and reterritorialization. Working title: "A New Nomos of the Earth." After five years at the University of Basel (Switzerland), I am now lecturer in Sociology at the University of Hamburg. Since 2008 I am Co-Editor of Foucault Studies.

Stephan Scheel

As an active member of the antiracist and no border movement for nearly ten years I have developed a strong interest in mobility, border and critical security studies (i.e. the securitisation of migration) while studying politcal science at the university of Hamburg. Moreover, I share a strong interest in collective knowledge production and in questions relating to the interface of (academic) knowledge production and politcal activism (e.g. the merits and dangers of "expert" knowledge for social movements, how to balance detachment and engagement etc.). In my master thesis I have tried to compensate for the "blind spot" that the agency of the supposedly powerless "abject" constitutes in the analytical framework of the Paris school (cf. C.A.S.E. 2006) by drawing on the concept of autonomy of migration. In my dissertation project I am trying to take these considerations  further by asking: How can one theorise (and analyse) the agency of migrants in securitised sites? I use the ongoing implementation of the Visa Information System (VIS) along with the introduction of biometric visas as a case study.

Gabi Schlag

My research interests are focusssed on securtization, visuality and the justification of military interventions. In my PhD thesis, I currently investigate the discursive practices of imagining the EU as a „global actor“, in particular how security and defence missions (ESDP) in Central Africa reconstitute the forms and practices of collective identitification. More broadly speaking,  I’m interested in understanding the constitutive effects of visuality, for example how images of war and violence shape our perception of world politics, manifest and transform relations of power but also resistance. I’m a research assoaciate at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and working in a collaboratory project on the transformation of security culture.

Peer Schouten

I am a PhD student at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and interested in the role of formal private security companies (PSC) in contemporary global governance. In my PhD, I investigate the 'political topography of private security' in Sub-Sahara Africa, with (fieldwork in) 3 country case studies: South Africa, the DRC, and Angola. I am particularly interested in the role of PSC in the assemblages around strategic economic spheres of activities, and try to make sense of that role using an ANT-inspired approach. Currently, I am struggling with Caliskan and Callon's theory of economization as a window on PSC as economizing agencies. I am also editor-in-chief of Theory Talks.

Anna Stavrianakis

I am coming to the end of my first major project (PhD and then book/articles on NGO activism in relation to the arms trade) and want to investigate more innovative methodologies for future research. At the moment I am investigating the possibilities of mapping as a critical methodology for understanding the (re)production of, and challenges to, international action on small arms control.

Owen D. Thomas

My overarching interests concern the role of biopolitics as a mode of analysis within the events of intervention. Within the collaboratory I am particularly interested in the role material phenomena in critical security studies, and in considering approaches that allow ‘materialities’ to be included within discourse analysis methodologies, such that the inclusion of materialities adds value and perspective beyond that reached through the inclusion of solely linguistic sources.

Nadine Voelkner

I am interested in how contemporary governmental practices, modern 
statecraft and subjectivities are constituted in flexible responses to ‘globalization’. Drawing on Foucault and Deleuze, I trace the (un-)becoming of transnational governmental assemblages. These are the sites in which boundaries of subjectivity and statecraft are redrawn. I focus particularly on the propensity of the diverse (human and nonhuman) materialities which come to make possible, and define the trajectories of, these assemblages. Specifically, I have been tracing two situated human security assemblages: the Migrant Health Assemblage in Thailand and the Human Trafficking Assemblage in Vietnam. Things such as the body, seafood processing plants, pathogens and faeces, cosmetics, the river Mekong, digits and computers play a vital role in how assemblages become, and governable subjects and states are constituted.

Juha A. Vuori

The main focus of my previous research has been on critically developing the theory of securitization through the illocutionary logic of speech acts and through empirical application to Chinese politics. In the collaboratory, I am interested in investigating how the study of images, symbols, and visuality could enhance our understanding of security. I am especially interested in whether insights from semiotics and speech act theory could be combined within securitization theory.

Christopher Zebrowski

My research is concerned with analyzing the notion of resilience within contemporary security discourses, and espcially those associated with Critical Infrastructure Protection.  My thesis is arranged in two parts consisting of a genealogy of the notion of resilience and a critical evaluation of its significance within contemporary security rationalities and practices respectively.

Ceyhun Cicekci

I am actually working in Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University.My research interests are laid upon a wide range of issues that i adopt them as linked each other in a manner of interdependency.From Nationalism Studies (especially Historical Development of Nationalism in Turkey and its future projecktions) to Security Studies (much interest in Securitisation Theory,Human Security and Paris School of Security Studies) Turkish Foreign Policy and also the MidEast Politics and its security implications.Further and normally,I am very interested in IR Theory with all its sub-themes.Recent works of mine are usually embedded on security dilemmas (symetric-asymetric) within the international arena stemmed from "the state" and individual presence that is victimized by transnational illegal organizations.With its securitisation theory aspects,I am trying to find out the linkage between securitisation theory-populism (probability in leading to a fascist apprehension) and also "the otherness".

Katie Hepworth

My phd research is currently focused on the Italian security laws passed in 2008. In my PhD research I am interested in the securitization of migration, and in particular, in how varying and contingent forms of belonging and non-belonging intersect with formal citizenship status. My research is particularly focused on how those cast as the objects in securitizing processes came to perceive those processes. Through attention to everyday practices, I have been looking at how securitization varies according to the micro-geographies of place. In conducting my research I have drawn on Said’s concepts of imagined geographies and contrapuntal analysis to understand how we might research security ethnographically.

I am also interested in alternative outputs for research on citizenship and migration. Since 2001 I have been a member of political arts gang boat-people.org.