Workshop 1 Abstracts

Alderson, Christopher

Internationalizing Knowledge Production, Visualizing the International

"The aim of statistical work is to make a priori separate things hold together, thus lending reality and consistency to larger, more complex objects. Purged of the unlimited abundance of the tangible manifestations of individual cases, these objects can find a place in other constructs, be they cognitive or political (Alain Desrosières, 1998: 236)."

Through the case study of migration statistics, my research articulates the relationship between social-scientific standardization, collaboration, aggregation, and the construction of an 'international' scale of perception and inquiry. I describe the practices of inscription that render 'international migration' perceptible as a phenomenon and the consequences of the construction of migration as a specifically international object. My work attempts to open the back door into analysis of some of the main objects of security studies, objects such as 'human trafficking,' 'environmental degradation,' 'arms proliferation,' and 'global economic recession' which are represented primarily through coordinated efforts at visualizing something termed international. My work historicizes the tables, indices, statistics, trend analyses, and reports that have so conveniently, as Bruno Latour reminds us, flattened confusing three-dimensional human movement into less confusing two-dimensional representations.

Thus far, my work has concentrated on historicizing current practices through a sketching out of the history of migration data collection and analysis, beginning with the British efforts at census collection and port-of-call records during the 19th century, and working through what I have identified as a period of an 'internationalizing' of social-scientific practice. Roughly speaking, the period of 1880-1930 marked an intense effort by European nations to standardize, correlate, and distribute statistical information pertaining to international phenomena. While the 19th century has been well documented by governmentality scholars as a period of intensification of state knowledge production, this period also witnessed the elaboration and sophistication of a new international scale of inquiry.

In terms of methodological observations, my work bridges the literature of Science and Technology Studies and (global) governmentality to look at the relations between metrology and securitization. A key assumption I hold, contra both scientific and political realism, is that the "facts" of migration do not simply appear alongside recent immigrants and emigrants. Rather, it is only with painstaking effort aimed at representing, documenting, and textualizing a particular reality of movement that migration has come to occupy such a dominant place in political and academic discourse. My work engages in what Bowker and Star have described as 'infrastructural inversion,' which they define as the recognition of the 'interdependence of technical networks and standards, on the one hand, and the real work of politics and knowledge production on the other' (2000: 34). I am interested in how objects of inquiry and their governance interrelate and co-articulate the need for one another.

Governmentality literature has done well to note the relationship between bureaucracy, numbers, population and biopower. However, many authors have remained at the scale of the state, failing to recognize the extra-territoriality of 'national' statistical practices. For example, during the last half of the 19th century, dozens of international organizations and congresses were established, facilitating the development of new best practices and new 'international' standards. Organizations such as the International Statistical Congress, the International Statistical Institute, and the International Labour Organization all worked at coordinating national bureaucracies and informational branches, resulting in the enactment of new common objects of inquiry.

Currently, my guiding research questions are: 'where is the location of international knowledge?', 'how does knowledge of the "international" affect action and perception of the local?' and 'what are the benefits and unintended consequences of representations which are aggregate?' Between finding out where and how statistical reasoning and methods proliferated between nations (the development of associations), and thinking through the changing condition of knowledge in the modern era, my analysis tries to locate the "international" field view and its ramifications for security theorization and policy.

Dr Aradau, Claudia

Materialities of security: 'crowded places' in the governance of terrorism

In 2009, the UK government held a public consultation on how to reduce the vulnerability of crowded places to terrorism. Crowded places have increasingly emerged as a main area of government concern alongside critical infrastructure protection. Crowded places are seen to have become placed of predilection for terrorist attacks – they are neither crowded places, i.e. places where people congregate and find themselves in large numbers nor crowded places, i.e. particular sites and locations which can be accessible by crowds. What matters for crowded places is that they are both objects and subjects. They are things, physical places and also places of economic profit. They are subjects of crowd mobility and action. How can we understand and analyse the emergence of crowded places as a new site of the governance?

I am interested in how to critically engage with constructions such as 'crowded places' which combine materialities (spatial and urban) and subjectivities (crowds). They are constituted through physical interactions, assemblies of bodies and discursive strategies. Securitisation has been seen as largely part of the linguistic and social constructivist turn in international relations. Risk, security, disaster and war have been unpacked as discursive and institutional practices that constitute both that which is to be secured and the threat. The subjects of security have been generally humans – be those more or less reified in particular communities, such as nations, states or regions. As a performative and intersubjective practice, securitisation has largely ignored the role of 'things' in the articulation of insecurities. Even the more recent literature drawing on Foucault's notion of the dispositif of security has been less interested in the role that objects played in the definition of the dispositif (Aradau and van Munster 2007: 89-115, 2008; Dillon 2008: 309-332; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008: 265-292; Lobo-Guerrero 2007)

I have been inspired by Karen Barad's work on material-discursive practices and posthumanist performativity. For her, things are not essentially given but play an active role in processes of materialisation. Not only do particular things come to count more than others – but also they create particular forms of agencies. Barad has attempted to modify Butler's theory of performativity and refine Foucault's concept of discourse to offer an understanding of how materialities come to matter in the production of social realities. As part of this project, I would like to explore intersections between Barad's theory and methodology and Latour's actor network theory (Barad has pointed out that the use of performativity with ANT theory is evacuated of its political history, particularly in relation to the political role that performativity plays for feminist and poststructuralist theories). I am also interested in how a genealogical account of 'crowded places' can be considered in this context.

Dr Bonditti, Philippe

Of Utility of Genealogy and the Dispositif

During the past thirty years, dissident voices within the discipline of International Relations (IR)/security studies have contributed reshaping the ways in which scholars engage with and analyse power, authority and identity. J. Der Derian, A. Tickner, R.B.J. Walker, R. Ashley, C. Weber, M. Dillon, W. Connolly, J. Huysmans, V. Jabri, D. Bigo, J. Bartelson, O. Waever – to name just a few – relied heavily on the work of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Virilio or Bourdieu to elaborate devastating critiques of the ontoepistemological premises of traditional IR and (International) Security Studies. In doing so, they highlighted the need to consider the role of ideas, language, discourses and technology for IR students and early career researchers. From an epistemological perspective, they have argued against axiological neutrality, and for interpretivism and reflexivity. These epistemological perspectives work within a pluralist ontology and emphasise the primacy of multiplicity, difference and heterogeneity over unity, identity and homogeneity. During the 1980s, their claims mainly targeted the (IR) Realist school of thought – and in some cases IR as a distinct discipline. More broadly, their critiques marked a rupture with behavioralism, rational choice/ game theory and quantitative methods. Nonetheless, while opening these inspirational analytical options, they have (deliberately) abandoned (us to) the question of method. Let's consider security-related issues and the Pandora's box opened by so-called "critical perspectives" (as to how one should understand security as a speech act, a production of social agents, a modality of emancipation, or a "new" mode of what Foucault called "governmentality"). Questions thus arise as to which methods are the most appropriate if one wishes to simultaneously engage on both the practical and technical levels with discourses, bureaucratic routines, architectural dispositions and computing tools for example.

Method has been posed as the condition of scientific knowledge. It often refers to order and rules because of the systems of hypothesis and research protocols it often implies. Debates about method generally articulate the basic divisions between quantitative and qualitative techniques and among the latter, also deal with specific techniques such as participant observation, content analysis, intensive interviewing techniques, in-depth unstructured or semi-structured interviews, and guided conversation. These techniques are antithetical to my own way of researching. However, this does not mean that those researchers who, like me, do not resort to the above-mentioned techniques don't have a method if reconceptualised as the very technicality of the everyday life-research.

The paper is not another paper about "security". It does not aim to answer the question of what "security" is by proposing a ready-made method that would end up giving the "true" meaning of security. Instead, I will try to explore the relation between, and the relative status of two dimensions that I am trying to articulate as a research method in my own work on antiterrorism: genealogy (approach), and the Foucaldian dispositif (tool). In the first part of the paper, I will argue for the utility of a double genealogy of "terrorism" and "antiterrorism". Drawing on Nietzsche, Foucault, Ashley and Der Derian, genealogy I will argue, is an approach, which implies a particular understanding of history and helps to decipher the machinery of security. I will then argue for a methodological use of the Foucaldian dispositif and try to demonstrate how the latter can help to actualise genealogy. This second part will also include a discussion of the triptychs tool/ instrument/ technique and approach/ theory/ method so as to argue for the deployment of both genealogy and the dispositif within an anarchist theory of knowledge (cf. Feyerabend). In the last part of the paper, I will explore how and why this articulation of genealogy and dispositif, if it cannot and should not be understood as a ready-made method, might nonetheless serve as the basis for collective research that (critically) engages with the political.

Bueger, Christian

Translation, Representation and the Post-Humanist Challenge: Can Actor-Network Theory advance Security Studies' Methodology and Methods?

This contribution discusses in what way actor-network theory, or better the 'sociology of translations', can advance the theory, methodology and methods of security studies. The sociology of translations is best understood as providing a relational ontological "infra-language" (Latour), a political philosophy of representation, and a distinct version of ethnography.

Based in science studies work the sociology of translations has meanwhile traveled widely, notably to organization studies and surveillance studies. The reason: it allows us to cope with specific challenges. "All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning", Deleuze and Guattari write. The sociology of translations provides concepts addressing (at least) two problematiques of current research: the post-humanist challenge and the challenge of writing ethnographies of the present. The relevance of these challenges for security studies shall be discussed in the following.

Our contemporary world is not only a world of humans but populated by non-humans. Constructionism (as well as Post-structuralism) not only has the tendency to over-intellectualize the social (Reckwitz), but has often led to the reduction of the material (from 'nature' to the 'body' and the 'things') to a matter of representation. Yet, things not only matter in our representation of them, but they make us act otherwise. Consider the speed bump as the materialization of a policeman (Latour), a document forcing us into patterns of actions (Walters) and an AK-47 altering social relations and violent activities (Mirzeler and Young). If things act too, if technology – notably technologies of surveillance, measurement, communication and warfare – is inscribed activity, then we require an ontological vocabulary that does not favor the social over the material – or vice versa – but strives for symmetry. In the vocabulary of the sociology of translations non-humans and humans are translated into each other and form activity bundles. [1] These collectives are assembled and – here is the direct link to political philosophy – are represented by actants speaking on their behalf. Such a vocabulary can be translated in security studies into a range of interesting question, such as the following ones: On the behalf of which collective is the securitizing agent speaking? Which activities of translating, assembling, and representing whom are necessary to make a threat resisting controversy and travel globally? Is an agent securitizing narcotics speaking on the behalf of an assemblage of "opium farmers, poppy crops, warlords, the 'war on drugs', military strategists, policemen, social workers , pharmaceuticals and physicians" (Stengers) and if so, how did he managed to do so?

"Actor-Network Theory is a theory for ants", Latour suggests. It requires microscopic and detective work of reconstructing processes of translation. This is not, however, an argument for a micro-sociology in the conventional, atomistic sense, rather the opposite! The argument is one of transcending scale. After all, the macro is manufactured in the micro (Latour and Callon, Knorr Cetina). Yet, the sociology of translations requires us to take an ethnographic lens.

Ethnography is a methodology based on the idea of the researcher visiting a bounded space (classically: the village). But networks, assemblages, collectives are not bound in a distinct space. How is it possible to be at several spaces at the same time? What if the actants are always already somewhere else? How can one simultaneously be at a ministry of foreign affairs, a centre of calculation, an airport, a war zone, a poppy field which all are spaces belonging to the network? While the problem of multi-sitedness is one of any ethnography of the present (Czarniawska), the sociology of translations has responded in suggesting an 'ethnography of the object'. The ethnography of the object (or 'objective ethnography') follows an object (e.g. a policy document, or a weapon technology) across spaces. The translation activities that were required to bring it about are reconstructed by following the object backwards, visiting the sites of its manufacturing and speaking to the actors whose relations were required.

Ethnographies of the present face another problem, which has well been recognized in security studies also: How to present research in an ethical, responsible, yet intelligible and relevant way without insisting on notions of 'truth' or 'facts'? This is essentially a question of writing. The sociology of translation also has an insightful, innovative suggestion here: To rely on literature theory and blur the genres of science, aesthetics and fiction. Latour speaks of "scientifiction" and presents us in Aramis, or the Love of Technology an example: a detective, love and mystery story in which he reconstructs the failure of an automated train system. His question: Who killed Aramis? His answer: Nobody, simply nobody loved Aramis enough. While Aramis is certainly not the kind of work, that a PhD student will make a career with, it is an invitation to experiment. To experiment with different literary styles and genres. Of course, as any experiment some will fail.

In sum, my contribution aims at discussing a range of challenges for security studies. It will question to which extent the concepts of the sociology of translation can be developed in a security studies context to inspire and practice innovative as well as intelligible research. The lines of argument developed in this proposal, originate in the early thoughts of a research project, which aims at writing an (objective) ethnography of pirates and poppy. It is results from experimenting with these cases – the "securitization of piracy and poppy" framed otherwise – I will draw on to contribute to the collaboratory.

Coleman, Lara

Security, government, ethnography: interpretation and participation in political mobilisation

My methodological interest is in the application of ethnography and an analytics of government to the critical study of security.

In my PhD project - Governing Resistance: Security, Repression and Docile Dissent - I am exploring how anti-corporate protest is governed through apparatuses of security aimed at keeping political dissent within optimal limits.  My theoretical interest, which emerges primarily from a mutual critique of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Boaventura Santos, is in how interrelated techniques of exclusion and inclusion, differently-constituted exceptions and technologies of civility, operate within apparatuses of security aimed at minimising the risks and inconveniences that protest represents. I have explored these themes through situated, empirical work tracing the trajectories of mobilisations against multinational corporations in Colombia, where protestors have been killed with impunity and exception is invoked not simply to punish protest but to manage it as what Foucault might have called "a crime important due to its probability" (2007:7). The course of these mobilisations as they became international campaigns illustrates how the elimination of political excess through exception works in tandem with strategies to produce docile dissent that can be incorporated into processes of global ordering.

My focus on apparatuses of security has implied attention to very specific practices of government as they are embedded in the quotidian conduct of conduct. It has meant looking into situated conducts of government and resistance, where dissenting subjects are produced and an array of reciprocally-conditioning techniques, procedures and knowledges applied in order to keep protest within a bandwidth of acceptability. Exploring these situated workings of power has involved in-depth, ethnographic research within and alongside Colombian social organisations - where I played the role of international accompanier, researcher, translator and photographer working with trade union and community organisations for a total of 18 months - and an equivalent period of participating in the same campaigns as part of a European network of solidarity collectives.

Despite the very embedded nature of ethnographic research, an analytics of government approach brings theoretical depth the the idea of a "global ethnography" (Burrawoy 2001) or "multi-sited ethnography" (Marcus 1995). Moving as it does from specific rationalities and techniques to broader programmes, regimes of practices and processes of ordering, an analytics of government makes it possible to avoid the parochialism of conventional ethnography while refraining from overdetermining particular practices as instances of something global or universal.

Ethnography, in this framing, is not merely a method, or means at getting access to the day-to-day conduct of conduct, it is also part of a intrepretative methodology and a "situated intervention" (Mosse 1996: 952) within conducts and counter-conducts, practices of government and resistance. This implies revisioning ethnography away from ideas of "participant observantion" and towards a notion of what I call interpretative participation, where I, as participant and researcher, am both subject and object of knowledge and power (cf. Foucault 1970: 312). This throws up numerous issues of the politics and ethics of research. For example, my interpretative participation in spaces of exception and insecurity - where even being suspected of future protest is enough for members of an already-surplus population to be apprehended as bare life and killed with impunity - has not only meant managing risks to my own physical integrity. It has also meant navigating the ethical and political tensions between these risks and the biopolitical and geopolitical inequalities implied in the fact that a letter confirming that my work is funded by a British research council is not only adequate to secure my own safe passage but also that of others I am accompanying.

Cormier, Youri François

Perception in Frictionless War

Advances in satellite imaging, real time communication and arms precision in the last thirty years, and their recent synthesis as 'battlespace' found on portable computer systems, have significantly enhanced the role of the individual soldier engaged in battle. Through this technological appendage, the properly-equipped soldier can hear, see, and react lethally in ways that a generation ago would have been relegated to the world of science fiction. Does enhanced perception alter the role of the soldier? Does it impact our concept of the tactical/strategic divide? Does it require new methods of training? The argument I make in this research is that theories of war based on empiricist philosophical theories of static perception are less applicable when a soldier's experience crosses into the field of immediate and dynamic perception beyond his or her natural sensory endowment. It is proposed that using a phenomenological framework in the context of technologically-enhanced perception in war is more practical, since it defines the observer as an active rather than passive participant in the process of perceiving. As the observer experiences sensory information beyond the natural existential space for which he is physically adapted, it becomes quite significant to analyze the role of the observer in generating this entirely new space, as opposed to merely experiencing it.

Perception-enhancing technology in warfare redefines the role of the individual-at-war, because it elevates the intuitive process of perceiving one's world or universe to a foremost determinant of the engagement's outcome. This sustains a tense relationship between responsibility and power. A contradiction appears: as perception is increasingly-removed from the individual's physicality; his responsibility for the physical outcomes of his perceptions is amplified. The study of perception in war is a subfield of war theory void of significant research for the plain reason that since perception is thoroughly integrated to self-existence and makes itself self-evident as it immerges in the mind, its truth is taken as an absolute given. Without a clear understanding of perception's process in the mind of the individual, the field of war theory makes dangerous concessions: it ignores the possibility of perceptual error and admits its inability to predict and correct such errors systematically.

This essay presents the notion 'perception' as a phenomenon and as a philosophical inquiry. It explores the nature of perceptual errors such as optical illusion and considers how humans teach themselves to improve their capacity to distinguish between increasingly narrow increments of variation and to avoid errors and traps. The essay challenges Locke's empiricist concept of a real (absolute) world and a passive observer. Instead, it builds upon Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological-existentialist notion of the individual 'making his world' at each conscious moment. Applying this approach to perception offers applicable conclusions on the changing relationship between strategy and tactics as their separation is blurred by technology and on the role of the soldier and methods for training his or her perception to embody, within the scope of intuitiveness, the precision we have come to expect from technology in war.

Dr Guillaume, Xavier

Ephemeral Resistance, Methodological Tactics and Critical Security Studies

Critical security studies (CSS) underline the structuring effects of security apparatuses – security practices, discourses, institutions – on individuals and groups and its dystopic effects on polities and political agents. At the same time, they call for studies that highlight the possibility of resistance, the possibility to transform these effects and to emancipate these individuals and groups from such apparatuses. Yet, this call generally does not translated into an actual theoretical or empirical

engagement with the concept of resistance, thus remaining a rather underconceptualized and under-studied concept and phenomenon (see c.a.s.e., n.d.; Guillaume and Huysmans, n.d.). This «structural» conception of security has translated in the methodological predominance of discursive analysis in CSS, a predominance that is reflected either in the central reliance on speech acts (Buzan et al. 1998) and/or on (critical) discourse analysis (Hansen 2006). Discourse analysis or speech acts are essentially interested in 'top-down' constitutive relations of power, centering on the elites or institutionalized discourses rather than on the resistance provided by individuals (Van Dijk 2001[1993]).

This is methodological predominance is important because acts of resistance that are not encompassed by a traditional understanding of resistance as a form of mobilized, altruistic and conscious collective political action are often overlooked or missed by CSS because of this methodological orientation. Yet, resistance can also be 'unorganized, unsystematic, and individual, … opportunistic and self-indulgent, … and/or … imply, in their intention or meaning, an accommodation with the system of domination' (Scott, 1985: 292). In other words, resistance becomes a more fleeting and discrete event and it translates in discourses and practices that do not come from nor are echoed in the elites or the security apparatuses. Acts of resistance are thus more difficult to situate and identify within larger processes through which individuals or groups find the occasion to enact forms of resistance to/within security apparatuses. This is reminiscent of Michel de Certeau's conception of tactics as an art of saying and doing that is enacted punctually by individuals in environments and in regards to situations (up)on which they don't have any influence and to which they have to accommodate themselves (De Certeau 1990[1980]: 59-61, 124, 127). These enactments are appropriative in the sense that they do not transform the securitized environments, sites or practices they are embedded in but employ or invest them to their purpose, even though it might reproduce the dystopic security apparatuses individuals are confronted with on the first place (see Guillaume and Huysmans, n.d.).

The key point here is that the actual form of this appropriation cannot be defined prior to its enactment; the occasion continues to trump definitions, because it cannot be isolated from a conjuncture or an operation (De Certeau 1990[1980]: 127). So how do we approach empirically tactics? How can we approach acts of resistance? How can we define them as they are embedded in a series of events constitutive of a security apparatus? At this juncture, we are confronted with a methodological question that is central for CSS to engage with for the reasons noted above. A methodological approach that seems to be best suited to engage with mundane and everyday resistance is ethnographic methods. Ethnographic methods, while generally overlooked in political sciences, are often best suited to analyze everyday life and its links with political processes. Moreover, ethnographic methods are an interdisciplinary undertaking par excellence reflecting the need to combine different methodological tools, qualitative and quantitative, in order to understand complex situations and processes that would remain opaque without them (see Bayard de Volo and Schatz 2004). This paper thus aims to reflect on the ethnographic methods in order to map, describe, identify, situate ordinary and mundane acts of resistance that the researcher has to replace, re-situate, restitute within security apparatuses. This paper also seek to map how as an interdisciplinary undertaking, the ethnographic method can be combined with other methodological tools in order to empirically approach acts of resistance in CSS.

Heck, Axel and Gabi Schlag

The Politics of Visual Security. Reconstructing justification narratives of EU's security missions

Critical security studies are developing as a quite prosperous research field investigating the political and social construction of in-/securities and their consequences. Advocates of the Copenhagen School have argued that security is a performative act: naming a threatened referent object and calling for extraordinary measures in order to protect it (Weaver 1995, Buzan/de Wilde/Weaver 1998). While securitization is productive of a state of emergency, politicization refers to a normalized, deliberate mode of decision making (e.g. Aradau 2004, Huysmans 2006). However, both processes – securitization and politicization – are based on specific "narratives of justification" to legitimize political decisions. These "narratives of justification", we would suggest, are not limited to "speech acts" in a narrow sense but composed of a multitude of inter-texts, e.g. relations between speeches, photos, sculptures, sounds and graphics. In this paper we will show that securitization and politicization may refer to inter-textual relations between linguistic and visual narratives of justification.

The so called "visual" or "aesthetic" turn has reached IR a couple of years ago. Namely the two issues of Millennium: Journal of International Studies (2001, 2006), and the special issue of Security Dialogue (2007) contain many useful and critical approaches and have tremendously triggered the discussion about the importance of "visuality" and "aesthetics" in IR. Recently, Lene Hansen (2008) has argued that images may play a central role in order to take securitization theory "beyond the word". She shows that the "Mohamed cartoons" functioned as an integral part within the process of constructing Islam and Islamism as a threat to Western democracies on the one hand. On the other hand, the cartoons became part of securitization moves as referent objects. In the proposed paper, we would like to advance this discussion on security, visuality and justification theoretically and methodologically.

Visuals imbue a double quality of depicting and performing. Images are neither subjective nor objective but intersubjective constructions of the world. In particular photos depict and perform its subject as Susan Sontag wrote: "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power. Photographs furnish evidence. […] Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it" (Sontag 1977: 4-5).

The "power of language" is still a central issue of productive methodological contemplation in the field of critical security studies (e.g. Debrix 2003). For the analysis of inter-textual relations between linguistic and especially visual narratives of justification we would like to propose a methodological framework, which is derived from different approaches of aesthetic theory (Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze and Seel) as well as studies in the field of visual culture (Barthes, Mitchell, Boehm). In a second step, we will show one possibility how to fertilize the methodology of aesthetic theory and visual culture for critical security studies. Our basic intension is to provide some conceptual anchors and methodological guidelines how to deal with "visuality" in the context of the politics of security.

In order to bring together the conceptual and methodological questions at stake, we will focus on the justification narratives of EU's security missions in the DR Congo. The ability to control the public image of the EU is an increasingly important aspect of EU's public diplomacy with a strong emphasize on its humanitarian engagement. Our central question is how these visuals invent, imagine and inscribe a subject who is in need of assistance and care

Dr Herschinger, Eva

With regard to the increasingly louder call to develop methodologies and methods from a critical, radical constructivist and poststructuralist perspective (Milliken 1999; Glynos and Howarth 2007), it was one of the central aims of my PhD thesis entitled "Constructing Global Enemies – Hegemony and Identity in International Discourses on Terrorism and Drug Prohibition" to create a genuine IR-poststructuralist methodological approach to security issues. In my current research I continue working on this issue, which explains my strong interest in your collaboratory -an overdue initiative to my mind.

My thesis focused on the discursive production and transformation of hegemonic orders in discourses of international terrorism and drug prohibition, the identities constructed thereby and the practices legitimized by these orders and identities. Empirically, I compared the efforts to counter terrorism at the level of the United Nations from 1972 to 2008 with developments in international drug prohibition from 1961 to 1988.

In terms of methodology, the thesis developed a model of discursive strategies to analyze the practices of hegemonic orders, allowing for insights into how concrete meanings of terrorism and drugs have spread throughout the respective fields and marginalized alternative understandings. The study's discursive model of hegemonic operations is based on the vocabulary of poststructuralist discourse theory. It takes into account a number of its central concepts (e.g. antagonism, identification, empty signifiers, etc) and refers back to the general logics of critical explanation. At the heart of the discursive model lies a systematization of the multitude of hegemonic strategies into productive and counterhegemonic strategies, depending on their impact on the construction of hegemonic orders at the international level.

Overall, my thesis combined IR-poststructuralist concepts (e.g. securitization) with those of poststructuralist discourse theory and supplemented this merger with a qualitative method (inductive coding) and a computer-aided analysis of the discourses under scrutiny.

With regard to the challenge of methodological advance of critical methods in security studies and to the aim of the collaboratory, one central avenue of my current research proves particularly interesting. As an outcome of my thesis, I am very much interested in developing a poststructuralist concept of strategy further and, most importantly, linking it to the current understanding and research on security practices. In this respect, the main challenge consists of not resorting to the phantasma of the self-conscious subject to work with the notion of strategy. I have already sketched out the essential contours of such an understanding of discursive strategies in a co-authored paper (Herschinger and Nonhoff 2008).

The importance of abstract reflection on strategy notwithstanding, I currently aim at applying this conceptualization to different security practices in order to understand the overall effects and problems of practices like UN or EU watch lists of terrorist suspects or the European arrest warrant on societies and the relation between citizens and the state. Moreover, I am interested in combining a poststructuralist notion of strategy with the question of how various security actors (police, state officials, security experts, civil society actors) deploy strategies of criminalization and politicization in struggles for hegemony and power in a particular security field, like e.g. international and European police cooperation. By developing a genuine critical account of the notion of strategy and the subject in security practices, I would like to make a contribution to the general endeavor of turning theoretical innovation into critical methodological means of inquiry. As such, my project would fit in very well with the overall aim of the collaboratory to foster exchange and stimulation within the community of critical security researchers.

Areas of methodological interest: discourse; power struggles between security professional (as outlined by the call); in addition, I am very much interested in research on security practices.

Hughes, Hannah

Security's part in the struggle over climate change

The security challenge climate change poses to human social and political systems has been highlighted by a number of actors in international politics, one of the most vocal proponents of this conceptualisation of the climate change problematic has been the British government. The Copenhagen School's securitization framework provides an account of the British government's role in positioning climate change on the international political agenda. However, this focus on the security discourse removes the government's actions from a context that could tell an alternative story about the government's attempt to securitize climate change. I suggest that securitization needs to be resituated amongst other political practices in order to investigate whether actors use security to promote their particular social and political framing of issues like climate change. To resituate securitization amongst other practices, I propose introducing the methodological insights of Pierre Bourdieu and the conceptual tools he developed most applicable to this task.

Analysing key documents and speeches made by the Prime Minister Tony Blair, the foreign secretary Margaret Beckett, and the environment minister David Milliband, one is able to map the change in British government's rhetoric on climate change during 2006-2007, which culminated in the government raising climate change as an issue for debate at the UN Security Council. This empirical research raised a number of questions, such as why would the government attempt to securitize climate change? And, what particular framing of climate change did this speech-act promote? It was at this juncture that the securitization framework demonstrated its limitations. The act of speaking security needed to be situated amongst other political practices in order to question whether the government's framing of climate change as an existential threat enabled them to gain political authority in the international struggle to conceptualise climate change and by doing so promote a definition that served their interests.

Pierre Bourdieu was first introduced into the discipline of International Politics in the late 1980s and since then interest in his thinking tools has continued to grow. Much of this research draws on one or two of Bourdieu's conceptual and methodological insights, such as symbolic capital or habitus. However, following the lead of a number of security studies scholars, I suggest a more comprehensive reading and application of Bourdieu's political sociology. Incorporating Bourdieu's notion of habitus, field, symbolic capital and symbolic power and combining these with the methodological insights gained by Didier Bigo on transnational fields, Jeff Huysmans on capital conversion, and Michael Williams on institutions, one is able to put together a more comprehensive methodology for questioning the UK government's use of the security discourse.

These conceptual tools orientate one's methodological approach to the object of study. The initial step is to establish the object of interest. Securitization would suggest that gaining control or initiating extraordinary measures is the object of a securitizing act. However, through the application of the field concept the question arises whether the meaning of climate change has become a force in itself. This would suggest that rather than identifying climate change as an existential threat to enact extraordinary measures to mitigate its effects, the British government used securitization to increase their political authority in the international struggle to define the climate change problematic. If this is the case, investigating security as one amongst other political practices requires determining the limits of the field, how the struggle structures the field, and the forms of capital and power that operate in the struggle to conceptualise climate change. Briefly, this illustrates how the work of Bourdieu initiates a rethinking of our methodological approach to the study of security, one that may help us understand the part that security plays in conceptualising issues like climate change.

Dr Huysmans, Jef

Dispersing politics of insecurity: the value and limits of Latour's actor networks for developing an analytics of the political transformative capacity of everyday practice

The substantive question I am currently interested in is: What can the politics of insecurity be in sites where insecurity is not constituted through an act but through actant networks?

As the literatures on risk, surveillance, cultures of fear, the governmentalization of security, and security fields show securitising can not simply be read as declarations of existential threats that move politics into the exceptional. The inscription of insecurity in political and social relations takes also place through a much more fragmented process of dispersing insecurities through networks of things and actors (actant networks) that do not pull various phenomena together around an existential enemy or catastrophe. If the critical moments when insecurity is constituted cannot be easily identified, the concept of act loses some of its political capacity. The question then arises what the politics of insecurity can mean in radically dispersing insecurities.

This work seeks to open a research agenda for exploring conceptions of political practice that read politics in terms of ordinary, normal, everyday practices and through notions of appropriation rather than the production of structures and governmental technologies. Instead of making the exceptional the locus of politics, this project seeks to read everyday, ordinary, and normal practice as defining sites of politics. One of the challenges for such a project lies in conceptualizing the everyday so that it is not dependent on exceptionalist framings of politics. One cannot simply invert the hierarchical relations between exceptional and everyday and thus retain the dichotomy. The notion of the everyday is a spring board for flattening the concept of politics; a concept that can operate critically in the dispersing and fragmented securitising characteristic of actant networks.

The specific work I intend to do in ICCM is to explore the value and limits of using Latour's work on actor-networks as a methodology for the study of dispersing politics of insecurities. I am particularly interested in working this methodological question of my project through interaction with other participants who study the complexity, dispersed and netted nature of practice but retain a critical focus on relations of domination and the possibility for political action from subordinated positions. Interesting to explore in this context are among others interstices between Latour, ethnographic methods, Bourdieu, Foucault, Deleuze and approaches to the politics of the everyday (e.g. Bayart, de Certeau).

Mireanu, Manuel

Speaking security on behalf of society: The case of Italian Vigilantes

Introduction

In 2009, the Italian government legalized citizens' patrols and allowed the formation of volunteer militia units, in a declared attempt to stop the spread of crime. Seen by many as a form of anti-immigrant mobilization, these vigilante groups have been around in various forms in Italy for the past years, before they were legalized. These are citizens who decide to organize themselves in patrols in order to redress what they perceive as a deficit of security. Despite their declared intentions to abstain from coercive measures, Italian vigilantes have been associated with acts of violence against immigrants and members of the Roma population. [2] As such, their case may challenge the way we conceptualise security as process and practice.

Exceptionalism

This challenge takes two forms. First, it points to new understandings of emergency measures as a defining characteristic of securitization. Vigilantism constitutes a case of social self-defence, whereby parts of the population take the law into their own hands. [3] Hence, it shows one the one hand how (societal) actors can implement exceptional measures in the absence of the state's coercive apparatuses, and thus how security is not only about the extraordinary politics of the 'sovereign'; on the other hand, it shows that exceptionalism is not always dispersed and normalized within a society, and that there is more to security than routine and technologies. Vigilantism reveals new ways of performing security without the usually implied capabilities of coercion, control, ban and surveillance, and yet with sufficient visibility and impact to be placed outside everyday normal practices.

Actors and audiences

The second challenge pertains to the actor-audience relationship. The vigilantes are just one form of securitizing attempt from within a population, yet its success shows that the securitizing actors have gained enough legitimacy from the relevant audiences. Yet, not all actors manage to securitize, and therefore the question emerges: how do some actors gain legitimacy to speak, while others do not? If 'anyone can speak security on behalf of society' [4], why do some securitizing attempts fail and other succeed? The vigilantes are actors that do not possess high levels of social capital, such as state representatives or 'security professionals', yet their security discourse is legitimized by the population. Moreover, for the Italian vigilantes, the state was one of the audiences whose legitimacy was sought. Therefore, the vigilantes are entwined with the general population and the state in several relationships of actor-audiences mutual constituency.

Methodology

In order to research the security practices of Italian vigilantes, I suggest that participatory observation techniques have to be complemented by discourse analysis. First, embedded participatory research will uncover the micro-mechanisms of daily actions and processes, and the securitizing actors and their practices. This will illustrate methods of 'doing' security, the actual implementation of security measures, specific languages and vocabularies of threat definition, and concrete attempts to reinforce legitimacy for the vigilantes' practices. It will illustrate how these practices unfold and have immediate social and political impacts.

Second, the analysis of the security discourses used by the vigilantes will point to broader hegemonic systems of meanings in which certain conceptualizations of the threat are included. Genealogical methods will be used to trace historical shifts in these articulations, and to show how certain discourses render some securitization acts more likely to be legitimized than others. Together with participatory techniques, discourse analysis can show the interactions between wider discourses and daily practices of security, as well as how securitizing actors and relevant audiences mutually constitute one another. Together, these two techniques will illustrate daily struggles and negotiations between actors and audiences for discursive hegemony, threat definitions and emergency measures.

Mutlu, Can E.

What's love got to do with it? Affect and securitization

In the past two decades, the Copenhagen School (CS) and securitization theory (ST) (Buzan, 1991; Buzan, Waever, & de Wilde, 1998) have established an influential framework that has generated an inclusive and productive debate around the field of critical security studies. Moreover, ST has been expanded by the contributions of Michael C. Williams (2003), on the role of images, and Thierry Balzacq (2005) on the significance of audience and context, as well the broadening of the ST framework by the inclusion of risk (Aradau & Van Munster, 2007) and immigration (Huysmans, 2005). These developments have created a blooming sub-field evolving around the debates shaping the ST framework. Similarly, in light of the War on Terror the association of ST with Carl Schmitt's theory of exception (Schmitt, 1922 (1985)) through Giorgio Agamben's works (1998; 2005) by the Paris school (c.a.s.e. Collective, 2006) have demonstrated the practical implications of such an analytical framework as a tool in understanding the recent developments in international politics.

While ST is invaluable in explaining the construction of security threats, with regards to the interaction between the securitizing agents (government officials, experts), audience and the medium of securitization – i.e. speech, images etc. – it lacks an appreciation of the role of the affective in these constructions. This paper argues that every successful securitization move requires an affective connection between the audience and the referent object of securitization. As David Campbell (1998) demonstrated in his analysis of the American identity in relation to the U.S foreign policy, identity is often shaped by the fear of an externalized Other. While Campbell's analysis only engages with fear, affective analysis can embody a broad spectrum of feelings such as love, hate, anger, and shame among many others in relation to the ST framework. In other words, the affective space provides the backdrop or the space in which discussions of security can take place, as the invocation of security requires a prima facie affective –empathetic – relation to securitized issue/object. Building on Mark Salter's compelling account of "failed vs. successful securitization moves" (Salter, 2010 (Forthcoming)) this paper introduces affective analysis into the ST framework as a key component in determining the fate of securitization moves.

As a case study, this paper focuses on The September 11 Photo Project, a community response to the tragic events of 9/11 designed to create impromptu public shrines for those who died during the attacks. According to the project website "[a]nyone wishing to participate was invited to give up to three photographs with accompanying text, which were hung in a donated gallery space" (The September 11 Photo Project). The project has since produced a book of selected pictures and matching narratives that depict the ways in which the attacks evoked emotions such as anger, helplessness, love and especially the loss of loved ones and loved objects – such as the loss of an iconic landmark (Feldschuh, 2002). In my analysis of this project, I look at how these different emotions represent the affective backdrop to the American trauma that has since been mobilized in the legitimization of the War on Terror and the securitization of various aspects of social life that ensued.

Inspired by the works of Jenny Edkins (2003), Paul Saurette (2006) and Michael Williams (2003), this paper will try to introduce affective analysis into ST framework by trying to demonstrate the affective backdrop to images and texts used in the process of securitization. In an attempt to establish the link between affective analysis and ST, I will rely on critical discourse analysis – of the texts from the September 11 Photo Project – as well as photo theory to elaborate on the affective link between the text and the pictures present in the September 11 Photo Project.

Dr Neal, Andrew

Parliamentary security discourses and the making of counter-terrorism legislation in the UK, 1996-2010

Although security scholars have produced good work on the impact and imperatives of emergency politics, there is little work on how emergency imperatives fade or become normalized over time. Neocleous and Donohue have demonstrated that temporary or reactive emergency laws almost always become permanent (Donohue, 2000, 2008, Neocleous, 2008: pp. 39-75). Starting from here, the substantive question I am concerned with is: how has that which was understood as exceptional come to be understood as normal over time?

I would like to develop critical research methods for studying the legislative and discursive dynamics through which counter-terrorism laws are created and become normalized. Instead of focusing solely on 'exceptional' moments and assuming that 'everything changed', this work will deliberately take a long view to understand the rise and fall of security imperatives in the legislative process and parliamentary discourses over time. This is connected to empirical research I planning elsewhere: a project that will investigate the life cycle of security politics through the example of British legislative debate and activity on counter-terrorism from 1996 to 2010.

There are three methodological avenues I would like to develop:

To explore more fully the implications of a move within some areas of critical thought to give the empirical a priority over the conceptual. What does it mean to take seriously Foucault's claim that 'choosing to talk about or to start from governmental practice is obviously and explicitly a way of not taking as a primary, original, and already given object, notions such as the sovereign, sovereignty, the people, subjects, the state, and civil society' (Foucault, 2008: p. 20). As Paul Veyne argues in his 1978 chapter 'Foucault Revolutionizes History', 'The difference is simply that Foucault undertakes to speak about practice precisely, to describe its convoluted forms, instead of referring to it in vague and noble terms' (Veyne, 1997: p. 156).

Can discourse analysis be developed in this empirical way to study security, remaining critical, but not giving priority to concepts like the 'exception', 'sovereign' etc.? How can theorists like Bourdieu and Latour help?

How can we empirically and critically study the practice of legislating?

Dr Olsson, Christian

Drawing on Didier Bigo's hypothesis of a transversal and trans-national field of (in)security professionals, the aim of this contribution is to discuss how the methodologies of Bruno Latour and Pierre Bourdieu – both insisting on the idea of "mapping" (both as a research technique and as a way of visualizing the latter's "results") - could (or not) be combined in the exploration of how such a field operates.

The aim is not here to discuss these two author's divergent epistemologies per se. Rather, the aim is to explore the extent to which their methodologies (as a practice and not necessarily as a theory although methodology is informed by epistemology in different ways) can be "extracted" and "autonomized" from their epistemology in order to allow for methodological cross-fertilizations across epistemological boundaries. While methodology is generally understood as a constraining research-protocol, the focus will rather here be put on the double function of the research-practice of "mapping":

1/ as a way of establishing hierarchies between more and less "significant" empirical data and evidence in a given "social space" in order to highlight relations and correlations;

2/ as a way of translating the "findings" and "results" of the research into heuristic visual representations;

The aim of this contribution is hence, firstly, to discuss these two thinkers' contributions to social science methodologies and, secondly, to show the extent to which their methodologies (based on different representations of what the activity of "mapping" means) can be combined in the analysis of the dynamics of a field of practice, the one of (in)security professionals, in a way that allows for the analysis both of routinized institutional practices and of the institutional "reactions" to "extraordinary events" or "emergencies" that play a central role in security-discourse.

Bruno Latour combines a theorization of networks (network-actors) with a 'mapping of controversies'. The methodology of this mapping involves the identification and visualization of all actors engaged in a specific debate. How controversies are framed in the field of security would be of primary importance in exploring the constraining and enabling conditions for security practices in times of "emergency". How such controversies differ between security agencies (military, intelligence, police) would also be of paramount significance. It is however important to remain cautious regarding network theorisation that might neglect dynamics of inclusion/ exclusion, practices of bordering and the relations between dominant and marginal positions between actors/ locutors in the considered debate or controversy. Moreover, the sole focus on "controversies" is likely to put the focus on the "exceptional/ extraordinary" as well as on discourses to the detriment of routinized and everyday social practice.

Pierre Bourdieu's approach might here be useful to the extent that he insists on the mapping not of only of "controversies" but of field of practices involving spaces of positions and dispositions both framed by professional struggles and organisational practices. Hence Bourdieuan methodology in the field of security practices involves identifying the doxa behind security-discourses by analysing the habitus and classificatory schemes of the agents and their structural homology with their structural positions. Bourdieuan theory hence allows showing why some institutions are related although their practices might differ and why some try to be 'distinctive' to others while playing the same game. Methodologically, the Bourdieuan idea of "mapping" social spaces and universes involves quantitative data and statistical correlations but also qualitative elements such as 'prosopographies' of the agents involved in the field, semi-structured and in-depth interviews and ethnographic investigations of the 'habitus' of security agencies.

These two authors, and their different ways of "mapping" social realities, will here be explored in order to highlight possibilities (and limits) to methodological cross-fertilization in the sociology of security practices and discourses. While this contribution will be mostly inspired by the so-called "Paris School" in critical approaches to security in Europe, other mapping-projects in the field of IR (Der Derian for example) might also be explored and discussed.

Dr Stavrianakis, Anna

I've always found that, when discussing methodology, people tend to discuss either specific methods or the epistemological assumptions behind their approach to studying the world; so I'm never really sure what is meant by methodology. I am interested in conducting postcolonial Marxist analyses of security issues, but am also increasingly interested in Foucault's suggestion, in The Birth of Biopolitics, that we suppose universals do not exist. Some would say Marxian and Foucaultian approaches are mutually exclusive, but I would like to explore the potential for productive engagement between the two for the study of particular problematics. I am interested in the methodological implications of historicising categories (such as the state, public and private) and/or/then supposing that such categories do not exist. For example, how are we to study and understand the illicit spread of small arms (probably the main category of contemporary conventional arms control) if we problematise the dominant conception of the state as a bordered power container (Anthony Giddens) with a monopoly on legitimate violence (Max Weber), either by contextualising this definition in its geographical and historical specificity, or by supposing that the category of "the state" does not exist? What methods would each approach use, and can they be combined to generate productive critique of contemporary security practices?

The main methods I used in my PhD and then book project (Taking Aim at the Arms Trade. NGOs, Global Civil Society and the World Military Order) were documentary analysis, semi-structured interviews and participant observation. For future projects I would like to either conduct more historical research into the arms trade, which could involve archival research and a genealogy of arms control with particular reference to North-South relations, or explore ethnographic methods more fully in the study of NGO activism.

Thomas, Owen D

Biopolitical materiality of discourse

I have recently commenced an MRes at the University of Exeter as part of a 1+3 ESRC studentship for a project on The biopolitics of Humanitarian Intervention, supervised by Nick Vaughan-Williams and Andrew Schaap. As part of my research training for the dissertation, I am currently familiarizing myself with discourse analysis as one method for investigating the biopolitics of securitization. In particular, I am interested in understanding how the biopolitical condition described by Foucault, and expanded as both the sovereign practices diagnosed by Agamben and those modes of resistance emphasized by Hardt and Negri work to constitute the subjects of intervention. In my contribution to the first workshop of the collaboratoy, I propose to outline some of the methodological puzzles that are emerging as I develop a full proposal for my PhD dissertation. In particular I am interested in considering how analysing security practices in terms of a biopolitical problematic might enable us to better comprehend the materiality of discourse.

Much of the emerging research within Security Studies has emphasized the importance of discourse analysis for understanding the production and reproduction of subjectivities. However those who employ discourse analysis in security studies typically limit their source material to linguistic texts (for example Hansen 2006). While such work has been praised for meeting the rationalist challenge, this method appears to ignore a fundamental aspect of discourse analysis, which is the role of materiality in the construction of those 'grids of intelligibility' which form the limits of a societal comprehensive capacity for what type of identities, threats, actions etc. are both legitimate and coherently meaningful. These authors often seem to have sidelined the possibility that materiality has just as much to do with the (re)production of meaning and identity as language. 'Textuality' should not refer solely to linguistic expression.

What is this materiality and how might it be included within Security Studies? Following Foucault's development of the genealogical approach, it seems prudent to investigate the role of biopolitics as an inherent component of genealogical discourse analysis, that is, the modes of regulation, diverse and diffuse, that places limits of 'common sense' actions of populations. These may emerge as a material apparatus. For example, the urban environment is clear example of a constituted effort to control the movement of populations. Several works have illustrated how this material form plays a considerable role in the production of 'locational identity' (Kwon 2002) or identity of minority groups (Shaw 2004).

What consequences might this emphasis have for security studies? Scholars such as Martin Coward, for example, have already demonstrated the value of material 'texts', suggesting that the destruction of the urban environment is an 'urbicidal' alternative to a traditional conception of violence as anthropocentrically orientated (Coward, 2006). Extending this material logic into a methodological approach for biopolitical discourse analysis would highlight the importance of material forms of identity construction within the constituted hegemonic discourse in addition to those found within linguistic 'texts'. Placed within humanitarian intervention, for example, perhaps we might understand the justification of interventions themselves, as the discursive production of a hegemonic meaning surrounding the objects of the peace building process, namely bodies. In this regard, it is perhaps possible to demonstrate that discourses of humanitarianism are reliant upon a biopolitical discursive production of certain 'bodies' as Agamben's Homines Sacri, and that cannot be diagnosed purely from linguistic sources. Instead the material apparatus of 'Kodak moments,' visual media, even personal property, contribute to the production of those individuals of 'imploring eyes' upon whom apolitical humanitarianism is the only recourse. This mode of analysis has already begun to be explored by scholars such as Jenny Edkins (Edkins 2006), and Anne Orford (Orford 2003).

Voelkner, Nadine

Scaling Sites of Human Security: Global Problematizations, Biopolitical Machines, and Dead Matter

The state is a recurring problem in the human security discourse and it is this that I problematize in my research. On the one hand, the human security agenda is presented as generally challenging the state security approach and state centrism in security studies and international relations. Its claim to critique the narrow and state-centrist conceptualization of security has often been repeated and hotly debated. Indeed, it has provided a fruitful basis, some claim an emancipatory basis even, to raising fundamental questions concerning the role and security of the sovereign state as well as the state of sovereignty in the contemporary global order. On the other hand, in spite of or rather because of the extensive problematizing activity around state-centrism and the state to which it has given rise, human security remains a largely statist logic. In my PhD project, I analyse how the problem of the state in human security is thought and constituted primarily in terms of a struggle for governmental management of dispersed circuits of human insecurity in global politics. It thereby precludes any political solution other than those of a governmental logic in which 'the state' as a doing or way of governing in global politics is reoriented towards the idea of managing situated moments of global circulation.

How and to what effect does human security matter concretely? Based on multi-sited ethnographic work, I problematize the material-discursive practices organized around the concepts of human security and the state developed in response to the problem of migrant health in Thailand and the problem of preventing human trafficking in Vietnam. Specifically, I develop an analytics of government in which I focus on the 'incessant transactions which modify, or […] insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of investment, decision-making centres, forms and types of control, relationships between local powers, the central authority and so on'

At least three methodological problems emerge from my research. Firstly, how to account for the multiple sites and shifting scales of human security? One way to resolve this is by tracing human security through the things it produces or appropriates: the email from New York to Bangkok to Ranong, or the management tool that is the spidergram, the software developed in Geneva and transferred to Bangkok where it was reconfigured and transferred to Samutsakhorn and so on. Secondly, how to resolve the programmatic/practice gap? One way to resolve this is by understanding this not as a gap but as a continuum. Finally, how to account for the situated struggle for governmental management in which not only some relations, institutions and subjectivities of the Thai and Vietnamese states were reconstituted but also some governmental things were appropriated by those targeted?

Dr Vuori, Juha A.

Towards a Methodology for Studying the Semiosis of Securitisation

One of the criticisms raised on the theory of securitisation has been the lack of images or visualisation within the framework of study. In the visual age, methods for studying visuality are however quite pertinent for critical students of security. Accordingly, the purpose of the present project is to develop a method for studying how images work in processes of constructing issues of security. This is done by building on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and John Langsham Austin.

As images are even more open for interpretation than speech situations, it would be difficult to convey an act of securitisation with images alone (without a previous securitisation that the image represents). If images should have an influence on an act of securitisation, these images have to be 'anchored' to a meaning, the 'floating chain of signifieds' has to be affixed to a preferred reading of the image (Roland Barthes). As images can convey emotion, emotional images can have a facilitating effect in securitisation processes where, on the one hand, threats and fear, while on another, certainty and relief play major roles; as in advertisements, when bound to securitisation processes, images can evoke emotions that facilitate the 'purchase' of a securitisation argument, in addition to providing a degree of plausibility or evidence for the claims of the securitising actor. Without 'anchorage' the images however remain too open for interpretation to have any meaningful chance of securitisation, they remain floating signifiers. But how can the issue of anchorage be approached in studies dealing with security?

Speech acts are not limited to speech: speech acts can be accomplished through speaking, writing, hand signals, images or any other system of symbols and meaning. From the point of view of politics, these various ways of achieving communicative interaction, including the use of images and the systems of meaning they can be attributed to, are embedded in fields of power and practices. It is important to keep in mind that what speech act theory, and thereby also securitisation theory is about is not words, or verbs, but illocutionary force. These forces may be brought about by words and utterances, but other forms of interaction (e.g., images) may at times also achieve perlocutionary effects. Inquiries into means of illocutionary acts beyond utterances however requires the theory of securitisation to develop its take on the theory of signs; what this type of research needs is a semiology/semiotics/semiosis of securitisation.

The present project sets out towards incorporating the theory of securitisation into the general study of signs. A fundamental difference between pragmatist (e.g., Peirce) and constructionist (e.g., Berger & Luckmann) approaches is that while constructionist approaches derive habits from conscious human action, pragmatists assume that habits that precede conscious interpretation are the foundation on which beliefs and knowledge of habits can develop. For Peirce, the continuous flow of semiosis is where beliefs and knowledge are formed.

Signs (e.g., images) contain three elements (representamen, object, interpretant) for Peirce. The ambiguity of signs is solved by the interpretant, and the interpretations of signs may have consistencies that may conform to what Wittgenstein termed 'language games.' Processes of signification can here be viewed as chains of signs which may conform to regularities or 'rules.' Such chains of signs or processes of signification may conform to 'archetypes,' and security can be considered to be one here. Investigating such chains of signs may allow us to understand how images are anchored to threats, and claimed possibilities of repelling them.

Zebrowski, Christopher

Archaeology, Genealogy and the Biopolitics of Resilience

While the relationship between archaeology and genealogy was often ambiguously outlined by Foucault he was explicit in his insistence that genealogy in no way served to replace archaeology. Archaeology continued to operate as a 'methodological framework': a series of rules that served to prevent the analysis from falling into the pitfalls outlined in Foucault's analytic of finitude  (Foucault, 2003) [5] My contribution to the collaboratory, based on my PhD research, reflects on how Foucauldian techniques of archaeology and genealogy can be applied to the study of the emergence of resilience discourses within Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP). In doing so, it also reflects on how these two methods can be synthesized within contemporary methodologies in the field of security studies.

My project begins with the assertion that the emergence of resilience strategies within CIP discourses is indicative of a former problematisation of security rationalities and techniques. A problematisation occurs when the modes of relating to a common-sense world break down, demanding reflection. [6] As a response to the governmental problematic posed by the radical contingency of species-life HOw does this relate to contingency becoming ontologised as per above? (Dillon & Lobo-Guerrero, 2008, 2009) [7]

Archaeological is employed to map the dynamic network of statements that compose resilience discourses seek necessary and sufficient conditions for identity" (D and R, 60) (Foucault, 1982) It will examine in particular the impact of the metaphors of the complexity sciences in affording 'truth-value' to these areas of expertise. Finally it will describe in detail the objects, subjects, concepts and strategies manifest within resilience discourses, including the correlative shifts in concepts such as risk, life, and security.

Genealogy will then be used to compliment this archaeological investigation by locating the historical problematic which gave rise to resilience discourses: that of the radical contingency that species-life is now said to exhibit. It looks to trace the migration of these understandings of contingency from these fields into military discourses aligned with the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and into National Security discourses.