Human security benchmarks : governing human wellbeing at a distance

When the United Nations Development Programme formally introduced the concept of human security in 1994, it was widely celebrated as a long-overdue humanist alternative to orthodox models of security. Today, human security is a buzzword for describing the complex challenges that individuals and communities face in achieving safety and wellbeing in an insecure world. This article directs attention away from the emancipatory and empowering qualities commonly ascribed to human security to explore, instead, the specific role of benchmarking within the wider human security agenda. The main focus here is on the ways in which human life has been operationalised, measured, and classified to create indicators that permit judgements about individual security and insecurity. The article argues that although a single global human security benchmark has yet to be established, the main indices used as performance metrics of human insecurity have produced a narrow understanding of what it means to live a ‘secure’ life and have reinforced the state as the main focal point of international security governance

Ontological insecurities and the politics of contemporary populism

The loss of faith in mainstream political parties and moderate electoral candidates seems characteristic of the zeitgeist in much of the Western world and beyond. Whether in the form of the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union (EU), the 2016 United States (US) presidential election of the Republican nominee Donald Trump, the prior strength of Senator Bernie Sandecrs within the Democratic party primaries, or the rise of the anti-neoliberal left alongside resurgent rightist anti-migration groups in Europe, varieties of populism have gravitated from the fringes of politics into the center. They have gained traction in tandem with widespread perceptions of crises, insecurity and alienation as markers of a ‘runaway world’ whose forces lie beyond the control of the many (Giddens 1999)

The power of Trump-Speak : populist crisis narratives and ontological security

For most observers, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States (US) came as a shock. This has been widely recast as the culmination of the American public’s long-standing dissatisfaction with the political elite and deep-seated frustrations with broader socio-economic conditions. We argue that the Trump campaign’s success also stemmed from its effective use of an emotionally charged, anti-establishment crisis narrative. With insights from political psychology, we examine the socio-linguistic mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of ‘Trump-speak’ through both quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Trump’s communications toolkit during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. We show that his leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose and explain why ‘crisis talk’ impacts on political behaviour. As we demonstrate, the crisis stories that political agents tell simultaneously instil ontological insecurity among the American public and serve to transform their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality’. Through these rhetorical mechanisms, the Trump campaign manipulated individuals’ ontological (in)security as a tool in the politics of reassurance at the broader, societal level

Making sense of terrorism : a narrative approach to the study of violent events

How does violence become understood as terrorism? In this article, we show how a narrative approach to the study of violent events offers a conceptually productive way to understand the process of “seeing” an event as a terrorist act, one that explicitly integrates the phenomenology of violence. While the collective practice of defining terrorism in academia and the policy arena has struggled to produce a universal definition, we identify a set of “common sense” characteristics. We argue that if the framing of violent events prominently features these characteristics as discursive anchors, this primes processes of sensemaking toward interpreting violence as terrorism. While terrorism markers are often articulated as being pragmatic and apolitical indicators of terrorist acts, we show that they are indeed at the core of political contests over historical and physical facts about violent events. The narrative approach we develop in this article underscores that intuitive leanings toward interpreting violence as terrorism are a sign of political agency precisely because they are produced through the stories political agents tell

Bad science : international organizations and the indirect power of global benchmarking

The production of transnational knowledge that is widely recognized as legitimate is a major source of influence for international organizations (IOs). To reinforce their expert status, IOs increasingly produce global benchmarks that measure national performance across a range of issue areas. This article illustrates how IO benchmarking is a significant source of indirect power in world politics by examining two prominent cases in which IOs seek to shape the world through comparative metrics: (1) the World Bank–International Finance Corporation Ease of Doing Business ranking; and (2) the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development FDI Regulatory Restrictiveness Index. We argue that the legitimacy attached to these benchmarks because of the expertise of the IOs that produce them is highly problematic for two reasons. First, both benchmarks oversimplify the evaluation of relative national performance, misrepresenting contested political values drawn from a specific transnational paradigm as empirical facts. Second, they entrench an arbitrary division in the international arena between ‘ideal’ and ‘pathological’ types of national performance, which (re)produces social hierarchies among states. We argue that the ways in which IOs use benchmarking to orient how political actors understand best practices, advocate policy changes, and attribute political responsibility thus constitutes ‘bad science’. Extending research on processes of paradigm maintenance and the influence of IOs as teachers of norms or judges of norm compliance, we show how the indirect power that IOs exercise as evaluators of relative national performance through benchmarking can be highly consequential for the definition of states’ policy priorities

A call to arms : hero-villain narratives in US security discourse

The rhetoric leaders use to speak to domestic audiences about security is not simply bluster. Political agents rely upon stories of enmity and threat to represent what is happening in the international arena, to whom and why, in order to push national and international security policy agendas. They do so for the simple reason that a good story is a powerful political device. This article examines historical ‘calls to arms’ in the United States, based on insights from archival research at US presidential libraries and the United States National Archives. Drawing on narrative theory and political psychology, the article develops a new analytic framework to explain the political currency and staying power of hero–villain security narratives, which divide the world into opposing spheres of ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Shifting the conceptual focus away from speakers and settings towards audience and affect, it argues that the resonance of hero–villain security narratives lies in the way their plot structure keeps the audience in suspense. Because they are consequential rhetorical tools that shape security policy practices, the stories political agents tell about security demand greater attention in the broader field of international security studies

Populism and the affective politics of humiliation narratives

This article examines how communicative practices, emotion, and everyday experiences of insecurity interlink in processes of populist political mobilization. Combining insights from international security studies, political psychology, and populism research, it demonstrates how populist political agents from the right of the political spectrum have constructed a powerful security imaginary around the loss of past national greatness that creates affinities with the experiences of those who feel disempowered and ties existential anxieties to concerns with immigration, globalization, and integration. As we show, within the populist security imaginary, humiliation is the key discursive mechanism that helps turn abstract notions of enmity into politically consequential affective narratives of loss, betrayal, and oppression. Humiliation binds together an ostensibly conflicting sense of national greatness and victimhood to achieve an emotive response that enables a radical departure from established domestic and international policy norms and problematizes policy choices centered on collaboration, dialogue, and peaceful conflict resolution

Resolution Enhancement in Surface Plasmon Resonance Sensor Based on Waveguide Coupled Mode by Combining a Bimetallic Approach

In this study, we present and demonstrate a new route to a great enhancement in resolution of surface plasmon resonance sensors. Basically, our approach combines a waveguide coupled plasmonic mode and a kind of Au/Ag bimetallic enhancement concept. Theoretical modeling was carried out by solving Fresnel equations for the multilayer stack of prism/Ag inner-metal layer/dielectric waveguide/Au outer-metal layer. The inner Ag layer couples incident light to a guided wave and makes more fields effectively concentrated on the outer Au surface. A substantial enhancement in resolution was experimentally verified for the model stack using a ZnS-SiO2 waveguide layer

Governing the world at a distance : the practice of global benchmarking

Benchmarking practices have rapidly diffused throughout the globe in recent years. This can be traced to their popularity amongst non-state actors, such as civil society organisations and corporate actors, as well as states and international organisations (IOs). Benchmarks serve to both ‘neutralise’ and ‘universalise’ a range of overlapping normative values and agendas, including freedom of speech, democracy, human development, environmental protection, poverty alleviation, ‘modern’ statehood, and ‘free’ markets. The proliferation of global benchmarks in these key areas amounts to a comprehensive normative vision regarding what various types of transnational actors should look like, what they should value, and how they should behave. While individual benchmarks routinely differ in terms of scope and application, they all share a common foundation, with normative values and agendas being translated into numerical representations through simplification and extrapolation, commensuration, reification, and symbolic judgements. We argue that the power of benchmarks chiefly stems from their capacity to create the appearance of authoritative expertise on the basis of forms of quantification and numerical representation. This politics of numbers paves the way for the exercise of various forms of indirect power, or ‘governance at a distance’, for the purposes of either status quo legitimation or political reform