Securitising Citizenship: (B)ordering Practices and Strategies of Resistance

This article builds upon Yasemin Soysal's early work on post-national citizenship as constituting sites of resistance in contemporary European politics. Post-national citizenship provides every person with the right and duty of participation in the authority structures and public life of a polity, regardless of their historical ties to that community. This celebration of human rights as a world-level organising principle is, however, constantly challenged by liberal discourses and practices aimed to securitise identities and citizenships through the bordering of space, place and identities. Proceeding from a critical take on securitisation, we propose that in addition to a focus on the exceptional and on elite speech acts, we need to recognise that it is through everyday practices that people engage in (de)securitising strategies and practices that both rely upon and contest notions of belonging and borders. We exemplify by looking at two (diverse) minority communities in Britain and Canada that have been securitised at transnational, national and local levels, and study the extent to which we can see evidence of everyday resistance through the explicit or implicit use of desecuritising strategies. In both settings, the communities we study are young Muslims

Introduction to 2018 special issue of European Security:“ontological (in)security in the European Union”

The European Union (EU) faces many crises and risks to its security and existence. While few of them threaten the lives of EU citizens, they all create a sense of anxiety and insecurity about the future for many ordinary Europeans. Amongst these crises are the more obvious challenges of sovereign debt and fiscal austerity; refugees from conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; and the rise of populist far-right parties across Europe. But behind these challenges lie less visible insecurities about economic prospects, social wellbeing, and a widespread expectation that the EU is unable to answer the challenges of twenty-first century global politics. In other words, the greatest security challenge facing people across Europe is not physical, despite the threats of Putin and ISIS, but is a sense of fear and anxiety over their daily lives

Fear and institutions

Fear allowed early humans to adapt, evolve, and survive. When humans moved into settled communities, with more advanced means of production, the nature of fear-much like the nature of social relationships-changed. Once the means of social reproduction were secured, fear became less necessary as a survival instinct, and more useful as a heuristic device. Fear cannot be characterized as an essentially socially constructed phenomenon, or as the self-contained, individualized response to internalized traumas. The growth and nature of fear must be studied as a process that develops under its own inertia and as a phenomenon that is both shaped by and shapes its institutional setting. Fear should be understood as both structurally determined and socially transformative. This research examines fear, specifically, as it relates to neoliberalism and institutions. © 2013, Journal of Economic Issues/Association for Evolutionary Economics

Application of Ligninolytic Enzymes in the Production of Biofuels from Cotton Wastes

The application of ligninolytic fungi and enzymes is an option to overcome the issues related with the production of biofuels using cotton wastes. In this dissertation, the ligninolytic fungus and enzymes were evaluated as pretreatment for the biochemical conversion of Cotton Gin Trash (CGT) in ethanol and as a treatment for the transformation of cotton wastes biochar in other substances. In biochemical conversion, seven combinations of three pretreatments (ultrasonication, liquid hot water and ligninolytic enzymes) were evaluated on CGT. The best results were achieved by the sequential combination of ultrasonication, hot water, and ligninolytic enzymes with an improvement of 10% in ethanol yield. To improve these results, alkaline-ultrasonication was evaluated. Additionally, Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) and principal component analysis (PCA) were employed as fast methodology to identify structural differences in the biomass. The combination of ultrasonication-alkali hydrolysis, hot liquid water, and ligninolytic enzymes using 15% of NaOH improved 35% ethanol yield compared with the original treatment. Additionally, FT-IR and PCA identified modifications in the biomass structure after different types of pretreatments and conditions. In thermal conversion, this study evaluated the biodepolymerization of cotton wastes biochar using chemical and biological treatments. The chemical depolymerization evaluated three chemical agents (KMnO4, H2SO4, and NaOH), with three concentrations and two environmental conditions. The sulfuric acid treatments performed the largest transformations of the biochar solid phase; whereas, the KMnO4 treatments achieved the largest depolymerizations. The compounds released into the liquid phase were correlated with fulvic and humic acids and silicon compounds. The biological depolymerization utilized four ligninolytic fungi Phanerochaete chrysosporium, Ceriporiopsis subvermispora, Postia placenta, and Bjerkandera adusta. The greatest depolymerization was obtained by C. subvermispora. The depolymerization kinetics of C. subvermispora evidenced the production of laccase and manganese peroxidase and a correlation between depolymerization and production of ligninolytic enzymes. The modifications obtained in the liquid and solid phases showed the production of humic and fulvic acids from the cultures with C. subvermispora. The results of this research are the initial steps for the development of new processes using the ligninolytic fungus and their enzymes for the production of biofuels from cotton wastes