Reclaiming the political : emancipation and critique in security studies

The critical security studies literature has been marked by a shared commitment towards the politicization of security – that is, the analysis of its assumptions, implications and the practices through which it is (re)produced. In recent years, however, politicization has been accompanied by a tendency to conceive security as connected with a logic of exclusion, totalization and even violence. This has resulted in an imbalanced politicization that weakens critique. Seeking to tackle this situation, the present article engages with contributions that have advanced emancipatory versions of security. Starting with, but going beyond, the so-called Aberystwyth School of security studies, the argument reconsiders the meaning of security as emancipation by making the case for a systematic engagement with the notions of reality and power. This revised version of security as emancipation strengthens critique by addressing political dimensions that have been underplayed in the critical security literature

Re-imagining the Borders of US Security after 9/11: Securitisation, Risk, and the Creation of the Department of Homeland Security

The articulation of international and transnational terrorism as a key issue in US security policy, as a result of the 9/11 attacks, has not only led to a policy rethink, it has also included a bureaucratic shift within the US, showing a re-thinking of the role of borders within US security policy. Drawing substantively on the 'securitisation' approach to security studies, the article analyses the discourse of US security in order to examine the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, noting that its mission provides a new way of conceptualising 'borders' for US national security. The securitisation of terrorism is, therefore, not only represented by marking terrorism as a security issue, it is also solidified in the organisation of security policy-making within the US state. As such, the impact of a 'war on terror' provides an important moment for analysing the re-articulation of what security is in the US, and, in theoretical terms, for reaffirming the importance of a relationship between the production of threat and the institutionalisation of threat response. © 2007 Taylor & Francis

The environmental security debate and its significance for climate change

Policymakers, military strategists and academics all increasingly hail climate change as a security issue. This article revisits the (comparatively) long-standing “environmental security debate” and asks what lessons that earlier debate holds for the push towards making climate change a security issue. Two important claims are made. First, the emerging climate security debate is in many ways a re-run of the earlier dispute. It features many of the same proponents and many of the same disagreements. These disagreements concern, amongst other things, the nature of the threat, the referent object of security and the appropriate policy responses. Second, given its many different interpretations, from an environmentalist perspective, securitisation of the climate is not necessarily a positive development

The discourse of Olympic security 2012 : London 2012

This paper uses a combination of CDA and CL to investigate the discursive realization of the security operation for the 2012 London Olympic Games. Drawing on Didier Bigo’s (2008) conceptualisation of the ‘banopticon’, it address two questions: what distinctive linguistic features are used in documents relating to security for London 2012; and, how is Olympic security realized as a discursive practice in these documents? Findings suggest that the documents indeed realized key banoptic features of the banopticon: exceptionalism, exclusion and prediction, as well as what we call ‘pedagogisation’. Claims were made for the exceptional scale of the Olympic events; predictive technologies were proposed to assess the threat from terrorism; and documentary evidence suggests that access to Olympic venues was being constituted to resemble transit through national boundarie

'Memory Must Be Defended': Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security

This article supplements and extends the ontological security theory in International Relations (IR) by conceptualizing the notion of mnemonical security. It engages critically the securitization of memory as a means of making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing or outright criminalizing others. The securitization of historical memory by means of law tends to reproduce a sense of insecurity among the contesters of the ‘memory’ in question. To move beyond the politics of mnemonical security, two lines of action are outlined: (i) the ‘desecuritization’ of social remembrance in order to allow for its repoliticization, and (ii) the rethinking of the self–other relations in mnemonic conflicts. A radically democratic, agonistic politics of memory is called for that would avoid the knee-jerk reactive treatment of identity, memory and history as problems of security. Rather than trying to secure the unsecurable, a genuinely agonistic mnemonic pluralism would enable different interpretations of the past to be questioned, in place of pre-defining national or regional positions on legitimate remembrance in ontological security terms

Using XML and XSLT for flexible elicitation of mental-health risk knowledge

Current tools for assessing risks associated with mental-health problems require assessors to make high-level judgements based on clinical experience. This paper describes how new technologies can enhance qualitative research methods to identify lower-level cues underlying these judgements, which can be collected by people without a specialist mental-health background. Methods and evolving results: Content analysis of interviews with 46 multidisciplinary mental-health experts exposed the cues and their interrelationships, which were represented by a mind map using software that stores maps as XML. All 46 mind maps were integrated into a single XML knowledge structure and analysed by a Lisp program to generate quantitative information about the numbers of experts associated with each part of it. The knowledge was refined by the experts, using software developed in Flash to record their collective views within the XML itself. These views specified how the XML should be transformed by XSLT, a technology for rendering XML, which resulted in a validated hierarchical knowledge structure associating patient cues with risks. Conclusions: Changing knowledge elicitation requirements were accommodated by flexible transformations of XML data using XSLT, which also facilitated generation of multiple data-gathering tools suiting different assessment circumstances and levels of mental-health knowledge

Hungary and the European Union: the political implications of societal security promotion

Hungary's constitutional commitment to support kin-nationals beyond its borders (nation policy) has been a central feature of its post-1989 foreign policy and highlights a particularly important national security concern—the societal security of national identity, culture, language and tradition. This article examines Hungary's societal security concerns and the policy methods it utilises, including its EU membership and the promotion of minority rights at the European level, to help combat these concerns. It is suggested that Hungary has found it somewhat difficult to balance its societal security policy objective with internal economic demands on its welfare system and its external foreign policy objective to maintain good neighbourly relations. This article also notes that Hungary's attempts to Europeanise, or rather 'EU-ise', minority and ethnic rights issues as a means to enhance societal security for the Hungarian nation has certain political consequences for the EU. This suggests that societal security provision is an issue that cannot be overlooked when trying to understand the longer-term implications of EU eastern enlargement

Social Work and Countering Violent Extremism in Sweden and the UK

Social Work in Europe, is now being tasked with managing the “problems” of terrorism, i.e supporting those affected by terrorist attacks, managing returnees affiliated with Terrorist groups in the Middle East, or, as will be discussed here, identifying those at risk from radicalisation and extremism. Both Britain and Sweden have Counter-Terrorism policies, but recent developments in both countries, have made it a statutory requirement for social workers, to work within such policies. This paper seeks to explore the policies in both countries utilising a comparative approach, to consider the similarities in not only policy and practice, but also in the ethical consequences such policies pose for social workers across Europe. The exploration considers; the extent to which anti-radicalisation policies influence social work practices in Sweden and the UK and how they might undermine social work as a human rights profession. The results indicate that anti-radicalisation policies run the risk of reducing social work to become a ‘policing profession’ practicing social control. This has substantial consequences for social work and its global ethics, which should be considered and struggled against by social workers committed to principles of social justice and human rights