Governing circulation: A critique of the biopolitics of security

About the book: This book examines global governance through Foucaultian notions of governmentality and security, as well as the complex intersections between the two. The volume explores how Foucault's understanding of the general economy of power in modern society allows us to consider the connection of two broad possible dynamics: the global governmentalization of security and the securitization of global governance. If Foucault's work on governmentality and security has found resonance in IR scholarship in recent years it is in large part due to his understanding of how these forms of power must necessarily take into account the management of circulation that, in seeking to maximize ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ circulatory flows, brings into play and problematizes the 'inside'/'outside' upon which domestic and international spaces have been traditionally understood. Indeed, Foucault introduces a set of conceptual tools that can inform our analyses of globalization, global governance and security in ways that have been left largely unexplored in the discipline of IR

Politics out of Security: rethinking trafficking in women

Human trafficking has recently become visible on the European agenda as a security problem, integrated in a continuum of organised crime, illegal migration, drug trafficking, and terrorism. This thesis unpacks the problematisation of human trafficking as security and attempts to rethink modes of unmaking security and disrupting its effects. Security practices have constitutive effects in terms of subjectivity and political effects in terms of the constitution of political community. The securitisation of trafficking in women entails practices that, for the purpose of governing the phenomenon, turn 'victims of trafficking' from suffering bodies into 'abject', risky others. Victims of trafficking are the locus of 'imputations of dangerousness', risky subjects who can engage in renewed migratory projects. Despite the depoliticising, inegalitarian, and exclusionary effects of security, political strategies that can unmake them are still lacking. This research proposes a politics of equality, liberty and universality, formulated as prescriptions against the state and enacted through forms of collective organisation. It draws on the work of Alain Badiou and Etienne Balibar to flesh out the implications of a politics of equality and universality in its relation to liberty and their disruption of practices of security. Equality and liberty suspend the practices of inequality and unfreedom that govern the situation of trafficking. A politics of equality and universality is formulated as the equality of work. Prostitution-as-work reconfigures the situation of trafficking, by making illegal migrant sex workers count where they had counted for nothing and changing forms of exploitation and abuse of victims in the margins of law from the perspective of work

The myth of preparedness

As potential disasters appear now as indeterminate, unpredictable and unexpected, preparedness exercises are placed at the heart of a new ratio which challenges or replaces statistical calculability. In this sense, the future of unexpected events cannot be known or predicted; it can only be enacted

Algorithmic Reason

Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism to investigate these transformations as more mundane and fraught. Aradau and Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic operations shape the government of self and other. While disperse and messy, these operations are held together by an ascendant algorithmic reason. Through a global perspective on algorithmic operations, the book helps us understand how algorithmic reason redraws boundaries and reconfigures differences. The book explores the emergence of algorithmic reason through rationalities, materializations, and interventions. It traces how algorithmic rationalities of decomposition, recomposition, and partitioning are materialized in the construction of dangerous others, the power of platforms, and the production of economic value. The book shows how political interventions to make algorithms governable encounter friction, refusal, and resistance. The theoretical perspective on algorithmic reason is developed through qualitative and digital methods to investigate scenes and controversies that range from mass surveillance and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the UK to predictive policing in the US, and from the use of facial recognition in China and drone targeting in Pakistan to the regulation of hate speech in Germany. Algorithmic Reason offers an alternative to dystopia and despair through a transdisciplinary approach made possible by the authors’ backgrounds, which span the humanities, social sciences, and computer sciences

The (Big) Data-security assemblage:Knowledge and critique

The Snowden revelations and the emergence of ‘Big Data’ have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less analytical attention. This paper proposes to take seriously the critical knowledge developed in information and computer science and reinterpret their debates to develop a critical intervention into the public controversies concerning data-driven security and digital surveillance. The paper offers a two-pronged contribution: on the one hand, we challenge the credibility of security professionals’ discourses in light of the knowledge that they supposedly mobilize; on the other, we argue for a series of conceptual moves around data, human–computer relations, and algorithms to address some of the limitations of existing engagements with the Big Data-security assemblage

Mobilising (global) democracy: a political reading of mobility between universal rights and the mob

This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of political democratic practice. Drawing on Georg Simmel's sociology of money, we show that practices of mobility become democratic moments in relation to structures of power that are constituted across the territorial circumscription of national states. Understood as a particular form of sociality, mobility can work upon structures of power through universal rights and the politics of the 'mob'. In this sense, practices of mobility are also democratic inscriptions of equality. Keywords: democracy, mass politics, migration, mobility, rights, Simme