Crisis is governance : sub-prime, the traumatic event, and bare life

The article provides a critical analysis of the role of discourses of trauma and the traumatic event in constituting the ethico-political possibilities and limits of the subprime crisis. It charts the invocation of metaphors of a financial Tsunami and pervasive media focus on emotional ‘responses’ like fear, anger, and blame, suggesting that such traumatic discourses constituted the subprime crisis as a singular and catastrophic ‘event’ demanding of particular (humanitarian) responses. We draw upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben to render this constituted logic of event and response in terms of the concomitant production of bare life; the savers and homeowners who became ‘helpless victims’ in need of rescue. We therefore tie the ongoing production of the sovereign power of global finance to broader processes that entail the enfolding and securing of everyday financial subjects. These arguments are illustrated via an analysis of three subjects: the economy, bankers and borrowers. We argue that it was the movement between subject positions – from safe to vulnerable, from entrepreneurial to greedy, from victim to survivor, etc. - that marked out the effective manner of governance, confirming in this process sovereign categories of financial citizenship, asset based welfare, and securitisation that many would posit as the very problem. In short, (the way that the) crisis (was constituted) is governance

Citizens and security threats : issues, perceptions and consequences beyond the national frame

Citizens are now central to national security strategies, yet governments readily admit that little is known about public opinion on security. This article presents a unique and timely examination of public perceptions of security threats. By focusing on the breadth of security threats that citizens identify, their psychological origins, how they vary from personal to global levels, and the relationships between perceptions of threats and other political attitudes and behaviours, the article makes several new contributions to the literature. These include extending the levels at which threats are perceived from the national versus personal dichotomy to a continuum spanning the individual, family, community, nation and globe, and showing the extent to which perceptions of threat at each level have different causes, as well as different effects on political attitudes and behaviour. These findings are also relevant to policy communities’ understanding of what it means for a public to feel secure

Migrating borders, bordering lives : everyday geographies of ontological security and insecurity in Malta

In this article, we seek to challenge some of these ways in which the ‘2015 Mediterranean migration crisis’ has been scripted by elites. Situated within – and contributing to – a flourishing research agenda on everyday geographies and ontologies of personal (in)security, we aim to bring non-elite knowledge and experience to the foreground. We do so by examining the diverse grounded perspectives of those on the move who are arguably the key dramatis personae in the so-called ‘crisis’ and yet whose voices are often absent in dominant representations of it. Specifically, we take as our analytical focus the dynamic interplay between contemporary EU border security apparatuses and mobile subjects who encounter, negotiate, and challenge these apparatuses. Drawing upon 37 in-depth qualitative interviews with recent arrivals as part of a multi-sited research project across the Mediterranean region, we offer a historicised and geographically situated analysis of the contested politics of ‘irregularity’ on the island of Malta. A geopolitically significant site along the central Mediterranean route, the changes in migratory dynamics witnessed in Malta over the past two decades offers an instructive lens through which the ‘crisis’ narrative can be usefully problematized and disaggregated

Stopping boats, saving lives, securing subjects : humanitarian borders in Europe and Australia

In April 2015, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called on European leaders to respond to the migration and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean by ‘stopping the boats’ in order to prevent further deaths. This suggestion resonated with the European Union Commission’s newly articulated commitment to both enhancing border security and saving lives. This article charts the increasing entanglement of securitisation and humanitarianism in the context of transnational border control and migration management. The analysis traces the global phenomenon of humanitarian border security alongside a series of spatial dislocations and temporal deferrals of ‘the border’ in both European and Australian contexts. While discourses of humanitarian borders operate according to a purportedly universal and therefore borderless logic of ‘saving lives’, the subjectivity of the ‘irregular’ migrant in need of rescue is one that is produced as spatially and temporally exceptional — the imperative is always to act in the here and the now — and therefore knowable, governable and ‘bordered’

Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security : the disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge

Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies (NSS) and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritised do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate: 1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct, and narrate 'security threats'; and 2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with, and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalisations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes, and stories reproduce the police order in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticise the grounds on which national security agendas are authorised, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease

Fit for purpose? Fitting ontological security studies 'into' the discipline of International Relations : towards a vernacular turn

The performance of International Relations (IR) scholarship – as in all scholarship – acts to close and police the boundaries of the discipline in ways that reflect power–knowledge relations. This has led to the development of two strands of work in ontological security studies in IR, which divide on questions of ontological choice and the nature of the deployment of the concept of dread. Neither strand is intellectually superior to the other and both are internally heterogeneous. That there are two strands, however, is the product of the performance of IR scholarship, and the two strands themselves perform distinct roles. One allows ontological security studies to engage with the ‘mainstream’ in IR; the other allows ‘international’ elements of ontological security to engage with the social sciences more generally. Ironically, both can be read as symptoms of the discipline’s issues with its own ontological (in)security. We reflect on these intellectual dynamics and their implications and prompt a new departure by connecting ontological security studies in IR with the emerging interdisciplinary fields of the ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ via the mutual interest in biographical narratives of the self and the work that they do politically

Security and the performative politics of resilience : critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian emergency preparedness

This article critically examines the performative politics of resilience in the context of the current UK Civil Contingencies (UKCC) agenda. It places resilience within a wider politics of (in)security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan for, pre-empt, and imagine extreme events. Moving beyond existing diagnoses of resilience based either on ecological adaptation or neoliberal governmentality, we develop a performative approach that highlights the instability, contingency, and ambiguity within attempts to govern uncertainties. This performative politics of resilience is investigated via two case studies that explore 1) Critical National Infrastructure protection and 2) Humanitarian Emergency Preparedness. By drawing attention to the particularities of how resilient knowledge is performed and what it does in diverse contexts, we repoliticise resilience as an ongoing, incomplete, and potentially self-undermining discourse

Vernacular imaginaries of European border security among citizens : from walls to information management

Our primary aim in this article is to explore vernacular constructions of Europe’s so - called ‘migration crisis’ from the grounded everyday perspectives of EU citizens. We do so as a critical counterpoint to dominant elite scripts of the crisis, which are often reliant upon securitized representations of public opinion as being overwhelmingly hostile to migrants and refugees and straightforwardly in favour of tougher deterrent border security. In addition to broadening the range of issues analysed in vernacular security studies, the article seeks to make three principal contributions. Theoretically, we argue for an approach to the study of citizens’ views and experiences of migration and border security that is sensitive to the performative effects of research methods and the circular logic between securitizing modes of knowledge production and policy justification. Methodologically, we outline and apply an alternative approach in response to these dynamics drawing on the potential of critical focus group s and a desecuritizing ethos. Empirically, we identify a vernacular theory of ‘the border’ as information management, and a significant information gap prevalent among participants with otherwise opposing views towards migration. These findings challenge bifurcated understandings of public opinion towards migration into Europe and point to the existence of vernacular border security imaginaries beyond either ‘closed’ or ‘open’ borders

Was the UK public prepared for a pandemic? Fear and awareness before COVID-19

Using public opinion data, Dan Stevens and Nick Vaughan-Williams explain that a pandemic was simply not seen as a major threat by the British public prior to 2020, despite its prominence in government security strategy. Going forward, and given pandemics will continue to be a major threat, public knowledge needs to remain close to where it is now as opposed to where it seems to have been before COVID-19

Male warriors and worried women? Understanding gender and perceptions of security threats

Differences between women and men in perceptions of security threats are firmly established in public opinion research, with the “male warrior” and the “worried woman” two well documented stereotypes. Yet, we argue in this paper, the differences are not as well understood as such labels, or the search for explanations, imply. One reason for this is the lack of dialogue between public opinion research and feminist security studies. In bringing the two fields into conversation in analyzing mixed methods research data gathered in Britain, we suggest that while the extent of the gender gap in opinions of security is overstated, the gaps that do exist are more complex than previously allowed: men and women define “security” in slightly different ways; women tend to identify more security threats than men not necessarily because they feel more threatened but due to a greater capacity to consider security from perspectives beyond their own; women are more confident about government’s ability to deal with security threats in the future but not simply because of greater faith in government than men. This complexity implies a need to revisit assumptions, methods and analytical approaches in order to develop the field of gender and security further