This book brings together a number of contributions that look into the political regulation of movement and analyses that engage the material enablers of and constraints on such movement. It attempts to bridge theoretical perspectives from critical security studies and political geography in order to provide a more comprehensive perspective on security and mobility. In this vein, the book brings together approaches to mobility that take into account both techniques and practices of regulating movement, as well as their underlying infrastructures. Together the contributions inquire into a politics of movement that lies at the core of the production of security. Drawing on the insight that security is a contingent concept that hinges on the social construction of threat – which in turn must be understood through its political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions – the contributors offer fine-grained perspectives on a presumably mobile and insecure world. The title of the book, Security/Mobility, is a direct reference to this world that at times appears dominated by these two paradigms. As is shown throughout the book, rather than being opposed to each other, a great deal of political effort is undertaken in order to reconcile the need for security and the necessity of mobility. Running through the book is the view that security and mobility are entangled in a constant dynamic – a dynamic that converges in what is conceptualised here as a politics of movement.
of this, I take a step back and reflect more broadly on the intersections, actual and potential, between the literatures on mobilities and critical security studies. The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ emerged across different disciplines from sociology to geography, anthropology to business studies, migration and tourism to urban studies. 1 Mobility may be undoubtedly fashionable but evaluating its
For over five decades, the Cold War security agenda was distinguished by the principal strategic balance, that of a structure of bipolarity, between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR). This book seeks to draw from current developments in critical security studies in order to establish a new framework of inquiry for security in the Middle East. It addresses the need to redefine security in the Middle East. The focus is squarely on the Arab-Israeli context in general, and the Palestinian-Israeli context in particular. The character of Arab-Israeli relations are measured by the Israeli foreign policy debate from the 1950s to the 1990s. A dialogue between Islam and Islamism as a means to broaden the terrain on which conflict resolution and post-bipolar security in the Middle East is to be understood is presented. The Middle East peace process (MEPP) was an additional factor in problematizing the military-strategic concept of security in the Middle East. The shift in analysis from national security to human security reflects the transformations of the post-Cold War era by combining military with non-military concerns such as environmental damage, social unrest, economic mismanagement, cultural conflict, gender inequity and radical fundamentalism. By way of contrast to realist international relations (IR) theory, developing-world theorists have proposed a different set of variables to explain the unique challenges facing developing states. Finally, the book examines the significance of ecopolitics in security agendas in the Middle East.
–neomarxism, historical materialism, feminism, environmentalism, postcolonialism and postmodernism. This dissident trend, a broad canvas referred to as ‘critical security studies’, has shed light on some of the emerging patterns of conflict that have dramatically altered both the contours of security and the possibilities for conflict resolution in the post-Cold War era. The task of revisiting the subject of security has
make it possible to track and survey the movement of humans and objects across space in real time. This list of examples is tentative and could easily be continued – yet it is emblematic of a way of thinking about security and mobility together that is reflected in political programmes and ensuing analyses. What is striking is that research from the field of critical security studies largely focuses on movement as such, and
overwhelmingly in the developing world, ‘critical security studies cannot ignore the politics of security provision in differing political circumstances’ ( Dalby, 1997 : 23). All this questions the claims of the state to realist types of sovereignty, from which flow their particular conceptions of security ( Krause and Williams, 1997 : 45). The disjuncture between state and society leads to
professor was that of his liberal freedom. In both cases, however, mobility was deeply interlinked with security and this interlinkage could be observed through the kind of connectivity that characterised their Christian and liberal life. These two hypothetical cases highlight an issue at the core of contemporary critical security studies. Mobility is not simply a phenomenon through which to analyse how to
). 2 Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York, Columbia University Press, 1995); Richard Wyn Jones, ‘ “Travel Without Maps”: Thinking About Security After the Cold War’, in M. Jane Davis (ed.), Security Issues in the Post-Cold War World (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 1996); Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds), Critical Security
, however, they are but surface products that emanate from a multitude of institutionally situated, day-by-day, organisational processes constantly taking place in the FRS that engage data and digital technologies in different ways. In recent times, much work within critical security studies and within social science goes under the veneer of the information found in graphs and the like to inquire into how
become one of the first markers in the technology-centric race for body-based data – known as “Biometrics” in surveillance speak – transgender and gender non-conforming people have been some of the first and most directly affected’. This chapter focuses on an understudied topic in critical security studies: how neoliberal governing structures in the post-9/11 era relegate such gender-nonconforming bodies