Month: January 2018

“Politics of Anxiety” (2017) – Reviewed by Jessica Auchter

Eklundh, Emmy, Andreja Zevnik, and Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, eds, Politics of Anxiety. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. Book Review by Jessica Auchter Politics of Anxiety, edited by Emmy Eklundh, Andreja Zevnik, and Emmanuel-Pierre Guittet, is arguably one of the better applications of Lacan in the field of International Relations (IR), following on engagement with Lacan by… Read more »

Debunking the Security Myth of Military Might

By Vitoria Basham Using and maintaining military force as a means of achieving security:  a flawed idea? In my recent article published in Security Dialogue I critique the longstanding idea that military force and the maintenance of strong armed forces provides security. This idea forms part of the social contract between liberal democratic states and… Read more »

Confronting the Colonial- Even in Critical Studies

By Maria Eriksson Baaz and Judith Verweijen At a time when colonial revisionism is seemingly on the rise and articles calling for re-colonization are published even in renown critical journals (though clearly and comfortably not without controversy), turning a critical eye towards ourselves as ‘critical’ scholars might be seen as ‘navel-gazing’ or even as dangerously… Read more »

Performativity of Security in Military Interventions

By Elke Krahmann Many actors have embraced performance as a measure for the effectiveness and legitimacy of their international governance activities, ranging from the United States government to the World Health Organization and the World Bank. In my recently published article in Security Dialogue, “From performance to performativity: The legitimization of US security contracting and… Read more »

The Soldier We See

By Julia Welland In contemporary Britain, the figure of ‘The Soldier’ is increasingly visible. S/he (although the figure is, of course, nearly always a ‘he’) appears in documentaries, in art and museum exhibitions, in Armistice Day commemorations, guarding the 2012 Olympics, in ‘boot camp’ exercise regimes, in schools, as the ‘real heroes’ of reality TV… Read more »

Agamben, Hobbes, and Rethinking Security in the Messianic Key

By Sergei Prozorov Contemporary critical security studies increasingly turns to the problematic of political theology. This interest and inquiry into the theological origins of today’s political concepts and categories enables more effective critical interventions in contemporary politics. “Messianism” is one of the less explored aspects of political theology in security studies. While its connotations of… Read more »