Compounds labelled as chemical weapons and pesticides share common active chemical ingredients, which function as nerve agents to humans and insects whether they are considered a form of warfare or a farming staple. Why are such substances considered acceptable and necessary in the context of agriculture while deemed exceptional and unnecessary in the context of… Read more »
Category: Author’s Blog
Migrant deaths in the name of law
In international political sociology, a variety of scholars following Agamben and the so-called state of exception emphasize the routes of violence against migrants in the light of their privation of rights or “suspended law”. While acknowledging that law creates at times violent conditions, this scholarship tends to consider that the main problem of migrant deaths… Read more »
Can Videogames Shape Public Understandings of Weaponized Artificial Intelligence?
Millions of consumers play videogames like Call of Duty and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon. The battlefields these series portray increasingly feature drones, tanks, and robots that select and engage targets on their own, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements. Although prior research suggests that pop-culture portrayals like these can shape public understandings of AI-weaponization, our… Read more »
Technopolitics of Security
Security Dialogue recently published a special issue, edited by Frank I. Muller and Matthew A. Richmond, which explores how technologies condition the way that security is enacted and experienced. We argue that as well as human actors, such as police, militaries, private security companies or criminal groups, objects and technologies also shape everyday experiences of,… Read more »
Private Security Contractors and the porousness of International Enclaves
International green zones like Baghdad’s ‘Emerald City’ or Kabul’s ‘Kabubble’ are usually understood to be insular, ‘bunkerised’, and sealed off from the outside world. However, my research with private security contractors in Mogadishu shows that these enclaves are far more porous than we assume. In a recent article in Security Dialogue, I argue that international… Read more »
Counterterrorism in the absence of terror on home soil: Everyday practices of policing in Ghana
The unexpected and catastrophic nature of terrorist attacks has called for the implementation of precautionary measures aimed at combating the threat of future attacks. Across the globe, this has given rise to the proliferation and circulation of counterterrorism measures and models – also in countries that have not experienced terrorist attacks on home soil. This… Read more »
‘May peace not cost us our lives’: Reading Colombia’s peace process as hegemonic crisis
The Colombian government and the guerrilla group FARC-EP envisioned to make history when they sealed the 2016 Peace Agreement, which ended one of the longest standing armed confrontations in human history and promised the cessation of protracted violence. In post-accord Colombia, however, this promise has been eclipsed by setbacks in the implementation efforts, political polarization,… Read more »
Expecting the exceptional in the everyday: Policing global transportation hubs
Global transportation hubs such as airports and maritime ports have become vital spaces for the international networked economy. Global economic opportunities depend on the effective flow of people and things, and make use of the different infrastructures and modes of the transport system. For instance, around 80 percent of global trade in goods, measured by… Read more »
Rethinking and Revising the Theory of Network-centric Warfare
If we take a step back and cast a reflective eye over the evolutionary trajectory of western military thought, we will find that in around the 1990s—as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) began to proliferate—discussions regarding the latest Revolution in Military Affairs also started to gather pace. It was in this context that some military… Read more »
Modular Sovereignty and Infrastructural Power: The Elusive Materiality of International Statebuilding
Space and materials matter. But how? My article (Open Access) in Security Dialogue explores what spatial and material arrangements reveal about the way international statebuilding exerts (sovereign) power. Statebuilding interventions support the establishment of sovereign states by taking control of, arranging and ordering spaces. This was immediately apparent when I first entered the Mogadishu International… Read more »