In late December 2020, former US president Donald Trump pardoned the four Blackwater private security contractors involved in the Nisour Square incident, a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that resulted in the death of 14 Iraqi civilians. Although Joe Biden’s administration is unlikely to follow his predecessor in condoning such actions, the United States (US) reliance… Read more »
Category: Author’s Blog
Governing Border Security Infrastructures: Maintaining Large-Scale Information Systems
Europe is an interconnected space, built upon different kinds of infrastructures that organise the circulation of people and “stuff” – capital, commodities, energy, data, etc. Among these infrastructures are large-scale IT systems that allow state authorities to share biographical information (e.g. names, passport numbers) and biometric data on people crossing borders. For example, French border… Read more »
Conflating societal and national security – Resilience and civil preparedness in Sweden
In May 2018, the Swedish government distributed a pamphlet entitled “If the Crisis or the War Comes” to 4.8 million households in Sweden. Both the pamphlet (pictured above) [1] and its distribution may be are unprecedented in the current era. The stated purpose of the pamphlet from the government’s perspective was “to help increase people’s… Read more »
Conflicting visibilities of migrant-squatters on the northern border of Chile
The inhabitants of the squatter settlements in the border city of Arica, mostly indigenous migrants from the Peruvian-Bolivian highlands, feel the effects of the racialized geography of northern Chile through social discrimination, economic exploitation, and deprivation of their political rights. In these settlements, migrant residents make palpable the pervasive tension between a mode of visibility… Read more »
Navigating vulnerabilities and masculinities – how gendered contexts shape the agency of male sexual violence survivors
A persistent cliché about survivors of wartime sexual violence is that they are helpless and ever-vulnerable victims in need of white and patriarchal protection. This stereotypical view is particularly visible for male victims of conflict-related sexual violence, who are typically thought to be indefinitely stripped of their manhood and, as a result, to have lost all agency… Read more »
Food as a weapon? The geopolitics of food and the Qatar-Gulf rift
On 4 June 2017, residents of Qatar rushed the country’s grocery aisles, stocking up on as much food as they could fit into their carts or their budget. Qatar had just become the subject of a far-reaching embargo by its regional Gulf neighbors, spearheaded by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. In addition to cutting all… Read more »
Rashomon in the Sahel: Conflict Dynamics of Security Regionalism
Between 2013 and 2017, as a Ph.D. student I devoted my efforts to the attempt of analyzing in a comparative way the American, the French, and the European security initiatives towards one of the most unstable and conflict-prone regions in Africa, namely the Sahel. Since the beginnings of the Malian crisis in 2012, the Sahel… Read more »
The War Against Vague Threats: The Redefinitions of Imminent Threat and their Impact on Anticipatory Use of Force in the “War on Terror”
In this research project, I explored how the United States (U.S.) has redefined the concept of ‘imminent threat’ to relax the rules for anticipatory use of armed force against insurgent groups. In particular, two new definitions of imminent threat have changed the conduct of specific combat activities: drone strikes and ground combat operations. In the first part of the… Read more »
The Past Shall not Begin – Frozen Seeds, Extended Presents, and the Politics of Reversibility
In 2008, the first global seed bank—the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV)—went into operation. Even before its opening, the SGSV had already attracted media attention and provoked all kinds of theological and eschatological parables. The SGSV quickly received the nickname ‘Doomsday Vault’ while some commentators spoke of a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for plants. In fact, the… Read more »
Armed Mothers in Militant Visuals
In Hamas’ 2004 poster of suicide bomber Reem al-Riyashi, she poses for the camera holding a rifle her in left hand and her son in the other. al-Riyashi killed four Israelis and herself in a joint Hamas and al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades bombing on the Gaza-Israel border. Over twenty years earlier, and nearly 5,000 miles away,… Read more »