Category: Book reviews

Book Review: On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence

by Mike Hill 2022. London: University of Minnesota Press. 237pp. ISBN: 978-0-8166-6090-2. In the past two decades, talks about ‘everywhere’ and ‘endless’ wars have become familiar refrains among scholars of critical security studies. Whether as a strategic consequence of the use of new weapons and media or as part of a political discourse aimed at… Read more »

Book review: Counterterrorism Strategies in Egypt: Permanent Exceptions in the War on Terror

by Ahmed M. Abozaid, Routledge, 2022, pp. 176. ISBN: 0367714639 Abozaid starts his book “Counterterrorism strategies in Egypt; permanent exceptions in the War on Terror” with a personal encounter with security forces. This opening is a powerful reminder for security scholars how counter-terrorism policies, post-colonial legacies and legal protection are not merely conceptual lenses but… Read more »

Book review: Biopolitics After Truth: Knowledge, Power, and Democratic Life

by Sergei Prozorov, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 192 pp., ISBN: 9781474485784 Rarely does a book of political philosophy manage to triangulate three themes of public interest as effectively as Sergei Prozorov’s Biopolitics After Truth: Knowledge, Power, and Democratic Life (2021). Its main topics—biopolitics, ‘post-truth,’ and post-Soviet Russia—not only speak directly to pandemic politics but also… Read more »

Book review: The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State

by Rizwaan Sabir, Pluto Press, 2022, 256 pp. ISBN: 9780745338484 The contemporary surveillance state of the UK and its allies is in many ways the bureaucratic par excellence, with its logics, language and processes operating through seemingly deliberate and elaborate sets of contradictions and linguistic sleights-of-hand. It is simultaneously vague, due to its characteristically administrative… Read more »

Book review: Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America

by C. Birchall, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2021, 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-5179-1043-3 Why is it that debates about trade-offs between supposed binary opposites of secrecy and transparency, and between secrecy and security, so often feel unsatisfying? As Clare Birchall acutely points out in her new book, Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied… Read more »

Book review: Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army

by Maria Rashid, Stanford University Press, 2020. 288pp. ISBN: 9781503610415 Plenty of social scientists and humanities scholars are preoccupied with the technics of warfare, such as lawfare, drones, “low intensity warfare” and the shifting spaces of war. Yet, attention to a traditional means of war, that is, the institution of the military and its constituting… Read more »

Book review: Encountering extremism. Theoretical issues and local challenges

by Alice Martini, Kieran Ford and Richard Jackson (Eds) Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020. 328 pp. ISBN: 978-1-5261-3660-2. What is the difference between terrorism and extremism? The book Encountering extremism. Theoretical issues and local challenges, edited by Alice Martini, Kieran Ford and Richard Jackson, jumps in this debate by charting the linguistic shift from terrorism… Read more »

Book review: Ethics of Drone Strikes. Restraining Remote-Control Killing

by Christian Enemark (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. IX + 204 p The increasing use of armed drones has raised a series of ethical and legal questions. The fast-evolving development and sophistication of technologies that drones combine (aerospace, robotics, satellites, artificial intelligence) have stimulated intensive debates about the need of international regulation, tackling the… Read more »

Book club review: Savage Ecology – War and Geopolitics at the End of the World

          Pardon me, I was dreaming; I forgot you are herewaiting for me to accept you again, tell you that you’re not dangerous. Alice Notley, Above the Leaders With the global security system implicated in just about every scenario of civilisational and species collapse, should it be said that scholars have given too much time… Read more »

Book club review*: Savage Ecology – War and geopolitics at the end of the world

*An in-depth review from @SecDialogue by Jairus V. Grove. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0484-4 Welcome, reader, to a new experience for the Security Dialogue blog. While we will continue to feature standard book reviews, in our book club reviews we present a novel kind of in-depth engagement with interesting books. First… Read more »