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 »
Tag: Security
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 »
Book review: The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression
by A. Dirk Moses, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 598 pp. On March 23, 2021—just over ten years from the day the UN Security Council authorized the United States and NATO intervention in Libya—the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing on Samantha Power’s nomination to lead the US Agency for International Development…. Read more »
Book review: Protecting Human Rights Defenders at Risk
edited by Alice M. Nah, London: Routledge, 2021. 212p. ISBN 9781138392618 ”‘Seguridad’ refers to all the conditions necessary to make human and political life flourish. These are conditions of dignity. But security [to the government] is reduced to a military or police perspective…. People have been sold the idea that the more troops, the more… Read more »
Book review: Breaking Through: Understanding Sovereignty and Security in the Circumpolar Arctic
edited by Wilfrid Greaves and P. Whitney Lackenbauer. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2021., 278p. ISBN 9781487523527 Breaking Through examines the state of sovereignty and security in the Arctic. Over the past four decades, scholars have identified sovereignty as challenge in the region, particularly in Canada, in the works of researchers such as Michael… Read more »
Book Review: Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence
by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran (eds), University of Minnesota Press, 2020, ISBN 978-1-5179-0748-8, 352 pp. Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence is a volume of essays edited by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran, and addresses the contemporary conceptual constraints that surround academic research in remote warfare. In the words of the editors, this volume attempts to “interrogate the cultural… Read more »
Book review: Security as Politics: Beyond the State of Exception
by Andrew W. Neal, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 288pp., £80/$US104.00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9781474450928 “How do we know security when we see it?” was the question that remained in my head during the whole time I was reading this book. I went to the kitchen to grab a coffee and my brain started drifting to… Read more »
Book review: Secrecy and Methods in Security Research: A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork
Edited by Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins Secrecy and Methods in Security Research, edited by Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins, promises to be a long-lasting contribution to the field of critical security studies (CSS) but also to the broader social-scientific debate on the methodological challenges of researching secrecy. CSS has… Read more »
Nuclear Governmentality: Governing Nuclear Security and Radiation Risk in Post-Fukushima Japan
The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan was classified as a level-7 international nuclear event. The disaster disrupted lives and livelihoods; yet, it is but one of many predicted to occur based on the frequency of past nuclear failures. [i] [ii] However, despite its fundamental riskiness, nuclear energy remains tied to national security and… Read more »
Freezing time, preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security
My paper on stockpiling, published in Security Dialogue, began with party conversations. When I told people that I work on catastrophe preparedness, the conversation inevitably shifted towards stockpiling. Concerned friends would ask how much food, water, and candles you have to store to be safe during an emergency. The gentrification critic would remark that we… Read more »