Jef Huysmans

"Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerois areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbors, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security Unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life"--Page four of cover.

Enacting Democratic Limits

Security Unbound

Claudia Aradau

Andrew Neal

Nadine Voelkner

Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies. It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sites of security and insecurity. Against the familiar methdological language of rigour, detachment and procedural consistency, Critical Security Methods reclaims the idea of method as experiment. The chapters offer a series of methodological experimentations that assemble concepts, theory and empirical cases into new frameworks for critical security research. They show how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be practiced as interventions into diverse instances of insecurity and securitisation, including airports, drug trafficking, peasant struggles, biometrics and police kettling. The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in critical security studies, politics and international relations.

New frameworks for analysis

Critical Security Methods

Andrew Dobson

Raia Prokhovnik

Following the end of the Cold War the security agenda has been transformed and redefined, academically and politically. This volume poses the question of political agency in relation to some of the most significant questions asked concerning the governance of insecurity and protection in the contemporary world.

Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency

The Politics of Protection

Jef Huysmans

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