| 1. |
- Aalberts, Tanja, et al.
(författare)
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Rituals of World Politics: On (Visual) Practices Disordering Things
- 2020
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2162-4909 .- 2162-4887. ; 8:3, s. 240-264
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Rituals are customarily muted into predictable routines aimed to stabilise social orders and limit conflict. As a result, their magic lure recedes into the background, and the unexpected and disruptive elements are downplayed. Our collaborative contribution counters this move by foregrounding rituals of world politics as social practices with notable disordering effects. We engage a series of ‘world pictures’ to show the worlding and disruptive work enacted in rituals designed to sustain the sovereign exercise of violence and war, here colonial treatymaking, state commemoration, military/service dog training, cyber-security podcasts, algorithmically generated maps, the visit of Prince Harry to a joint NATO exercise and border ceremonies in India, respectively. We do so highlighting rituals’ immanent potential for disruption of existing orders, the fissures, failures and unforeseen repercussions. Reappraising the disordering role of ritual practices sheds light on the place of rituals in rearticulating the boundaries of the political. Rituals can generate dissensus and re-divisions of the sensible rather than only impose a consensus by policing the boundaries of the political, as Rancière might phrase it. Our images are essential to the account. They help disinterring the fundamentals and ambiguities of the current worldings of security, capturing the affective atmosphere of rituals.
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| 2. |
- Bousquet, Antoine, et al.
(författare)
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Becoming weapon: an opening call to arms
- 2017
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 5:1, s. 1-8
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)
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| 3. |
- Bousquet, Antoine
(författare)
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Lethal visions: the eye as function of the weapon
- 2017
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 5:1, s. 62-80
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a ‘logistics of perception’, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking) and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders is concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has however extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light itself through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation is to be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb.
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| 4. |
- Ericson, Mathias, 1976, et al.
(författare)
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If I tell you I will have to kill you: secrecy in public administration in a time of securitization and militarization
- 2022
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 10:1, s. 43-54
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Critical security studies examine how everyday life is affected or transformed by practices that militarise civil society. This article addresses one such area: qualitative changes in the openness and transparency of public administration, instating a mode of suspicion and secrecy. The article is based on interviews and observations in the area of the total defence in Sweden, where we during three years encountered challenges in gaining access to authorities that initially welcomed participation of researchers, but progressively became inaccessible. We use these experiences to reflect on both methodological issues and wider implications for the securitisation of civil society. The article concludes that difficulties in gaining access to the field may itself serve as valuable data in understanding the changing condition of public administration in a time of militarisation.
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| 5. |
- Eriksson Baaz, Maria, 1971-, et al.
(författare)
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Race and racism in narratives of insecurity : from the visceral to the global
- 2021
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Taylor & Francis. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 9:1, s. 2-6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This introductory text frames the contributions of this forum, bringing together, scholars who have been working for a long time to dismantle knowledge systems that sustain whiteness, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy, in the context of recent developments. It first provides a brief overview of well-established knowledges on the various ways in which racism and racial inequalities remain deeply embedded within academia. This is followed by a snapshot of all the different essays that together make up this intervention forum.
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| 6. |
- Holmberg, Arita, Docent, 1974-
(författare)
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Swedish teachers’ views of security in schools : narratives disconnected from the national security discourse
- 2021
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 9:3, s. 226-240
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- National security discourses have entered teacher’s classrooms. A strand of largely critical literature in education studies have noted that new security tasks clash with the roles of teachers. However, few studies have yet approached this audience about their views on security. This article analyses how Swedish teachers conceive of security in relation to the school system. Data consists of semi-structured interviews with teachers and principals, conducted in medium-sized municipalities in Sweden. The analysis finds that teachers maintain a conceptualisation of security that focuses on the individual. Simultaneously, teachers rarely adopt national security discourses (except regarding school violence) and several argue against emphasising the concept of security in relation to schools. The results offer an opportunity to analyse the views of teachers as audiences in relation to the extension of the security field into the educational domain.
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| 7. |
- Markussen, Håvard Rustad
(författare)
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Conceptualising the smartphone as a security device : appropriations of embodied connectivity at the Black Lives Matter protests
- 2022
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 10:2, s. 70-84
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article contributes to our understanding of security devices by engaging with the distinctiveness of one particular and especially important device: the smartphone. Drawing from Barad’s understanding of posthumanist performativity and turning to the smartphone literature outside of security studies, it develops a conceptual account of the smartphone as a security device. The article suggests that the smartphone stands out from other comparable devices because humans have come to embody its connective features. Using the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as an illustration, the article shows how the smartphone’s intra-action with users enable the crafting of new security practices through appropriations of embodied connectivity, especially when such appropriations are carried out on the streets. The police appropriated the smartphone to monitor social media activity and for geofencing, while the protesters appropriated it to obfuscate data and for livestreaming. By (re)locating the negotiation of competing security interests in the (extended) bodies of the protesters through the affordance of these practices, the smartphone contributed to the acceleration and intensification of a racialised spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance.
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| 8. |
- Zhou, Jiayi
(författare)
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The (universal) human and beyond: constituting security objects in theory and practice
- 2022
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 10:1, s. 16-29
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper addresses an analytical gap in critical security studies related to the social construction, legitimation, and institutionalisation of referents objects, or the for whom of security. As it lays out, referent objects tend to be assessed based on pre-theoretical commitments that themselves fall outside of the scope of critical security analysis. This has important analytical and ethical consequences, which I heuristically illustrate in relation to the individual in both Copenhagen School securitisation theory and human-centred security. In one case, the individual is understood as an atomised Hobbesian figure at odds with the collective, and in the other, as a socially embedded figure representative of humanity. Incommensurate ontological baselines have on the one hand stymied fruitful dialogue between these two influential approaches. More importantly, however, fixed perspectives on the individual have also served to limit each approachs purview, even on their own terms. In highlighting the value of de-naturalising the individual, I lay out a broader argument for problematising referent objects more generally, as a more productive way of thinking about security that moves the conversation beyond practically endless articulations of potential danger. Overall, I argue that the intersubjective processes by which any referent object is constituted as a legitimate claimant to security, is as central to the critical study and ethical practice of security, as that of putative threats to it.
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| 9. |
- Öberg, Dan, 1973-
(författare)
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Ethics, the military imaginary, and practices of war
- 2019
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Routledge. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 7:3, s. 199-209
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Maja Zehfuss' book War and the politics of ethics makes the claim that Western practices of war are constituted by debates and ideas of ethics, illustrated in particular through the Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Herein, this claim is assessed by drawing on Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brightons argument that in contemporary research, war tends to be conceived through secondary phenomena. The paper argues that research focusing on how war is shaped by secondary phenomena often falls back on a reductive understanding, in which war is represented as violent destruction. Moreover, that by seeing war as a multifaceted form shaped by military imaginaries centring on military theory, tactics, and operational art, we may gain a more comprehensive understanding of its ontology and practices.
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| 10. |
- Ördén, Hedvig, 1983-
(författare)
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Instilling judgement : counter-narratives of humour, fact and logic
- 2018
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Ingår i: Critical Studies on Security. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2162-4887 .- 2162-4909. ; 6:1, s. 15-32
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- With citizens turning to extremism, ‘counter-narratives’ have been forwarded as a remedy for online ‘counter-radicalisation’. Still, the relationship between counter-narratives and counter-radicalisation remains theoretically under-examined. Taking as its starting point a policy proposal by the Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN), and drawing on the work of Arendt and Kant on judgement, this article explores the link between political mind-change and the counter-narrative forms of logic, facts and humour. By understanding radicalisation as an error of judgement, the text examines implicit assumptions about politics and the mind in counter-narrative policy. While counter-narratives of fact and logic emphasise the self-evident nature of political decision-making by ‘saying what is’, the humorous counter-narratives, meant to disarm through laughter-induced aporia, fail to live up to the instrumental logic required by the policymakers. Rather than representing a solution to the problem of radicalisation, the counter-narrative remedy is better described as a ‘vehicle for sense’ in the discourse on extremism.
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