Abstract The assassination of Haitian President Jovenal Moïse on July 7, 2021, revealed an intricate international enterprise, with the participation of mercenaries from at least four countries. The Colombian nationals under investigation for supposedly participating in the sinister operation were former members of the national army who fought the U.S.-backed war on drugs, and at least one of them was previously a member of a special unit investigated for crimes against humanity. How may we draw connections between the enduring violability of bodies in Colombia's long war and imperial violence elsewhere? Although this article is focused on Colombia, by placing the magnicide in relation to everyday racialized practices of security in the region, the article underscores and goes beyond activists’ outcries that not only are cops, soldiers, militias, and self-deputized individuals “just” violence workers whose practices render the territorial and legal borders of policing as fictions, but also their increasing confluence reveals a much broader imperial strategy of outsourcing and democratizing violence to uphold global and domestic statecraft. It is argued that domestic Pax Colombiana meets Pax Americana in the ever-expanding foundational violence that increasingly drags bodies (youth killed in the U.S.-sponsored war on drugs, displacements by the Colombian armed conflict, or nameless victims of Colombian-exported mercenaries around the world) into the global plantation's spaces of death. How do Black activists envision peace midts an imperial continuum of violence?
Preventing violent extremism (PVE) programs are central to state efforts to counter radicalization, particularly in educational settings. This unique ethnographic study, based on 68 hours of classroom observation, examines the Educational Youth Program (EPJO), where police officers conduct "radicalization" workshops for primary school children (aged 11-12). Officers perceive Muslim pupils as potential threats, effectively racializing them as a "suspect community" in need of reform. Police braided words of care and love with the language of security and surveillance, a form of "tough love" that serves as a tool of control. Their intimate methods of care/love extract knowledge, or better said, intelligence from children in the form of confessions. "Salvation" is promised only if pupils recast their religious identities to fit a securitized-secular framework. Otherwise, a secular hell-suspicion, surveillance, and exclusion-is awaiting these children in this world. This paper expands the literature on racialized PVE initiatives by revealing how care, security, and secularism intersect, and how invasive efforts are reframed as benevolence. Officers' affective labor transforms classrooms into securitized spaces, turning "love" and "care" into tools of a racialized, secular governance. The apparent success of EPJO reflects its mastery of pastoral, intimate power: presenting control as care and security as love, all while entrenching systemic exclusion under the guise of societal protection. The state has not abolished hell, it only secularized it.
By examining how the UK's onshore circulation of natural gas is secured according to plural notions of risk, this article develops a conceptual framework for attending to the relational constitution of circulating bodies and things, and the negotiated ways in which their realities are strategically manipulated through security's practice. Deploying the language of molecular security, it offers 3 inflection points for critical security studies. First, it challenges reductions of circulatory security to practices of filtration and maintenance, showing how lines of exception are drawn through entities' constitutive relations in attempts to manage their capacities to act. Second, the paper demonstrates how security operates according to plural imperatives (public safety, economic productivity, political stability, climate security), referent objects (nation-states, populations, economies, organisations, environments, individuals), and performances across a variety of scales (atomic to planetary). And third, it stretches security's relationship with the exception, showing how it often takes mundane, managerial, forms whereby both the threats identified, and the interventions deployed, may never cross the threshold from normal to exceptional politics.
International Relations scholars in recent years have argued that games and gaming are poorly understood and underresearched within the discipline. Aggie Hirst (2022) observes that gaming is regarded by many academics as singularly unserious despite now being the leading form of entertainment worldwide in terms of sales. The notable exception to this depoliticization of gaming is an abundance of studies of a so-called "military-entertainment complex" (MEC), many of which focus on U.S. Military recruitment. In particular, America's Army, a free game produced directly by the U.S. Army that functioned as an extremely effective recruitment tool, has been studied extensively under the conceptual umbrella of the MEC. This paper discusses the decline of America's Army and need for scholarship to move beyond it, recognizing a sharp, highly contested, and ill-documented pivot among the U.S. armed forces toward recruiting via "eSports." In doing so, I posit that the MEC and associated conceptual tools are ill-equipped for studies of complex, modern gaming culture, proposing assemblage as a better means for social scientists to study games not only as a boxed product but as a part of a wider assemblage that includes social groups, events, platforms, and media outside of the game's own software.
This article examines how automated technologies produce threat knowledge in pursuit of "situational awareness". Focusing on intrusion detection systems (IDS), it argues that searching for "anomalies" represents not only a technical shift but a sociotechnical reconfiguration. Drawing on interviews with technical operators, engineers, and institutional actors involved in Norway's national IDS, the article shows that anomaly detection does not deliver the seamless oversight or predictive control often promised by automation and Machine Learning. Instead, it produces new forms of uncertainty and interpretive labour warranted by military doctrines of "total security". By exploring the conditions under which threats become known-a situated awareness-"omniboxing" is conceptualised as a lens to unpack the production of threat knowledge where uncertainty is not eradicated but operationalised. In contrast to Latour's black box, omniboxing acknowledges that while technical operators preserve an unyielding commitment to realising "total security", technologies are not experienced as settled or self-evident. By foregrounding the ongoing and open-ended interpretive labour of human operators, the article demonstrates how IDS are not neutral tools of detection but are active in constituting what is seen, known, and acted upon as a threat. Situational awareness, often imagined as a means of achieving omniscient oversight, is rather a reflexive and situated process, revealing cybersecurity technologies as sociotechnical configurations rather than technical objects.
This article explores how women are integrated into pandemic preparedness measures to deliver health security. The article pursues this aim by developing the idea of feminist pandemic preparedness, an idea explicitly drawn from the interconnections between feminist international political economy (IPE) and feminist security studies (FSS). Feminist pandemic preparedness seeks to reframe the central dilemma of pandemic preparedness-how to reconcile public health security needs with state economic interests-to how to reconcile public health security initiatives with the political economic lives of women. The article pursues this contribution in two parts. Part one situates the idea of feminist pandemic preparedness within existing debates on global health security, securitization of health, and the relationship between emerging scholarship on feminist health security, feminist security studies, and feminist IPE. Part two explores how women are being integrated into existing pandemic preparedness measures: 1) the World Health Organization (WHO)'s reform of the International Health Regulations (IHR2005), Pandemic Agreement, and Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response; and 2) the World Bank's Pandemic Fund; and 3) and Africa CDC's Partnerships for African Vaccine Manufacturing (PAVM).
This article explores the work strategies through which Afghan local staff employed by NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) sought to navigate a hierarchical and mistrustful work environment in which they held structurally subordinate positions. Drawing on sociological and feminist theories of performance and performativity and based on in-depth interviews with 17 former ISAF employees, the article identifies three performance strategies through which local staff sought to enhance professional standing and work continuity: insider performances, bridgebuilding performances, and subordinate performances. We explore specific performance types and dynamics within each strategy, substantiated by concrete examples of how local staff reported speaking with, offering expertise to, and dressing among international personnel. The article advances a more nuanced understanding of the relational dynamics within peace operations and extends emerging scholarship on local staff by foregrounding their strategic responses to their work environment. More broadly, it contributes to analyses on the interactions between international and local actors and critiques how security is enacted toward host populations by shifting the analysis inside the missions themselves.
The present article contributes to surveillance studies as well as health security studies by presenting an analysis of the Chinese COVID-19 dataveillance Track and Trace System (TTS) as a new form of dromopolitics. Unlike most states, China's total dataveillance combined with stringent means of discipline (strictest forms of quarantine) allowed China to retain societal flow-control that was akin to governmentality even without mass vaccination during the first year of the pandemic. In the TTS, colour was used as a technique with the goal of maintaining flow-control, for making the microscopic virus visible, and for providing a mundane security routine that provided visual tokens of trust and validity. Such measures worked to turn the uncontrollable terror of the virus into a manageable fear and were part of the emotional work done to maintain social stability and political legitimacy. We argue that Paul Virilio's notions of speed and dromopolitics provide for new insights into the politics of this unprecedented dataveillance operation. Our analytical reading in the article is based on previous literature on China's COVID-19 sociotechnical assemblages and first-hand experiences and observations in the PRC during its international closure.
Critical security scholarship has explored how different actors-including experts-make, practice, and legitimate security, often employing theories of exceptionalism to point to how experts are emboldened by the state of exception and can aid to enact it. But how do experts themselves understand and respond to exceptionalism? Do they recognize the political rupture of the exception? How do they understand the impact of exceptionalism on their advice, their behavior, and their role in emergency policymaking? Using data from interviews with public health experts in the United States during COVID-19, this paper argues that, like other security actors, experts conceptualize and respond to an emergency context in different-and occasionally competing-ways. Specifically, experts can adopt three distinct positions vis-& agrave;-vis exceptionalism: embrace, or the acceptance of exceptionalism and its changes to sovereign power; resistance, or an effort to push back against key ruptures to the norm; or denial, or the refusal to acknowledge any alterations or responsibility for exceptional measures. Connecting this to experts' understandings and practices, this paper details how experts are not a monolithic or uncritical security actor, but can be willing participants in exceptionalist politics, actively push back against perceived excesses, or obscure their responsibility altogether.
This article explores the protection of queer/trans refugees under temporary asylum in Turkey. It argues that the existing international asylum and refugee regime falls short of adequately protecting queer and trans refugees because of its narrow understanding of security. The regime tends to privilege physical security and offers protection in "emergency" cases in which immediate threats endanger bodily safety. While doing so, it neglects ontological security-the sense of stability and continuity that arises from maintaining one's queer/trans identity and agency. An exclusive focus on physical security has two key implications: it obscures how systemic and structural inequalities and discrimination undermine refugees' ontological security, and it transforms protection into a mechanism of control, discipline, and containment. The article conceptualizes protection as a contested category continually negotiated by states, international organizations, NGOs, and queer/trans refugees. The meaning of protection shifts across a continuum of varied, and sometimes contradictory, layers of physical and ontological in/security. Methodologically, an interpretivist approach is adopted to analyze how the state, NGO professionals, and queer and trans refugees negotiate the meanings attached to security and protection.
How war is anticipated has become a central problem of contemporary security governance. Across liberal democracies, simulated exercises, ranging from tabletop wargames to civil-military drills, are increasingly used to render uncertain futures actionable in the present. Drawing on ethnographic participation in two wartime simulation exercises in Taiwan-a state-led civil-military drill and a civilian-organized drill-this article examines how different modes of simulation shape the temporal and affective conditions under which war is imagined, inhabited, and performed. Situating these cases within critical scholarship on affect, anticipation, and security, the article argues that the political significance of simulated exercises lies less in their representational realism or future prediction than in their capacity to produce distinct temporal-affective subjectivities. The state-led exercises predominantly operate on a logic of preparedness, seeking to manage uncertainty by standardizing roles and procedures and mitigating adverse outcomes. In contrast, the civilian-led exercises mobilize a preemptive logic that treats uncertainty, disorientation, and embodied vulnerability not as failures but generative conditions of action and subject formation. Conceptualizing exercises as temporal-affective machines, the article shows how bodies, objects, infrastructures, emotions, and environments actively participate in shaping how war is sensed and lived in the present. In doing so, the study of simulated exercises opens new analytical space for understanding how security is constructed not only through policy, procedures, and institutions, but through the shaping of perception, temporality, and human-material relationships.
The re-election of Donald Trump has reignited debates about his impact on U.S. democracy. This article examines an underexplored aspect of his leadership: the rhetoric and actions that promote domestic military power and the expansion of other militaristic practices. Using the concept of civilian militarism, it analyzes how Trump's framing of internal threats, shaped by economic decline under neoliberalism, drives his radical political strategy. This dynamic is evident in the Make America Great Again movement, whose militaristic undertones became particularly pronounced during his second term. Drawing on Michael Mann's framework of ideological, economic, military, and political power, as well as Carl Schmitt's theory of political authority, civilian militarism provides a lens for situating Trump's actions within broader historical and comparative contexts, especially Latin American presidential traditions. The article argues that civilian militarism, as a particular form of illiberal governance, blurs the boundary between political and military power when civilian leaders integrate military and militaristic practices into broader governance. While previous research has analyzed Trump's illiberal tendencies, this study focuses on the logic of domestic militarization. By tracing its evolution and drawing parallels abroad, it highlights how civilian militarism, as a phenomenon, threatens democratic stability.
This article advances ontological security studies and understandings of conflict transformation by theorizing "fateful moments." These moments are discursively constituted-distinguishable by no inherent properties of the events being narrated but inscribed as "fateful" through authoritative interpretation. Their performative inauguration retroactively founds conditions that make narrative transformation possible and creates space for new relational futures without provoking ontological crisis. Such reconfigurations demonstrate how the ontological security-seeking project can move beyond anxiety-managing continuity postures by instituting revised narrative orders that provide new frameworks of meaning the state subsequently seeks to secure. The article identifies how fateful moment inauguration is conditioned by material dissonance, actors' seeking to (re-)assert authority as providers of intelligibility, and the intertextual anchoring of narratives-that are themselves subject to supplementation via iterative movement. Inter-Korean relations demonstrate the framework's interpretive utility. Despite decades of antagonistic identity bordering, the inter-Korean peace process of the 2000s became viable through performative narrative reframing. Events were rendered consequential not by essence, but through the exercise of interpretive authority within permissive discursive conditions. Analyzing performative language, the article intervenes in ontological security studies debates regarding change, tracing how stability is resecured after fateful moments, while demonstrating how this enables conflict transformation.
Scandals have become an important mode of making visible and knowable the violence of security practices. This is done through a revelatory mechanism that rests on the staging of secrecy to expose transgressive behaviours. This article argues that most conceptualizations of scandals rely on a problematic understanding of critique, one that rests on an understanding of epistemology as revelation. Revelation, however, implies a hierarchical and unilateral relationship between an all-knowing entity and a community of faith. Critique through this epistemology is limited to questioning the strength of the community's faith in its normative order. The purpose of revelation is to produce an authoritative, yet authorless, voice that participates in the assemblage of credibility to redeem the community's moral identity. Instead, we should turn to the reference points articulated in the debates generated by scandals, to resituate critique within their sociality. Such a sociality, as demonstrated through the analysis of the 2023 shooting of French teenager Nahel Merzouk, enables the formulations of solidarities across space and time. Paying attention to the sociality of critique allows us to understand the crucial role scandals play in the (re)formation of collective identities and their memorialization.
Technoscientific controversies are not only public disputes over science and technology. Some of them may also evolve into security events that shape how security knowledge is produced and contested. A prime example of this dynamic is the "lab leak controversy" about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on this case, the article asks: how was the epistemic authority of liberal global health institutions challenged throughout this controversy, and how did this shape the prospects of making security public? To explore how the authority of established security knowledge producers is challenged and destabilized, the article introduces the concept epistemic insecurity and develops a framework for analyzing the construction, management, and political effects of epistemic insecurity. Through this lens, the paper studies the transformation of the "lab leak" conspiracy theory into an expert hypothesis considered by established political and scientific authorities and examines how this process interacted with the epistemic authority of global health institutions and shaped the space for their critique. It finds that the management of epistemic insecurity by liberal institutions initially delegitimized any critique and later led to the personalization and technocratization of critique, thus preventing a deeper critical reflection on the entanglements of science and security.
This article examines the controversy surrounding "PeDRA"-a Frontex surveillance programme for harvesting data from illegalised migrants-to explore how opaque security practices are transformed into objects of public-political contestation. By centring the EU's freedom of information (FOI) mechanism as both a methodological and analytical vantage point for interrogating the regime of opacity in EU migration management, it contributes to debates in critical border and security studies concerned with mundane entanglements between secrecy and security. How do FOI mechanisms intervene in the politics of controversy and broader epistemic struggles surrounding Europe's border regime, and what forms of (non)knowledge do they engender? Drawing on a large trove of confidential records, the analysis shows, first, how FOI disclosures can be mobilised to trace the emergence of controversies by exposing the internal contestations and irregularities that underpinned the unlawful expansion of PeDRA. Second, it identifies the obfuscatory tactics that EU border bureaucracies deployed to strategically manage the political reverberations of the controversy, both in the public arena and the bureaucratic backstage. While FOI mechanisms cannot undo the irreducible opacity of datafied bordering infrastructures, the article concludes that they remain vital tools for rendering security practices (partially) visible and, thus, politically contestable.
This article examines the controversy surrounding Canada's Chinook visa processing tool to explore how sociotechnical illegibility is produced and sustained during public disputes over border automation. While state secrecy is often cited as the main obstacle to understanding security technologies, we argue that illegibility is also produced through competing interpretive frames advanced by actors with divergent political agendas. Drawing on STS, controversy studies, and frame theory, we analyze how public actors-including immigration lawyers, journalists, politicians, and universities-translated Chinook variously as a case of procedural injustice, AI overreach, racism, and linguistic discrimination. Rather than clarifying the devices' role in rising visa refusals, these competing frames deepened confusion about what Chinook is and how it operates. Combined with obfuscation, this fragmentation reinforces state narratives about such devices. The result is persistent illegibility that impedes public contestation, even as automation reshapes immigration control. In contrast to scholarship foregrounding critiques of algorithmic governance through the study of controversies, we foreground the epistemic limits of controversies for generating knowledge about security devices. We conclude by calling for scholars to support publics in engaging in more robust sociotechnical literacy to better navigate the political, technical, and institutional dynamics of automated bordering.
This article intervenes in International Relations (IR) debates on infrastructural politics by centering the role infrastructures play in sustaining species domination, as a key foundation of international political relations. It argues that infrastructures materialize a distribution of killability, where some lives, particularly those of certain humans, are deemed non-killable, while others, like wolves, are subjected to exclusion, marginalization, and even death. By focusing on the Netherlands and Belgium, the article examines the rise of wolf-exclusionary infrastructures that create artificial boundaries, sustaining promises of human security shielded from the dangers posed by other species. These infrastructures obscure the violent histories of successive human wars against wolves and embed ongoing violence within technical vocabularies and international standards that make it seem neutral and inevitable. The article challenges IR to recognize infrastructure as a key tool of violence and urges a rethinking of how risks and vulnerabilities are materially distributed within multispecies relations. In so doing, it reveals the politics of infrastructure as central to the ongoing struggle of living with other species in a world shaped by entrenched human interests. Finally, the article calls for a reconsideration of security and explores a redistribution of the risks of earthly living across species lines.
Ethnographic scholarship on fortified enclaves has explained how spatialised modalities and practices of urban security shape city life, yet it has rarely probed how everyday practices of security-provision co-produce social order within these enclaved spaces. Building on seminal work on gated communities, this article repositions enclaves as ordinary but politically charged sites of security-provision in insecure, postcolonial southern urbanisms. Through an ethnographic account of the processes of 'enclavisation' within a fortified enclave in Karachi, the paper brings the production of space into conversation with everyday boundary-work, affective judgments, and negotiation between guards, residents, and service-class entrants. Focusing on how routine security work is enacted and encountered at entry gates, the article reveals the temporal, processual, and relational nature of security-making in a socially stratified, postcolonial urban context marked by class division and democratic fragility. It argues that understanding enclaves as ongoing processes-rather than as static products-illuminates how subjective experiences of security are intimately tied to shifting power relations, processes of exclusion, and urban citizenship. The analysis offers new insights into the local politics of boundary-making. It shows how class, status, and postcolonial urban governance fundamentally shape the circulation, negotiation, and resistance that constitute everyday security in Karachi's urbanism.
