This article investigates online speech governance as a case study of contemporary security practices, focusing on how states have tried to regulate the moderation of digital communication flows. Drawing on governance theories and critical security studies, the study analyzes and compares different regulatory regimes in the United States and Europe. Using a quali-quantitative analysis of seven legislative texts, it identifies three distinct approaches to managing information flows: free circulation, patrolling, and flow optimisation. These regimes reflect a shift in security governance from controlling content to channelling its circulation, embedding platforms within state-driven frameworks of transparency and accountability. The analysis reveals how legislation reshapes platform practices, transforming them into quasi-public entities subject to bureaucratic oversight. Platforms, in turn, adapt by integrating regulatory expectations into their operations, balancing compliance demands with their business models. Contributing to the literature on critical security studies, this article critically examines how these diverse regulatory regimes converge around a shared mechanism of security bureaucratisation. Rather than governing through direct content control, states translate security imperatives into administrative rationalities - transparency, auditing, and reporting - that programme platforms conduct and govern information circulation through continuous bureaucratic procedures.
In the Italian context, jihadist radicalisation is considered among the foremost security threats, although no lethal terrorist attack in the name of Islam has occurred. Scholars and practitioners describe this situation as exceptional. Building on this literature, this paper examines another Italian exception: the absence of a comprehensive strategy to Prevent and Counter Violent Extremism. It argues that the reliance on preventive and pre-criminal instruments compensates for the lack of P/CVE programmes (making Italy a distinct case in the EU) and that this anticipatory logic leads to framing Muslims as more dangerous than other citizens, not only for national security concerns but also because of anti-Muslim attitudes. By engaging with critical scholarship on the preventive and pre-criminal turn of counterterrorism, I show that Italy's counterterrorism policies are marked by three key features of pre-crime - vagueness, imagination, and identity - and that the boundaries between preventive and precautionary logics are becoming porous. A discussion of preventive measures and administrative deportation will follow, examining its discriminatory impact on Muslims. Further, I contend that recent bills to endow Italy with a P/CVE strategy assume that radicalisation is a process mostly connected with jihadism, minimising other violent threats such as right-wing extremism.
This article critically examines the making crime process within anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) frameworks in Switzerland and Canada, through the analytical lens of the 'chain of security'. By deconstructing the mechanisms of suspicion production by reporting entities and the role of financial intelligence units (FIUs), we highlight how the governance of (il)licit financial flows reveals a diversity of mechanisms and frameworks that deviate from the linearity perceived by the chain model. Our analysis reveals that, contrary to the theoretical assumptions of intelligence-led policing, the AML/CFT system operates through a selective process in which suspicion is often transferred rather than actively detected. Law enforcement actors maintain control over the 'making crime' process by leveraging financial intelligence in ways that reinforce pre-existing investigative priorities, rather than uncovering new criminal behaviours. This study challenges dominant conceptualisations of financial security governance and underscores the need to rethink the role of financial intelligence in shaping crime definitions and enforcement strategies.
This article revisits David Garland's 'responsibilization strategy' by examining how the banking and cross-border logistics sectors are co-opted into security governance through a 'politics of reporting'. Based on fieldwork in Canada, we analyse how responsibilities for surveillance and control are constructed within these economic subfields. We argue that while moral duty plays a role, reputational stakes primarily drive these sectors' participation in security arrangements, refracting state security demands into business logics centred on legitimacy and competitive advantage. Reputation emerges as a form of symbolic capital, integral to compliance and market positioning, yet unevenly distributed across these industries. Larger firms leverage reputational gains for competitive advantages, whereas smaller companies are often marginalised by the high costs of compliance, pushed into informal market practices. The study highlights how the integration of security and economic logics results in a co-evolution of capitalist market strategies and state security objectives, reshaping both fields in complex and dynamic ways.
Migration governmentality is enforced through multiple actors which are driven by partially divergent political and economic rationales and interests. Focusing on the French-Italian border, the article interrogates how to account for the irreducible heterogeneity of practices of migration governance which are presented as harmonised and coordinated but that, at a closer glance, appear unhitched. The paper starts by introducing the concept of 'unhitched control' and, drawing on that concept, it pushes forward a twofold argument. First, it contends that partially discordant practices and rationalities ultimately converge in choking migrant lives and their infrastructure of life-support. Second, it argues that an exclusive focus on securitisation and security practices sidelines the multiple socio-political and economic components of unhitched control. In order to illustrate such a point, the article focuses on the Franco-Italian border, which is a key border crossing point for migrants, shaped by a long history of migrant passages. Building on archival sources, the piece mobilises a historical approach to investigate how modes of unhitched control in the second half of the last century converged in channelling labour mobility. In the last section it centres on the present context, investigating how unhitched control impacts on migrants' movements and lives.
This intervention examines how science fiction can be mobilised to legitimise the development of human enhancement (HE) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in contemporary military discourses. Combining Jasanoff's concept of sociotechnical imaginaries with Foucault's notion of the archive, it analyses the shift from Terminator to Iron Man imaginaries in NATO debates on future war. While Terminator figures symbolise autonomous, dehumanised violence, Iron Man articulates a human-centred vision of future war in which technology enhances the soldier. This shift marks a rupture, not a rearticulation of power, as human agency is sustained through privately owned epistemic infrastructures. By conceptualising Iron Man's use of the AI-enabled J.A.R.V.I.S. system as an archive, I reveal how human enhancement normalises new forms of militarised governance operating through algorithms, optimisation, and control.
Drawing on Jasanoff's concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, this intervention examines sociotechnical imaginaries of future war in Chinese science fiction, identifying three key themes: (1) the erosion of human agency; (2) imagined future wars between humans and non-humans; and (3) China's central leadership role in such conflicts. Building on these findings, the intervention makes two analytical moves. First, by highlighting dystopian portrayals of advanced AI systems, it argues that, alongside recognising the cultural specificity of sociotechnical imaginaries, it is equally important to acknowledge the overlaps and similarities between Western and Chinese imaginaries. Second, using China as a case study, this intervention demonstrates how science fiction can function as a politically productive resource of sociotechnical imaginaries in authoritarian contexts. It also suggests that further research is needed to better understand the extent - if any - of Chinese science fiction's influence on government thinking and policy formation.
Utopian and dystopian Science Fiction imaginaries of war are poli-tical interventions. A narrative methodology that relates individual texts to larger social imaginaries redeems the complex layers of these works. With this in place, we can map out the relationship between war and political order disclosed by utopian and dystopias texts, broadening our view of the elements comprising interna-tional thought in the process.
Visual narratives are defined as 'stories that are told through visual media such as photographs, films, memes, cartoons and so on'. The visuals of children in conflicts display a specific story of suffering and humanitarian catastrophe. Yet, the literature has less to offer on the visuals of child soldiers, who are not merely victims but also hold agency. The aim of the study is twofold: first, it offers VNA as a valid and effective method for analysing agency; second, it operationalises Visual Narrative Agency Framework to analyse the visual dimension of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)'s narratives regarding the child soldiers. The article analyses the images and accompanying texts that are utilised by ISIS to from three layers: visual composition, narrative meaning and representational agency. This article examines how and to what extent visuals depicting child soldiers contribute to the reinforcement of ISIS's discursive and ideological regime. It further explores the implications of these visual representations for the broader narrative ISIS projects about itself: such as gender and racial distribution, indoctrination, and conflict justifications through these visual narratives.
Drawing on Bruno Latour's reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, this intervention challenges the tendency to treat Skynet as the sole 'monster' in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I argue that responsibility for Judgement Day lies not only with Skynet but also with the human policymakers who designed, activated, and subsequently abandoned the system in an effort to manage geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. By studying Skynet as an AI-enabled nuclear command, control, and communication system, this article broadens the empirical focus of existing scholarship on The Terminator franchise beyond the depiction of autonomous weapon systems. In doing so, it highlights the analytical value of studying 'monsters' for Critical Security Studies debates on sociotechnical imaginaries, nuclear risk, and future war.
In what ways can science fiction (de)stabilise dominant sociotechnical imaginaries of future war? While existing Critical Security Studies scholarship has examined the relationship between science fiction and world politics, this collection of interventions extends these insights by building on the growing conceptual interest in the study of sociotechnical imaginaries. We make two significant contributions to Critical Security Studies scholarship. First, we provide a novel conceptually informed account of how science fiction stories can inform the background understandings of (un)desirable visions of future war held by different audiences. Second, we help expand the empirical remit of sociotechnical imaginaries scholarship beyond its current focus on elite policy discourses by developing the study of science fiction as a key site of everyday sense-making and political contestation. As the introduction to this collection, this intervention contextualises existing understandings of the relationship between science fiction, sociotechnical imaginaries and future war. It also summarises the arguments developed in each of the four other interventions and identifies several areas for future research.
This article combines interdisciplinary child studies with critical heritage studies to fill a gap in research about the practices of documenting aftermaths of violence and terrorism. It asks how the police and police work are produced in young people's responses to acts of terror. Focusing on the documentation in four Stockholm-based museums of the 2017 truck attack in Sweden's capital, I analyse young people's narratives preserved in three collections and one exhibition. Expressing gratitude and praising the police for their service is a clear theme across the narratives, yet police work and counter-terrorism appear as mystifying and largely unknown. Young people visually document participating in the practices, widespread at the time, of giving flowers to officers and placing flowers on police cars. These can be seen as gratitude practices as well as strategies for domesticating the police force and producing it as safer and more approachable. The article positions the self-initiated narratives as important documents of young people's emotional experiences and their notions of safety and threat in the aftermath of an emergency.
The tightening of controls along French borders since the mid-2010s has brought the railroads and their professionals face-to-face with migration issues. How do railroad workers position themselves relative to this issue? Based on fieldwork with railroad workers at the Franco-Spanish border, I show that migration policing in the rail transport sector occurs mostly through the day-to-day activities of railroad workers. It relies on employees at the bottom of the hierarchy. Their independent judgement and discretionary power are mobilised to decide whether or not to let migrants through. I discuss the emergence of the migration issue in this sector due to the French government's heightened controls on migration. I document the ways that the securitisation of the border finds concrete expression in the daily tasks and professional spaces of railroad workers. They face multiple issues formulated in terms of 'security', those specific to the railroad being confronted with those relating to migration. I explore the moral dilemma railroad workers face: whether or not to collaborate with the police. I show how the pluralisation of policing spreads across different players in the public sector, as a matter of their own free will as opposed to part of a structured and definite policy.
This study critically examines the securitisation of migration in India through the lens of the Rohingya refugee crisis, theorising how postcolonial security apparatuses intersect with contemporary ethno-nationalist politics to produce specific forms of racialised exclusion. Moving beyond the conventional Copenhagen School frameworks, I argue that securitisation in postcolonial contexts operates through 'institutionalized precarity', a systematic deployment of state practices that simultaneously construct and manage threat perceptions while producing conditions of perpetual vulnerability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and 55 in-depth interviews conducted across five sites between 2021 and 2025, this research demonstrates how securitisation functions not merely as discourse or policy, but as embodied practice that reshapes refugee subjectivities and everyday survival strategies. Findings reveal that restrictive mobility regimes, arbitrary detention, selective documentation practices, and the spectre of deportation converge to create what I conceptualise as 'manufactured insecurity', a deliberate production of fear that serves both governmental and political ends. This study advances securitisation theory by foregrounding the affective dimensions of security governance in the Global South, demonstrating how fear operates as a technology of exclusion that disciplines refugee populations while legitimating state violence, challenging Western-centric theoretical frameworks that inadequately capture the complexity of refugee governance in South Asia.
Since the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the risk of nuclear war has remained a persistent source of fear and anxiety, particularly among children. While disarmament activists often invoke "saving children's futures" to advocate for a global ban of nuclear weapons, this approach frequently overlooks children's active agency in interpreting nuclear threats. This article addresses this gap by exploring children's imaginaries of war grounded in nuclear anxiety. Through a qualitative visual and content analysis of 29 artworks created by youth (aged 9-18) for the UK-based charity Never Such Innocence competition (2020-2024), the research reveals how children use diverse representational strategies to articulate their views. These include symbols like mushroom clouds and cranes, and stark color contrasts between light and dark. Thematically, children demonstrate sophisticated engagement with the topic, referencing historical events like the bombings of Japan during the World War II (1945) and accidents at Chornobyl (1986) and Fukushima (2011). Their work highlights the risks of future nuclear war-including planetary destruction and humanitarian impacts-while expressing aspirations for disarmament as a long-term solution.
The ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza demonstrate that algorithmic warfare is no longer a speculative future, but a present reality reshaping the lives of both military personnel and civilians. This article advances an interdisciplinary research agenda to trace the realities of algorithmic warfare, focusing specifically on the forms of harm it produces. Shifting the focus away from the perspectives of those in power and towards the lived experiences of those who innovate, deploy, and endure the violent impacts of algorithmic technologies in Ukraine and Gaza, we conceptualise and bring out two forms of algorithmic harm: the 'beforemaths' and 'aftermaths' of algorithmic warfare technologies. Our paper demonstrates how forms of algorithmic beforemath and aftermath harm compound and reinforce each other, leading to new and under-researched ways of harm for civilians, which include the harmful effects of living under constant surveillance, the psychological harm involved in not knowing which behavioural or physical features in the data will cause civilians to be marked as a target, and the weaponisation of a civilian's basic survival behaviour and their communities by the algorithm. Through our embodied epistemology, we offer a demilitarised ontology of algorithmic warfare, opening up debates on lines of responsibility and accountability.
According to scholars studying UN-led peace operations, the missions generate a wide range of 'unintended consequences' that affect their ability to fulfil their mandate, the host societies in which they are deployed, and even the societies of states that contribute troops. While studying the 'unintended consequences' of peace operations usefully draws attention to their multifaceted effects, the concept raises both analytical and normative issues. Analytically, the concept centres the intentions of interveners as a key variable and posits that we can clearly disentangle the intended effects of peace operations from their unintended ones. But 'unintended' effects are rarely unanticipated and can instead be productively conceptualised as the results of choices or trade-offs, raising questions of responsibility and accountability. This is apparent in cases of UN missions enabling authoritarian practices by the host state and increasing the risk of sexual exploitation and abuse. While the 'unintended consequences' concept is analytically thin, it performs significant normative work and ultimately reproduces the idea that peace operations are inherently good. Unpacking the concept makes visible structures and power relations involved in the peacekeeping project.
This paper reflects on what it means to be interpellated as threat through the European response to Hamas’s success in the 2006 Palestinian elections. While you might recognise elements of securitisation in this paper, here the performative utterance of threat relies on material and discursive histories of racism, sexism and colonialism to be successful. Securitisation is successful because it reiterates symbolic and material histories of permissible violence against racialised and sexualised subjects, normalised because the ‘securitised’ other have always been cast as threatening. This paper emphasises the asymmetries of power that mark the encounter between the European colonialist and Hamas, and the consequences of being marked as threatening entail. The securitisation of Hamas delivered through boycott, sanction and siege meant the collective punishment and death of the Palestinians and a coordinated imperial effort to dismantle local resistance.This paper interweaves excerpts from different performative texts: my interviews with European Union and Hamas representatives; theories of performativity and the questions of race and sex that shape contemporary developments this theory namely the works of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed, and finally anti-colonial and anti-racist literatures, notably Toni Morrison and Frantz Fanon that describe experiences of being marked as less than human.
This paper makes a contribution to critical scholarship on EU b/ordering and ontological security. It deploys an aesthetic approach informed by decolonial scholarship and queer theory to critically examine the operation of EU security from the vantage point of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a site perennially relegated to the EU's dysfunctional periphery which has recently re-entered the spotlight in contemporary debates over the EU's border regime refracted through the Balkan route. Mobilising decolonial scholarship and queer theorising offers a provocative entry point to interrogate EU security as a regime of the normal that constitutes the EU as a coherent, stable and progressive self/space through the production of places that 'fail' to be knowable according to its universalising norms. Such analytic reveals the stakes of being rendered a target of EU security for the communities that inhabit this site of b/ordering, while also making visible subjugated knowledges that are discarded and disqualified in normative narratives and practices. Aesthetic methods afford us a powerful entryway to uncover such knowledges. I propose a conceptual reading of two local documentary films premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival that unsettle dominant mappings of the region. I argue that aesthetic knowledges produced through these films contain alternative, more pluralist and creative ways of being in the world that defy progressive temporalities and neat b/ordering, exposing the limits of EU security.
