Address: Professor of International Politics School of Politics and International Relations ArtsOne Building Queen Mary University of London Mile End Road London E1 4NS United Kingdom
This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo... more This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo internacional"-o, ¿qué significa dar primacía al movimiento? [Movement fracturing 'the international'-or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?] (Translated by Angela Iranzo).
Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences, 2023
This article starts from the observation of intense political mobilisations of existential ending... more This article starts from the observation of intense political mobilisations of existential endings. One of the defining challenges for critical engagements with such mobilisations remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics seriously without making existential end-times the conditions that define the present. The article proposes to move beyond critical knowledge that makes security contingent and engage with the conception of life inscribed in the mobilisations of existential endings. It puts forward a concept of life that emphasises continuous movement rather than defining it from the perspective of its inevitable end in death. This point of view challenges traditional existential notions of life and death, highlighting instead the dynamic and transformative nature of life itself.
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2022
This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on d... more This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on discussions on the cultures of fear and on the social and political process which weaves fear and insecurity into the fabric of society, we analyse how austerity was justified and opposed in the Finnish parliament in 2015. We bring out different renditions of fear in five registers of justification that were deployed in the dispute. The registers evoked fear with threats to national sovereignty, dangers to societal security, and threats of harm and vulnerability. In addition, the registers evoked fear by drawing rhetorical force from the welfare state identity and by intertwining fear with political trust. Even though the renditions of fear played an important role, our findings also speak against straightforward interpretation of the politics of austerity as an example of moving into a culture of fear and insecurity.
This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo... more This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo internacional"-o, ¿qué significa dar primacía al movimiento? [Movement fracturing 'the international'-or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?] (Translated by Angela Iranzo). Relaciones Internacionales. No. 54, pp. 15-37.
Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
'Resistance' and related concepts like 'counter-conduct', 'counter-politics' and 'revolution' con... more 'Resistance' and related concepts like 'counter-conduct', 'counter-politics' and 'revolution' continue to gain an intense interest and use. At the same time, however, we observe an intensified questioning of the concept of resistance and in particular the logic of negativity that it inscribes into our understanding of difference and its politics. Engaging with contributions that have pushed the concept of resistance and its dialectic logic of negativity to its limits in order to explore what it yields for analysing different political practices, we look for new interventions into modes of thinking about critical politics. To that purpose, we introduce the concepts of 'folds' and 'folding'. They allow for understanding how differences work not through opposition to something but through enveloping in dynamic structures of multiple connections that generate a specific social field. We speak loosely of 'against resistance?' not as a claim that the concept of resistance has or should be moved to the dustbin of history but rather to argue for experimenting in International Political Sociology with conceptions of nondialectic critical politics that work in a perspective of coexistence in heterogeneity and multiplicity and the conditions for openness and social possibility that it creates.
International Political Sociology. Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 2-21, 2021
This paper asks how international political sociology (IPS) can articulate its criticality so tha... more This paper asks how international political sociology (IPS) can articulate its criticality so that it can continue to engage with lineages that privilege processes and practices emerging from the always fluid and multiple en- tanglements of fragments without resorting to totalizing logics. IPS and IR more generally have experienced an intensified interest in situated and micro analyses. Engaging the fragmentation of the international, however, has gone hand in hand with pulls towards thinking big and wholes as a condition for critical analysis. We share the position that critical thought needs a conception of the structural if it does not want to remain locked in simply describing un-connected fragments of life. However, the chal- lenge is to do so without making the meaning of fragments derivative of conceptions of wholes that reinsert horizons of totalization. Drawing on Deleuzian thought, the paper opens towards a conception of the struc- tural and its relation to fragments that embraces heterogeneity, multiplic- ity, and fluidity with the express intent of vacating lingering totalities and foregrounding creativity in life. In a context of fragmenting international relations, we see re-engaging the question of how to separate structural thought from horizons of totalization as a contribution to ongoing debates on the nature and limits of critique.
Security Dialogue. Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 238-255., 2022
The article explores challenges that giving conceptual primacy to movement poses for thinking the... more The article explores challenges that giving conceptual primacy to movement poses for thinking the politics of security. In security studies, there has been an intense interest in mobile phenomena and the nature of security techniques that seek to control, contain or steer them. However, when exploring how these mobile phenomena bear upon conceptions of politics and their contestation, the analytics tend to turn back to more static or sedentary categories and reference points. Against this background, the article develops an analytical framework for security and its politics that gives conceptual primacy to movement. Giving conceptual primacy to movement implies three key moves: (a) changing lines from enclosures and connectors to pathways; (b) shifting from understanding movement through positions and nodes to the continuity of movement; and (c) displacing architectural and infrastructural readings of the relations between movements with readings of continuously unfolding confluences of movements moving in relation to one another. Applying these three moves displaces conceptions of movement as border crossings and networked connections with the notion of entangling movements moving in relation to one another. One of the implications for security studies is that taking such a point of view challenges the use of ‘the subject of security’, understood in terms of state sovereignty and the positioning of differential security claims hooked into group identity, as a key device for making security politically meaningful and contested. The article concludes that giving conceptual primacy to movement invites security studies not to limit itself to studying the politics of movement but to also incorporate a motioning of politics.
Against the background of a continuing interest in the everyday in international relations, this ... more Against the background of a continuing interest in the everyday in international relations, this article asks what kind of analytics upon and within the world mobilises one through the concept of the everyday and what consequences this may have for thinking about politics. In particular, it explores a conception of the the everyday that foregrounds the abundance of human life and ephemeral temporalities. The abundance of life invites a densification of politics combined with an emphasis on displacing levels or scales by associative horizontal relations. The ephemeral introduces a conception of temporality that foregrounds the political significance of fleeting practices and the emergent nature of life. When applied to politics, this conception of the everyday performs politics as emergent, as possibilities that are not already defined by fixing what politics can possibly be. The order of politics is then understood as an immanently precarious succession of situations and practices in which lived political lives remain inherently aleatory, momentary and emergent rather than as an order of mastering the political. The concept of the everyday, thus draws attention to the immanent elusiveness and fragility of politics as it loses its ground, its referent.
Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards i... more Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards internal to knowledge practice to validate their knowledge claims. This quest for scientific standards now also operates against the background of debates on ‘post-truth’, which raise pressing and perplexing questions for critical lines of thought. We propose a different approach by conceptualizing validity as practices of assembling credibility in which the transversal formation and circulation of credits and credentials combine with disputes over credence and credulity. This conceptualization of the validity of (critical) security knowledge shifts the focus from epistemic and methodological standards to transepistemic practices and relations. It allows us to mediate validity critically as a sociopolitical rather than strictly scientific accomplishment. Developing such an understanding of validity makes it possible for critical security studies and international relations to displace epistemic disputes about ‘post-truth’ with transversal practices of knowledge creation, circulation and accreditation.
In the past few years the relative success of international political sociology as an intellectua... more In the past few years the relative success of international political sociology as an intellectual project has stimulated debates about its contribution to international studies. With this issue we celebrate ten years of International Political Sociology. The journal was created in 2006, with the first issue published in 2007. It has been an intellectually fascinating ride. Since its beginnings, IPS sought to engage the “problem of the international” by questioning practices that delimit a realm with clear boundaries as grounds for making claims about world politics (Bigo and Walker 2007a,b). As such, it tried to articulate a strategy of openness and transversality that would circulate through, and connect, various intellectual terrains and could be filled in multiple ways (Lisle in this volume; Basaran et al. 2016; de Goede forthcoming; Guillaume and Bilgin forthcoming; Guzzini forthcoming; Leander 2016; Villumsen Berling 2015). In fact, IPS is not really an approach, let alone a school of thought, but more a signifier that connects people sharing a disposition toward traversing familiar, institutionalized repertoires of analysis; toward re-conceptualizing and displacing the questions that can be asked, the methods that can be used, the styles of arguing that are acceptable. The particular forms this disposition takes depend on the lineages one draws on to do such transversal research. While this disposition has produced a rich and diverse conversation around innovative themes and strategies, we try to resist the tendency, not uncommon in intellectual movements such as IPS, to a certain normalization around empirically grounded research inspired by the shift to sociological, analytical, and methodological practices (see Lisle in this volume). We therefore decided to use our introduction as a singular interference into the field rather than a state of the art of ten years of International Political Sociology. In this introduction our aim is thus not to evaluate how far IPS has come in creating a new and “less restrictive topology” of international relations and their boundaries. Rather, we seek to offer some insights into how this project can retain its openness, its exploration of in-betweenness, as well as its potential as a site of contestation and critique of contemporary world politics. We try to foreground the contingencies and ambivalences that characterized the critical ambition of IPS at its inception.
Taking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I a... more Taking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I am proposing ‘democratic curiosity’ as a tool for revisiting the question of democracy in times of extitutional surveillance. Democratic curiosity seeks to bring into analytical play the social and political power of little nothings – the power of subjects, things, practices, and relations that are rendered trivial – and the uncoordinated disputes they enact. Revisiting democracy from this angle is particularly pertinent in extitutional situations in which the organisation and practices of surveillance are spilling beyond their panoptic configurations. Extitutional surveillance is strongly embedded in diffusing arrangements of power and ever more extensively enveloped in everyday life and banal devices. To a considerable degree these modes of surveillance escape democratic institutional repertoires that seek to bring broader societal concerns to bear upon surveillance. Extitutional enactments of democracy then become an important question for both security and surveillance studies.
Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in Inter... more Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.
This article makes a claim for re-engaging the concept of ‘act’ in the study of securitization. W... more This article makes a claim for re-engaging the concept of ‘act’ in the study of securitization. While much has been written about the discursive and communicative aspects of securitizing, the concept of ‘act’ that contains much of the politicality of the speech-act approach to security has been relatively ignored.The task of re-engaging ‘acts’ is particularly pertinent in the contemporary context, in which politically salient speech acts are heavily displaced by securitizing practices and devices that appear as banal, little security nothings. The main purpose of the article is to begin the framing of a research agenda that asks what political acts can be in diffuse security processes that efface securitizing speech acts.
European citizenship is marked by a tension: between a citizenship that is derivative of the nati... more European citizenship is marked by a tension: between a citizenship that is derivative of the nation-state and a citizenship that is defined by free movement. Approaching this tension as symptomatic of a deep-rooted contradiction between integration and mobility that is constitutive of modern social formations, this article develops a political sociology of mobility that challenges territorial and culturalist accounts of European citizenship. It does so by exploring the political enactment of European citizenship by marginalized subjects, whose engagement in relations of exchange serves as the ground for acts of European citizenship that ‘mobilize mobility’. This is illustrated by an analysis of the 2005 Declaration for the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe.
This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the ro... more This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of political democratic practice. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s sociology of money, we show that prac- tices of mobility become democratic moments in relation to structures of power that are constituted across the territorial circumscription of national states. Understood as a particular form of sociality, mobil- ity can work upon structures of power through universal rights and the politics of the ‘mob’. In this sense, practices of mobility are also democratic inscriptions of equality.
Both political leaders and academics often claim exceptional times. But what does it mean to spea... more Both political leaders and academics often claim exceptional times. But what does it mean to speak of exceptional politics in international relations? In one sense exceptionality is a descriptive category referring to a radical change in the sys- temic conditions of international politics. In this article a dif- ferent notion of exception is examined. It refers to a particu- lar method of conceptualizing the nature of international political order. The exception defines political order by means of constitutional-legal reasoning in which different under- standings of the nature and status of international law and its political transgressions describe competing visions of inter- national political order. The focal point of this international politics of exception is not the traditional distinction between liberal and realist views of international politics but the con- stitutionalist triad of normativism, decisionism, and institu- tionalism. KEYWORDS: exception, international law, norma- tivism, decisionism, institutionalism
This article deals with the question of how migration has developed into a security issue in west... more This article deals with the question of how migration has developed into a security issue in western Europe and how the European integration process is implicated in it. Since the 1980s, the political construction of migration increasingly referred to the destabilizing effects of migration on domestic integration and to the dangers for public order it implied. The spillover of the internal market into a European internal security question mirrors these domestic developments at the European level. The Third Pillar on Justice and Home Affairs, the Schengen Agreements, and the Dublin Convention most visibly indicate that the European integration process is implicated in the development of a restrictive migration policy and the social construction of migration into a security question. However, the political process of connecting migration to criminal and terrorist abuses of the internal market does not take place in isolation. It is related to a wider politicization in which immigrants and asylum-seekers are portrayed as a challenge to the protection of national identity and welfare provisions. Moreover, supporting the political construction of migration as a security issue impinges on and is embedded in the politics of belonging in western Europe. It is an integral part of the wider technocratic and political process in which professional agen- cies – such as the police and customs – and political agents – such as social movements and political parties – debate and decide the criteria for legitimate membership of west European societies.
This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo... more This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo internacional"-o, ¿qué significa dar primacía al movimiento? [Movement fracturing 'the international'-or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?] (Translated by Angela Iranzo).
Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences, 2023
This article starts from the observation of intense political mobilisations of existential ending... more This article starts from the observation of intense political mobilisations of existential endings. One of the defining challenges for critical engagements with such mobilisations remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics seriously without making existential end-times the conditions that define the present. The article proposes to move beyond critical knowledge that makes security contingent and engage with the conception of life inscribed in the mobilisations of existential endings. It puts forward a concept of life that emphasises continuous movement rather than defining it from the perspective of its inevitable end in death. This point of view challenges traditional existential notions of life and death, highlighting instead the dynamic and transformative nature of life itself.
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2022
This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on d... more This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on discussions on the cultures of fear and on the social and political process which weaves fear and insecurity into the fabric of society, we analyse how austerity was justified and opposed in the Finnish parliament in 2015. We bring out different renditions of fear in five registers of justification that were deployed in the dispute. The registers evoked fear with threats to national sovereignty, dangers to societal security, and threats of harm and vulnerability. In addition, the registers evoked fear by drawing rhetorical force from the welfare state identity and by intertwining fear with political trust. Even though the renditions of fear played an important role, our findings also speak against straightforward interpretation of the politics of austerity as an example of moving into a culture of fear and insecurity.
This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo... more This is the pre-proof, pre-translation version of: Jef Huysmans (2023) El movimiento fractura "lo internacional"-o, ¿qué significa dar primacía al movimiento? [Movement fracturing 'the international'-or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?] (Translated by Angela Iranzo). Relaciones Internacionales. No. 54, pp. 15-37.
Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
'Resistance' and related concepts like 'counter-conduct', 'counter-politics' and 'revolution' con... more 'Resistance' and related concepts like 'counter-conduct', 'counter-politics' and 'revolution' continue to gain an intense interest and use. At the same time, however, we observe an intensified questioning of the concept of resistance and in particular the logic of negativity that it inscribes into our understanding of difference and its politics. Engaging with contributions that have pushed the concept of resistance and its dialectic logic of negativity to its limits in order to explore what it yields for analysing different political practices, we look for new interventions into modes of thinking about critical politics. To that purpose, we introduce the concepts of 'folds' and 'folding'. They allow for understanding how differences work not through opposition to something but through enveloping in dynamic structures of multiple connections that generate a specific social field. We speak loosely of 'against resistance?' not as a claim that the concept of resistance has or should be moved to the dustbin of history but rather to argue for experimenting in International Political Sociology with conceptions of nondialectic critical politics that work in a perspective of coexistence in heterogeneity and multiplicity and the conditions for openness and social possibility that it creates.
International Political Sociology. Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 2-21, 2021
This paper asks how international political sociology (IPS) can articulate its criticality so tha... more This paper asks how international political sociology (IPS) can articulate its criticality so that it can continue to engage with lineages that privilege processes and practices emerging from the always fluid and multiple en- tanglements of fragments without resorting to totalizing logics. IPS and IR more generally have experienced an intensified interest in situated and micro analyses. Engaging the fragmentation of the international, however, has gone hand in hand with pulls towards thinking big and wholes as a condition for critical analysis. We share the position that critical thought needs a conception of the structural if it does not want to remain locked in simply describing un-connected fragments of life. However, the chal- lenge is to do so without making the meaning of fragments derivative of conceptions of wholes that reinsert horizons of totalization. Drawing on Deleuzian thought, the paper opens towards a conception of the struc- tural and its relation to fragments that embraces heterogeneity, multiplic- ity, and fluidity with the express intent of vacating lingering totalities and foregrounding creativity in life. In a context of fragmenting international relations, we see re-engaging the question of how to separate structural thought from horizons of totalization as a contribution to ongoing debates on the nature and limits of critique.
Security Dialogue. Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 238-255., 2022
The article explores challenges that giving conceptual primacy to movement poses for thinking the... more The article explores challenges that giving conceptual primacy to movement poses for thinking the politics of security. In security studies, there has been an intense interest in mobile phenomena and the nature of security techniques that seek to control, contain or steer them. However, when exploring how these mobile phenomena bear upon conceptions of politics and their contestation, the analytics tend to turn back to more static or sedentary categories and reference points. Against this background, the article develops an analytical framework for security and its politics that gives conceptual primacy to movement. Giving conceptual primacy to movement implies three key moves: (a) changing lines from enclosures and connectors to pathways; (b) shifting from understanding movement through positions and nodes to the continuity of movement; and (c) displacing architectural and infrastructural readings of the relations between movements with readings of continuously unfolding confluences of movements moving in relation to one another. Applying these three moves displaces conceptions of movement as border crossings and networked connections with the notion of entangling movements moving in relation to one another. One of the implications for security studies is that taking such a point of view challenges the use of ‘the subject of security’, understood in terms of state sovereignty and the positioning of differential security claims hooked into group identity, as a key device for making security politically meaningful and contested. The article concludes that giving conceptual primacy to movement invites security studies not to limit itself to studying the politics of movement but to also incorporate a motioning of politics.
Against the background of a continuing interest in the everyday in international relations, this ... more Against the background of a continuing interest in the everyday in international relations, this article asks what kind of analytics upon and within the world mobilises one through the concept of the everyday and what consequences this may have for thinking about politics. In particular, it explores a conception of the the everyday that foregrounds the abundance of human life and ephemeral temporalities. The abundance of life invites a densification of politics combined with an emphasis on displacing levels or scales by associative horizontal relations. The ephemeral introduces a conception of temporality that foregrounds the political significance of fleeting practices and the emergent nature of life. When applied to politics, this conception of the everyday performs politics as emergent, as possibilities that are not already defined by fixing what politics can possibly be. The order of politics is then understood as an immanently precarious succession of situations and practices in which lived political lives remain inherently aleatory, momentary and emergent rather than as an order of mastering the political. The concept of the everyday, thus draws attention to the immanent elusiveness and fragility of politics as it loses its ground, its referent.
Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards i... more Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards internal to knowledge practice to validate their knowledge claims. This quest for scientific standards now also operates against the background of debates on ‘post-truth’, which raise pressing and perplexing questions for critical lines of thought. We propose a different approach by conceptualizing validity as practices of assembling credibility in which the transversal formation and circulation of credits and credentials combine with disputes over credence and credulity. This conceptualization of the validity of (critical) security knowledge shifts the focus from epistemic and methodological standards to transepistemic practices and relations. It allows us to mediate validity critically as a sociopolitical rather than strictly scientific accomplishment. Developing such an understanding of validity makes it possible for critical security studies and international relations to displace epistemic disputes about ‘post-truth’ with transversal practices of knowledge creation, circulation and accreditation.
In the past few years the relative success of international political sociology as an intellectua... more In the past few years the relative success of international political sociology as an intellectual project has stimulated debates about its contribution to international studies. With this issue we celebrate ten years of International Political Sociology. The journal was created in 2006, with the first issue published in 2007. It has been an intellectually fascinating ride. Since its beginnings, IPS sought to engage the “problem of the international” by questioning practices that delimit a realm with clear boundaries as grounds for making claims about world politics (Bigo and Walker 2007a,b). As such, it tried to articulate a strategy of openness and transversality that would circulate through, and connect, various intellectual terrains and could be filled in multiple ways (Lisle in this volume; Basaran et al. 2016; de Goede forthcoming; Guillaume and Bilgin forthcoming; Guzzini forthcoming; Leander 2016; Villumsen Berling 2015). In fact, IPS is not really an approach, let alone a school of thought, but more a signifier that connects people sharing a disposition toward traversing familiar, institutionalized repertoires of analysis; toward re-conceptualizing and displacing the questions that can be asked, the methods that can be used, the styles of arguing that are acceptable. The particular forms this disposition takes depend on the lineages one draws on to do such transversal research. While this disposition has produced a rich and diverse conversation around innovative themes and strategies, we try to resist the tendency, not uncommon in intellectual movements such as IPS, to a certain normalization around empirically grounded research inspired by the shift to sociological, analytical, and methodological practices (see Lisle in this volume). We therefore decided to use our introduction as a singular interference into the field rather than a state of the art of ten years of International Political Sociology. In this introduction our aim is thus not to evaluate how far IPS has come in creating a new and “less restrictive topology” of international relations and their boundaries. Rather, we seek to offer some insights into how this project can retain its openness, its exploration of in-betweenness, as well as its potential as a site of contestation and critique of contemporary world politics. We try to foreground the contingencies and ambivalences that characterized the critical ambition of IPS at its inception.
Taking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I a... more Taking my cue from feminist curiosity and literature on the everyday in surveillance studies, I am proposing ‘democratic curiosity’ as a tool for revisiting the question of democracy in times of extitutional surveillance. Democratic curiosity seeks to bring into analytical play the social and political power of little nothings – the power of subjects, things, practices, and relations that are rendered trivial – and the uncoordinated disputes they enact. Revisiting democracy from this angle is particularly pertinent in extitutional situations in which the organisation and practices of surveillance are spilling beyond their panoptic configurations. Extitutional surveillance is strongly embedded in diffusing arrangements of power and ever more extensively enveloped in everyday life and banal devices. To a considerable degree these modes of surveillance escape democratic institutional repertoires that seek to bring broader societal concerns to bear upon surveillance. Extitutional enactments of democracy then become an important question for both security and surveillance studies.
Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in Inter... more Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.
This article makes a claim for re-engaging the concept of ‘act’ in the study of securitization. W... more This article makes a claim for re-engaging the concept of ‘act’ in the study of securitization. While much has been written about the discursive and communicative aspects of securitizing, the concept of ‘act’ that contains much of the politicality of the speech-act approach to security has been relatively ignored.The task of re-engaging ‘acts’ is particularly pertinent in the contemporary context, in which politically salient speech acts are heavily displaced by securitizing practices and devices that appear as banal, little security nothings. The main purpose of the article is to begin the framing of a research agenda that asks what political acts can be in diffuse security processes that efface securitizing speech acts.
European citizenship is marked by a tension: between a citizenship that is derivative of the nati... more European citizenship is marked by a tension: between a citizenship that is derivative of the nation-state and a citizenship that is defined by free movement. Approaching this tension as symptomatic of a deep-rooted contradiction between integration and mobility that is constitutive of modern social formations, this article develops a political sociology of mobility that challenges territorial and culturalist accounts of European citizenship. It does so by exploring the political enactment of European citizenship by marginalized subjects, whose engagement in relations of exchange serves as the ground for acts of European citizenship that ‘mobilize mobility’. This is illustrated by an analysis of the 2005 Declaration for the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe.
This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the ro... more This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of political democratic practice. Drawing on Georg Simmel’s sociology of money, we show that prac- tices of mobility become democratic moments in relation to structures of power that are constituted across the territorial circumscription of national states. Understood as a particular form of sociality, mobil- ity can work upon structures of power through universal rights and the politics of the ‘mob’. In this sense, practices of mobility are also democratic inscriptions of equality.
Both political leaders and academics often claim exceptional times. But what does it mean to spea... more Both political leaders and academics often claim exceptional times. But what does it mean to speak of exceptional politics in international relations? In one sense exceptionality is a descriptive category referring to a radical change in the sys- temic conditions of international politics. In this article a dif- ferent notion of exception is examined. It refers to a particu- lar method of conceptualizing the nature of international political order. The exception defines political order by means of constitutional-legal reasoning in which different under- standings of the nature and status of international law and its political transgressions describe competing visions of inter- national political order. The focal point of this international politics of exception is not the traditional distinction between liberal and realist views of international politics but the con- stitutionalist triad of normativism, decisionism, and institu- tionalism. KEYWORDS: exception, international law, norma- tivism, decisionism, institutionalism
This article deals with the question of how migration has developed into a security issue in west... more This article deals with the question of how migration has developed into a security issue in western Europe and how the European integration process is implicated in it. Since the 1980s, the political construction of migration increasingly referred to the destabilizing effects of migration on domestic integration and to the dangers for public order it implied. The spillover of the internal market into a European internal security question mirrors these domestic developments at the European level. The Third Pillar on Justice and Home Affairs, the Schengen Agreements, and the Dublin Convention most visibly indicate that the European integration process is implicated in the development of a restrictive migration policy and the social construction of migration into a security question. However, the political process of connecting migration to criminal and terrorist abuses of the internal market does not take place in isolation. It is related to a wider politicization in which immigrants and asylum-seekers are portrayed as a challenge to the protection of national identity and welfare provisions. Moreover, supporting the political construction of migration as a security issue impinges on and is embedded in the politics of belonging in western Europe. It is an integral part of the wider technocratic and political process in which professional agen- cies – such as the police and customs – and political agents – such as social movements and political parties – debate and decide the criteria for legitimate membership of west European societies.
Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security p... more Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, 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 becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through 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.
Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies.... more 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.
The issue of security – what it means and how it can be achieved - is one of the defining questio... more The issue of security – what it means and how it can be achieved - is one of the defining questions of the early 21st century. It is a question that has come to affect more and more intimate elements of people's lives, impacting on relationships between states, between individuals and the state, but also between individuals as they interact in their everyday lives. This is the starting point of this interdisciplinary collection, which aims to both unpack and engage with current debates in the global fight against terrorism by focusing on the question of what security and insecurity do, can and should mean politically. Considering a wide range of social and political forums in a range of countries, the chapters in this book open up a serious debate about what community and citizenship mean in the present securitized context, in order to sharpen our appreciation of the political and social consequences of the range of understandings that are currently under negotiation.
The act of violence of 9/11 changed the global security agenda, catapulting terrorism to the top ... more The act of violence of 9/11 changed the global security agenda, catapulting terrorism to the top of the agenda. Weapons of mass destruction grabbed public interest and controlling the free movement of people became a national security priority.
In this volume, Jef Huysmans critically engages with theoretical developments in international relations and security studies to develop a conceptual framework for studying security. He argues that security policies and responses do not appear out of the blue, but are part of a continuous and gradual process, pre-structured by previous developments. He examines this process of securitization and explores how an issue, on the basis of the distribution and administration of fear, becomes a security policy. Huysmans then applies this theory to provide a detailed analysis of migration, asylum and refuge in the European Union.
This theoretically sophisticated, yet accessible volume, makes an important contribution to the study of security, migration and European politics.
This book shows how from the end of the Cold War, the security agenda has been transformed and re... more This book shows how from the end of the Cold War, the security agenda has been transformed and redefined, academically and politically.
It focuses on the theme of protection. It moves away from the dominant question of whom or what is threatening to the crucial questions of who is to be protected, and in the case of conflicting claims, who has the capacity to define whose needs prevail.
It also poses the question of political agency in relation to some of the most significant questions raised in relation to the governance of insecurity and protection in the contemporary world. The authors identify and explore issues that challenge or raise a number of questions about the traditional notion that states are to protect their citizens through retaining a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.
In the context of the ‘global war on terror’, the issue of security has come to affect more and m... more In the context of the ‘global war on terror’, the issue of security has come to affect more and more intimate elements of people’s everyday lives. This is the starting point of this interdisciplinary collection, which focuses on how the line between security and insecurity is negotiated through changing concepts of ‘community’ and ‘citizenship'.
In the context of the ‘global war on terror’, the issue of security has come to affect more and m... more In the context of the ‘global war on terror’, the issue of security has come to affect more and more intimate elements of people’s everyday lives. This is the starting point of this interdisciplinary collection, which focuses on how the line between security and insecurity is negotiated through changing concepts of ‘community’ and ‘citizenship'.
Por mucho tiempo considerada una disciplina preocupada con el problema del orden, las Relaciones ... more Por mucho tiempo considerada una disciplina preocupada con el problema del orden, las Relaciones Internacionales pasaron por un proceso de transformación que amplió su alcance hacia las esferas más diversas de la vida social y política del mundo contemporáneo. Una parte significativa del crédito de este proceso de renovación puede ser atribuida al giro crítico en los estudios internacionales. Al incorporar el dinamismo intelectual del posestructuralismo y del posmarxismo a los debates teóricos en el área, el pensamiento crítico internacional creó las condiciones para la actual diversificación y pluralización del área. El presente artículo discute cómo la Sociología Política Internacional (SPI) surge como efecto de este proceso de cuáles son sus contribuciones para el desarrollo de formas innovadoras de crítica de la política mundial contemporánea. Intentamos mostrar cómo, a través de métodos y epistemologías transdisciplinares, la SPI ofrece nuevas formas de articular procesos socia...
‘Resistance’ and related concepts like ‘counter-conduct’, ‘counter-politics’ and ‘revolution’ con... more ‘Resistance’ and related concepts like ‘counter-conduct’, ‘counter-politics’ and ‘revolution’ continue to gain an intense interest and use. At the same time, however, we observe an intensified questioning of the concept of resistance and in particular the logic of negativity that it inscribes into our understanding of difference and its politics. Engaging with contributions that have pushed the concept of resistance and its dialectic logic of negativity to its limits in order to explore what it yields for analysing different political practices, we look for new interventions into modes of thinking about critical politics. To that purpose, we introduce the concepts of ‘folds’ and ‘folding’. They allow for understanding how differences work not through opposition to something but through enveloping in dynamic structures of multiple connections that generate a specific social field. We speak loosely of ‘against resistance?’ not as a claim that the concept of resistance has or should be moved to the dustbin of history but rather to argue for experimenting in International Political Sociology with conceptions of non-dialectic critical politics that work in a perspective of co-existence in heterogeneity and multiplicity and the conditions for openness and social possibility that it creates.
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on d... more This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on discussions on the cultures of fear and on the social and political process which weaves fear and insecurity into the fabric of society, we analyse how austerity was justified and opposed in the Finnish parliament in 2015. We bring out different renditions of fear in five registers of justification that were deployed in the dispute. The registers evoked fear with threats to national sovereignty, dangers to societal security, and threats of harm and vulnerability. In addition, the registers evoked fear by drawing rhetorical force from the welfare state identity and by intertwining fear with political trust. Even though the renditions of fear played an important role, our findings also speak against straightforward interpretation of the politics of austerity as an example of moving into a culture of fear and insecurity. This is an original manuscript / preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology on 26 Feb 2021, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2021.1888763
Migration, refuge, asylum seeking have been high on the political agendas in Europe and North Ame... more Migration, refuge, asylum seeking have been high on the political agendas in Europe and North America for decades now. In the last year or so, however, cross-border human mobility has taken on an intensified visibility and at times visceral politicization, among others in the EU and the US presidential elections. It is therefore a good time to take stock on what IPS has contributed to our understanding of migration, its governance and its politicization, including that refugees, asylum seekers and migrants are not just a major governmental issue in Europe and North America but equally so elsewhere in the world. A range of governmental practices, including incarceration, humanitarianism, border closure, regulating marriage, resilience and racialized policies seek to shape, steer, contain, and manage human cross-border mobilities with multiple effects for individuals, families, communities and the enactment of transnational interdependencies. This virtual issue is an invitation to further reflect and stimulate debate on international political sociologies of human mobilities across the world.
What do the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in the Ukraine, and climate change have in common? An unde... more What do the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in the Ukraine, and climate change have in common? An understanding that politics, whether global, international, or planetary, are defined by struggles for survival. In each of these cases, delivering security intensely operates as the first and main objective of politics. Borders close to an unseen extend to protect human life from a global pandemic. European politics is being redefined through militarised geopolitical fears of threats to state survival. Calls for a planetary politics continue to intensify in reference to life on earth heading towards a catastrophic collapse. Security seems to truly be the baseline of contemporary political order. However tempting such a conception of politics is today, one of the defining challenges for critical engagements with security remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics serious but without making security the defining point of view of social and political life. ‘Really? Is that a major challenge? Why would you want to be critical about security in these conditions that obviously call for a profound security response? And, even if you want to, how can you gain critical leverage on security in a world that seems saturated by insecurities of such international and planetary magnitude?’ The lecture will engage with these objections by revisiting developments in Critical Security Studies (CSS) since the 1990s and propose a post-critical analytic that fractures security by foregrounding a conception of life-in-motion rather than life-unto-death. In doing so, the lecture introduces an international political sociology of insecurity that seeks to challenge the grip that founding politics in death retains in contemporary politicisations of insecurity.
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This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on d... more This paper examines how fear and insecurity are deployed in disputes over austerity. Drawing on discussions on the cultures of fear and on the social and political process which weaves fear and insecurity into the fabric of society, we analyse how austerity was justified and opposed in the Finnish parliament in 2015. We bring out different renditions of fear in five registers of justification that were deployed in the dispute. The registers evoked fear with threats to national sovereignty, dangers to societal security, and threats of harm and vulnerability. In addition, the registers evoked fear by drawing rhetorical force from the welfare state identity and by intertwining fear with political trust. Even though the renditions of fear played an important role, our findings also speak against straightforward interpretation of the politics of austerity as an example of moving into a culture of fear and insecurity.
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Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
Recently, several calls have been made to renew research agendas on movement, mobility, and motion in IR. They invite to prioritise analyses that explore how movement itself rather than belonging to a polity, society, and community enacts social and political relations. Such approaches have raised and continue to present challenges for modern conceptions of the international that embed social and political life in a sedentarist metaphysic that prioritises territorial roots and relations between enclosed entities, in particular territorialised sovereign states — or, state-like entities — that contain a society. This article contributes to these agendas by unpacking what it means to prioritise movement in IR. In the first instance, giving primacy to movement means making conceptions of movement the primary analytical driver for understanding political and social relations. Drawing on literature in mobility studies, the article introduces three different ways of conceptualising movement: crossing perimeters, connecting points, and threading passings. The first is movement within a sedentary world. The latter two create relations that challenge sedentary arrangements through networked organisations of movement and the entangling of movements moving in relation to one another. The article also develops a second answer to the question. It proposes that giving conceptual primacy to movement requires taking the point of view that life and matter are essentially movement and that movement is continuous and undivided, which makes it quite different from networks. The article concludes that such a conception of movement provides a pathway for developing research agendas in International Political Sociology that fracture the inside/outside binary and facilitate experimenting with transversal understandings of the social and political. It creates a paradoxical situation for IR, however, in that ‘the international’ can then no longer be the defining reference in relation to which to organise the analysis given that the concept of ‘the international’ inherently pulls studies of movement into sedentary arrangements that partition insides and outsides and conceive of movement mainly in terms of border crossing.
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 becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through 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.
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.
In this volume, Jef Huysmans critically engages with theoretical developments in international relations and security studies to develop a conceptual framework for studying security. He argues that security policies and responses do not appear out of the blue, but are part of a continuous and gradual process, pre-structured by previous developments. He examines this process of securitization and explores how an issue, on the basis of the distribution and administration of fear, becomes a security policy. Huysmans then applies this theory to provide a detailed analysis of migration, asylum and refuge in the European Union.
This theoretically sophisticated, yet accessible volume, makes an important contribution to the study of security, migration and European politics.
It focuses on the theme of protection. It moves away from the dominant question of whom or what is threatening to the crucial questions of who is to be protected, and in the case of conflicting claims, who has the capacity to define whose needs prevail.
It also poses the question of political agency in relation to some of the most significant questions raised in relation to the governance of insecurity and protection in the contemporary world. The authors identify and explore issues that challenge or raise a number of questions about the traditional notion that states are to protect their citizens through retaining a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.
This virtual issue is an invitation to further reflect and stimulate debate on international political sociologies of human mobilities across the world.
‘Really? Is that a major challenge? Why would you want to be critical about security in these conditions that obviously call for a profound security response? And, even if you want to, how can you gain critical leverage on security in a world that seems saturated by insecurities of such international and planetary magnitude?’ The lecture will engage with these objections by revisiting developments in Critical Security Studies (CSS) since the 1990s and propose a post-critical analytic that fractures security by foregrounding a conception of life-in-motion rather than life-unto-death. In doing so, the lecture introduces an international political sociology of insecurity that seeks to challenge the grip that founding politics in death retains in contemporary politicisations of insecurity.