Nadine Voelkner

How can a microbial approach to global health security protect life? Contemporary infection control mechanisms set the human and the pathogenic microbe against each other, as the victim versus the menace. This biomedical polarization persistently runs through the contemporary dominant mode of thinking about public health and infectious disease governance. Taking its cue from the currently accepted germ theory of disease, such mechanisms render a global city like Hong Kong not only pervasively “on alert” and under threat of unpredictable and pathogenic viruses and other microbes, it also gives rise to a hygiene and antimicrobial politics that is never entirely able to control pathogenic circulation. The article draws on recent advances in medical microbiology, which depart from germ theory, to invoke an ecological understanding of the human-microbe relation. Here, while a small number of viruses are pathogenic, the majority are benign; some are even essential to human life. Disease is not just the outcome of a pathogenic microbe infecting a human host but emerges from socioeconomic relations, which exacerbate human-animal-microbial interactions. In a final step, the article draws on Daoist thought to reflect on the ways that such a microbial understanding translates into life and city dwelling.

Drohnen, Viren, Wirbelstürme, kritische Infrastrukturen – dies sind nur einige der materiellen Elemente, die in der internationalen Politik eine Rolle spielen. Diese Materialität wird zunehmend wiederentdeckt in gegenwärtigen diskurstheoretischen Erklärungsansätzen der Internationalen Beziehungen. In der noch jungen Debatte um den Neuen Materialismus geht es vor allen Dingen darum, wie eine aktive statt passive Materialität in der politischen Welt zu verstehen ist.

Published in Global Society 2014 28(3)

Since Vietnam's advances in “capitalist globalisation” in the late 1980s, it is argued to have become a source and destination country of trafficking in men, women and children. Considered a global problem, human trafficking draws together an array of national and international actors, governing logics and practices in its global governance. This article examines how, in the prevention of trafficking in women and children in Vietnam, a global neoliberal governance logic converged with socialism. Specifically, it focuses on one site where this can be seen playing out, namely in the attempt to prevent trafficking in women and children in the Mekong Delta area in the mid-2000s. The article draws particular attention to the affective economies at play in the discursive regimes of Vietnamese femininity deployed to prevent the trafficking of women and girls. It thereby complements a Foucauldian reading of governance with Ahmed's work on the cultural politics of emotions.

This article traces the emergence of human security as a situated political strategy for managing the circulation of pathogens relating to Burmese migrant communities in Thailand. Specifically, it focuses on the intricate and productive interplay of a range of human and non-human elements that helped to bring forth and shape the vernacular micropolitics of human security. The article documents the techno-(bio)political mechanisms of the human security intervention in two of Thailand’s provinces. By enframing, ordering and depoliticizing the complex health world of Burmese migrants in terms of simple dichotomies in which ‘unruly’ nature (pathogens, diseases, bodies) is contrasted with human techno-scientific ingenuity (scientific evidence, technological innovations, managerial effectiveness), these mechanisms render the circulation of pathogens amenable to biopolitical governance. It is here argued that in the struggle to manage pathogenic circulation, human security transforms the issue of migrant health into a technical matter concerned with the (self-)management of bodies and the governmentalization of the Thai state to the exclusion of important but difficult questions concerning a violent politics of exclusion.

The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies (ICCM) considers critical research and critical methodology in conjunction, as mutually dependent rather than as isolated entities. The Collaboratory is an ESRC-funded virtual research environment for investigating the potential of critical methods for security studies and a space for collaboration and collective writing. As a web-based research environment, the Collaboratory aims to build a capacity for recurrent and sustainable research exchange and knowledge creation.

Postgraduate research is largely focused on a toolbox of methods that students mix and match depending on their particular disciplines (for example, discourse analysis or ethnographic research). Methods are generally taken to be of a limited number and transferable from one field to another and, to a certain extent, from one theory to another. The Collaboratory aims to inquire into the problems that arise out of existing assumptions of transferability, consider the nuanced ways in which methodological developments in other areas can be ‘translated’ in critical security studies and interrogate how methods - in close connection with theoretical apparatuses and conceptual toolboxes - can have critical purchase.

Book description

This book examines global governance through Foucaultian notions of governmentality and security, as well as the complex intersections between the two.

The volume explores how Foucault's understanding of the general economy of power in modern society allows us to consider the connection of two broad possible dynamics: the global governmentalization of security and the securitization of global governance. If Foucault's work on governmentality and security has found resonance in IR scholarship in recent years it is in large part due to his understanding of how these forms of power must necessarily take into account the management of circulation that, in seeking to maximize ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ circulatory flows, brings into play and problematizes the 'inside'/'outside' upon which domestic and international spaces have been traditionally understood. Indeed, Foucault introduces a set of conceptual tools that can inform our analyses of globalization, global governance and security in ways that have been left largely unexplored in the discipline of IR.