Papers by Stephanie Simon
Space and Polity, Jan 1, 2008
Securing the internet has arguably become paradigmatic for modern security practice, not only bec... more Securing the internet has arguably become paradigmatic for modern security practice, not only because modern life is considered to be impossible or valueless if disconnected, but also because emergent cyber-relations and their complex interconnections are refashioning traditional security logics. This paper analyses European modes of governing geared toward securing vital, emergent cyber-systems in the face of the interconnected emergency. It develops the concept of ‘bureaucratic vitalism’ to get at the tension between the hierarchical organization and reductive knowledge frames of security apparatuses on the one hand, and the increasing desire for building ‘resilient’, dispersed, and flexible security assemblages on the other. The bureaucratic/vital juxtaposition seeks to capture the way in which cybersecurity governance takes emergent, complex systems as object and model without fully replicating this ideal in practice. Thus, we are concerned with the question of what happens when security apparatuses appropriate and translate vitalist concepts into practice. Our case renders visible the banal bureaucratic manoeuvres that seek to operate upon security emergencies by fostering connectivities, producing agencies, and staging exercises.
Nearly 15 years after 9/11, it is time to grapple with the way in which imperatives of preemption... more Nearly 15 years after 9/11, it is time to grapple with the way in which imperatives of preemption have made their way into routine security practice and bureaucratic operations. As a growing literature in security studies and political geography has argued, preparing for catastrophe, expecting the worst, and scripting disasters are central elements of contemporary, speculative security culture. One of the most-discussed findings of the 9/11 Commission Report was that US security services had insufficiently deployed their imagination to foresee and preempt the attacks. This article introduces a special issue that offers a range of in-depth empirical studies that analyse how the imperative of ‘routinizing the imagination’ plays out in practice across different policy domains. It deploys the lens of performativity in order to conceptualize and explain the materialization of preemption and its situated entanglements with pre-existing security bureaucracies. We detail the idealized traits of a ‘security of the interstice’, which include interoperability, emergence, flexibility and analytical foresight that are meant to bridge the perceived gaps of security spaces and the temporal bridges between present and possible futures. The lofty rhetoric of preparing for the worst and bridging the gaps encounters numerous obstacles, challenges and reversals in practice. As becomes clear through the notion of performativity, such obstacles and challenges do not just ‘stand in the way’ of implementation, but actively shape the materialization of preemption in different sectors.
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2014
Using two post-9/11 films set in New York City, Cloverfield (2008) and The Visitor (2008), this a... more Using two post-9/11 films set in New York City, Cloverfield (2008) and The Visitor (2008), this article interrogates the urban space of pre-emptive security practice in the United States. Putting these two films together, and tracing their characters’ paths through the city, offers insights into the relationship between threat imaginaries, security practices and the complex cities within which they are interwoven. While pointing to some of the continuities with longer-standing socio-spatial tactics of urban control, this analysis also draws attention to the particular spatio-temporal landscape of pre-emption, which has come to define post-9/11 security stances. It is argued that pre-emptive security imaginaries and practices are stretched across urban spaces in ambiguous and uneven ways as attempts are made to render urban complexity, uncertainty and circulation visible and knowable. The cinematic paths of the characters in Cloverfield and The Visitor offer points of micro-visibility onto post-9/11 urban security practice as a circulatory process that is not ultimately fixed or fully competent. In this way the article complicates the imagination of a seamless, fully rendered urban battlespace and instead stresses the active process of securitizing potentialities and acts that slip in and out of the innumerable spatial stories that compose the urban fabric.
Security Dialogue, Jan 1, 2012
Photographers have become common targets of security practice in the public spaces of US and UK c... more Photographers have become common targets of security practice in the public spaces of US and UK cities. The securitization of photography – where photographers are commonly stopped, questioned, told to surrender film or delete photos, and in some cases arrested – rests upon the invocation of a post-9/11 context and the preemptive security logics that characterize the ‘war on terror’. Here, the spatio-temporality of the photograph and the photo-taking subject are in tension with preemptive security stances in which everyday, ordinary actions – such as photography – are rendered suspicious and worthy of potential intervention. Using examples of specific encounters between photographers and security personnel, this article interrogates the conduct of these interventions and the preemptive security stance that scopes ordinary actions and everyday urban spaces through flexible and dispersed acts. Finally, the article considers how this uncoordinated and dispersed practice travels across a wide variety of actors without clear, causal linkages. The practice is a mobile, circuitous one, and through its analysis the article argues for more attention to be paid to everyday, embodied, and dispersed practices of preemption.
Antipode, 2013
This article analyses European initiatives to counter radicalisation and recru-itment as a practi... more This article analyses European initiatives to counter radicalisation and recru-itment as a practice of governing that works preemptively through civil society and semi-public spaces. Since the London and Madrid bombings, the EU agenda in this domain is substantial and ambitious. At the same time, proposals are embraced by member states to various degrees and materialise in local settings and concrete programmes in different ways. We propose to regard radicalisation as an assemblage of governing that is mobilised through particular threat representations, knowledge practices, training programmes and strategies for intervention. This lens allows for the simultaneous recognition of national differentiations, the power and reach of “Europe”, and the tensions, fluid relations and alignments that are forged in counter-radicalisation conceptualisation and practice. In so doing, the motivation behind our research is to make strange the idea of radicalisation itself, which has been fully embraced and mobilised as a problem of governance across Europe.
Commissioned by the European Parliament, Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee, Brussels. , 2013
AntipodeFoundation.org, 2013
Space and Polity, Jan 1, 2008
This paper focuses on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to theorise the spatiali... more This paper focuses on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to theorise the spatialities of post-9/11 security knowledge and practice in the US. It analyses the organisational discourses that animate homeland security work, such as preparedness, vulnerability, the new threat environment, risk analysis and capabilities-based planning, and considers the implications of these practices for contemporary geographies of security. It is argued that DHS operates through a virtual ontology of threat, whereby potential, future threats are addressed as present possibilities that emerge in the spaces of everyday life. The sources of American freedoms and insecurities, the everyday, emerging circulations of goods and people, present DHS with a terrain of shifting threats from which both emergencies and preparedness may materialise. Disaster looming, the potential suspension of everyday life forms the basis for security practice as the emergency becomes a fact of life itself. The spatialities of this environment of imminent threat are considered and it is argued that the everyday emergency operates topologically as a continuous process of spatialisation.
Social & Cultural Geography, Jan 1, 2010
Journal of Geography, Jan 1, 2009
Reports by Stephanie Simon
This study examines the technical feasibility and financial soundness of the Commission legislati... more This study examines the technical feasibility and financial soundness of the Commission legislative proposals to establish a EU Entry/Exit System (EES) and EU Registered Traveller Programme (RTP) for the external borders of the Union. It puts the impact assessment documents accompanying the proposals in comparative perspectives with likeminded initiatives in third countries (US-VIST), at the national level in the EU (UK border checks and e-Borders), and with past European initiatives (SIS II, VIS). It finds that it is not reasonable to consider that the measures envisaged in the smart borders package are technically feasible and financially sounds, and formulates recommendations to the LIBE Committee and the European Parliament in this regard.
Institutional Publications by Stephanie Simon
This study was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights a... more This study was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the LIBE Committee. With a number of high-profile criminal cases, such as ‘Silk Road’, cybercrime has been very much in the spotlight in recent years, both in Europe and elsewhere. While this study shows that cybercrime poses significant challenges for law enforcement, it also argues that the key cybercrime concern for law enforcement is legal rather than technical and technological. The study further underlines that the European Parliament is largely excluded from policy development in the field of cybercrime, impeding public scrutiny and accountability.
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Papers by Stephanie Simon
Reports by Stephanie Simon
Institutional Publications by Stephanie Simon