Everyday migration hierarchies: negotiating the EU’s visa regime

Laura J. Shepherd, ed. (2013). Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 304 pp., $160.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68017-2), $54.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68016-5). Mark B. Salter and Can E. Mutlu, eds. (2013). Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction . Routledge, London and New York, 256 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53539-7), $51.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53540-3). Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit. (2013). Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 208 pp., $145.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-1-415-62046-8), $46.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-62047-5). Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner, eds. (2014). Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis . Routledge, London and New York, 230 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71294-1), $44.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71295-8). “There is a point at which methods devour themselves” (Fanon 1952, 12). Almost 20 years since the publication of Krause and Williams's edited volume Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997), critical security studies (CSS) has reached a moment in which critiques of more traditional or mainstream modes of studying the politics of war, security, and violence are supplemented by a great deal of explicit attention to their methods and methodologies for doing so. The last few years have witnessed a sudden proliferation of textbooks on methods for critical security studies that have attempted to chart the field and provide guidance for students or newcomers on methods for conducting research consistent with its values and goals. The four volumes discussed in this review essay follow on the heels of numerous other textbooks that attempt to map the terrain of security studies, such as Hansen and Buzan (2009), Peoples and Vaughan-Williams’s edited compilation of key and illustrative works (2010), Jarvis and Holland (2014), and the second edition of Karin Fierke’s Critical Approaches to International Security (2015 [2007]). In recent years, the establishment of several journals, including Critical Security Studies and particularly Security Dialogue , as well as Journal of Global Security Studies (an ISA journal) and European Journal of International Security (a BISA journal), that are dedicated to pluralistic studies of security have also suggested the popularity and continued innovation of diverse strands of scholarship that can be grouped as “critical security studies.” Furthermore, the selection of “Methods, Methodologies, and Innovation” to frame the 2014 Millennium conference and subsequent special issue also suggests a great deal of both interest and tension around the question of method and methodology for critical, interpretative, and pluralistic scholars, including the question of whether or not issues of “method” should be … lw487{at}cam.ac.uk

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

This article traces the recent history of border closures in Turkey and Morocco and their impact on human mobility at the two ends of the Mediterranean. Border closures in the Mediterranean have produced new spaces where borders are often fenced, immigration securitized, and border crossings and those facilitating border crossings criminalized. Here, bordering practices are conceptualized as physical bordering practices, border controls, and legal measures. Turkey and Morocco constitute comparable cases for an analysis of border closures insofar as they utilize similar mechanisms of closure, despite having quite different outcomes in terms of numbers. The article’s findings are based on fieldwork conducted at both locations between 2012 and 2014, as well as on analysis of Frontex Risk Assessment Reports from 2010 to 2016. The first part of the article reflects on the concepts of border closure and securitization, together with their implications, and draws for its argument on critical security studies and critical border studies. The second part of the article is an overview of controls over mobility exercised in the Mediterranean from the 1990s onward. Then, in the third and fourth parts, we turn to the particular cases—respectively, Turkey and Morocco—in order to discuss their processes of border closure and the various implications thereof. Through analysis of the two country cases, we show that border closures are neither linear nor irreversible.

Every time we hear the expression ‘peace in our world’, it naturally conjures the absence of warfare and internal disorder, and the end of military or other hostilities. Throughout history, innumerable human beings have suffered from the scourge of conflict. Quite naturally they tried, often at significant costs, to protect themselves with assorted resources against all major threats to their (human) security. The human security concept continues to loom large in global policy and peace discourse notwithstanding growing doubts about the ‘effectiveness’ of its promise in a highly vulnerable modern society overloaded with weapons of mass-destruction amid other threats to peace. The bottom-line is the imperative of replacing the dominant thoughts about securing peace. This paper accentuates the theory of peace and its relationship to the concept of human security. It takes its point of departure from the theoretical framework of critical security studies (CSS) and argues that there is a specific sense in which CSS needs to comprehend peace, and that this understanding is closely affiliated with human security. The paper is arguably a theoretical exploration of the concepts of peace and security. It is not, therefore, an empirical examination of where or when there is peace or how to obtain it. It is important to emphasize that this is not a paper that answers the question ‘what is peace?’ Although a proposal of how CSS theorists should contemplate peace is made, the main aim is the theoretical relationship between peace and human security and the theoretical and possible practical gains achieved by a clarification of this relationship.

This chapter critically analyzes the counter-terrorist narrative in Morocco and argues that the perceived threat of terrorism is used by the regime in order to legitimize and normalize exceptional measures and human rights violations. The chapter analyzes discursive and non-discursive practices, overcoming the central socio-linguistic focus of Critical Terrorism Studies by borrowing sociological tools from the proponents of International Political Sociology. Moreover, Critical Security Studies’ central analyses of western securitization processes have neglected the transnational dialogue on the Global War on Terror (GWoT) in the Global South, and its elites. The use of the counter-terrorist narrative in Morocco helps us to understand the relational and political nature of the concept of security and its effect on social power relations. The paper concludes that the GWoT strengthens authoritarianism in Morocco and opens the debate on the impact that this local alignment with global securitization practices has on other global issues such as conflict resolution, democratization, or development.

Human security suggests that security policy and security analysis, if they are to be effective and legitimate, must focus on the individual as the referent and primary beneficiary. In broad terms, human security is “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear:” positive and negative rights as they relate to threats to core individual needs. Human security is normative; it argues that there is an ethical responsibility to (re)orient security around the individual in line with internationally recognized standards of human rights and governance. Much human security scholarship is therefore explicitly or implicitly underpinned by a solidarist commitment to moral obligation, and some are cosmopolitan in ethical orientation. However, there is no uncontested definition of, or approach to, human security, though theorists generally start with human security challenges to orthodox neorealist conceptions of international security. Nontraditional and critical security studies (which are distinct from human security scholarship) also challenges the neorealist orthodoxy as a starting point, although generally from a more sophisticated theoretical standpoint than found in the human security literature. Critical security studies can be conceived broadly to embrace a number of different nontraditional approaches which challenge conventional (military, state-centric) approaches to security studies and security policy. Human security has generally not been treated seriously within these academic security studies debates, and it has not contributed much either.

This article furthers the debate between European Studies and Critical Security Studies by demonstrating how European Union (EU) single market integration functions as a security practice in the area of cybersecurity. It explores how the EU has rendered digitisation as a security concern and cybersecurity emerged as an object of EU governance by developing an analytical approach based on problematisation. Situating the problematisation approach in the genealogical tradition of Foucault, it argues that it provides us with an analytical toolbox enabling inquiry into the conditions that make contemporary security problems possible, powerful and changeable. Tracing EU security problematisations of digitisation over four decades, it shows how the single market has come to function as a security practice and stresses the political implications of it. The final part of the article re‐problematises the findings to afford insights into how they can be rethought at the intersection of European Studies and Critical Security Studies.

O surgimento, e afirmação, de uma corrente de estudos críticos em segurança internacional plantou firmemente a idéia de que os problemas de segurança internacional não estão meramente relacionados com aspectos objetivos que ameaçam os Estados, mas esses problemas estão relacionados estreitamente com as relações entre indivíduo e emancipação humana. Assim, a condição de segurança em sentido forte tem, como precondição, a emancipação humana. Porém, em que condições esse overlap entre segurança internacional e emancipação acontece? A tese deste artigo é problematizar essas condições, que escapam ao diálogo endógeno dos critical securities studies (CSS). E que uma pista para operacionalização pode ser procurada nos diálogos entre a teoria crítica cosmopolita e a teoria liberal cosmopolita. Essa interseção, ou continuum, aponta a tese do artigo, é possível se os CSS atentam para dimensões do liberalismo político que têm sido negligenciadas, especialmente a democracia pensada em bases transnacionais e as possibilidades da sociedade civil transnacionalizada.

‘Security’ is a uniquely rich object for critique. It rests on a long and noble conceptual history in Western thought. And yet the provision of security most often consists of a shoring up, through the discourses of nationality, ethnicity, political economy or even science, of what is assumed to be solid at its core but weakened through the contingencies of politics, society, ideology, and so on. The article argues that the critical force of critique stems from the fact that critique itself is a practice inescapably bound up with insecurity, and thus that the critique of security exercised since around 1997 as ‘critical security studies’ is self-replicating. By introducing concepts from Husserlian phenomenology, it attempts to show that insecurity is not a simple feature of an otherwise secure state of life, ripe for critical analysis that promises to expose its false premises. Rather, insecurity lies at the very foundation of critical thought. Building upon the bare and basic question, ‘What does it mean to mean?’, a phenomenology of security asks the straightforward question: ‘What is the security-ness of security?’ It permits one to ask what remains of security when all else is stripped away, what essential minimum must be retained in order for security to be security.

Dutch national police recently became the world’s first force to train eagles to combat the growing rise of drones within the Netherlands. Partnering with an eagle-training security firm, Guard From Above, both organizations believe using eagles to intercept and retrieve drones is the most effective countermeasure to handle rogue drones in the skies. This paper questions whether such a police operation to increase air security respects the rights of the eagles and ensures the animals’ protection from unreasonable injury, harm and suffering. Such an examination lies at the intersection of green criminological perspectives and critical security studies’ scholarship, an intersection of which I consider more thoroughly. By implementing a qualitative media analysis, this paper examines twenty media reports detailing the facts of the Dutch ‘Flying Squad.’ I contend that police agencies in the West must seriously consider such eagle initiatives as intrusive, harmful practices. The findings suggest that conceptualizing the eagles as exceptional ‘biotechnological’ state agents may increase sky security in Western countries, but such anthropocentric logics of security minimize the concerns for ‘species justice’ and the safeguards for eagles.

The chapter provides a conceptual introduction to the notion of Security as Emancipation (SAE), originally identifi ed with the ‘Welsh School’ of Critical Security Studies (CSS). The three key tenets that characterize this approach are: recognition of individuals as ultimate referents of security, emphasis on the political underpinnings and implications of security praxis, and a normative commitment towards emancipatory transformations. Employing the case of the 1984 industrial accident in the Indian city of Bhopal, the chapter demonstrates how SAE is useful to understand and act politically upon a specifi c security issue. The chapter also refl ects upon the signifi cance of SAE in CSS, while recognizing its methodological implications and some of its limitations.

The traditionally dominant discourse of The Great White North views Canada as a land of vast wilderness and abundant resources. However, this discourse excludes growing environmental risk and prevalent insecurity felt by vulnerable populations in Canadian society, namely indigenous groups whose livelihoods are deeply dependent upon their relationship with their environments. The effect of the relationship between the physical environment and conceptions of security can contribute to a deeper understanding of traditional and critical accounts of security. This article investigates traditional Canadian environmental security discourses and alternative environmental security discourses promoted by Arctic Inuit groups. It examines how these discourses impact the analytic and normative goals of critical security studies and interprets the way in which they affect the concept of emancipation. It argues that Canadian security is co-constituted with its understanding of the environment, and that the Canadian case compels an expansion of the notion of the referent object of security to include the environment – a change which throws it into contrast with other schools of critical security, whose visions of emancipation might not, as currently theorized, be equipped to overcome these phenomena.

This paper argues that peace studies and the Welsh school of critical security studies both define themselves in opposition to the traditional view of security, with the only difference that the former goes through the concept of peace in voicing its critique of security. Pointing to some striking similarities in the epistemology, methodology and ontology of Johan Galtung and Ken Booth, it shows that the two studies have been driving on parallel roads and that they would profit greatly from joining forces. Being the kind of applied and anti-hegemonic science that scholars at Aberystwyth strive for, peace studies could provide the Welsh school with greater practical applicability and access to everyday life. The Welsh school, in turn, could endow peace studies with academic reputation and a solid critical foundation. This would not only put peace back on the agenda of IR, but also contribute towards the decolonization of the discipline.

A central and formative ingredient in the governance of migration in the European Union (EU) is the continuous construction of a large-scale digital infrastructure to ensure border security. Although border and critical security studies have increasingly focused on the multiple aspects of techno-materiality and infrastructural devices of border control, less has been said about how such an infrastructure encodes and transmits collective future visions of border (in)security. Therefore, this paper analyzes the making of a sociotechnical imaginary of digital transformation of the EU border regime, specifically focusing on the role of eu-LISA, the European agency for the development and management of large-scale IT systems. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interview material, we analyze the ways in which this agency emerges as a site for assembling and rehearsing this sociotechnical imaginary, gradually transforming borders into sites of experimentation in the EU Schengen laboratory. As our case illustrates, studying the visionary dimensions of digital infrastructuring helps us to understand how imagination becomes collectivized and materialized, opens up or closes down sociotechnical realizations, and thus tacitly governs the project of digitally infrastructuring the EU border regime.

A positive link between open-mindedness and multilingualism suggested in intercultural psychology research (e.g., Dewaele & Botes, 2020; Korzilius et al., 2011; Dewaele & Oudenhoven, 2009) has also been implicitly assumed in Norway’s Core Curriculum (NDET, 2017) and in the curricula for English (NDET, 2019a) and Foreign Languages (NDET, 2019b). However, little empirical research has been conducted to explore how becoming multilingual, especially through learning foreign languages at school, can be connected to the development of students’ open-mindedness. The present study addresses this gap by exploring open-mindedness in lower secondary school students (n=593) learning one or two foreign languages in school. In addition, other factors related to students’ multilingualism, such as their multilingual identity, migration background, experience living abroad and having friends with home languages other than Norwegian, are also considered to better understand the complex relationship between open-mindedness and multilingualism in the school context. By analysing the data collected with the Ungspråk questionnaire (Haukås et al., 2021a), the study reveals no particular relationship between open-mindedness and students’ migration background and experience of living abroad. However, it indicates that open-mindedness is positively linked to L3 learning at school, multilingual identity and having friends who use other languages at home. These findings have significant pedagogical implications suggesting that promoting learning a second foreign language at lower secondary school, developing students’ self-identification as multilingual and encouraging the interaction with peers speaking further languages may contribute to the enhancement of open-mindedness among students.
 Keywords: open-mindedness, multilingualism, multilingual identity, foreign language learning, L2, L3