Abstract Classifying information, or concealing reasons for government decisions, can weaken state legitimacy in a democratic order where citizen insight and participation are imperative. Despite these democratic drawbacks, state secrecy can appear to be necessary and even to consolidate the state. Recognizing that secrecy may both weaken and strengthen state legitimacy, this article argues that feminist perspectives on security and protection deepen the understanding of the relationship between secrecy and legitimacy in democratic states. Through an analysis of contemporary Cold War military heritagization in Sweden, we demonstrate how secrecy's Janus-faced relation to the state is fundamentally gendered. This intervention contributes to critical security literature on secrecy by engaging specifically with the feminist theorizing on the logic of masculinist protection. The way in which state secrecy actualizes gendered protection can shape secrecy practices into both a resource for and a threat against state legitimacy. We argue that while state legitimacy depends on the connections among masculinist protection and the making and keeping of secrets, those very same connections also mean that the leakage of state secrets suggests a feminized vulnerability and an inability to protect citizens. Such feminization may delegitimize the state.

Abstract Technoscientific controversies are not only public disputes over science and technology. Some of them may also evolve into security events that shape how security knowledge is produced and contested. A prime example of this dynamic is the “lab leak controversy” about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on this case, the article asks: how was the epistemic authority of liberal global health institutions challenged throughout this controversy, and how did this shape the prospects of making security public? To explore how the authority of established security knowledge producers is challenged and destabilized, the article introduces the concept epistemic insecurity and develops a framework for analyzing the construction, management, and political effects of epistemic insecurity. Through this lens, the paper studies the transformation of the “lab leak” conspiracy theory into an expert hypothesis considered by established political and scientific authorities and examines how this process interacted with the epistemic authority of global health institutions and shaped the space for their critique. It finds that the management of epistemic insecurity by liberal institutions initially delegitimized any critique and later led to the personalization and technocratization of critique, thus preventing a deeper critical reflection on the entanglements of science and security.

Abstract On what basis can it be said that climate change contributes to human migration? What are we to make of new statistical models used to construct the relationship between these two epochal phenomena? This article proposes Collier’s conception of topology to characterize the novel politics of gravity modelling, a technique increasingly used to calculate numeric estimates of ‘climate migrants’. These models do not simply signify a revival or repetition of political sovereignty, nor an affirmation of biopower, but a novel recalibration of power arising in response to the climate crisis. This recalibration signals the early stages of a new topology of power organized around intuitive calculation. To make this claim, the article draws on recent discussions in geography on the relationship between calculation, number and the political to first situate the models within contemporary critical scholarship on climate change and migration. It then examines the models’ statistical logics, in particular how intuition, inference and the incalculable shape three facets of this emerging topology: the correlation of Earth science data with population-level economic data; the calculation of mobile populations; and the unique spatiality at stake in gravity modelling.

Recent work on trauma and memory in international relations has sought to emphasize the key role trauma plays in state and community formation, security policies, the mediatization of atrocities, and transitional and social justice. This article problematizes the doxology of trauma in this body of work: the assumptions about the traumatic that go without saying because they come without saying in the discipline. We counter, in particular, international relations’ unreflective consumption of Cathy Caruth’s paradigm of trauma as an incomprehensible shock. In this article, we excavate the contours, origins, and effects of this doxology. We first use the examples of post-conflict struggles for truth and reconciliation and the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate that international relations’ vision of trauma centralizes a psychiatric and medicalized paradigm of governance and management that depoliticizes suffering. We then seek to provide an alternative account of trauma woven in dialogue with the psychoanalytical reflections of Francophone and Lusophone scholars in the Black Radical Tradition, particularly Fanon, Mbembe, Kilomba, Nascimento and Gonzalez. The goal is to move from a theory of trauma-as-event to an understanding of (colonial/racial) trauma as it appears in the writings of those who never felt protected or at peace in the white colonial order.

This article examines the relationship between violence, (in)security, and the reproduction of ordinary life, focusing on the significance of mundane survival practices and their connection to the emergence of scenarios of collective action and politicization. Based on the experiences of women from the Colombian Caribbean region, this article explores how ordinary interactions aimed at satisfying individual and urgent needs end up having community-level consequences and amplifying women’s political subjectivity. These interactions, I argue, can be conceptualized as vital encounters – seemingly uneventful encounters with the potential of transcending the short-lived temporality in which they exist, becoming crucial spatial-temporal instances for collective security-making. Conceptually, vital encounters contribute to a nuanced understanding of the manifold dimensions of (in)security that collide and converge in contexts with different manifestations of chronic violence. As such, vital encounters engender a sense of security that transcends crisis-centric paradigms, which tend to gravitate towards a warlike logic that sees security as the neutralization of a military enemy or the protection from armed violence.

With the objective to predict and pre-empt the emergence of political violence, the US Department of Defence (DoD) has devoted increasing attention to the intersection between neurobiology and artificial intelligence. Concepts such as ‘cognitive biotechnologies’, ‘digital biosecurity’ and large-scale collection of ‘neurodata’ herald a future in which neurobiological intervention on a global scale is believed to come of age. This article analyses how the relationship between neurobiology and AI – between the human and the machine – is conceived, made possible, and acted upon within the SMA programme, an interdisciplinary research programme sponsored by the DoD. By showcasing the close intersection between the computer sciences and the neurosciences within the US military, the article questions descriptions of algorithmic governmentality as decentring the human, and as juxtaposed to biopolitical techniques to regulate processes of subjectivity. The article shows that within US military discourse, new biotechnologies are seen to engender algorithmic governmentality a biopolitical dimension, capable of monitoring and regulating emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and subjectivity on population level, particularly targeting the minds and brains of ‘vulnerable’ populations in the global South.

Palestinian women have envisioned and enacted resistance and resilience in different ways throughout the long-running Palestinian resistance movement. Strategies have ranged from direct collective actions to the resolute maintenance of everyday life in the face of ongoing occupation, settler-colonialism, displacement and violence. Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank have begun to develop tactics that attempt to negotiate a widespread aversion to ‘illegitimate’ and aid donor-prescribed actions, as well as to the gendered risks with which politically active women must contend. While this approach once encompassed the principle of resilience, recent times have seen the growing rejection of neoliberal resilience narratives in the belief that they normalize and entrench an oppressive status quo. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank, this article explores how women’s search for legitimate and feasible modes of resistance and resilience has generated tactics characterized by incrementalism, but which form part of a transformative social change strategy. In so doing, it reveals the dynamic ways in which women constantly renegotiate resistance to violence in Palestine. It also demonstrates how development models based upon neoliberal understandings of resilience exacerbate gendered impacts of insecurity while eroding women’s capacities to withstand them.

Who has responsibility for addressing the security implications of climate change? States and the United Nations justify their existence on the promise of providing security. Yet, although the national and international security implications of climate change are increasingly acknowledged, incorporation of climate change in national security planning or institutional arrangements is far from universal, while debates in the UN Security Council about its role in addressing climate change have been characterized by contestation. This article examines key debates about the responsibilities these institutions have for providing security in the face of the threats posed by climate change, examining the extent to which these institutions accept responsibility for providing security in these contexts. Drawing on Toni Erskine’s notion of institutional moral agency, the article examines a 2017 inquiry into the national security implications of climate change in Australia, and the September 2021 UN Security Council debate on the international security implications of climate change. These two case studies explicitly focus on the question of institutional responsibility – of the Australian Government and the UN Security Council respectively – for addressing the threat of climate change. In both cases these institutions stop short of accepting responsibility for providing security in the face of climate change, with limited policy responses or institutionalization as the result. With the security implications of climate change increasingly apparent, and increasingly recognized by these (and other) actors, the failure to accept responsibility raises potentially significant questions about the legitimacy of these institutions themselves.

If a diplomatic cocktail party lasts two hours, does it equal the duration of peace? Or are there less simplistic conceptualizations of ‘peace’ and ‘time’ for the theorization of diplomatic practices? This article draws on a concept of temporality based on an irreversible before/after distinction, and combines it with the modern systems theoretical premise that every event within the diplomatic system occurs under the medium of peace, finding that: (a) peace is not a state of affairs, but a medium of communication; (b) peace has no chronometric duration, but it is temporally minimal, vanishing as soon as it appears; (c) peace needs constant reproduction, i.e. the system of diplomacy regenerates itself by continuously triggering further peace-mediated events; and (d) peace is both negative and positive, as it denotes a restraint of violent capacities but needs active communication. These insights offer a universal concept of ‘peace’ that is abstract enough to cover every interpolity tie. They also suggest further research opportunities, including into what the rapid acceleration of society means for the proliferation of ever-quicker, ever-more-trivial diplomatic practices.

From Baghdad’s ‘Emerald City’ to Kabul’s ‘Kabubble’, international green zones have been characterized as ‘bunkerized’ and temporary. Despite efforts to make these spaces appear sealed, they are more porous than we assume. Drawing on fieldwork in Mogadishu and research with private security contractors, this article reconceptualizes international enclaves in terms of their inherent plasticity, moulded by the mobilities, intentions and bureaucracies of those within. The article illustrates the heterogenous sociospatial relations within Mogadishu’s green zone, arguing that it is sustained through internal frictions and transgressive spatial practices that are not captured by the bunkerization motif. The limits of bunkerization are revealed most starkly through the work of security contractors who enjoy greater mobility and access to information than many of the green zone’s transient international workers. They assume the gatekeeper role, sustaining conditions of manageable insecurity by ordering the messy sociopolitical space of the city into bounded zones. Beyond the façade of the enclave, however, their mobility is reliant on ‘local’ Somali partners navigating the complexities of Mogadishu on their behalf. As an interface between the secure inside and the dangerous outside, some contractors have emerged as opportunistic power-brokers connecting Somali entrepreneurs on the outside to the resources within.