Abstract This article reconsiders contemporary urban security governance. Conceptually, it revisits Foucault’s governmentality lectures to comprehend how security governance is carried out in places where the use of digital security technologies co-exists with overly lethal and repressive forms of policing. The author advances his analysis by conceptualizing a triangle of security governance in which disciplinary powers of control, apparatuses of security and sovereign/necropower are at work simultaneously, complemented by a fourth dimension that takes into account what Foucault outlined in the lectures as the ‘government of things’, which is the sociotechnical relationship between the agency of humans and machines. Empirically, the article explores the technopolitical turn in urban security policies in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the wake of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Using discourses that are embedded in globalized mega-event security standards and legacy claims, authorities in Rio promoted a narrative of new material and non-material security measures that were intended both to secure the World Cup and the Olympics and to help overcome permanently entrenched urban conflicts in the city. By critically analysing these two approaches of new material and non-material security measures, the author shows how new security technologies are perfectly integrated into a continuum of death politics in Rio de Janeiro in ways that are conceptually best appreciated by considering how the triangle of security governance works in the digital era.

This article examines the technopolitics of prevention in postwar Guatemala. In the 2010s, experts and policymakers shifted security governance in Central America’s most populous country towards anticipation. Against the background of rising gang violence, they implemented a set of sociopolitical and techno-material measures – based on the latest crime-control technologies, new policing strategies and urban design methods – in Guatemala’s most violent municipalities. The stated goals were to reconstruct state sovereignty and to improve public security by strengthening community resilience and inducing positive behavioural change in ‘at-risk’ citizens. Zooming in on the case of Villa Nueva, the article examines the emergence and effects of Guatemala’s ‘prevention assemblage’. It demonstrates that this technopolitical project has failed, as prevention turned into a new layer of control that shifted responsibility to local communities, further securitized urban spaces and populations, and reproduced exclusionary and repressive security governance.

By combining securitization literature and literature from the field of border criminologies, this article reflects upon the ongoing securitization of intra-EU East–West mobility. The European Union is built on the inherent tension between the (economic) benefits and risks of one of its core principles: the principle of free movement. The two enlargements of the EU that led to the inclusion of several countries located in Central and Eastern Europe further increased this tension and led countries in Western Europe to officially reconstruct intra-Schengen borders. By looking into recent practices of (border) policing in the Netherlands, this article illustrates how CEE nationals are subjected not only to a securitized discourse around their mobility but also to securitized policing practices that aim to create a division between ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ Europeans while at the same time distinguishing between possible ‘crimmigrant’ others and bona fide travellers.

In 2009, in a move to improve the situation regarding the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain, a left-wing government led by the Socialist Workers' Party drafted a new policy aimed at focusing police efforts exclusively on the deportation of 'foreign criminals'. Ethnographically tracing the enforcement of deportation by a central police unit in Madrid, this article shows how the practical implementation of a policy that seemingly sought to limit the use of deportation in fact allowed for continuous and even reinvigorated deportation practices aimed at all categories of illegalized migrants. Operating under the idea that they were now fighting 'dangerous criminals', many police agents felt increasingly motivated about carrying out deportations and reassured about the morality of doing so. Rather than focusing on illegalized migrants who had been indicted for serious crimes, most police agents considered anyone with a police record to fit their target group. As a result of the specific police interpretation of the new policy, the deportability of illegalized migrants in Spain was not only increased but also left to be enforced according to the racialized and racist ideas of police agents. The article argues for the need to scrutinize all new deportation policies within Western liberal states in terms of their effect on deportability by highlighting entrenched and institutionalized forms of racism against illegalized migrants within the police force.

This article introduces ‘eco-war tourism’, a growing niche in which tourists venture into war zones to seek adventure and ‘save’ nature from its violent surroundings. In Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, such tourists can experience the ‘threat of mortality’ while visiting mountain gorillas, contribute to the survival of the park and supposedly participate in regional peacebuilding. This article considers how the amalgamated commodification of war and gorillas leads to the bunkerization of tourism, the reconfiguration of space into ‘safe’ and ‘dangerous’ areas and the militarization of conservation. It links critical security studies and political ecology to theorize how eco-war tourism intensifies green militarization and how militarized conservation itself becomes a spectacularized tourist attraction. Eco-war tourism is informed by, and productive of, various affective geographies, entrenched in colonial durabilities that produce Eurocentric ideas about how and by whom nature should be protected. I call for critical security studies to examine how diverse security interventions – e.g. military, tourism, humanitarianism and conservation – are entangled in and reconfigure inherently political nature–society relations and underscore the futility of approaching ‘society’ and ‘the environment’ as separate fields of security.

This article deals with the technologies and apps that asylum seekers need to navigate as forced hindered techno-users in order to get access to asylum and financial support. With a focus on the Greek refugee system, it discusses the multiple technological intermediations that asylum seekers face when dealing with the cash assistance programme and how asylum seekers are obstructed in accessing asylum and financial support. It explores the widespread disorientation that asylum seekers experience as they navigate un-legible techno-scripts that change over time. The article critically engages with the literature on the securitization and victimization of refugees, and it argues that asylum seekers are not treated exclusively as potential threats or as victims, but also as forced hindered subjects; that is, they are kept in a condition of protracted uncertainty during which they must find out the multiple technological and bureaucratic steps they are requested to comply with. In the final section, the article illustrates how forced technological mediations actually reinforce asylum seekers’ dependence on humanitarian actors and enhance socio-legal precarity.

The search for security has become an almost permanent feature of the contemporary lived experience and what Brian Massumi has called an ‘operative logic’ for states across the globe. The modern study – and practice – of security has, nonetheless, been largely concerned with the protection, preservation and sustaining of the material, the tangible and the visible. For many people around the world, however, feelings of security also derive from understandings of an individual or community’s relationships with invisible and spiritual forces. Religious devotion and divine protection represent a central plank of security for many, just as fears of divine retribution, demonic possession or witchcraft feature as a central dimension of insecurity for many others. This remains, however, a significant blindspot in much of security studies – and, indeed, often eludes and challenges state authority as much as it intersects with and enhances it. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in northwestern Uganda, this study reflects critically on the provenance and implications of this blindspot and argues for an expanded understanding of what ‘counts’ as (in)security. In doing so, the article emphasizes the global character of spiritual (in)security and the challenges an understanding of (in)security that encompasses this pose to longstanding scholarly and practitioner associations of (in)security with state authority.

The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck’s history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th century. In contrast, Foucault highlights how the psychiatric application of the concept of crisis was itself political, conditioned by the disciplinary power of the psychiatrist. Unlike the ancient medical concept of crisis that emphasized the doctor’s judgement in observing the event of truth in the course of the disease, psychiatric crisis is explicitly forced by the doctor in order to elicit the desired symptoms in the patient and convert their power of disciplinary confinement into medical diagnosis. The article argues that this notion of crisis resonates with the tendencies observed in contemporary crisis governance in Western societies. While these tendencies are often addressed in terms of ‘psychopolitics’ that presumably succeeds Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’, we suggest that Foucault’s own work on psychiatric power offers a valuable genealogical perspective on the contemporary governance of crises.

Abstract Conceptualizations of post-conflict agency have been widely debated in feminist security studies and critical international relations studies. This article distinguishes between three feminist approaches to post-conflict agency: narrative of return, representations of agency and local agency. It argues that all these approaches in distinct ways emphasize a modality of agency as resistance. To offer a more encompassing account of post-conflict agency the article engages Saba Mahmood’s (2012) critique of the modality of agency in feminist theory and her decoupling of agency from resistance. The article explores experiences of women who fought in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Nepal. It focuses on ‘withdrawing from politics’, a dynamic whereby women ex-fighters move away from party activities and the public sphere, and rearticulates this withdrawing as a location of political agency. The article argues that being an ‘ex-PLA’ emerges as a form of subjectivity that is crafted through experiencing war and encountering peacebuilding, enabling a production of heterogeneous modalities of agency in the post-conflict context. By examining these modalities, the article challenges us to rethink post-conflict agency beyond the capacity to subvert regulatory gender norms and/or discourses of liberal peace.