Blog post archive
Displaying 113 blog posts in series Security Dialogue
January 2025
Migrant deaths in the name of law
Image byJim BlackfromPixabay In international political sociology, a variety of scholars following Agamben and the so-called state of exception emphasize the routes of violence against migrants in the light of their privation of rights or “suspended law”. While acknowledging that law creates at times violent conditions, this scholarship tends to ...
Can Videogames Shape Public Understandings of Weaponized Artificial Intelligence?
Image byLukasfromPixabay Millions of consumers play videogames like Call of Duty and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon. The battlefields these series portray increasingly feature drones, tanks, and robots that select and engage targets on their own, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements. Although prior research suggests that pop-culture portrayals like these ...
June 2023
Technopolitics of Security
Security Dialogue recently published a special issue, edited by Frank I. Muller and Matthew A. Richmond, which explores how technologies condition the way that security is enacted and experienced. Security technology. Image by Pexar from Pixabay We argue that as well as human actors, such as police, militaries, private security ...
Private Security Contractors and the porousness of International Enclaves
Photo: Jethro Norman International green zones like Baghdad’s ‘Emerald City’ or Kabul’s ‘Kabubble’ are usually understood to be insular, ‘bunkerised’, and sealed off from the outside world. However, my research with private security contractors in Mogadishu shows that these enclaves are far more porous than we assume. In a recent ...
January 2023
Book review: Counterterrorism Strategies in Egypt: Permanent Exceptions in the War on Terror
by Ahmed M. Abozaid, Routledge, 2022, pp. 176. ISBN: 0367714639 Abozaid starts his book “Counterterrorism strategies in Egypt; permanent exceptions in the War on Terror” with a personal encounter with security forces. This opening is a powerful reminder for security scholars how counter-terrorism policies, post-colonial legacies and legal protection are ...
Counterterrorism in the absence of terror on home soil: Everyday practices of policing in Ghana
The unexpected and catastrophic nature of terrorist attacks has called for the implementation of precautionary measures aimed at combating the threat of future attacks. Across the globe, this has given rise to the proliferation and circulation of counterterrorism measures and models – also in countries that have not experienced terrorist ...
May 2022
Book review: Biopolitics After Truth: Knowledge, Power, and Democratic Life
by Sergei Prozorov, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 192 pp., ISBN: 9781474485784 Rarely does a book of political philosophy manage to triangulate three themes of public interest as effectively as Sergei Prozorov’s Biopolitics After Truth: Knowledge, Power, and Democratic Life (2021). Its main topics—biopolitics, ‘post-truth,’ and post-Soviet Russia—not only speak directly ...
Book review: The Suspect: Counterterrorism, Islam, and the Security State
by Rizwaan Sabir, Pluto Press, 2022, 256 pp. ISBN: 9780745338484 The contemporary surveillance state of the UK and its allies is in many ways the bureaucratic par excellence, with its logics, language and processes operating through seemingly deliberate and elaborate sets of contradictions and linguistic sleights-of-hand. It is simultaneously vague, ...
December 2021
Book review: Dying to Serve: Militarism, Affect, and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army
by Maria Rashid, Stanford University Press, 2020. 288pp. ISBN: 9781503610415 Plenty of social scientists and humanities scholars are preoccupied with the technics of warfare, such as lawfare, drones, “low intensity warfare” and the shifting spaces of war. Yet, attention to a traditional means of war, that is, the institution of ...
Expecting the exceptional in the everyday: Policing global transportation hubs
Global transportation hubs such as airports and maritime ports have become vital spaces for the international networked economy. Global economic opportunities depend on the effective flow of people and things, and make use of the different infrastructures and modes of the transport system. For instance, around 80 percent of global ...
Rethinking and Revising the Theory of Network-centric Warfare
If we take a step back and cast a reflective eye over the evolutionary trajectory of western military thought, we will find that in around the 1990s—as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) began to proliferate—discussions regarding the latest Revolution in Military Affairs also started to gather pace. Figure 1: Trajectory ...
Modular Sovereignty and Infrastructural Power: The Elusive Materiality of International Statebuilding
Space and materials matter. But how? My article (Open Access) in Security Dialogue explores what spatial and material arrangements reveal about the way international statebuilding exerts (sovereign) power. Statebuilding interventions support the establishment of sovereign states by taking control of, arranging and ordering spaces. This was immediately apparent when I ...
Time will tell - Defining violence in terrorism court cases
Counter-terrorism measures are characterized by pre-emptive logics: suspicious behavior must be detected and captured before it materializes into terrorist attacks. Terrorist networks need to be mapped and surveilled to prevent the moving of funds or weapons. Through increased regulations, these pre-emptive dynamics increasingly find their ways to the domestic judicial ...
September 2021
Book review: Ethics of Drone Strikes. Restraining Remote-Control Killing
by Christian Enemark (ed.) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021. IX + 204 p The increasing use of armed drones has raised a series of ethical and legal questions. The fast-evolving development and sophistication of technologies that drones combine (aerospace, robotics, satellites, artificial intelligence) have stimulated intensive debates about the need ...
Book club review: Savage Ecology - War and Geopolitics at the End of the World
Screenshot from book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFP2m8O2Ex8 Pardon me, I was dreaming; I forgot you are herewaiting for me to accept you again, tell you that you’re not dangerous.Alice Notley, Above the Leaders With the global security system implicated in just about every scenario of civilisational and species collapse, should it be ...
Book club review*: Savage Ecology - War and geopolitics at the end of the world
*An in-depth review from @SecDialogue by Jairus V. Grove. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 368pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-0484-4 Welcome, reader, to a new experience for the Security Dialogue blog. While we will continue to feature standard book reviews, in our book club reviews we present a novel kind of in-depth ...
June 2021
Book review: The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression
by A. Dirk Moses, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021, 598 pp. On March 23, 2021—just over ten years from the day the UN Security Council authorized the United States and NATO intervention in Libya—the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing on Samantha Power’s nomination to lead the ...
Book review: Unmanning: How Humans, Machines and Media Perform Drone Warfare
by Katherine Chandler, New Brunswick & Newark: Rutgers University Press, 2020. 190pp. ISBN: 1978809743 Imaginations of the possibility (and the terror) of drone strikes existed well before they were possible. Echoing science fiction work like H.G. Wells’ War in the Air, Nikola Tesla warned in 1921 of “Machines of destruction ...
Book review: Protecting Human Rights Defenders at Risk
edited by Alice M. Nah, London: Routledge, 2021. 212p. ISBN 9781138392618 ”‘Seguridad’ refers to all the conditions necessary to make human and political life flourish. These are conditions of dignity. But security [to the government] is reduced to a military or police perspective…. People have been sold the idea that ...
February 2021
Military drones beyond targeted killing: The case of Israel
The emergence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or “drones” as they are more popularly known, is one of the most widely discussed developments in contemporary security and military affairs.So far, the academic literature on drones has been heavily focused on what is usually known as “targeted killings” in the context ...
Negotiating Detention
In mid-October 2020, hundreds of Houthi rebels and pro-government fighters were freed inYemenin a prisoner swap agreed at UN-supervised talks. In September,Afghanistanresumed freeing Taliban militants whose release was a key part of the peace deal between the US and the Taliban in February. These recent events underscore how conflict-related imprisonment, ...
Book Review: The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare
by Craig Jones. Oxford University Press, p.400. Hardback: 9780198842927 The law of armed conflict is often imagined as a moderating force, limiting the violence that can be inflicted on the battlefield by banning certain practices, prohibiting certain targets and outlawing certain weapons. Although the law allows civilians to be killed ...
Book Review: Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence
by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran(eds),Universityof Minnesota Press, 2020,ISBN 978-1-5179-0748-8,352 pp. Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violenceis a volume of essays edited by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran, and addresses the contemporary conceptual constraints that surround academic research in remote warfare.In the words of the editors, this volume ...
Book review: Security as Politics: Beyond the State of Exception
by Andrew W. Neal, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019, 288pp., £80/$US104.00 (Hardback), ISBN: 9781474450928 “How do we know security when we see it?” was the question that remained in my head during the whole time I was reading this book. I went to the kitchen to grab a coffee and ...
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