Blog post archive

Wednesday, 24 Nov 2021
European Union-Belarus Border Crisis: Why the narrative of “hybrid warfare” is dangerous

The 2021 EU-Belarus border crisis was preceded by a rapid deterioration of the already strained European Union (EU)-Belarus relations, in most part due to the Ryanair 4978 incident and the concomitant wide-ranging sanctions imposed by the EU on the authoritarian government of the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has often been referred by the media ...

Thursday, 8 Jul 2021
After The bomb: The Securitization of the Norwegian Government Quarters 2011-2021

July 22, 2011, at 15.25, a bomb placed inside a white van exploded next to the H-bloc (‘Høyblokka’) where the prime minister’s office was located. Eight people were killed in the blast: most were government employees, and some were passing by. More than 200 people were injured. Additionally, the explosion ...

Monday, 1 Feb 2021
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 ...

Friday, 31 Jan 2020
Book review: Securitization and Desecuritization of FARC in Colombia

Başar Baysal, 2019.Securitization and Desecuritization of FARC in Colombia, Lexington Books. The study of illegal armed organizations is difficult. Data availability is limited, as is access to key actors. When conflicts end, therefore, scholars face the opportunity to trace processes, and unpack the black box of how illegal organizations work ...

Monday, 19 Nov 2018
Beyond the Police: Jerusalem’s Modular Security Provision

When we think about public security, we often think about the police, the military, or perhaps about border guards or the criminal courts. But security is often pursued in cooperation with a variety of public and private actors, enlisted by state security actors to reinforce their legal and operational capacities, ...

Monday, 15 Jan 2018
Confronting the Colonial- Even in Critical Studies

By Maria Eriksson Baaz and Judith Verweijen At a time when colonial revisionism is seemingly on the rise and articles calling for re-colonization are published even in renown critical journals (though clearly and comfortably not without controversy), turning a critical eye towards ourselves as ‘critical’ scholars might be seen as ...