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This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emotional security needs and fears of those being protected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically assesses the CIA's drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa'ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House's presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2001, border security policy between Canada and the US has morphed from “smart borders” to the present “beyond the border” (perimeter security) agreement resulting in the expansion of new techniques of border surveillance including pre-emptive profiling of travellers and biometric data sharing. In this paper, we argue that these border agreements have increasingly resulted in a changing experience of sovereign power for those crossing the border. This is demonstrated through a discussion of: the major border policies between Canada and the US since 11 September 2001, developed under the influence of US hegemony; how these policies perpetrate a generalised state of exception; and how these policies affect refugees, migrants, and citizens. Reading Agamben’s insights from a sociological perspective, we argue that the presumption of security-through-surveillance erodes border crossers’ human rights, and that some people – those from disadvantaged race/class backgrounds – are more affected than others by the implementation of the evolving border regime. We also emphasise the contingencies and unintended consequences of the ongoing projects. The conclusion offers brief comments on the consequences of these developments on Canadian identity and points out the directions for future research in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the export-import business of penal policies that accompanies the “war on transnational street gangs” between the United States and Central America. It argues that far from being a unidirectional export of punitive politics from the United States towards Central America, many of these punitive exports travel “back home”. This creates transnational punitive entanglements that contribute to the contingent convergence of punitive geopolitics and domestic politics in the guise of a transnational penal apparatus that integrates law enforcement agencies and military forces, securocratic epistemic communities and national political entrepreneurs into a functionally cohesive but decentred transnational security structure engaged in a multilayered punitive containment of transnational street gangs across the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The impacts of recent food, financial, and energy crises have reinvigorated a geopolitical enframing of global food security that makes foreign development assistance a primary component of national security strategies. This centres elite fears of hunger and underdevelopment and strongly shapes policies and strategies adopted in response. Geopolitical fears of hungry and food insecure populations are compounded by the politics of austerity and cuts to foreign aid budgets and social spending. This paper examines the geopolitics of food security, fear, and austerity as expressed in the rhetoric and strategies of major aid donor governments, especially the US and UK, and proposes an alternative geopolitics that builds from the affective dimensions of hunger, food insecurity, and vulnerability as experienced by the hungry and poor. The example of farmer suicides and agrarian political mobilisation in India demonstrates how this affective alternative geopolitics may be constructed and examined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Critical security scholars have argued that biometric identity technologies, databanking, digital surveillance, and risk analysis reveal not a blockaded boundary but a border that follows transboundary migrants as they move within and between national territories. Managed through risk-based technologies, this networked, contingent border respatialises inclusion and exclusion, forming a border that is potentially everywhere and nowhere in particular. At the same time, immigration scholars have shown how immigration authorities deploy policing, inspection, and identification practices both within and beyond territorial boundaries, making life increasingly uncertain for noncitizens. In the US, Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) authority to detain noncitizens has become a key spatial strategy in domestic counter-terrorism, interior immigration enforcement and border securitisation. Thus, transboundary migration and state responses to it trouble analytic distinctions between domestic and foreign policy, immigration and national security, the border and the interior. This paper builds on recent work in immigration geopolitics to analyse how detention, in particular, works to contain individual migrants and deter future migrants. Focusing on noncitizen family detention, this article situates US noncitizen detention in a broader milieu of pre-9/11 US immigration enforcement law and post-9/11 security practices. I then analyse how detention congeals a number of spatial strategies – remoteness, isolation, spatial ordering, inter-centre transfers, and criminalisation – that work to destabilise migrants' support networks. Modulated with digitised border and identity surveillance technologies, detention foregrounds the persistence of disciplinary tactics in risk-dominated security regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a political ecology approach to the study of borders through consideration of a lemon's travels in contemporary North American border space. Following discussion of recent work on the dynamic, multi-scalar, and process-based character of modern borders, I suggest that such critical approaches could be usefully augmented by drawing on ideas about socio-material networks advanced by Bruno Latour. By adopting a political ecology framework, border scholars would be able to consider more fully the materiality of borders and bordering processes. Through the example of the lemon, I demonstrate that in constructing the fruit as a particular socio-material artifact that embodies multiple threats to US national space, it and its carrier become implicated in the regulation of political-economic and geopolitical networks that are seemingly far removed from the object of concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush downplayed traditional 'realist' security concerns by defining America's goal as countering threats generated by the internal characteristics of Arab societies. Bush advanced a strategy of regional transformation based on regime change in Iraq and economic, social, and political reform across the Arab world. This strategy, however, failed to address the security interests of regional governments while generating insecurity for Arab societies. To explain these results, the article develops a framework for understanding the Middle East regional system that recognises the role of societal discourses of insecurity and the system's multipolar structure. The framework is used to suggest an alternative strategy for US Middle East policy. Rejecting both a renewed project of regional transformation and a return to neorealism, the paper outlines a strategy based on managing a multipolar, pluralist system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'War on Terror' has justified a whole new set of re-territorialisations of security and identity, also in the 'West'. In this paper, I highlight one particularly powerful aspect of the idea of the 'West under threat': one wedded to the idea of a demographic-reproductive menace. Such ideas are not only the prerogative of extremist fringes, for the two authors whose work is discussed in this piece are very much part of the mainstream: Samuel Huntington, whose latest book Who Are We? America's Great Debate focuses on the 'deconstruction' of American identity and the threat represented by hyper-fertile immigrant populations and Italian writer-journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose two most recent books have launched an offensive against the 'Islamic Reverse Crusade' that threatens to 'submerge and subjugate' Europe. Certainly, the intimations of a 'threat' to the West are in no way new, nor are they a unique product of the 'War on Terror'. What is new, however, is the force with which they are being articulated today and the ways in which they are entering into popular circulation, in both Europe and America. What is more, on both sides of the Atlantic, those raising the sound of alarm for 'The Death of the West' prescribe not only a re-affirmation of (Western) ideals, but also - and increasingly - a set of policies for the biological survival of the West. 'The Death of the West' is thus not only a parable of political and geopolitical decline, but also a morality play regarding real deaths and, especially, real births. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]