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As policing and threats become increasingly transnational and plural, practices of managing risk increasingly use technologies that promise certainty. Drawing on a study of the creation of a new border detection device, and ideas from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that devices deployed as objective tools for risk assessment and management in the policing of borders, and the laboratories that develop them, are not simply linear applications of scientific knowledge to control risk but rather are crucial sites in which multiple and contending conceptions and practices of risk converge. Following the interactions of scientists, border guards, policing agents and the EU shows how an official discourse of risk, a scientific conception and experiential working knowledge of risk all 'danced' together in the development of a portable detection device. In the process experiential/contextual and professional knowledge of risk were often privileged over rationalistic and statistically based risk assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how a discourse of crime and justice is beginning to play a significant role in justifying international military operations. It suggests that although the coupling of war with crime and justice is not a new phenomenon, its present manifestations invite careful consideration of the connection between crime and political theory. It starts by reviewing the notion of sovereignty to look then at the history of the criminalisation of war and the emergence of new norms to constrain sovereign states. In this context, it examines the three ways in which military force has recently been authorised: in Iraq, in Libya and through drones in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. It argues the contemporary coupling of military technology with notions of crime and justice allows the reiteration of the perpetration of crimes by the powerful and the representation of violence as pertaining to specific dangerous populations in the space of the international. It further suggests that this authorises new architectures of authority, fundamentally based on military power as a source of social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]