Search

Human trafficking has recently become visible on the European agenda as a security problem, integrated in a continuum of organised crime, illegal migration, drug trafficking, and terrorism. This thesis unpacks the problematisation of human trafficking as security and attempts to rethink modes of unmaking security and disrupting its effects. Security practices have constitutive effects in terms of subjectivity and political effects in terms of the constitution of political community. The securitisation of trafficking in women entails practices that, for the purpose of governing the phenomenon, turn 'victims of trafficking' from suffering bodies into 'abject', risky others. Victims of trafficking are the locus of 'imputations of dangerousness', risky subjects who can engage in renewed migratory projects. Despite the depoliticising, inegalitarian, and exclusionary effects of security, political strategies that can unmake them are still lacking. This research proposes a politics of equality, liberty and universality, formulated as prescriptions against the state and enacted through forms of collective organisation. It draws on the work of Alain Badiou and Etienne Balibar to flesh out the implications of a politics of equality and universality in its relation to liberty and their disruption of practices of security. Equality and liberty suspend the practices of inequality and unfreedom that govern the situation of trafficking. A politics of equality and universality is formulated as the equality of work. Prostitution-as-work reconfigures the situation of trafficking, by making illegal migrant sex workers count where they had counted for nothing and changing forms of exploitation and abuse of victims in the margins of law from the perspective of work.

How did we end up in a world in which everything and everyone has already been targeted - computationally and algorithmically fused, and correlated, archived and modeled as a multidimensional digital twin? Guided by this question, this thesis is set up as an historical investigation of the conditions of possibility of the present, mapping the trajectories of how military targeting produce and operationalize the enemy and what the effects of these understandings are. Conceptualizing military targeting as a martial epistemology that makes worlds actionable the thesis moves beyond the literature on discursively produced enemy figures. Analyzing targeting through the historical transformations in statistical thought and practice, and the mathematical and computational technologies and techniques of data production, processing and modeling, the aim of the thesis is to illuminate how military targeting mobilizes and configures heterogenous discourses, technologies and practices at different historical junctures and how these assemblages in turn produce and operationalize the enemy, (re)construct environments and enable specific forms of warfare. The thesis thus extends the conceptualization of military targeting beyond recent scholarship exploring the sociotechnical production and conjunction of vision and violence while at the same time bring forward the burgeoning critical literature on war seeking to explore the apparatuses through which war is imagined, assembled and waged. Designed to traverse the scales between military imaginaries, epistemologies, configurations and cognitive operations, the thesis draws on a wide range of critical practice-relational theories and methodologies at the intersection of critical security and war studies, and science and technology studies. Specifically mobilizing the concepts of 'configuration' and 'cognitive assemblage' specific attention is paid to the different historical ways in which military imaginaries, humans, instruments and the environment are configured together to form ecologies of operations and how these in turn processes information. Empirically, the thesis maps the historical trajectories and epistemic transformations of US targeting configurations through four chapters from the interbellum years to the present. Each chapter explores how the complex practices and techniques of targeting translate and configure worlds of 'knowns' and 'unknowns' into enemy models. Historicizing targeting highlights the intimate relations between (knowledge) production and destruction, but also how enemies, operational environments and warfare emerge as relational effects of historically specific (re)configurations and their cognitive operations. Arguing that military targeting is fundamental to the ways in which enemies are understood and operational environments (re)constructed, the sociotechnical practices of targeting are shown to function as an important condition for the possibility of warfare. These martial epistemologies will be shown to continuously enact and configure the entire planet into the closed and self-referential worlds of targeting. Ultimately, the thesis highlights some of the acute ethico-political issues that accompany these contemporary (re)configurations of military targeting, through which war is (re)imagined, rationalized, justified, legitimized and waged.

This thesis's objectives are twofold. On the one hand it contributes to the literature on critical security studies by advancing an empirically-grounded narrative on security innovations, particularly the making of policing technologies, which questions the idea of neoliberal policy diffusion and accounts for the role of materiality. On the other hand, it explores the potentialities of different ontological perspectives and methods in the field of International Relations theory. By deploying the concepts of translation, mediation and controversies while focusing on the immanent properties and connections that hold socio-technical assemblages together, I offer different accounts for some of the basic dichotomies within mainstream IR theory, such as local and global, public and private, culture and nature. I address such objectives through the analysis of police innovations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in preparation for the FIFA World Cup (2014) and the Olympic Games (2016). In a short period, authorities and private entrepreneurs invested in variegated digital technologies which promised to enhance police efficiency and accountability, while also raising awareness among locals and tourists on the spatialisation of crime and insecurity. I carried out fieldwork with security professionals engaged in everyday operations in Rio's Integrated Centre for Command and Control (ICCC), and followed a Brazilian-based think tank which developed a crime prediction app ('CrimeRadar') to inform citizens on risk levels across the city. The thesis offers empirical insights into the transformation of security practices in Rio de Janeiro, and theoretical contributions to the literature on critical security studies and international political sociology, increasing the repertoire of critical methods and the analytical vocabulary for productive intervention. By understanding the power struggles that build technologies up and hold them together, it is also possible to delineate strategies to disrupt or hack them in our benefit. We can then move from critique to composition, from debunking to (re)assembling.

This dissertation investigates the recent transformations of security practice and arms industries in post-Cold War societies. Specifically, I analyse emerging actors and technologies positioned in the sociohistorical context of Sweden in the 90s and 00s, and how new threats and risks as well as new ideas for how to secure society became constructed and imposed in structures of so-called total defence; that is, in the strong historical traditions in Sweden of war preparedness and domestic arms production. This transforming field is not only heterogeneous in how it mobilises both public spokespersons and private companies from both the civil- and military domains, but it is also distinctively situated in the larger context of Europe and its security industry that has emerged in similar ways in recent years in line with the ongoing militarisation of Europe and strengthening of the EU's external borders and surveillance systems. Exploring these empirical issues, I draw on the works of Bourdieu and other critical thinkers and social theorists, and employ a perspective of field economies and symbolic power in order to offer a more profound reading of what is often imprecisely referred to as military-industrial complexes, and how these are changing in late modern societies. In the dissertation, I aim to render visible some key effects of these recent transformations of security and defence fields. For example, I show how Swedish actors, including spokespersons coming from the state and its bureaucracies, have begun cooperating and competing in a more directly transnational context, and how their professional struggles and stakes are increasingly located in, framed as, or disguised by R&D in the security area. The legal arrangement interlinking the fields of Swedish and US security practitioners, for example, is designed as a science and technology agreement but may just as well include counterterrorism cooperation, information sharing, and political opportunities. Moreover, I demonstrate how the major arms industry in Sweden has come to expand increasingly into "civil"- or "societal" security technologies, including products and services for surveillance and border control. These technologies, I argue, are both associated with or feeding into military production, and tend to become wielded socio-politically in controversial arms export contexts. Here, industrialists and spokespersons continue to exploit and reconstruct the historical Swedish nation-brand of being "innovators", "humanitarians", and somehow "neutral". The dissertation concludes that fields of security and defence, both in Sweden and elsewhere, are configured around resilient structures organised historically by the interests of military- and elite actors, but that they have indeed transformed to the effect that public-private security industries now follow dual logics and produce tools for controlling at once the frontiers and interiors of societies.

This thesis investigates the transnationalisation of British intelligence, in the context of intelligence cooperation with European partners in anti-terrorism matters. This inquiry puts forward the idea of a 'Europe of anti-terror intelligence cooperation' to challenge false beliefs and, in particular, two dominant representations of intelligence relationships. Despite the British opt-out from Justice and Home Affairs and ‘Brexit’, it disputes not only the assumption whereby Britain has an ambivalent position towards the European Union as a result of its ‘special relationship’ with the United States but it also debunks the myth of the unbreakable allegiance of British services to the American 'friend'. By contrast, it shows that alliances with European services have long been in development and have formed, over time, a space of relationships which is structured around specific stakes and modalities of action. The contribution of sociology, notably through Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts, is crucial since it breaks with the dominance of rational choice theory and functionalist approaches and puts the role of social actors and their daily 'ways of doing things’ at the core of the inquiry. It is, therefore, by carrying out an ontological and an epistemological rupture with previous studies that this project can shed light on the ‘Europeanness’ of British services.

Tragedy has played a prominent and active role in the construction of Western political imaginaries. For many thinkers working not only in International Relations but also in a host of other disciplines including philosophy, political theory and psychoanalysis, tragic drama offers a singular and compelling representation of humanity’s social, political, and/or ethical capacities and limitations. This thesis begins by establishing a genealogical understanding of tragedy as a discourse embedded within relations of power/knowledge. In so doing, it problematises the genre’s current privilege within IR theory, asking questions of the ways in which the discipline has framed debates about agency, subjectivity, power, and the politics of culture and performance. This thesis makes an original contribution to these debates by asking, conversely, what a comic sensibility might have to offer to IR. Theorising the comic as a performative ‘way of operating’ – as a diverse and indeterminate assemblage of subject-producing practices neither detached from mechanisms of power nor reducible to them – the thesis embarks upon this task by turning to the parasite, a stock character of ancient Greek comedy. Informed in part by the theory of relations outlined in Michel Serres’ The Parasite, it argues that this ambiguous and ambivalent figure demonstrates one way in which comic practices might operate productively and creatively within and with the fields in, by and through which political (non-)subjects are constituted. Moreover, in so doing, the parasite also supplements existing accounts of difference and otherness within post-structuralist IR theory by introducing an indeterminate ‘third’ element into the self/other, identity/difference dialectic. The second half of the thesis juxtaposes this ‘parasitic’ understanding of comic-political subjectivity with three sites at which comic practices can be seen to have been charged with a political purpose or function: cartoons drawn in French concentration camps during the Second World War; smallscale direct action concerned with the global HIV/AIDS crisis; and carnivalesque mass protest around the 2005 meeting of the G8. Acknowledging the practical and tactical limitations of the comic, the thesis nevertheless concludes by arguing for its value as a field of practice in which dissonant and transformative subjectivities can (potentially, and only ever provisionally) performatively be enacted.

The thesis focuses on non-alignment in the context of the Indian state in the years when Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister (1947-1964). The central argument of the thesis is that non-alignment can be theorized and studied as an approach to security, particularly the critique, discourse and practice of it. The opening chapters discuss this argument in detail – the first chapter is a review of the literature and the second chapter is an extensive discussion of the critique of the nation-state and the idea of the international within the conceptualization of non-alignment. These ideas are further investigated by discussing the Indian response to four international events – the Korean War, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution and the Congo Crisis. These events are studied in three chapters. The thesis is bookended by an introduction and a concluding chapter. The narrative uses material from six different archives in India, the UK and the US. As the events studied all took place in the 50s and 60s, the thesis has relied very heavily on historical analysis. The use of rare archival material aims to contribute to the writing of India’s diplomatic history (for instance, correspondence between Budapest and Delhi on the Hungarian Revolution, or the memoirs of India’s first Ambassador to the Congo and reports of the Indian representatives of the UN commissions during the Korean War). As all the chosen case studies are international events, the thesis contributes to the writing of India’s international history, India’s international relations and International Relations per se. The theoretical framework of the thesis has borrowed heavily from Critical Security Studies and also aims to contribute to that literature by bringing a non-Eurocentric viewpoint to it. The wider debates in the thesis also help redefine points of view on Indian foreign policy, particularly in respect to the significance and continued relevance of non-alignment to modern India.

This thesis uses a study of the police in Jordan and their management of common grievances to demonstrate that the police, even in an illiberal setting, can be central to the process of constructing hegemonic consent. Most existing political science critiques of police forces in the Middle East focus on their coercive and disciplinary powers, emphasizing their role in repressing and observing the citizenry of states perceived to lack legitimacy, or on their corruption and usurpation of judicial powers, perceived as a result of inadequate civil oversight. While this can be justified by regional trends of authoritarianism, it presents a distorted picture of state control. It also fails to address the importance of ‘low-policing’, where the police rely on alternative strategies of power to promote and realise social order, particularly in policing disputes between citizens. While dispute management in non-Western societies has long been of interest to legal anthropologists – largely due to the importance of societal actors in the process - it has been largely overlooked in contemporary police studies. Unlike orthodox criminological appraisals of crime control that render unproblematic the nature of state power, I contend that the manner in which offences are handled by the police is deeply political, defining the state’s character and moreover the social order within it. In this context, Gramscian hegemony – interpreted as a process - is a productive way of understanding how social order is produced. I bring my theory to life in Jordan, a tribal society whose police force balances its longstanding delegation of dispute-resolution to societal actors, with more recent requirements to intervene more intensively into citizen’s lives. By analysing the seemingly mundane practices involved in the management of common offences, I offer insights into how Jordan’s complex social order is constructed.