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The National Security League was an elite private lobbying group in the World War I preparedness movement in the United States. Its educational wing was a group consisting mostly of college professors called the Committee on Patriotism through Education, which sought to use education to promote a militaristic brand of patriotism. This paper adds to our knowledge of the geopolitics of the period by critically reviewing the Committee's propaganda efforts, as organized into its Patriotism through Education Series. More importantly, this paper theorizes this propaganda by engaging with two literatures that seldom cross paths: emerging interest in intimacy-geopolitics and Gramsci's concept of war of position. Intimacy-geopolitics is used to highlight the performative edge of war propaganda, as it directs desire and affect to toward geopolitical visions which accord with elite visions of the good life. Intimacy-geopolitics as an analytical framework helps connect affect and war in a way that avoids scalar hierarchies of violence. The Committee deliberately sought to direct emotion toward militaristic ends, and saw teachers as foot soldiers in that effort. Understanding how war propaganda works through affect, that is, how it positions country as an object of affection, also qualifies and dovetails with an understanding of war propaganda as elemental to the Gramscian war of position. Quite apart from accusations of war-profiteering, elite manipulation of desire and affect toward the war effort also worked to obfuscate class interest in favor of gender and other social roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper considers a key academic support of US geopolitics overseas, which I term the 'military-strategic studies complex'. The paper begins by outlining the development of Strategic Studies in the US since the early 1980s. It then uses the example of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments to work through a discussion of the palpable agency of the military-strategic studies complex in advancing a dual military-economic securitization strategy for what it calls the contemporary American 'leasehold empire'. This strategy is focused especially on the Persian Gulf and involves both an enduring US military presence and long-term neoliberal designs for the region. Finally, consideration is given to alternative military-strategic visions before attention is turned to the task of Geography in countering US geopolitical and geoeconomic scriptings of the Middle East, all expedited under a vernacular of 'national security'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

When US military commanders refer today to the 'long war', they could more instructively refer to the 'long war of securitization', involving both practices of war and reconstruction that have always been based on a therapeutic logic of preemption and an endgame of protection from global economic risk. Since the early 1980s, the centrepiece of US foreign policy has been the securitization of the Persian Gulf region, with the newly created United States Central Command (CENTCOM) given the task of effecting a grand strategy that has subsequently been consistently based on two interrelated tactics: first, the discursive identification and positing of the Persian Gulf as a precarious yet pivotal geoeconomic space, essential to US and global economic health; and second, the enactment of a dual military-economic securitization strategy to secure, patrol and regulate designated 'vital interests' in the region. With the rhetorical power of 'risk management' perhaps more palpable today than ever, this paper reflects on the neoliberal discourses of 'risk' and 'regulation' that sustain a 'long war' in which the perennial potentiality of a volatile global political economy necessitates securitization by US military force. [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]

This article explores the cinematic portrayals of the amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne. Bourne's odyssey is plotted against a number of themes—gender, dangerous places, and apparently banal things, such as paper files. It provokes interesting questions about how a “known unknown” is addressed by national security managers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technologies that deploy algorithmic calculation are becoming ubiquitous to the homeland securitization of the war on terror. From the surveillance networks of the city subway to the biometric identifiers of new forms of border control, the possibility to identify “association rules” between people, places, objects and events has brought the logic of pre-emption into the most mundane and prosaic spaces. Yet, it is not the case that the turn to algorithmic calculation simply militarizes society, nor even that we are witnessing strictly a commercialization of security. Rather, algorithmic war is one form of Foucault's sense of a “continuation of war by other means”, where the war-like architectures of self/other, here/there, safe/risky, normal/suspicious are played out in the politics of daily life. This paper explores the situated interplay of algorithmic practices across commercial, security, and military spheres, revealing the violent geographies that are concealed in the glossy techno-science of algorithmic calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since September 11, many cities have undergone significant changes in both morphology and management as a result of the greater perceived risk of terrorist attack. Such changes have often sought to territorialise the city through the redesign of space and the modernisation of management systems. More recently, such 'resilience' planning is becoming increasingly focused upon how the general public can assist this securitisation process by becoming better prepared and more responsible for their personal risk management. To illustrate these processes, a case study of Manchester, UK, between 1996 and 2006 will be used to indicate how these operational changes are having impacts on the rebordering of the city and upon broader issues of citizenship. The paper also questions how greater public acceptability can be achieved within urban security strategies. [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]

Africa is a region of renewed interest for American foreign-policy elites, both in and out of government. The purpose of this paper is twofold: to explore American foreign-policy elites' assessments of Africa before and after 11 September 2001, and to analyze how these assessments have been translated into American foreign policy toward Africa. The analysis is based on a review of government, think-tank, and other publications and transcripts associated with American foreign-policy elites, including the journal Foreign Affairs. Special focus is given to the strategic ranking and assessment of foreign countries within a global geopolitical code, or mental map of priority areas for U. S. military, economic, and diplomatic resources and engagement. American foreign-policy elites' assessments of Africa have shifted substantially since the 1990s, when the continent was largely regarded as quite marginal to American interests. Since late 2001, concerns about failed and failing states have emerged as a central theme in American foreign-policy elites' assessment of Africa and other parts of the developing world. Concerns about the nexus of transnational Islamist terrorism and failing states have prompted many such elites to call for a grand American geopolitical program of nation-building and military decentralization. To date, the United States has taken only small steps to align its foreign policy toward Africa. Significant tensions and contradictions limiting the execution of a new grand strategy remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]