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Securitization theory has paid extensive attention to transnational issues, actors, and processes. Surprisingly, however, only little attention has been paid to the securitization of diaspora communities, defined as overseas citizens or co-nationals abroad. This article fills this gap by developing an analytical framework to study the securitization of diasporas, focusing on three discursive formations: diasporas as threatening actors, as objects under threat, or as security resources. Building upon the recent literature on state–diaspora engagement and drawing on an analysis of Israeli elite discourse (from 1948 to 2022), this article demonstrates how the securitization of diasporas serves as a discursive mechanism that naturalizes and legitimizes extra-territorial policies towards Jews abroad. Thus, the article complements structural and rational explanations of state–diaspora engagement by examining the intersubjective process that endows diaspora policymaking with meaning. Against the backdrop of extensive securitization scholarship that focuses on attempts to keep "foreigners" out, this article shows how securitization justifies bringing certain people in or governing their national identity abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the discursive politics of intimate partner violence during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Israel. It asks how, despite greater awareness and recognition, intimate violence disappeared from the mindset of those managing the pandemic, even as it soars. The analysis traces the conditions that enable the dialectic of presence–disappearance, by reading the ideological prescriptions in policy papers, parliamentary debates, court appeals, and media debates. I argue that disregard of intimate violence is made possible by the idealization of home and family as spaces of security and protection, coupled with the mobilization of militaristic measures and discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary volunteering is often considered a neoliberal phenomenon that has become prevalent in an era of post-national sentiments and individualism. Although it is frequently depicted as non-political, it may serve the promotion of political agendas, such as neo-nationalism, outside the traditional frame of the state and its institutions. This becomes particularly salient when non-governmental organizations practice volunteering in ways that undermine the state's monopoly in the realms of security and public order. We conceptualize this tendency as securitized volunteering – instances of volunteering work that is promoted by, in this case non-state, organizations who are involved in voluntary security activities that are violent (or potentially violent). Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Israeli organization HaShomer HaChadash (The New Guard), this article demonstrates how agricultural and security volunteering is used to advance a neo-nationalist agenda that circumvents the state, and at the same time maintains an apolitical stance. This is achieved through the implementation of two corresponding forms of securitized volunteering – civilianization of security volunteerism and securitization of civilian volunteerism. Blurring the distinction between both forms enables the organization to attract supporters and volunteers that come from various social sectors and to reinforce its seemingly apolitical position and nationalist agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical prison studies have demonstrated how states use imprisonment and detention not only to punish individuals, but also to quell dissent and disrupt opposition movements. In protracted conflicts, however, the use of mass incarceration and unlawful detention often backfires on states as politically motivated prisoners exert their relevance by making imprisonment itself a central issue in the wider conflicts. Rather than retreating to the margins, prisoners have taken back prison spaces as loci of resistance, forcing both state authorities and their own external parties to engage with them seriously as political actors. This subversion of the prison space is not automatic, however; as this article demonstrates, prisoners have exerted the most influence on both authorities and their own factions when they have combined pragmatism and radicalism through multilevel strategies such as establishing praxes for self-education and organizing; using everyday non-compliance to challenge prison administrators; and occasionally, engaging in hunger strikes that exert boomerang pressure from external factions and solidarity networks on state authorities. Drawing from the case studies of Israel–Palestine, Northern Ireland and South Africa, this research shows how these radically pragmatic tactics create a 'trialectic' interaction between prisoners, state authorities and external networks, forcing direct and indirect negotiations regarding prisoners' rights, and, at times, influencing broader conflict dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes Judith T. Irvine's insights about the indeterminacy of participant roles and interpretive frameworks to explore how the increased use of social media in journalism leads to new quandaries for political actors. The dialogics of distributing or amalgamating participant roles provide for a particularly tricky domain of maneuver for journalists in India and Israel, where rightwing leaders seek to control news that disseminates rapidly on the currents of social media. Journalists have long sought to avoid becoming the story themselves, as part of claiming liberal positions that distinguish the reported events from their representation. It considers the current attempt to clamp‐down on social media use by journalists as a securitization of communication, where the very journalistic utterance is used by ruling politicians to make the journalist, or potentially the news media more generally, into a threat to public security. However, even such policing can be too slow. This article thus also considers how outraged publics become an important aspect of policing social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study emphasizes the place that cognitive processes rather than objective concerns have in ratification of multilateral treaties. We argue that secondary securitization by non-security experts hinders treaty ratification. When security is at stake, the potential costs of undesired action by the treaty's IO are deemed higher, risk-aversion increases, and asymmetry among the member states' policy perceptions is greater. Thus, our secondary securitization model improves over existing explanations of multilateral treaty ratification by assuming that national selfishness drives treaty (non)ratification, but not necessarily in a rational way. We support our argument with survival analysis regarding the ratification process in Israel of 243 treaties, based on documents retrieved from official archives, and controlling for a variety of competing explanations. We break securitization into objective and subjective components and correct for the possibility of undocumented acts of securitization. Our results are robust to all this. We follow with discourse and content analysis of official discussions of three human rights treaties (ICCPR, ICESCR, and CEDAW). We innovate theoretically by distinguishing secondary from primary securitization, and by combining Securitization and Principal-Agent theories. We believe our results travel well for other countries in which security concerns overshadow aspect of civilian life, and IOs are regarded with suspicion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the securitization of delegitimization as a national security threat in Israel. The article contains three elements. First, theoretically, it analyzes legitimacy as a national security asset and delegitimization as a risk to ontological security. Second, it traces the Israeli response to delegitimization, providing an empirically rich account of this approach. Finally, it seeks to provide an assessment, albeit preliminary, of the effectiveness of the Israeli response. It concludes by discussing policy implications, emphasizing the benefits and counterproductive outcomes of an otherwise successful securitization process. Although Israel has had success curbing delegitimization with regard to political elites at the state level, it continues to lose ground with both the grassroots and Western liberal audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Israeli law obliges the construction of bomb shelters as integrated rooms within every residential unit throughout the country. Based on 12 months of fieldwork and extensive interviews with both Jewish–Israeli and Arab–Palestinian citizens of Israel, we argue that the mundane presence and use of these everyday-cum-security spaces has produced a new civilian sensibility towards securitization, which we call ‘routinergency’: the naturalization of security emergency as intrinsic to the flow of routine life. We demonstrate that while the privatization of domestic securitization affords reliable protection to every citizen, routinergency also excludes Arab–Palestinians from the ethnonational boundaries that still inform the constitution of collective identities in Israel. Yet, as embodied practice, routinergency also enables access to a universal form of citizenship in Israel, which is premised on socioeconomic criticism of Zionist discourse. We use the topological metaphor of a Mobius strip to discuss how mamad rooms accentuate the contemporary tension in Israel between these ethnonational and neoliberal vectors of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines rumour as a distinct type of speech act and makes a case for engaging with the spaces within which rumours are deployed and circulated in practice. Critiquing the rigid linguistic focus on speech acts within prevailing securitization theories, it follows insights from the fields of political geography and anthropology in order to incorporate voices from the margins more fully into its analysis of threat construction. Examining the local deployment and circulation of rumours in religiously mixed Arab localities in Israel, it argues that the perlocutionary force of rumour not only is rooted in local security and policing arrangements but reveals a spatialization of violence that is particular to the margins. In so doing, the article seeks to contribute to a broadening of the research agenda on the social construction of threat that would not only bring ‘security have-nots’ to the centre of its analysis but draw attention to the margins as a particular type of security space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the phenomenon of minoritarian regimes in the Middle East, focusing on Bahrain, Syria and Israel/Palestine. It considers, in each, how minority rule was established, the mechanisms through which it is maintained, and the means through which it is legitimated. Although these regimes are not typically analyzed as a category, they have important features in common. In all three, the state's political and security institutions are controlled by members of an ethnic/religious group that is a numerical minority in the country, at the expense of a majority group with a competing claim to indigeneity. While the legal and political mechanisms that these regimes use to restrict access to power vary, they employ similar strategies for legitimating minority rule, presenting democracy as a threat not only to the regime's survival, but also to the security of the group whose interests it claims to represent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This short comment on Loïc Wacquant's ‘Marginality, Ethnicity, and Penality’ begins by highlighting three of Wacquant's most important interventions. It then extends the analysis by drawing on research about urban marginality in South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Whereas Wacquant focuses on the state response to urban marginality, I suggest that it is important to look beyond the state to consider how other actors have responded to the growth of precarious populations. Specifically, I point out that private security companies and residents' associations are at the forefront of efforts to police poor black South Africans, while an imperial network of security forces polices the Palestinian precariat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to demonstrate how discriminatory laws, passed in Israel since the eruption of the second intifada, are part of an ongoing securitization process of the Palestinian minority in Israel. These discriminatory laws serve as part of a security practice, employed by political elites that seek to represent threats to the hegemony of the Jewish identity as existential to national security. In doing so, the Israeli authorities advance a national security policy that perpetuates the perceived threat posed to the state by the Palestinian minority. The analysis focuses on discriminatory legislation passed between 2000 and 2012 by the Israeli Knesset and the political attitudes of the Israeli public before and after the second intifada to uncover the ways in which political actors and audiences negotiate the meaning of security in Israel. Securitization theory helps explain why desecuritization of the minority is highly unlikely even in the event that the Israeli–Palestinian conflict will be resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards the end of 2012, a group of Israeli settlers and right-wing activists attacked an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base on the West Bank. IDF soldiers and members of the Israeli Knesset had provided information to the attackers, who adopted a ‘bring it on’ tone that commentators described as echoing ‘civil war’. As the occupation blurs the categories of inside/outside, what we are witnessing is a challenge to the traditional distinction between politics and war. Accordingly, we are moved to think in terms of the distribution and variable intensities of violence, rather than to accept simple debates about either the absence or presence of war or the monopoly of violence. This article seeks to examine the evolving relationship between the state and society in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring through an investigation of the relationship between neoliberalism and sovereign violence. It argues that ‘price tag’ actions perpetrated in the Occupied Territories and Israel are the effect of a neoliberal organization of power characterized by a form of governing by non-intervention, where the abandonment of certain parts of society produces the desired containment of elements considered undesirable to the body politic. This article challenges Weber’s theory of state sovereignty as the monopoly of legitimate state violence, arguing instead that state apparatuses may in fact ‘outsource’ violence. We can understand this shift in the mode of operation of sovereignty by theorizing ‘society’ as the effect of warlike relations whereby particular tactics and strategies are employed as a way of organizing and policing forms of life necessary for the continuation of a particular body politic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Turkish foreign policy has recently undergone remarkable changes, and these changes have led to a considerable degree of foreign policy activism, most notably in the Middle East, which has never been seen throughout the history of the Turkish Republic. It is unquestionable that Turkey's activism in the Middle East increased the country's power in the Arab-Muslim political circles but also caused deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations. Although there has been a consensus on relating the changes in Turkish foreign policy towards the Middle East with the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) leading echelons, to date only a few studies attempted to incorporate a particular theoretical approach to explain this agency based shift. This paper argues that role theory can be incorporated into the theory of securitization and it can be used as a conceptual tool for decoding Turkey's strained relations with Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long occupied a prominent place on the foreign agenda of the European Union (EU). Over the past 40 years, the member states of the EU have defined with increasingly coherence their approach to the resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a commitment to Israel's right to live in peace and security and support of the Palestinians to national self-determination. At the same time, European discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shifted as its own internal needs and strategic concerns have changed. This changing narrative has impacted critically on the policy instruments and approach adopted by the EU to the conflict. Through an analysis of European statements and speeches, this article argues that European discourse in the 1980s and 1990s was underscored by a normative, justice-based framing. The collapse of peace process in 2000 has led to a noticeable securitization of European discourse on the conflict, one now marked by a growing sense of 'risk, danger, and urgency' and a fear that the conflict has begun to impact negatively on its domestic stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National security conception or securitization theory frames threats and conceptualizes the responses towards them. But in many cases, and especially in the Israeli context, there is a tendency to blur the nature and essence of different threats; security threats become strategic threats and then existential threats. In the Israeli context, because the broad concept of security is perceived, in most cases, as equivalent to military security, the meaning of the strategic threat will be framed, mostly, militarily, derived from military thought. The article examines the nature of existential threats in the Israeli context and seeks to find the implications of securitization theory in this regard by analyzing the unique role of the military establishment and the influence of the military thought on strategic thought in Israel. The article also deals with the centrality of 'military wisdom' in the Israeli ethos and the sense of insecurity embedded in the Israeli narrative that leads to an 'intellectual symbiosis' between the political and the military echelons and finds this phenomenon as one of the major explanations for the influence of the military establishment on defining the nature of security threats as well as on the crucial decision to launch wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the past few decades, Israel has developed a set of legal, criminal justice and other law enforcement initiatives under the broad category of 'counter-terrorism policy'. This policy attempts both to separate and manage more effectively a group of suspected and accused terrorists. This article utilizes the New Penology perspective to trace the ways in which notions of risk and dangerousness are embedded in the counterterrorism discourse and practices developed in Israel. Additionally, this article analyzes various initiatives and, in particular, laws and the institutional mechanism that administrate the management of risk posed by terrorist groups. Our analysis reveals how such initiatives and their enforcement are legitimized and grounded in a single discourse embedded with the socially and politically constructed notions of 'dangerousness', 'risk assessment' and 'security'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]