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Security (studies) and the limits of critique: why we should think through struggle

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 01:22 authored by Lara Montesinos ColemanLara Montesinos Coleman, Doerthe Rosenow
This paper addresses the political and epistemological stakes of knowledge production in post-structuralist Critical Security Studies. It opens a research agenda in which struggles against dominant regimes of power/knowledge are entry-points for analysis. Despite attempts to gain distance from the word ‘security’, through interrogation of wider practices and schemes of knowledge in which security practices are embedded, post-structuralist CSS too quickly reads security logics as determinative of modern/liberal forms of power and rule. At play is an unacknowledged ontological investment in ‘security’, structured by disciplinary commitments and policy discourse putatively critiqued. Through previous ethnographic research, we highlight how struggles over dispossession and oppression call the very frame of security into question, exposing violences inadmissible within that frame. Through the lens of security, the violence of wider strategies of containing and normalizing politics are rendered invisible, or a neutral backdrop against which security practices take place. Building on recent debates on critical security methods, we set out an agenda where struggle provokes an alternative mode of onto political investment in critical examination of power and order.

Funding

Discipline, dissent and dispossession; G1216; INDEPENDENT SOCIAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Critical Studies on Security

ISSN

2162-4887

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

2

Volume

4

Page range

202-220

Department affiliated with

  • International Relations Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2016-05-24

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-11-18

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-05-24

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