Introduction: Transnational assemblages and the production of security knowledges. New perspectives on security governance in, and on, conflict and post-conflict contexts

ABSTRACT

This special issue asks how governance orders and security knowledges are co-produced through transnational assemblages. It opens the black box of these assemblages by examining the challenges in bringing together the variety of everchanging interests, representations and positions held by the actors involved in them, and how these affect the making of security governance and the production of security knowledges. The contributions to this issue draw on a postcolonial security knowledge research agenda, and offer empirical cases of security assemblages that defy the traditional geographical and imaginary boundaries between North and South, the local and the international, and expert and experiential knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• assemblages
• knowledge production
• security governance
• postcolonial

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ‘Global forms’ are systems of governance and administration, regimes of ethics and values, technoscience, expert systems or standards that have a ‘global’ quality in the sense that they have ‘a distinctive capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations’ that they participate to reconstitute (Collier, 2014, p. 400).

2 McFarlane (2009, p. 562) who criticises Collier and Ong (2005) for implicitly making a distinction between forms as ‘global’ and assemblages as ‘local’ proposes to use the prefix ‘translocal’ as an ‘attempt to blur, if not bypass, the scalar distinction between local and global’ to analyse social movements. We prefer using ‘transnational’ as it reflects better the scale of analysis of the contributions.