Cutting off the King’s head: security and normative order beyond the state

Abstract

Central to the ‘liberal political tradition’ is the legitimacy of violence enacted by the state. While, since the Cold War, the horizons of security have broadened beyond the national boundaries of states, the sovereign state acting as the principal security agent remains the central tenet of the modern world order. Yet in much of the contemporary world, if the provision of security were ever the sole preserve of states this is no longer the case. This article, and the others gathered here that it acts as a preamble to, argue that there is a pressing need for greater comprehension of the complexities and dynamics of power relations through which security and justice are enacted. It briefly considers other conceptual and theoretical frameworks better suited to model these relations in ways that do not proceed simply from normative, global assumptions as to the forms that these relations should take. It concludes by stressing the necessity for grounded, empirical study of the everyday practices of security arrangements and actors in the contemporary world.

Keywords:

• Security
• hybridity
• assemblage
• securitisation
• state violence
• conflict
• justice

Introduction

Inasmuch as an era can be characterised by epochal modes of description, it seems fair to say that we currently live in an ‘age of security’.¹ It is an era in which people and populations are polarised by the threat of terror, civil liberties are suspended and torture, assassination and invasion, in flagrant contravention of international law, are justified by governments on the basis of the need to secure the safety of states and ensure global stability. The world, it would seem, has never been such an insecure place. Yet, while current concerns with security are often traced to the momentous events of 11 September 2001, as Goldstein notes, the ‘global obsession with security […] considerably predates that moment’.² Indeed, the very basis on which nation states, the building blocks of the modern international order, are predicated is intimately related to notions of insecurity, and the capacity to enact sovereign order in the interests of protecting and safeguarding citizens.

In Leviathan, published originally in 1651, Hobbes stresses the necessity of curtailing the natural human proclivity to violence, and that in the interest of common peace and safety, citizens should cede the right to use force to the holders of sovereign authority. Hobbes chose the metaphorical image of the biblical sea monster, the Leviathan, as representative of sovereign power. To submit to the authority of Leviathan was to recognise its terrible potential for violence, but also to accept that the alternative to sovereign rule was a ‘time of war, where every man is enemy to every man’, and subject to ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.³ The role of the sovereign was thus to protect and secure peace, to wield the ‘sword of justice’ to guard against domestic threats, and wield the ‘sword of war’ against threats from without.⁴ As Hobbes emphatically asserts, ‘all the duties of rulers are contained in this sentence, the safety of the people is the supreme law’.⁵ It is the claims of those that profess to act on behalf of the ‘people’ to ensure they remain ‘safe’ that are the concern of the contributors to this special issue.

At the heart of Hobbes’ absolutist vision of Leviathan and his ‘shock and awe’ approach to government is the fundamental dilemma of the infringement of civil liberty—the right to protect oneself—for the sake of preserving the common peace. The authority of the state thus flows from fear and insecurity, a theme that, as Sarat and Culbert note, continues in later renditions of the violent relations of states to their citizenry. The legitimacy of violence enacted by the state remains central to the ‘liberal political tradition’, and a key characteristic of the modern world order in which the installation or preservation of the rule of law is a defining feature of the sovereign state as the principal security agent.⁶ International recognition of domestic authority by other governments adheres to such models, and assumes a normative aspect in which sovereignty is presumed to reside in the state alone, and which then becomes the necessary condition of the outward agency of states⁷ and their responsibility to protect their citizenry.⁸

These state responsibilities have in the last decade or so been at the heart of a growing humanitarianism evident in matters of foreign policy. That is, a shift from violence meted upon people in the name of national and global security, to efforts to secure individuals and communities from ‘fear’ or ‘want’ in the name of ‘human security’.⁹ Threats to human security are conceived broadly, and range from war and genocide to natural disasters, famine and flood.¹⁰ The human security approach extends global values and rights to all, regardless of race, religion or creed, and in this sense ‘everyone is, in effect, a citizen’.¹¹ Security and development agendas have thus converged as aspects of liberal global governance,¹² in which the rule of law, justice, human rights and market reform are critical components of efforts to promote peace, stability and order.¹³ Yet as the articles in this volume show, the complex networks of human interaction through which security is enacted often overflow categories such as ‘state’ or ‘non-state’ and ‘public’ or ‘private’, and operate in accordance with principles and values at odds with the ideals of liberal governance.

While the authors come from different disciplinary backgrounds, and employ various methodological approaches and theoretical paradigms, they share common ground in their commitment to understanding security not as an end in itself. Rather, their concerns are with the cultural production of threat and insecurity, and the political, social and economic effects that can be traced to the ways in which ‘securityscapes’ are constituted.¹⁴ Security is then analysed not only in terms of political economy, but as a field of action in which the focus is upon ‘grounded social interactions and relations’,¹⁵ and which highlight the difficulty of thinking in terms of categories such as ‘state’ and ‘non-state’. All of the articles individually highlight the fluidity between these two analytical categories, and show the difficulties of demanding clear distinctions between the two—as law and governance regimes do—when mobilised for specific needs and purposes in the context of local settings. As Scheye notes, Western notions of a clear separation of powers, the monopoly of violence, clearly defined roles of security providers, civil society and the rule of law are not easily transferable or even appropriate in contexts in which multiple actors, state as well as others, provide justice and security.¹⁶

There is a pressing need for greater comprehension of the complexities and dynamics of power relations through which security and justice are enacted, and, we argue, for conceptual and theoretical frameworks able to model these relations in ways that do not proceed simply from normative, global assumptions as to the forms that these relations should take. This entails recognition of the plurality of the range of institutions that promote security,¹⁷ and moving away from the centrality of the state, indeed of the state as a particular kind of political form, in order to think more reflexively about the relevance of forms of sociality, cultural milieu and political context in the consideration of security as an object of analysis. The contributors to this volume, practitioners from the fields of political science, social anthropology and conflict studies, in various ways speak to this need for a more nuanced analysis of security. They examine articulations of security—the way it is conceptualised, enacted and politically configured—in a variety of social, cultural and historical settings. The empirically rich case studies they present here underline the value of locating the study of a global phenomenon such as security at a local level, and highlight divergence, convergence and application through local needs, power relations, politics and cultures. That is, not simply to assume correspondence between ostensibly similar articulations of security and its referent objects at different levels of political scale, the international, national and local. But rather, to focus upon the practice of security without begging the question as to who or what should be secured by whom.

The study of security

While the study and analysis of security has been most conspicuous in the disciplines of political science and international studies, anthropology has more recently joined the fray.¹⁸ Goldstein argues for sustained anthropological engagement with security, and the value of ‘a broader comparative ethnography […] that would place security at the centre of global society and its contemporary problematics, revealing the important ways in which “security” in its many forms is operative in the daily lives and communities of the people with whom anthropologists work’.¹⁹ Concerns with the narrowness of notions of security, including its temporal specificity in ‘liberal political cosmology’ also exercise Pedersen and Holbraad, who stress the need for the cross-cultural study of security, and the refashioning of the conceptual tools necessary for the purposes of doing so.²⁰ Similarly, calls for more empirically grounded studies are to be heard from the field of security studies, driven by concerns over the lack of a ‘convincing framework for understanding either the politics of security or the ethics of security […] in a range of social, historical and political contexts’.²¹

In response to these calls, the contributors to this volume address the need for a more nuanced analysis of security as a decentred and distinctly contextualised practice, and to empirically ground analysis of social and political forms constituted through exclusionary security practices. The collective aim of the articles gathered here is to examine the normative frameworks in which those that exercise violence come to do so under the rubric of security. As such, the emphasis is less upon what security is, and more upon what security does, and what this might imply about political formations as they manifest in the everyday lives of citizens. How do ideas about security enter public consciousness, come to define policy and shape the forms that power and authority take in the contemporary world? Who defines who or what is ‘secured’? Why and for whom are security actors considered as ‘legitimate’ security actors, and others not? To what extent are actors linked to the state formally or informally (permitted, sponsored, assisted, delegated)? In what ways does the valorisation of specific qualities or attributes of actors work to legitimate or justify their actions? How do social constructions such as gender and class figure in the articulation of forms of security? These questions framed the thoughts of contributors in their consideration of the ways that security—and insecurity—transpires in the lives of the people they represent here.

Security as a relational phenomenon

The notion of security itself as a ‘desirable existential state’—that of being safe and secure²²—belies the degree to which it is a contingent term, the meaning of which is far from stable across cultures and social forms.²³ As a basic assumption, the provision of security entails a known, imminent potential for force employed in the interests of preserving the safety or interests of a community, object or resource. Working to secure someone or something from threat serves to demarcate a field in which an essential, political distinction is made between who is the ‘same’ and who is ‘other’, or, as Burke notes, between ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.²⁴ Security defines the boundaries of belonging, and as such is a contested, and often lethal, ordering of social reality. Whether defined exclusively in terms of the particular claims of ethnic or national identity, or inclusively in line with the broader associations of humanitarian ideals, the discourses and practices of security can be seen as a register of political identity. While the political subjectivities generated through this ordering entail some form of coercive capacity, it also entails the recognition, or denial, of the authority of those actors that claim to provide security on behalf of any given group or community.

Acting to provide security, whether underwritten by the rule of law, customary rights and practice or any other legitimising discourse, and driven by political exigency, communal desire or commercial interest, in this sense constitutes a public claim to authority.²⁵ Such claims to authority—whether originating from ‘state’ or ‘non state’ actors—are negotiated, contested and, importantly, should not be seen merely as indicative of the limits or boundaries of the centralised authority of the state.²⁶ Rather, we would suggest, in exploring the production and reproduction of security regimes, there is a need to collapse the analytical distinction between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’.²⁷ That is, not to assume the presence of the state as a structural principle or primary point of reference. The problem, however, remains that much of the conceptual framing of state-building and security relations is shot through with an implicit understanding of state/society relations as distinct domains, and conceptions of legitimate authority and sovereign power that ‘condition the intelligibility of the state as a distinct species of political life’.²⁸

As Spyer cautions, there are ‘epistemological risks’ involved in employing any analytical framework that draws conceptually on ‘the terms used to describe the aims of government’.²⁹ These risks are especially poignant with the use of such implicitly normative terms such as security that, we would argue, require an analytical framework sensitive to the ontological construction of a term and its referents.³⁰ Over the last decade or so in the social sciences efforts have been made to overcome the strictures of conceptual models rooted in nineteenth-century political imaginaries of social reality centred upon the nation state.³¹ Attempts to capture the fluid realities of a globalised and complex modernity have given rise to new theoretical framings stressing the emergent and heterogeneous nature of social realities.³² Work on security governance has benefitted from this analytical shift of focus, employing notions such as ‘global security assemblages’ to make sense of new configurations of security governance that transcend national boundaries;³³ or analysing security governance in terms of ‘hybridity’ in order to move beyond simple state/non-state binaries in the analysis of complex networks of actors working in security spaces.³⁴

Analysts working on the everyday politics through which security is contested and negotiated have tended to find more traction in the notion of hybridity than assemblage. For example, Willems and van der Borgh (this volume) aptly demonstrate the value of thinking in terms of hybrid political orders. Doing so allows them to elucidate ways in which the authority of the state in South Sudan is mediated through the contestation of security, rather than thinking simply in terms of the failure of the state to enact its authority.³⁵ The advantage of higher-level theoretical constructs such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘assemblage’ is that they nudge the analytical purview away from the discursive configuration of domains of knowledge, with an emphasis on meaning as the primary object of enquiry, towards relations between entities. That is, away from what social entities as internally coherent, substantive units ‘are’, to the ‘interactive and mutually conditioning ways in which entities come into existence’.³⁶ These frameworks grant better perspective on the realties of security provision in much of the contemporary world, in which forms of legitimacy, types of authority, moral and legal accountability are ambiguous, overlapping and contested. They thus go some way to counter the admonition of security configurations not easily rendered to Euro-American political imaginaries and categorical distinctions between private and public domains, state and civil society, and so on.

Securitisation and meaning

Treating security as a relational entity entails embracing the ontological instability of the term itself, and requires heightened sensitivity to the ways in which it affects its own referent.³⁷ With regard to the designation of threat and insecurity, the formative effects of language are recognised in a dominant theoretical paradigm in security studies, securitisation theory. Securitisation refers to the discursive construction of threat as a means of legitimating extraordinary measures justified through the invocation of security. In the sense of the term as originally deployed by the Copenhagen School, securitisation refers to an illocutionary speech act. That is, the act of declaring a referent object as being under threat, of speaking of a security issue, has effect in the world—‘by labelling something a security issue it becomes one’.³⁸ However, the theoretical rendering of security as an emergent, complex and fluid set of relationships, in our understanding as an assemblage, requires that language be treated as only one aspect of the overall puzzle, and not be afforded primacy in analysis.³⁹ Thus illocution—the meaning being conveyed by the securitisation of a referent object—must be considered in relation to other elements or components of a security assemblage, and not thought of as being a constitutive force in its own right.⁴⁰ Similar concerns with the securitisation paradigm have recently been voiced from within security studies. There is clearly a need to consider securitisation more broadly, in ways other than only a discursive construction of threat.⁴¹

Anthropological engagement with the notion of securitisation has included recent work by Holbraad and Pedersen, who sympathise with the conceptual aims of the notion as an attempt to attend to ‘different forms (and opposed to the different contents) of the political’.⁴² Securitisation’s strength as a theoretical paradigm, they suggest, is that it ‘theorizes how political forms create their own contexts’.⁴³ Consequently, securitisation as an analytical paradigm should not be critiqued on the grounds of its ‘socio-cultural’ content, but rather its adherence to a ‘liberal political ontology, with its key divisions between individual and state, rule and exception, and ordinary and special politics’.⁴⁴ They make the case for the importance of reflexivity in the conceptual framing of other kinds of political forms, which they argue should then form the basis of further inductive reflection gleaned from the analysis of other empirical case studies.⁴⁵ As such, the challenge is to bring the contingencies of ‘empirical philosophy’⁴⁶ into tension with those actively engaged in the formulation of policy and development intervention. That is, the aim is not to formulate general models for contingent case studies but rather, following Holbraad and Pedersen, to see the potential for the particularities of case studies to generate ‘further conceptual work’.⁴⁷ Considering security arrangements as emergent and complex phenomena is one way in which we might set about this task, and begin to engage with diverse articulations of security and their ontological construction. This is not to doubt the lethality of naming practices. Yet, we would argue, in order to ascertain the ways in which insecurity is constituted and security is enacted in its wake, we need to define the complex dynamics of security systems and the broader fields of power in which they are embedded.

By way of example of what we have in mind, and drawing explicitly on an analytical framework posited by Manuel DeLanda,⁴⁸ we might consider ‘security’ as it is manifest in the institutional practices (e.g., surveillatory, disciplinary, regulatory), normative regimes (e.g., law, customary rights), objects (e.g., uniforms, ID cards, territorial boundaries) and organisational forms (e.g., justice systems, vigilante groups, police stations) through which it is articulated, and the way exclusionary political claims are narrated and performed. Importantly, and with respect to analyses of the practices of police, military or parastatal units, their role as actors exercising the will of the state is not derived solely from abstract legal principles,⁴⁹ but must be understood relationally. In terms of the analysis of ‘security’ and security actors, identifying components of security systems and the relationships between them does not entail making any qualitative distinction between ‘state’ and ‘non-state’ actors. Vigilantes, militia units, civilian defence forces, police and military units are all the same for the purposes of analysis in so far as they purport to provide security. Rather, the focus is upon the ways in which the capacities of components are articulated at any given point in time, one such capacity being that for violence. The legal basis of the monopoly of violence, as an aspect of sovereign power, is thus a particular historical outcome, but only one aspect of the complex social ontology of security. Unpacking this complexity is the challenge to which the authors of the articles gathered here rise.

Security beyond the state

Each of the authors here in their own way approach the task of understanding security beyond state-centric notions of political order. Importantly, they do so via consideration of people’s lives, and the ways in which they are transformed through the discourses and practices of security. Van Stapele, in her intimate and moving account of the victims of extra-judicial killing of young men in the ghettos of Nairobi, details the terrible cost to those perceived to constitute a threat to broader society. Excluded from dominant discourses of citizenship and cast as harmful gang members, very little outcry is raised over the deaths of the young men with whom she works. The routinised violence, she argues, that flows from these exclusionary discourses, is neither extraordinary nor sporadic, and must be understood as a ‘societal process’. Criminalised, and constituted in media representations as a threat to the nation, the killing of these young men is both state sanctioned and publicly accepted. Living in a ‘warzone’ facing the constant, daily possibility of violent death, excluded from broader civil society and subjected to the double standards of the law, these young men have little alternative but to embrace their gang membership and the sense of belonging, support and opportunity that it provides. Her account highlights the ambivalence of conceptions of justice, and of those that claim to serve its ends. The article also demonstrates the benefits to be gained from ethnographic knowledge of processes of identity formation and group association, and challenges two-dimensional media images of young men in the ghettoes as members of ethnic gangs. These insights inform van Stapele’s analysis of the ways in which factors such as gender relations and ethnicity intersect with the legal status of citizenship, with lethal consequences for the marginalised young men excluded from belonging to broader societal imaginaries.

Both Willems and van der Borgh, and Mucha in this volume draw on the notion of securitisation as a means of thinking through the ways in which threat and insecurity are politicised.⁵⁰ Mucha makes conceptual use of the notion in his examination of the relationship between militia groups and guerrillas, and the ways in which the threat of the ‘Shining Path’ was neutralised through the militarisation of local communities. However, rather than focus on the (speech) actions of political leaders to construct threat at a national level, Mucha chooses to broaden the use of the model to focus more specifically on the actions of local leaders in the name of security, and their effects on people’s lives. More evident then are the ‘intersubjective process of negotiation’⁵¹ through which security, as ‘a site of competing visions about a group’s core values; threats to those values; and the means of protecting or advancing them’,⁵² is contested. Importantly, Mucha highlights the long-term insecurity that often results from the creation of informal security forces as an immediate response to threat. Civil militarism is a powerful force once unleashed, all the more so in environments in which centralised authority remains at best an ideal, and often responsible for new patterns of violence configured by local disputes and customs.

Focusing on a local ‘defence force’ in South Sudan, the ‘Arrow Boys’, and their legitimacy as security actors, Willems and van der Borgh show the degree to which these contested negotiations over who might provide security are constitutive of political entities in which authority is multiple, contested and diverse. The perceived inadequacy of state agents, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), to protect against the ‘external’ threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army, provided justification for the presence and activities of the Arrow Boys. The negotiations between Zande communities and the Government of South Sudan which led to the government’s acquiescence to local demands for the Arrow Boys to provide security for their communities should not simply be read as a response to an objective threat. Rather, the authors argue, the constitution of security threats, their magnitude and how and who should guard against them, must be understood in relation to the broader field of power and contestation of authority. Securitisation in this sense can be seen as an implicitly political act that works to politicise its referents through the expression of sovereign power.

Reporting from the Jos Plateau in Nigeria, Higazi gives us valuable insight into violence and insecurity in more rural areas where ethno-religious conflict is a frequent occurrence. Higazi argues that global perceptions of threat derived from the ‘war on terror’ discourse are articulated locally through the presence of the militant Muslim group Boko Haram. Even though, in Higazi’s view, Boko Haram would seem to have minimal involvement in conflict around Jos, their presence inflects relations between Christian and Muslim groups in the Plateau State. Consequently, a grand narrative of jihad elides the local origins of conflict. Christian and Muslim communities have different perceptions about the causes of conflict and violence, and these frame interactions with state actors. Local understandings of security are shaped by customary practice and, as Higazi shows, narratives of insecurity are constructed through a confluence of discourses and practices that have profound implications for the interactions between actors. The causes of conflict are multiple and overlapping, and threats to economic livelihood and way of life, ethnic association and religion are all factors that contribute to the potential for inter-communal conflict. Local conflicts interpolate with the broader discursive construction of antagonistic relationships between Christian and Muslim communities. Thus, through detailed, grounded analysis of security on the Jos Plateau Higazi neatly unpacks narratives of religion or ethnicity as the primary lines of division and conflict.

To return then to Hobbes’ pronouncements with which we began this short article, those on the provision of the safety of the people as being the ‘supreme law’, the essential dilemma is who is entrusted to wield the sword of war on behalf of the people, and to do so justly? Wrenching our gaze from the state as the only agency entrusted with enacting this responsibility, to the broader assemblages of actors, both formal and informal, organisational forms, customary practices, identity politics and so on through which security is negotiated and contested in much of the world, itself requires a violent act, that of theoretical regicide. As Foucault famously urged, with both Hobbes and the notion of the sovereign body in mind, there is a need to cut off the King’s head⁵³—to focus on the diversity of political forms, and to consider the power relations which give rise to them as diffuse and capillary, and not as concentrated, consistent and coherent. However, we would suggest that Foucault did not go far in enough in arguing for the decapitation of the King. With regard to security policy there is an urgent need to both cut off the King’s head, and to dissolve his body. That is, to stop thinking in terms of organic metaphors for diverse social processes,⁵⁴ and instead think in terms of the relational capacities of security arrangements and actors. Methodologically, this requires detailed, empirical study of the everyday practices through which security is enacted, and the ways in which these practices impact upon people’s lives. It is to this end that the articles gathered here speak.

Notes of contributors

Lee Wilson is a lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. His work examines the social, cultural and material causes of violence in conflict-prone localities, in particular in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Current projects focus on the governance of security, informal modes of conflict management, gender and violence, and the ways in which these are configured through the politics of everyday life.

Laurens Bakker is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he teaches development and economic anthropology. His research focusses on non-state violence in Indonesia, as well as on investments and natural resource conflicts in South-East Asia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [grant number 463-08-003], and the Isaac Newton Trust, Trinity College, Cambridge, as part of the research project ‘State of Anxiety: A Comparative Ethnography of Security Groups in Indonesia’. This special issue originates from a workshop of the State of Anxiety Project funded by the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde (KITLV) in Leiden. The authors are grateful to Professor Henk Schulte Nordholt for his generous support of the project.

Notes

1. Spencer, ‘The Perils of Engagement’, S294.

2. Goldstein, ‘Toward a Critical Anthropology’, 490.

3. Hobbes, Leviathan, 95–96.

4. Hobbes, Man and Citizen, 175–178.

5. Ibid., 258.

6. Sarat and Culbert, ‘Introduction’, 4.

7. Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty, 42.

8. For example, such assumptions clearly pertain to the United Nations report on the threats and challenges to peace-building efforts in a post 9/11 world, in which it is stated that ‘[w]hatever perceptions may have prevailed when the Westphalian system first gave rise to the notion of State sovereignty, today it clearly carries with it the obligation of a State to protect the welfare of its own peoples and meet its obligations to the wider international community’ (UN, A More Secure World, 17).

9. Kaldor et al., ‘Human Security’, 273.

10. Ibid., 273–274.

11. Ibid., 283.

12. Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars.

13. Stern and Öjendal, ‘Mapping the Security-Development Nexus’. Critical to the security-development nexus has been the concept of security sector reform (SSR), a developmental model that sprang from the need for ‘political and security normalization’ in Central and Eastern Europe following the Balkans conflict in the late 1990s (Hadžić, ‘The Concept of Security Sector Reform’, 11–12). While a constantly evolving and hotly debated concept, SSR has rapidly become a central plank in EU foreign policy (Council of the European Union, A Secure Europe), and part of a democratising agenda in which standards of progress are measured in accordance with the extent to which public control is exercised over the various state and non-state actors that together comprise the ‘security system’.

14. Weldes et al., ‘Introduction’, 8.

15. Thelen et al., ‘Introduction to Stategraphy’, 9.

16. Scheye, ‘Pragmatic Realism’, 39–40.

17. Wood and Dupont, Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security.

18. Although Holbraad and Pedersen, ‘Revolutionary Securitization’, argue that the study of security has long been implicit to anthropology, it is only more recently that anthropological attention has been more directly focused upon security as an object of analysis.

19. Goldstein, ‘Toward a Critical Anthropology’, 488.

20. Pedersen and Holbraad, ‘Introduction’, 8.

21. Browning and McDonald, ‘The Future of Critical Security Studies’, 236–237.

22. Luckham. ‘The Discordant Voices’, 683.

23. Bubandt, ‘Vernacular Security’, 291.

24. Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence, 6.

25. Lund, ‘Fragmented Sovereignty’, 886.

26. Grassiani and Ben-Ari, ‘Introduction’, 12.

27. Kyed and Albrecht, ‘Introduction’, 2.

28. Bartelson, The Critique of the State, 14.

29. Spyer, ‘Some Notes on Disorder’, 188.

30. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 1–2.

31. Law and Urry, ‘Enacting the Social’.

32. Marcus and Saka, ‘Assemblage’, 106.

33. Abrahamsen and Williams, ‘Security Beyond the State’.

34. Bagayoko et al., ‘Hybrid Security Governance in Africa’.

35. Boege et al., ‘Hybrid Political Orders’, 13. They propose thinking in terms of hybrid political orders as a response to the (pathologically informed) notion of ‘weak’ or ‘fragile’ states. That is, those states unable to extend their authority throughout their domain in accordance with Western political ideals. Alternatively, hybridity is an attempt to move beyond these ideals and recognise more positively the ways in which governance in much of the world is enacted through non-state institutions (ibid., 14–15).

36. Brigg, ‘Relational Peacebuilding’, 61–62.

37. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 2.

38. Waever, ‘Aberystwyth, Paris Copenhagen’, 13, in Taureck, ‘Securitization Theory’, 54–55.

39. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 2.

40. Ibid., 3.

41. McDonald, ‘Securitization and the Construction of Security’, 564.

42. Holbraad and Pedersen, ‘Revolutionary Securitization’, 192.

43. Ibid., 193.

44. Ibid., 193.

45. Ibid., 194.

46. Ibid., 168.

47. Ibid., 195. One can see direct applications for such a theoretical and methodological approach in the field of security sector reform. For example, security assistance programmes that are not necessarily ‘scalable’ with regard to applicability or approach, but are defined by common methodological parameters as knowledge making practices.

48. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 2–3. It should be obvious that DeLanda’s interpretation of Deleuze’s writing on assemblages has heavily influenced our thinking on the theoretical value of considering security as an assemblage.

49. Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making’, 169.

50. Buzan et al., Security.

51. McDonald, Security, the Environment and Emancipation, 11.

52. Ibid.

53. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 88–89.

54. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 19–20.