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

Abstract

This paper addresses the political and epistemological stakes of knowledge production in post-structuralist critical security studies (CSS). 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.

Keywords:

• security
• struggle
• Foucault
• violence
• critique

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Moran Mandelbaum, Cerelia Athanassiou, Anna Maria Friis Kristensen and three anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on earlier drafts, and to Moran, Cerelia and Anna Maria for the invitation to contribute to this special issue. Lara Montesinos Coleman also thanks the Independent Social Research Foundation for research funding.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. From hereon, when we say ‘CSS’ we mean those approaches influenced by post-structuralism.

2. Cf. Mark Laffey’s (2000, 439) pertinent critique of Campbell’s assumption that signification fully represents ‘the logic of the social’.

3. See Coleman (2015a); a full discussion of these dynamics is forthcoming.

4. While Aradau and Blanke suggest Foucault’s own work is the source of the difficulty, the following section of our argument should make clear that problem lies with the conceptual framing of CSS itself.

5. For a recent example outside of finance, see Collier and Lakoff (2015). Although their object of study – systems of transportation, electricity and water – is quite close to Foucault’s own object of study, it is only insofar of interest to them as it relates to questions of national security, vulnerability and the role of infrastructure in national emergencies.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Lara Montesinos Coleman

Lara Montesinos Coleman is Lecturer in International Relations and International Development at the University of Sussex. She has published widely on ethics, resistance, human rights and the politics of knowledge. She is co-author of a book in Spanish on struggles over oil and human rights in Colombia, and co-editor of Situating Global Resistance: Between Discipline and Dissent (2012).

Doerthe Rosenow

Doerthe Rosenow is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. She has published widely on questions of political resistance, environmental politics, and continental philosophy. Her monograph on anti-GMO activism and a radical politics of resistance beyond binary conceptualisations is forthcoming in the series Routledge Research on Space, Place and Politics.