Topologies of security: inquiring in/security across postcolonial and postsocialist scenes

ABSTRACT

Postcolonial and postsocialist thought has critiqued Critical Security Studies (CSS) on its Eurocentric orientation in terms of its concepts, categories, and concerns of security. In this introductory text, we discuss a concept in tension – topology/scene – to deepen a dialogue between postcolonial and postsocialist scholarship alongside insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Drawing on various contributions, we demonstrate how topology/scene enables critical reflections on how the ‘networked’, material approaches to security exemplified by STS can be put into a productive conversation with critiques grounded in postcolonial and postsocialist theory and praxis. Topologies and scenes of security are thus offered as a method to reflect, interrogate, and question existing relationalities of in/security as well as the power of different materials, discourses, organisations, and people in various times and places. We seek to move beyond the scalar hierarchies of ‘local’ and ‘global’ to question and investigate uneven power relations. Along with contributions in this special issue, it is possible to point towards the potential to situate inquiry across thus-far ‘peripheral’ places and societal milieus to offer insights into the experiences and understandings of in/security which have been rendered invisible or marginal.

KEYWORDS:

• CSS
• Postcolonialism
• Postsocialism
• STS
• Topology
• Scene

Introduction

This special issue engages in a growing, critical discussion on the planetary entanglement of security and securitisation that has been dominated by, and from, a western and northern perspective. Collectively, this introduction and subsequent contributions seek to bridge the epistemological and political gaps produced by such dominant perspectives alongside the critical thinking and practice that re-prioritise the focus of research and practice on, and of, security. As a contribution to these debates, we suggest that critical studies of security – including, but not restricted, to Critical Security Studies (CSS)¹ – would profit from a study of security that takes greater issue with power as residing ‘within’ processes, practices, and devices of securitisation. To do so, we propose a conceptual dyad of topologies and scenes of security, inspired by research and practice from postcolonial and postsocialist scholarship as much as from Science and Technology Studies (STS). Topologies, in our proposal, are connections, networks, or linkages that sustain purportedly ‘global’ transformations, whereas scenes are sites where security becomes practiced, performed, and staged. Together, topology/scene work in tandem and are in tension. Topology then permits the flexible and fluid, yet circumscribed, quality of overarching postcolonial and postsocialist security constellations emerging in the enduring aftermath of colonialism and socialism, to intersect with STS’s interest in how materials and infrastructures circulate, penetrate, and reconfigure society at various scales. Whereas scene can render material and actionable the complicated entanglements, interdependencies, and contradictions of security in place where power becomes manifest. In this productive conceptual tension, there is the potential to challenge the enactment of power in, on, and of security and securitisation precisely at the point where topologies of postcolonial, postsocialist and socio-technical dynamics intersect across various scenes.

As we unpack in this introductory piece, postcolonial, postsocialist and STS scholarship, along with the intellectual, experiential, and geographies that they are interwoven within, offer invaluable insights into the workings of power as they become manifest in security that are not yet fully accounted for by critical studies of security. Our contemporary moment is characterised by an often-violent entangling of postcolonial and postsocialist positionalities with renewed attempts at domination from western/northern metropolises. These are crucially brought about, and mediated, by security technologies, as used within ‘anti-terrorism’ measures, border control practices, financial and military surveillance, as well as long-distance and algorithmic warfare. Yet it is also in the oft-characterised banal, everyday lived experience of in/security where security discourses and technologies materialise. Thus, materiality and technology must be brought into view as devices that co-constitute, and are interrelated with, postcolonial and postsocialist perspectives on security. This opens a path to broaden, both conceptually and methodologically, issues of the representation of in/security beyond the west/north.

From security as simultaneously understood both topologically and performed and staged across numerous scenes, we seek to excavate a conceptual tension between topology/scene that allows for a way to grasp the emergent, fluid, yet sticky, nature that characterise contemporary questions of security that can be neither ascribed wholly to the ‘global’ nor to the ‘local’. In this respect, the papers in this special issue add to current debates in CSS where post- and decolonial, postsocialist and STS perspectives begin to become visible and their productivity is emphasised (von Schnitzler, 2016; Van Riet, 2017; Gheciu, 2018). In the rest of this introduction we then: 1) examine the contributions of postcolonial, postsocialist and STS research and practice to the study of security; 2) excavate how this scholarship collectively inform the conceptual dyad of topology/scene and its contribution to ongoing debates; 3) Before exploring in greater depth how the various papers of this special issue have engaged with topology/scene at varying intensities and vectors as much as we reflect on our own positionality through topology/scene.

Postcolonial, postsocialist and STS scholarship in critical studies of security

As a conceptual basis for topology/scene, this section offers a brief discussion between postcolonial, postsocialist and STS scholarship that critique western/northern epistemological agendas that can be beneficial in relation to critical studies of security. A common ground between these perspectives is their scepticism of any teleological or determinist paths, that variously may embrace an ‘end of history’ argument or singular routes to development. Their collective critique variously questions an allegedly western path to democracy, wealth, and security, grand schemes of ordering, the ‘nation’ as a default political order, and claims of technological solutionism for society. We briefly summarise some of these important critiques to bring them into closer conversation with each other and within CSS.

Postcolonial perspectives

Gaining traction at a similar time to critical studies of security in the 1980s, postcolonial critique questioned categories that condition political and cultural perceptions in societies of the global west/north, such as the ‘West’, ‘modernity’, or ‘nation’. It demonstrated how these categories are formed and formatted through the domination and (mis-)representation of the colonial other, effectively exposing the complicity of those categories with colonial domination (Spivak, 1988; Chatterjee, 2000). Such epistemological critique and a problematisation of normatively charged categories informing social theory and practice (Bhambra, 2007; Connell, 2007) has also informed the emergence of, and conversation with, decolonial strategies and approaches (see Kušić, Lottholz and Manolova, 2019, 15). One aspect that postcolonial and decolonial approaches share with critical studies of security, in turn, is a problematisation of linear narratives of societal and political development. Post- and decolonial critique challenges the narrative of a new beginning through formal political decolonisation. Critical studies of security, in turn, have displayed an interest in genealogies of contemporary security constellations, for instance in its critique of liberal notions of security (Neocleous, 2008).

Yet, the relationship between security studies and postcolonial thought cannot be reduced to a mutual inspiration in terms of genealogies of society, polity, and security. Apart from these parallels in critical thinking, a thread of explicit postcolonial engagement, valorising scenes of security that are different from those usually envisaged in security studies, has been evolving from Barkawi and Laffey’s (2006) critique of the field’s Eurocentric tendencies; via Hönke and Müller’s (2012) proposal to focus on the global entanglements and practical, everyday aspects of the production of in/security across historical epochs and various (post-)colonial geographies; to Bilgin’s (2017) call to inquire ‘others’ conceptions of ‘security’’, i.e. those of people excluded from dominant accounts of security. In this respect, particularly important is the proposal by Abboud and colleagues to critically consider the construction of objects of investigation by security studies through reflecting, first, on ‘how and to what extent security discourse may risk colonising other fields in the pursuit of interdisciplinary scholarship’ (captured in the term ‘security trap’, see C.A.S.E. Collective, 2006) and, second, to embrace a decolonial pedagogy by which students, but potentially also activist and wider societal circles, are encouraged to actively participate in knowledge production and thus pluralise and de-centre understandings and practices of security (Abboud et al. 2018, 273).

Postsocialist perspectives

Similar to postcolonial critique, postsocialist approaches point to the stickiness of categorisations in the international system that outlived, and potentially predated, the era of state socialism (Neumann, 1999; Verdery, 1999; Todorova, 2009). Within the number of studies on security in the context of Eastern Europe’s and the Eurasian region’s ‘transition’ to neoliberal capitalism and (supposed) democracy, Alexandra Gheciu’s study (2018) of ‘security entrepreneurs’ presents important insights of the particularities of security production. Her analysis of the invocation and increasing adoption of European standards and practices in the private security sector exhibit the reproduction and translation of Eurocentric categories and ontologies (2018, chap.3). Conversely, Erica Marat’s (2018) study of police reform in Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan shows how Soviet-era principles like hierarchy of command and centralised control outlive attempts of reform. She traces how policymakers adopt and re-kindle globally circulating concepts (e.g. the ‘broken windows theory’) and technologies (like CCTV or GPS tracking) in a way that in most cases serve to stabilise existing regimes and institutional cultures rather than transforming them into people-centred and needs-based ones. These perspectives present important insights on the way that discourses, practices and technologies of security coalesce to produce or further entrench forms of insecurity which in Eastern Europe and wider Eurasia are characterised by various dimensions of historical continuity and global entanglement.

There is ample scope for thinking and conceptualising postcolonial and postsocialist constellations together. Epistemologically, both constellations have triggered critiques of modernity and modernisation positioned at non-western (semi-)peripheries (Langenohl, 2007). Historically, both constitute spaces emerging from variegated imperial projects, which, however, have operated with essentially similar mechanisms of economic extraction and exploitation, political domination and cultural as well as racialised othering to justify the former two (Chari and Verdery, 2009, see also Todorova, 2009). In this light, Chari and Verdery have called for a postsocialist-postcolonial dialogue that would move beyond the compartmentalisation into Second and Third World (Chari and Verdery, 2009), a point taken up by Tlostanova and Mignolo’s Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (2012) which unpacks the successive colonial, state socialist and neoliberal projects of ordering and their material, cultural-political and epistemic effects across these global peripheries. Recent interventions have further addressed the common underlying threads of these conditions – e.g. the ‘coloniality of power’ operating both in these spaces and globally (e.g. Kušić, Lottholz and Manolova, 2019) – as well as the trajectories of hierarchy, exclusion and accumulation by dispossession they produce along lines of gender, class, race and others (Mulaj, Mulaj and Wallace, 2020). In the context of Central Asia, Philipp Lottholz’s (2022) work is advancing this perspective through an analysis of peacebuilding and community security practices implemented in the aftermath of interethnic conflict and in the name of democracy, human rights and a ‘liberal peace’. He traces the translation, (re-)interpretation and recasting of these concepts through different imaginaries, including ones of Soviet modernity, traditionalism and Islamic belief. His research thus demonstrates that the present-day liberal capitalist project in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia more generally takes on similar vectors of power, domination but also re-appropriation and resistance as the historic endeavours of Russian and Soviet imperial rule. Likewise, authors in this special issue investigate issues of violence and insecurity in semi-peripheral (Gheciu, 2022) and post-war societies (Majstorović, 2022), but also at the margins of a West European society (Ivasiuc, 2022) and in a global South context (van Riet, 2022). Thus, the special issue further advances existing efforts of thinking the dialogue between postsocialist and postcolonial perspectives not only in terms of parallel conditions and transferable concepts, but in terms of how these are actualised in concrete scenes of security.

Perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS)

In a more recent turn, critical studies of security have engaged with conceptual developments coming from STS (Bellanova, Jacobsen and Monsees, 2020). This has frequently been advanced with reference to digital technologies, from policing (Evans, Leese and Rychnovská, 2021) to cybersecurity (Stevens, 2020). There has also been increasing interest in infrastructures as a conceptual tool to unpack dynamics of power in postcolonial settings (Gupta, 2015), which can be brought together with infrastructural incarnations and invocations of security (see the contributions of Langenohl and Van Riet, 2020) through close analyses of the socio-technical materiality of infrastructures. Another conceptual thread developed from a focus on security practices (for instance, Bigo, 2000; Balzacq 2011), and even on instability (Mumford, 2023), have pointed to understandings, institutions and even territorial borders that require a constant performance and enactment for the impression of their givenness and fixity to be maintained.

More recently, critical studies of security have sought to examine the role of computer algorithms in the context of the politics of security (Hoijtink and Leese, 2019; Amoore 2020). For example, Andrew Dwyer’s (2023) work has sought to examine how ‘more-than-human’ agency operates in socio-technical relationships between hackers, malware, and material ecologies in geopolitics beyond the (western) state. In advocating for an expansive socio-technical reading, he has also sought to critically attend to differently-positioned people and communities in cybersecurity that does not lose the crucial ethico-political, and colonial, dimensions of such technologies (Dwyer et al., 2022). We contend that these various strands can be connected to the long-running engagement in postcolonial studies with STS and ‘technoscience’ (McNeil, 2005), and also to the increasing scrutiny towards socio-technical systems in postsocialist studies reviewed above. As an example for this approach, one may cite Antina von Schnitzler’s (2016) book on water insecurity in Soweto, managed through the introduction of water metres. Her research shows how for the city administration and the local water company this is not an issue of insecurity, but one of rational distribution and accountable use of a scarce resource and its safeguarding, while for the township’s dwellers it brings all sorts of inconvenience, up to newly created and compounded hygiene and health problems. Von Schnitzler’s work is a good example of the rising interest and importance in the materiality and technicality of (post-)coloniality – a point which, against the background of a predominant orientation of postcolonial critique as the critique of representation, should also be addressed as a potential hinge between critical studies of security, postcolonial studies, and postsocialist studies.

This brief overview demonstrates how the postcolonial and postsocialist critiques and extensions of critical studies of security, along with an increased focus on the socio-technical and materials of security with STS, share important epistemological convictions and self-positioning with respect to received categories that organise social and political theory and practice. Yet, critical studies of security studies are far from having overcome their western- and Eurocentric tendencies, nor have found ways to adequately reflect on their knowledge claims and positioning in the (geo-)political economy of knowledge production. It seems fair to say that much research in this field is still premised on a ‘co-constitutive – although never egalitarian – set of relations between European and non-European worlds’ (Abboud et al. 2018, 278). In this, albeit ever-changing order, security dominates as a form of global politics and governance, materialising as a complex figuration of power across different sites and spaces. This is where the addition of perspectives from STS can be beneficial to complement the representational with socio-technical and materialist contributions. This synthesis is showcased in Ivasiuc’s (2022) contribution to the special issue on the difficulty of understanding, let alone governing, the occurrence of fires and other disturbances in Roma camps in the campi nomadi outside Rome, Italy, and further, in Majstorović’s (2022) examination, of the collective scepticism and affect driving a protest wave against police misconduct and state-centric security understandings in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. While acknowledging that finding ways to overcome pervasive Eurocentrism will take immense and long-term efforts, we wish to advance this agenda by foregrounding formations of (in-)security beyond western experiences and with a particular focus on postcolonial and postsocialist configurations.

Engaging topology

To critically study security based on an albeit complex thread between security studies, postcolonial and postsocialist critique, as well as STS, topology can be used as a conceptual device to thread together this various scholarship and (re)consider the production and negotiation of in/security in diverging scenes. In mathematics, the notion of topology challenges the idea of a naturally given space, as in Euclidean geometry (Collier, 2009). Instead, space can be mathematically articulated and abstracted in many ways, focusing on the relations between nodes rather than their place within Cartesian space (e.g. see Bigo, 2016 on the mobius strip). This can then capture how processes and relations unfold repeatedly and how their unfolding changes with time, which is reflective of the emergence, contingency and complexity characterising not only processes in nature but in society as well.

Departing from this approach towards complexity, the ‘same’ topological structure may be articulated in different spatial registers at different times, with alternate meanings for the practice of power. In this sense, topological thinking aligns with the idea of structure with that of its transformation: One reconstructs the topological structure not from the ways it manifests in space, but from the ways it transmutes across different spatial registers (Serres, 1982). As Stephen Collier notes, topological thinking opens up a perspective on ‘“patterns of correlation” in which heterogeneous elements – their techniques, material forms, institutional structures and technologies of power – … ’ are reconfigured, redeployed and re-combined (2009, p.80). This approach helps to move away from calculative and mathematical practice, and a reductive determinism, to make the case for understanding security and its associated power relations through understanding networks, connections, and the spatio-temporal circulation of power. As an example, we might think of the ways that the financial system, often termed ‘global’, actually constitutes a security topology – a point that Andreas Langenohl (2021) has worked on. That topology consists of a limited number of devices through which financial institutions worldwide hedge their risk exposures – mostly, collateralization, diversification, the shortening of investment horizons, and through passing on risk. These devices produce threats to the financial security of households through very different problematics connected to household debt. Depending on the relational and historical circumstances that these households find themselves in, households in Eastern Europe faced the risk of currency swings as they were sold loans in foreign currency by their banks; households in South Asia receiving micro-credits faced strict sanctions upon default, which in turn increased the security of international investors. Financial technologies and global ‘market devices’ (Callon, Millo and Muniesa, 2007) thus touch ground with their economic components not globally, but in highly circumscribed and densely contextualised scenes that articulate the social insecurity of financial securities.

Conceived in this way, topological thinking about security challenges a static (and in particular, statist) understanding of order, structure, and security. Moreover, topology as a modality of critical thinking, although invoking the register of spatiality and territoriality precisely as it leaves them behind, involves other processes of structuration, separation, and categorisation, such as understandings of temporal sequences of societal order (Collier, 2009). Through topology, we might consider connections between the invocation of security, the problematisation of its often-territorial idiom, and the actual entanglement of such territorial idioms with temporal dynamics and historical configurations, as highlighted by research on postcolonial, postsocialist, and socio-technical and material scenes. It is here that issues and concerns arising in postcolonial and postsocialist configurations can be productively addressed. As has long been argued in postcolonial and postsocialist scholarship, configurations are constituted through a topologically dynamised relationship between the (modern) west and the non-modern, or, to cite Homi Bhabha (1984), ‘not quite’ modern non-west, invoking spatiality and territoriality as mediators while displacing them as natural containers through a temporal and historical interrogation. This double gesture of identifying spatial registers as signifying hierarchies while at the same time deconstructing their territorial fixity through temporalising topological thinking can be seen in such arguments as ‘the constitution of the self-consolidating other’ in (post-)colonial relationships (Spivak, 1999, pp.409–410). It refers to the political and cultural construction of an image of the colonial ‘Other’ that is kept floating as it is used to construct a dominant western self-image as self-same – a point that has also been made with respect to how ‘Europe’ used to imagine its ‘East’ (Neumann, 1999; Todorova, 2009). These spatialised imaginaries of distinctions and hierarchies, surviving as they are into the present era and characterised by a violent shuttling between globalisation naturalism and geopolitical and geoeconomic zero-sum games, urges scholars to address relationships of power through a terminology like topology that accounts for power’s historical transmogrifications (Collier, 2009).

Articulating scenes

Given its emphasis on complexity, emergence and contingency, the notion of topology might appear alone to be one of a global instruction, one that once again subsumes dominant narratives, power, and discourses in a totalising move, even if it emphasises changing states. However, we believe topology to be in a productive and necessary tension with the notion of ‘scene’, which so far has been used loosely to refer to the ways that postcolonial and postsocialist studies as well as STS may intervene in critical studies of security. Topology is a concept that denaturalises the givenness of a certain state and its permanency. It proceeds from relationality, that is, it looks at the ways that elements in a given relationship are constantly co-constituting each other. Scene, in contrast, adds to this the consideration that the process of constant reproduction and transformation does not proceed automatically and deterministically, like in a dynamised structuralism (see Schweitzer, 2015), but occurs in place, somewhere, with materials and people. Scenes actively construct and actualise relations that are given some sense of urgency or transitory permanence by topologies that are intensifying or weakening, and places where different viewpoints come together, where contingency opens up, and where conflict and power struggle become manifest. Thereby, ‘scene’ does not refer to the sheer givenness of the empirical but presupposes processes of composition and staging.

In analysing the tension between topology and scene, power becomes of crucial importance in both its lineages from postcolonial and postsocialist perspectives as well as from STS. In proceeding, and following, understandings of power through postcolonial feminist science studies, which argues for a ‘world of materialities’ (Willey, 2016), we can see how power is imbricated both in the tools, objects and scientific thinking of the ‘west’ and ‘north’ and in the role of materials that may afford certain capacities for scenes to be enacted. Although early theorisations of power in ‘Actor Network Theory’ (Latour, 1999) and beyond could be understood to disaggregate the human so that it becomes only part of a hybrid agency of ‘things’ with agency in their capacity for connection, we instead note how the scene becomes a place for power and representation that is conditioned and (de)stabilised by the presence and absence of materials and their topological connections. This is not to follow a determinism that suggests that materials structure the possibility of any form of struggle and resistance, but rather posits that materials condition the extent by which these can be practiced. A topological understanding suggests, then, how power becomes magnified, intensified, or weakened through networks that are commonly supported by materials and technologies such as the Internet, transportation, or different media. These may be discursive, forms of solidarity, or the negotiation of security practice that can weave different actualisations of scenes. Yet, these scenes are sites of power – both actualised through materials and discursive practices – become effective through their topological interlinking to other scenes. Power, in this sense, becomes distributed among materials, but does not then substitute the politics, ethics, or senses of security that are enacted in different scenes.

In seeing power in such ways, we argue that the topology/scene tension cannot then be understood through a global/local scale dualism. Power works through and among scales ranging from the body to technical implementations of internet blocking, to capitalist networks. These do not make sense as either global or local manifestations, but rather as topological relations. Yet, these senses of power cannot be divorced from the talk and performance of the scene, as much as the scenes themselves are situated among and through various topologies themselves. Thus, we cannot say, for example, that there is a global topology and a local scene eo ipso. Rather, we would suggest to analytically construct the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, through multiple scenes of the water droplets that transmit the virus to the police closure or restriction of groups of people as being threaded by a topology of discursive practices of ‘good hygiene’ or sharing of data that themselves become enacted in scenes of the WHO or a digital contact tracing application. Therefore, we simultaneously suggest that the scene must not be seen as a lesser scale or power than topology, but that they work in tandem, in alternate forms and compositions, to constitute a tension of two ways of researching and understanding the world. This is illustrated in Gheciu’s (2022) analysis, in this special issue, of the ‘changing scenes of security’ during the COVID pandemic. She observes that the overly restrictive isolation of meat industry workers from Eastern Europe by German authorities sat uncomfortably alongside their definition as essential workers and thus added to the diverging understandings of the EU(ropean) project between Western and (postsocialist) Eastern European governments. Van Riet’s (2022) article in this special issue on the work of the phenomenon of the ‘Peri Peri’ vigilante group in South Africa indicates a similar compromise of tacit acceptance of this group in a situation of insufficient funding and preparedness of state institutions within a wider economy of lack and illicitness.

As these and other contributions suggest, the specificity inherent in the notion of ‘scene’ may be further detailed as disposing of a certain theatricality (see Goffman, 1961; Boal, 2000) that encompasses the multilayeredness of that which is staged: it could be an enactment, but also a representation of something else, a carnival or a deception, whilst also being reflexive (Agnew 1986). Topologies of security become not merely executed in scenes of security, but they are – to stay in the theatrical metaphoric – staged, applauded, or booed at, exaggerated, reflected upon, struggled about or ignored. These scene-bound processes can thus be regarded as constitutive moments in the emergent and transformative processes through which topologies of security unfold, not unlike feminist work such as by Judith Butler (1990), who notes the importance of ‘performativity’ and which has been used extensively in security research (Laffey, 2000; Amicelle, Aradau, and Jeandesboz 2015).

Thus, scenes can be regarded as points where power becomes actualised through heterogeneous dynamics of security topologies folded onto each other. Here, power can be conceived as a proxy to invite more concrete conceptualisations of how we might think topology/scene. To outline an example: in studies in anti-terrorist financing and its securitisation, de Goede (2017, 2018) has used an ANT-inspired notion of ‘translation’ (cf. Latour, 1999) in order to reconstruct the complex processes that intersect with the constitution of a ‘security issue’ (for instance, a financial transaction from a core country to a peripheral country being identified as terrorism financing and legally pursued thereafter). Through such ‘chains of security’, otherwise seemingly disparate relations of policing power, definitional power, and financial power become mutually entangled within the matrix of a complex geopolitical and geo-economic topology. However, it is only in the different scenes where ‘security’ becomes articulated that these topological relationships become activated, materialised, and tilted, for instance, in the courtroom; in communications between financial firms and political authorities; in moral panics regarding terrorism; among others. As the dynamic interrelations in this example show, one might envisage ‘translation’ not as a mere one-to-one transmission of power, but as adding more layers of complexity. Translation might not just interconnect different ‘contexts’ but anticipate, envisage, perspectivise and co-constitute the ‘context of origin’ and the ‘target context’ in the first place (Langenohl, 2014). To, if only provisionally, accept ‘translation’ as a conceptual concretisation of ‘power’ also makes visible that the topology/scene relationship might be understood in terms of representational as well as non-representational theories, as ‘translation’ may be understood as a concept referring to an associational, or non-representational, as well as to a hermeneutical epistemological tradition.

Used in the multiple senses of the stage, of performance, and of reflection, scene then permits an entry, an analytic, in which we can partially enter, be situated in, and explore the complex meanderings and twists of topologies. Thus, we arrive at what could be called a dialectic between topology and the scene. It is impossible to render one without the other; but their respective logics are not reducible to one another either. This tension is perpetually irresolvable, so it calls upon us as researchers to be attentive to, and deal with, the tension through extending it into methodological, epistemological, and political terrains.

Unpacking (in-)security through topology/scene

In this introduction, we have presented topology/scene to conceptualise and analyse the multidimensional (re-)production of insecurity at the intersection of postcolonial, postsocialist and STS debates. Drawing on these literatures, including our own work, and the contributions to this special issue, we have shown that these fields offer new viewpoints to critical studies of security and its subdomains precisely as they address scenes of security usually effaced in west- and north centric security studies. As this discussion has also suggested, however, more work is needed to explore possibilities of forging the intellectual synthesis and thus addressing the tension between STS’ common flat ontologies and limited critique of power and inequality on the one hand and the critiques put forward by representational modes of theorising in postcolonial and postsocialist thought, on the other. While attempts to make STS and CSS more generally ‘attuned to researching controversies in the profoundly political domain of security’ (de Goede, 2020, 4) are of great importance in their own right, we would argue that topology/scene is a productive concept for understanding the contingent and globally connected nature of any effort to subject security practices, processes and technologies to intellectual critique or political debate and control.

The contributions to this collection attest to the productive and critical potential of topology/scene and present another step in further broadening the scope of security research into regions, communities and societal struggles that have not received due attention so far. Gideon van Riet’s (2022) article demonstrates the relevance of topology/scene in the field of non-state policing in the JB Marks Municipality in South Africa, a context marked by colonial legacies and practices of policing and racial segregation. Against the backdrop of downsizing and lacking capacity of the South African Police Service (SAPS), van Riet compares practices of non-state policing in the two neighbourhoods of Potchefstroom, a historically white and middleclass town, and the historically black township of Ikageng. In the latter, he demonstrates how the forming of a ‘vigilante’ group called Peri Peri has evoked scepticism as part of a wider concern with such groups’ legal and procedural groundings. However, pointing out the specific everyday challenges and forms of insecurity faced by residents, van Riet points to the vital role of the Peri Peri in maintaining basic order, which is also tacitly approved of by the SAPS. He further argues that crime needs to ‘be situated within a broader topology of illegitimate and racialised political economies’ and dealt with accordingly, which necessitates a reconsideration of policing and public ordering in this and other settler colonial and racialised contexts globally.

Similar to such issues of state incapacity, Majstorović’s (2022) article on ‘security, justice and affective sociality in the European periphery’ deals with predatory conduct of state institutions and the insecurity this creates. The contribution is centred around the ‘Justice for David’ movement which held a series of protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s second largest city, Banja Luka, following the mysterious death of a student and glaring irregularities and misconduct in its investigation. This protest wave not only galvanised collective feelings of insecurity and helplessness vis-à-vis a corrupt and predatory state and political elite. Rather, it could be understood as a scene in which the wider discontent and trauma of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with its ethnopolitical division reified in its territorial and institutional structures, a neoliberal economic regime only serving oligarchic elites while pushing ordinary working people towards labour migration, and with its newly appointed role of a buffer state to fend off refugees on their way to the European Union. Majstorović’s analysis thus demonstrates how topologies of insecurity present intersections of geographic, economic, and geopolitical forces and how the injustice and suffering thus produced can spur significant waves of affect and resistance.

Alexandra Gheciu’s (2022) contribution carries forward the theme of insecurity produced by states and political regimes into the East European and wider EU context. She illustrates the aspect of repetition or reinscription in topologies of insecurity as she juxtaposes illiberal practices of exclusion of third-country migrants by Poland and Hungary’s right-wing governments to the treatment of East European workers in Germany, where their work was deemed as ‘essential’ but did not lead to appropriate working conditions and protection measures. This demonstrates how across the whole EU – not just in its Eastern member states as usually purported – attempts to ensure societal and economic interests have translated into ‘dehumanising practices that place vulnerable individuals and groups into acute situations of insecurity’. The dehumanising potential of hegemonic forms of security is also problematised in Ana Ivasiuc’s (2022) article, which pursues the topology/scene concept further into non-representational approaches. Empirically focused on the scene of Roma camps or campi nomadi outside of Rome, Italy, Ivasiuc reveals the role of materiality and sensoriality – which is manifest in sights and smells of fires, waste heaps and other forms of uncleanliness and disorderliness – in the construction of security (siccurezza). She confronts these hegemonic understandings of security by exhibiting the authorities’ complicity in insufficient and makeshift conditions of camps and points out the need to provincialise security. Drawing on the camp communities’ perspectives, she reveals the Euro- and ethnocentric misconception by which Roma are constructed as ‘other’ and how a more holistic understanding of security would include their concerns and do away with existing exclusions in both scholarship and policy.

Thinking this politico-practical relevance of topology/scene further along the lines suggested by Ivasiuc and Majstorović, it is worth noting that apart from advancing analysis and reflection within CSS, topology/scene might also serve as a lens that helps to reflect how academic knowledge production is part of topologies of in/security. In fact, awareness about history requires us to ask how legacies of Empire and racism become actualised and rendered imperceptible by topological formations. This has become most obvious in current critiques and ensuing altercations over methodological whiteness and racism in security studies (Howell and Richter-Montpetit, 2020; cf. Behera, Hinds and Tickner, 2021). But, as we have indicated, it is a much more long-standing concern emanating especially from postcolonial scholarship. How does the perpetual dominance of whiteness in the academy, of English as the dominant, and often the only language of communication, as well as the global political economy of knowledge production with its paywalls and gate-keeping arrangements, help (re-)produce Eurocentric, white and male-dominated formations of knowledge that we are part of? Topology/scene may help to understand and address such dependencies in security research – where topological arrangements and their actualisation in scenes can be interpreted with different coagulations of understanding.

Rather than creating an optic on which theory is acceptable and which one is not considering these criteria, we understand such reflections to face up to the responsibility conferred to the privileged status of academic researchers and structures. That this privilege is subject to multiple exclusions, hierarchies and inequalities was not least demonstrated by the challenges that the contributors to this collection faced in terms of health, working and living conditions against the background of the COVID-19 and wider systemic crises in education and society at large. These have significantly delayed the publication of the special issue and have reduced its geographical scope and diversity, with one contribution on wider global and particularly West Asian/Middle Eastern perspectives unfortunately remaining unrealised. It is in this light that we advocate for an advancing of the debate on the topologies and scenes of power and knowledge production. This should not, of course, be only within the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 138 ‘Dynamics of Security: Types of Securitization from a Historical Perspective’ (universities of Giessen and Marburg) that seeks to decentre established conceptions of security and securitisation through historicization and which funded the labour for this project. Rather, along with those voices who are present and are less so within this special issue, we collectively in academia and beyond must be aware of the topologies and scenes of power, hierarchy and dis-/order that we are interpellated in and that require interrogation, deconstruction and reversal.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the journal team for their support and patience with this collection, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and comments. We also thank the participants of a June 2020 workshop of the same name of this special issue that assisted greatly with its initial development. The event and work on this collection was funded by the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 138 ‘Dynamics of Security’, under a Grant from the German Research Foundation (grant number 227068724).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew C. Dwyer

Andrew C. Dwyer is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research is concerned with state (offensive) cyber policy, the role of digital decision-making, and developing ‘critical’ perspectives on cyber security. He was a Visting Fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 'Dynamics of Security' in 2019.

Andreas Langenohl

Andreas Langenohl is professor of Sociology with a focus on General Comparative Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen and professor extra-ordinary of Political Studies at the School of Government Studies, North-West University, South Africa. His research covers the areas of the social studies of finance, social and cultural theory, transnationalism, and the epistemology of the social sciences.

Philipp Lottholz

Philipp Lottholz is a post-doctoral fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio ‘Dynamics of Security’ and the Center for Conflict Studies, Philipps-University of Marburg. His research interests lie at the intersection of peace, conflict and security studies and further include peace- and statebuilding, post- and decolonial thought, and cooperative, dialogical and activist approaches to research.

Notes

1. We refer to critical studies of security as a broader field which exists with and through those which may self-identify as ‘Critical Security Studies’. We therefore refer to the former unless we specifically intend to speak to this community.