Critical Security Studies (CSS) have been a major development in the analysis of security since the 1990s. This workshop intends to foster discussions to identify key areas and directions for future CSS. It proposes to bring together doctoral students and academics working on new theoretical directions and empirical interrogations of (in)security to both question and prompt new developments in critical approaches to security.

We invite contributions that address conceptual, methodological and empirical perspectives from different disciplinary perspectives. We aim to reflect on emerging themes – such as digitization of security and surveillance, political ecology and security, gender and (in)securities, borders and mobility, etc. – and key conceptual and political question about the relation between security and politics, security and justice, security and critique. We also invite participants to discuss ways of doing research and of questioning security actors and practices.

The aim of this one-day workshop is to develop a network on critical security studies at KCL and build links and intellectual conversations around critical approaches to (in)security across disciplines and boundaries.

Call for abstracts

Send us a brief outline of your research highlighting major conceptual, methodological and/or empirical questions you address (200 to 250 words) by 15 October 2016.

Contact:

claudia.aradau@kcl.ac.uk

lucile.maertens@sciencespo.fr

Dace Dzenovska (COMPAS, Oxford), Bridget Anderson (COMPAS, Oxford), Nicholas De Genova (Geography, KCL)

Tuesday 17 May 2016, 4pm, War Studies Meeting Room (K6.07)

Dace Dzenovska is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at COMPAS and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA). Prior to this, she held a Marie Curie Fellowship at COMPAS and a three-year research and teaching position in social anthropology at the University of Latvia. She received a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Dace has turned her doctoral dissertation on tolerance promotion and postsocialist democratization in Latvia into a book manuscript entitled Complicit Becoming: Tolerance Work and Europeanization After Socialism. Her second book project is on outmigration from Latvia and is entitled The Great Departure: Staying and Leaving as Tactics of Life After Post-Socialism.

Bridget Anderson is Professor of Migration and Citizenship and Research Director at COMPAS. She is the author of Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Controls (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (Zed Books, 2000). She co-edited Who Needs Migrant Workers? Labour Shortages, Immigration and Public Policy with Martin Ruhs (Oxford University Press, 2010 and 2012) The Social, Political and Historical Contours of Deportation with Matthew Gibney and Emanuela Paoletti (Springer, 2013), and Migration and Care Labour: Theory, Policy and Politics with Isabel Shutes (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Nicholas De Genova <www.nicholasdegenova.net> is Reader in Urban Geography and Director of the Spatial Politics research group at King’s College London. He is the author of Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (2005), co-author of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (2003), editor of Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States (2006), and co-editor of The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement (2010). He is currently writing two new books — one on The Migrant Metropolis and another on The “European” Question: Migration, Race and Postcoloniality — and has also edited a new book on The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (forthcoming, Duke University Press).

This event is part of the Borders, Citizenship & Mobility workshop, co-organised by RCIR and the Department of Geography, King’s College London

Dr Ruben Andersson, London School of Economics 

Tuesday 15 March 2016, 3pm, War Studies Meeting Room (K6.07)

Amid the political panic over the migration or refugee ‘crisis’, the capability to control cross- border movement has emerged as a holy grail for anxious politicians in Europe and elsewhere – just at a time when the capability to regain such control looms large for well- connected refugees and migrants themselves. This paper sketches some initial thoughts on how to analyse and research this tense juncture, characterised by a growing mismatch between states’ vast resources to control movement and the equally unprecedented resources at migrants’ disposal, as well as by the increasing securitisation of mobility that attempts to ‘paper over’ this very mismatch. One way of approaching this juncture from an anthropological perspective, I suggest, is to build an ‘ecological’ approach that explores interactions in a ‘complex system’ of mobility control. Complex systems analysis may help bridge historical and empirical scales, reaching an ethnographically grounded account of today’s perennial ‘mobility crises’ that joins up the microphysics of mobility with meso/macro structures and longer historical shifts. In the same vein, an ecological perspective may also allow for analytically treating what are often seen as separate ‘mobility problematics’ within the same frame, from the heavily patrolled European borderlands to the control of air travel and the perennial refugee encampments outside the West.

Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the author of Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (University of California Press, 2014).

This event is part of the Borders, Citizenship & Mobility workshop, co-organised by RCIR and the Department of Geography, King’s College London

Dr. Roee Kibrik, chaired by Dr. Leonie Ansems de Vries, discussant: Dr. Filippo Costa-Buranelli

Tuesday 22 March 2016, 5pm, War Studies Meeting Room (K. 6.07)

Embracing the notion that concepts are a foundation of political behavior and that politics is at the base of conceptualization processes, researchers have focused on the political and social processes of attributing meanings to concepts. This work contributes to this effort by introducing the idea that the state of concepts can be an analytical tool which assists researchers and practitioners who delve into this field of concepts. It argues that a concept can be in one out of four states: stable, contested, essentially contested, or destabilized. The concept’s state derived from the specific historical context of relations and interactions between existing knowledge, socio-political structures and practices and experiences. The state of a concept has consequences in terms of the political actors’ ability to communicate and project a future act and execute it effectively. The paper takes the example of sovereignty in Jerusalem to demonstrate the political and epistemological advantages of recognizing that concepts have different states.

Roee Kibrik is an Israel Institute postdoctoral Fellow, and a visiting researcher at King’s College London, the Department of War Studies.  He received his PhD. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the department of International Relations. His work has focused on the socio-cognitive processes that shaped the behaviour of the Israeli actor in the negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. He integrates insights from political theory, political psychology, language and history, in order to expose the complex relations between theory and politics and describe different dynamics of mutual construction and change. In the last years he served as a Neubauer Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel-Aviv, and as a Postdoctoral Fellow