scholarly journals Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare: The Hawija bombardments

2021 ◽  
pp. 096701062110388
Author(s):  
Lauren Gould ◽  
Nora Stel
Keyword(s):  
Security Studies ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Expiration Date ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Strategic Ignorance

How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing about civilian casualties. Official narratives shifted from denial to secrecy to strategic ignorance. Bridging work on secrecy from the field of critical security studies with work on strategic ‘unknowing’ from ignorance studies, we propose a new take on the Foucauldian notion of ‘regimes of truth’. The regimes of truth that emerge to justify shifts to remote warfare – that it is riskless, precise and caring for civilian others – rely not merely on secrecy and denial but on feigned and imposed ignorance about casualties. Whereas denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date, ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways. Deliberate unknowing does not just postpone investigation and accountability but fundamentally and indefinitely obstructs it and thus sustains the regimes of truth for future remote wars.

Battlefields from Event to Heritage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Carman ◽  
Patricia Carman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The World ◽  
War And Conflict ◽  
Modern War

What is—or makes a place—a ‘historic battlefield’? From one perspective the answer is a simple one—it is a place where large numbers of people came together in an organized manner to fight one another at some point in the past. But from another perspective it is far more difficult to identify. Quite why any such location is a place of battle—rather than any other kind of event—and why it is especially historic is more difficult to identify. This book sets out an answer to the question of what a historic battlefield is in the modern imagination, drawing upon examples from prehistory to the twentieth century. Considering battlefields through a series of different lenses, treating battles as events in the past and battlefields as places in the present, the book exposes the complexity of the concept of historic battlefield and how it forms part of a Western understanding of the world. Taking its lead from new developments in battlefield study—especially archaeological approaches—the book establishes a link to and a means by which these new approaches can contribute to more radical thinking about war and conflict, especially to Critical Military and Critical Security Studies. The book goes beyond the study of battles as separate and unique events to consider what they mean to us and why we need them to have particular characteristics. It will be of interest to archaeologists, historians, and students of modern war in all its forms.

Sicherheit und Frieden? Ein Blick von außen

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 235-237
Author(s):  
Lothar Brock
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Management ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
New Wars ◽  
Peace Research ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Military Security

Whether or not, and how, ‘security’ and ‘peace’ go together has always been an issue of discussion among peace researchers. The focus on peace instead of on (military) security was constitutive for early German ‘critical peace research’. The inception of S+F can be regarded as an attempt to bridge the divide between peace and security studies. In this regard, the title of the journal was programmatic. It served a useful purpose when, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, peace research (with important exceptions, of course) tended to move towards critical security studies combined with a reductionist understanding of peace as ‘comprehensive security’ and as a label on a tool box for civil conflict management (in the ‘new wars’). In this context, S+F reminded the community of the need to maintain the distinction between peace and security. The journal also offered the space for debating this distinction in terms of the different logics of peace and security.

scholarly journals Concept of Soft Violence in Critical Security Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-108
Author(s):  
Candyce Kelshall ◽  
Natalie Archutowski
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Online Forum ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Transnational Social Movements

On September 16, 2021, Professor Candyce Kelshall and Ms. Natalie Archutowski presented on the Concept of Soft Violence in Critical Security Studies at the 2021 CASIS Vancouver Defence and Security Advisory Network online forum. Primary topics included: evaluating violence as soft in nature, how and where soft violence might fit in the realm of critical security studies, violent transnational social movements (VTSMs), sharp power, and soft power. 

scholarly journals Securitising Covid-19? The Politics of Global Health and the Limits of the Copenhagen School

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-257
Author(s):  
Daniel Edler Duarte ◽  
Marcelo M. Valença
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Control Strategies ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Scientific Controversies ◽  
Copenhagen School ◽  
State Surveillance ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The One

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked controversies over health security strategies adopted in different countries. The urge to curb the spread of the virus has supported policies to restrict mobility and to build up state surveillance, which might induce authoritarian forms of government. In this context, the Copenhagen School has offered an analytical repertoire that informs many analyses in the fields of critical security studies and global health. Accordingly, the securitisation of COVID-19 might be necessary to deal with the crisis, but it risks unfolding discriminatory practices and undemocratic regimes, with potentially enduring effects. In this article, we look into controversies over pandemic-control strategies to discuss the political and analytical limitations of securitisation theory. On the one hand, we demonstrate that the focus on moments of rupture and exception conceals security practices that unfold in ongoing institutional disputes and over the construction of legitimate knowledge about public health. On the other hand, we point out that securitisation theory hinders a genealogy of modern apparatuses of control and neglects violent forms of government which are manifested not in major disruptive acts, but in the everyday dynamics of unequal societies. We conclude by suggesting that an analysis of the bureaucratic disputes and scientific controversies that constitute health security knowledges and practices enables critical approaches to engage with the multiple – and, at times, mundane – processes in which (in)security is produced, circulated, and contested.

Critical Security Studies

2018 ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Chris Hendershot ◽  
David Mutimer
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Collaborative Effort ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indigenous Sovereignty

This chapter intends to provoke the present in order to motivate an unsettling and un-settled future for Critical Security Studies (CSS). To be unsettling CSS must (continue to) commit to unconventional inquisitiveness through refusing discipline and embracing reflexive accountability. To be un-settled, CSS must do the serious work of decolonizing. The need to decolonize as an effort to support indigenous sovereignty may create the unsettling possibility that CSS does not have a future. To imagine that CSS has no future is to take reflexive account of the colonial complicities of Anglo-European scholarship, while becoming open to fostering more meaningful collaborations with Indigenous people. Being unsettled and becoming un-settled must be a collaborative effort among all knowledge producers in order to critically confront the past, present, and future problems of doing and thinking (through) security.

Critical Security Studies and Global Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-177
Author(s):  
João Nunes
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Regional Stability ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Core ◽  
Core Concepts ◽  
Political Dimensions

This chapter argues that Critical Security Studies (CSS), a diverse range of approaches that have questioned traditional ways of conceiving security, can provide a useful set of tools for understanding global health. CSS enables rich analyses of how health problems emerge as matters of security and allows one to discern the underlying conditions that make this possible, as well as the effects of framing diseases as threats. It also shows how health security can be conceived as a layered phenomenon, encompassing not just state and regional stability but also the everyday lives of individuals and groups. The chapter contextualizes and lays out the core tenets of CSS, then shows how some of the core concepts in the CSS literature can be applied to analysis of health issues. Finally, the chapter demonstrates how CSS can function as a privileged entry point into the political dimensions of the current global health regime.

Making amends: Towards an antiracist critical security studies and international relations

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 8-16
Author(s):  
Navnita Chadha Behera ◽  
Kristina Hinds ◽  
Arlene B Tickner
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies

Critical security studies, racism and eclecticism

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 142-151
Author(s):  
Samuel M Makinda
Keyword(s):  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies
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