Biosecurity politics in New Zealand is implicated in the constitution of a new dimension of citizenship, a biosecure citizenship. This form is distinct in that the political determinants of citizenship do not fully rest on the individual body, but on the body’s connections to other entities, the inter‐ and intra‐active symbiotic condition of human‐non‐human ‘living together’. Through its constitutive role in enabling the ‘dangerous’ mobility of pathogens, viruses and invasive species, symbiotic individuality has become politicised as a matter for state determination and control. Contemporary articulations of biosecure citizenship emphasise a variety of contractual and non‐contractual responsibilities, which augment the national coordinates of citizenship, reconstitute symbiotic individuality, and justify the state penetration of the private sphere. Drawing on biosecurity legislation, public education campaigns and research with community weed removal projects, I chart the reinforcement and practice of this biosecure citizenship. I argue that there is an urgent need to democratise decisionmaking about the construction of biological threat, about where and how to make cuts in our symbiotic associations with different species, and between species and spaces. By articulating biosecure citizenship not only as a discourse of ecological responsibility but of rights, biosecurity could be reinvigorated as ‘bios‐security’, the inclusive politics of continually questioning the ecological good life.

IntroductionA biosecurity threat is defined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as``matters or activities that individually or collectively present biological risk to ecological welfare or to the well-being of humans, animals and plants' ' (Fasham and Trumper, 2001, page 7). Donaldson and Wood (2004) remark that the term biosecurity' was largely unheard of in the UK until the 2001 foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreak, during which it evolved from a reference to practices such as cleansing and disinfecting, to the surveillant control of movement and spaces. Yet it was still firmly associated with attempts to stop the transmission of animal diseases within farming, and this has become the dominant area of social science attention (Donaldson and Wood, 2004; see also Hinchliffe, 2001;Law, 2006). Internationally in the post 9/11 era the term has also come to be associated with the prevention of bioterrorism and the spread of apocalyptic human viruses (Collier et al, 2004). In New Zealand, however, the meaning of biosecurity is broader and its history deeper. The current biosecurity regime is simply one manifestation within the context of 150 years of social and legislative practices related to native and alien species concerns. Biosecurity in New Zealand is currently defined as``the exclusion, eradication or effective management of the risks posed by pests and diseases or unwanted organisms to the economy, environment and human health'' (MAF, 2007). This definition has changed in emphasis over the seventeen years during which a discernible integrated national system has been in place, (1)

Emergency preparedness is a distinctive feature of contemporary anticipatory politics, yet “preppers,” a sub‐culture who prepare to survive a range of possible crisis events through practices including stockpiling and survival skill development, are subject to media ridicule and academic dismissal. If the hoarder is the symbolic deviant figure of the consumer society, the prepper is that of the security society. Such constructions of prepper pathology, however, work to reinforce the neoliberal security state. By repositioning the prepper as an amplifier of conditions of the present, what emerges is an emblematic and anticipatory figure who troubles the cracks in the security state's governing logics, exposing its social differentiation and rehearsing the inevitability of its future failures. Drawing on qualitative research on UK prepping cultures, I define prepping across three constellations of imaginative‐material practices, concerning “value,” “temporalities,” and “crisis.” I argue that prepping exposes the contradictions of infrastructural weakening alongside the networked dependencies and restricted agency felt within late modernity, challenges the expert determination of what constitutes crisis, and unveils the myth of the universality of state security protection. Living with profound crisis attunement, preppers nevertheless recuperate pleasure in material potentiality and skilful practice, in thoughtful engagement with temporalities, and in the vitality of community and meaning formed in the times and spaces in, and around, crisis.

Biosecurity poses the problem of how to live with and manage the complex, contingent and emergent circulations of life. This excess of circulating life manifests in a host of different circumstances: from the biopolitical attempt to sort 'good' from 'bad' circulations disrupted by a zoonotic virus making use of air transportation networks; to fluid microbial topologies that challenge the bounded individual body; from a biosurveillance network signal prompting anticipatory governance responses; to the intersection of financial and microbial geographies in the risky practices of industrial agribusiness. The 'shock of the real' from these eventful and everyday occurrences not only illuminates empirical connections between circulating bodies, microbes, knowledges, electronic signals, seeds, capital, food and anxiety, but also highlights that the complexity of securing processes that are elaborating new forms of life cannot be fully captured through any one theoretical lens. In this review article I consider the burgeoning field of biosecurity studies through attention to these differing concepts of circulation, and suggest neglected circulations for future research.