Nearly 15 years after 9/11, it is time to grapple with the way in which imperatives of preemption have made their way into routine security practice and bureaucratic operations. As a growing literature in security studies and political geography has argued, preparing for catastrophe, expecting the worst, and scripting disasters are central elements of contemporary, speculative security culture. One of the most-discussed findings of the 9/11 Commission Report was that US security services had insufficiently deployed their imagination to foresee and preempt the attacks. This article introduces a special issue that offers a range of in-depth empirical studies that analyse how the imperative of 'routinizing the imagination' plays out in practice across different policy domains. It deploys the lens of performativity in order to conceptualize and explain the materialization of preemption and its situated entanglements with pre-existing security bureaucracies. We detail the idealized traits of a 'security of the interstice', which include interoperability, emergence, flexibility and analytical foresight that are meant to bridge the perceived gaps of security spaces and the temporal bridges between present and possible futures. The lofty rhetoric of preparing for the worst and bridging the gaps encounters numerous obstacles, challenges and reversals in practice. As becomes clear through the notion of performativity, such obstacles and challenges do not just 'stand in the way' of implementation, but actively shape the materialization of preemption in different sectors.

In recent years, the European Union has supported the development of a new civil security market, capable of providing security technology for new and global security challenges. This article analyses the emerging growth market for civil security in relation to contemporary notions of potential crisis and emergency. Building on ongoing academic analysis of what Melinda Cooper has termed 'economies of emergence', the article points out how the figure of emergence generates investment in more flexible, adaptive and, so it is argued, potentially lucrative markets for civil security. Drawing on observations at a number of security trade shows and stakeholder workshops, the analysis demonstrates that 'civil' aspirations, concepts and technologies build on earlier formulations of military strategic discourse in the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs -though in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. More generally, the motivation behind the analysis is to investigate civil security and civil markets as performative enactments, and so to critically engage with the emergence of the civil security market as a priority in EU policymaking.

Against the background of the growing use of machine learning (ML) based technologies by the military, our article calls for an analytical perspective on ML platforms to understand how ML proliferates across the military and to what effects. Adopting a material–technical perspective on platforms as developed within new media studies, and bringing this literature to critical security studies, we suggest that a focus on platforms and the technical work they do is needed to understand how digital technologies are emerging and shaping security practices. Through a detailed study of Google's open-source ML platform TensorFlow and a discussion of the US Department of Defense Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team, or Project Maven, we make two broader contributions. First, we identify a broader “platformization” of the military, with which we refer to the growing involvement and permeation of the (technomaterial) ML platform as the infrastructure that enables new practices of decentralized and experimental algorithm development across the military. Second, we draw out how this platformization is accompanied by new entanglements between the military and actors in the corporate domain, especially Big Tech, which play a key role in this context, as well as the open-source community that is organized around these platforms.

Against the background of a sense of crisis in the European Union and in international politics, European Union Member States have since 2016 increased their cooperation within the Common Security and Defence Policy, for example, establishing the European Defence Fund. Scholars have long pointed out that the European Union lacks the necessary ‘hard’ military power to influence international politics, subscribing to and constituting an image of the European Union as not masculine enough. We are critical of these accounts and develop a different argument. First, building on insights from feminist security and critical military studies, we argue that the European Union is a military power constituted by multiple masculinities. We consider the European Union to be a masculine military power, not only because it uses and aims to develop military instruments, but also because of how militarism and military masculinities permeate discourses, practices and policies within Common Security and Defence Policy and the European Union more broadly. We argue, second, that the crisis narrative allows the European Union to strengthen Common Security and Defence Policy and exhibit more aggressive military masculinities based on combat, which exist alongside entrepreneurial and protector masculinities. These developments do not indicate a clear militarisation of Common Security and Defence Policy, but, rather, an advancement and normalisation of militarism and the militarised masculinities associated with it.

This chapter introduces the space of inquiry that opens up at the intersection of security and mobility. It begins with briefly setting the stage of the security/mobility dynamic, after which a conceptual exploration follows. Security is regarded as a discourse revolving around threat. Distinct about security today is it being premised on openness which encourages intervention upon and thus regulation of mobility. Mobility is regarded as socially produced motion and concerns the ways in which the fact of displacement is made possible. Attention is then directed at the productive effects of both concepts and their interaction: they bring about particular relations of power, thereby privileging certain forms of security and mobility. The introductory chapter ends with an overview of the structure of the book and the individual chapters.