“…The state actors or those who assume to represent ‘the human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber, 1994, p. 310) share this claim increasingly with non‐state actors, among whom ethnographers find new interlocutors, as in the case of privatization of warfare, intelligence and policing (Low & Maguire, 2019). Whether one traces contract mercenaries of global wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere (Coburn, 2018; Li, 2020; Singer, 2003); private security companies (Diphoorn & Grassiani, 2019; Grassiani & Diphoorn, 2017; Grassiani & Müller, 2019); supranational policing agencies (Andersson, 2014; Feldman, 2012, 2018); the makers of national security culture and architecture (Collier & Lakoff, 2022; González, 2010; Gusterson, 1996, 2004; Masco, 2014); or critical infrastructure protection policies (Cavelty & Kristensen, 2008), the proliferation of actors and agents of geopolitics‐in‐the‐making underscores the networked, diffuse and often sinister operations of war, militarism and securitization gone global and neoliberal. Confronting militarism and securitization stimulates scholarly inventiveness to devise new instruments and techniques to overcome their seeming opacity (see Pallister‐Wilkins et al., 2020) and to design new conceptual currencies to break their ostensibly hegemonic pervasiveness.…”