Governing (in)security in a postcolonial world: Transnational entanglements and the worldliness of ‘local’ practice

Abstract

While analysis of transnationalized forms of security governance in the contemporary postcolonial world features prominently in current debates within the field of security studies, most efforts to analyse and understand the relevant processes proceed from an unquestioned ‘Western’ perspective, thereby failing to consider the methodological and theoretical implications of governing (in)security under postcolonial conditions. This article seeks to address that lacuna by highlighting the entangled histories of (in)security governance in the (post)colonial world and by providing fresh theoretical and methodological perspective for a security studies research agenda sensitive to the implications of the postcolonial condition.

The gendered and racialized politics of risk analysis. The case of Frontex

“…of the hypermasculine racialized villain, the white masculine savior, and the feminized victim (Peterson 1992;Young 2003). Postcolonial approaches particularly show how such constructions are bound to Western-centric perspectives on governing (in)security and the continuation of colonial legacies in security regimes (Agathangelou and Ling 2009;Hönke and Müller 2012;Peoples and Vaughan-Williams 2014), especially with regard to border security (Barkawi and Laffey 2006;Vukov and Sheller 2013). These legacies reinstitute colonial notions of Europe and its racialized 'Other' into contemporary (EU) border regimes (Andersson 2012;Barbero 2012;Kinnvall 2016;M'charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014).…”

Researching Private Security in Africa: Two Theoretical Orientations, Two Tales of Security Governance

“…The approaches range from descriptive outlines of mercenarism and private security companies in the continent (Musah and Fayemi, ) to theoretically fueled inquiries connecting local security practices to global trends and ‘rationalities’ (Abrahamsen and Williams, ). A number of issues have permeated the debate, among them the impact of private security in scenarios of fragile statehood (Avant, ), the regulation of the field (Chesterman ) and the notion of hybrid security, understood as the intertwinement of public and private actors’ roles and spheres of influence (Hönke, ; Hönke and Müller, ). The two books under review in this essay engage with the previous literature, but they do so from very different theoretical orientations.…”

Anticipating the Struggle against Everyday Impunity in Myanmar through Accounts from Bangladesh and Thailand

“…Although work on impunity for spectacular, large‐scale violence is profoundly important, here we deliberately adopt a research strategy that takes routine violent state practices seriously. This strategy requires of us that we engage ‘with everyday forms of security practice, with competing rationalities of governing (in)security and with local agency’ (Hönke & Müller, :392), so as to identify and understand the many unexceptional ways that impunity is reproduced and normalized. It also requires that we attend to how official responses to disparate, seemingly unrelated acts of violence by state officers and their proxies are not arbitrary or ad hoc but are indicative of general arrangements for political domination.…”