Introduction: Security/Mobility and the politics of movement

Abstract

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.

Radical mobilities

“…In an effort to move away from a politics of mobility that centres on ‘rigid social formations’ (Bissell, 2016) of given subjects or identities, these approaches consider the pre-cognitive, immanent forces within (im)mobility. This aligns with views in which mobility itself is an operation or technique of power (Bærenholdt, 2013), rather than a fact of displacement which is then enabled or controlled (Beauchamps et al, 2017) and given meaning through power. This allows for important understandings of how mobility constitutes subjectivities and how these could be remade in creative ways within politics understood as more than simply institutional or structural.…”

“…In contrast to understandings of mobility discussed above, critical studies of mobility have increasingly sought to understand how movement is shaped by and entangled with relations of power (Nikolaeva et al, 2019; Robinson, 2015; Peck and Theodore, 2010; Söderström et al, 2013a; Beauchamps et al, 2017; Bissell, 2016; Blickstein, 2010; Cresswell, 1999, 2006, 2010b; Sheller, 2018). Although the terms critical and radical have sometimes been used interchangeably (Peake and Sheppard, 2014), here I use ‘critical’ to refer to approaches that describe, diagnose and analyse relations of power.…”

Safe assemblages: thinking infrastructures beyond circulation in the times of SARS-CoV2

“…This conception of a duality of legitimate and illegitimate circulation, which must therefore be controlled and restricted, can also be found in contributions to research on infrastructures in the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006 ). Recent suggestions in critical security studies have referred to this body of literature, aptly arguing that ‘while contemporary liberal politics actively encourages and enables mobility for the sake of our modern lifestyle and the economic benefits that it yields, it also seeks to render the flows of such mobility knowledgeable and controllable’ (Beauchamps et al 2017 : 1). From the perspective of security studies, the gist of the ‘new mobilities’ literature is a notion of mobility that does not equal that of movement alone (see also Aradau 2016 ), but also entails stationary components (like, for instance, infrastructures supporting air, rail and road travel) and, crucially, accounts for the effecting of immobilisation as a flip side of the enabling of movement.…”

Security in transition(s): The low-level security politics of electric vehicle range anxiety

“…Interesting, just as security is an empty signifier to be filled contextually (Beauchamps et al, 2017), range anxiety 'has no consistent psychological definition, but is rather used with different meanings that range from anticipated discomfort to actually experienced fear (Rauh et al, 2017: 30). '…”

“…1 Hence, it is possible to see stress, and indirectly range anxiety, as an instance of insecurity, as it represents an intermediate bodily and emotive response to uncertainty, one that people try to avoid. Interestingly, just as security is an empty signifier to be filled contextually (Beauchamps et al, 2017), range anxiety 'has no consistent psychological definition, but is rather used with different meanings that range from anticipated discomfort to actually experienced fear' (Rauh et al, 2017: 30). Likewise, stress knows 'no solid agreement about the definition .…”