Practicing (In)Security in the City

Security at home: How private securitization practices increase state and capitalist control

“…For Fawaz and Akar (2012) securitization originates at this particular sociopolitical and global moment when everyday experience is constantly interrupted by security concerns. They focus on ‘security as lived’ and unravel both the performance power of security and the personal narratives that capture its meaning (Fawaz and Akar, 2012: 106).…”

“…For Fawaz and Akar (2012) securitization originates at this particular sociopolitical and global moment when everyday experience is constantly interrupted by security concerns. They focus on ‘security as lived’ and unravel both the performance power of security and the personal narratives that capture its meaning (Fawaz and Akar, 2012: 106). In their ethnography, neoliberalism is again associated with securitization, especially in the Arab city made up of overlapping and complex sets of anxieties that are materialized spatially through segregation and socially along race, class, gender and religious or sectarian lines (Fawaz and Akar, 2012).…”

“…They focus on ‘security as lived’ and unravel both the performance power of security and the personal narratives that capture its meaning (Fawaz and Akar, 2012: 106). In their ethnography, neoliberalism is again associated with securitization, especially in the Arab city made up of overlapping and complex sets of anxieties that are materialized spatially through segregation and socially along race, class, gender and religious or sectarian lines (Fawaz and Akar, 2012). Fawaz, Harb, and Gharbieh identify the ‘securities’ and ‘threats’ of living in Beirut, Lebanon, and find that an ‘architecture of security is an integral element of the city that works to entrench socio-spatial divisions and shapes the daily experience of dwellers’ (2012: 187).…”

“…In my research I focus mainly on how interviewees employ security discursively to rationalize their attempts to keep others out, and I refer to this process as securitization. At the same time I am also using the term theoretically to describe the interlocking processes and spatial scales of legal, institutional, governmental and financial strategies of producing ‘security’ that resonates with the work of Goldstein (2013), Fawaz, Harb, and Gharbieh (2012) and Amar (2013). What distinguishes my work from these other studies is that it is embedded in 20 years of ethnographic research on middle-class residential developments in the United States and Mexico, and the theoretical framework of securitization emerged as a grounded theory from these findings.…”

Securing Urban Frontiers: A View from Yangon, Myanmar

“…Lucia Zedner (: 9) describes security as ‘a promiscuous concept … wantonly deployed in fields as diverse as social security, health and safety, financial security, policing and community safety, national security, military security, human security, environmental security, international relations and peacekeeping’. A lively literature focused on cities, security, socio‐spatial fragmentations and urban geopolitics has developed, further catalysed by the post 9/11 contexts (Caldeira, 2000; Avant, ; Abrahamsen and Williams, ; Graham, ; Fawaz and Bou Aker, ; Jaffe, 2017; Rokem et al ., ; Pasquetti, 2019), asking who, what and where is being secured and with what consequences? Informed by that literature, our focus here is on the relationship of security—police and, especially, private security guards—to wider reconfigurations of the urban, viewed from downtown Yangon, the largest city in, and commercial capital of, Myanmar…”