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- Convenors:
-
Alexandra Schwell
(University of Klagenfurt)
Ana Ivasiuc
Monika Weissensteiner
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 01/037
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The state is both actor and addressee of (in)security. Yet, its security promise is challenged by non-state actors such as vigilante groups seeking to position themselves as alternative beacons of hope. The panel invites papers that address the role of the state for the production of (in)security.
Long Abstract:
In a globalized world under conditions of postindustrial transformations and increasing complexity, the state is only one among many actors that shape the lives and life chances of people and populations. Nevertheless, the national security community and its sovereignty play a crucial affective role beyond their actual meaning in international relations. At least in theory, the state holds a security promise for its members. At the same time, non-state actors such as vigilante or neighbourhood watch groups thwart the state's production of security in complex and often contradictory ways, seeking to position themselves as alternative beacons of hope and forcing the state to adapt its (in)security narrative. The state is both an actor and addressee of (in)security; it produces both security and insecurity policies, narratives, and imaginaries; it is the recipient and legitimizer of security demands and concerns.
The panel invites ethnographically informed papers that address the relation between the state and (in)security and ask:
- Beyond securitization theory, what becomes a state security issue and how? Which strategies are used to implement and legitimize security policies?
- What is the role of trust in security agencies and forces?
- How can we conceptualize reconfigurations of state sovereignty in the field of (transnational) security practices?
- How is the state's relation to vigilante groups who seek to challenge, substitute, or counteract the state?
- How does the state actively create and perpetuate politics of (in)security and emergency narratives? How does it act as a broker and moderator of (in)security feelings?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the ways in which Roma people have been constructed as a security problem in the Romanian town of Baia Mare. It uses archival research to focus on the period between 1979 and 1989, when the Communist Party initiated a national process of forced integration of Roma people.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyses the ways in which Roma people have been discursively constructed as a security problem in the Romanian town of Baia Mare. It uses archival research and interviews to focus on the period between 1979 and 1989, when the Romanian Communist Party initiated a national process of forced integration of Roma people.
This analysis seeks to depart both from an exceptionalist view of securitisation and from a non-elitist “everyday” perspective. The securitisation of Roma people in Baia Mare in the 1980’s was a state-led project aimed at constructing and strengthening the newly built socialist infrastructure. Roma people were articulated as a threat to this infrastructure, inasmuch as they actively resisted being enrolled in the socialist workforce and being registered in one territory. However, despite its dense array of policing mechanisms, the Romanian Communist state did not tackle this “threat” with exceptional measures, but rather through an assemblage of administrative and criminalisation policies.
The Roma people were seen as a surplus population that posed a number of problems such as theft and petty crimes, squatting, “hooliganism”, carrying diseases and generally disturbing public order. The local authorities claimed they were being “helpless” against these situations, and demanded an increase in policing. A series of complaints from local residents likewise demanded more security against Roma people. As a result, these people were evicted, removed from the city, or segregated in peripheral territories at the city's margins. As a result, currently, Baia Mare is witnessing an extreme marginalisation of Roma people.
Paper short abstract:
In the face of radical uncertainties, predictability and the lack thereof are forcefully addressed as extremely vital political concerns. Taking Turkey as an example, this paper explores what the contentious politics of authoritarian unpredictabilities can tell us about the role of states.
Paper long abstract:
In the face of radical uncertainties, predictability and the lack thereof are forcefully addressed as extremely vital political concerns. This is decisive in the context of authoritarian states, particularly pertaining to the management of insecurities in the wake of multiple crises during a global pandemic. In this respect, the Covid-19 pandemic has challenged the (supposed) role of the nation-state in security. It has also highlighted how un/accountabilities are produced, assigned, or manipulated. Focusing on the forms of governing and the experience of pandemic and viral uncertainties in Turkey, this paper aims to explore the contentious politics of strategically produced and/or deployed unpredictabilities by the state. It offers a sketch of the political situation and how unpredictabilities became routine rather than exceptional to the everyday lives of citizens. Drawing on remote-ethnographic material, I explore how authoritarian “unpredictableness” is enacted via state institutions, digital infrastructures, surveillance systems and data politics - during the pandemic and beyond -, and also experienced and contested within the digital and datafied worlds. This work opens up the question of what practices and debates around the lived experience with datafied (in)securities and political (un)predictabilities under the Presidential System in Turkey can tell us about the role of (authoritarian) states in uncertain times.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses, how state actions regarding rural development in the Colombian peace process are becoming a security risk for peasant communities and, how one of these, namely the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, is pursuing its own ideas of security, peace and a dignified life.
Paper long abstract:
The question of security is a central aspect of most state peace processes after violent conflicts - not only in Colombia. The end of hostilities and the demobilization of combatants directly increase the "physical" and "public security" of all inhabitants in conflict regions. Peace measures, such as rural development programs or land reforms, aim to improve "human security". Interestingly, some of the key addresses of such measures, such as rural communities, are not really involved in their design and implementation (although Colombian state institutions claim exactly the opposite). Thus, it is not surprising that in the implementation of these measures, frictions between local conceptions of peace and national peace policies, which at their core concern ideas and concepts of security, become apparent. Drawing on the example of the peasant Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, where I have been conducting repeated fieldwork since 2006, this paper shows not only how state peace measures regarding rural development with an extractivist focus pose an existential threat to peasants’ way of life, but also how a peasant community develops and pursues alternative ideas and conceptions of security, peace and a dignified life.
Paper short abstract:
In Denmark, the emic security concept of tryghed has become a politically hot potato. The paper focuses ethnographically on how the state employs tryghed as a register of security to define the citizens who deserve the security of assurance, and those who are deemed worthy of measures of deterrence.
Paper long abstract:
In 2021, 20 new local police stations opened in small Danish provincial towns. The establishment of these police stations occurred in the context of a broader political project of promoting tryghed - an emic concept of security/safety that is set aside from its closest English translations by evoking feelings of warmth, familiarity, proximity, trust, everyday well-being and predictability - not entirely unlike the now famously commercialized Danish notion of hygge. Focusing ethnographically on the establishment of one such police station as a specific form of state performance, the paper argues that rather than fighting crime, a main function of these police stations is to embody a particular state-sanctioned security ideal associated with a (nostalgic) vision of provincial small-scale social order. Conveying an idyllic image of the police as a friendly, jocular, and an integral part of their host communities, the local police stations arguably operate as a negative mirroring of how the state presents itself in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods (so-called ghettos or parallel societies) with large immigrant populations. These areas have been defined by politicians as hubs of utryghed (the negation of tryghed) and have consequently become the targets of fairly draconian law and order policies, e.g. stop-and-frisk zones and ‘double penalty’ laws. Against this backdrop, the paper suggests that the politics of tryghed is intimately linked to political definitions of the citizens who deserve the security of state assurance and, conversely, those that are deemed worthy of hardline measures of deterrence.