Paper short abstract:

The paper introduces interdisciplinary research (at the intersection of STS, International Relations, security studies, and anthropology) on so-called security leftovers, understood as the afterlives of material manifestations of security regimes and discourses.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores what happens to socio-material infrastructures built to address specific security challenges when the threats they were supposed to tackle fade away, when the dominant security discourses change, and when the technologies they use are no longer fit for their intended purposes. These ‘security leftovers’ stay in the world and continue to have lives of their own. They may take many forms: from infrastructures of colonial domination in the Global South through never-used military arsenals and abandoned Cold War bunkers and barracks to logistical bases and protection technologies developed during the Western counterterrorism and counterinsurgency endeavours following 9/11. However, beyond armaments and built environment, there are also many less tangible security leftovers, such as institutions and corresponding bodies of expertise that were used to uphold security regimes of the past and that keep their diverse lives in the new conditions.

Serving as an introduction to a larger project working with diverse case studies, the paper focuses on studying the trajectories of technologies, infrastructures, objects, and sites, which were designed to serve specific security purposes, yet their social life continued even in the new conditions as security regimes shifted. Seeking to go beyond (but not leaving aside) the focus on security artefacts as objects of remembering, this paper is interested in repurposing, adapting, and reusing particular security materialities, and their enduring social role.