Paper short abstract:

Security requirements find expression in the production of normative templates that address any given domain relevant to public safety and livelihood security. The panel will investigate in what way politics of securitization affect complex plural legal configurations at various scales.

Paper long abstract:

The governance of human security at transnational scale has attracted increasing interest these days. Security requirements find expression in the production of normative templates that address a variety of issues ranging from protection against threats to public safety, to any given domain relevant to livelihood security. Commonly, such processes are communicated in the language of neoliberal achievements.

Politics of securitization are mainly dominated by the global governance institutions, such as the United Nations with its numerous sub-organizations, the IMF, the World Bank. They are setting up legal frameworks of security for various areas of human livelihood thus re-defining the conditions of people's legal agency. As one of the major fields appears the governance of conflict and violence (crime prevention, gated communities, urban security, anti-terrorism legislation, law on torture, on war, on war crimes, mass atrocities) and normative scripts for all kinds of post conflict scenarios. In this context, control over the flow of information and informational politics also play a decisive role. In addition, health, food and resource security, economy and finance are domains in which transnational normative securitization becomes increasingly effective.

Proceeding from the assumption that there is a coherent logic behind this wide range of normative operations, the panel will investigate what the means and ends of such politics of securitization are and how they affect complex plural legal configurations at various scales.

Paper short abstract:

I focus on the link between land and human security by comparing the biographies of two agricultural households. In their efforts at adapting and challenging the tensions in their multiple networks they produce an unstable equilibrium of human security but forfeit state provided social security.

Paper long abstract:

In this research I address the anthropological discussion of neoliberal transition in postsocialism, a genre that has been dubbed "post-post-transition theories" by Manduhai Buyandelgeriyn (2008). Serbia is an interesting case insofar as it had already featured agricultural markets, decentralization and relative workers democracy in socialist times, so that the application of privatization of agricultural and other industries and marketization (agricultural laissez-faire) in the 2000s should seem suspect cures of the ailment of the "socialist" economy even from a "market-believer's" point of view. Contrary to Buyandelgeriyn's view that anthropological critique of shock therapy and the description of the "multiple paths" of neoliberalism in postsocialism has already "contributed to wider anthropological theory" (2008: 237), I follow Tatjana Thelen's (2011) verdict that our theorizing has reached a "dead-end". As long as we do not stop following implicit neo-institutionalist approaches with their underlying assumptions from the modernization/ traditionalization paradigm (cf. Allcock 2000), we are comparing ideal capitalism with actually existing (post)socialism. I propose we can produce new theory when our critique of neoliberalism (cf. Mirowski & Plehwe 2009) becomes concrete, i.e. extending the perspective of our informants by drawing on critical theory in analysing their situated practices within late capitalism (cf. Burawoy 2009).

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in the US and Freetown my presentation explores the different dimensions of international counternarcotics law enforcement in West Africa focusing on the technologies's role in the securitization and internationalization of the war on drugs.

Paper long abstract:

The US Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S), which combines intelligence services, law enforcement agencies and the armed forces, is one of the most important organisations in the field of international crime control. JIATF-S played an important role in the interception of a large drugs shipment in Sierra Leone. The shipment and the arrest of several suspects led to the so-called Cocaine Trial before the High Court in Freetown, the first trial of this scale in Sierra Leone. Drawing on interviews conducted at the JIATF-S headquarters on Key West and fieldwork in Sierra Leone my presentation will examine the various technologies employed by JIATF-S and the authorities in Sierra Leone to deal with the smuggling of narcotics through Africa. My presentation tracks how new technologies are employed in the securitization of transnational crime control.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation critically examines the interplay between law and visuality in the emerging pre-crime order and in the post-9/11 securitization of everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

The "Global War on Terror" has significantly increased the pressure on governments to think and act pre-emptively. The security apparatus no longer seems to be activated (solely) by the breach of a norm, an immanent threat or a reasonable suspicion, but by a vast array of abstract risks and diffuse threats.

The anticipatory logic that increasingly securitizes everyday life implies that these un(fore)seen risks and threats can somehow be made (fore)seeable, that the still unknown and faceless offender can be rendered visible before s/he even knows that s/he is about to commit a criminal act. In this context, imaginative or "visionary" techniques take on new political significance. This presentation critically examines the role that the visual plays in the emerging pre-crime order and in the securitization of everyday life. Most importantly,it will scrutinize the implications of this "visualization before justice," i.e. this visualization of a threat or "risky other" in advance of laws.