Alternatives: Global,Local,Political

Looking at the key theoretical approaches to the social construction of threat in the sociology of deviance and in political science, this article addresses the way boundaries between groups are created in different contexts. Comparison between UK media coverage of terrorists and football hooligans reveals that this is a rational process that draws boundaries on the basis of the position of the target group in the political field rather than the objective seriousness of the threat.

The article explores the proliferation of discourses on (anti)terror and the production of discursive “peripheries” that provide a rationale for social exclusion, ethnic intolerance, and governmental disciplining after 9/11. Preconditions and functionality of the vocabulary of terror in the construction of the identity of the Roma ethnic minority in Lithuania are presented in the case study. The case study focuses on the conflict in late 2004 between state authorities and the Roma community settled in the Kirtimai district of the capital city.

This article draws attention to the changing concepts of risk and security after 9/11 and the consequences that these changes have for political constructions of the state/market relation. By focusing on how the concept of partnership designates a certain understanding of risk and security, the article questions the construction of the role of private companies in US security policy after 9/11, as well as the construction of a politics of security in the private market of insurance. The article argues that, in political texts, the private company is constructed as an agent in the provision of national security; the private company is constituted as a political actor with political responsibilities that exceed respect for the law. Additionally, the article demonstrates the ways insurance businesses strive to uphold a classical understanding of the private insurance market and its responsibility.

Security has been located either in the political spectacle of public discourses or within the specialized field of security professionals, experts in the management of unease. This article takes issue with these analyses and argues that security practices are also formulated in more heterogeneous locations. Since the early days of the “war on terror,” the insurance industry has had an instrumental role and “underwriting terrorism” has become part of the global governmentality of terrorism. We explore the political implications of the classi-ficatory practices that insurance presupposes and argue that the technologies of insurance foster subjects who are consistent with the logic of capitalism. Insurance entrenches a vision of the social where antagonisms have been displaced or are suspended by an overwhelming concern with the continuity of social and economic processes. These effects of insurance will be discussed as the “temporality,” “subjectivity,” and “alterity” effects.

The changing contours of conflicts, wars, and crises with and after the end of the Cold War have led to a semantic shift: Not the avoidance of threats, so the argument goes, but the management of risks characterizes contemporary security practices. By juxtaposing the well-known security “dilemma” with the new “security paradox,” this contribution argues that a redefinition of “uncertainty” and “probability” is constitutive for this semantic shift. We argue that new security concerns like terrorism have (re)introduced “unstructured” uncertainty as the rationale for new security practices. To conceptualize this re-opening, we propose a topology of risk, uncertainty, and probability theories that highlights the multiple and conflicting logics of security policies currently at play.

The concept of war is clearly not its old self. The recent debate indicates with considerable clarity that there no longer exists a superior position from which to authoritatively enforce a dominant and broadly accepted definition. The most profound challenges consist of the claims that the concept has had its days and should accordingly be abandoned. In addition to exploring the background of this critique, the article aims to evaluate what accounts for the openness in the first place. The effort is to probe the broader constellations underpinning war and in particular the nexus between war and the state in order to trace possible changes. The article argues that these broader constellations provide a firmer basis for arriving at conclusions about both the nature of the debate and the future of war as a fundamental political and social concept.

It is commonly argued that time is the defining element in modern warfare. Whether one looks to military strategy, or to critical academia, the analysis is often the same: time and speed, not mass and space, are the essentials of warfare. In the 'Global War on Terror' this is the case for both the Western high-tech militaries and their asymmetrical terrorist opponents. This article attempts to qualify the current relation between time and space in war. By heuristically applying Zygmunt Baumann's concepts of the tourist and the vagabond, this article claims that, although new technologies of time have changed the relationship between space and time, space has not lost its importance. Paradoxically, by employing new temporal means, the making of space becomes the central issue in current globalized warfare.