Security Dialogue

The duty to render assistance at sea appears to be a well-established humanitarian norm; nonetheless, in 2011 alone more than 1500 people drowned in the Mediterranean. Witnesses recount that many could have been rescued if fellow seafarers had not ignored their pleas for help. Struggling to understand failures to rescue, many seek to portray indifference as individual failure from the norm. In contrast hereto, this article provides an insight into the governing of indifference in contemporary liberal societies - that is, how people are guided towards becoming indifferent to the lives and sufferings of particular populations. Thus, my focus will be on the workings of law and its potential to produce collective indifference. The drowned, I argue, are not casualties of individual immoral behaviour; through a system of sanctions, fellow human beings are encouraged to look away and even to let people die at borders in the name of security. This not only dilutes the legal duty to rescue but has also had a detrimental impact upon the normative landscape, leading to a distinction between worthy lives that fall within the duty to rescue and charitable lives becoming a question of benevolence.

This article supplements and extends the ontological security theory in International Relations (IR) by conceptualizing the notion of mnemonical security. It engages critically the securitization of memory as a means of making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing or outright criminalizing others. The securitization of historical memory by means of law tends to reproduce a sense of insecurity among the contesters of the ‘memory’ in question. To move beyond the politics of mnemonical security, two lines of action are outlined: (i) the ‘desecuritization’ of social remembrance in order to allow for its repoliticization, and (ii) the rethinking of the self–other relations in mnemonic conflicts. A radically democratic, agonistic politics of memory is called for that would avoid the knee-jerk reactive treatment of identity, memory and history as problems of security. Rather than trying to secure the unsecurable, a genuinely agonistic mnemonic pluralism would enable different interpretations of the past to be questioned, in place of pre-defining national or regional positions on legitimate remembrance in ontological security terms.

We explore what we refer to as municipal corporate security (MCS) units, a new form of security organization that differs significantly from public police and private contract security. Based on 36 interviews with MCS managers in 16 cities across Canada and in the United States, we examine how in-house security practices developed in private corporations are being transferred to municipal governments. We draw from the sociology of security governance to demonstrate how the Department of Homeland Security funding and policy has shaped MCS in the USA since 2001. The absence of similar centralized funding and policy for MCS in Canada has led to more piecemeal policy transfer, fewer links to federal government or national security, and more focus on nuisance policing than anti-terrorism. We also engage with the sociology of security consumption to argue that governments should be conceived as major buyers of security goods.

This study applies a governmentality approach to analyse the European Union’s civil society promotion in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process through the EU’s Partnership for Peace instrument. Contrary to a widespread conviction in earlier academic research, it argues that the EU engagement with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict has political substance, and the Partnership for Peace provides a good illustration of this. The governmentality perspective highlights the power of the technical in guiding civil society towards particular visions, activities and goals. It brings to light a set of supposedly neutral definitions and technical instruments related to project applications and project selection that sort out, promote and link together civil society action in a way that manages and reinforces the existing dynamics of the peace process. The technical brings with it a particular idea of civil society, which is encouraged to assume functions that focus on the management of the outcomes of the conflict rather than striving for a transformative vision of peace based on political deliberation and fundamental change. The use of the governmentality approach not only aims to provide a better understanding of the nature of the Partnership for Peace programme, but also contributes to debates over the theoretical merits of governmentality by applying the approach to peace and conflict research.

The objective of emancipatory security theory is to examine the insecurities of individuals and social groups that stem from oppressive power processes, relations, and structures. However, the image of power in emancipatory security studies does not correspond to such a normative and analytical motivation. This renders the theory susceptible to substantial criticism on the grounds of inadequate analysis of resisting individuals as agents of security in their own localities. To address this issue, the present article conceptualizes ‘emancipatory power’. In this exercise, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power, enriched by Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and feminist insights, will be used as the theoretical foundation to tailor collective power based on trust in a ‘moment’ of emancipation. Collective power will be illustrated by references to the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011.