Security Dialogue

This article considers the calls for police reform and the continuation of police brutality to be twinning modes of policing within Kenya’s broader counterterrorism and preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) architecture. Rather than seeing ongoing police brutality as a failure of, or at odds with, calls for police reform, we argue that what appears to be a paradox is actually indicative of a dialectic central to civil counterinsurgency – a dialectic comprising what we call ‘coercive compliance’ and ‘abject coercion’. Based on extensive field research in Kenya, this article centers the institution of the police as an integral mode of P/CVE-as-counterinsurgency to analyze various manifestations of police power, including international compliance vis-a-vis police reform, police brutality, and community engagement. We further theorize P/CVE-as-counterinsurgency in conversation with Kenya’s colonial history, arguing that police violence is neither new nor unique to today’s counterterrorism regime. Rather, we argue that contemporary policing in Kenya contains sediment of racialized counterinsurgency tactics that were critical to colonial rule in the mid-20th century. In conclusion, we offer reflections on other security contexts where the dialectic of coercive compliance and abject coercion might serve as a useful analytic.

This article builds upon a growing body of critical security literature that explores the diverse, multiple and scalar experiences of crises and emergencies. While there has been extensive analysis that looks at the conceptualization of these terms and the state and international politics surrounding them, this article focuses on more local experiences and perspectives of what it means for particular events to be exceptional, particularly in places where crisis is context. By employing a vernacular security lens to Sierra Leone, where both authors have done over a decade of fieldwork, this article empirically examines intersections and divergences of experiences in periods generally recognized as extraordinary – namely the civil conflict (1991–2002), the Ebola epidemic (2014–2016) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020 onward) – alongside insecurities in everyday life, in order to better understand what comes to constitute the exceptional in particular circumstances and why. By scrutinizing exceptionality in the Sierra Leonean context, where crisis is endemic for most people, we demonstrate how and why there are often disconnects between international and state declarations and examine the reactions and perspectives of local people and what this can tell us about engaging with particular concepts in critical security studies.

This article examines Britain’s special relationship with Hong Kong from an ontological security perspective. By drawing on this case and revisiting key literature, it distinguishes between ‘critical situations’ and ‘fateful moments’ as different types of threats to state ontological security based on induced anxieties. In particular, it conceptualizes ‘fateful moments’ as ontological security threats that states can anticipate and adjust to before they transpire. Accordingly, two crucial events in Hong Kong’s history are examined as fateful moments: the 1997 Handover from Britain to China and the 2020 Hong Kong National Security Law. An analysis of British narratives reveals that Britain’s interpretation of the Sino-British Joint Declaration’s ‘one country, two systems’ concession functions as an ontological security seeking mechanism by constructing narrative continuity between Britain’s empire and post-empire identities. Furthermore, we argue that preemptive narrative adjustments ahead of each fateful moment enabled new policy preferences, as best illustrated by Britain’s stances toward ‘British National (Overseas)’ passport holders. In addition to advancing the ontological security studies agenda, this study contributes to ongoing debates over Britain’s post-Brexit identity.

Nuclear strategy has long been formulated through analogies. We focus on one in particular: guns. Early nuclear strategists in the United States used multiple analogical comparisons to make sense of the new, apparently unprecedented technology that confronted them. They compared nuclear deterrence to gun dueling and the nuclear revolution itself to the rise of gunpowder on European battlefields. Both analogies invoked empire, in the form of American settler frontier gunfights and the impact of firearms on European expansion. This article offers a critical reading of them. We show both analogies were historically flawed, relying on outdated accounts of how firearms shaped military-political change. Our argument proceeds in three stages. First, we document the role of gun analogies in early US nuclear strategic writing. Second, we critically evaluate the analogy, showing its historical and analytical limits. Drawing on firearms literatures in history, sociology, criminology, and economics, we show that much of what we now know about firearms diverges from nuclear theory and history. Third, we develop an alternative interpretation, contrasting these analytical fictions with the actual history of nuclear colonialism.

This article explores the meanings of security within the context of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (CIIT) project in southern Mexico, a proposed multimodal transport corridor connecting the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Touted as a viable alternative to the Panama Canal, the CIIT aims to expedite global goods circulation while simultaneously boosting the local economy. However, as with many large-scale infrastructure or resource extraction projects, such developments often lead to profound changes—altering landscapes, populations, and economies—frequently at the cost of the environment and communities’ established ways of living. Drawing on interviews with local residents, the article delves into the significance of the communal life system, or comunalidad, in securing alternative lifeworlds. These lifeworld-based notions of security stress the importance of mutuality, reciprocity, and care—principles through which natural resources are managed and collective well-being is structured. This article argues that in order to adequately conceptualize, critique, and challenge the harm caused by invasive infrastructure megaprojects, it is necessary to broaden conventional security frameworks to include the protection of distinct lifeworlds—that is, co-constituted conditions of being-together, rooted in the interconnectedness of human, non-human, and natural worlds.

This article investigates the temporal and material relations of secrecy and revelation through the lens of haunting. Critical security scholars have contributed to a deeper understanding of (state) secrecy by unpacking the material and discursive practices that conceal, reveal, or expose information, showing that there is no linear process from secrecy to transparency and accountability. In this article, I contribute to this literature by developing haunting as a concept to study how secrets from the past continue to shape the possibilities of political and legal debate in the present and future. I propose attending to how secrets can haunt specifically in situations where legal transgressions and violent politics are erased. I illustrate this conceptual framework through a case study of two secret operations in the War on Terror by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I illustrate how in both instances, secrets refused to remain buried, but rather came back to haunt public and political discussions about accountability. Based on the empirical insights, the conclusion presents future possibilities for studying secretive security issues through a framework of haunting.

The legitimacy of security forces and the broader security sector partly derives from the legitimacy of the state, but they also possess and cultivate a legitimacy of their own. What strategies do they employ to obtain and sustain legitimacy? This article argues that the sector presents itself as dual: extraordinary yet accessible, superior yet close to society, as part of a self-legitimation strategy. Self-legitimation targets actors both outside and within the sector, justifying the sector’s existence, power and activities to external and internal audiences. This argument is based on secondary literature and observations of slogans, images, artefacts and performances at four editions of two security fairs: the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) in London (2015, 2017) and LAAD Defence & Security in Rio de Janeiro (2019, 2023). Security fairs, are methodologically useful to identify self-legitimation strategies and are themselves legitimation instruments. They play a key role in (re)producing contemporary forms of militarism by legitimating, naturalizing and universalizing weapons-based, tech-based and industry-dependent views of security provision.

In today’s age of revanchist nationalism and xenophobia, ‘identity’ is commonly understood as a question of collective belonging. But another valence of identity is highly empirical, associated with the individual and constantly enforced by and beyond the state: ‘ID’, or ‘identity verification’. A focus on ID is novel because a new kind of speculative identity verification is apace: digital identity. We argue that, distinct from biometrics and other forms of identity verification such as fingerprints that seek to tie an individual to their body, digital ID enables and heightens a search for intent that is social and speculative. This is a novel subject and space for borders and policing. States and the firms they hire to police their borders are increasingly concerned with digital identity as the means to know individuals, and especially individuals who are beyond their borders but whose intent they surmise is to cross and harm. We examine two disparate cases of digital identity and efforts to police them in order to conceptualize what digitalizing identity means for bordering specific individuals. This effort to identify via privately held data carries a focus on particularly vulnerable populations such as refugees and missing people, reinforcing collective identity and borders against these ‘strangers’, while tracing a trajectory further into the material world of digital capitalism.

In Sweden, the national security objective to establish a total defence, which has been pending since the end of the Cold War, has been reintroduced. This has increasingly shifted the attention from civil crisis management to military defence, with subsequent increased resources for defence mobilization. A key threat representation in the current Swedish security narrative is the grey zone, which refers to a new, complex security situation framed as neither war nor peace. In this article, the idea of the grey zone is traced in the national discourse by analysing government policies and mass media content from 2010 to 2021. This threat representation has implications as it conditions perceptions and security work in particular ways. These implications are discussed in relation to the Swedish Security Protection Act and its impact on public administration, cooperative settings and daily work practices. While national policies stress how defence mobilization will provide security and benefit the societal response to all kinds of crises, these security practices may have unforeseen consequences, fostering a culture of suspicion and accusation. Moreover, practices of secrecy and suspicions may ultimately threaten the Swedish constitutional principles of transparency – one of the key core values that the Swedish total defence aims to protect.

Hezbollah has withstood intensifying attacks since its emergence in the 1980s. Major powers – especially the United States and Israel – have led the assault through political, legal and military means to ostracize and eradicate it. Without success. Hezbollah has repelled these attacks and grown stronger as a result. The systematic scale of assault on Hezbollah makes its very existence, let alone growing strength, paradoxical. This article explains why. It locates Hezbollah’s strength in its prudent mobilization of religious ideology to counter the justifications that major powers use to ostracize and destroy it. Transcending explanations based on pragmatism and normalization, the article theorizes Hezbollah’s struggle for survival as a form of ‘mimetic hedging’, leveraging its extra-institutional and institutional roles to absorb internal and external assaults. Hezbollah prudently applies simulation and dissimulation to avert present, and potentially mortal, threats to buy time for pursuing an Islamic liberationist order in the future. Building on extensive fieldwork and media archives in Lebanon and interviews conducted with Lebanese and UN officials, this article contributes to theorizing the resilience of non-state armed organizations and their role in the security of postcolonial states.