Claudia Aradau

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Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism through which these transformations can be explored. Claudia Aradau and Tobias Blanke develop conceptual and methodological tools to understand how algorithmic operations shape the government of self and other. They explore the emergence of algorithmic reason through rationalities, materializations, and interventions, and trace how algorithmic rationalities of decomposition, recomposition, and partitioning are materialized in the construction of dangerous others, the power of platforms, and the production of economic value. The book provides a global trandisciplinary perspective on algorithmic operations, drawing on qualitative and digital methods to investigate controversies ranging from mass surveillance and the Cambridge Analytica scandal in the UK to predictive policing in the US, and from the use of facial recognition in China and drone targeting in Pakistan to the regulation of hate speech in Germany.

What should be done about trafficking in women? Rethinking Trafficking in Women argues that the question to be asked is, 'What cannot be done about trafficking in women?' Exploring the complex relationship between security, subjectivity and politics, Aradau argues that security practices reproduce a politics of unfreedom and inequality. Politics out of security, on the contrary, is formulated around universality, equality and freedom. In the situation of trafficking, the equality and universality of work disrupt the specification of difference and of particularized subjectivity upon which security practices rely. Aradau emphasizes that the reduction of politics to security limits struggles for equality and freedom and entrenches divisions and boundaries in the world.

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.

Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards internal to knowledge practice to validate their knowledge claims. This quest for scientific standards now also operates against the background of debates on ‘post-truth’, which raise pressing and perplexing questions for critical lines of thought. We propose a different approach by conceptualizing validity as practices of assembling credibility in which the transversal formation and circulation of credits and credentials combine with disputes over credence and credulity. This conceptualization of the validity of (critical) security knowledge shifts the focus from epistemic and methodological standards to transepistemic practices and relations. It allows us to mediate validity critically as a sociopolitical rather than strictly scientific accomplishment. Developing such an understanding of validity makes it possible for critical security studies and international relations to displace epi...

The use of digital devices and the collection of digital data have become pervasive in borderzones. Whether deployed by state or non-state actors, digital devices are rolled out despite intense criticism and controversy. In this article, I propose to approach these interventions through the prism of experimentality. Experimentality was initially formulated in the anthropological literature on the globalisation of clinical trials and, more recently, revisited in feminist science and technology studies. Drawing on this work, I argue that experimentality has become a rationality of governing in borderzones, which renders social relations continuously decomposable and recomposable by inserting mundane (digital) devices into the world. The introduction of various digital devices in Greece since 2015, starting with Skype for the pre-registration of asylum seekers, helps shed light on a particular form of governing through experiments without protocol. This form of experimentality has specific political effects for migrants' lives. Firstly, experimentality builds upon and intensifies neoliberalism by rearranging rather than redressing precarity. In so doing, experimentality through digital devices produces debilitation rather than better connectivity or access to asylum. Secondly, migrants become not only subjects of surveillance, but subjects of extraction of 'surplus data' which entangles their lives into the circuits of digital platforms.

The opacity of digital technologies has posed significant challenges for critical research and digital methods. In response, controversy mapping, reverse engineering and hacking have been key methodological devices to grapple with opacity and ‘open the black box’ of digital ecosystems. We take recent developments in digital humanitarianism and the accelerated production of apps for refugees following the 2015 Mediterranean
refugee crisis as a site of methodological experimentation to advance hacking as critical methodological interference. Drawing on the work of Michel Serres, we propose to understand digital technologies as ‘parasitic’ and reconceptualise hacking as ‘acts of digital parasitism’. Acts of digital parasitism are interferences that work alongside rather than work against. On one hand, this reworking of hacking advances an agenda for digital
methods through reworking hacking for digital humanities and social science research. On the other, it allows us to show how the object of research – humanitarian apps – is configured through platformisation and incorporation within digital parasitic relations.

As digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data and how the boundary between self and other is drawn algorithmically. It argues that algorithmic security practices and Big Data technologies have transformed self/other relations. Rather than the enemy or the risky abnormal, the ‘other’ is algorithmically produced as anomaly. Although anomaly has been often used interchangeably with abnormality and pathology, a brief genealogical reading of the concept shows that it works as a supplementary term, which reconfigures the dichotomies of normality/abnormality, friend/enemy, and identity/difference. By engaging with key practices of anomaly detection by intelligence and security agencies, the article analyses the materialisation of anomalies as specific spatial ‘dots’, temporal ‘spikes’ and topological ‘nodes’. We argue that anomaly is not simply indicative of more heterogeneous modes of othering in times of Big Data, but represents a mutation in the logics of security that challenge our extant analytical and critical vocabularies.

Response to Sarah Bertrand, 'Can the subaltern securitize'? Sarah Bertrand's article invites us to reflector reflect anew-upon the status of critical theorising in security studies and to engage seriously with the (post)colonial moment in critical security studies, and particularly in securitization theory. In reading the 'colonial moment' through the silence implied in securitization theory, Bertrand's article advances two key criticisms of securitization theory at the intersection of postcolonial and feminist scholarship. In so doing, it builds on Barkawi and Laffey's discussion of the erasure of agency in 'The postcolonial moment of security studies'. 1 It also explicitly engages with Lene Hansen's criticism of the silencing that securitization entails for women's insecurity, thus also implicitly contributing to debates in feminist security studies more broadly. 2 The editors' invitation to be part of a Junior-Senior dialogue based on Bertrand's article asked us to both engage in a real debate and use the dialogue as a platform to develop potential orientations for moving security studies forward in some way. In this intervention, I start by addressing the critique of silencing and the epistemology of securitization theory developed in Bertrand's article and then offer a few reflections on orientations for critical work on (in)security today, two decades after the publication of Buzan, Waever, and de Wilde's seminal work on securitization. 3 A critique of silencing, its implications and (re)significations of speech acts have been key devices of inquiry in critical work in security studies and International Relations. Bertrand's article takes up the challenge of developing a typology of silence and unpacking the mechanisms of silencing in order to formulate a critique of securitization theory. In a first part, I focus on what silence as an analytical category entails for how we understand security practices and not just securitization theory. While securitization theory has undoubtedly risen to dominance in critical security studies, it seems to have become more of an impediment to critical research than useful equipment. As one of my students in a Critical Security Studies module has put it this year, securitization hides more than it helps us see. Bertrand's critique of securitization sheds light on the colonial dimensions of this impasse. Therefore, in the second part, I want to reflect on some theoretical and methodological orientations for what I call critical approaches to (in)security. Critical approaches to (in)security do not subscribe to a school or a theory but focus on transversal conceptual and methodological work across established disciplinary boundaries. The orientations I propose here take (i) the analysis of security practices in the direction of disputes, controversies and struggles; (ii) the analysis of security's effects into the unpacking of the © British International Studies Association 2018.

Critical analyses of security have focused on the production of knowledge, techniques, and devices that tame unknowns and render social problems actionable. Drawing on insights from, science and technology studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of " ignorance studies, " this article proposes to explore the enactment of non-knowledge in security and legal practices. Starting with legal challenges brought against the NSA and other intelligence agencies after the Snowden revelations about mass surveillance , it shows how different modes of non-knowledge are enacted and not just " tamed " : uncertainty, ignorance, secrecy, ambiguity, and error. The en-actment of non-knowledge has important implications for how we understand security practices, the relation between security and law, and public challenges to mass surveillance in a digital world. On the one hand, the enactment of non-knowledge by security and legal professionals limits activist and NGO resistance to mass surveillance, when these are focused on claims to knowledge, disclosure, and transparency. On the other, reassembling non-knowledge and knowledge differently has generative political effects and opens new possibilities for intervention and resistance.

Critical infrastructure has become one of the main references of the security apparatus. From the ‘next terrorist attack’ to the next natural hazard, critical infrastructures are metaphorically defined as the ‘backbone of the nation’ (Department of Homeland Security 2013). Yet, given their constitution in relation to future events, critical infrastructures are produced negatively, through counterfactual scenarios, ‘what ifs’ of disaster and catastrophe.  Defining critical infrastructures through derivation from unexpected and potentially catastrophic events is entwined with processes of infrastructure materialization that have political effects of marginalization, rendering invisible or precarious. This paper approaches the problem of critical infrastructure protection from a feminist perspective. In a first move, it engages with Karen Barad’s material feminism in order to draw out the political effects of the performative enactment of infrastructures as critical. In a second move, it argues that this analysis needs to be supplemented by a feminist materialism. To this purpose, it draws on autonomous feminist readings of social reproduction proposed by Silvia Federici.  A dual material feminist and feminist materialist reading makes visible the internal and external exclusions that the securitization of critical infrastructure as vital assets to be protected against unexpected and potentially catastrophic events creates.

The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ and critical security studies share vocabularies of mobility, circulation and security. Yet, there have been only limited intersections between these approaches. This article explores the relation between mobility and security by developing a series of epistemic-political distinctions between motion, circulation and mobility. It argues that different political grammars of mobility have emerged historically and that we need to attend to the particular articulations of these grammars today, which conjugate mobility to security and subjectivity. The article starts by placing the semantics of motion and circulation, on the one hand, and of mobility, on the other, in historical context. It shows that motion, circulation and mobility are entwined with the production of particular governmental subjects and objects of (in)security. Finally, it explores how grammars of mobility shape political responses in contemporary site of intense securitisation – the UK–French borderzone at Calais.

From ‘connecting the dots’ and finding ‘the needle in the haystack’ to predictive policing and data mining for counterinsurgency, security professionals have increasingly adopted the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction. Digital devices and big data appear to offer answers to a wide array of problems of (in)security by promising insights into unknown futures. This article investigates the transformation of prediction today by placing it within governmental apparatuses of discipline, biopower and big data. Unlike disciplinary and biopolitical governmentality, we argue that prediction with big data is underpinned by the production of a different time/space of ‘between-ness’. The digital mode of prediction with big data reconfigures how we are governed today, which we illustrate through an analysis of how predictive policing actualizes between-ness as hotspots and near-real-time decisions.

Since 2005, when citizenship tests were effectively introduced in the UK, the official guidance book Life in the United Kingdom has been a veritable battleground over identity, history and knowledge. ‘Could you pass a citizenship test? ‘Most young people can’t’, the media reiterate with each new edition. [1] Knowledge and ignorance are firmly placed at the heart of public debates about the test. Their distribution underpins moral economies of political capacity, action and credibility. Assumptions about knowledge and ignorance disqualify some from access to citizenship, or they trace a path for ‘earning’ citizenship that is equivalent to the journey from ignorance to knowledge. As many could not pass the test, what did this (un)acknowledged ignorance mean for citizenship?

The Snowden revelations and the emergence of ‘Big Data’ have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less analytical attention. This paper proposes to take seriously the critical knowledge developed in information and computer science and reinterpret their debates to develop a critical intervention into the public controversies concerning data-driven security and digital surveillance. The paper offers a two-pronged contribution: on the one hand, we challenge the credibility of security professionals’ discourses in light of the knowledge that they supposedly mobilize; on the other, we argue for a series of conceptual moves around data, human–computer relations, and algorithms to address some of the limitations of existing engagements with the Big Data-security assemblage.

Mark Neocleous’s War Power, Police Power reproblematises the relation between war and police and develops a systematic critique of discourses of ‘the new’ across policy and academic fields. To nuance Neocleous’s powerful critique, I show that disjunctures between war and police are as politically
important as their conjunction.

‘Crowded places’ have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that several subtle reconfigurations take place. First, counter-terrorism governance derives the knowledge of crowds from ‘generic events’ as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. This move activates 19th-century knowledge about crowds as pathological, while the spatial referent of ‘crowded places’ reconfigures workplaces as crowded places and workers as crowds. Second, new guidance for emergency planning and policing deploys a more rational approach to crowds, put forward in recent psychosocial approaches. These modes of knowledge derive ‘generic crowds’ from normal social relations rather than extraordinary events. Generic events and generic crowds effectively depoliticize crowds, as they exclude a more radical generic politics, in which crowds are not derivable, but negate determination.

Over the past decade, resilience has become a quasi-universal answer to problems of security and governance, from climate change to children's education, from indigenous history to disaster response, and from development to terrorism. This article places the proliferation of resilience in relation to the earlier proliferation of security discourse and practice. Why resilience today? It answers this question by unpacking the epistemic regimes that underpin the move to resilience. Rather than tracing the differences between protection, prevention, pre-emption and resilience, the article argues that the political transformation that resilience entails becomes explicit in relation to the promise of security. Although the language of ‘promise’ and ‘promising’ has been widely used in relation to security, its political implications have remained unexplored. Underpinned by an epistemology of surprising events, resilience discourses reconfigure the promise of security. Through an empirical engagement with the turn to resilience in DFID's humanitarian policy in the UK and a theoretical reconsideration of Hannah Arendt's conceptualisation of the promise, I offer a critical vantage point on the transformation that resilience portends for our contemporary condition.

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.

ABSTRACT Tarak Barkawi has recently enjoined International Relations and security studies scholars to embark upon a critical study of the phenomenon of war. There is much to agree with in his argument and the idea of ‘critical war studies’ seems particularly apposite in a world where war and other forms of organised or dispersed violence have become increasingly constitutive of daily life. However, the turn to ‘critical war studies’ works by silencing disagreements and homogenising the heterogeneity of critical security studies. Instead, I propose a dialogue that brings to the fore the political stakes of a critique of war, security and violence. Not only have security and war been entwined in complex ways, but I argue that they need to be analysed within a continuum of violence that includes insurrections, revolts, revolutions, insurgencies, rebellions, seditions, disobediences, riots and uprisings.

Drawing has been largely neglected in discussions of visuality, conflict, and violence. In 2007, the International Criminal Court accepted 500 children's drawings depicting the conflict in Darfur as contextual evidence for war crime trials against Sudanese officials. Starting from this event, and the attention that the Darfuri children's drawings have garnered internationally, this article explores the role that drawings, and children's drawings in particular, play in the visualization of conflict and violence. Rather than focusing primarily on the relation between image and text, the article argues that visuality needs to be understood as both an aesthetic and social object, whose production, circulation, and reception transform its political effects. It then shows how children's drawings are both differentially produced, and productive of difference and ambivalence, in the “truthfulness” of conflict.

The “next terrorist attack” has become one of the main fixtures of the collective imagination of catastrophic futures. Reflecting on a series of exercises and scenarios deployed to prepare for terrorist attacks, this article interrogates the co-constitution of temporality and spatiality in such practices. The main argument is that practices of preparedness enact a withdrawal of time, where the temporal uncertainty of the future event is displaced on the management of space. The separation of space and time implies that actions are not focused on understanding the conditions of possibility of the disruptive event but shift attention to the management of spaces and attention to behaviour that is considered out of place.

As potential disasters appear now as indeterminate, unpredictable and unexpected, preparedness exercises are placed at the heart of a new ratio which challenges or replaces statistical calculability. In this sense, the future of unexpected events cannot be known or predicted; it can only be enacted.

Sovereignty is simultaneously one of the more revered and reviled concepts in International Relations (IR). Long taken for granted as the ontological founding concept of the discipline, sovereignty has gradually become the locus of debates about the conditions of possibility of change and transformation, limits of politics and agency. 'Articulations of sovereignty' considers sovereignty as a practice which is worked upon and in turn works with and against other practices.How does sovereignty function in international politics, what limits, subjectivities, and dominations it reproduces and what 'margins, silences and bottom rungs' (Enloe 1996) it excludes from the purview of politics?

How are risk technologies redeployed from commercial, environmental and policing domains to the domain of the War on Terror? How can the invocation of risk in the War on Terror be understood conceptually? Do these moves embody transformations from sovereignty to ...

These two statements, one chosen from an anti-traffick-ing website and not dissimilar to most anti-trafficking discourses, and the other qualifiing nineteenth-century "white slaves" in Canada, seem to be not only temporally but equally logically incompatible. Yet, this paper ...

This chapter traces the contribution of critical scholarship to security studies since the 1990s.Drawing on continental philosophy more largely has allowed security scholars to challenge dominant understandings and practices of security and add new dimensions to the ...

Psychological knowledge has become incorporated into a range of security practices, discourses, and interventions in catastrophic events, including terrorism. By engaging the existing literature on the medicalization and psychologization of security, this article reads the enactment knowledge deployed in preparedness exercises from the perspective of psychodrama and sociodrama rather than that of psychoanalysis or psychosocial risk management. Enactment has become an important mode of knowledge for the governance of terrorism, as preparedness exercises deploy action methods, drama, enactment, and performance to prepare for unexpected, catastrophic events. Taking seriously the conceptualization of enactment, as deployed in psychodrama and sociodrama, can also challenge the securitization of catastrophic events. The article concludes that enactment, which foregrounds action rather than speech, and suggests that meaning follows action, can also offer critical insights into securitizati...

The “next terrorist attack” has become one of the main fixtures of the collective imagination of catastrophic futures. Reflecting on a series of exercises and scenarios deployed to prepare for terrorist attacks, this article interrogates the co-constitution of temporality and spatiality in such practices. The main argument is that practices of preparedness enact a withdrawal of time, where the temporal uncertainty of the future event is displaced on the management of space. The separation of space and time implies that actions are not focused on understanding the conditions of possibility of the disruptive event but shift attention to the management of spaces and attention to behaviour that is considered out of place.