Can E. Mutlu

Securitisation and Diego Garcia

To advance the on-going debate on Securitisation Theory (ST), we argue that the important questions of audience and attention can be addressed through careful historical study. In an analysis of the securitising moves concerning the American military base on Diego Garcia, we are able to demonstrate that the Copenhagen and Paris Schools are not methodologically incompatible, and empirically that public attention for security issues has a tendency to dissipate without continual discursive investment.

Psychoanalytic theory and border security

Freezing is a common sign of panic, a response to accidents or events that overflow our capacity to react. Just as all civil airspace was cleared after the 9/11 attacks, the US-Canada border was also frozen, causing economic slowdowns. Border policies are caught between these two panics: security failures and economic crisis. To escape this paradox, American and Canadian authorities have implemented a series of security measures to make the border ‘smarter’, notably the implementation of biometric identity documents and surveillance by UAV Predator drones. Psychoanalytic theory can help us explain why the Canadian and American governments have invested so much money for so little evident or measurable increase in either security or economic flows. The article uses the notion of phantastic objects to explain these (over-)reactions to risk management at the US-Canada border.

Of algorithms, data and ethics: : A response to Andrew Bennett

Developments in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will have a significant impact on the way we study international relations. Opportunities related to data processing and automated reasoning that emerge through developments in complex algorithms will inevitably generate a debate on research methods in social sciences. Algorithms provide novel and innovative ways to sort and make sense of digital data. Applications of ‘big data’ and its potential uses in the social sciences remain understudied in IR. The field has not fully picked up on the potential uses of algorithmic processing for research. This article looks at the ethical questions that arise from the use of algorithmic data processing and automated reasoning. In particular, the article asks whether there should be any ethical limitations on the ways we collect data to be processed by algorithms.

How (Not) to Disappear Completely: Pedagogical Potential of Research Methods in International Relations:

The question of research methods, and their role in the field, is a major source of contention for IR scholars. We can, however, discuss method, methodology, and innovation without revising or revisiting old debates. Methods do not have to be divisive, or disciplining. A frank discussion of research design, methods, and methodological preferences is essential to innovation and reproducibility. This intervention is a call for increased transparency in IR research outputs; IR theorists should not erase their own footprints from their publications and openly admit and discuss failures as productive moments in research. The act of disappearing, which has become the norm in the name of professionalised publications, robs the field of the productive pedagogical potential of research methods. The true impact of research rests in its pedagogical potential. As researchers, our job is thus to find a sensitive balance between not determining the outcome of the research from the get-go by making it all about our preferences and opinions, but also not making the impact of our preferences and opinions disappear completely. Building on this premise, this intervention discusses the significant pedagogical potential of research methods, reproducibility and discussion of failures in International Relations.

Commensurability of research methods in critical security studies

In the past few years, the critical security studies field has witnessed the emergence of a debate on the role of methods. Along with our edited volume on Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction, there have been a number of exciting contributions (Shepherd 2013; Aradau and Huysmans 2013; Aradau et al. forthcoming) that further developed this focus on methods in critical security studies. Whereas our edited volume looked at the issue of research design, with a particular focus on questions surrounding sufficient proof, critical position and coherence, others have either focused on ontological and epistemological issues surrounding the meaning of critical methods, and the use of methods as ‘devices and acts that disrupt social and political worlds’ (Aradau and Huysmans 2013, 3), or ventured into a territory where theories and methods were discussed in an intertwined fashion (Shepherd 2013). In this forum, we invited our contributors to build on this debate by asking them to discuss the question(s) of cumulative knowledge in a multi-method field such as critical security studies, and what that means for broader discussions of methods and methodology in the field. In particular, we pressed the contributors to discuss the concept of commensurability in critical security studies methods. Critical security studies have exogenous and endogenous factors contributing to both theoretical and methodological developments that disrupt, discipline and transform the field in numerous and simultaneous ways. It is very difficult to identify that boundary where the field and the other fields begin. This is not a disadvantage. Critical security scholars are wanderers, not to say pirates. We travel into far away disciplines and bring back concepts, ideas or tools that we believe that explain the social and the political in reflexive ways. Emerging contributions to scholarship in critical security studies that touch on emotions, feminisms, science and technology, and popular culture, among others all make theoretical contributions that originate from debates in other disciplines. A complex social requires non-disciplinary thinking that is attuned to mess and is itself disorganized. Just as Searlian speech act theory informs the kind of discourse analysis often used in studying Securitization Theory or the Bourdieusian field analysis informs practice-driven approaches, exogenous theories and methods get incorporated into critical security studies in different ways that either build on existing knowledge claims, or dramatically transform, or disrupt them; wandering across disciplinary boundaries result in the cross-pollination of disciplinary fields. When we asked, ‘how do we do what we do?’ (Salter and Mutlu 2013, 1), our goal was neither to discipline nor disrupt the field. What we were, and continue to be,