Michael Bourne

Guns don't kill people, cyborgs do: a Latourian provocation for transformatory arms control and disarmament

This article seeks to provoke a deeper engagement of Critical Security Studies with securitys relations to technology and weapons. It explores existing assumptions about these relations in mainstream arms control and disarmament theory, and the way such assumptions are deployed and distributed in the current settlement of arms control and disarmament practice. It then draws on recent social and philosophical discussions of materiality, particularly on the thought of Bruno Latour, to propose a different set of concepts for exploring the aims and limits of arms control and disarmament. These concepts emphasise the mediating roles of material things in social relations and they may offer a richer view of the object of arms control (weapons and violence) and of the practices of arms limitation and reduction; one that may ultimately gesture towards a different understanding of arms politics, and that may be used to explore the transformatory potentials of arms control and disarmament.

Laboratizing the border: The production, translation and anticipation of security technologies

This article critically interrogates how borders are produced by scientists, engineers and security experts in advance of the deployment of technical devices they develop. We trace how sovereign decisions are enacted as assemblages in the antecedent register of device development through the everyday decisions of scientists and engineers in the laboratory, the security experts they engage, and the material components of the device itself. Drawing on in-depth interviews, observations, and ethnographic research of the EU-funded Handhold project, we explore how assumptions about the way security technologies will and should perform at the border shape the development of a portable, integrated device to detect chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives (CBRNE) threats at borders. In disaggregating the moments of sovereign decision-making across multiple sites and times, we question the supposed linearity of how science comes out of and feeds back into the world of border security. An interrogation of competing assumptions and understandings of security threats and needs, of competing logics of innovation and pragmatism, of the demands of differentiated temporalities in detection and identification, and of the presumed capacities, behaviours, and needs of phantasmic competitors and end-users reveals a complex, circulating and co-constitutive process of device development that laboratises the border itself.

The Proliferation of Small Arms and Light Weapons

The use and misuse of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) are estimated to result in over 500,000 deaths per year, and countless injuries.1 For example, one often cited statistic indicates that in 90 percent of conflicts since 1990, SALW have been the only weapons used in fighting, and have contributed to between 30 and 90 percent of civilian deaths in those conflicts.2 SALW were used extensively in the organization and conduct of the Rwandan Genocide; are the primary weapons of narco-insurgents and paramilitaries in Colombia; and are the dominant tools of ongoing insurgency in Iraq, to name but a few examples. Their widespread availability and misuse contributes to transnational organized crime and conflicts of all types, and is closely related to current concerns such as weak and collapsed states, human rights abuses, and the pantheon of both traditional and nontraditional security issues. They are the tools of the trade for terrorists, rebels, and criminals and their spread has gone largely unchecked for many decades.

Netwar Geopolitics: Security, Failed States and Illicit Flows

Recent and emerging security policies and practices claim a mutual vulnerability that closely links human insecurity in failed states with the threat to powerful states from illicit flows. This article first examines this ‘emerging orthodoxy’ of transnational security issues that reinforces the securitisation of poverty and the poor. It then subjects this orthodoxy to theoretical and empirical critique. Theoretically it shows that this orthodoxy is formed as a ‘geopolitical imagination’ that associates and stabilises particular views of weak states and illicit flows in a ‘netwar imagination’ by reasserting and reconfiguring traditional assumptions of the spatiality and nature of threats. A final empirical section, focusing on drug production and nuclear smuggling, argues that those assumptions and their assemblage are a partial, incomplete and often self-referential reading of illicit flows.

Controlling the Shadow Trade

From tackling illicit flows of small arms to combating nuclear smuggling, the shadow trade has become a central target of attempts to control the means of violence. This article argues that much of this practice and literature is framed in unhelpful terms that posit two distinct worlds, an upperworld and underworld, that separates illicit flow networks from the familiar world of state security policy. This implies that the possibilities for controlling the shadow trade are limited or require expansive and expensive controls. The article then examines the formation of illicit flow networks, drawing on examples including narcotics, small arms, nuclear materials, nuclear technology, major conventional arms, dual use technologies, and chemical weapons precursors; and finds that state and hybrid actors rather than extensive private networks are constitutive of illicit networks in many ways. It concludes by reclaiming hope for controlling the means of violence in this hybridity.

Invention and uninvention in nuclear weapons politics

If there is one uncontroversial point in nuclear weapons politics, it is that uninventing nuclear weapons is impossible. This article seeks to make this claim controversial by showing that it is premised on attenuated understandings of invention and the status of objects operative through familiar but problematic conceptual dualisms. The claimed impossibility of uninvention is an assertion that invention is irreversible. Drawing on ‘new materialism’, this article produces a different understanding of invention, reinvention and uninvention as ontologically similar practices of techno-political invention. On the basis of empirical material on the invention and re-invention of nuclear weapons, and an in-depth ethnography of laboratories inventing a portable radiation detector, both the process of invention and the ‘objects’ themselves (weapons and detectors) are shown to be fragile and not wholly irreversible processes of assembling diverse actors (human and non-human) and provisionally stabilising their relations. Nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented! Why not?

Securing the human in critical security studies: the insecurity of a secure ethics

Abstract This article argues that Critical Security Studies (CSS), exemplified by Ken Booths Theory of World Security, has outlined an ethics of security as emancipation of the ‘human’, but also a highly problematic security of ethics. After drawing out how the ethics of CSS operates, we examine the security of this ethics by examining it against a hard case, that of the 1998–99 Kosovo crisis. Confronting this concrete situation, we draw out three possibilities for action used at the time to secure the human: ‘humanitarian containment’, military intervention and hospitality. Assessing each against Booths requirements for ethical security action, we counter that, in fact, no option was without risks, pitfalls and ambiguities. Ultimately, if any action to promote the security and the emancipation of the human is possible, it must embrace and prioritise the fundamental insecurity of ethics, or else find itself paralysed through a fear of making situations worse.