Nick Vaughan-Williams

Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies

The starting point of the ‘Lines in the Sand?’ programme is expressed in our title, the idea of lines in a shifting medium. The most common use of the expression today is to reject further concessi...

Borderwork beyond inside/outside? Frontex, the citizen–detective and the war on terror

Abstract The article begins by noting Etienne Balibars insight that the borders of Europe may be vacillating but that they are changing and multiplying rather than simply disappearing. Drawing upon this insight, it seeks to investigate ways in which responses to the threat of terrorism in the EU have involved bordering practices that to some extent challenge commonsensical understandings of what and where the borders of Europe should be according to the conventional ‘inside/outside’ model. In this context, two cases are examined: the recent surveillance activities of the new EU border management agency Frontex in Africa; and the emergence of surveillance strategies arising from the linking of notions of European citizenship with EU-wide counter-terrorism initiatives following 9/11. It is argued that new border vocabularies are necessary in order for emerging forms of borderwork to be identified and interrogated in the context of the on-going ‘war on terror’.

Europe's border crisis : biopolitical security and beyond

Europes Border Crisis investigates dynamics in EU border security and migration management and advances a path-breaking framework for thought, judgment, and action in this context. It argues that a crisis point has emerged whereby irregular migrants are treated as both a security threat to the EU and as a life that is threatened and in need of saving. This leads to paradoxical situations such that humanitarian policies and practices often expose irregular migrants to dehumanizing and lethal border security mechanisms. The dominant way of understanding these dynamics, one that blames a gap between policy and practice, fails to address the deeper political issues at stake and ends up perpetuating the terms of the crisis. Drawing on conceptual resources in biopolitical theory, particularly the work of Roberto Esposito, the book offers an alternative diagnosis of the problem in order to move beyond the present impasse. It argues that both negative and positive dimensions of EU border security are symptomatic of tensions within biopolitical techniques of government. While bordering practices are designed to play a defensive role they contain the potential for excessive security mechanisms that threaten the very values and lives they purport to protect. Each chapter draws on a different biopolitical key to both interrogate diverse technologies of power at a range of border sites and explore the insights and limits of the biopolitical paradigm. Must border security always result in dehumanization and death? Is a more affirmative approach to border politics possible? Europes Border Crisis sets out a new horizon for addressing these and related questions.

The UK Border Security Continuum: Virtual Biopolitics and the Simulation of the Sovereign Ban

This paper analyses the emergence of the UKs new border security doctrine. It argues that the vision of the UK border being put forward is not one that corresponds to conventional understandings of what and where borders are in contemporary political life. Rather, the UK border is increasingly projected overseas and across UK territory, ever more invisible, electronic, and mobile through the use of sophisticated identity management technologies and is based on principles of preemption. In search of critical resources appropriate to the analysis of these practices, I draw on the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean Baudrillard and argue that the UK case is symptomatic of broader attempts to simulate the effect of security in the West.

Introduction: An Agenda for Resilience Research in Politics and International Relations

During the fallout from the Boston bombings in April 2013, the city’s mayor highlighted the resilience shown by the people of Boston. He celebrated the fact that Boston was a ‘resilient city’ that would bounce back (Menino, 2013). Numerous media commentaries, blog posts and online memorials picked up this theme of resilience to articulate a range of positive attributes that individuals/Boston/America had exhibited. They had been brave, quick thinking, a strong community and yet, at the same time, calm and able to follow instructions from the security forces that amassed and co-operated. Resilience, it seems, carried both popular appeal and policy relevance in a manner that allowed security objectives to shift, adapt, and – according to media narrative – move quickly in relation to the event, the perpetrators and the political challenges that were arising.

Vernacular theories of everyday (in)security : the disruptive potential of non-elite knowledge

Citizens increasingly occupy a central role in the policy rhetoric of British National Security Strategies, and yet the technocratic methods by which risks and threats are assessed and prioritized do not consider the views and experiences of diverse publics. Equally, security studies in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises has privileged analysis of elites over the political subject of threat and (in)security. Contributing to the recent ‘vernacular’ and ‘everyday’ turns, this article draws on extensive critical focus-group research carried out in 2012 across six British cities in order to investigate (1) which issues citizens find threatening and how they know, construct and narrate ‘security threats’, and (2) the extent to which citizens are aware of, engage with and/or refuse government efforts to foster vigilance and suspicion in public spaces. Instead of making generalizations about what particular ‘types’ of citizens think, however, we develop a ‘disruptive’ approach inspired by the work of Jacques Rancière. While many of the views, anecdotes and stories reproduce the police order, in Rancière’s terms, it is also possible to identify political discourses that disrupt dominant understandings of threat and (in)security, repoliticize the grounds on which national security agendas are authorized, and reveal actually existing alternatives to cultures of suspicion and unease.

Security and the performative politics of resilience: Critical infrastructure protection and humanitarian emergency preparedness

This article critically examines the performative politics of resilience in the context of the current UK Civil Contingencies (UKCC) agenda. It places resilience within a wider politics of (in)security that seeks to govern risk by folding uncertainty into everyday practices that plan for, pre-empt, and imagine extreme events. Moving beyond existing diagnoses of resilience based either on ecological adaptation or neoliberal governmentality, we develop a performative approach that highlights the instability, contingency, and ambiguity within attempts to govern uncertainties. This performative politics of resilience is investigated via two case studies that explore 1) critical national infrastructure protection and 2) humanitarian emergency preparedness. By drawing attention to the particularities of how resilient knowledge is performed and what it does in diverse contexts, we repoliticize resilience as an ongoing, incomplete, and potentially self-undermining discourse.

Towards a Problematisation of the Problematisations that Reduce Northern Ireland to a 'Problem'

Abstract This essay highlights but then refuses a dominant urge within extant applications of political philosophy to the Troubles: the urge to prescribe ‘solutions’ to ‘the Northern Irish problem’. The argument presented here is that this urge can be seen as constitutive of the very problem presumably most analysts seek to overcome. The aim, therefore, is to explore alternative approaches to representations of conflict drawing on aspects of the work of William Connolly, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how a deconstructive approach might open up new possibilities for critical intervention into ‘the Troubles’ in a way that avoids merely reproducing the main fissures of conflict.

The generalised bio-political border? Re-conceptualising the limits of sovereign power

This article is a response to calls from a number of theorists in International Relations and related disciplines for the need to develop alternative ways of thinking ‘the border’ in contemporary political life. These calls stem from an apparent tension between the increasing complexity of the nature and location of bordering practices on the one hand and yet the relative simplicity with which borders often continue to be treated on the other. One of the intellectual challenges, however, is that many of the resources in political thought to which we might turn for new border vocabularies already rely on unproblematised conceptions of what and where borders are. It is argued that some promise can be found in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose diagnosis of the operation of sovereign power in terms of the production of bare life offers significant, yet largely untapped, implications for analysing borders and the politics of space across a global bio-political terrain.

New Materialisms, discourse analysis, and International Relations: a radical intertextual approach

This article investigates the recent ‘New Materialisms’ turn in social and political thought and asks what the potential theoretical and methodological significance might be for the study of International Relations (IR). To do so we return to debates about the theoretical status of discourse in IR as it is in this context that the question of materiality – particularly as it relates to language – has featured prominently in recent years. While the concept of discourse is increasingly narrow in IR, the ‘New Materialisms’ literature emphasises the political force of materiality beyond language and representation. However, a move to reprioritise the politics of materiality over that of language and representation is equally problematic since it perpetuates rather than challenges the notion of a prior distinction between language and materiality. In response, we draw on earlier poststructural thought in order to displace this dichotomy and articulate an extended understanding of what analysing ‘discourse’ might mean in the study of IR.