Motioning the politics of (in)security: From borders and boundaries to the primacy of movement

In security studies, there has been an intense interest in mobile phenomena and the nature of security techniques that seek to control, contain or steer them. However, when exploring how these mobile phenomena bear upon conceptions of politics and their contestation, the analytics tends to turn back to bounded and sedentary categories and reference points. Against this background and drawing on approaches take life and matter as motion and nothing but motion, the paper develops an analytical framework for security and its politics that gives conceptual primacy to movement over borders and boundaries. The conceptual primacy of movement implies three key moves: (a) changing lines from enclosures and connectors to ‘pathways’, (b) shifting from understanding movement through positions and nodes to the continuity of movement, and (c) displacing architectural and infrastructural readings of the relations between movements with readings of continuously unfolding confluences of movements moving in relation to one another. Doing so displaces conceptions of movement as border crossings and networked connections with entangling movements. One of the major implications for security studies is that taking such a point of view challenges the use of state sovereignty, borders and bounded identities as a key device for making security politically meaningful and contested. It invites a transversal re-imagining of politics and an international political sociology of motioning the politics of (in)security.

Professor Katja Franko will act as a discussant. 

Jef Huysmans is Professor of International Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He co-convenes the research cluster Doing International Political Sociology.

He is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity, the securitization of migration, critical methods, and international political sociology. Currently he is working on an international political sociology of fracturing worlds and motioning the politics of (in)security.

He has published widely in leading journals in international studies, politics, and European studies. He is author of Security Unbound. Enacting Democratic Limits  (Routledge, 2014), The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. (Routledge 2006); and What is Politics? (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). He edited with Andrew Dobson and Raia Prokhovnik The Politics of Protection. Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency. (Routledge 2006); with Patricia Noxolo Community, citizenship, and the ‘war on terror’: Security and insecurity. (Palgrave 2009), with Xavier Guillaume Citizenship and Security. The constitution of Political Being. (Routledge 2013), and with Claudia Aradau, Andrew Neal and Nadine Voelkner Critical Security Methods. New Frameworks for Analysis. (Routledge, 2014). 

Katja Franko is Professor of Criminology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has published widely on issues of globalization, border control, and  criminalisation of migration. She is among others the author of The Crimmigrant Other: Migration and Penal Power (Routledge) and Globalization and Crime (Sage Publications).

You can register for the event here.