CCIG Forum 23 - Resisting (In)Security, Securing Resistance

Security and insecurity dominate the vocabulary of social, political and economic problems. Terrorism, migration, poverty and, most recently, the financial crisis are made sense of in these terms, as forms of insecurity to be eliminated, neutralised or at least contained with the aim of achieving security. Yet, insecurity and security are not so easily separable, as governmental interventions to make secure entail their own insecurities. Paradoxically, the elimination of insecurity both works through and fosters insecurity by constituted risky and dangerous subjects alongside objects of insecurity. So how can resistance to insecurity be conceptualised, analysed and practiced? Resistance to insecurity can also subtly morph into that which it tries to resist. Resisting insecurity can become a security practice, while resistance to security gives rise to its own insecurities. What kinds of security practices emerge out of the desire to resist complex insecurities and what forms of resistance are thinkable?

This workshop starts exploring this dynamics of resisting (in)security by opening the semantic, theoretical and political field of resistance through three related terms: agency, resilience and event. These are three terms that have been recently taken up in thinking resistance to insecurity.

Agency has increasingly informed critical work engaging the securitisation of migration in particular, but also the intensification of security concerns about citizenship and mobility more widely. How can we think of agency in the context of resistance insecurity? What are the limits and potential drawbacks of using the language of agency? What is its political potential and how does it relate to the language of resistance?

Resilience is of more recent extraction and appears to function as an alternative to both resistance and resilience. At the same time, resilience does not promise security and challenges the desire of being secure. The message of resilience theories and practices is that resistance may be not only futile, but also undesirable in a world which is increasingly imagined as inter-related complex systems. What does resilience do to our political vocabulary and our analyses of (in)security?

To think events is to think 'bare' insecurity, insecurity devoid of attributes, insecurity in its happening. At the same time, events also place us at the heart of insecuring neoliberal practices. Can events be resisted or can they be resistance?

Event organised by the Securities Research Programme and the Postgraduate Student Group, CCIG, The Open University

Keynote by Mitchell Dean (University of Newcastle, Australia)

Resisting the Irresistible Event

This paper starts from the centrality of the 'Event' in recent extensions of both security and corporate control. It examines the thesis that contemporary liberal governing has sought to capture, construct, anticipate and deploy the event through (at least) four different grids of intelligibility: rupture, exception, crisis and catastrophe. It suggests that the event is best understood less within an art of government, or a political theology, than within the genealogy of economic theology. It asks whether it is possible to imagine or engage in an alternative politics of the event or whether a de-theologised politics takes a necessarily de-eventalised form.