Members research interests

Vron Ware

My research looks at the relationship between civil and military spheres and at processes of militarisation during ongoing wars. I am interested in looking comparatively at ways in which notions of citizenship are related to national (military or civic) service. How are national armies raised, and how is foreign policy shaped by and reflected in national identity etc? eg at what point do nations become identified as peace-keepers, humanitarian agents, counter-insurgency experts etc.?

Beyond questions of citizenship, military service, foreign policy and national narratives, my research also covers the effects on citizens (at home and in combat zones) of developments in post-modern warcraft - EODs, armed social work (Kilcullen) and new forms of public diplomacy (social media, development etc). I am interested in gender politics of military intervention, including counter-insurgency, and the different uses of 'culture' as both a weapon and a ground for waging war.

Raia Prokhovnik

Raia Prokhovnik has two lines of research which intersect with the interests of the working group. Her work on sovereignty and the character of domestic and international politics is furthered by the discussions in the group about the securitisation of issues in the international sphere, in the EU, and within nation states. She also engages with the group through her research on the body, bodies and embodied subjectivity.

Andrew Hill

My work is concerned with visuality and the way in which visuality figures as fundamental to questions of knowledge, politics and history. It is organised into two overlapping areas: how the act of seeing functions in different historical moments and settings, and the relationship between conflict and visuality. In regard to both areas I am interested in the way in which questions of visuality encourage us to rethink the nature of concepts such as 'security' and 'fear' and to reassess how these concepts intersect with politico-historical processes.

In regard to the first area I am currently engaged in work on the 'scopic economy' of early modern Europe - how the act of seeing was distributed and   attempted to be organised in this period - through focusing upon a series of specific settings and moments, including the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and the Amsterdam Bourse.

In regard to the second area - conflict and visuality - I have explored this relationship in regard to the War on Terror and Northern Ireland. My current work addresses a series of themes around visuality, conflict and aesthetics, including the relationship between war and beauty.

Francis Dodsworth, Security Culture

My research explores the history of security culture in modern England since the eighteenth century, particularly as it relates to the problems of crime and disorder. In much literature on security the chief actor is the state, and much critique of security practices is a critique of state power. But in the last few years there has been increasing recognition that security is no longer principally the preserve of the state, which is being supplemented, and to some extent superseded, by an array of private organisations and personal practices which exceed direct state control (see, for example, Loader and Walker, Civilizing Security). Even this work, however, assumes that this is a relatively novel process, a feature of 'late capitalism' or some similar characterisation of the present. However, as Johnston and Shearing, Governing Security recognises, security practices have always exceeded the state to a significant extent. This is borne out by existing histories of crime, policing and other elements of past security practices, such as prosecution associations. Equally, there are a few sociological works on private security and policing which contain very brief historical surveys. There is, however, no comprehensive or detailed history of security culture in the broad sense, from the development of locking and lighting technologies, to private security and detective agencies, or systems of self defence. My aim is to develop such a history which analyses the discursive and non discursive (visual, technical, embodied) practices which have shaped our security culture over the last three centuries, cutting across the boundaries of the public, the private and the personal.

Claudia Aradau

My research engages with the effects of (in)security practices and possibilities of political agency and resistance. More recently, as part of a co-authored book project, I have grown particularly interested in how worst case scenarios of unexpected catastrophic events problematise security knowledge. While fears of apocalypse, dreams of catastrophic transformation and occurrences of disaster have punctuated history, governing catastrophe appears to require mutations in our way of thinking about threats and dangers, their temporality and intensity. Catastrophes appear as particular types of events which remain shrouded in uncertainty, confound expectation and challenge predictive and preventive knowledge. I would like to research further how we are increasingly governed 'through the future'. I am also interested in methods of analysing objects of security – such as buildings, public spaces, infrastructures – and visuality, particularly drawings that create a 'regime of truth' about particular insecurity situations. Last but not least, I would like to also pursue the question of resistance in securitised sites.

Evelyn Ruppert, CRESC, OU

My research is in the area of  the sociology of governance specifically in relation to the biopolitics of population knowledge. I am interested in the intersections of security, territory, and population as articulated by Foucault and the simultaneous and integrated operation of all three forms of modern rule in the practices involved in the 'discovery' of populations. I investigate how different socio-technical arrangements organise and make possible a particular way of making population and acting upon and shaping the social such as how these arrangements define and identify risky and at-risk populations. I have investigated this in relation to the census and my recent work extends this to the operation of statistical devices and contemporary modes of expertise involved in 'assembling' identities through networked and joined up state administrative databases. I investigate the different population objects and subjects that these devices enact and produce and the different forms of power and intervention they make possible.

While population databases are my object of interest I am more generally engaged in thinking about methods as objects in their own right. Through my work on CRESC's new theme, The Social Life of Methods (SLOM) I am undertaking a variety of projects that critically investigate research methods as active agents in the construction and the enactment of the social.

Jef Huysmans, The Everyday Politics of Insecurity

In the Research Programme Securities I work on how global insecurities are embedded in everyday life and on the political significance of everyday practice rupturing these securitising processes. Conceptually, I look at notions of proliferation, mobility, act, and appropriation, the creation of insecurity densities, and the everyday as a political category. Methodologically, I work on how to study and develop situated knowledge. Empirically, I work on the securitising of mobility, how technologies work global insecurities into everyday life, and rupturing practices in securitised sites.

Vicki Squire

My research is located at the intersections of migration studies, citizenship studies, and critical security studies. This reflects my interest in the ways that practices of mobility, citizenship and security feature in the (re)production and transformation of social formations and political subjectivities. Currently, my research links to the "Borders, Mobility and Citizenship" strand of the Securities research programme, and considers what it means to 'be political' in a context of intensified mobilities. Specifically, I am concerned with contemporary practices of border control and 'migration management', both in terms of their practical effects and in terms of the struggles to which they give rise. This focus is developed through an analysis of the securitization of asylum in The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum, a monograph which was published in 2009. More recently, I have edited a volume of essays entitled The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, which explores how irregularity features as a stake within contemporary border struggles as well as an analytic lens by which (re)bordering practices can be analysed.

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