Comment archive

Friday, 21 Nov 2025
Twenty years of vernacular security research

The concept of security is a complicated, and much contested, one. Does it entail survival, freedom, the absence of fear, a predictable future? Is it a property of states, of individuals, of groups, of collective identities? And how do we go about evaluating – or even attempting to rank – the importance of threats to security when those threats might be as different as climate change, great power war, domestic violence, pandemics, and terrorism?

Friday, 31 Jan 2025
Migrant deaths in the name of law

Image byJim BlackfromPixabay In international political sociology, a variety of scholars following Agamben and the so-called state of exception emphasize the routes of violence against migrants in the light of their privation of rights or “suspended law”. While acknowledging that law creates at times violent conditions, this scholarship tends to ...

Monday, 13 Feb 2023
Book Review: On Posthuman War: Computation and Military Violence

by Mike Hill 2022. London: University of Minnesota Press. 237pp. ISBN: 978-0-8166-6090-2. In the past two decades, talks about ‘everywhere’ and ‘endless’ wars have become familiar refrains among scholars of critical security studies. Whether as a strategic consequence of the use of new weapons and media or as part of ...

Thursday, 4 Feb 2021
Book Review: Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence

by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran(eds),Universityof Minnesota Press, 2020,ISBN 978-1-5179-0748-8,352 pp. Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violenceis a volume of essays edited by Rebecca A. Adelman and David Kieran, and addresses the contemporary conceptual constraints that surround academic research in remote warfare.In the words of the editors, this volume ...

Wednesday, 30 Sept 2020
Book Review: Digital Punishment: Privacy, Stigma and the Harms of Data-Driven Criminal Justice

Sarah Esther Lageson. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020 pp. vii-242. $34.95 cloth. ISBN 9780190872007 Critical studies of security have long examined the role of information technology, databases, dataveillance and predictive risk technologies in emerging security infrastructures. These studies will be immeasurably aided by Sarah E. Lageson’s new book on criminal ...

Tuesday, 8 Sept 2020
Book review: The Force of Nonviolence: The Ethical in the Political

Judith Butler. New York: Verso, 2020; pp. ix – 209. $26.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781788732765 In its shift away from traditional approaches to security studies that implied work done through the frame of war and a state-centric approach, debates regarding the discursive and theoretical implications of the concepts, grammars, methodologies, and ...

Tuesday, 24 Mar 2020
Book review: From Righteousness to Far Right. An anthropological rethinking of critical security studies.

by Emma Mc Cluskey In her bookFrom Righteousness to Far Right, Emma Mc Cluskey brings an anthropological revision of critical security studies and offers an ethnographic contribution for understanding the securitisation of migration. The book comes as an alternative to the narrow perspective of early schools of critical security studies ...

Tuesday, 24 Mar 2020
Book review: Secrecy and Methods in Security Research: A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork

Edited by Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins Secrecy and Methods in Security Research,edited by Marieke de Goede, Esmé Bosma and Polly Pallister-Wilkins, promises to be a long-lasting contribution to the field of critical security studies (CSS) but also to the broader social-scientific debate on the methodological challenges ...

Monday, 11 Mar 2019
Stepping into the haunted house? Two challenges when slowing down critique

A world without the need for critique is unthinkable. And yet, Critical Security Studies (CSS) have learned that critique is a difficult and far from self-evident exercise. The Security Dialogue 50th anniversary issue builds on this legacy and addresses, once again, the specter of critique. It is an attempt to ...

Friday, 9 Nov 2018
A Political Economy of ‘the Exception’? A comment to Jacqueline Best

One of the most noteworthy responses to the election of Donald J. Trump came from politically radical African-Americans. In light of the longue durée of racial supremacy and the experience of those exploited by America’s economic system, it was not surprising or exceptional that aracist, misogynist, xenophobic plutocrat could succeed the ...