Mobility and the Model: Policy Mobility and the Becoming of Israeli Homeland Security Dominance

Abstract

Israel's dominant position within the homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism field is now quite widely acknowledged within academic literature and beyond. While existing accounts of Israel's HLS industry have made a number of critical contributions to understanding its rise, they fail to readily address how Israeli HLS approaches have come to be understood as mobile and universal strategies to be applied worldwide. They also negate the extent to which Israel's security ‘solutions’ are (re)invented as they move geographically. I argue that Israeli claims to HLS dominance are realized through their encounters beyond Israel/Palestine in ways that stabilize their practices and technologies as global exemplars. Building on policy mobilities scholarship, I suggest that bound up with the development of an Israeli HLS ‘model’ is the constitution of an audience, which is central to giving these approaches their global appeal and respective political force. In developing these claims I explore the role of geographical imaginations in the constitution of mobilities and argue for the need to move from a framework of discourse to one of performativity.