Spooks

Security is of political nature; however, it does not stand for the essence of political security. This security category is a result of the application of the sector security analysis methodology. According to the methodology, all security-related issues are divided into sectors where detailed analyses are conducted with the application of specialized research methods, techniques and means. The use of sector methodology is a consequence of widening the meaning of contemporary security that makes it complex and multidimensional. A comprehensive security analysis can be confined to six sectors: political, military, economic, ecological, societal and common security. The contents of the political security sector are varied and hinged upon the level of analysis and the security subject type the analysis is conducted for. Generally, the political security of political units means the state of the certainty of existence, sovereign functioning and development of its political system. It is achieved as a result of lack of political threats or possession of appropriate capability to protect against them.Crucial to understanding political security are political threats, which are occurrences, processes and activities that can harm the existence, sovereign functioning and development of a political unit’s political system, but only those not included in other security sectors.The article provides a general overview of the political security sector and political security, and can be a starting point for further detailed analysis conducted from the perspective of specific subject categories placed on varied levels of analysis.

Introduction: Theoretical Contexts for Security Reconceptualizations since 1990.- Introduction: Globalization and Environmental Challenges: Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century.- Security as Attributes of Social Systems.- The Conceptual Quartet:Security, Peace, Development and Environment and its Dyadic Linkages.- Conceptual Quartet: Security and its Linkages with Peace, Development, and Environment.- Peace and Security: Two Evolving Concepts and Their Changing Relationship.- Peace and Environment: Towards a Sustainable Peace as Seen From the South.- Underdevelopment and Human Insecurity: Overcoming Systemic, Natural, and Policy Risk.- Emergent Sustainability: The Concept of Sustainable Development in a Complex World.- Development and Security: Genealogy and Typology of an Evolving International Policy Area.- Security and Environment Linkages Revisited.- Philosophical, Ethical and Religious Contexts for Conceptualizations of Security.- Oriental, European, and Indigenous Thinking on Peace in Latin America.- Security in Hinduism and Buddhism.- Security in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Philosophy and Ethics.- Security in Confucian Thought: Case of Korea.- Security in Japanese History, Philosophy and Ethics: Impact on Contemporary Security Policy.- Thinking on Security in Hinduism: Contemporary Political Philosophy and Ethics in India.- Human Security in Jewish Philosophy and Ethics.- From Homer to Hobbes and Beyond - Aspects of' security' in the European Tradition.- Security Conceptualization in Arab Philosophy and Ethics and Muslim Perspectives.- Security in African Philosophy and Historical Ideas.- Security in Latin American Philosophy, Ethics, and History of Ideas.- The Brazilian View on the Conceptualization of Security: Philosophical, Ethical and Cultural Contexts and Issues.- Spatial Context and Referents of Security Concepts.- Securitization of Space and Referent Objects.- Structural Setting for Global Environmental Politics in a Hierarchic International System: A Geopolitical View.- Global Environmental Change and Human Security.- Globalization and Security: The US 'Imperial Presidency': Global Impacts in Iraq and Mexico.- Globalization from Below: Social Movements and Altermundism - Reconceptualizing Security from a Latin American Perspective.- Security Regionalism in Theory and Practice.- Identity-based Security Threats in a Globalized World: Focus on Islam.- Security and Sovereignty.- Subordinate, Subsumed and Subversive: Sub-national Actors as Referents of Security.- Non-state Based Terrorism and Security.- Agents of Insecurity in the Andes: Transregional Crime and Strategic Relations.- Re-conceptualizing Security Research with Individual Level Data.- Reconceptualization of Security in Scientific Disciplines since 1990.- Quest for International Security: Benefits of Justice versus the Trappings of Paranoia.- Security in International Law Since 1990.- Human Security from the Standpoint of an Economist.- The Concept of Security in International Relations.- Security in Peace Research and Security Studies.- Reconceptualizing Dimensions of Security (Debates since 1990).- Security: The State (of) Being Free From Danger?.- From a Security towards a Survival Dilemma.- The Changing Agenda of Military Security.- Political Security, an Uncertain Concept with Expanding Concerns.- Economic Security.- The Changing Agenda of Societal Security.- Environmental Security Deconstructed.- Institutional Security Concepts Revisited for the 21st Century.- Human Security and the UN Security Council.- Evolution of the United Nations Security Concept: Role of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change.- Security, Development and UN Coordination.- Reconceptualization of Security in the CSCE and OSCE.- The Comprehensive Security Concept of the European Union.- Reconceptualization of External Security in the European Union since 1990.- Democracy and European Justice and Home Affairs Policies from the Cold War to September 11.- From a European Security Community to a Secure European Community Tracing the New Security Identity of the EU.- EU Policy Coherence on Security and Development A New Agenda for Research and Policy-making.- From Obsession to Oblivion: Reconceptualization of Security in NATO since 1990.- NATO's Role in the Mediterranean and Broader Middle East Region.- German Action Plan: Civilian Crisis Prevention, Conflict Resolution and Peace Consolidation - A Reconceptualization of Security.- Interfaces between Development and Security: Converging the Role of Development Policy and Security Policy?.- Reconceptualizing Regional Security for the 21st Century.- European Security in the 21st Century: An Institutional Perspective.- Regionalization of Great Power Security - Near Abroad, Broader Middle East, and European Neighbourhood.- A Regional Security Perspective From and For the Arab World.- ECOWAS and Regional Security Challenges.- A Regional Security Perspective from and for the Horn of Africa.- Regional Security in Southern Africa Development Community: Perspectives on Security Challenges.- The Security Problematique in South Asia: Alternative Conceptualizations.- Security Debates in East Asia since the End of the Cold War.- China and the New International Security Agenda.- Security in the New Millennium: A Debate in the South Pacific on Peace and Security: Alternative Formulations in the Post Cold War Era.- Security on the American Continent: Challenges, Perceptions, and Concepts.- Towards an Ethical Framework for Security.- Reconceptualizing Security and Alternative Security Futures.- Prediction in Security Theory and Policy.- Climate Change and Security in the 21st Century.- Global Security: Learning from Possible Futures.- Role of Prediction in Sustainable Development and Disaster Management.- Summary and Conclusions.- Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century: Conclusions for Research and Policy-making.

Abstract: The Malaysian conceptions of security are influenced by the country’s political and social variables. Its conceptions of security have been dominated by political and policy elite who were mostly of the dominant United Malays National Organization (UMNO). The historical development and social configuration of the country have made Malay-dominance an inescapable theme in political life. While economic development and growth in the last decade, coupled with more liberal policies embodied in Prime Minister Mahathir’s Vision 2020, have replaced the once all-prevailing focus of ethnic conflicts, the latter nevertheless has great influence over the ways competing groups view security matters. In general, Malaysia’s conception of security combines the uniqueness of the country’s physical configurations, its historical and colonial experiences, the ethnic and cultural make-up of its population, and its pragmatic policies dealing with contemporary changes in the regional and international environments. No doubt military and political security has been a constant concern and rightly so, but the interests of Malaysia cannot be defined exclusively in terms of military and political security. The contributions by the Malaysian political elite are their holistic, expansive and comprehensive views of what constitute contemporary security concerns. From the standpoint of Malaysian leaders, it is the preoccupation with and ultimately the reconstruction of self-resilience and regional economic linkages that will, for a long time to come, continue to direct the country’s attitude towards security.

The understanding of cultural heritage as a growing issue in contemporary security has been described as a heritage-security nexus recognising the protection of cultural heritage as a cross-sectoral topic. It represents an urgent issue in international security politics and in the related field of heritage studies. This article shows how the protection of cultural heritage has found its way into rhetoric relating to security politics, thus placing it on political agendas. This development has had an important impact on the academic field of heritage studies. Therefore, this article seeks to identify the linkage between cultural heritage and security threats and the recognition of it as a new theme in academia during the last two decades. The study argues for a newly defined research field that combines heritage studies with security studies in academic fields such as political science and international relations. Finally, this article argues that the academic field of heritage studies, as well as the heritage institutions and related organisations, needs to have a critical approach to the securitisation process. Involved parties need to consider the intentions and causes of the securitising actors and how they usually benefit from security policies.

ABSTRACTAs cyber-security incidents become increasingly prevalent, we are facing a major political and democratic challenge: who comprises “the public” in relation to such incidents? Based on a study of the controversies surrounding the WannaCry ransomware attack, this article unpacks issues facing the creation of publics in contemporary ICT-mediated security practices. It shows how cyber-security incidents, such as WannaCry, do not neatly align with traditional national security politics and democracy, and it demonstrates the need to attend to how security publics are created. This may paradoxically entail both political and democratic challenges and possibilities for security politics in the digital age.

This article examines the post-imperial migration and racial anxieties that underwrite fantasies of national security in postwar British fiction. Focusing on the autocratic educational institutions featured in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), the article identifies the school as a fraught ideological site wherein conceptions of national insularity collide with the complex pressures of British globalization. Spark’s Marcia Blaine School and Ishiguro’s Hailsham masquerade as microcosms of a homogeneous British nation only through a rigorous process of racial redaction. By adapting Joseph Slaughter’s concept of the “vanishing point”, the article traces two nonwhite immigrant characters whose brief, silent appearances unsettle the novels’ optics of power, thereby intimating a vast history of racial violence disavowed in the name of bodily, cultural, and political security. Connecting the novels’ vanishing acts to the discursive lacunae perpetuated in the war on terror, the article also considers the imperial residues that continue to shape the contemporary security state.

`Human security' is a promising but still underdeveloped paradigmatic approach to understanding contemporary security politics. We argue that tension between those embracing the politics of development and those supporting the human security paradigm has intensified because the transnational dimensions embodied within the latter approach have been under-assessed. The idea of `threat' also needs to be identified with more precision for the human security concept to accrue analytical credibility. We focus on how transnational behaviour addresses the central human security problems of vulnerability and immediacy. Human security's utility for confronting crisis is also evaluated via the application of two case studies of humanitarian intervention: the 1994 multinational operation in Haiti and the 1999 intervention in East Timor. We conclude that, while general security politics includes both domestic and international issues, human security allows us to transcend sovereign prerogatives and to address emerging transregional threats more effectively.

This article assesses the concepts of militarism and militarization in relation to contemporary security interventions in the Sahel, a region increasingly understood through the prisms of violence, cross-border illicit flows, and limited statehood. This region is subject to security interventions that include French military action, EU-funded projects to prevent drug trafficking, and both bilateral and multilateral efforts against irregular migration. To many observers, it is experiencing an ongoing militarization. We argue that while the inextricable concepts of militarism and militarization go some way towards explaining interventions’ occasional use of military violence, they are limited in their grasp of the non-martial and symbolic violence in security practices. We instead propose a focus on assemblages of (in)security to show the heterogeneous mix of global and local actors, and often contradictory rationalities and practices that shape the logics of symbolic and martial violence in the region. Throughout, the article draws on the authors’ fieldwork in Mauritania, Senegal, and Niger, and includes two case studies on efforts against the Sahel’s ‘crime–terror nexus’ and to control irregular migration through the region. The article’s contribution is to better situate debates about militarism and militarization in relation to (in)security and to provide a more granular understanding of the Sahel’s security politics.

This study maps changes in patterns of radical struggles between children-driven movements and child-targeting regimes. To better understand the global implications of these contests, this article argues that scholars need to challenge persistent forms of methodological and epistemological infantilization. Taking up the pivotal case of Egypt, this study traces how contemporary security regimes and populist modes of governance configure children as “the last savages” while collectives of children generate innovative forms of cultural, political, and economic resistance. This study deploys public ethnography, social history, and political-institutional discourse analysis. Providing avenues for thinking differently about both security politics and dissidence, this study offers three theory tools: emancipatory inhiraf and labor agency, child sovereignties and ‘Eid temporalities, and Ultra-generational tactics and wild disinfantilization—a mapping of the mass-mobilizing activities of very young workers, street denizens, and football/soccer fan collectives who are labeled “Ultras” in Egypt.

This article combines feminist international relations theory with critical heritage studies to theorise how gender and sexualities shape heritage as a national security resource. By analysing the mobilisation of gender in military memory initiatives coproduced by Swedish heritage and security actors, we expand the literature on populist ‘illiberal memory-making’ and demonstrate that situations of insecurity may prompt gender-conservative and militarised memory-making also in stable liberal democracies. In response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Swedish cultural heritage has been framed as part of the national defence and a means to prepare citizens for war. By examining this novel heritagization, we reveal how today’s security politics appear to emanate naturally from history. Associations between territory and heterosexuality communicate nativist versions of history and delineate who is entitled to protection. The mobilisation of gender in heritagization makes the nation seem transcendental and supports military violence as a precondition of national security and survival. In relation to contemporary security policy, values and emotions connected to femininities and masculinities both delegitimise earlier security doctrines and pave the way for rearmament and militarisation. Gendered military heritagization contributes to shaping violence as a ‘security truth’ and restricts alternative perspectives and democratic conversations.

How is the rise of global health security transforming contemporary practices of security? To date the literature on global health security has sought to trace how the securitisation of global health is affecting the governance of diseases in the international system; yet no-one has analysed – conversely – how the practices of security also begin subtly to change when they become concerned with a growing number of contemporary health issues. This article identifies three such changes. First, health security debates endow our understandings of security and insecurity in contemporary world politics with an important medical dimension. Second, the rise of global health security enables a range of medical and public health experts to play a greater role in the formulation and analysis of contemporary security policy. Finally, health security debates have also encouraged attempts to secure populations through recourse to a growing array of pharmacological interventions and new medical countermeasures. Drawing upon a rich literature in medical sociology, these three transformations in the contemporary practice of security collectively constitute the ‘medicalisation of security’. This novel perspective on the rise of global health security also reveals new limitations inherent in the emerging health–security interface – limitations associated not so much with the processes of ‘securitisation’ already noted in the global health literature, but rather with wider social processes of ‘medicalisation’. Awareness of the additional limitations renders the threat of a future pandemic even more serious than is commonly thought.

The post-Cold War era has witnessed a dramatic transformation in the German political consensus about the legitimacy of the use of force. However, in comparison with its EU and NATO partners, Germany has been reticent to transform its military to meet the challenges of the contemporary security environment. Until 2003 territorial defence rather than crisis-management remained the armed forces' core role and the Bundeswehr continues to retain conscription. The book argues that 'strategic culture' provides only a partial explanation of German military reform. It demonstrates how domestic material factors were of crucial importance in shaping the pace and outcome of reform, despite the impact of 'international structure' and adaptational pressures from the EU and NATO. The domestic politics of base closures, ramifications for social policy, financial restrictions consequent upon German unification and commitment to EMU's Stability and Growth Pact were critical in determining the outcome of reform. The study also draws out the important role of policy leaders in the political management of reform as entrepreneurs, brokers or veto players, shifting the focus in German leadership studies away from a preoccupation with the Chancellor to the role of ministerial and administrative leadership within the core executive. Finally, the book contributes to our understanding of the Europeanization of the German political system, arguing that policy leaders played a key role in 'uploading' and 'downloading' processes to and from the EU and that Defence Ministers used 'Atlanticization' and 'Europeanization' in the interests of their domestic political agendas.

JCMS: Journal of Common Market StudiesVolume 52, Issue 2 p. 437-438 Book Review The EU as a Global Security Actor: A Comprehensive Analysis beyond CFSP and JHA, by C. Kaunert and K. Zwolski (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, ISBN 9780230378674); xi+243pp., £57.80 hb. Daniel Fiott, Daniel Fiott Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit BrusselSearch for more papers by this author Daniel Fiott, Daniel Fiott Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit BrusselSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 February 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.12125_3Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Volume52, Issue2March 2014Pages 437-438 RelatedInformation

The article describes new aspects in the development of contemporary international security situation and strategic stability. The author opines that the current phase of international relations tends to be rather chaotic and highly unpredictable in its evolution. He attempts to trace the influence of such unorthodox factors as polycentrical nature of the world, departure from exacerbated military confrontation, global terrorist threat on the formation of a principally novel model of strategic stability which substitutes the paradigms of the cold war era. The article dresses the list of specific proposals on the strengthening of military and political security worldwide.

How can we make sense of tensions and contradictions in digitally mediated practices of anonymity and identification? This article calls for foregrounding computer protocols as key sites for locating how agency amongst increasingly complex sets of relations between human and non-human actors is impacting contemporary (in)security. We distinguish agency within and between contemporary finance/security infrastructures by tracing the development, application and updating of a particular set of computer protocols – blockchains. Locating agency at the site of these and other computer protocols, we argue, exposes security politics that have largely remained overlooked in the ongoing engagement of critical security studies with science and technology studies. Widening engagements with security devices, this article also broadens the interdisciplinary engagements of critical security studies with new media and software studies.