Security Continuum Research Articles

Crisis as war: undocumented migration and the Greek nation under threat

ABSTRACT The paper examines the interconnections between crisis, war and undocumented migration focusing on the crisis at Evros borderzone, Northeastern Greece, in February/March 2020. It puts forward an analysis of public discourse that posits Greece as “a nation under threat” and reflects on the notion of crisis both as a dimension of the present historical moment and a governmental device for strengthening state power. The paper suggests that crisis and war be understood as parts of a security continuum and that the Evros crisis of 2020 rendered visible the mutual constitution of the processes of illegalization and securitization of migration. Formulated as an open threat for Greece and Europe, undocumented mobility feeds into the (in)security spiral promoting more surveillance, tighter border control and deepening the social hierarchy that positions illegal(ized) migrants at the lowest social strata.

A two-generation study of attachment in mothers and their young adult offspring: Latent classes of attachment and associations with anxiety and depression

BackgroundEvidence supports the conceptualization of adult attachment as existing along a continuum of attachment security and insecurity; however, ongoing debates persist regarding the use of categorical versus continuous approaches to studying attachment. Attachment data collected from a large community sample of mothers and their offspring in young adulthood were used to examine i) latent classes of adult attachment, ii) associations between mother and offspring attachment, iii) the relationship between adult attachment and mental health symptoms. MethodsMothers and offspring were each administered the Attachment Style Questionnaire when offspring were aged 21-years. Latent class analyses (LCA) were performed to examine response patterns across ASQ items. Associations between mothers' and offspring attachment, and correlations between attachment domains and depression/anxiety subscales were examined. ResultsLCA identified four latent classes across a continuum of secure and insecure attachment rather than four distinct adult attachment styles. Anxious attachment subscales correlated strongly with depression/anxiety symptoms in both cohorts. Mothers' attachment was significantly but weakly correlated with their young adult offspring attachment. LimitationsAttachment was measured at one time point and as such, a causal maternal-offspring attachment relationship could not be established. ConclusionsFindings support a dimensional view of attachment security and insecurity over a four-category model of adult attachment. Attachment correlated with anxiety and depressive symptoms and highlights the importance of considering adult attachment when addressing mental health. There was limited evidence of a relationship between middle aged mothers and their offspring in young adulthood, suggesting other factors influence attachment in adulthood.

Incorporating Environmental Protection Requirement in Industrial IoT Access Control Security Using Arduino Technology MQ2 and DHT11 Sensor Networks

This paper presents the development of environmental monitoring mechanism based on Arduino Sensor Technology for Industrial Internet of Things (Industrial IoT) Critical Infrastructure (CI) Protection in an Access Control role. Access control of hazardous substances is one of the most vulnerable aspects of Industrial IoT CI. The idea behind this study is to harden environmental security through live ecological monitoring of Temperature, Humidity and emitted hazardous substances or gases due to Industrial activities and processes in Smart CI places such as Nuclear Processing Plant, Thermal Generation Power Industries, Fossil Processing Plant, Military Chemical warfare plant, food processing factory, Agriculture Chemical Manufacturing Plant and many other CI industries. Live monitoring is one of the most important security requirements for any cyber-Access Control Mechanism. The literature revealed that similar systems were developed and implemented in different organizations and with different System Requirements and specifications. However, most CI industries have not automated environmental monitoring requirements and integrated the requirement into a broad institution security continuum. The consequence of neglecting environmental security is climate change. Furthermore, Toxic gas pollution affects millions of people around the world and contributes to about 5.4 percent of deaths worldwide. Pollution kills more people than the combination of malaria, AIDS, and tuberculosis hence the development of security mechanisms to monitor pollutants in the atmosphere. The main objective of this study was to develop a computer-based application for monitoring environmental hazardous substances such as extreme temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and Smoke in the atmosphere surrounding Industrial IoT CI Industries. The system development approach employed was the Arduino engineering process model. To achieve this objective, cheaper ecological sensor Networks that include MQ2 and DHT11 Arduino Sensors are connected to Arduino Uno Microcontroller through a solderless breadboard Arduino component. The backend database was MySQL Relational database management system. The developed prototype application produced a number of results including live monitoring of temperature, humidity, CO2, CO, Smoke, and many others. A system evaluation process was conducted and the result indicated 99.999% accuracy levels. The results, it evidence that the developed prototype application can improve environmental security in Industrial IoT CI institutions.

The war for the future

The following essay was born out of the authors’ participation in the Hamburg (Insecurity) Sessions 2019: Un-Cancelling the Future, and the discussions that took place in the workshop on Future Weapons and Emerging Technologies. The workshop participants critically addressed such problems as the future of defence technologies and their sociotechnical environments, cybersecurity and surveillance proliferation and the improvised instruments of insurgency. Our task was to weave the ideas and insights of the workshop’s participants into a vision of the world in 2040 and use it to motivate an analysis of the technoscientific imaginaries emerging in the present. From the workshop presentations and discussions, we identified three key areas of that allowed us to imagine the outlines and interactions of global security and technoscientific practice in 2040: ecopolitics: the exploitation of ecological systems for strategic ends; technonationalism: the use of advanced technologies to pursue racialised and nationalistic geopolitical agendas; and the security continuum: the extension of conflict modes to all aspects of social life and the open-source proliferation of security tools and techniques.

Gleaning in the 21st Century: Urban food recovery and community food security in Ontario, Canada

Historic gleaning activities in Europe took place in farmers’ fields where gleaners could collect the leftovers of the harvest. One of the primary motivations for modern gleaning in Canadian cities is to donate fresh food to local organizations such as food banks. As there is currently little research in this area, this study aims to explore how gleaning initiatives contribute to community food security. The study is based on interviews and surveys with volunteers from several gleaning organizations in Ontario, combined with the Dietitians of Canada’s Food Security Continuum (FSC) as a framework for analysis. Findings include that gleaning contributes to all three stages of the FCS: initial food systems change, food systems in transition, and food systems redesign for sustainability. Respondents felt that while the amount of food harvested could be scaled up, there were benefits that augmented community food security, such as increased food literacy, food awareness, community cohesiveness, and a fresh food supply. Overall, this study improves our understanding of how gleaning initiatives can contribute to community food security. With better ongoing support from the community and on the policy agenda, such projects could further enhance their impacts.

Indicators for Measuring Spatial Justice and Land Tenure Security for Poor and Low Income Urban Dwellers

There exist various indicators that measure land tenure security for urbanites. Most of those indicators measure the degree to which land titling promotes the security of tenure. Based on the reviewed literature, it is admitted that land titling is not a panacea to land tenure security. Measuring the degree of land tenure security should not rely only on the legalisation of landownership. This paper makes a meta-analysis and conceptual modelling to connect spatial justice and land tenure security. It discusses the potential of inclusive urban development grounded on the claim that spatial justice enhances land tenure security. A comprehensive framework of indicators which can measure the degree of land tenure security from a spatial justice lens is thereafter derived. The meta-analysis and conceptual modelling were coupled with research synthesis to perform an in-depth review and qualitative content analysis of the literature on concepts of spatial justice, land tenure security, and urban (re)development processes. This study proposes 60 indicators which measure the degree of spatial justice and land tenure security along a continuum of spatial justice and land tenure security. Those indicators provide a more holistic approach for measuring land tenure security from a spatial justice lens than the separated sets of existing indicators.

Validation francophone du Toddler Attention Questionnaire, un questionnaire d’attention des jeunes enfants

ObjectivesThere is a lack of tools for non-parental caregivers and in the French language to assess the quality of the attachment relationship with toddlers. The Toddler Attention Questionnaire (TAQ) is an Italian scale created for caregivers in day care centers. By its focus on the exploration system, the TAQ offers the opportunity to study the relation between attention characteristics and attachment behavior in toddlers. In the attachment theory, a link is often assumed between these two concepts. Mary Main has described the different attachment patterns (secure, insecure avoidant, insecure ambivalent-resistant, disorganized) by using cognitive psychology dimensions relying on attentional processes. However, this relation is hardly proven scientifically and study results in this field are not always congruent. The validation of the TAQ in French, main purpose of this study, is likely to add new contributions to this field. Materials and methodsThe Toddler Attention Questionnaire is composed of 29 self-reported items and four dimensions which describe 4 attentional processes: lability, flexibility, detachment, disorientation. The items present different behaviors and measure, on a five-point Likert scale, the quality of children's attention during exploration. The French translation was made by two native bilingual persons following the back translation procedure and was administered to the primary caregiver, who was in charge of each child in 13 French daycare centers. The questionnaires were completed for 148 children aged from 20 to 36 months who attended to the daycare center at least 20 hours per week. ResultsThe analyses show a robust structure into three dimensions: the disorientation subscale was deleted because of its reduced contribution to the total variance. Some items were also shifted (9 items) or deleted (6 items) compared to their contribution to the different dimensions. Moreover, a qualitative analysis of the remarks from the participants allowed to adapt some items’ formulation (4 items). The final French version of the TAQ, composed of 23 items, explained 46.94 % of the variance. The Cronbach's Alphas ranged from 0.64 (Flexibility) to 0.83 (Lability). The TAQ is a dimensional tool: the sum of the scores gives a position of the child behavior in a continuum of attachment security in each dimension. ConclusionsTwo main differences between the present validation and the original study may limit generalization and comparability. First, we adopted large selection criteria, including children who attended to a daycare center at least 20 hours per week, instead of 36 hours per week of the original study. This choice allowed to collect more questionnaires and to be closer to the total rate of hours attended by French children in daycare center. Second, our sample of professional participants was more heterogeneous than the Italian sample regarding the professional experiences and the seniority in the daycare center. With few items, well-defined questions and easy administration, the TAQ seems to be a cost-effective alternative to the traditional methods used to assess attachment behaviors such as the Strange Situation or the Attachment Q-Sort. Hence, the major advantage of our validation is to allow French researchers to carry out studies with large samples in the attachment field, particularly with toddlers and professional caregivers. Studying the secondary attachment relationship is essential to highlight how a child copes with the absence of his primary attachment figure in the daycare center. Moreover, the focus on attention processes is important to prevent attention deficits and learning difficulties and to reduce its potential effect on the child's development. Nevertheless, further research would be needed to extend its psychometric proprieties (convergent, discriminant and test-retest validity) and to examine its clinical usefulness.

Revealing community security within the Australian security continuum

The Australian security continuum is broad, with its more traditional subdomains clearly understood. However, significant parts of this continuum are not well known or examined. The study used an exploratory interpretive approach to examine the Australian security domain functions through an analysis of protection-associated job descriptions (N = 170) and criteria language. Thematic analysis uncovered discrete patterns of protective roles, resulting in the emergence of community security. The study revealed that community security has jurisdictional boundaries, with functions to maintain community protection, safety, crime prevention and other community services; however, community security is underrepresented in security literature. Community security addresses broad wellbeing issues such as crime, anti-social behaviour and homelessness. Consequently, greater recognition of community security is necessary, along with its participants and their language.

Cultures of Migration and Conflict in Contemporary Human Mobility in Turkey

We approach Turkish mobility using a culture of migration perspective with reference to conflict. Conflicts are defined broadly into an array of situations including minor disputes, tensions or latent conflicts on the one hand and major violent events on the other. These situations, defined along a security continuum shape individual perceptions. Increasing perceptions of human insecurity are positively correlated to a rise in migration propensity. Applied to Turkey’s international migration history we note that major conflicts have determined inflows and outflows of populations and created a Turkish culture of migration, which reinforces continuous population flows between countries of destination and origin. Migration flows between Germany and Turkey are exemplary in this regard.

Syrian refugees in Turkey: from “guests” to “enemies”?

AbstractSince the war erupted in Syria in 2011, Turkey has followed an “open door” policy toward Syrian refugees. The Turkish government has been promoting this liberal policy through a humanitarian discourse that leads one to expect that Syrian refugees have not been securitized in Turkey. This article, however, argues that a security framework that emphasizes control and containment has been essential to the governance of Syrian refugees in Turkey, despite the presence of such non-securitarian discourses. To develop this argument, the article first builds an analytical framework based on a critical engagement with the theory of securitization, which was originally developed by the Copenhagen School. Unlike the Copenhagen School’s theory emphasizing “speech acts” as the vector of securitization, this article applies a sociological approach to the analysis of the securitization process by focusing on both discursive and non-discursive practices. In carrying out this analysis, securitizing practices, both discursive and non-discursive, are defined as those that: (1) emphasize “control and containment,” especially in relation to societal/public security concerns (here, specifically, the labor market and employment); and (2) establish a security continuum about various other issues—including criminality, terrorism, socioeconomic problems, and cultural deprivation—and thereby treat migrants as “risky” outsiders. Subsequently, in line with this analytical framework, the article seeks to trace the securitization of non-camp Syrian refugees, especially in the labor market. Finally, the article demonstrates that this securitization process is likely to conceal structural and political problems, and to close off alternative public and political debate about the refugees.

The food security continuum: a novel tool for understanding food insecurity as a range of experiences

The current lack of consensus on the relationships between hunger, malnutrition and food insecurity frustrates efforts to design good policies and programs to deal with the many problems. Disputes over terminology distract from the need for urgent action. This paper argues that our understanding of food insecurity is incremental: it develops as new research in a variety of food-deprived and nutrition-deprived contexts reveals causes, experiences and consequences and how they are interlinked. If we are to improve beneficiary selection, program targeting and intervention impact assessment, it is vital to coordinate our new understandings. The paper brings convergence to our understanding of food insecurity by introducing a new framework that visualizes levels of food insecurity, and the concomitant consequences and responses, as a continuum. Some potential benefits of using the continuum as a diagnostic tool are increased focus on less extreme but nevertheless urgent manifestations of food insecurity, more accurate targeting of interventions and better follow-up, and improved accountability for donor spending.

The European Security Continuum and the EU as an International Security Provider

The European Union has long been seen as a distinctive or sui generis actor in international politics, epitomised by the notions of civilian or normative power, or more recently by the “Comprehensive Approach”. However, these conceptualisations of the EU as a distinctive international security provider are being challenged by the blurring of the traditional internal-external security divide. The threats and challenges identified in the various EU security strategies increasingly transcend geographic and bureaucratic boundaries, creating a European security continuum, which complicates the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the EU as a security provider. Significant friction continues to exist in the formulation and implementation of security policy as EU institutions and capabilities struggle to overcome the traditional architecture separating internal and external security. In parallel, the cross-fertilisation of internal and external security norms and practices undermines understandings of the EU's role as a normative international security provider.

‘Crowded Places Are Everywhere We Go’: Crowds, Emergency, Politics

‘Crowded places’ have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This article argues that several subtle reconfigurations take place. First, counter-terrorism governance derives the knowledge of crowds from ‘generic events’ as unexpected, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. This move activates 19th-century knowledge about crowds as pathological, while the spatial referent of ‘crowded places’ reconfigures workplaces as crowded places and workers as crowds. Second, new guidance for emergency planning and policing deploys a more rational approach to crowds, put forward in recent psychosocial approaches. These modes of knowledge derive ‘generic crowds’ from normal social relations rather than extraordinary events. Generic events and generic crowds effectively depoliticize crowds, as they exclude a more radical generic politics, in which crowds are not derivable, but negate determination.

Land tenure regimes and land conservation in the African drylands: the case of northern Ghana

In Africa’s drylands, threats to economic livelihood from climate change are exacerbated by a low rate of investments in land conservation. The existing literature identifies land tenure insecurity as a major contributory factor. To help better understand this challenge, this paper investigated, empirically, the impact of land tenure regimes on investment in land conservation, focusing on northern Ghana. The study’s findings identified three dominant traditional institutions of land administration, viz., tendana, chieftaincy and family. These institutions in turn define three broad categories of tenure regimes, namely, freehold, leasehold and lineage. It further finds that these regimes exhibit a continuum of tenure security that impact differentially on investment in land conservation. This is buttressed by the quantitative analysis, which reveals that whereas freehold (relative to lineage) significantly engenders investment in conservation, leasehold shows no important impact. Among others, the paper recommends the institution of reform processes that promote durable and individualized land tenure security.

Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Greece: International Comparative Perspectives ed. by Leonidas K. Cheliotis and Sappho Xenakis (review)

Reviewed by: Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Greece: International Comparative Perspectives ed. by Leonidas K. Cheliotis and Sappho Xenakis Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis Leonidas K. Cheliotis and Sappho Xenakis, editors. Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Greece: International Comparative Perspectives. Oxford: Verlag Peter Lang. 2011. Pp. xx + 615. 12 figures, 8 tables. Paperback $86.95. The collection edited by Leonidas K. Cheliotis and Sappho Xenakis, the first such English-language volume of its kind, aims at bringing together the criminological work of Greek scholars and subject matter specialists from other Western countries in order to impart a comprehensive picture on crime and criminal justice in Greece. Drawing on a rich variety of approaches, the book principally aims, as stated in the Introduction to the volume by Cheliotis and Xenakis, to fill in an important gap in the literature by providing a systematic, but not necessarily exhaustive, introduction to issues of crime and punishment in contemporary Greece. To this effect, the editors choose an extremely useful comparative methodology. Topics are first discussed by specialists on Greece and then commented upon by international experts. The chosen methodology allows for an in-depth analysis of the interaction between the national and the global and, by placing the Greek criminal system in the context of much wider international and global trends, provides a much needed corrective to stereotypical discourses that insist one-sidedly on a real or imaginary “Greek exceptionalism.” [End Page 159] The collection is divided into three sections. The first deals with the experience of crime, the second with topical crime issues, and the third with reactions to crime. Overall, it comprises fifteen primary chapters and accompanying commentaries. The contributions to the collection are diverse and of high quality. Opening Part I, Cheliotis and Xenakis introduce a number of core themes on crime, fear of crime, and punitiveness, and propose a theoretical framework in which to understand them. In their commentary, Jonathan Jackson, Monica Gerber, and Carolyn Côté-Lussier provide a comparison with the UK and suggest that ideological positions are an important explanans of the variance in public feelings of safety, trust in the police, and punitiveness. The chapter by Giannis Panousis focuses on media representations of crime and criminal justice. Commenting on Panousis’s chapter, Robert Reiner makes a useful comparison with the British and North American experience. Next, Vassilis Karydis addresses in a characteristically lucid and informative manner the politically sensitive issue of the relation between immigration and crime. In his commentary, Didier Bigo places the narrative transforming the migrant into a potential enemy in a wider discursive context, which he terms “the (in) security continuum.” In the closing chapter of Part I, Ioannis Papageorgiou provides an overview of studies on the relation between youth and crime. In his commentary, Cheli-otis observes that, despite the expansion of pertinent research on the subject, the role of the family appears to have been overlooked to a large extent. Part II of the collection starts with a chapter by Effi Lambropoulou on corruption, which, after presenting the pertinent legal framework, surveys empirical and theoretical analyses of the phenomenon. In his commentary, Peter Bratsis challenges the view that Greek corruption can play a role either in understanding the particular dynamics of Greek society or in explaining the current crisis. In the following chapter, Joanna Tsiganou canvasses the historical unfolding of drug control policies, insisting that, since its first introduction under the influence of international developments, the prohibitory system of regulation has remained essentially unchanged. In his commentary, Trevor Bennett argues that drug policy is the result of the combined interaction of criminalization and medicalization, while expressing some skepticism about evidence-based approaches. Next, Sappho Xenakis discusses the interplay between organized crime and political violence, highlighting the politics surrounding official efforts to characterize these challenges as a single problem. Vincenzo Ruggiero’s commentary sheds light on the Greek experience by way of a critical examination of international security discourses, tying together organized crime and political violence. A second commentary by Margaret E. Beare stresses the importance of US influence by comparing the Greek experience with that of Canada. In their chapter on sex, trafficking, and crime policy, Georgios Papanicolaou and Paraskevi Bouklis trace the emergence...

The Anthropologist as Witness: Humanitarianism between Ethnography and Critique

The Anthropologist as Witness: Humanitarianism between Ethnography and Critique Nicolas Guilhot (bio) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present Didier Fassin Translated by Rachel Gomme Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. xvi + 324 pp. Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics Erica Bornstein and Peter Redfield, eds. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2011. xi + 320 pp. In the concluding session of his 1976 lecture at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault introduced the notion of “biopower” to designate a new set of political technologies emerging in the eighteenth century and developing throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These technologies no longer expressed the traditional right of life and death that the sovereign exercised over his subjects, nor did they discipline discrete bodies according to the functional requirements of war, economic production, justice, or education: instead, they operated over the seamless and anonymous surface of large populations. Demographics, epidemiology, social hygiene, psychiatry, but also their institutional and political inscription into healthcare systems, insurance regimes, social medicine, or urban planning policies sought to secure conditions optimizing the life of populations in its most immediate biological manifestation. Biopower does not just preserve extant life: it actively intervenes throughout the social body to augment it and reshapes society as a secure, life-supporting environment. Foucault thus saw in biopower a new episode in the history of sovereignty, characterized by large-scale technologies of care and the dispensation of a modicum of social security, which deeply transformed the logic of government. The course was titled “Society must be defended.”1 Twenty-five years later, a similar linkage between sovereignty and the biopolitical imperative of securing life was articulated in an influential document. Its birthplace was not the amphitheaters of the Collège de France but the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Its purpose was not to enlighten the public of the Latin Quarter in Paris but to clarify for the international community the mechanisms [End Page 81] and circumstances under which militarized humanitarian interventions could take place. Its title was not “Society must be defended” but, close enough, “The Responsibility to Protect.”2 In many ways, the report can be considered a landmark in the history of biopower. One of the striking things about this document is the extent to which it seems to vindicate Foucault’s suggestion that biopower was replacing or redefining sovereignty. It enshrined this transformation by making sovereignty conditional—something unthinkable in terms of classical political theory or legal philosophy—on the effective provision of security and stated that “state authorities are responsible for the functions of protecting the safety and life of citizens and promotion of their welfare.” Sovereignty no longer manifested itself exclusively by its capacity to provide security against external dangers such as foreign aggression but it included primarily protection against dangers immanent to social and political life itself (what Foucault called “endemic” dangers), namely, “threats to life, health, livelihood, personal safety and human dignity.”3 But biopower has come a long way since 1976, and it is now acknowledged as the ordering principle of global politics. To the extent that it seeks to regulate complex life environments, biopower is not limited by the artificial partitions of political space, since a local security deficit becomes “a risk to people everywhere.”4 In order to be effective, biopower has to be global. This does not mean that it bypasses state sovereignty (the report insists that the “responsibility to protect” departs from the confrontational notion of a “right to intervene”) but rather that sovereignty has to be reconstructed according to the biopolitical imperative. In the age of a globally shared responsibility to protect, sovereignty becomes the local instantiation of a security continuum that should ideally remain seamless.5 The report thus outlines a principle of subsidiarity, as it were, a “fallback responsibility” whereby the failure of a state to provide basic security to its population opens the possibility of an external intervention meant to ensure that the global security continuum is restored. This, according to the authors of the report, “bridges the divide between intervention and sovereignty.”6 Foucault is not the only author who seems to be vindicated by this emerging doctrine of global humanitarian...

Humanitarian Arms Control and Processes of Securitization: Moving Weapons along the Security Continuum

This article undertakes a critical analysis of what have been labelled humanitarian arms control (HAC) initiatives, most notably, recent agreements to ban cluster munitions and landmines as well as efforts to restrict the proliferation of small arms. The article critiques conventional accounts that view such initiatives as illustrating the potential of global civil society to interject human security concerns into the domain of arms regulation through the exercise of bottom-up power. In order to do this, the article first outlines the concept of securitization, particularly Floyd's discussion of positive and negative forms of securitization and Abrahamson's concept of the security continuum. This is used to frame an analysis of contemporary HAC initiatives that locates them in the much longer history of pariah weapons regulation and the way it relates both to the framing of legitimized weapons and changes in the broader regulation of the conventional defence trade in different eras. In contrast to conventional accounts of the HAC agenda, it is argued that initiatives such as those on landmines and cluster munitions were successful precisely because they were consonant with the same discourse used to legitimize both post-Cold War liberal interventionism and the new generation modern high-tech weapons. Moreover, the extra-securitization of landmines, cluster munitions and small arms has been accompanied by the (relative) desecuritization of the trade in major conventional weapons and associated dual-use technologies, a process that has a number of quite negative effects in terms of arms trade regulation. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of the preceding analysis both for thinking about processes of securitization and for arms trade non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Human Trafficking, Human Security, and the Balkans by Richard H. Friman , Simon Reich (review)

REVIEWS igi glacial periods to Soviet collectivization. The heart of Crate's analysis comes in chapter three, in a detailed discussion ofwhat she terms theViliui Sakha 'cows-and-kin system', a dense network of social, cultural, ecological and economic relationships that knit humans and cattie into a web of interdepen dence. Whereas the Soviet period was characterized largely by the centrali zation of agriculture and relative stability, the post-Soviet period brought rapid decentralization and radical instability to theViliui Sakha. Households' most common adaptive strategy in these uncertain times, Crate shows, was to increase their domestic herd sizes substantially and, concomitantly, to revive various sorts of ecological knowledge connected with raising cattle. In extended descriptions backed up with detailed case studies, Crate shows how thisnew focus on cattle also transformed relationships among kin: in the labour exchanges necessary for procuring hay; in the movement of foodstuffs through extended families; and inan emerging distinction between households that own cattle and those that do not. Chapter four then follows one important strand of the cows-and-kin system, tracing villagers' relationships to land through the Soviet period and into the post-Soviet years with particular emphasis on the recollections of elders. In her final chapters, Crate asks perhaps themost pressing question, one that concerns not only theViliui Sakha she knows best but communities of all shapes and sizes around theglobe: can human cultures successfully adapt their lifeways to the unprecedented transformations caused by the convergence of global climate change and ever-intensifyingnatural resource exploitation (in theViliui Sakha case, this means nearby diamond mines)? The jury is stillout on this question, Crate suggests, but any workable solution must include respect for, and dialogue among, multiple understandings of what 'sustain ability'means. Crate begins thisdialogue in these chapters, both by reporting on focus groups she and her collaborators conducted on the topic of sustain ability among the Viliui Sakha and by drawing comparisons with other indigenous communities in the circumpolar north (especially Canada) and elsewhere. In these chapters, as in the book as a whole, it is delightful to see ethnography conducted in the former Soviet Union linked so closely to pressing concerns in broader anthropology and, indeed, in the social and natural sciences. Department of Anthropology Douglas Rogers Tale University Friman, Richard H. and Reich, Simon (eds). Human Trafficking, Human Security,and the Balkans. The Security Continuum: Global Politics in the Modern Age. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2007. vii + 214 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $19.95 (paperback). In the concluding chapter of their edited volume, Human Trafficking, Human Security, and the Balkans, Richard Friman and Simon Reich note that academic writers and policy practitioners often have a tendency to talk and, indeed, 192 SEER, 87, I, JANUARY 200g think straightpast each other ? in a way that is detrimental to thework of both parties. Policy makers' interests in identifyingwhat actions should be taken in response toparticular social problems (in this case, human trafficking in theBalkans), argue Friman and Reich, can lead them down a very different conceptual path to that taken by students of policy, who strive to explain the origins and mechanisms of those problems. In Human Trafficking,the editors attempt to bridge that gap by bringing authors from the academy together with practitioners drawn from non-governmental and international organiza tions. The effort is laudable and the resulting text provides an illuminating and nuanced picture of one of themost troubling and persistent social prob lems seen across the Balkan Peninsula ? the traffickingofwomen for sexual exploitation and children for forced labour. At the same time, however, the collected works reflect the validity of the editors' concerns about the difficulty of reconciling theory and practice. Since the volume is, beyond all else, a book about social relations in the Balkans, it is not surprising that thework's key strength lies in the authors' rich description of the state of human traffickingin Southeastern Europe. The editors' introductory chapter and a contribution by JulieMertus and Andrew Bertone collate the latest available data on levels of traffickingthroughout the formerYugoslavia, in a way that highlights the clear regional nature of the problem. Lynellyn Long shiftsto amicro-level investigation inher 'Reflections from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia...

Debates

While the economic potential of privatizing small‐scale properties in impoverished urban areas of the developing world is receiving a good deal of attention, in reality the potential only applies to a segment of the urban poor. ‘Informally occupied property’, instead of existing as a category, in reality operates as a broad continuum of tenure security. Toward the secure end informal occupation can contain the ingredients that facilitate titling and access to capital via title. But toward the other end, acute tenure insecurity meshes with severe forms of personal, food and livelihood insecurity. This paper discusses the relevancy of the poverty–property rights–capital argument to the segment of the urban poor that is acutely tenure insecure.

Water Security: A Discursive Analysis

Water resources continue to attract considerable attention and have increasingly become a significant feature of the world security environment. In order to locate water in the security continuum, it is necessary to revisit the debate on the traditional and non-traditional aspects of security. On the one hand, notions and images often conjured up when water issue is highlighted are often associated with concerns like national survival, inter and intrastate tension and the likelihood of “water wars” - the ‘securitisation’ of water. On the other hand, the security discourse also examines the necessity to ‘desecuritise’ water-related problems so as to reduce perception of threat and facilitate negotiations.