Notion Of Politics Research Articles

Super-Cripple Sights: Disable Heroes in Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex

Robert and Tiresias, disable protagonists respectively of Raymond Carver's Cathedral and Sophocles' Oedipus Rex with their super cripple qualities challenge the imperatives of ableist ideals. Protagonists’ blindness leads them to insight whereas their counter characters’ sight leads them to darkness. Such a role reversal leads to a questioning of dichotomies and establishes an alternative view to the definition of blindness and insight. To support this claim, I use Lennard J. Davis’ concept of disable bodies in literature, Rod Michalko’s notion of fictional explorations of disability, and Nickianne Moody’s model of disability informed criticism backed up by Judith Butler’s notion of body politics, Rosemarie Thompson’s idea of extraordinary bodies, and different critical readings on body. This framework of interpretation validates disable bodies as cultural construction. It also regards literatureas apt venue to challenge culturally assigned definition of ability and disability in favor of new body possibilities. The theoretical framework thus discovers Carver and Sophocles redrawing the concept of able-bodiedness and deeply rooted cultural hierarchies like able/disable, sight/blind, sight/insight, body/mind, visible/invisible, and inside/outside in their literary texts.

The messy work of decolonial praxis: insights from a creative collaboration among queer African youth

On the African continent, coloniality/modernity and the (un)freedom of queer peoples intersect in particular historically embedded and newly oppressive ways, making queerness a significant area for transformative struggles. This article draws from the learnings of a collaborative project, called the Qintu Collab, wherein queer African youth created an anthology of graphic stories and a set of podcasts based on their life experiences. The project aimed to link academic scholarship with art and activism through a specifically queer feminist perspective in an effort towards decolonising methodology; and to explore queer collaboration as an antidote to the coloniality of power of dominant western perspectives on queerness and the marginalisation of queer Africans, particularly in countries where same-sex sexuality is criminalised. Taking a feminist queer perspective, we explore the potential of participatory creative research as decolonial practice, to reveal the complex messy work of working together. Specifically, we address the question of when collaborations begin and how methodological decision-making takes place; assumptions about shared ideology and how ideological differences, in our case around notions of queer politics and personhood, are addressed within collaborative settings, as well as how the imagined audience shapes collaborative processes. Our learnings are pertinent for anyone undertaking participatory research collaboration as a transformative endeavour. We want to trouble the idea that participatory collaboration and creative methods are sufficient as decolonial practice. We found that early shared decision-making, (queer) insider research and creative methods were significant for raising and holding contestation and ideological difference, as well as enabling critical thinking and conscientisation. However, maintaining an open, collaborative process conducive to decolonial thinking and doing was hard, ongoing and imperfect work, as we constantly negotiated personal and structural conditions of coloniality.

“Eurasian Dictionaries” of Sir Isaac Newton: Their Importance in Understanding Cultural Unity of Eurasia

Sir Isaac Newton may be considered the first pre-Eurasianist thinker. My research of his unpublished manuscripts demonstrates that he maintained the presence of cultural unity of Eurasian space. To prove it, he elaborated so-called “Eurasian dictionaries.” They are symbolic dictionaries translating meaning into symbols and vice versa. As Newton evidently showed, the symbols standing for the most important religious and political notions of people inhabiting Eurasia, were always the same, from ancient times to the Great Migration Era. In my paper written in Russian specially for the fruitful discussion with my Russian colleagues, I demonstrate the role of Sir Newton’s ideas in our correct realising the cultural unity of Eurasia.

Leadership and Politics of Belonging in a 2015 FeesMustFall Movement: A Case of UPrising

ABSTRACT This article examines UPrising, a student-led movement that emerged at the University of Pretoria’s Hatfield campus during the 2015 Fees Must Fall protests in South Africa. Using the notion of politics of belonging, the articles shows how internal dynamics in UPrising sought to fragment students and student leadership solidarity as they challenged the state and the university on the imminent tuition, residential fees and food price increases as well as other campus-specific issues. We use the concept of politics of belonging to argue that toxic student politics that manifested through contestation for control of campus political space and politics of gender resulted in inclusion and exclusionary practices among student leaders. These contestations were mainly visible through actions of various campus-based student political formations within themselves and towards UPrising leadership. In light of these setbacks, UPrising and women student leaders and activists were able to respond and keep UPrising united and focused on the struggle at hand. This study draws from the authors’ personal participant observation, in-depth interviews and social media during 2015 Fees Must Fall protests in South Africa.

The Apocalypse and the Politics of the Impossible

This article outlines various concepts of the Apocalypse and their relationship to such political ideas of modernity as socialism, liberalism and conservatism. Eschatology is based on the idea that time is striving to elaborate itself and fulfil its own meaning and is therefore directly related to the concept of history as the link between the present, past and future. Different versions of the Apocalypse have become the basis for certain political perspectives: the aspiration to eradicate the old world and establish the Kingdom of God is related to the ambitions of emancipatory and revolutionary movements, while liberalism derives its coherence from a Kantian ethics in which the eschatological assumption provides the foundation for personal moral autonomy. However, the attempts of revolutionaries to realize the meaning of history and the eschatological “fulfilment of time” have become a key element in the criticism of emancipatory movements by conservatives. Contrary to the widespread idea that eschatological expectation and politics are opposed, the author argues that the very notion of politics is impossible without addressing certain concepts from the Apocalypse. The similarity of their eschatological tropes should not be taken as a suggestion that socialist, conservative or liberal ideas (which continue to be in a state of fundamental conflict) may possibly converge; but it does indicate a deep connection between politics as such and the notion of the end of time. These foundations of the political are now threatened by a post-politics associated with the disappearance of the experience of time — an “eternal present” in which the multitude of catastrophes we constantly experience devalues each of them as a unique event and inscribes the idea of the Apocalypse in the reproduction of the existing order of things.

Victimhood in Bataille‘s Reading of Sade and in Popular Sovereignty

This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenue for transgression: Sadean victimhood. The article then applies these aspects to the pamphlet in Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir, “Frenchmen, Some More Effort If You Wish to Become Republicans,” in relation to a contemporaneous document of popular sovereignty, the preamble to the Constitution of the Year III, titled “Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and Citizen.” Attending to the aspects of Sadean victimhood in “Effort” shows that its system’s very impossibility makes it the Declaration’s logical completion. Finally, that impossibility is revealed as the sovereignty of the masses, distinct from that of the crowd.

Mahmoud Darwish: The Politics of Mourning and Catastrophe

This article examines the ways in which Mahmoud Darwish's contrapuntal notion of memory, catastrophe, and mourning exhibit an aesthetic of freedom, intransigence and resistance. Darwish's intellectual and aesthetic project is primarily premised upon the pleasures and pitfalls of memory and catastrophe as a site of spatial and cultural resistance. For Darwish, memory and catastrophe are not only about the absence and presence of geography and home, but they are also metaphorical in every way. In The Presence of Absence (2011), Darwish argues that metaphors form a peculiar mode of geography and space. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of late style and Judith Butler's argument on the politics of mourning, this article sets out to examine the ways in which Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presence of Absence embody a radical form of aesthetic and intellectual praxis, writing against the grain and the politics of mourning.

Public art projects in exposed social housing areas in Denmark – dilemmas and potentials

ABSTRACT Western European cultural policies increasingly target marginalized and socially deprived communities. In Denmark, this happens in the political and discursive context of the so-called “ghetto act” (2018), a set of laws and amendments aimed at radically changing low-income public housing neighbourhoods with a high percentage of “non-Western” residents. Consequential, several Danish public housing neighbourhoods undergo drastic renovation and demolition. Simultaneously, cultural governing bodies and institutions approach the neighbourhoods with a variety of publicly funded projects in arts and culture. These are part of a general strategy to reach new audiences / user groups by supporting art manifestations outside the formal art institutions but also of a more specific betterment agenda based on the assumption that the deprived social housing areas can be “elevated” through art and cultural projects. Based on research in four Danish social housing areas in urban margins, the article introduces the social and cultural policies targeting the areas. We identify a triple exposure to social inequality, stigmatization and intervention, and ask how public art projects in the areas interact with and may resist this exposure. From the perspective of Chantal Mouffe’s notions of antagonistic politics and dissensual artistic practices, we explore a range of public art projects in four selected social housing areas, and identify four different types of art projects: 1) permanent physical interventions, 2) temporary (re)makings of the neighbourhood, 3) reinforcement of creative skills and agency, and 4) co-inhabitation. Presenting cases from each of these four types, we outline their challenges and potentials. Finally, we discuss how they fit into and/or negotiate the “betterment” agenda and the seemingly neutral vision of the mixed, balanced, or creative city.

Jews and the Ends of Theory

Jews and the Ends of Theory

RELIGION AS A BOND – A DELUSIVE HOPE OF POLITICS

Politics is on the one hand an attempt to implement certain good, a desire for achieving agreed objectives, on the other hand – as Max Weber says – a simultaneous a#empt to avoid a particular evil. If in defining the notion of politics there are references to good and evil, purpose and desire, it has to include the non-political spheres – culture, axiology, religion. Mark Lilla argues that for decades we have been aware of the great and final separation that has taken place in Western Europe between political and religious life. This awareness implies a conviction, which is obligatory today in most countries and societies, that to separate politics from religion is a great achievement. For many thinkers and politicians this is an undisputed success from which the West learns to benefit while preparing other regions of the world for such separation. Therefore it seems that modern politics should be free from religious inspiration and temptation. On the other hand, many sociologists and political scientists show the vitality of religious attitudes, proving that in its deepest essence religion is an expression of human behaviour. Each person and each community always has an element of irreducibility which is an internal defence against reducing man to “here and now”, restricting his world to what is useful and usable. We experience that in man there is a natural opening to what is transcendent. Thus, if man is ever to achieve individual and social reconciliation with himself, he will always look for rational and moral meanings. This situation creates a platform for the emergence of a completely new a#itude in society and politics – to seek and pursue spirituality in a world without religion. Increasingly, the understanding of religion reveals itself in a wide etymological sense, sociological and ethnological: religare – “to connect”, “to bind”, “to build community ties”. Religion so understood would be a great solution to the dilemma of separation – the adoption of religion (bonds) without the doctrine, while ensuring social cohesion, strengthening the feeling of being together, maintaining a spiritual connection. Many thinkers are convinced that we cannot base social life only on fear, discipline and economy; we need a deeper and stronger foundations for Community Cohesion. But is such a project possible at all? Is politics becoming a place for the formation of relationships, education and conservation of values, a narrative space which tells citizens what is good and right and what is wrong and alien? Can it replace religion in its deepest essence – in its intimate sense of an exploration and discovery of transcendence? Will it not become a caricature of religion, and a caricature of politics, and ultimately a trap for freedom?

ESCAPING FROM MODERN CHAOS: BRAVE NEW WORLD

Huxley’s Brave New World can be seen as the futuristic and dystopic state of the world with the extreme use of technology and the growing power of totalitarian governments in modern period. It demonstrates how this modernity leads human beings to become inhuman. The struggle in the aftermath of the two destructive world wars, the growing technology and the new political and social ideologies result in an enormous change in the world. The crucial changes in modern period caused the state of chaos and depression in society and it led people and mostly the writers to resist these changes and create their own worlds by demonstrating the possible pessimistic future for humanity, which can be called “dystopia”. Throughout history, almost every society needed to create a better world because of the problems that they had to face in terms of social, economic and political conditions. In this regard, with Plato’s Republic the notion of utopia came into view for the first time and later Sir Thomas More coined the word “utopia” with his book Utopia. Until modern period, utopias were used for criticizing the current situation of society. But in the modern chaotic situation, different kinds of worlds were needed to be created but they were the dystopias which were hopeless and depressed. Dystopias such as 1984, We, and Brave New World should be read as a warning and a political criticism towards the modern notions of politics and technology. As Brave New World has such features as a futuristic and technologically developed state and the clash between nature and science, it can be categorized as a science-fiction novel as well. The aim of this study is to discuss how modern period and modernity affect society and literature in the time being and how Huxley structured his utopian-like dystopia Brave New World by comparing the characteristics of utopia and dystopia.

“Credo nel progresso non nello sviluppo”. Alcune riflessioni sul rapporto tra pedagogia, economia e comunità a partire da Pier Paolo Pasolini

Il contributo intende approfondire il rapporto tra pedagogia, economia e comunità a partire dalle “inattuali” riflessioni di Pier Paolo Pasolini intorno a due termini: progresso e sviluppo, così come le riporta in un suo articolo del 1973 inserito in Scritti Corsari. Il progresso (economico e sociale) lo vogliono coloro che non hanno interessi immediati da soddisfare, è dunque una nozione sociale e politica all’opposto dello sviluppo che invece è un fatto pragmatico e economico, poiché riguarda la produzione dei beni e dei valori legati al consumo di quei beni. La formazione del soggetto-persona deve contemperare una visione teleologica al “bene comune”, a quel senso di comunità che più espropria, in parte o per intero, gli uomini dalla loro “proprietà” più intima e più li tiene uniti da una “mancanza”, da un limite che assurge a collante etico-politico. La riflessione pedagogica, precipuamente se legata all’economia, ha il compito di veicolare leggi e valori legati all’educazione democratica: equità, uguaglianza di genere, senso del limite, partecipazione contro le logiche di mercato omologanti e neoliberiste.

A conditional norm: chemical warfare from colonialism to contemporary civil wars

The norm against chemical weapons (CW) is considered to be a strong and universal restraint against poisonous methods of warfare. Yet the repeated CW attacks during the Syrian civil war have raised questions about the robustness of this international norm. Under what conditions do third parties emphatically sanction violators of the norm? Adopting a historical approach, we analyse the discursive and contextual dynamics characterising the CW attacks since the early twentieth century. Employing process tracing, we consult a variety of rich archival resources including primary language documents to study a number of historical cases including late colonial wars during the interwar period, and Middle Eastern civil wars since the late twentieth century. Building on Judith Butler’s distinction of grievable and ungrievable lives and Didier Fassin’s notion of politics of life, we argue that the anti-CW norm has never had universal status and always remained conditional on a hierarchy of victims. CW attacks targeting certain groups have been more readily justifiable and generated ineffective and inconsistent third-party reactions. Consequently, certain groups, who are implicitly or explicitly perceived to be outside the pale of civilised order, remain more vulnerable to CW attacks than others.

Por uma reflexão sobre a "promessa" nos estudos performativos

Como ato de fala prototípico na tradição performativa, a promessa é analisada em diferentes estudos que promoveram leituras a respeito do legado de John L. Austin, como nos esforços de sistematização formal, em John Searle, ou mesmo a partir da dimensão do corpo, em Shoshana Felman. Este artigo revisita esse ato de fala em uma análise que busca explorar, com Jacques Derrida, a sua dimensão iterável, ao passo que reflete sobre a relação insustentável da promessa com o corpo e sobre sua subversão em relação ao político. Para isso, traz ao debate os trabalhos de Judith Butler e Joana Pinto, bem como a noção política de Jacques Rancière, em um diálogo que faz ver outros potenciais, falhas e infelicidades da promessa.

The Queer Politics of Billy Budd

본 논문의 목표는 랑시에르의 정치철학과 벤야민의 폭력론을 활용해 『빌리 버드』의 퀴어성을 밝히는 것이다. 멜빌의 중편소설은 정신분석학이나 19세기 미국 사회와 연결되어 다각도의 관점에서 연구됐으나, 작품 전체를 관통하는 동성애적 욕망에 관한 연구는 의외로 많지 않다. 퀴어를 성적 지향에 국한된 것이 아닌 “공동체, 섹슈얼리티, 체현, 활동의 비규범적 조직과 논리”라는 넓은 의미로 봄으로써, 본 글은 『빌리 버드』가 보이지 않고 들리지 않는 퀴어 욕망을 드러내는 다양한 방식에 주목한다. 우선 본론의 첫 부분에서 자끄 랑시에르의 독특한 정치철학에 대해 개괄한 후, 두 번째 부분에서 ‘불화’, ‘오산’, ‘감성의 분할’이란 랑시에르의 개념을 통해 퀴어 욕망이 가시화되는 방식을 분석할 것이다. 정치를 대중의 합의가 아닌 ‘몫 없는 자’들의 불화와 오해로 보는 랑시에르의 사상이 『빌리 버드』 속 몫을 갖지 못한 동성애 욕망이 몫을 주장하는 퀴어한 방식에 잘 구현되어 있다는 것이 필자의 주장이다. 본론의 후반부에서는 멜빌 소설 속 폭력에 관한 기존비평에 유토피아 논의를 더하고자 한다. 즉 기존 논의가 비어 선장의 폭력을 ‘법 정립적, 법 보존적 폭력’으로 규정하는 데 집중했다면, 이 글에서는 빌리의 비극적 죽음이 결혼의 은유를 통해 신적 폭력으로 변모하며 벤야민식 (퀴어) 유토피아를 엿보게 해줌을 주장하려 한다.The goal of this paper is to examine queerness embedded in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd in light of Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy and Walter Benjamin’s critique of violence. While Melville’s novella has been amply discussed from diverse perspectives of psychoanalysis and 19th century American history, for example, the queer aspect of the novella remains underrepresented. Viewing queerness as “nonnormative logics and organizations of community... embodiment, and activity,” not confined to sexual orientation, my paper hopes to illuminate the ways the evasive homoeroticism in the novella seeks to be “vocal and visible.” The first half of the paper reads this queer desire to be heard and seen using Rancière’s concepts, such as “disagreement,” “miscount,” and “distribution of the sensible.” Ranciere’s notion of politics as disagreement and contention, I argue, is felicitously embodied in Billy Budd’s queerly defiant moments invoked by the “part that has no part” in society. In the second half, my essay adds to prior criticism on Billy Budd and violence by analyzing the way that Billy’s death, previously read as a tragedy resulting from Vere’s “lawmaking and law-preserving” violence, transforms into “divine violence” which leads to a Benjamian revolution toward a queer utopia.

Juridification as politics: An institutional view

In the existing literature on depoliticization, the increasing use of law as a medium to tackle social and political issues is deemed to be detrimental to the legitimacy of political processes. Against this view, I argue that this trend – which some scholars call ‘juridification’ – can be key to giving life to new forms of politics. First, I show why juridification is a political more than a legal process. Second, I illustrate recent critiques of the dangers inherent in the particular type of juridification that involves the growing use of rights. Third, while concurring with these critiques, I make the case that other facets of juridification are often underrated that can ignite a novel kind of politics. On this account, I go on by elaborating on the idea of self-organization of social groups vis-à-vis the state that is entailed in this notion of politics. Finally, I discuss the recognition of non-conventional family networks to exemplify how a politics of juridification could work. The conclusion is that, while juridification calls for a thorough revision of the tasks of politics, it does not thwart it. Rather, traditional representative politics could and should take stock of how it involves social actors in the creation of new bodies of regulation.

Donald Trump and Jacob Zuma as charismatic buffoons

ABSTRACT This analysis uses Walden Bello’s notion of charismatic politics to explain why ordinary people as voters have been complicit with the authoritarian politics of Donald Trump in the USA and Jacob Zuma in South Africa. In both cases, the authoritarian has displayed the capacity to connect with the masses by exploiting the yawning gap between popular aspirations and the messy realities of liberal democracy. Although, given the different contexts, they are different, the authoritarianisms of Trump and Zuma are not only charismatic, but share the quality of buffoonery, the capacity to attract popular support by acting out the charlatan and the fool. Yet the leader who combines charismatic authoritarianism with buffoonery is dangerous, presenting a threat to democracy which in the case of Trump is global and Zuma was local.

LandBody: Radical Native Commitments

LandBody:Radical Native Commitments Diana Rose (bio), Robert Geroux (bio), and Kennan Ferguson "Who are a people?" and "What is land?" may seem to be separate questions, but they are not. Despite colonial incursions, Native communities continue tribal lifeways, constructing and reconstructing systems of reciprocal survival. Place is not a neutral backdrop, "where something happens." Connection to a specific land comprises a central component of indigenous being, a commitment to site specificity contrary to the current celebrations of migration, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. Land and body—both of them collective, both of them transformative—cannot therefore be separated. This symposium invites a variety of Native scholars to illuminate, interrogate, and implement these connections. Where most conventional political thinking orients around subjects such as state, law, and authority, the authors here emphasize relationships to power and existence which highlight place and interconnections between people and other beings. They insist upon a richer and more imbricated notion of politics than that of settler-colonial society, with its reliance on the isolated individual, capitalist value-form, and alienable land. In contrast, these scholars point to a longer history of collectivity and commitments to land and flourishing, even in the face of the massive power of the states which repeatedly deny and undercut their very existence. In a time where theorists—political and otherwise—increasingly focus on the role of the non-human in the social life of humans, few still take seriously the philosophical traditions of Native communities, where ongoing discussions about the connections between human beings, non-human lifeforms, and geographical and physical landscapes persist. Such contemporary categories as "the environment," "actants," and "medicinal plants" all too often replicate these dualities; the Native theorists in this symposium instead argue for (or, daringly, presume) concomitance. Humans, other animals, plants, and what too many dismiss as "geographical features" such as mountains and rivers interact, interweave. Land and people and power cannot be separated. The symposium begins by questioning the relationship of indigeneity to land itself. Bernard Perley calls his theorization of this complexity between land and belonging "translocality." A Maliseet scholar writing from the continent's opposite coast, Perley notes the disasporic nature of much Native existence. While the white popular [End Page 973] imagination locates American Indian and First Nations existence as predominantly on reservations and reserves, Perley underscores both the violent dislocations which created such spaces, as well as the fact that most Natives live outside the boundaries of "their" reservations, whether in cities or in distant towns. Yet, Perley argues, this does not undermine the necessary connection to land, rather it demands complex "cosmogonies" which attend to the praxis of living with and through sacred lands in multiple languages and locations. These emergent vitalities—located at literal touchstones such as the now-submerged Tobique Rock, or in language practices including translations between Maliseet, Menominee, Oneida, and Anishinabemowin—constitute the continued, contested survivance of Native peoples. Talia Gomez Quintana also sees the indigenous resistance emanating from both remembrance and physical location. In "Hiaki Vatwe," Gomez Quintana traces the recognition of space and land as kin to humans, along with non-human animals and elements such as the Yaqui River. Settler colonialism seeks the same power as that which animates the Yoeme people: when the Mexican government seeks to tame, transform, and dam the Hiaki Vatwe, it strikes at the lifeblood of those who have lived with the river as partners. Fortunately, Gomez Quintana argues, the river has taught resistance: the Talking Tree's lessons on how to fight colonial settlement were made intelligible though travel along the river, and the Deer world (home to language, the Yaqui people, and songs of memorialization) arises from its water. But, she shows, this conflict continues, with the existence of the Yaqui Nation pitted against the state's desire for a new aqueduct. Water projects are similarly analyzed as usurpations by Giovanni Batz. He historicizes such "development" as the newest settler-colonial invasion strategy. Others have long sought the lands of the Ixil (shared, in part, with the K'iche' and Q'anjob'al), but the Ixil have in part protected their ways of life through a combination of strategic and military resistances. In the wake of...

BRICS and Evolving Trends of Complex Interdependence: Implications for Pakistan

By far, the Realist notion of Power politics has remained the dominant paradigm in examining interstate relations; however, I want to argue that the evolving international landscape is moving fast towards complex interdependence. The peaceful rise of China, recurrence of Russia and rising Indian stature with a stable economic outlook and human capital of over 1 billion are hard facts, which is transforming the prevailing norms of international order by way of cooperative engagement, economic collaboration, common development and creating shared destiny by way of win-win cooperation. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has assumed greater significance, as it is a transregional organization based on economic integration. This research article explores the contours of a successful model, identify potential challenges and opportunities and suggests a way forward for optimizing the gains promised through this economic bloc.

The ontological politics of cyber security: Emerging agencies, actors, sites, and spaces

AbstractIn this article, we show how Annemarie Mol's notion of ontological politics helps to open up the research agenda for cyber security in Critical Security Studies. The article hence seeks to further the debate about STS and Critical Security Studies. The article's main claim is that the concept of ontological politics enables an engagement with the complex and transformative dynamics of ICT and the new security actors and practices that shape security politics in the digital age. By examining the virulent attacks executed by the Mirai botnet – one of the world's largest, fiercest, and most enduring botnets – we point to four aspects of cyber security that attention to the ontological politics of cyber security attunes us to: the proliferation and entanglement of security agencies, actors, sites, and spaces. These aspects of cyber security, we argue, are becoming increasingly prominent alongside the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G network technology. In conclusion, we discuss the wider security theoretical and normative-democratic implications of an engagement with the ontological politics of security by exploring three avenues for additional conversation between ontological politics and Critical Security Studies.