Security Rhetoric Research Articles

Conflict, Borderlands and Displacement: The Persistent and Escalating Crisis in Northwest India

Borderlands are the geographical spaces or zones around a territorial border between nations. Defined by the borders that create and maintain the nation–state, the borderlands are the sites in the making, continually moulded, transformed or reconstructed by the social actors inhabiting them. Going beyond the boundary lines, borderlands encapsulate a much broader area where the impact of happenings at the border is felt and reverberated. Borderlands are of different types. They are classified as ‘alienated’ when dominated by conflict, hostility, insecurity and instability, as in parts of northwest India, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) since 1947–1948. The border between India and Pakistan in J&K called the ‘Line of Control’ (LoC), is a de facto and not an international boundary and remains contested, disturbed, militarised and controlled. The borderlands surrounding it have witnessed many wars, war-like situations and displacement of people with several socio-economic ramifications. The post-colonial state tried to settle these conundrums of border-making but got entangled in the persistent and escalating crisis of intractable border disputes. The state and the media reconstructed and reproduced the rhetoric of nationalism and national security, sustaining the conflict and border entanglements. This paper argues for an alternative discourse to understand the crises of conflict based on people’s lived experiences, border formation and displacement in the wake of the partition of India and thereafter.

‘Law and (dis)Order’: security rhetoric in the Irish Free State, 1922–1937

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of ‘law and order’ rhetoric by governing parties in the Irish Free State. In the post-Civil War period, Cumann na nGaedheal governments devised and implemented a series of public safety measures to combat real or perceived security threats, accompanying each with robust and repeated justificatory rhetoric. As this article illustrates, such rhetoric was also utilised as a means by which to burnish Cumann na nGaedheal’s image as the protectors of ‘stability’, and to cast doubt on the commitment of political opponents to the maintenance of order should they ever achieve power. In addition, the article counters the often implied view that whereas Cumann na nGaedheal (and later Fine Gael) embraced a reputation as the party of ‘law-and-order’, Fianna Fáil eschewed such nomenclature. Rather, it shall be demonstrated that despite variations in tone, once in power, Fianna Fáil adopted a broadly similar approach to the utilisation of ‘law-and-order’ rhetoric.

Narratives of Mediterranean migrants in Italian cinema: The camera angle and close-up in Terraferma and Fuocoammare

Over the last two decades, Italian cinema has turned its gaze towards the Mediterranean Sea to dismantle the narratives constructed by populist political parties and mainstream European media, which have emphasized the rhetoric of border protection, security and legality through the systematic depersonalization of migrants. Film counter-narratives to this have been effectively developed, and cinema has responded to the materiality and fixity of migrants’ bodies by composing stories in which these migrants recover their sociopolitical agency. This article provides a close analysis of the characterization in Emanuele Crialese’s Terraferma (2011) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea) (2016) in relation to technical and stylistic forms of filmic representation. Particular attention is paid to the correlation between the aesthetic level of the films and the social dimension of the characters, which is primarily expressed through framing in which the migrant occupies the central position, establishing a dialectical relationship with the other characters and their social space.

A Gendered Response to a Watchful Gaze

We are constantly under the rays of the spectator’s eyes, an inevitable consequence of modern urban life with high demand for the rhetoric of safety and security under the disguise of omnipresent surveillance systems. Expanding from contributing author Sophia-Rose Diodati’s spatial analysis of “affect arrays” and surveillance of racialized bodies, this response aims to situate Diodati’s analysis alongside nineteenth-century Iranian palatial towers in order to highlight the intersection of gender politics and power relations in the surveilled body.

Crimes against Community: The Therapeutic Politics of South Korea’s COVID-19 Public Health Surveillance

This essay argues that the success of South Korea’s COVID-19 responses—called “K-Quarantine”—is symptomatic of the country’s liberal politics in crisis. The therapeutic politics of K-Quarantine is enacted by an amalgam of moral guilt and legal liabilities for damages to the community, framing the COVID-stricken public as potential criminals against community. In this political context characterized by potential guilt, the public feel culpable if they resist the overshadowing power of public security. This essay offers a critique of the public security rhetoric, examining the case of an LGBTQ South Korean charged on violations of the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act amid the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. A critical evaluation of invasive and punitive measures found in the case demonstrates that the K-Quarantine strategy contradicts its own underlying liberal ideal of the autonomous subject because its public health deliberation reproduces a guilt mandate by constructing a perpetrator/victim binary.

The argumentative function of rescue narratives: Trump’s national security rhetoric as a case study

ABSTRACT A pervasive feature of populism is the use of rescue narratives to stimulate emotional adherence with audience predicated on evoking fear versus hope for salvation. This paper argues that restricting the rhetorical appeal of rescue narratives to the affective domain obscures the argumentative function that these narratives partake in constructing political arguments. It, thus, claims that rescue narratives can perform as arguments when used to provide reasons to justify political action. The paper examines the way(s) Donald Trump employs rescue narratives as arguments to justify military interventions in Iraq and Syria. The analytical framework supplements the argumentative strategies of the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Studies with pragma-dialectics’ argumentation schemes. The analysis shows that the different elements of the narrative construct premises for argument schemes adduced to justify the rightness of claims. Conceptualizing Trump’s rescue narratives as arguments prompts a reflection on the possibility of narrative discourse to be associated with the domain of reason.

Export Controls and Securitization of Economic Policy: Comparative Analysis of the Practice of the United States, the European Union, China, and Russia

National security rhetoric has gained prominence due to increasingly pervasive digitalization, the emergence of cutting-edge technologies, and developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Increased reliance on these areas fuels industrial development but also renders national economies vulnerable to foreign interference. Ultimately, the current wave of technological development with its potential threats intensifies competition between states and redefines their economic and military advantages over potential global rivals. Against this background, certain states have expanded the scope of their export control regimes by extending the lists of controlled items and/or imposing ‘catch-all’ control. Used in conjunction with economic sanctions, weaponized tariffs, and extensive investment screening mechanisms aimed to protect national security interests, such measures go beyond conventional non-proliferation purposes to address economic security, technological supremacy, and human rights concerns for which those states are willing to sacrifice the economic efficiency that accompanies trade liberalization. Using the United States, the European Union, China, and Russia as case studies, this article discusses to which extent different export control objectives of these international actors have been securitized. Securitization of certain states’ interests is inevitable, even if not desirable. Yet, this article argues that international law can be managed to control and limit the level of securitization of domestic policies in order to strengthen the international legal system as a whole. export controls, national security, economic security, securitization, emerging technologies, technological supremacy

Proposition 187 and the Travel Ban: Addressing Economy, Security, and White Christian Nationalism in U.S. Christian Communities

The ideology of white Christian nationalism has become increasingly visible in the United States. This ideology intersects with public debate over immigration, posing a threat both to immigrants’ well-being and to American ideals of democracy. This essay considers how religious leaders in primarily white Christian communities addressed two historical moments related to immigration in the U.S.: Proposition 187 in California, and the “travel ban” instituted by the Trump administration in 2017. Christian leaders who supported Prop 187 and the ban, and those who opposed the two policies, tended to talk past each other when they discussed the issue of immigration and these specific policies. Pro-187 leaders used rhetoric of economic damage and pro-ban leaders used rhetoric of national security, whereas anti-187 and anti-ban leaders used rhetoric of hospitality and nondiscrimination. Christian leaders who opposed these policies attempted to apply the moral teachings of their religious tradition, but ethicists and religious leaders who wish to fully engage in conversation about immigration in the U.S. should incorporate discussion of economic and security concerns into their consideration of hospitality, in order both to address anxieties and to pull the veil back on racial and religious discrimination that hides behind these anxieties.

Managing role expectations and emotions in encounters with extremism: Norwegian social workers’ experiences

To prevent radicalisation and violent extremism, many European countries have adopted a multiagency approach, consisting of both police, teachers and social workers. Such strategies have caused concern for a securitization of social policy and stigmatization of vulnerable groups. This study aims at gaining insight into how Norwegian social workers involved in prevention work against violent extremism experience and manage role conflicts and emotions during interaction with their clients. This article presents findings from 17 individual and two focus group interviews which indicate that social workers experience emotional strain caused by role conflicts and emotional dissonance within a securitized field of social work. To handle these challenges, social workers apply a dynamic combination of surface and deep acting strategies, at both the reactive and proactive level, such as ‘Keeping a brave face’, ‘Character acting’ and ‘Adopting the client’s perspective’. Our findings contribute to expanding both the empirical and conceptual understanding of emotion management at work, and provides a novel insight into how prevention work against violent extremism is perceived by social workers. Also, in a field influenced by security rhetoric, our study gives encouraging new knowledge about how social workers can resist falling into oppressive and controlling practices by seeking to engage with and understand their clients’ human side, and relate this to their own lives.

Gastrocolonialism: the intersections of race, food, and development in West Papua

ABSTRACT This paper explores how racial discrimination and agro-industrial development undermine the right to food of Indigenous communities in the West Papuan district of Merauke. Traditional forest foodways express the cultural and territorial identity of Marind and affirm their intimate and ancestral relations with each other and with the sentient forest ecology. Yet these foodways are routinely cast as culturally, evolutionarily, and nutritionally backward by State and corporate actors. Paternalistic development discourses, compounded with the rhetoric of national food security, have legitimated rampant deforestation and agribusiness expansion, with dire impacts on local food availability, access, and quality. Drawing from Chamorro scholar and activist Craig Santos Perez’ concept of 'gastrocolonialism', I argue that the contemporary transformation of Marind’s alimentary regimes is rooted in and perpetuates the historically entrenched, racialised violence of settler-colonialism and attendant human rights abuses in West Papua. Gastrocolonialism operates alongside other forms of structural and everyday discrimination enabled by the systemic violation of Indigenous communities’ right to free, prior, and informed consent – from population dilution and settler favouritism, to land appropriation and Indigenous displacement. I conclude by assessing the potential of framing alimentary racism in West Papua through the lens of food as right, security, sovereignty, and justice.

Guilty When Innocent. Australian Government’s Resistance to Bringing Home Wives and Children of Islamic State Fighters

Currently there are 20 Australian women and 47 children being held in the Al-Roj camp in Northern Syria, who are the family members of Islamic State fighters. The Australian government argues that it is both unsafe for government officials to rescue those held in the camp and unsafe for Australia to repatriate these women and children. This security rhetoric is commonly understood as Australia’s abandonment of its citizens and their entitlements to protection and repatriation. This paper argues that the Australian government is condemning its citizens to a condition of statelessness and displacement, simulating the following conditions under which refugees and asylum seekers are forced to live: murder, violence, deprivation of adequate food and shelter, disease, and the potential hazards of the COVID-19 infection. Rendering its citizens to a condition of statelessness and displacement constitutes both punishment meted out on those deemed guilty by their presence in Syria, and provides the Australian government the opportunity to revoke the citizenship of women and children. Three Australian women who travelled to Syria have already been stripped of their Australian citizenship. This paper explores the conditions and methods by which the Australian government has erased the entitlements, protections and certainty of citizenship for Australian Muslim women and children.

The Social Construction of Food Security: The Israeli Case

” Food securitization” refers to the process by which food supplies are linked to larger security issues or broader notions of human security. While this study is built on the surge of food policy studies that acknowledge the importance of discourse, rhetoric, and labeling in shaping the notion of security there is no empirical research that explicitly examine how securitization process of food policy takes place, why, when and the implications of this. The aim of the study was to examine the contextual events that triggered the securitization of food policy: the actors who used food security rhetoric, and the institutional measures they suggested for solving food insecurity. By taking a discursive approach, the study quantitatively examined how and why food was securitized during debates on Israeli food policy took place during two time periods: 1948–1950, the years of the implementation of the austerity laws; and 2008–2017, the years of global recession, and the rise of obesity. The study found that the notion of food security was strategically used to define a variety of food-related issues. Each definition of food security was triggered by a variety of events and social contexts such as war, increases in the cost of living, the rise in obesity rates, and global warming. These frames, used throughout the debates, then influenced the actor’s choice of solutions. The study shows that most Israeli actors reacted to food security frames using institutional welfare measures.

Ambivalent broadcasters: women contest the public sphere in postwar U.S. college radio

ABSTRACT Between the end of World War II and the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, college radio women secured a tenuous credibility within the postwar educational landscape. Educators claimed civic discourse could advance democracy at home and abroad by training student broadcasters and audiences to resist crass commercialism and political subversion. Dismissed as future housewives peripheral to a white male-defined public sphere, female broadcasters strategically deployed national security rhetoric to gain acceptance within Cold War containment logic. Racially diverse women used civil rights strategies to transform the public sphere into an incubator for a non-hierarchical, inclusive society. Using Nancy Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics” as a theoretical framework, I analyze how women built on-air female communities that acted collectively to achieve social change. By examining women-authored radio scripts, educational radio publications, promotional materials, studies, and speeches, one can better understand how women used college radio as a platform for intersectional, even international, racial and gender equity movements.

Genocide in the human security discourse and rhetoric of Sudan's Darfur : an Asantean view

Genocide is horrible. It is an abomination of the human species, which is totally unacceptable. This is a common denominator among international lawyers, political scientists and other scholars and practitioners with an interest in the study of conflict and its implications on human existence. It is an obscenity, the evil of our time that all people must work to eradicate and this, in itself, is enough to explain why the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is obligatory to all states, including those who are no party to other related international legal instruments such as the Rome Statute of 2002. Thus, genocide is operationally referred to as the general practice of mass extra-judicial executions. To this end, this article seeks to achieve the following two central objectives: (1) interrogate the historical (and/or rhetorical) use of the term ‘genocide’ to refer to the security situation in Darfur region of Sudan during the year 2009 and (2) determine if genocide did take place in Darfur or it was simply a rhetoric. This is informed by the fact that this has been a matter of disagreement among policy makers, academics, political commentators and diplomats. Using the blend of Afrocentric perspective and interdisciplinary critical discourse analysis in its broadest form, we base our argument on the past developments about the Darfur conflict. The major finding of this article partly confirms the Euro-American claim of the occurrence of genocide in Darfur around the year 2009.

La construcción de las fronteras europeas como origen de la criminalización de las migraciones en Europa: retóricas de securitización y humanitarismo

Resumen El presente artículo realiza un breve recorrido histórico en torno a la construcción de las fronteras exteriores de Europa a partir del tratado de Schengen (1985). La progresiva desaparición de las fronteras interiores genera un estiramiento de las fronteras europeas, las cuales se construyen como espacios dinámicos justificando su continua reterritorialización allí donde se fundamenten cómo artefacto para garantizar la seguridad, y consecuentemente entendiendo la migración hacia Europa y dentro de esta como una amenaza. La gestión de las fronteras por la Unión Europea no se vincula a un discurso de odio, si bien en la actualidad sí existe un auge de las fuerzas políticas ultraderechistas en Europa, sino que debe basarse a nivel discursivo en una retórica de seguridad, pero también de humanitarismo. Sin embargo, las fronteras, como afirma Balibar (2003), son la condición absolutamente no democrática -o discriminatoria- de las sociedades democráticas.

THE RIGHT TO DATA PROTECTION VERSUS “SECURITY”

The protection of personal data in the cyberspace has been an issue of concern for quite some time. However, with the revolutions in information technology, big data and the internet of things, data privacy protection has become paramount in an era of free information flows. Considering this context, this research intends to shine a light on the experience of Brazil regarding data privacy protection, through the analysis of a brand new bill passed by Congress: the Brazilian General Personal Data Protection Act. Our assessment of the legislation was made from the perspective of a human rights-based approach to data, aiming to analyze both advancements, limitations and contradictions of the rights-discourse in the LGPD. Our main conclusions were that the (public and national) security rhetoric, also present in the bill, can create a state of exception regarding the processing of personal data of those considered “enemies of the state”, which may result in violations of fundamental rights and procedural guarantees.

The Researcher as a National Security Threat

AbstractBased on ethnographic research in Iran among the country's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and its Basij militia, this article explores the process of gaining access to these militarized groups in order to conduct long-term research. Specifically, what does it mean to build rapport and gain trust within a highly securitized space such as this? What happens when the researcher is a potential “national security” threat in both Iran and the United States? How is national security enacted in everyday interactions in the field? Given that anthropologists have tended to have an affinity with the group and community they work with, this article explores the implications of research among a group of men in charge of surveillance, intelligence gathering, and citizen suppression in the country. The article argues that in the midst of national security rhetoric, interrogative surveillance is a strategic tool that makes space for engagement.

The UK pensions landscape – A critique of the role of accountants and accounting technologies in the treatment of social and societal risks

The well-being of older people in society depends in part on their having sufficient financial resources to provide for their everyday needs, and to enable them to maintain their health and relationships. Pensions are therefore directly implicated in the well-being of older members of the population and hence are a potential source of significant social and societal risks. This paper critiques the role of accountants and accounting technologies in the treatment of the social and societal risks inherent in the UK occupational pensions’ landscape in relation to four characteristics of pensions’ security, namely that pensions should be predictable, stable, long-lasting and comprehensive. The UK pensions’ landscape has undergone rapid and fundamental change in recent years. A range of examples drawn from state, public and private sector occupational schemes are discussed. Across all sectors, while some people have gained, others have lost valuable pension benefits. In occupational schemes, employer costs have been reduced and pension liabilities have been de-risked, usually involving risk sharing with employees or risk shifting towards employees. The role played by accountants and other business advisers in quantifying, analysing and mitigating this work is critiqued. The rhetoric of de-risking, security and enablement inherent in the various pension changes, where the reality is often different, is examined and implications for social and societal risk explored.

Debating Security in Japan

Since the post-war era, understanding Japan’s security rhetoric and actions presented certain incongruities. While the constructivist arguments underscore that the influence of post-war antimilitarist norm shaped Japan’s security behavior, it contradicts the realist underpinnings influencing Japan’s choices. To understand Japanese post-war security orientation and comprehend the rapidly unfolding policy shift, this paper explores three sets of questions: firstly, what are the competing schools of thought in the Japanese security debate? What are their core arguments on key issues including Article 9 of the Constitution, potency of the Self-Defense Forces (SDFs), nature of the U.S.-Japan alliance and historical narratives of Japan’s past? What are the inter-school and intra-school fault lines? Secondly, what are the drivers that propelled the dominance of each school at different time frames? How does the factional power struggle in the domestic political landscape enable each school to maximize their space and influence in the current security discourse? More specifically, why did mercantilists remained the dominant political force throughout the Cold War? In contrast, what led to normalists gaining momentum and substituting mercantilism as a potent force in the post-Cold War period? Thirdly, how have political elites pursued their competing agendas and critically analyze the case of Shinzo Abe? What are the influences that shaped his values? What are the methods he employed to pursue his ambitions of making Japan a “normal” nation? And how did he consolidate his political strength and manage to realize concrete policy objectives?

Security through numbers? Experimentally assessing the impact of numerical arguments in security communication

Numerical arguments are increasingly present in security communication and are widely assumed to possess a distinct capacity to make an argument convincing, thereby contributing to the dynamics of securitization. Yet, does the inclusion of numbers really enhance the strength of rhetorical attempts to convince an audience that something or someone is a security problem? We examine this question by developing an experimental design that connects cognitive theories of information processing with theories of security and risk communication. Contrary to a widely shared view, our results suggest that numbers do not have a direct, unambiguous, or unconditional impact on the strength of security rhetoric. Quantitative information only enhances direct attempts to securitize issues under very specific circumstances and, even in these cases, has ambiguous effects. Factors such as the legitimacy of the individual who makes the argument may play an important role in determining the impact of numbers in security communication.