Governing insecurity: contingency planning,protection, resilience

Abstract

How should we understand the politics of security today? This article addresses this question from one particular perspective, that of ‘biosecurity’. It examines contemporary strategies for managing biorisks in three European states: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We suggest that the framing of threat and response differs, even within Europe, and that one can identify three different configurations: contingency planning, protection and resilience. Each of these embodies a significantly different way of reconciling fundamental imperatives for those who would govern a liberal society today – the imperative of freedom and the imperative of security.     

Renormalizing citizenship and life in Fortress North America

The relation between the concepts of sovereignty and citizenship are being rearticulated through what is popularly referred to as ‘Fortress North America’. The ‘War on Terror’ has amplified previously emerging shifts in governance, control and surveillance. One significant consequence is the development of increasing border harmonization schemes between the United States of America and Canada. This development has led to newly emerging technologies of citizenship in both Canada and the USA. This paper pays particular attention to the shifts that are taking place with regards to the revocation of citizenship, the creation of new categories of citizenship through programs such as ‘Nexus’ and the proposed introduction of bio‐metric ID cards in Canada and the introduction of the discourse of the ‘new normal’. Through new border harmonization programs established in the ‘Smart Border Declaration’ citizens and non‐citizens in both Canada and America will be organized, controlled and subjected to new forms of state surveillance. The discourse of the ‘new normal’ is meant to signal a shift in our expectations of daily life. Whether we are experiencing the ‘new normal’ due to disease, fear, risk, loss of faith or security, we are being called into place as subjects of this discourse. The ‘new normal’ is used in reference to the need for greater control, the expectation of greater security and surveillance of cells, microbes, bodies and society. This paper will explore the logic that is embedded within the discourse of the ‘new normal’.     

The colour purple: perceptions of accountability across the Tasman

This article explores the changing rhetoric and substance of accountability in the relationships between parliamentarians and public servants in what Alex Matheson terms the ‘purple zone’—where the ‘blue’ of political strategy and ‘red’ of public administration merge in ‘strategic conversation’. The primary focus is on current developments in Australia. As the Westminster system of governance, and the role of public administration within it, undergo profound transformation, the prerogatives of elected parliamentarians (in the blue corner) and the responsibilities of career public servants (in the red corner) are changing fundamentally. In Australia and New Zealand the increasingly complex relationships that exist between government, parliament, public service and the wider community challenge the traditional notions of accountability. Both the lines of accountability, and its standards, are under challenge. The acceleration of Australia's move to contract out the delivery of government services is creating new arenas of creative tension between administrative review and management for results. Public service agencies are increasingly perceived to be themselves in a contractual relationship with government. There is a risk that the public good may become subverted by private interest. How will we ensure that agencies will ‘not contract out responsibility at the citizen's expense’? © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Public Admin. Dev. Vol. 17 , 293–306 (1997). No. of Figures: 0. No. of Tables: 0. No. of Refs: 33.     

The Politics of Everyday Coalition-Building

One of the most important challenges of contemporary progressive politics is building social movements for change that take up the ways that that relations of power are shaped by the interaction and intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and other lines of power. As such, questions related to coalition—political solidarity across difference—are key. How do we build coalitions that take up the complexity of these power relationships? How do we build movements that don't leave people out? In this article, I will distinguish between two approaches to coalition. The first are coalitions grounded in shared or overlapping interests or goals; in such coalitions, groups identify common ground and then work together towards the achievement of mutual goals or interests. The second is grounded in a process of what María Lugones (2003) calls becoming “interdependently resistant” in which people recognize and back up each other’s resistances to multiple relations of power in their everyday lives. This article unpacks the nuts and bolts of building such “everyday coalitions” in our lives.     

Public affairs,issue management and political strategy: methodological issues that count — a different view

In the preceding article, Doug Schuler makes two challenges to scholars in the areas of public affairs, issues management and corporate political strategies to advance the state of empirical knowledge: (1) to make use of more sophisticated methodology, and (2) to adopt a grand theory to guide our empirical efforts. This paper is a commentary on these challenges. In it, I agree that our field of inquiry requires additional sophistication in methods, measures and statistical tools. However, I disagree that a grand theory would aid us in advancing our field. Instead, I propose that advancement is more likely to occur with the acceptance of a common dependent variable to guide our efforts. I propose that until we agree why we study what we do, we will have difficulty building a coherent stream of knowledge that speaks to the managerial audience. I advocate adopting firm performance as our ultimate dependent variable and defining our area of inquiry as ‘What makes some firms outperform others in the nonmarket environment?’ and ultimately, ‘How does non‐market performance affect overall firm performance?’ Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Diversifying British Political History

This article explores what the diversification of British political history might look like. Building on an expanded definition of citizenship and attention to ‘ordinary’ politics, it suggests several questions which might diversify political history's content and approach. Whom do we count as political actors? Who has access to democratic processes and where does politics happen beyond these processes? To what forms of political thought do we attend? Drawing on examples from my own research on refugees and asylum seekers in modern Britain, and on the wider field of modern British history, I demonstrate the possibilities of diversification as a way to enliven political history's future.     

Humanitarian Crises and the International Politics of Selectivity

How has the international community responded to humanitarian crises after the end of the Cold War? While optimistic ideational perspectives on global governance stress the importance of humanitarian norms and argue that humanitarian crises have been increasingly addressed, more skeptical realist accounts point to material interests and maintain that these responses have remained highly selective. In empirical terms, however, we know very little about the actual extent of selectivity since, so far, the international community’s reaction to humanitarian crises has not been systematically examined. This article addresses this gap by empirically examining the extent and the nature of the selectivity of humanitarian crises. To do so, the most severe humanitarian crises in the post-Cold War era are identified and examined for whether and how the international community responded. This study considers different modes of crisis response (ranging from inaction to military intervention) and different actors (including states, international institutions, and nonstate actors), yielding a more precise picture of the alleged “selectivity gap” and a number of theoretical implications for contemporary global security governance.     

Europe and Islam: Alarmists,Victimists, and Integration by Law

This article reviews the minefield of Muslim integration in Europe, paying special attention to the legal integration of Islam, which has not yet found the attention that it deserves. In a first step, the article contrasts ‘victimist’ and ‘alarmist’ views on contemporary Muslim integration, both of which are found misleading. Instead, as argued in the second part, significant progress has been made through the legal route. The conclusion provides a reflection on the role of Islam for Europe’s ‘liberal identity’ today.     

The personality of populists: provocateurs,charismatic leaders,or drunken dinner guests?

Abstract

The ‘populist phenomenon’ has received a lot of attention in recent years. Yet little is known about the populists themselves: who are they? They are often described as bad-mannered provocateurs disrupting the political game, but also as charismatic leaders able to persuade and motivate. Can a populist ‘style’ or ‘personality’ be identified? This article assesses to what extent populists score differently from ‘mainstream’ politicians on established personality inventories. Using a new dataset based on expert ratings for 152 candidates (including 33 populists) having competed in 73 elections worldwide, it is found that populists score lower on agreeableness, emotional stability and conscientiousness. At the same time, populists score higher on extraversion, narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism. These results have important implications for the study of the success of populists in contemporary democracies and beyond.     

Border Security and Drug Trafficking in Senegal: AIRCOP and global security assemblages

Transnational security governance initiatives in West Africa, operationalized through international statebuilding interventions, are altering the sub-region’s borders and border enforcement. The article employs a practice-oriented ‘global security assemblages’ approach to demonstrate how border security professionals compete over how, who, and where to secure the border from borderless threats like drug trafficking. The article demonstrates this theoretical position empirically through an analysis of struggles over a flagship drug control project implemented by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) at Senegal’s Leopold Sédar Senghor (LSS) airport—AIRCOP. Senegalese customs, police, and gendarmes simultaneously cooperate and compete with international actors, private actors based at the airport, and amongst themselves, over how to curb drug trafficking. Through these competitive struggles over who should be the border’s guardian and how it should be guarded, it can be seen how new security practices and understandings are devised, as well as how borders become (re)constituted within the connected spaces of global security assemblages.     

Commercial Lobbying in Australia: Exploring the Australian Lobby Register

Politicians and policy makers routinely engage with lobbyists and see them as crucial agents in the political process. But how much do we really know about the Australian lobby system? Although there are a range of reviews of lobby regulation schemes and discussions about the work of lobbyists, a comprehensive contemporary picture of the commercial lobbying system in Australia is missing. Using data from the ‘federal lobby register’, this article sets out to map the commercial lobbying scene at the national level. Using this as a backdrop, the article goes on to discuss what questions this raises and how we might develop a deeper understanding of the commercial lobbying system in Australia.     

Writing about Rwanda since the Genocide: Knowledge,Power and ‘Truth’

This debate article reflects upon four articles recently published in this journal as part of a special Forum on Rwanda (Volume 8, Issue 4, 2014)—released to coincide with the 20-year commemoration of the 1994 genocide. In doing so it highlights what this author considers to be a crisis in contemporary ‘Rwanda studies’. This crisis—referenced and reproduced to some extent in all four articles—combines methodological (‘how can we write about Rwanda?’) and epistemological (‘how should we write about Rwanda?’) uncertainty against a backdrop of highly polarized, partisan and sometimes personalized research agendas. In exploring this phenomenon, the study explores not only the role of academics (mainly European and Rwandan) but also of the Rwandan government itself, highlighting the rise of ‘activist polities’ such as that in contemporary Kigali. These regimes consider knowledge production to be an aspect of their own sovereignty and this poses fundamental challenges, as yet largely unacknowledged, to parts of Western Africanist scholarship.     

Migrants into Members: Social Rights,Civic Requirements,and Citizenship in Western Europe

How do the states in Western Europe turn outsiders into insiders? This article examines that question by introducing a new qualitative framework that we term national membership conditionality structures (MCS). This framework includes not only status acquisition rules, such as those governing naturalisation and settlement, but also, crucially, civic integration requirements and social benefit eligibility standards. The article illustrates how linkages across these policy sectors shape different membership-making processes for third-country nationals by examining the MCS variation in Great Britain and Germany, two countries that both experienced significant migration inflows beginning in the first post-war decades. As a contrast to these two ‘mature’ MCS cases, a study of Spain is also included as a ‘nascent’ case, whose recent experience with large-scale immigration provides an opportunity to consider an MCS under active construction. The article concludes that while EU-level policies and institutions have extended their reach to cover ever more sectors, the components of national MCS remain largely outside supranational purview. As such, membership remains a core imperative of the contemporary nation-state.     

Still ‘like birds on the wire’? Freedom after neoliberalism

In this paper I suggest that we might understand some features of contemporary populism by reworking the concept of ‘authoritarian populism’ first proposed by Stuart Hall in his analysis of ‘Thatcherism’. Following a brief review of my earlier analytics of ‘governing through freedom’, I suggest that while the political movements identified by the names of Trump, Wilders, Le Pen, the Austrian Freedom Party, the True Finns etc. may be ephemeral, it is worth considering whether they are beginning to articulate a new set of rationalities and technologies for governing ‘after neoliberalism’. I analyse some key elements of these movements, the new epistemologies that they employ and the ethopolitics that they espouse, and suggest that the key operative concepts may be ‘the people’, security and control. We may still be ‘birds on the wire’ as Leonard Cohen once put it, but perhaps what we are enjoined to seek in these strategies for ‘governing liberty’ is not so much freedom but security.     

(Dis)qualified bodies: securitization,citizenship and ‘identity management’

This article attempts to think citizenship politics in the international security context of a post‐September 11th world. Considering specifically the introduction of biometric technologies, the article reveals the extent to which contemporary citizenship is securitized as a part of the wider post‐September 11th ‘securitization of the inside’. This securitization contributes directly to the intensification of conventional citizenship practice, as biometric technologies are employed to conceal and advance the heightened exclusionary and restrictive practices of contemporary securitized citizenship. The intensified restriction and preservation of particular rights and entitlements, vis‐à‐vis the application of biometric technologies, serves both private and public concerns over ‘securing identity’. This overall move, and the subsequent challenges to conventional notions of citizenship politics and agency, is referred to here as ‘identity management’. To then ask ‘What's left of citizenship?’ sheds light on these highly political transformations, as the restricted aspects of citizenship—that is, its continued obsession with the preservation and regulation/restriction of specific rights and entitlements—are increased, and the instrument of this escalation, biometrics, dramatically alters existing notions of political agency and ‘citizenship/asylum politics’.     

Did You Spot an Alien? Voluntary Vigilance,Borderwork and the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program

In 2008, the US launched an Internet site, the Texas Virtual Border Watch Program, which shows real-time video from the US–Mexico border. With this site, anyone can participate in US border control. In this article, the programme is discussed in relation to contemporary theories of border studies: the relocation of borders, borderwork and the bordering process. The programme is described as part of a widespread voluntary vigilance and as a continuum of the technological control over the border. Based on an analysis of the media, three discourses have been identified: the vigilant citizens, the reassuring authorities and the sceptical critics. These reveal the advantages and risks of the programme from different perspectives. It is argued that the programme remains ‘cosmetic’ border control and that this echoes the dilemma between economic wellbeing and security issues.     

Globalisation and Public Language

This article questions what the concept of ‘globalisation’ really amounts to. In doing so it highlights problems for the ascendancy of globalisation in contemporary public debate. Globalisation has become a catch‐all; the phrase is now used to try and explain all manner of phenomena from everyday life to international politics. But the article suggests that this may be little more than a combination of rhetoric and wishful thinking. It asserts that the contemporary world is being driven by older and familiar pressures, such as state power and nationalism. As a result, the idea of ‘globalisation’ needs to be treated with some scepticism.     

Do Critical Citizens Foster Better Governance? A Comparative Study

Both critical citizens and governance are attracting increasing interest in political science. Strangely enough, however, the two strands of research are rarely combined. This article sheds light on the relation between governance and political criticism by focusing on Europe. The article discusses and examines whether the level of political criticism expressed by a state's citizenry correlates with or even affects the quality of governance. In contrast to the conventional ‘translation’ of criticism as discontentment, this article scrutinises ‘normative critical attentiveness’, which is explained in detail (data: International Social Survey Program 2004, module: Citizenship). Legitimate and effective governance, as measured by the World Bank indices, correlates positively with critical attentiveness: states with citizenries that regard attentiveness as a civic duty provide more legitimate and effective governance than states with less attentive citizenries. These correlations remain significant when controlled for economic development. The cause of direction is not uniform, but must be differentiated for different characteristics.     

Intelligence reform: The logic of information sharing

A cornerstone of US intelligence reform is ‘information sharing’ as a means of adapting to contemporary security challenges. It was a central recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, reflected in the wide-ranging ‘Information Sharing Environment’ mandated by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. Yet the underlying logic of information sharing for intelligence reform has received little attention. Drawing on information and communications theory, this paper critiques the logic by highlighting problems of sense-making and interpretation overlooked amid the scholarly enthusiasm for an intelligence ‘culture of sharing’. With their impersonal, technical, and highly bureaucratic approach, today's reforms may favor the flow of information and its sheer volume at the expense of the context and analytic tradecraft that render it meaningful, actionable intelligence. For effective information sharing, the paper suggests reformers pay more attention to the socio-technical environment of analysis when interpreting ambiguous, uncertain information.     

Against ‘creativity’: a ­philistine rant

The aspiration to be creative seems today to be more or less compulsory in an increasing number of areas of life. In psychological vocabularies, in economic life, in education and beyond, the values of creativity have taken on the force of a moral agenda. Yet creativity is a value which, though we may believe we choose it ourselves, may in fact make us complicit with what today might be seen as the most conservative of norms: compulsory individualism, compulsory ‘innovation’, compulsory per­formativity and productiveness, the compulsory valorization of the putatively new. This article suggests that, in order to escape the moralizing injunction to be creative, we need to cultivate a kind of ethical philistinism, albeit disaggregating such philistinism from the negativism of outright cynicism or fatuity. However, there is not much use in outlining an abstract model of philistinism. Instead, we take some ‘exemplars’ of a philistine attitude to creativity – Gilles Deleuze, F. R. Leavis, and Paul Cézanne – in order to show how such an ethos can be accomplished, on the one hand, with or without philosophy, and, on the other, with or without even the very idea of creativity itself, invoking instead the notions of ‘inventiveness’ and an ‘ethics of inertia’ as against creativity as such. The message should be that, rather than this or that theory, only exemplars – the bit-by-bit assembly of reminders – can help liberate us from the potentially moronic consequences of the doctrine of creativity.