Rupert Alcock - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Papers by Rupert Alcock
bris.ac.uk
Since its first articulation in official discourse in 1974, 'food security' has become the primar... more Since its first articulation in official discourse in 1974, 'food security' has become the primary cognitive lens through which the prevalence and complexity of global hunger are viewed. This study traces a genealogy of 'food security' through a series of intergovernmental texts and academic studies as a means to historicize and relativize contemporary understandings of the term. A discourse analytic approach serves to deconstruct prescribed definitions and interrogates the knowledge/power relations of 'food security' as a rationalising technology of global liberal governance. The authority of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to 'speak food' is examined in light of changing conceptions of what food security 'is' and how best it should be 'achieved'. The study embodies a critique of traditional positivist approaches to the study of food security, and to the study of social science more generally. It shows how changing discursive technocracies produce new regimes of truth which replace the need for political decision with the dictates of technoscientific knowledge and the governmental rationality of risk management.
Capacity Building for Maritime Security, 2020
Taking the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia and the Kampala Process as key focal ... more Taking the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia and the Kampala Process as key focal points for the complex of actors involved in Somalia’s maritime governance, this chapter reconstructs a number of stories that convey how recursive relations between modes of problematisation, processes of institutionalisation and practices of capacity building have served to produce what we might call Somalia’s nascent maritime security assemblage.
bris.ac.uk
Since its first articulation in official discourse in 1974, 'food security' has become the primar... more Since its first articulation in official discourse in 1974, 'food security' has become the primary cognitive lens through which the prevalence and complexity of global hunger are viewed. This study traces a genealogy of 'food security' through a series of intergovernmental texts and academic studies as a means to historicize and relativize contemporary understandings of the term. A discourse analytic approach serves to deconstruct prescribed definitions and interrogates the knowledge/power relations of 'food security' as a rationalising technology of global liberal governance. The authority of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to 'speak food' is examined in light of changing conceptions of what food security 'is' and how best it should be 'achieved'. The study embodies a critique of traditional positivist approaches to the study of food security, and to the study of social science more generally. It shows how changing discursive technocracies produce new regimes of truth which replace the need for political decision with the dictates of technoscientific knowledge and the governmental rationality of risk management.
Capacity Building for Maritime Security, 2020
Taking the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia and the Kampala Process as key focal ... more Taking the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia and the Kampala Process as key focal points for the complex of actors involved in Somalia’s maritime governance, this chapter reconstructs a number of stories that convey how recursive relations between modes of problematisation, processes of institutionalisation and practices of capacity building have served to produce what we might call Somalia’s nascent maritime security assemblage.