Sarah Da Mota | University of Coimbra (original) (raw)

Book by Sarah Da Mota

NATO, Zivilisation und Individuen

This book critically engages with NATO’s two main referent objects of security: civilisation and ... more This book critically engages with NATO’s two main referent objects of security: civilisation and individuals. By rethinking the seemingly natural assumption of these two referent objects, it suggests the epistemological importance of an unconscious dimension to understand meaning formation and behaviour change in international security.
The book provides a historicised and genealogical approach of the idea of civilisation that is at the core of the Alliance, in which human needs, narratives, and security arrangements are interconnected. It suggests that there is a Civilised Subject of Security at the core of modern Western security that has constantly produced civilised and secure subjects around the world, which explains NATO’s emergence around a civilisational referent. The book then proceeds by considering the Individualisation of Security after the Cold War as another stage of the civilising process, based on NATO’s military operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
https://www.palgrave.com/cn/book/9783319744087#aboutBook

Papers by Sarah Da Mota

Third World Quarterly, 2016

This article analyses the critical connections between drones as lethal technological devices, vi... more This article analyses the critical connections between drones as lethal technological devices, visibility, and the very possibility of politics. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s core postulates on politics, modern security and society, it problematises the political implications of using drones as a prominent security instrument in contemporary life. This reading is unpacked through the concept of visibility as a critical reference to analyse how security policies are dealt with politically. It suggests that drones have operated as an instrument of double invisibility, both to those living in the contexts where they are employed, and to those under whose name they are being used. The consequences of this invisibility for political life and the practice of security are also discussed in the light of the policy under the Obama administration.

Dissertação de mestrado em Relações Internacionais, especialização em Estudos da Paz e da Seguran... more Dissertação de mestrado em Relações Internacionais, especialização em Estudos da Paz e da Segurança pela Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra, 2009

Universitas: Relações Internacionais, 2011

Tese de doutoramento em Relacoes Internacionais na especialidade de Politica Internacional e Reso... more Tese de doutoramento em Relacoes Internacionais na especialidade de Politica Internacional e Resolucao de Conflitos, apresentada a Faculdade de Economia da Universidade de Coimbra

This paper engages with the security dynamics underlying the use of drones and their impact on se... more This paper engages with the security dynamics underlying the use of drones and their impact on security subjects – individuals and groups that are the ultimate recipients of specific security policies, regardless of whether these have beneficial effects on them. Using Mark Duffield’s distinction between the insured Global North and the non-insured Global South, this paper discusses how drones generate a radical dissociation between the intervener and the intervened that ultimately produces new security environments at the margins of the international system. These new security environments are defined by the articulation between space, technologies and bodies: bodies of invisible subjects; bodies that are uninsurable.

Universitas: Relações …, Jan 1, 2011

Human Security Perspectives Journal, vol.10, issue 1 , 2014

Boletim P@x, nº19, Mar 2012

Universitas: Relações Internacionais, vol. 9, nº2, 2011

Human Security Perspectives Journal, 2011

Book Reviews by Sarah Da Mota

A new powerful military weapon has appeared in the skies of world and with it a new form of warfa... more A new powerful military weapon has appeared in the skies of world and with it a new form of warfare has quickly emerged bringing with it a host of pressing ethical questions and issues. This book brings together some of the best scholars currently working on these questions and provides timely and important arguments on many of the most significant and previously unexplored areas of this recent debate. Essays range from broad theoretic questions regarding the moral permissibility of killing by drones to specific examinations of particular uses of unmanned weapons such as their role in counterinsurgency operations, humanitarian interventions, and their controversial use in “targeted killings.” Some scholars engage remarkably vexing issues such as what happens to classic military virtues such as bravery for the warriors who fly remotely controlled drones from complete safety, half a world away from the combat in which they operate. Others wrestle over the future of such technology and...

Conference Presentations by Sarah Da Mota

For several decades, space was mostly the matter of a few greater nations endowed with the necess... more For several decades, space was mostly the matter of a few greater nations endowed with the necessary resources to strive in a great-power matrix. But today, not only do private actors have a major role in the new space economy, as more than sixty countries have now developed their own national space program. While the main concern in the literature has been to dwell on the implications of major powers’ space policies such as the US, Russia and China, given their stronger geopolitical rationale and potential to weaponize and militarize space, this paper takes on the space strategy of a small power such as Portugal’s to reflect on the possibilities for different power approaches regarding space. From a perspective that is integrated in the wider European framework, this paper offers to analyse the Portuguese space strategy, to show how space policies may assume different forms, interests and motivations, and ultimately understand how different forms of power may manifest at different scales, namely that of a smaller power working interdependently at the regional level to reinvent its strategy, reassert its capacities, and project renewed national power.

Although space exploration has been evolving increasingly rapidly, at the material, technological... more Although space exploration has been evolving increasingly rapidly, at the material, technological and economic levels, IR has been generally dismissive of the topic, and almost exclusively focused on geopolitical approaches. As traditional paradigms of IR have encapsulated outer space affairs in an epistemic parallax – a locus of epistemic irreconcilability – time urges to rethink the fundamental purpose of doing (social) science. It is thereby suggested that, although it would be much more useful and progressive for humanity as a whole that they both address the same problems in the same epistemic vein, the state of the world and IR Theory have rather moved at a different speed. While outer space affairs reveal the depth of that epistemological and phenomenological displacement, it is argued that they constitute a critical object of study with the potential to enable IR to move forward along with the state of the world.

Book chapters by Sarah Da Mota

A participação de Portugal em missões internacionais. Uma política externa em mudança, 2023

NATO, Zivilisation und Individuen

Third World Quarterly, 2016

Universitas: Relações Internacionais, 2011

Universitas: Relações …, Jan 1, 2011

Human Security Perspectives Journal, vol.10, issue 1 , 2014

Boletim P@x, nº19, Mar 2012

Universitas: Relações Internacionais, vol. 9, nº2, 2011

Human Security Perspectives Journal, 2011

A participação de Portugal em missões internacionais. Uma política externa em mudança, 2023

EU as an international actor: peace and security in narratives and practices, 2023

In a context of rapid evolution of the space field, marked by a new expanding space economy with ... more In a context of rapid evolution of the space field, marked by a new expanding space economy with a growing number of actors becoming involved, various states, organisations and private actors have strategically adapted to compete for a share of space power. Europe is an active candidate in this second space race as it seeks to assert itself as a relevant regional actor in search of autonomous capabilities that would ensure both a secure ac-cess to space and the protection of its economy, its environment, and its way of life. This chapter focuses on the atypical nature of the European space architecture, defined by a close cooperative relationship between the ESA and the EU, as well as by the in-creasing integration of the security and defence field. Based on the premise of a postmodern European foreign policy (Smith, 2003), in which a post-sovereign dimension is added to existing national foreign policies, this chapter shows how the current European space architecture results from an assemblage of post-sovereign national policies and a network of shared infrastructure resources, which combine to form a constellation of innovative institutional arrangements, in a configuration that ultimately contributes to making the EU’s actorness in security and defence more robust.

Contemporary European Security, 2019

Emancipar o mundo. Teoria Crítica e Relações Internacionais, 2021

As the most decisive and influential normative trend of post-Cold War international security, the... more As the most decisive and influential normative trend of post-Cold War international security, the Individualisation of Security has progressively re-oriented security policies and their related discourses and rationales from the state to the individual. The Individualisation of Security has entailed the reformulation of security policies and the very conduct of war, reconfiguring them around a different conception of life-valuation that has the Liberal individual at its core. Through the strong ideological and biopolitical stances of humanitarianism, the Individualisation of Security has produced an international discourse of discipline and normalisation, according to which a conduct that is respectful of individuals should be held as natural for all states. This illustrates the extension of the civilising power through international organisations and can be considered as another stage of the civilising process coming from the West.

NATO, Civilisation and Individuals

To what extent has NATO as a security community been influenced by the Individualisation of Secur... more To what extent has NATO as a security community been influenced by the Individualisation of Security as another stage of the civilising process? As a normative transformation of international security, the Individualisation of Security is very significant for the Alliance, for it complements and serves the purpose of its institutional reinvention after the Cold War. Fundamentally, the Individualisation of Security also serves the sustainability of NATO’s civilisational referent. The role of the individual referent of security is assessed in NATO’s military operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, by focusing on particular aspects of each mission: the referent object of security, the justification advanced for the intervention, their formal mandate, their objectives, their normative principles, their self-declared results, always in the light of NATO’s civilisational narrative.

As civilisation within NATO is commonly portrayed in monolithic and essentialist terms, important... more As civilisation within NATO is commonly portrayed in monolithic and essentialist terms, important interpretive spaces remain regarding the idea of civilisation and its implications for security. The predominance of short duration perspectives veils the role of individuals, their needs, perceptions and behaviour, for understanding the relationship between civilisation and international security. Civilisation and security need to be reconciled through a more comprehensible, humanising, approach that incorporates the role of unconscious forms of knowledge and social duration. To that end, a long duration approach is needed, one that allows for the historicisation and genealogical development of the idea of civilisation that is at the core of the Alliance, and interconnects human needs, narratives, and security arrangements throughout its evolution.

This chapter proposes to individualise the approach of civilisation through a set of different co... more This chapter proposes to individualise the approach of civilisation through a set of different conceptual and theoretical tools, mostly derived from sociology and psychoanalysis, especially the notion of “civilised habitus”. What does civilisation consists of, and how is it related to conceptions of security? How does civilisation contribute to security? Narrowing down the idea of civilisation to individuals, it is argued, is a missing link for an improved understanding of the unconscious dimension of international security. This approach materialises into the conceptualisation of a Civilised Subject of Security, framed within the unconscious processes that compose the ontological relation between civilisation and security. Security, it is claimed, is the ultimate value giving an ontological sense to the process of civilisation, for its deep and metaphysical bonding character in human societies. In short, a civilised subject of the West has been forcefully a secure subject.

Civilisation proved to be a central concern in the deep origins and formation of the Alliance (Ch... more Civilisation proved to be a central concern in the deep origins and formation of the Alliance (Chap. 5), but how did that concern evolve afterwards? From its birth in 1949 to the end of the Cold War, NATO’s discourses show how the representation of civilisation, or civilised behaviour, suffered modifications through time, depending on the social priorities of given temporal periods. Across those decades, the Alliance evolved very aware of its time, consistently displaying reflexivity about its current pertinence in the world, what role it should play, what mission it should embrace. In this sense, the civilised habitus of the West was continued at the level of a democratic habitus. Ultimately, the evolution of NATO’s referent object reveals as an open process, in which both conscious and unconscious perceptions about Selfhood and time cohabit.

This chapter is the first step of the wider purpose that aims at providing a longer and deeper se... more This chapter is the first step of the wider purpose that aims at providing a longer and deeper sense of history in the denaturalisation of the knowledge on civilisation. It questions the apparent absence of the West from IR and shows, on the contrary, how the evolution of IR as a discipline has been closely connected to the evolution of (Western) civilisation in both individual and collective perceptions. IR thus needs to be understood as a discipline, a source of knowledge, whose origin and raison d’etre depend on the very crises of Western civilisation. The socio-political and intellectual context in which IR evolved across the twentieth century indicates that it can hardly be dissociated from the evolution of Western society’s own perceptions, increasing awareness on, and reflexivity of, its civilisation.

This chapter discusses the role of “civilisation” in the formation of the Alliance, by highlighti... more This chapter discusses the role of “civilisation” in the formation of the Alliance, by highlighting the antecedents leading to the need to safeguard the civilisation of the North-Atlantic people. By focusing on the 1939–1949 period, the extent to which civilisation needed to be upheld through a Western organisation of defence and security is assessed. How far were the civilised habitus and the Civilised Subjects of Security on the verge of being lost? Key elements such as the lack of self-restraint, the stereotyping of the Soviet Union as uncivilised, the role of spirituality and symbolism, and the reinforcement of interdependence are the most significant manifestations and expressions of the civilised habitus during that period. Together, they show how the civilised habitus was reformulated, redefined and reasserted, and help understanding that the Alliance emerged around civilisation as a formative referent object of security.