Putting Security Culture and Experimentation into Context: Towards a View from the Field(s) of Rule of Law Reform (original) (raw)

Law’s knowledge. On the susceptibility and resistance of legal practices to security matters

2012

Contrary to the prevailing debate on the governance of security with its focus on emergency and exception, a Foucauldian perspective enables us to capture how law transforms in a rather gradual and unnoticed manner. As a practice, law constitutes itself through knowledge. Relying upon knowledge, it is notoriously susceptible to security matters. This will be illustrated by analysing the rationality of pre-emptive action that is facilitated by automated surveillance technologies. Taking a recent torture debate as an extreme example elucidates that a conception of law as practice also serves as a tool of critique and articulating dissent.

Configuring Security and Justice (by Jean-Paul Brodeur and Clifford Shearing)

2005

Surveys of public opinion conducted at different times in Canada and in the UK show that many more respondents believe in the criminal courts than in the police for controlling crime. The implications of this perceived gap in the crime control efficiency of punishing and of policing are examined through an analysis of the notions of penal justice and of security, considered as providing the theoretical underpinnings of two paradigms of crime control. These two concepts are discussed in terms of meaning, kinships, differences and the conflicts that their application may generate at the level of practice. It is concluded through the presentation of field experiments in the development of a new model of policing that justice and security may be complementary but their integration cannot be so complete as to abolish their difference.

Democracy, Society and the Governance of Security

Canadian Journal of Political Science-revue Canadienne De Science Politique, 2007

Criminologist and sociologist Clifford Shearing only contributes one paper to this edited collection, but his presence is apparent on almost every page. A longstanding leader in critical policing studies, Shearing's work in recent years has become notably more proselytizing. Not content to analyze and critique existing security arrangements, he and a group of colleagues have sought to reconfigure policing scholarship as the study of how security is governed. Specifically, they advocate the embrace of a model that attends to nodes within wider networks of security. Each node is characterized by discrete configurations of mentalities, technologies, institutional arrangements and resources. The ultimate aim is to align these attributes in such a way as to provide equitable and just forms of security. Key to this formulation is that no particular node should be prioritized in attempts to understand security dynamics or in pragmatic efforts to foster security. It is an approach that effectively and self-consciously displaces the state from its longstanding privileged position as exclusive security provider.

Security (studies) and the limits of critique: why we should think through struggle

Critical Studies on Security, 2016

This paper addresses the political and epistemological stakes of knowledge production in post-structuralist Critical Security Studies. It opens a research agenda in which struggles against dominant regimes of power/knowledge are entry-points for analysis. Despite attempts to gain distance from the word 'security', through interrogation of wider practices and schemes of knowledge in which security practices are embedded, post-structuralist CSS too quickly reads security logics as determinative of modern/liberal forms of power and rule. At play is an unacknowledged ontological investment in 'security', structured by disciplinary commitments and policy discourse putatively critiqued. Through previous ethnographic research, we highlight how struggles over dispossession and oppression call the very frame of security into question, exposing violences inadmissible within that frame. Through the lens of security, the violence of wider strategies of containing and normalizing politics are rendered invisible, or a neutral backdrop against which security practices take place. Building on recent debates on critical security methods, we set out an agenda where struggle provokes an alternative mode of onto-political investment in critical examination of power and order.

Law and Security: facing the dilemmas

2009

The current volume in the EUI Law Department series of working papers results from the collaboration between the Department and the Finnish national Centre of Excellence Foundations of European Law and Polity, led by Professor Kaarlo Tuori of Helsinki University.

Engineering the Law and Justice Deconstruction

Professional knowledge is produced and transmitted in the context of state and societal relationships. Academic knowledge, including the study of law, is no exception and should be explicated as an articulation, construction and de-construction of embedded social rifts around fundamental issues, like nationality, ethnicity, religion and social class. It is an avenue through which ideologies may be generated and challenged. Scholars have ordinarily addressed differences between hegemonic knowledge that serves the ruling elite and prevailing national ideologies, and counter-hegemonic knowledge that is supposed to challenge it. This article goes deeper by focusing on the lenses through which legal experts and legal academics perceive their profession and how the attributes they assign to it affect the knowledge they construct and articulate in the constitutive context of state-society relationships.

(Not) Accessing the Castle: Grappling with Secrecy in Research on Security Practices

Secrecy and Society

This article discusses how to deal with secrecy and limited access in ethnographically inspired research of security fields. Drawing inspiration from recent debates about secrecy in Critical Security Research and from Franz Kafka's The Castle, we propose to treat access limitations and the secrecy we encounter as methodological tools that provide insights into social relations and power structures of security fields. We develop the argument in two steps. First, we argue for a more fine-grained taxonomy of secrecy, that allows to distinguish between mystery, concealment and the relational dimension of secrecy. Second, we apply the taxonomy to our respective fieldwork experiences in the fields of cybersecurity and refugee governance, to show how attending to different forms of secrecy produces empirical insights into the fields of study. Setting out how to work with rather than against secrecy, the article contributes to methodological debates in Critical Security Studies and Secrecy Studies, and ultimately to further cross-fertilize these fields.

Security, Control and Deviance: Mapping the security domain and why

2013

Security is one of the foundations on which a stable and cohesive society is built. It is this security that allows citizens to go about their daily lives with freedom and certainty,affording them the ability to make their own choices as to what they do. Yet it may be argued that security is a concept that is misunderstood and perceived in a myriad of ways by the various stratum of society. Since the tragic events of 9 September 2001, security has become a much used and abused term. Law and legislation have been changed and enacted to protectand control the community. Personal rights and freedoms have been given up, wars have been waged and it may be argued by some, police states have emerged out of democracy in the name and pursuit of security. In this period,the global community has witnessed massive growth of global security organisation and the rise and legitimization of its cousin the global private military company. Yet there is remarkably little consensus as to what security ...