This paper explores how the mobile body and, specifically, the face have become a site of observation, calculation, prediction, and action in the process of moving across borders. The paper explores how in the circulatory space of the airport/border, the body's circulatory systems, biological rhythms, and affective expressions have become objects of suspicion—mobile surfaces from which inner thoughts and potentially hostile intentions are scrunitized, read, and given threatening meaning by the newest modes of airport security and surveillance. Examined according to the vectoral modes of historicity and virtual possibility, as well as the internal and external play of intention and feeling, the paper uncovers an increased attention to differential axes of mobility—of past and future, surface and interior. The paper situates these techniques within the preemptive biopolitical securitisation of mobility across borders which, it is argued, has found its referent object in the primal realm of affective capacities.

Facing Airport Security: Affect, Biopolitics, and the Preemptive Securitisation of the Mobile Body

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.

Governing insecurity: contingency planning, protection, resilience

In this paper we review recent social science work on the issue of biosecurity and suggest ways in which geographers and social scientists can approach and intervene in current biosecurity practices. Our argument is that it is both useful and necessary to locate and intervene at sites where the ordering of biomatters is open to doubt and/or contestation. We pitch discourses of biological immanence and emergence against forms of social science thinking which tend to trace overarching logics or seemingly unstoppable forces in matters of power and politics. While acknowledging the import of both literatures, our aim is to engage with the fraught empirical practicalities of making biomatters secure in order to bring to the fore the ways in which life matters are patterned by any number of processes and the ways in which these patterns are always conditional on sociomaterial contingencies.

Securing Life: The Emerging Practices of Biosecurity

It is now beyond doubt that attention to the ‘security—development nexus’ has become commonplace in national and global policymaking. However, how ‘the nexus’ is differently imbued with meaning and ultimately employed remains underexplored. In this article, we suggest a possible framework for mapping the multiple understandings that underlie specific articulations of ‘the nexus’ in order to reveal the ways in which meaning may shift in different (yet seemingly similar) discourses. To this end, we draw upon familiar stories about ‘development’ and ‘security’, and we offer a brief reading of ways in which ‘the nexus’ is articulated in policy texts. Ultimately, this framework may hint at what such articulations may imply for the policy agenda.

http://pdf2.hegoa.efaber.net/entry/content/1369/STERN_OJENDAL_Mapping_Security-Development_Nexus_2010.pdf

Mapping the Security—Development Nexus: Conflict, Complexity, Cacophony, Convergence?

Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases have, for some at least, become key challenges for contemporary global society. They threaten progress in global health, compromise food security, and, along with climate change and global terrorism, seem to usher in a state of emergency and a radically uncertain future. The central claim of Pathological Lives is that any solution offered to these kinds of emerging and often communicable diseases requires a broad–based geographical scrutiny. The book marks an empirically and theoretically informed contribution to a world seemingly under constant microbiological threat, drawing together and extending empirically based geographical scholarship in human–environment relations, science and society, more than human geographies and spatial theory to understand and evaluate efforts at making life more secure. The focus is on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease can reach pandemic proportions. The authors review current approaches to biosecurity or making life safe within those sectors, analyse underlying drivers and logics to existing programmes and ask whether the resulting solutions can succeed. They follow farmers, retailers and regulators, amongst others, asking how pathological lives can be successfully regulated without making life more dangerous as a result.

Pathological Lives: Disease, Space and Biopolitics

This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics as a dispositif de securite and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant biopolitics of security in the molecular age.

Dillon Michael

Papers

Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century