Showing papers in "International Political Sociology in 2014"

After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance

Abstract: Current revelations about the secret US-NSA program, PRISM, have confirmed the large-scale mass surveillance of the telecommunication and electronic messages of governments, companies, and citizens, including the United States' closest allies in Europe and Latin America. The transnational ramifications of surveillance call for a re-evaluation of contemporary world politics' practices. The debate cannot be limited to the United States versus the rest of the world or to surveillance versus privacy; much more is at stake. This collective article briefly describes the specificities of cyber mass surveillance, including its mix of the practices of intelligence services and those of private companies providing services around the world. It then investigates the impact of these practices on national security, diplomacy, human rights, democracy, subjectivity, and obedience.

From Defense to Resilience: Environmental Security beyond Neo‐liberalism

Abstract: While the rise of “resilience” as a strategic concept has been widely noted, critical security scholars have given it a frosty reception, viewing it as a vehicle and multiplier of neo-liberal governmentality. This article acknowledges that resilience does form part of a neo-liberal security regime, but argues that a shift from defense to resilience is not devoid of critical potential, and develops recent calls for critique to be made more context specific. It begins by arguing that blanket condemnation of resilience is part of a wider tendency to apply Foucault's “governmentality” concept as a particular global form of power, rather than as an empirically sensitive analytic framework open to different configurations of power. It then shows how resilience also forms part of a strategy to manage uncertainty—particularly in relation to coping with global environmental risks—which directly challenges neo-liberal nostrums. A comparison with the concept of “defense” is made, arguing that resilience, while problematic for other reasons, potentially avoids the pernicious us-them logic, exceptionalism, and short-termism characteristic of defense strategies.

A Global Politics of Pity? Disaster Imagery and the Emotional Construction of Solidarity after the 2004 Asian Tsunami

Abstract: The study of emotion has become a steadily growing field in international relations and international political sociology. This essay adds to the field through a further empirical examination of the political roles emotions can play. Specifically, the essay questions how emotions were implicated in the construction of transnational solidarity—and the associated humanitarian actions—following an event of pivotal global importance: the Asian tsunami disaster of December 2004. To this end, I focus on the emotional dimensions of dominant media tsunami imagery and examine how emotions helped to produce the humanitarian meanings and ideologies on which the subsequent solidarity and humanitarian actions were based. Analyzing photographs in the New York Times, the essay demonstrates that the dominant tsunami imagery helped to evoke solidarity and garner aid. It did so, at least in part, through mobilizing stereotypical and deeply colonial representations of developing world disaster that are suggestive of a “politics of pity.” In this way, the essay contributes both an empirical study of emotions in world politics and an examination of the linkages between emotions and contemporary humanitarianism.

Technologizing Humanitarian Space: Darfur Advocacy and the Rape‐Stove Panacea

Abstract: We examine how an unassuming domestic technology-the fuel-efficient stove-came to be construed as an effective tool for reducing sexual violence globally. Highlighting the process of problematization, the linking of problems with actionable solutions, we show how US-based humanitarian advocacy organizations drew upon spatial, gender, perpetrator, racial, and interventionist representations to advance the notion that "stoves reduce rape" in Darfur. Though their effectiveness in Darfur remains questionable, efficient stoves were consequently adopted as a universal technical panacea for sexual violence in any conflict or refugee camp context. By examining the emergence and global diffusion of the rape-stove problematization, our study documents an important example of the technologizing of humanitarian space. We postulate fuel-efficient stoves to be a technology of Othering able to simplify, combine, decontextualize, and transform problematizations from their originating contexts elsewhere. When humanitarian advocates construe immensely complex crises as "manageable problems," the promotion of simple technical panaceas may inadvertently increase the burden of poverty for user-beneficiaries and silence the voices of those they claim to champion and serve.

Criminalizing Communism: Transnational Mnemopolitics in Europe

Abstract: The Eastern enlargement of the European Union has intensified calls for the reconstruction of a common European remembrance of the continent's multiple totalitarian legacies. Various political initiatives to condemn, along with counter-attempts to re-legitimize, the legacy of communism have emerged at the pan-European level. Each aspires to leave an imprint on the symbolic moral order and the legal regime of the broader European community. This article builds a conceptual framework for understanding the contestation of political and juridical regulation of the transnational remembrance of totalitarian communist regimes in Europe. Critically engaging the concept of cosmopolitanization of memory, it is argued that mnemonic identity in Europe is being transformed via new claims on “European memory.” These claims are being made by various East European actors seeking recognition of the region's particular historical legacies as part of the pan-European normative verdict on twentieth-century totalitarianisms.

Deep Securitization and Israel's “Demographic Demon”

Abstract: Securitization theory's core contention—the social construction of security as a “speech–act”—is perceptive and productive, yet insufficiently attentive to societies engulfed in profound existential uncertainty about their own survival. Such societies are immersed in what I call “deep securitization,” whereby widespread public discourses explicitly frame threats as probable, protracted, and endangering the very existence of the nation/state. Under deep securitization, to politicize is to securitize, sectors intensely intertwine, political legitimacy's object is the polity/identity itself, and securitization steps are typically nonbinary and nonlinear. Empirically, if some securitizations are deeper than others, Israel's is one of the deepest. In this study, I examine this exceptionally apt, though little-examined, case for securitization theory. Israeli public discourse abounds with “existential threats,” invariably depicting the Jewish people and polity as endangered. The article analyzes the securitization of demography and its linkage to geography and democracy in the Israeli-Jewish discourse and praxis.

Security and the Claim to Privacy

Abstract: When US President Barack Obama publicly addressed the data mining and analysis activities of the National Security Agency (NSA), he appealed to a familiar sense of the weighing of the countervailing forces of security and privacy. “The people at the NSA don't have an interest in doing anything other than making sure that where we can prevent a terrorist attack, where we can get information ahead of time, we can carry out that critical task,” he stated. “Others may have different ideas,” he suggested, about the balance between “the information we can get” and the “encroachments on privacy” that might be incurred (Obama 2013). In many ways, conventional calculations of security weigh the probability and likelihood of a future threat on the basis of information gathered on a distribution of events in the past. Obama's sense of a trading-off of security and privacy shares this sense of a calculation of the tolerance for the gathering of data on past events in order to prevent threats in the future. In fact, though, the very NSA programs he is addressing precisely confound the weighing of probable threat, and the conventions of security and privacy that adhere to strict probabilistic reasoning. The contemporary mining and analysis of data for security purposes invites novel forms of inferential reasoning such that even the least probable elements can be incorporated and acted upon. I have elsewhere described these elements of possible associations, links, and threats as “data derivatives” (Amoore 2011) that are decoupled from underlying values and do not meaningfully belong to an identifiable subject. The analysis of data derivatives for security poses significant difficulties for the idea of a data subject with a recognizable body of rights to privacy, to liberty, and to justice.

Everyday International Relations: Garbage, Grand Designs, and Mundane Matters

Abstract: Garbage is stuff that matters: the generation, disposal, and management of waste represent some of the most visceral flows in our society. Yet most international scholars continue to regard it as trivial to focus on the mundane practices and menial materiality associated with managing rubbish. Contra this dissociation, and through an analytics of assemblages, I argue that international theory can (and nowadays must) encompass both the grand designs of diplomacy and the mundane cosmopolitics of everyday life. In the everyday, the “international” is embodied, performed, and domesticated. I chart these multi-scalar connections as they unfold in Sydney, Australia, demonstrating how a focus on a global challenge such as climate change has been redefining the mundane realities of waste management.

Fields of Global Governance: How Transnational Power Elites Can Make Global Governance Intelligible

Abstract: To make global governance intelligible, we need to study a neglected but crucial phenomenon, namely the development of the social division of labor, both in transnational society and more specifically with regard to the fields of politics, law and economics. This notion of a social division of labor has to be distinguished from the mere technical division of labor. The process in question is not merely one of differentiation in an ever more complex world, nor does it take place in a relative power vacuum. Instead, it involves unequal distributions of resources and the use of influence and power. In other words, we need to examine, far more carefully than in the existing literature, the operators of globalization: those individuals and social and professional groups, rooted in evolving national and transnational societies, who govern global governance. Going behind the facade of global institutions and instead focusing on the arguably deeper structures of global governance, we can also start to explain the emergence of new forms of power as they develop around new transnational power elites operating in, around, and beyond a growing number of international institutions (Kauppi and Madsen 2013). This forum brings together scholars from different but related social scientific disciplines, all of whom are engaged in empirical work which focuses on new forms of global power brokers. We all share a basic skepticism towards the tendency to grand theorizing, both in International Relations (IR) and in the sociology of globalization. We argue that a better way ahead for understanding global political phenomena is to devise tangible objects of empirical inquiry. One such object of inquiry is what we generally refer to as transnational power elites: transnational professionals defined not by their institutional affiliation—for example as international civil servants—but as transnational social groupings. To undertake this more empirically …

Free Movement for Whom, Where, When? Roma EU Citizens in France and Spain

Abstract: EU citizenship is often regarded as the culmination of a process whereby the transnational mobility of “workers” has led to the granting of rights to “humans” qua citizens, with both legal scholars and ethnographers emphasizing its normative significance in this respect. Challenging such a narrative, this study sets out to highlight the contingent nature of a postnational EU citizenship, with reference to the lived experiences of migrant Roma. As a first step, we highlight the conditionality within EU law associated with the granting of rights to those enacting EU citizenship by residing within EU territory beyond their own member state. In a second step, we highlight the variable ways in which such conditionality is deployed in different national contexts, with reference to the frameworks in France and Spain. While the former has deployed these conditions in a manner that has excluded EU citizens, particularly migrant Roma, the latter—at least for a time—was more permissive in its granting of rights to EU citizens than EU law required. However, in a third step, we suggest that the lived experiences of migrant Roma in these two national contexts have not been as different as the legal differences suggest. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on Romanian Roma in two municipalities near Barcelona, we demonstrate the ways in which a local politics of exclusion is legally possible, even within an ostensibly permissive juridical framework of citizenship. We highlight how the ambiguity of a multilevel citizenship not only opens up possibilities for multifaceted forms of exclusion, but also for various forms of resistance, both within and beyond a juridical citizenship framework.

The Politics of Privacy in the Age of Preemptive Security

Abstract: In August 2013, a report was leaked to the Washington Post in which it was revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) violated its own privacy rules 2,776 times over a one-year period (Gellman 2013). The privacy violations documented in the report range from technical errors to serious violations such as operations without consent from the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance (FISA) court and breach of the five-year data retention period. Other breaches are described as “broad syntax” errors, which are related to imprecise queries. This type of fault is presumed reducible “if analysts had more complete and consistent information available about … targets.” Following the recent disclosures concerning the NSA's PRISM program, which has the capacity to search and connect numerous social network databases in the name of security, the importance of the publication of this privacy report cannot be overestimated. While much of the public discussion concerning PRISM has so far focused on the person of Edward Snowden and his unlikely journeys to Hong Kong and Russia, relatively few questions have been raised about the value and legitimacy of the PRISM program itself. The Washington Post revelations concerning the NSA privacy breaches have grabbed the headlines and may lead to Congressional Hearings (Blake 2013). As with other security and surveillance programs, privacy is a key anchor for critical questioning and public debate (for example, Lyon 2003; Salter 2007; Bigo and Tsoulaka 2008). At the same time, however, the discussions concerning the privacy violations of the NSA demonstrate the problems and limits of critiquing data-led security through privacy. In a reply to the leaked report, the NSA stated that most of the incidents “were in a category that did not involve Americans” and that the number of errors attributable to human analysts was excessively small in …

Privatizing Security, Securitizing Policing: The Case of the G20 in Toronto, Canada

Abstract: Allegations of police brutality, unlawful detention, and other breaches of civil liberties during the G20 in Toronto in June 2010 provide an important case through which to understand the changing nature of security and policing, raising questions about the political implications of such shifts in terms of police accountability, transparency, and democracy. Within the field of public policing, scholars predicted that globalization processes would weaken public policing as a dominant policing institution. Instead, it has expanded, in part, through the convergence of internal and international dimensions of security, whereby new policy networks cooperate in matters of policing and security in a new integrated model, the result of which is a further militarization of urban space and expanded markets for security, leading to the securitization of everyday life. This article examines the case of Toronto's hosting of the G20 and the role that the Integrated Security Unit—led by the RCMP and including private security firms—played. By focusing on the role of multilateral networks that include private sector actors, we examine the implications of the privatization and securitization of policing for democracy, citizenship, and accountability, looking at how they affect the ability of publics to engage in public debate, to consult, or to protest policies.

Visualizing Climate‐Refugees: Race, Vulnerability, and Resilience in Global Liberal Politics

Abstract: The literature on climate-induced migration agrees that it is almost impossible to identify individual people as displaced by global warming. At the same time, it is very hard not to see climate-refugees—thanks to the news, reports, films, and charity adverts that picture climate-refugees as the “human face of global warming.” This article engages with this often unnoticed and taken-for-granted field of visibility and investigates its implications for the securitization of climate-induced migration. Based on a Foucauldian notion of security, the paper conducts a visual discourse analysis of 135 images collected from publications, newspapers, and Web sites on climate-induced migration. Throughout this analysis, the climate migrant/refugee appears as a racialized figure, a passive and helpless victim of global warming. In turn, global warming is pictured as an overwhelming, omnipresent, and erratic threat, endangering large parts of the global population. This field of visibility showcases a shift from liberal biopolitics in the name of human security toward securing through fostering resilience. This shift depoliticizes the issue of global warming, makes those affected by it responsible for their own survival, reinstates them as the dangerous Other and so bars them from crossing the global “life-chance divide.”

Free Us from Power: Governmentality, Counter-conduct, and Simulation in European Democracy and Reform Promotion in the Arab World†

Abstract: For over a decade, Arab governments have been enrolled into EU initiatives aimed at promoting democratic reform in the region. Common to these initiatives are their claims to be uninvolved with power and external imposition, professing instead to be based on voluntary notions of local demand and ownership. This article challenges this core liberalist assumption of the absence of power. Drawing on Foucault's reflections on liberal governmentality, it shows how power operates through a technology of “contractualization” which produces a distinct Arab subjectivity in the form of a lack (of reform will). Yet governing technologies are never complete, and possibilities of reversal and resistance always exist. In the second part, the article engages with the emerging debate on Foucault's concept of counter-conduct, opening up the concept to more subtle and less spectacular forms of resistance. Drawing inspiration from Derrida's analysis of (in)hospitality and Baudrillard's logic of simulation, the article shows how the liberal assumptions of “invitation,” “ownership,” and “gradualism” inherent in European reform initiatives enable resistance in the form of: (i) selection of entry; (ii) setting conditions; and (iii) simulating reform.

Saving the Discipline: Plurality, Social Capital, and the Sociology of IR Theorizing†

Abstract: For several decades, the field of International Relations theory has been preoccupied with its own methodological and theoretical plurality. As a consequence, IR scholars have proposed a range of different solutions to this “problem.” In doing so, they have drawn from different sources of social capital in the field, allowing them to base their legitimacy on the ways they relate to “progress” and the status quo. Drawing from Bourdieu's sociology, this article will explore five different strategies for “saving the discipline” and show how they relate to different kinds of scientific capital and power relations in the field. It will also explore the ways in which social conventions (such as politesse) can be used as tools for symbolic violence. The article will finish by arguing that rather than a problem to be resolved, plurality functions as an organizing principle regulating social power relations in the field.

The International Judiciary as Transnational Power Elite

Abstract: The emergence of a global structure of judicialized international law is closely linked to more general efforts throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries to establish an international community governed by law. While the proliferation of international courts (ICs) and its consequences has been described elsewhere (Romano 1999; Koskenniemi and Leino 2002; Alter 2014), we know surprisingly little about the judges sitting at the helm of contemporary judicialized international law and quite literally ruling (on) the world. This short paper addresses precisely this question by examining the ever expanding international judiciary in terms of a transnational power elite (Kauppi and Madsen 2013): a transnational grouping which is not defined simply by its institutional affiliation but by its collective transnational professional power. The first truly international court (IC), the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), was set up in 1922 under the League of Nations. Although it was short-lived and had to be rescued as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 1946, it left an important structural imprint on the genesis of the international judiciary. The long debates during the negotiations of the PCIJ about who could actually be appointed as judges to rule on sovereign states is highly evocative of the underlying …

Foucaultian dispositifs as methodology: the case of anonymous exclusions by unique identification in India

Abstract: This paper examines the Indian government's Unique Identification (UID) program, the largest digital biometric program in history. UID is intended to provide a new model of security based on a complex interrelation between welfare, identity and rights. The program resembles the kind of liberal governmentality and biopolitical imperative described by Foucault, yet it is also inseparable from the specific socio-historic conditions in India that constitute the strategic need for UID. This paper contributes to an ongoing debate as to the suitability of Foucault's thought for international studies by suggesting a productive line of inquiry: tracing the variance between the rationality of government programs and the technologies of enactment. The paper utilizes three methodological “prescriptives” from Foucault's concept of the dispositif, which are applied to the case study. This paper argues that the concrete application of the program challenges the perception that biometric technologies can guarantee the identity and inclusion of the political subject when applied across different geographies with different socio-historical conditions. The specific discursive and non-discursive conditions present in the application of UID lead to unexpected political strategies. While India's UID program seeks to augment the population with the biometric identity necessary for consumer citizenship, frugal government and expanded surveillance, those whose bodies are not “readable” by the biometric technology are excluded. It is exactly those subjects that the program aims to help that are most likely to be excluded.

Materializing US Security: Guantanamo’s Object Lessons and Concrete Messages

Abstract: While a growing body of literature working at the intersection of security and visual studies recognizes the value of studying images, how these visualities are produced is less theorized, especially with respect to materialities and their capacity to compel meanings. Analyzing the tours of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, which have been arranged by the US military for VIP visitors since the site opened, this article argues that the selective organization and presentation of specific matter was image-making and therefore meaning-making. Through efforts to produce a spectacle of detention, Guantanamo was deliberately constructed as “safe, humane, legal, transparent”—in the process shifting the meaning of these very concepts. Guantanamo's tours as visual and material practices were therefore used to produce meaning in the debate over the future of the site and how best to secure the US state post-9/11. They were part of the constitution of the war's legitimacy, leading, ultimately, to certain understandings of security. Guantanamo, with its “object lessons” and “concrete messages,” is therefore a useful case study for understanding security meaning-making as produced by the interaction of linguistic, visual, and material domains and their elements.

Identity Switching and Transnational Professionals

Abstract: Transnational professionals maintain their position in the international political economy through the use, rather than possession, of ideational and material resources. One important means of doing so comes from a capacity to build claims to knowing how to govern—claims that can be generated from identity switching between different network domains. This piece sketches how transnational professionals engage in identity switching and how they can play off different pools of professional knowledge, which enables them to engage in acts of “epistemic arbitrage.” When successful over time, such transnational professionals can also become “epistemic arbiters” of what is appropriate knowledge and meaningful action across a range of policy areas. The combination of identity switching and epistemic arbitrage can be used to maintain professional jurisdictional control in transnational policy space, as well as to provide the means and policy content for transnational professional mobilization. The capacity to move between different networks is a great advantage for those who need to muster support to change how matters are governed. How transnational governance is shaped is frequently considered from the viewpoint of processes linked to authority, or attributed to structure or culture. We can step back from such macro-level analysis and zoom in on how transnational professionals are able to get their way. Useful concepts for this purpose can …

Encountering Violence: Terrorism and Horrorism in War and Citizenship

Abstract: This article introduces Adriana Cavarero's concept of “horrorism” into International Relations (IR) discussions of the relationship between war and citizenship. Horrorism refers to a violent violation of vulnerable humans who are defined by their simultaneous openness to the other's care and harm. With its motif of physical and ontological denigration, horrorism offends the human condition by making its victims gaze upon and/or experience repugnant violence and bodily disfiguration precisely when the vulnerable are most in need of care. The article argues that horrorism complicates disciplinary understandings of contemporary violence which tend to see terrorism, but not horrorism, in war and which generally neglect to theorize how violence—and particularly horrorism—is embedded in, and exchanged, through state/citizen relationships. To elaborate these arguments, the article analyses three pieces of war art: Jeremy Deller's “Baghdad, 5 March 2007,” Donald Gray's mural, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and a still image from Cynthia Weber's film, “Guadalupe Denogean: ‘I am an American.’” By taking the War on Terrorism as their subject, these pieces demonstrate how war makes visible the terror and horror in state/citizen relationships. The article concludes by reconsidering how encountering signs of horrorism might broaden our frames of war and further our empathic vision toward the precarious victims of horrorism or, alternatively, might confirm the patriotic allegiances of imperial citizens in ways that further bind their citizenship to state political and economic violence and narrow the scope for genuine empathy.

The Value of Privacy in an Era of Security: Embedding Constitutional Limits on Preemptive Surveillance

Abstract: The reconfiguration of the security landscape in recent years has resulted in the transformation of the relationship between the individual and the state. A catalyst toward this transformation has been the growing link between securitization and preemptive surveillance, and the focus of security governance on the assessment of risk (Amoore and de Goede 2008). Central in this context is the focus on the future, and the aim of preemptive surveillance to identify and predict risk and dangerousness (Bigo 2006). The preemptive turn in surveillance has been based largely upon the collection, processing, and exchange of personal data, which has in turn been marked by three key features. The first feature involves the purpose of data collection and processing. This is no longer focused solely on data to address the commission of specific, identified criminal offenses, but focuses rather on the use of personal data to predict risk and preempt future activity. The second feature involves the nature of the data in question. On the one hand, preemptive surveillance focuses increasingly on the collection of personal data generated by ordinary, everyday life activities. This includes records of financial transactions (Mitsilegas 2003; de Goede 2012), of airline travel (PNR) reservations (Mitsilegas 2005), and of mobile phone telecommunications (Mitsilegas 2009). The focus on monitoring everyday life results in mass surveillance, marked by the collection and storage of personal data in bulk. On the other hand, the focus on prediction and preemption has been linked with the deepening of surveillance via the collection of sensitive personal data from the human body, such as DNA samples and biometrics (Lyon 2001; Amoore 2006). The third feature of preemptive surveillance involves the actors of surveillance. A key element in this context, linked with the focus on the monitoring of everyday life, is the privatization of …

The International Civil Servant

Abstract: A key feature of transnationally organized governance elites is that their claim to authority is based on an already presumed universal validity. This is so, at least for those with a claim to authority that is epistemic in character, because there is a general belief that the institution of science produces findings that transcend national borders. Thus, for example, medical doctors from different countries can agree to engage in governance activities based on a shared epistemological framework. I have elsewhere (Sending 2014) compared the emergence of a transnational field of population governance driven by demographers with the emergence of the international governance of the UN Secretariat. Both follow distinct trajectories. Actors that are part of transnational elites compete for positions of authority, but they do so within a shared register in which national borders do not count as prima facie valid grounds on which to dismiss any particular claim about the issues at stake in these fields, be they health, population, or economic governance. This is in contrast to the field of international governance, where competing claims are assessed within a shared epistemological framework in which national borders are the key rationale for the respective actors’ position and differentiation from others. For students of international politics, an important yet seriously understudied case in this regard is the emergence …

Power Elites and Club-Model Governance in Global Finance

Abstract: Why and how have pre-financial crisis power elites maintained their influence and privileges in the post-crisis governance landscape? To understand their continuing relevance, it is useful to consider the mechanisms through which these global agents attain and preserve authority. A close examination of the actions and interactions of the transnational financial policy community, actors traditionally understood as elites, shows that they organize themselves in a club-like manner. The “club” serves as the mechanism through which self-selected, elite members of the community gain influence and replicate their power. This short article proposes club governance as a key concept in transnational interactions and governance. It argues that a sociological understanding of elites operating through a club model provides the detail about actor motivations, engagement and conflicts that is missing from approaches that privilege scientific knowledge or material interest. The club model does not merely describe but sheds light on the role of interactions of individuals beyond and across institutional forms, instead of relying on the assumed interests of the former, or the organizational characteristics of the latter. Ultimately, it helps explain why the transnational financial policy community appears unchanged following the crisis. In the transnational space occupied by the agents of global finance—the community of central bankers, regulators, managers of large financial conglomerates and selected academics—club mechanisms demarcate an arena which is highly protected from …

Spatial Alternatives and Counter‐Sovereignties in Israel/Palestine

Abstract: The securitization of the spaces of Israeli-Palestinian interaction, from checkpoints to the West Bank Separation Wall, continues to intensify and receive attention from journalists, scholars, and activists. Understandably, the focus is on the negative consequences of existing spatial configurations. Receiving far less attention is the development of alternative spatial formations which might advance forms of “desecuritization,” especially in those spaces that are crucial hinges of Israeli-Palestinian interaction (Jerusalem and other mixed cities, the Wall, the Green Line, roads). This article explores whether alternative ways of using, organizing, experiencing, and coexisting in space—especially at the micro level—hold out promise for helping to reframe significant dimensions of Israeli-Palestinian interaction. It seeks to better understand whether disjointed forms of sovereignty that appear—or disappear—across the occupation can be met by counter-sovereignties; whether new spatial counter-realities can be articulated through everyday life; and whether forms of agency, especially contestation, can reset understandings of, and perspectives on, spaces. A range of examples are considered within Jerusalem, mixed cities, the occupied Palestinian territories and at the border, bearing on religious sites, healthcare, gentrification, security infrastructure, popular protest, and festivals.

Data Protection, with Love

Abstract: How to engage with the politics of privacy in the age of preemptive security? My suggestion is to start with data protection. Which, following De Hert and Gutwirth (2006), is not exactly the same of privacy. Extrapolating from their analysis of the two as different “legal tools”, I would say that privacy and data protection are two slightly different rationales of power relations: the one of privacy based on the “opacity of the individual”, and the one of data protection on the “transparency and accountability of the powerful” (Gutwirth and De Hert 2008: 275, emphasis in original). These rationales (attempt to) orientate two different loose dispositifs, each formed by a composite ensemble of elements. Some of these elements are peculiar to each dispositif, while others are shared or encompassed by both.

Climate Anarchy: Creative Disorder in World Politics

Abstract: “Climate anarchy” describes the divergence of climate politics from established mechanisms of global governance and an emergent political order. This new (dis)order represents alternative governances and politics, and a challenge to national governmental perspectives on world politics. When interstate policymaking, such as that on climate change, falters at the point of agreement—as it has from Copenhagen in 2009 to Rio+20, and on to Warsaw in 2013—different global relationships are engendered. This occurs as the narrowly defined anarchy of national jurisdictions is superseded by a wider anarchic diversity in political practices. If states must respond to climate change, they are not leading climate policy effectively, and state-centric perspectives cannot account for such political disorder. The ensuing discomfort about the fragmentation of climate governance should be embraced as an opportunity for political innovation, and the diverse responses to climate change viewed as an emerging paradigmatic shift in world politics. The argument thus informs broader debates on policy and governance, as well as conceptual and disciplinary developments, by testing the construction, governance, and anarchy of climate issues.

Knowledge Warfare: Social Scientists as Operators of Global Governance

Abstract: The future of the world depends on the knowledge we have of it. Keynes famously added to this that the world is ruled by the ideas of economists and political philosophers—and little else. But while nobody would dispute the power of ideas, Keynes forgot to add that ideas are always somebody's ideas. Social groups seek to monopolize the ideas they consider valuable and to discredit those that are a threat. Therefore symbolic struggles over legitimate principles of domination are not only ideational, as constructivists and discursive institutionalists argue. Unless fused with material interests, ideas or ideal interests are powerless (Weber in Gerth and Wright Mills 1991:280). They require the sustained mobilization of a variety of powerful carriers of convergent material and ideal interests—social groups such as politicians, experts, political activists, and journalists. From this perspective, global governance boils down to a constant, mainly upstream, “under the radar,” and politically defused warfare over the knowledge and interests that steer it. Social scientists play a key but concealed part in the steering of global governance in a variety of social roles and fields of action. They partake in the development of influential transnational professional groups that operate under and beyond global institutions (Kauppi and Madsen 2013). By producing practical knowledge for everyday or “banal” global governance, social scientists shape the politically imaginable …

Constituting Omar Khadr: Cultural Racism, Childhood, and Citizenship

Abstract: Until 2012, Omar Khadr was both the only former child soldier and Western national left in Guantanamo Bay. Captured by US forces at the age of 15, this Canadian youth would spend more than 40% of his life in US custody during the War on Terror. This article advances two key arguments. First, as a child soldier, Khadr is simultaneously cast as an object of sympathy and suspicion. The construction of Khadr's childhood is animated by a cultural racism, which casts Khadr as both a victim of an extremist family and the evil outcome of a “jihadi” upbringing. Second, this article examines competing culturally racialized claims about citizenship, prompted by the failure of the Canadian government to seek Khadr's repatriation. While the central preoccupation of liberal citizenship discourse is the erosion of Canada's identity as a Western, liberal democracy, “racial-nationalist” discourse raises the alarm on the threat posed by “citizens of convenience” who must be cast out of the polity through practices of “pure exclusion.”

On the National Production of Global Elites: The Rise of a French Trained Global Elite in Financial Derivatives†

Abstract: A small but dominant group of global financial elites has been trained in France These elites hold powerful positions in the global derivatives industry, most prominently in the field of equity derivatives The specialized French role is both a cause and a consequence of the intensifying use of derivatives, one of the major developments in global financial capitalism Equity derivatives have spread from France to Europe, and now to Asia, with London and Hong Kong serving as control centers Three factors are key in explaining the French niche in global derivatives First, particular characteristics of national systems, in this case highly advanced French mathematics education, can spawn market dominance in specific areas of the global economy Second, French networks, founded on shared experiences in French schools and French banks, are both relatively closed and highly portable across national borders Third, new actors in developed and developing regions of the global economy are driving demand for derivatives products that are designed by French trained elites in French banks and especially in global banks The global financial crisis has neither derailed the demand for derivatives nor, consequently, the role French engineering schools play in educating some of the top global financial practitioners

Pathologizing Subjecthoods: Pop Culture, Habits of Thought, and the Unmaking of Resistance Politics at Guantanamo Bay

Abstract: Beginning with a recurrent discussion about the choice between two imagined Star Trek technologies, the holodeck and the transporter, this article explores how popular culture can be revealing of ways in which political possibilities are variously made and foreclosed by dint of deeply held but underinterrogated ideational commitments circulating in the mundane and carried forward by what might seem unlikely voices. Tracing a few such commitments as they pertain to the legitimation and delegitimation of political subjecthood, we examine the political stakes of questions of agency and delusion through what were initially reported to have been the June 2006 suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the crisis that emerged with respect to multiple hunger strikes at that same facility some seven years later. Through these we ask whether there might be resistance-enabling possibilities as yet unimagined in agential choices that can so deeply offend prevailing sensibilities that it is sometimes difficult to abide them as valid choices at all. As we struggle with these resurgent security politics, it might seem frivolous to turn to film and television, or pub games at conferences, for guidance. What this article demonstrates is that these popular renderings of the limits of acceptable subjectivity draw on deep currents in our very broadest culture. In a very real sense, we are all very well prepared for our present political rendition.