Security Unbound

Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy. Security is not in the first instance a right or value but a practice that challenges democratic institutions and actions. We are familiar with emergency policies in the name of national security challenging parliamentary processes, the space for political dissent, and fundamental rights. Yet, security practice and technology pervade society heavily in very mundane ways without raising national security crises, in particular through surveillance technology and the management of risks and uncertainties in many areas of life. These more diffuse security practices create societies in which suspicion becomes a default way of relating and governing relations, ranging from neighbourhood relations over financial transactions to cross border mobility. Security Unbound demonstrates that governing through suspicion poses serious challenges to democratic practice. Some of these challenges are familiar, such as the erosion of the right to privacy; others are less so, such as the post-human challenge to citizenship. Security unbound provokes us to see that the democratic political stake today is not our security but preventing insecurity from becoming the organising principle of political and social life.

This book compares and contrasts publicly espoused security concepts in the Nordic region, and explores the notion of societal security. Outside observers often assume that Nordic countries take similar approaches to the security and safety of their citizens. This book challenges that assumption and traces the evolution of ‘societal security’, and its broadly equivalent concepts, in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. The notion of societal security is deconstructed and analysed in terms of its different meanings and implications for each country, through both country- and issue-focused studies. Each chapter traces the evolution of key security concepts and related practices, allowing for a comparison of similarities and differences between these four countries. Using discourses and practices as evidence, this is the first book to explore how different Nordic nations have conceptualised domestic security over time. The findings will be valuable to scholars from across the geographical and theoretical spectrum, while highlighting how Nordic security discourses and practices may deviate from traditional assumptions about Nordic values. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, Nordic politics and International Relations. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.routledge.com/Nordic-Societal-Security-Convergence-and-Divergence/Larsson-Rhinard/p/book/9780367492922, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This encyclopedia provides an authoritative guide intended for students of all levels of studies, offering multidisciplinary insight and analysis of over 500 headwords covering the main concepts of Security and Non-traditional Security, and their relation to other scholarly fields and aspects of real-world issues in the contemporary geopolitical world.

European states and international organizations have established multiple policies and mechanisms to deal with various risks, crises and disasters. This edited volume examines the emerging multi-level policy space of European civil security governance, identifying patterns and reviewing the opportunities and obstacles for cooperation.

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security. This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are required to cope with the Anthropocene - the Human Age. Drawing from various disciplines, this bold reinterpretation explores the possibilities for understanding and preparing a future that will look vastly different than the past. The book asks to dig deeper into what it means to be human and secure in an age of ecological exception. "In a growing field of interdisciplinary work on the Anthropocene, ›Security in the Anthropocene‹ sets itself apart. It blends ideas from criminology, international security studies and the environmental humanities to provide unique interdisciplinary insight into the challenges of living on an increasingly turbulent earth." - Audra Mitchell, Balsillie School of International Affairs/Wilfrid Laurier University "This essential, groundbreaking book offers a new conceptual framework that recalibrates what security means in the Anthropocene. Not content on simply highlighting the state of crisis fostered by existential risks in this new era, Cameron Harrington and Clifford Shearing invite us to imagine a more positive and caring form of security." - Benoit Dupont, University of Montreal "Harrington and Shearing's fine book explores evocatively how humans might cope with a world that is fundamentally changed through a critical appraisal of how new impacts on the Earth system shift the conditions of security. This is a tour de force of how our concepts of security create the world that afflicts us. The authors argue, convincingly, that there can be no security in the Anthropocene without an expanded vision of care." - John Braithwaite, Australian National University

Central Asia remains on the periphery, both spatially and in people’s imaginations. When the region does attract international attention, it is often related to security issues, including terrorism, ethnic conflict and drug trafficking. This book brings together leading specialists from a range of disciplines including geography, anthropology, sociology and political science to discuss how citizens and governments within Central Asia think about and practise security. The authors explore how governments use fears of instability to bolster their rule, and how securitized populations cope with (and resist) being labelled threats through strategies that are rarely associated with security, including marriage and changing their appearance. This collection examines a wide range of security issues including Islamic extremism, small arms, interethnic relations and border regions. While coverage of the region often departs from preconceived notions of the region as dangerous, obscure and volatile, the chapters in this book all place emphasis on the way local people understand security and harmony in their daily lives. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Central Asian Studies as well as Security Studies and Political Science. The chapters were originally published in the journal Central Asian Survey.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography, PKC 2011, held in Taormina, Italy, in March 2011. The 28 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The book also contains one invited talk. The papers are grouped in topical sections on signatures, attribute based encryption, number theory, protocols, chosen-ciphertext security, encryption, zero-knowledge, and cryptanalysis.

This book explores the reasons for a recent securitization of climate change, and reveals how the understanding of climate change as a security threat fuels resilience as a contemporary political paradigm. Since 2007, political and public discourse has portrayed climate change in terms of international or national security. This increasing attention to the security implications of climate change is puzzling, however, given the fact that linkages between climate change and conflict or violence are heavily disputed in the empirical literature. This book explains this trend of a securitization of global warming and discusses its political implications. It traces the actor coalition that promoted the idea of climate change as a security issue and reveals the symbols, narratives and storylines that make up this discourse. Drawing on three detailed case studies at the international level of the United Nations, the regional level of the Euro-Mediterranean and the national level of the UK, the book reveals how climate change is turned into a non-linear and unpredictable threat. The resulting complexity discourse prevents the adoption of any exceptional measures and instead presents resilience as the only way to cope with the climate threat. This book shows that we can only grasp the complexity of the securitization process and its implications in the climate change case by comparing it at different political levels over a longer period. By developing a securitization framework the book makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate on security and resilience in critical security studies. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, resilience, environmental studies, global governance and IR in general.