17–19 Jun 2020
Civic Centre
Europe/London timezone

Mapping the ‘new global security environment’: the implicit geographies of network thinking

18 Jun 2020, 10:00

Description

International security analysts describe the “global security environment” as an increasingly de-territorialized one: global conditions are less contained by territorial states and their borders. In response, analysts’ concepts and methods are supposedly being de-territorialized as well, with a growing focus on complex global networks and flows. As critical security scholars have correctly highlighted, metaphors of networks and flows have tended to abstract from, rather than elucidate, the situated geographical conditions in relation to which processes of de-territorialization actually materialize. While others attribute this flaw to a failure to engage with geography at all, I show that security analysts’ applications of “network thinking” are actually highly attuned to geographical differences. I show, first, that these discourses are primarily concerned with differentiating desirable networks and flows from threatening ones. Second, I show that the principle heuristic for making these differentiations is a geographical imaginary that distinguishes “developed” from “underdeveloped” spaces and contexts. I situate this geographical imaginary in relation to 20th century securitizations of "tropical anarchy" (the security problematique applied to "uncivilized" spaces) as distinct from interstate anarchy (the security problematique applied to the 'civilized' "society of states"). Attention to these geographical imaginaries is important for recognizing the mechanisms through which racial ontologies of sovereignty and security continue to be reproduced in international security theory and practice and how this materializes in contemporary geographies of state violence.

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