Description
When we think about ‘homeland security’, we imagine an effort to secure domestic life and the nation at all costs but also the multiplication of policing practices across borders. Indeed, the rise of homeland security after the September 11th attacks is widely understood as a process involving a global convergence around exemplars of repressive ‘militarized’ statecraft, which originate in particular locations under exceptional political circumstances and then colonize domestic policing as they circulate around the world. This paper argues that such a conception of homeland security problematically conflates its relational and world-making ambitions with an actually-existing universality. While much of the scholarship on homeland security is highly critical, the great majority accepts and naturalizes homeland security's self-implied assuredness by treating it as already monolithic and totalizing. This paper unsettles these presumptions. Following the work of Israel’s homeland security industry in India, insists that grappling with homeland security's worldliness requires following the involved actors as the basis of theorizing, rather than assuming their location, influence, or character and advance. In doing so, the paper locates the geopolitics of homeland security in terms of the fraught everyday encounters at work in the (re)makings of colonial statecraft across historical, geographic and cultural difference.
