Description
This paper takes the global spread of Countering Violent Extremism discourse and practices as an entry point from which to examine the rise of population-centric approaches to security and the related question of whose security is at stake in global spread of counterterrorism approaches in the aftermath of 9/11. We demonstrate how the embrace of population-centric—allegedly less intrusive—approaches substantial expansion of security logics, often extremely militarized, into the lifeworlds of ‘the local’ and ‘the social’, an expansion that is further facilitated by the processes in which the population-centric turn is embedded in wider discourses on ‘convergences’ and ‘borderlessness’ of global security threats. As such, we argue that the expansion beyond military logics and the apparent ‘convergences’ of threat scenarios shaping contemporary global security governance gives rise to new contingently emerging constellations and positionalities of actors and alliances across local, national, and global scales, as well as across the spectrum of state and ‘non-state’. This new constellation of actors produces a global division of labor in regard to population-centric security governance that is characterized by a multiscalar interrelation of increasingly specialized but functionally integrated actors and institutions aiming at governing ‘at-risk’ populations in the name of global security by countering violent radicalization.
