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God. Interestingly, International Relations (IR) and security studies are largely silent with regard to mortality and death anxiety. This silence is striking, given the violent and morbid topics studied within the discipline of IR: war, terrorism and genocide, to name a few. Of course, it is true that contemporary IR literatures of biopolitics and thanatopolitics focus on death in their own way, as
Death is simultaneously silent, and very loud, in political life. Politicians and media scream about potential threats lurking behind every corner, but academic discourse often neglects mortality. Life is everywhere in theorisation of security, but death is nowhere.
Making a bold intervention into the Critical Security Studies literature, this book explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security after the Death of God – arguing that security emerged in response to the removal of promises to immortal salvation. Combining the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman with literature from the sociology of death, Heath-Kelly shows how security is a response to the death anxiety implicit within the human condition.
The book explores the theoretical literature on mortality before undertaking a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Center in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. By interviewing the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, Heath-Kelly shows that practices of memorialization are a retrospective security endeavour – they conceal and re-narrate the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority.
The book will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of Critical Security Studies, Memory Studies and International Politics.
which authoritarians identify, may dominate. Against this backdrop, this opening chapter has three purposes. First, we discuss previous research on these issues in the otherwise discrete literatures produced in the fields of IR and Security Studies on the one hand and Political Psychology on the other. These works are rarely – if ever – brought into conversation with each other and yet, we argue, the
literatures in the study of security threats is what we consider to be the problematic assumption that qualitative and quantitative methods cannot be used alongside each other for methodological reasons. For us, however, the key distinction here is not between qualitative and quantitative at the level of methods understood as ‘material devices that enact worlds’ (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014 : 9), but
-called ‘turns’ within the literature produced by the subfield of Critical Security Studies (CSS) in particular – ‘the vernacular’ and ‘the everyday’. 2 However, these nascent bodies of work – and other related traditions such as standpoint feminist approaches – have developed largely separately from rather than in conversation with each other, which has both perpetuated existing blind spots and also
incursion of mortality haunts the city until it is mitigated through the reclamation and marking of place. The second section of this chapter expands the analysis of the connection between visuality, mortality and security by considering reactions to other bombs-without-bombsites: those bombsites we cannot see because they are thousands of miles away. In particular, the section draws upon literatures of
incorporate temporalities of practice usually ignored within the International Relations (IR) literature and subvert the traditional understanding of threat as ‘future potential danger’. Death isn’t just a future possibility; it is happening and has happened. If security functions to mitigate death, then it acts in the present tense and upon the past. Sovereignty also needs to be protected against the visceral
. Within this reading of grief and memory as lingering insecurity, the bereaved and survivors are framed as ‘key stakeholders’ who should be consulted regarding commemorative events (Eyre 2006 ; Nicholls 2006 ). The literature argues that consultation in commemorative processes and having a say may be integral, indeed fundamental, for recovery. Quoting the noted trauma theorist, Judith Herman, the UK
literature associated with the affective turn has prompted extensive analysis of the affective dimensions of apparatuses of security from the perspective of what Michel Foucault famously termed governmentality – ‘the conduct of conduct’ – it has paid less attention to the voices of those subjects produced by such architectures of governance. 2 Indeed, Jarvis and Lister's ( 2012 ) complaint about the
technique of mortality effacement. By engaging with literature from sociological and historical studies of death practice, we argued that death, security and the emergence of modern rationalism are connected. Death was not perceived as terrible in the pre-modern era; rather it only took on those social characteristics during the rise of rationalism and modernity. Why? Working with the history of death in Western Europe