Beyond Resisting Security: Thinking the Complex Political Environment Doerthe Rosenow (Royal Holloway, University of London) & Leonie Ansems de Vries (University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus)
[email protected] [email protected] Paper to be presented at the Millennium Annual Conference London School of Economics, 20-22 October 2012 Work in progress. Please do not cite without the permission of the author. Comments are most welcome. 1 Introduction (…) between substantial forms and determined subjects, between the two, there is…a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them.1 According to critical security scholars, categories of identity and opposition, the self and the other, are crucial to understand contemporary security practices, which ‘form[…] a people’ by instilling fear of what is deemed to be different.2 Security practices, the argument continues, facilitate exclusion and suppression of forms of life that are categorised as less valuable, or are deemed an outright threat. Related to this, the question of how to resist securitisation has emerged as an important one in recent years.3 Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster distinguish between two different approaches to resistance: (1) the ethical approach that focuses on how the subject of security can and should develop a different understanding of the self and its identity, recognising its interrelation with the Other, and (2) the agency approach that criticises how the Other, the abject of security, is continuously derived from the (ultimately Western) ‘us’ and deprived of any agency.4 This paper appreciates that the question of resistance has appeared on the agenda of critical security studies and values the insights provided by existing research, be they ‘ethical’ or ‘agency’-focused.