Since the infamous events of 9/11, the fear of terrorism and the determination to strike back against it has become a topic of enormous public debate. The 'war on terror' discourse has developed not only through American politics but via other channels including the media, the church, music, novels, films and television, and therefore permeates many aspects of American life. Stuart Croft suggests that the process of this production of knowledge has created a very particular form of common sense which shapes relationships, jokes and even forms of tattoos. Understanding how a social process of crisis can be mapped out and how that process creates assumptions allows policy-making in America's war on terror to be examined from new perspectives. Using IR approaches together with insights from cultural studies, this 2006book develops a dynamic model of crisis which seeks to understand the war on terror as a cultural phenomenon.

Abstract. This article seeks to develop a concept of 'security governance' in the context of post-Cold War Europe. The validity of a governance approach lies in its ability to locate some of the distinctive ways in which European security has been coordinated, managed and regulated. Based on an examination of the way governance is utilised in other political fields of political analysis, the article identifies the concept of security governance as involving the coordinated management and regulation of issues by multiple and separate authorities, the interventions of both public and private actors (depending upon the issue), formal and informal arrangements, in turn structured by discourse and norms, and purposefully directed toward particular policy outcomes. Three issues are examined to demonstrate the utility of the concept of security governance for understanding security in post-Cold War Europe: the transformation of NATO, the Europeanisation of security accomplished through EU-led initiatives and, finally, the resultant dynamic relationship between forms of exclusion and inclusion in governance. IntroductionThinking about European security has been shaped by a series of different ideas and concepts over the past quarter of a century: an architecture, regime, community. However, it has not been subjected to an account through the lens of governance. Given the application of the concept to a range of other thematic areas, this is rather surprising. This article seeks to explore 'security governance' in the context of post-Cold War Europe. The validity of a governance approach lies in its ability to locate some of the distinctive ways in which European security has been coordinated, managed and regulated. Three issues are chosen to illustrate this: the transformation of NATO, the Europeanisation of security accomplished through EU-led initiatives and, finally, the resultant dynamic relationship between forms of exclusion and inclusion in governance.The timing of research into security governance in Europe might be seen to be rather challenging. From a series of arguments about the nature and balance of institutional responsibilities, to debates over the role of institutions in the global 'war on terror', to the seeming marginalisation of those institutions in the war in Iraq, it has been difference that has seemingly been the hallmark of European security interaction. Indeed, this might raise a question about why think in terms of governance now; why at all? Other frameworks are viable, networks perhaps most obviously. Governance is, however, an obvious choice, not least because in a sense, it is the concept that policymakers have sought to develop. Governance also encompasses many of the central themes of European security: the importance of ideas, of institutions and both formal and informal structures, of multiple actors purposefully motivated. Security governance might also be able to emphasise key strengths of other approaches: being based on both shared epistemologies (as with epistemic communities) and ...

The development of ontological security studies, for example by Mitzen, Steele, and Berenskoetter and Giegerich, has been an important innovation in the field. However, by focusing on the level of the state rather than that of the individual, this new tradition is somewhat different from the intellectual origins of ontological security in sociology and psychology. Drawing on those disciplines, I argue that the key focus should be on the understandings of individuals about their own security, intersubjectively constructed. Ontological security can be understood in terms of the need to construct biographical continuity, to construct a web of trust relations, to act in accordance with self-integrity, and to struggle against ontological insecurity, or dread, in Kierkegaard's sense. I then take and apply this framework to understand the process by which British Muslims have become insecuritized (understood as a term through which dominant power can decide who should be protected and who should be designated as those to be controlled, objectified, and feared) in the period since 9/11.

IntroductionDuring the fallout from the Boston bombings in April 2013, the city's mayor highlighted the resilience shown by the people of Boston. He celebrated the fact that Boston was a 'resilient city' that would bounce back (Menino, 2013). Numerous media commentaries, blog posts and online memorials picked up this theme of resilience to articulate a range of positive attributes that individuals/Boston/America had exhibited. They had been brave, quick thinking, a strong community and yet, at the same time, calm and able to follow instructions from the security forces that amassed and co-operated. Resilience, it seems, carried both popular appeal and policy relevance in a manner that allowed security objectives to shift, adapt, andaccording to media narrative -move quickly in relation to the event, the perpetrators and the political challenges that were arising.Much like the concept of globalisation that rose to popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, resilience seems to carry a productive ambiguity that both resists exact definition and allows for a spectrum of interactions and engagements between policy and the everyday which are as (seemingly) effective as they are (apparently) apolitical.What is resilience? How did it emerge? What are the political effects of this emergence? The ambition of this special issue is to outline an agenda for research into resilience that emphasises how we might address the status of politics and the political in relation to this discourse of security. In many ways, this is a highly unconventional and therefore distinctive collection of articles. For a start, it is unusual in combining both academic and practitioner perspectives, a quality that we believe to be increasingly important in order to understand the complexity of issues at stake in the rise of resilience. The special issue is also marked by a deliberate eclecticism in terms of authors' theoretical and methodological approaches, the type of sources they use and ultimately their normative attitudes towards resilience, per se. As is to be expected, we find moments of tension as well as agreement between the pieces assembled here but, for us, this only enhances the collection as a whole by openly exploring the multifaceted -and highly political -nature of resilience.Some of the articles contribute to existing debates by diversifying the policy contexts in which the politics of resilience can be analysed, including: international peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention and human security (Chandler, 2013;Williams, 2013); the maintenance and bs_bs_banner

The performance of International Relations (IR) scholarship -as in all scholarship -acts to close and police the boundaries of the discipline in ways that reflect power-knowledge relations. This has led to the development of two strands of work in ontological security studies in IR, which divide on questions of ontological choice and the nature of the deployment of the concept of dread. Neither strand is intellectually superior to the other and both are internally heterogeneous. That there are two strands, however, is the product of the performance of IR scholarship, and the two strands themselves perform distinct roles. One allows ontological security studies to engage with the 'mainstream' in IR; the other allows 'international' elements of ontological security to engage with the social sciences more generally. Ironically, both can be read as symptoms of the discipline's issues with its own ontological (in)security. We reflect on these intellectual dynamics and their implications and prompt a new departure by connecting ontological security studies in IR with the emerging interdisciplinary fields of the 'vernacular' and 'everyday' via the mutual interest in biographical narratives of the self and the work that they do politically.