Cutting off the King’s head: security and normative order beyond the state

Abstract

Central to the 'liberal political tradition' is the legitimacy of violence enacted by the state. While, since the Cold War, the horizons of security have broadened beyond the national boundaries of states, the sovereign state acting as the principal security agent remains the central tenet of the modern world order. Yet in much of the contemporary world, if the provision of security were ever the sole preserve of states this is no longer the case. This article, and the others gathered here that it acts as a preamble to, argue that there is a pressing need for greater comprehension of the complexities and dynamics of power relations through which security and justice are enacted. It briefly considers other conceptual and theoretical frameworks better suited to model these relations in ways that do not proceed simply from normative, global assumptions as to the forms that these relations should take. It concludes by stressing the necessity for grounded, empirical study of the everyday practices of security arrangements and actors in the contemporary world.

Past Communal Conflict and Contemporary Security Debates in Indonesia

“…That is not to say there was not a degree of sympathy among some in the region for Santoso and his group -interviewees explained "he was an icon defending the exclusion and 32 The work of Bakker (2016) shows how non-state ormas -mass civil society organisations -located in Kalimantan, North Sulawesi and Jakarta also seek legitimacy by 'performing' security and Wilson and Bakker (2016) also explore how the discourse on the threat of terrorism also supports the interests of such ormas. 33 There was greater sympathy for the group from residents of Tamanjeka neighbourhood located at the bottom of the Biru mountain where the group was located.…”

“…However, this paper predominantly explores the geopolitical interests of state and security actors in "performing" security, as we could find little evidence in the fieldwork that non-state actors were significantly involved in the hunt for Santoso or that they had established their own groups with a "security" function alongside the special operations (cf Wilson and Bakker 2016)…”

The connections between crisis and war preparedness in Sweden

“…Security has historically been regarded as the core competence of the state, whereby sovereign power, hierarchical structures and command and control have had the survival of the state itself as their primary objective (Wilson and Bakker, 2016; Rådestad and Larsson, 2018). A broader understanding of security became more widely accepted after the end of the Cold War, particularly among Western countries.…”

Place, peace and security in Solomon Islands

“…This means analysing the forms of power emerging from the ‘very local’ to the ‘supranational’ (Dinnen and Allen, 2018: 136–137), as they interact in place. Place as an observational scale acknowledges the reality that the state is not the ‘principal security agent’ (Wilson and Bakker, 2016: 290) against which one can measure levels of security/insecurity (Brigg, 2018; Brown, 2017: 26; Vogel, 2018: 433). This also enables us to shift our analytical lens to the ways in which state power manifests and interacts within particular locales (Mitchell, 2006).…”