Entangled security: Science, co-production, and intra-active insecurity

Abstract

This article advances a new account of security as an intensely relational and ontologically entangled phenomenon that does not exist prior to, nor independently of, its intra-action with other phenomena and agencies. Security's ‘entanglement’ is demonstrated through an analysis of the protracted security concerns engendered by ‘dangerous’ scientific experiments performed with lethal H5N1 flu viruses. Utilising methodological approaches recently developed in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the article explicates the intensely ‘co-productive’ dynamics at play between security and science in those experiments, and which ultimately reveal security to be a deeply relational phenomenon continuously emerging out of its engagement with other agencies. Recovering this deeper ontological entanglement, the article argues, necessitates a different approach to the study of security that does not commence by fixing the meaning and boundaries of security in advance. Rather, such an approach needs to analyse the diverse sites, dynamics, and processes through which security and insecurity come to intra-actively materialise in international relations. It also demands a fundamental reconsideration of many of the discipline's most prominent security theories. They are not merely conceptual tools for studying security, but crucial participants in its intra-active materialisation.

Globality and Entangled Security: Rethinking the Post-1945 Order

“…Looking forward, any understanding of future security challenges that is not rooted in perspectives that take the globe itself as a unit and fundamental starting point for analysis will be incomplete. Whether it be the impacts of economic or migration interdependence (Farrell and Newman 2019;Tennis 2020;Tsourapas 2018); the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed underlying transformations in the global economy (McNamara and Newman 2020); how public health itself is a global and not a national security question (Elbe and Buckland-Merrett 2019); or the role that new levels of virtual engagement may play in reshaping patterns of cross-border interconnectivity, the necessity of understanding security entanglements as a distinct form of globality will only become more consequential.…”

“…The concept of security entanglement points to how both national and international security are inherently deeply relational and ontologically interconnected phenomena that do not exist prior to, nor separate from, dynamic interactions with other phenomena (see e.g., Elbe and Buckland-Merrett 2019). 2 Entanglement also suggests the possibility of transcending international and national divides to examine other spaces and cross-cutting dynamics and thereby to understand security dynamics as not just taking place within the international system, but as fundamentally constitutive of world orders.…”

Securitising Covid-19? The Politics of Global Health and the Limits of the Copenhagen School

“…While the Copenhagen School considers science to be an auxiliary discourse in the epistemological construction of existential threats (specialists are 'functional actors' who authorise speech acts), it is argued here that scientific/medical and security practices and knowledge are interwoven in the everyday. The grammar proposed by Buzan and Waever disregards the multiple ways in which the security rationality insinuates itself into the various dimensions of society, but also how it is reshaped and, as noted by Elbe (2011;Elbe and Buckland-Merrett 2019), instrumentalised by medical knowledge. In other words, securitisation theory excludes:…”

Enfolding wholes in parts: quantum holography and International Relations

“…Recent years have witnessed a growing interest among social scientists and IR scholars in quantum theory (Becker, 1991; Der Derian and Wendt, 2020; Elbe and Buckland-Merrett, 2019; Haven and Khrennikov, 2013; Montgomery, 2016; O’Brien, 2016; Overman, 1996; Tesař, 2015; Zanotti, 2017). 11 Much of the debate, however, has been on the implications of non-locality, uncertainty/indeterminacy, consciousness, entanglement, and the measurement problem for social sciences, whereas the quantum effect of holography has received far less attention.…”