The Everyday Life of Security: Capturing Space, Practice, and Affect

Nyman, Jonna

doi:10.1093/ips/olab005

Cited by 29 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 74 publications

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“…41 There is a connection here to normative possibilities raised by the everyday turn, much of which focuses on taking what appears routine and showing how it is, in fact, political. 42 Everyday images of war, peace, and security have the potential to disturb and denaturalise the dominant vision or image that we associate with each of these, creating counter-visuals or a visual counter-archive 43 that adds texture to our understanding of security. Before turning to methods of researcher-produced photography in IR, we should also note that other disciplines have been much more open to experimentation with photography as method.…”

Section: Photography And/in Irmentioning

confidence: 99%

What does security look like? Exploring interpretive photography as method

Ferhani

Nyman

2023

Eur. j. of int. secur.

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IR’s visual turn has emphasised visual analysis over visual method, centring images of war and crisis. Meanwhile security studies centres great power politics and moments of rupture. Together, they reinforce a dominant image of security as spectacular. This article unites two ethnographic projects focused on everyday security: one examining everyday security landscapes in China, and one examining health security at the UK border. Both found a gap between the dominant image of security and what we saw, and explored this gap through photography. Building on the everyday and visual turns, the article introduces interpretive photography as method to make two contributions. The first is methodological: it introduces interpretive photography as a distinct critical qualitative method that operates on five modes: enabling the seeing-capturing-making-sharing of visual artefacts, it also disrupts dominant visions and contributes to the construction of international relations. The second contribution is empirical: a deeper, richer account of what security looks like. While the discipline associates security with emergency politics or a state of exception, Nyman’s photographs show the exception-made-everyday, while Ferhani’s photos reject the exception by showing banal routines. In this way, photography engages the visuality of security, and can change how we see security.

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Section: Photography And/in Irmentioning

confidence: 99%

What does security look like? Exploring interpretive photography as method

Ferhani

Nyman

2023

Eur. j. of int. secur.

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“…What matters is not so much whether people actually believe the ideology and ideas articulated, but that regardless of what people believe, ideology shapes how they behave and what they can say on an everyday basis (Sorace, 2017: 10). Here I focus on elite discourse about security, for an exploratory study examining how ordinary Chinese citizens experience state security, see Nyman (2021).…”

Section: A Brief Conceptual History Of Security In Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a global security studies: what can looking at China tell us about the concept of security?

Nyman

2023

European Journal of International Relations

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Existing scholarship has demonstrated that theorising about security is Eurocentric. This leaves us with a partial account of the concept of security, which is presented as universal. This in turn generates explanatory problems because we are only seeing part of the picture. Yet there have been few attempts to move beyond critiques of Eurocentrism to examine the concept of security ‘elsewhere’. This paper takes China as its starting point, asking: what can looking at China tell us about security? In answering this question, the paper makes two contributions. First, it presents new empirical findings, building a conceptual history of security in China. Drawing on 140 key texts dating 1926–2022, the paper traces the emergence of the concept of security in China and its evolution through three explicit security concepts. Drawing on postcolonial insights it demonstrates that these concepts are hybrid, evolving out of multiple domestic and international influences. They have similarities as well as differences with the Eurocentric concept that dominates International Security Studies (ISS) and produce a discrete approach towards security that has been overlooked in a discipline that uses ‘Europe to explain Asia’. Second, considering these insights, the paper demonstrates that the universal concept of security that underpins theorising in ISS is partial and misleading. Differences in security concepts matter for theorising security and for understanding security policy. Consequently, I argue that we need to provincialize the concept of security: a truly global security studies is of necessity a provincial one attuned to difference and similarity.

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“…Ostensibly banal or quotidian constructions of (in)security merit serious attention. Such constructions may have causal importance, as Crawford and Hutchinson (2016: 1196) put it: ‘What someone reads on the Internet and reads on the television news about security may have direct impacts upon how that person experiences, responds to and feels security measures in their everyday life.’ They may also have constitutive significance, as Nyman (2021: 318) argues: ‘From bedrooms to subways, public parks, supermarkets, social media feeds, and the Buffyverse, in/security is (re)produced and experienced in mundane locations outside of formal politics.’…”

Section: Security Texts: Official and Everydaymentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday security and the newspaper obituary: Reproducing and contesting terrorism discourse

Jarvis,

Whiting

2023

Security Dialogue

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This article explores the obituary as an important, yet neglected, site of everyday security discourse. Through an original analysis of 86 published obituaries of 11 prominent ‘terrorists’, we offer three arguments. First, obituaries play an important constitutive role in shaping public understanding of terrorism and terrorists. Second, in so doing, terrorist obituaries frequently draw upon and reproduce established constructions of terrorism. Especially important here, we argue, are claims associated with the influential, yet heavily contested, ‘new terrorism’ thesis that posits profound transformations in the motives, organization and violences of terrorist groups from the late 20th century onwards. Third, notwithstanding the above, the (terrorist) obituary also offers important resources for nuancing and problematizing dominant constructions – such as of ‘new terrorism’ – in part because of the opportunity for sociopolitical critique afforded by this mnemonic genre. In making these arguments, the article therefore offers new empirical and conceptual insight into the obituary as a genre of everyday security knowledge, and into the mobility and resilience of established security discourses.

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The Everyday Life of Security: Capturing Space, Practice, and Affect

Cited by 29 publications

References 74 publications

What does security look like? Exploring interpretive photography as method

What does security look like? Exploring interpretive photography as method

Towards a global security studies: what can looking at China tell us about the concept of security?

Everyday security and the newspaper obituary: Reproducing and contesting terrorism discourse

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