Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The concept of human security, coming both out of international relations theory and the UN Commission on Human Security (whose final report will be issued May 2003), seeks to shift the focus of security and security studies from the level of the state to the level of the individual. This move is designed to redirect security debates from an exclusively national and military focus toward the daily conditions differently-situated people face in maintaining everyday life and as such, how to render them secure. This means taking into account such threats as not only war and civil conflict but domestic violence, the provision of adequate food, water, housing, employment opportunities, ethnic and religious freedoms, and a clean environment, among many others, when considering the meanings of security. Traditional security studies has responded to the emergence of this term, however, with a general dismissal, regarding it as far too sweeping and open-ended, not to mention so opaque and diffuse as to incorporate so many aspects of human life that it is no longer possible to locate precisely what is it not. More specifically, political science looks upon human security as lacking causal relationships; analytical separation; and analytical leverage and as having purged security of the most familiar connotation . . . safety from violence (Paris, 2001: 92, 91, 95). Such a response, however, seeks, I argue, to delimit and discipline any resistive potential, critical faculty, or theoretical purchase that human security as a principle or strategy may have beyond consideration and out of existence. While security studies seems to have detected a strategic and/or resistive potential inherent in human security, one which it seeks to dismiss and diffuse, human rights practitioners and theorists have also sought to respond to its emergence. The human rights community has largely embraced its arrival and sought to found its pursuit in established human rights regimes (Bunch, 2003). It remains important, however, to ask what is at stake when discourse and policy shifts from human rights to human security. Is this a move that seeks to dismantle and eclipse the established impact of human rights or a potential reinvigoration of a set of practices dismissed by guardians of the national interest and practitioners of realpolitik? In this paper, I want to explore the resistive potential of human security to disrupt the flow of traditional security and rights discourses. I want also, however, to consider the ways in which human security itself may be implicated in the securitization of everyday life, quite contrary to the intent of those who would embrace it as an important and workable alternative to national security and human rights. That is to say that the principle of human security may, in practice, render aspects of life not previously considered part of security debates as matters of national security and in so doing, function as a political technology, new form of biopolitics, and means of control over bare life. Such a possibility and potential needs to be carefully considered before human security becomes anointed as a new paradigm of critical study and dissent in international relations. Citations: Bunch, Charlotte. Human Rights and Human Security, unpublished talk given at the UN Commission on the Status of Women meeting. March 6, 2003. Paris, Roland. Human Security: Paradigm Shift or Hot Air. International Security. 26.2 (Fall 2001). 87-102.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper plays off Agamben's interpretation of the state of exception and Foucault's understanding of biopolitcs for the purpose of conceptualising the nature of politicisation in biopolitics. The paper concludes that the debates on multilateralism versus unilateralism in IR are neglecting powerful biopolitical processes that are ordering international relations on the basis of technologies and knowledges of administering life.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As the applications of biometric technologies continue to proliferate well beyond simplistic physical access control applications, the lines between the digital and the analog, and indeed Heidegger’s assertion that humans are technological and technology is human are becoming ever more apparent. Focusing on specific developments in the area of gait biometrics and the construction of a so-called ‘digital shoe’ – relying on ‘Adaptive FIT’ technology and intended to revise the craft and fashion oriented nature of the shoe industry – this paper considers these disruptions more closely in the context of an emerging digital/biometric state. According to many in the biometrics industry, the perceived invasiveness of biometric technologies, particularly when employed as static access controls vis-à-vis retinal, iris, or fingerprint scanning is best overcome through dynamic measurement approaches, in this case, the ‘biometric shoe’. Such approaches not only disrupt the digital-analog divide, but blur the lines of separation between technology and human, and the technology of capture and the captured body, thus making Heidegger’s assertions ever more apparent. The lofty ambitions or slippery slopes of such technologies further erode and/or rearticulate dominant notions of the self and disrupt modern liberal understandings of citizenship. In what is referred to here as ‘deep biopolitics’, drawing on deep ecology literature, this paper considers the rearticulations of the citizenship and the move towards a digital citizen, that is a fully designed and readable/digital body.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: The study of politics has been famously defined as the study of who gets what, how much and why. During periods of exception the fractures between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ become more apparent as the normalcy of everyday life is called into question. One way of cutting into this divide is an examination of the space between the politics of production and the politics of disposability. This paper is an examination into how social policies construct the space and distinction between the populations of disposability and the populations of entitlement in the contemporary global political economy and the series of exceptions that mark current iterations.This analysis sketches how the space of disposability is constructed by late modern capitalism which both defines populations and the structures of disposal associated with particular populations. An analysis of the biopolitics of disposability is a particular cut into the specific articulations of late modern capitalism that becomes more apparent during the periods of exception of ‘normal’ politics. The insights gleaned from such periods of exceptions as civil wars, natural disasters and welfare policies have in common a similar production of the space of marginalization that marks a new iteration of both biopolitics and the politics of disposability that provides explanation into why some get social goods, and the space of exclusion from these same goods.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Biopolitics is a structure of apprehending life and yet can give way to an indifference to or exchangeability of particular—not singular—lives. Gilles Deleuze describes this as a modulation between disciplinary and control societies. I argue that this is