February 2022 Monthly Digest

The Monthly Digest is a resource provided by Security in Context that provides a list of recent publications, calls, conferences and other items relevant to the critical global, security, and international political economy studies audience. In addition to new items, our digest may contain relatively recent entries, so please double check dates on any calls or conferences. All descriptions taken from their original sources unless otherwise indicated. If we’ve missed something, or you have items you’d like to contribute for future digests, please email us at: submissions@securityincontext.org

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Books

Hard Times in the 21st Century

Helen Thompson

Getting to grips with the overlapping geopolitical, economic, and political crises faced by Western democratic societies in the 2020s.

The 21st century has brought a powerful tide of geopolitical, economic, and democratic shocks. Their fallout has led central banks to create over $25 trillion of new money, brought about a new age of geopolitical competition, destabilised the Middle East, ruptured the European Union, and exposed old political fault lines in the United States.

Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century is a long history of this present political moment. It recounts three histories - one about geopolitics, one about the world economy, and one about western democracies - and explains how in the years of political disorder prior to the pandemic the disruption in each became one big story. It shows how much of this turbulence originated in problems generated by fossil-fuel energies, and it explains why as the green transition takes place the long-standing predicaments energy invariably shapes will remain in place.

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Cyber Security Politics : Socio-Technological Transformations and Political Fragmentation

Edited By Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Andreas Wenger

This book examines new and challenging political aspects of cyber security and presents it as an issue defined by socio-technological uncertainty and political fragmentation.
Structured along two broad themes and providing empirical examples for how socio-technical changes and political responses interact, the first part of the book looks at the current use of cyber space in conflictual settings, while the second focuses on political responses by state and non-state actors in an environment defined by uncertainties. Within this, it highlights four key debates that encapsulate the complexities and paradoxes of cyber security politics from a Western perspective – how much political influence states can achieve via cyber operations and what context factors condition the (limited) strategic utility of such operations; the role of emerging digital technologies and how the dynamics of the tech innovation process reinforce the fragmentation of the governance space; how states attempt to uphold stability in cyberspace and, more generally, in their strategic relations; and how the shared responsibility of state, economy, and society for cyber security continues to be re-negotiated in an increasingly trans-sectoral and transnational governance space.
This book will be of much interest to students of cyber security, global governance, technology studies, and international relations.

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Counterterrorism Strategies in Egypt : Permanent Exceptions in the War on Terror

Ahmed M. Abozaid

This book reveals how counterterrorism discourses and practices became the main tool of a systematic violation of human rights in Egypt after the Arab Uprising.

It examines how the civic and democratic uprising in Egypt turned into robust authoritarianism under the pretence of counterterrorism and the ‘war on terror’. By interrogating Egypt’s counterterrorism legislation, the book identifies a correlation between counterterrorism narratives and the systemic violation of human rights. It examines the construction of a national security state that has little tolerance for dissent, political debate or the questioning of official policy, and how the anti-terrorism measures undertaken are actually anti-democracy strategies. The book also traces 150 years of Egyptian counterterrorism and counterinsurgency discourse, and analyses how this links with these practices of human rights assaults. By investigating how this discourse constructs and reproduces knowledge and meaning about terrorism and counterterrorism practices in Egypt, the book highlights how the government legitimises these violations against the population in the interests of the ruling elite.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism studies, critical terrorism studies, discourse theory, Middle Eastern politics, decoloniality, and International Relations.

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Controlling Immigration, A Comparative Perspective, Fourth Edition

EDITED BY JAMES F. HOLLIFIELD, PHILIP L. MARTIN, PIA M. ORRENIUS AND FRANÇOIS HÉRAN

The fourth edition of this classic work provides a systematic, comparative assessment of the efforts of major immigrant-receiving countries and the European Union to manage migration, paying particular attention to the dilemmas of immigration control and immigrant integration. 

Retaining its comprehensive coverage of nations built by immigrants—the so-called settler societies of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand— the new edition explores how former imperial powers—France, Britain and the Netherlands—struggle to cope with the legacies of colonialism, how social democracies like Germany and the Scandinavian countries balance the costs and benefits of migration while maintaining strong welfare states, and how more recent countries of immigration in Southern Europe—Italy, Spain, and Greece—cope with new found diversity and the pressures of border control in a highly integrated European Union. 

The fourth edition offers up-to-date analysis of the comparative politics of immigration and citizenship, the rise of reactive populism and a new nativism, and the challenge of managing migration and mobility in an age of pandemic, exploring how countries cope with a surge in asylum seeking and the struggle to integrate large and culturally diverse foreign populations.

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Scholarships & Fellowships

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Postdoctoral position in peace and conflict Research, Uppsala Universitet

The Department of Peace and Conflict Research was established in 1971 to conduct peace research and offer courses in peace and conflict studies. Currently approx. 85 persons are employed at the Department and at present some 300-400 students are enrolled every academic year. Courses offered include undergraduate and post-graduate courses, as well as a Ph. D. programme. 

The Department is now recruiting a postdoc researcher to support the project “Politics of Protection: Explaining International Responses to Atrocities” (with funding from a Wallenberg Academy Fellowship), headed by Professor Lisa Hultman. The position is for two years and starting 1 May 2022.

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Journal Articles

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Black Temporality in Times of Crisis

An issue of: South Atlantic Quarterly

Special Issue Editors: Badia Ahad, Habiba Ibrahim

Contributors to this special issue use crisis as a framework to explore historical and present-day Black temporalities. Considering how moments of emergency shift and redefine one’s relationship to time and temporality—particularly in the material, psychic, and emotional lives of Black people—the authors examine the resulting paradoxical aspects of time. They argue that crisis demands response while revealing no clear course of action and holds its victims in states of suspension and expectation. The authors use 2020 as a point of departure, in which “pandemic time” emerged as an experience of time’s seemingly simultaneous expansion and compression: the slow time of monotony, the racing time of anxiety, and the cyclical time of mourning. The essays cover racial capitalism as it exists through stolen land (dispossession of Native sovereignty), stolen life (African enslavement), and stolen time; the temporal differences between the lived experience of Black flesh and the Black body; and the significance of time to the production of Black ontology and the field of Black studies.

Contributors. Badia Ahad, Margo Natalie Crawford, Eve Dunbar, Julius B. Fleming, Tao Leigh Goffe, Habiba Ibrahim, Shaun Myers, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard, Sarah Stefana Smith, Frederick C. Staidum Jr.

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Unmasking the racism of orthodox international relations/international political economy theory

John M Hobson

Published February 16, 2022

This article emerges out of the racism debate in Security Dialogue (May 2020). It takes its cue from the passing claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is different from racism and that the former is deemed to be relatively innocuous while the latter is viewed as egregious. Here I reveal how Eurocentrism is equivalent to cultural racism. I show how racism has outwardly shapeshifted through time in everyday life and world politics, and how orthodox international relations theory’s racist trajectory has mirrored this. Since 1945, modern orthodox international relations theory has covered its racism with a non-racist mask through a sublimated discourse that focuses on cultural difference but is white racism in disguise. Unmasking modern international relations/international political economy theory exposes this sublimated racist discourse by revealing its racist double move: first, it whitewashes racism and denies its presence in the conduct of world politics and the global economy in the last three centuries, thereby providing an apologia for racist practices; second, it advances subliminal cultural-racist analytical/explanatory frameworks. I close by solving the conundrum as to how white orthodox international relations scholars who are most probably non-racist (though not anti-racist) in their personal lives embrace, albeit unwittingly, racist theories of world politics and the global economy.

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The impact of (counter-)terrorism on public (in)security in Nigeria: A vernacular analysis

Akinyemi Oyawale

Published January 27, 2022

This article examines the impact of (counter-)terrorism on public (in)security in Nigeria through engaging with non-elite understandings of ongoing conflicts in the northeast. Through 41 in-depth interviews carried out during a four-month fieldwork exercise with internally displaced persons in Nigeria, the article contributes to current (counter-)terrorism research on Nigeria and Africa by examining the lived experiences of non-traditional security ‘practitioners’, thus enriching current debates about ‘deepening’ and ‘broadening’ the security concept within critical security studies. The images of security that emerge show that the public in Nigeria adopt two main discursive devices, that is, a story and an interpretative repertoire, to discursively position themselves in relation to Boko Haram, the state and societal discourses and practices. Two discourses are prominent, namely a ‘(counter-)terrorist people’ discourse and a ‘kafir’ or ‘infidel’ discourse, which are constructed around ‘ethnic’ and ‘religious’ identities. This vernacular study of public understandings of (counter-)terrorism in Nigeria achieves three primary objectives: (i) it serves to invigorate debates around the meaning and practice of (in)security in Nigeria, (ii) it expands public (in)security debates on Africa, and (iii) it enriches vernacular research debate through foregrounding the experiences of groups and individuals who experience insecurity in their everyday lives.

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Lectures & Webinars

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Energy Security and Geopolitics in the 21st Century: is the search for energy a driver of conflict?

A panel by Security in Context, March 9th at 1pm EST, 7pm CET for a discussion on the relationship between "energy security" and foreign policy. This webinar is part of a series of discussions convened by Security in Context to explore the implications of multipolarity and 21st century geopolitics on the global South. 

Speakers:

Emily Meierding, Professor of National Security Affairs, Naval Postgraduate School

Robert Vitalis, Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Michael Klare, Professor Emeritus, Hampshire College

Moderated by Omar Dahi

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Book Panel: Jennifer Bajorek's "Unfixed Photography & Decolonial Imagination in West Africa"

In this book panel by Security in Context, Jennifer Bajorek discusses her book "Unfixed Photography & Decolonial Imagination in West Africa".

Speakers:

Jennifer Bajorek

El Hadj Malick Ndiaye

Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo

Moderated by Daniel Kojo Schrade

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Job Openings

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Pennsylvania State University Postdoctoral Scholar, Political Science and School of Public Policy

The School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University invite applications for a postdoctoral scholar with a specialty in U.S. state politics and/or health policy. We are especially interested in candidates who study maternal and child health. This is a one-year appointment, to begin Fall 2022 with an excellent possibility of reappointment for a second year.

The postdoctoral scholar will work on a multi-university project funded by the National Science Foundation. This will be a joint appointment under the direction of Professors Bruce Desmarais and Johabed Olvera at Penn State, Jeff Harden (University of Notre Dame), and Fred Boehmke (University of Iowa). The project is focused on the development and effects of U.S. state policies related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We seek candidates with experience collecting, wrangling, and analyzing complex data. The project will involve the collection and analysis of data from a variety of sources, including, but not limited to, legislative records, population health data, and social media data.