Claudia Aradau

• PhD
• Professor at King's College London

The special issue on Scripts of Security proposes to advance interdisciplinary exchanges between Science and Technology Studies and Critical Security Studies. While performativity, enactment, and intra-action have opened important questions about the messiness of security practices and the contingency of their effects, there has been less attention...

This article proposes to understand the ‘invisible data work’ that asylum seekers must do to put together a ‘credible’ asylum application. While the intersections between asylum and work have typically been analysed in relation to access to employment and labour conditions, we attend to the work of collecting, assembling, and ordering different for...

While postcolonial approaches to International Relations have offered new concepts, methods, and political imaginaries of global politics, postsocialism has been absent as an analytical and political approach. Postsocialism has been mainly a descriptive term naming the temporal transition of the Second World to liberal democracy and market economy...

This article brings debates about data visualization in digital humanities in conversation with critical security studies and international relations. Building on feminist approaches in digital humanities, we explore the potential and limitations of data visualization as a critical method for research on (in)security. We unpack three aspects of mak...

Data have become a vital device of border governance and security. Recent scholarship on the datafication of borders and migration at the intersection of science and technology studies and critical security studies has privileged concepts attuned to messiness, contingency, and friction such as data assemblages and infrastructures. This paper propos...

Despite its common usage, the meaning of ‘democratic’ in democratic intelligence oversight has rarely been spelled out. In this article, we situate questions regarding intelligence oversight within broader debates about the meanings and practices of democracy. We argue that the literature on intelligence oversight has tended to implicitly or explic...

Alongside practice, performativity has inspired numerous engagements with ontology and epistemology in international political sociology . Some of the most exciting developments in sociologies of the international have their roots in embracing theories that foreground how words, discourse, things, data have performative effects. From reconfiguring...

In 2020, the European Union announced the award of the contract for the biometric part of the new database for border control, the Entry Exit System, to two companies: IDEMIA and Sopra Steria. Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of pub...

This chapter investigates the algorithmic production of potentially dangerous ‘others’. Starting from the public scene opened by the case of the Al Jazeera journalist Ahmad Zaidan, wrongly identified by the SKYNET programme of the US National Security Agency as a suspect terrorist, we show how others are produced as ‘anomalies’ at the intersection...

From the ‘needle in a haystack’ to microtargeting, big data and its algorithmic operations have produced new modes of knowledge for the government of individuals and populations. Big data has sparked much anxiety about the ways in which traditional modes of knowledge have been unsettled or even undone. Starting from the scene of the Cambridge Analy...

Are algorithms ruling the world today? Is artificial intelligence making life-and-death decisions? Are social media companies able to manipulate elections? As we are confronted with public and academic anxieties about unprecedented changes, this book offers a different analytical prism to investigate these transformations as more mundane and fraugh...

Analyses of digital capitalism, data capitalism, platform capitalism, and surveillance capitalism are underpinned by controversies over the economic value of data. In this chapter, we investigate different approaches to value and valorization. We take a scene of controversy around Spotify as an inquiry into the conjunction of digital production and...

The language of ethics has increasingly informed calls for the regulation of big data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence (AI). In this chapter, we analyse a series of initiatives by state, supra-state, tech, and civil society actors to deploy ethical principles and codes as ways of ‘conducting the conduct’ of developers, engineers, and compan...

As facial recognition is increasingly deployed around the world, from the US to China, civil liberties activists and democratic actors have drawn attention to its error rates and privacy invasions. The chapter unpacks new facets of algorithmic accountability, as it emerged nationally and transnationally by producing accounts of algorithmic error an...

In the Conclusion, we discuss the compound political implications of an ascendant algorithmic reason. What vocabularies have become available to us to render the rationalities and materializations of algorithmic reason? How can algorithmic reason be politicized? Even as the conditions of political action become more limiting through algorithmic rea...

Questions about the international have emerged around the power of big tech companies: Google attempting to access the Chinese market, Facebook providing digital infrastructures in Africa. Starting from the problem of drawing borders and boundaries as constitutive of the international, we analyse how states attempt to render algorithms governable b...

How do algorithms make decisions, how do they draw lines of difference? Mobilizing the lesser-known critical theory of Günther Anders, this chapter argues that we need to approach algorithmic decision-making through the prism of production and distributed human-machine work. To this end, we develop a methodology to ‘follow an algorithm’ marketed by...

This chapter investigates how algorithmic reason becomes materialized in the infrastructure of digital platforms. While the literature on platforms has focused on data extraction, centralization, and new enclosures through monopolization, we argue that platform power emerges from the work of decomposing and recomposing small and large forms, inside...

From statistical calculations to psychological knowledge, from profiling to scenario planning, and from biometric data to predictive algorithms, International Relations scholars have shed light on the multiple forms of knowledge deployed in the governing of populations and their political effects. Recent scholarship in critical border and security...

The use of digital devices and the collection of digital data have become pervasive in borderzones. Whether deployed by state or non-state actors, digital devices are rolled out despite intense criticism and controversy. In this article, I propose to approach these interventions through the prism of experimentality. Experimentality was initially fo...

Critical scholarship in international relations, border, and migration studies has analyzed the cultures of suspicion that underpin border practices and have increasingly reshaped the politics of asylum globally. They have highlighted either the generalization of suspicion through the securitization of asylum or racialized and gendered continuities...

Concerns with errors, mistakes, and inaccuracies have shaped political debates about what technologies do, where and how certain technologies can be used, and for which purposes. However, error has received scant attention in the emerging field of ignorance studies. In this article, we analyze how errors have been mobilized in scientific and public...

Despite extensive criticisms of mass surveillance and mobilization by civil liberties and digital rights activists, surveillance has paradoxically been extended and legalized in the name of security. How do some democratic claims against surveillance appear to be normal and common-sense, whereas others are deemed unacceptable, even outlandish? Inst...

This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions...

This set of collaboratively written keywords uses the critical standpoint of migration to engage with a range of categories and concepts that are "minor" in the sense that they are widely used in both public discourse and political theory, but which remain often under-theorized outside of critical border and migration studies. As the contributions...

Articulations of discontinuity and moments of dissent have been central to critical historical work. However, such vocabularies and analyses of historical change have received less attention in the emerging field of digital methods. Digital methods based on discerning patterns have focused on continuities, while discontinuities and ruptures have be...

The use of digital devices and the collection of digital data have become pervasive in borderzones. Whether deployed by state or non-state actors, digital devices are rolled out despite intense criticism and controversy. In this article, I propose to approach these interventions through the prism of experimentality. Experimentality was initially fo...

Biometrics, the technology for measuring, analysing and processing a person’s physiological characteristics, such as their fingerprints, iris or facial patterns, is increasingly used in the management of migrant and refugee flows. This panel interrogates the uses of biometric technologies and the consequences for the lives of migrants and refugees....

This article proposes ‘biopolitics multiple’ as an approach to the heterogeneity of biopolitical technologies deployed to govern migration today. Building on work that has started to develop analytical vocabularies to diagnose biopolitical technologies that work neither by fostering life nor by making people die in a necropolitical sense, it concep...

The opacity of digital technologies has posed significant challenges for critical research and digital methods. In response, controversy mapping, reverse engineering and hacking have been key methodological devices to grapple with opacity and ‘open the black box’ of digital ecosystems. We take recent developments in digital humanitarianism and the...

From securitisation theory to critical approaches to (in)security - Volume 3 Issue 3 - Claudia Aradau

Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards internal to knowledge practice to validate their knowledge claims. This quest for scientific standards now also operates against the background of debates on ‘post-truth’, which raise pressing and perplexing questions for critical lines of thought. We pr...

As digital technologies and algorithmic rationalities have increasingly reconfigured security practices, critical scholars have drawn attention to their performative effects on the temporality of law, notions of rights, and understandings of subjectivity. This article proposes to explore how the ‘other’ is made knowable in massive amounts of data a...

Critical analyses of security have focused on the production of knowledge, techniques, and devices that tame unknowns and render social problems actionable. Drawing on insights from, science and technology studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of “ignorance studies,” this article proposes to explore the enactment of non-knowledge in secu...

From ‘connecting the dots’ and finding ‘the needle in the haystack’ to predictive policing and data mining for counterinsurgency, security professionals have increasingly adopted the language and methods of computing for the purposes of prediction. Digital devices and big data appear to offer answers to a wide array of problems of (in)security by p...

The ‘new mobilities paradigm’ and critical security studies share vocabularies of mobility, circulation and security. Yet, there have been only limited intersections between these approaches. This article explores the relation between mobility and security by developing a series of epistemic-political distinctions between motion, circulation and mo...

The Snowden revelations and the emergence of ‘Big Data’ have rekindled questions about how security practices are deployed in a digital age and with what political effects. While critical scholars have drawn attention to the social, political and legal challenges to these practices, the debates in computer and information science have received less...

Mark Neocleous’s War Power, Police Power reproblematises the relation between war and police and develops a systematic critique of discourses of ‘the new’ across policy and academic fields. To nuance Neocleous’s powerful critique, I show that disjunctures between war and police are as politically important as their conjunction.

Algorithms, biometrics and body scanners, computers and databases, infrastructures of various kinds, ranging from what is commonly referred to as ‘hi-tech’ to ‘low-tech’ items such as walls or paper files, have garnered increased attention in critical approaches to (in)security. This article introduces a special issue whose contributions aim to fur...

‘Crowded places’ have recently been problematized as objects of terrorist attacks. Following this redefinition of terrorism, crowds have been reactivated at the heart of a security continuum of counter-terrorism, emergency planning and policing. How does the crowd referent recalibrate security governance, and with what political effects? This artic...

Over the past decade, resilience has become a quasi-universal answer to problems of security and governance, from climate change to children's education, from indigenous history to disaster response, and from development to terrorism. This article places the proliferation of resilience in relation to the earlier proliferation of security discourse...

Drawing has been largely neglected in discussions of visuality, conflict, and violence. In 2007, the International Criminal Court accepted 500 children's drawings depicting the conflict in Darfur as contextual evidence for war crime trials against Sudanese officials. Starting from this event, and the attention that the Darfuri children's drawings h...

Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and r...

Tarak Barkawi has recently enjoined International Relations and security studies scholars to embark upon a critical study of the phenomenon of war. There is much to agree with in his argument and the idea of ‘critical war studies’ seems particularly apposite in a world where war and other forms of organised or dispersed violence have become increas...

Psychological knowledge has become incorporated into a range of security practices, discourses, and interventions in catastrophic events, including terrorism. By engaging the existing literature on the medicalization and psychologization of security, this article reads the enactment knowledge deployed in preparedness exercises from the perspective...

In October 2005 200 delegates from twenty-eight countries in Europe gathered in Brussels to take part in an event for sex workers' rights, which involved a three-day conference, the presentation of a Declaration on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe in the European Parliament, the drafting of a Manifesto, recommendations for policy makers, a party...

The “next terrorist attack” has become one of the main fixtures of the collective imagination of catastrophic futures. Reflecting on a series of exercises and scenarios deployed to prepare for terrorist attacks, this article interrogates the co-constitution of temporality and spatiality in such practices. The main argument is that practices of prep...

A cidadania europeia é marcada por uma tensão entre uma cidadania derivativa do Estado-nação e uma cidadania definida pela liberdade de movimento. Abordando essa tensão como sintomática de uma profunda contradição entre integração e mobilidade que é constitutiva das formações sociais modernas, este artigo desenvolve uma sociologia política da mobil...

This book argues that catastrophe is a particular way of governing future events – such as terrorism, climate change or pandemics – which we cannot predict but which may strike suddenly, without warning, and cause irreversible damage. At a time where catastrophe increasingly functions as a signifier of our future, imaginaries of pending doom have f...

On 8 June 2008, groups of Roma and Sinti people took to the streets of Rome alongside their supporters and other activists in an attempt to challenge the ‘security package’ passed by the Berlusconi government and those laws and regulations that were increasingly perceived as discriminatory. ‘The Roma people come out of the camps!’ proclaimed the he...

The end of the cold war saw the reemergence of human trafficking on the global political agenda as a new security threat integrated in a continuum of organized crime, illegal migration, drug trafficking, and terrorism. The words of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (2007) echo this logic: "The threat to the United States posed by...

Critical infrastructure protection is prominently concerned with objects that appear indispensable for the functioning of social and political life. However, the analysis of material objects in discussions of critical infrastructure protection has remained largely within the remit of managerial responses, which see matter as simply passive, a blank...

European citizenship is marked by a tension: between a citizenship that is derivative of the nation-state, and a citizenship that is defined by free movement. Approaching this tension as symptomatic of a deep-rooted contradiction between integration and mobility that is constitutive of modern social formations, this article develops a political soc...

About the book: This book examines global governance through Foucaultian notions of governmentality and security, as well as the complex intersections between the two. The volume explores how Foucault's understanding of the general economy of power in modern society allows us to consider the connection of two broad possible dynamics: the global gov...

As potential disasters appear now as indeterminate, unpredictable and unexpected, preparedness exercises are placed at the heart of a new ratio which challenges or replaces statistical calculability. In this sense, the future of unexpected events cannot be known or predicted; it can only be enacted.

This chapter is structured around two ideas that are defining of a deconstructive approach to alterity: the ‘impossible’ and aporia. Deconstruction pays close attention to the remainder, tensions and the différance that the relation to the other presupposes.The aporia, according to Derrida, is the experience of responsibility that emerges from the...

Criminology and International Relations (IR) share a relatively wide vocabulary: political violence, crime, security, deterrence, war on terror, risk, human rights and freedom. Particularly in the case of the ‘war on terror’, similar concerns and conceptual tools have increasingly surfaced on both sides. Nonetheless, one debate—namely Carl Schmitt'...

This article argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of political democratic practice. Drawin...

About the book: A wide range of critical theorists is used in the study of international politics, and until now there has been no text that gives concise and accessible introductions to these figures. Critical Theorists and International Relations provides a wide-ranging introduction to thirty-two important theorists whose work has been influentia...

The article discusses the anti-Roma measures and violence in Italy following the murder of Giovanna Regianni in October 1007 as 'ordinary racism'. It challenges claims about the extraordinary situation of Italian racism by showing how racism is deeply embedded in European politics.

This chapter traces the contribution of critical scholarship to security studies since the 1990s.Drawing on continental philosophy more largely has allowed security scholars to challenge dominant understandings and practices of security and add new dimensions to the poststructuralist questions about the significance of identity construction and dis...

This chapter shows how the ‘bare life’ of victims of trafficking is not simply an empty space, constituted through negation, but has to be constituted through knowledge and technologies about who the women are, their biographical profiles, their past and their probable future development. Rights are only granted to particular categories of women an...

We have come to a fork in the road. This may be a moment no less decisive than 1945 itself, when the United Nations was founded … I believe the time is ripe for a hard look at fundamental policy issues, and at the structural changes that may be needed in order to strengthen them. History is a harsh judge: it will not forgive us if we let this momen...

The “war on terror” has triggered intense debates about the role of security and liberty, the trade-off between security and liberty, the meaning of security and the power of civil liberties. Nonetheless, while security has been closely dissected either as a governmental or exceptional practice, liberty has been largely shrouded in silence. Rather...

Security has been located either in the political spectacle of public discourses or within the specialized field of security professionals, experts in the management of unease. This article takes issue with these analyses and argues that security practices are also formulated in more heterogeneous locations. Since the early days of the “war on terr...

What should be done about trafficking in women? Rethinking Trafficking in Women argues that the question to be asked is, 'What cannot be done about trafficking in women?' Exploring the complex relationship between security, subjectivity and politics, Aradau argues that security practices reproduce a politics of unfreedom and inequality. Politics ou...

Political events that unmake the security dispositif of governing human trafficking are informed by the principles of equality and universality and connected with the excessive elements of a situation, the anomalous presence of those who should not be there, who are represented as not belonging to the situation. An evental politics harnessed to the...

The previous chapter has shown that the formulation of desecuritizing, emancipatory and ethical strategies to unmake security leads to a theoretical and practical impasse. The representations of victims of trafficking proposed by the humanitarian discourses, the representation of suffering and continuous insecurity that trafficked women experience...

In September 2005, one more story of trafficking was reported in the UK media1 — another raid, one more massage parlour and a police rescue operation. Yet, this story of rescuing victims of trafficking did not stop where most stories of trafficking told in the media end. While 19 women were reported as having been saved from the premises of the Bir...

‘Some 2.5 million people throughout the world are at any given time recruited, entrapped, transported and exploited — a process called human trafficking’, repeated a press release by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2007). As a political problem of such urgency and magnitude, human trafficking has been a recent addition to the E...

A politics that enunciates the equality and universality of work is both emancipatory and transformative in the situation of trafficking. It is harnessed to the excessive elements of a situation, the illegal migrant sex workers, who are present but represented as not belonging to the situation. By formulating the universal of work from the standpoi...

Strategies of unmaking security depend upon the dynamics of practices and representations that redeploy and reappropriate alternative discourses, ethical considerations and subjective resistance within the security dispositif. The humanitarian approach insidiously transforms into the governmentality of risk and folds victimhood upon risk factors, b...

‘Central to the problem of policing THB [trafficking in human beings] is the difficulty in clearly identifying the threat that THB poses to a State’. Thus starts a Europol Report on human trafficking (Europol, 2003). Another Report, this time by the IOM, is more explicit in identifying trafficking as ‘the most menacing form of irregular migration d...

On 18 October 2005, the European Commission issued a communication on ‘Fighting trafficking in human beings — an integrated approach and proposals for an action plan’. After naming ‘human rights’ as the fundamental concern in tackling human trafficking, the document immediately emphasizes its dimensions of organized crime and illegal migration. ‘Hi...