In “Making Sense of Security,” J. Benton Heath convincingly argues that the concept of security should be understood as a struggle for epistemic authority. Heath develops a comprehensive typology that helps to understand the processes through which people make sense of the term security, while it also helps identifying the legal and political practices involved. However, as he rightly observes, these approaches to security are “not stable equilibria but rather more like quantum states, in which each type contains the potential for the others.”1 Global counterterrorism law powerfully illustrates this evolution. In particular, the growing field of preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) reveals a flow of security conceptions, including realist, widened, and discursive security. Applying Heath's typology to this field shows that evolving rationales have set in motion normative practices, which are difficult to trace from within a traditional international security law framework. In their relational modes, such practices aim at turning risks into opportunities, thus denoting that one's security is the other's perpetuation of insecurities. The recourse to resilience as a technique of counterterrorism governance that instrumentalizes shared and emerging social identities and practices in order to prevent extremism, contributes to the entrenchment of an ever-expanding security apparatus. But it is precisely by resorting to social life—unpredictable as it is—that resilience becomes a quantum state itself, which bears potential for disruption.

Claims to security are everywhere. They are used by states to justify invading other nations1 and to derogate from international law obligations.2 They are invoked by governments as reasons to exclude foreign nationals from their territory;3 surveil their citizens;4 and kill citizens and foreigners alike by remote control.5 Some experts use security claims to underscore the seriousness of global threats, like COVID-19.6 Security claims are also used by communities to defend their rights and well-being from those threatening them, including the state itself.7 Still others criticize the use of security discourse—in at least some circumstances—describing it as undermining the rule of law.8 Embedded within these claims is a view about whose security matters most—something that is also implicitly reflected in J. Benton Heath's four-part typology of security claims described in his recent article, “Making Sense of Security.”9 This essay explores the importance of whose security matters to Heath's framework. It does so by examining one political movement currently challenging the U.S. national security state. This movement is led by members of groups targeted and disadvantaged by U.S. national security policies—namely, Muslim, African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian communities. In that movement's recently released policy agenda, Abolishing the War on Terror & Building Communities of Care: A Grassroots Policy Agenda for the Biden-Harris Administration and 117th Congress (Abolishing the War on Terror), 10 its leaders call for abolishing the national security state and the War on Terror that it birthed.11

In “Making Sense of Security,” J. Benton Heath pushes the reader to tangle with two unresolved foundational questions about the use of security in international law: who decides questions of security, and on what grounds.1 This essay examines the role of race in both of those questions, identifying structures and mechanisms of racial subordination that must be surfaced to fully make sense of security.2 In particular, it foregrounds the tension between reformist reforms and abolitionist reforms to which Heath makes reference. By rendering visible the historical and contemporary work performed by white supremacy in security, this essay seeks to elucidate and problematize that dilemma. Rather than retaining the exclusionary security frame, a turn to solidarity offers the possibility of a more inclusive approach to international law that creates connection based on our shared humanity.

Should the climate change crisis be framed in security terms? Many argue that it is dangerous to treat non-military threats as security issues. Such “securitization” is associated with the expansion of executive power and the exercise of exceptional measures involving the suspension of individual rights, secrecy, state violence, and a weakening of the rule of law. Nonetheless, climate change has already been identified as a security issue by many government agencies and international institutions.1 But, as J. Benton Heath explores in “Making Sense of Security,” the very concept of security is both ambiguous and contested.2 There are different and competing ideas about what it means, when, and by whom it should be invoked, the kinds of law and policy responses it should trigger, and, crucially, who gets to decide these questions. Heath argues that differing approaches to security reflect deeper struggles over whose knowledge matters in identifying and responding to security threats. He develops a typology for assessing these different approaches, and the implications they have for international law and institutions. But, while he notes that climate change is precisely one of those issues around which there are competing security claims, he leaves to others the question of whether, or how, to frame climate change in security terms. This essay takes up that question, continuing the inquiry into how best to understand the concept of security, and how Heath's typology helps think about the question. It argues that it may indeed be important to frame climate change in security terms, but as a matter of global security rather than national security.

In this essay, I analyze how feminist work on security is read and understood, where it is located, and the relationship between feminist scholarship and conceptions of security pluralism. I pick up J. Benton Heath's argument that “pluralist security” is a good tool to address widened security agendas and to decolonize international law.1 I also develop Heath's account of “widened security”—which he associates with feminist security studies and with the women, peace, and security agenda—to argue that making feminist sense of widened security requires distinguishing between which feminist knowledge is incorporated into international law and the larger corpus of feminist work.2 I use feminist analysis as a tool for examining, and responding to, the structural inequalities within law, starting with gender, but expanding to intersectional3 and postcolonial feminist insight.4 This approach facilitates the deployment of gender as co-constituted through adjunct vectors of inequality, including, but not limited to, race, sexuality, ableism, or class, as well as the legacies of empire.5