This article offers an original discursive analysis of the construction of terrorism within travel advice published by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It argues that this advice positions terrorism as a very specific – omnipresent, Islamist, and non-state – security threat from which British nationals will never be safe. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, the article offers a descriptively rich exploration of terrorism’s production in an entirely neglected site of discourse. Second, analytically, it details the work done by specific rhetorical mechanisms within FCDO guidance, including the recycling of generic claims relating to terrorism, quantifications of risk, and the imagination of hypothetical attacks. Third, conceptually, it demonstrates the contingent and precarious character of this discourse by highlighting important exclusions that cohere and constitute terrorism as constructed in travel advice. These exclusions – notably the violences of right-wing actors and of states themselves – contribute to a very specific construction of terrorism that helps foreclose discussion of UK responsibility for, or involvement in, terrorism.

In this paper we discuss how an innovative audio-visual project was adopted to foster active, rather than declarative learning, in critical International Relations (IR). First, we explore the aesthetic turn in IR, to contrast this with forms of representation that have dominated IR scholarship. Second, we describe how students were asked to record short audio or video projects to explore their own insights through aesthetic and non-written formats. Third, we explain how these projects are understood to be deeply embedded in social science methodologies. We cite our inspiration from applying a personal sociological imagination, as a way to counterbalance a ‘marketised’ slant in higher education, in a global economy where students are often encouraged to consume, rather than produce knowledge. Finally, we draw conclusions in terms of deeper forms of student engagement leading to new ways of thinking and presenting new skills and new connections between theory and practice.

While traditional and non-traditional issues of security are at the very top of the policy agenda, security studies has been subject to much criticism. These concerns have often been framed in terms of challenges to the field’s relevance. This paper seeks to further the debate on relevance in security studies. Specifically, the paper examines the field in three major dimensions of relevance: responsiveness, diversity, and intellectual pluralism. Unlike previous disciplinary investigations, which have solely focused on United States (US) security studies, this paper examines trends pertaining to relevance in security studies in the USA as well as in Europe. The paper finds some evidence of responsiveness, a slight trend toward a more equitable share of female authors, and conflicting evidence when it comes to intellectual pluralism. The paper suggests that the field appears more as a ‘broad church’ than ‘irrelevant cult’ when its output in the USA, as well as in Europe, is taken into account.

Drawing on the insights of critical security studies, this article argues that an understanding of emancipation as a process of freeing up space for dialogue and deliberation enables a focus on crucial questions, experiences and practices neglected in most orthodox accounts of security and terrorism. In particular, emancipation has the potential to serve as a philosophical anchorage for a nascent critical terrorism studies research agenda. The paper goes on to outline what a critical terrorism studies informed by a concern with emancipation might look like, focusing on a series of key questions that such an approach might encourage in the context of the post-2001 ‘war on terror’.

Contemporary reckoning with the catastrophic outcomes of the post-9/11 era opens important questions for the future of counterterrorism policy. It also raises significant issues for thinking through the future priorities and purposes of security scholarship. In this article we make two core claims. First, recent years have seen considerable mainstreaming of ostensibly critical ideas on (counter)terrorism within political debate, media commentary, and – crucially – security policy. Second, such ideas – including around the futility of ‘war’ on terror; the ineffectiveness of torture; the unstable framing of threats such as radicalisation; and the inefficiency of excessive counterterrorism expenditure – were widely dismissed as lacking in policy relevance, even being utopian, when articulated by critically oriented scholars. This development, we argue, raises important ontological questions around the ending of security paradigms such as the war on terror. It also prompts vital political, epistemological, and normative questions around the status of overtly critical scholarship when its ideas and recommendations achieve wider currency.

Although Critical Security Studies (CSS) has done much to advance security debates, some shortcomings remain. Its excessive focus on the individual – which we term ‘me’ – reduces CSS' capacity to propose solutions to current global security problems such as pandemics and climate change. This paper contributes to the emerging scholarship on the potential of relational ontologies in Security Studies by introducing Buen Vivir Indigenous cosmopraxes into the debate. Indigenous cosmopraxes such as Sumak Kawsay, Suma Qamaña, and Teko Kavi, we argue, can inform CSS by providing alternative considerations to the pluriverse of ideas that address security crises. These cosmopraxes, which make up the broad notion of Buen Vivir, provide a way to think and enact security from a collective perspective, one that emphasises ‘we’ instead of the liberal self. In that sense, these cosmopraxes allow us to conceive security differently and face insecurities together.

Ontological security studies (OSS) has been established as a significant area of study in critical security studies (CSS) to describe the ways in which social groups sustain and secure a stable sense of self. Although the self is the central figure of OSS, the subfield is yet to engage in a sustained interrogation of subjectivity in a way that questions its colonial foundations. In this article, I return to Jef Huysmans’s seminal understanding of security as a ‘thick signifier’ to analyse the ways in which OSS upholds the colonial activity of ordering, particularly an ordering of the self. By introducing Sylvia Wynter’s account of the emergence of Man-as-human, I question OSS’s conventional understandings of the self as constituted by identity. Analysing the self as a sociogenic being governed by autopoetics uncovers the ways in which understandings of the self that collapse into ‘identity’ serve to uphold coloniality. By redeploying Huysmans’s understanding of ontological security as that which simultaneously orders and guarantees the activity of ordering, I interrogate the ways in which doing OSS has real-world implications for those denied humanness in our colonial present. This analytic, termed a ‘demonic’ approach by Wynter, unlocks radically alternative understandings of being human that can be operationalized in service of collective liberation.

How do scenarios of dangerous futures imagined in the framework of the post-9/11 counterterrorism shape security institutions? Critical Security Studies (CSS)'s dominant answer is that state apparatus are significantly transformed by the use of new technologies of prediction that are very prolific in imagining potential risks. The present article questions this technologically determinist thesis. Introducing the notion of weak field in the study of pre-emption, it argues that the political sociology of transnational fields of power can help us in historicise and assess more precisely the impact of imagination over power and control in the pre-emptive era. The article analyses NATO's reaction to 9/11 as a case study. It shows how the fabrication of potential terrorist threats by NATO's practitioners, that served to justify the pre-emptive use of the collective self-defence clause of the Washington Treaty (Article 5), evolved into an ambiguous support for NATO's military policing of the Mediterranean basin and into its involvement in migration control.

In this article, we show how Annemarie Mol's notion of ontological politics helps to open up the research agenda for cyber security in Critical Security Studies. The article hence seeks to further the debate about STS and Critical Security Studies. The article's main claim is that the concept of ontological politics enables an engagement with the complex and transformative dynamics of ICT and the new security actors and practices that shape security politics in the digital age. By examining the virulent attacks executed by the Mirai botnet – one of the world's largest, fiercest, and most enduring botnets – we point to four aspects of cyber security that attention to the ontological politics of cyber security attunes us to: the proliferation and entanglement of security agencies, actors, sites, and spaces. These aspects of cyber security, we argue, are becoming increasingly prominent alongside the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G network technology. In conclusion, we discuss the wider security theoretical and normative-democratic implications of an engagement with the ontological politics of security by exploring three avenues for additional conversation between ontological politics and Critical Security Studies.

How do public protests emerge and become impotent? Inspired by Žižek's ideology critique, the article examines the ideological underpinnings of contemporary public-private security governance and suggests that worried, complaining subjects are a product of a dominant discourse of expert knowledge and technification. It then introduces three Žižekian dynamics that prevent protests from challenging the prevailing discourse – particularisation, ultra-politics, and cynicism – and illustrates these dynamic through a case study of the history of public complaints about Facebook. The article suggests that Facebook communicates through a discourse of technification whereby it constantly invents technological fixes unable to satisfy the complaints. The article further suggests that Facebook turning into a national security partner in the fight against terrorism online prevents complaints from becoming universalised by rendering even particularised privacy contestations illegitimate. This is reinforced, the article argues, by the subject's cynical enjoyment; that is, the ‘letting off steam’ on Facebook while criticising it.

Edward Snowden exposed the discrepancy between the official US defence discourse of liberal values in cyberspace and secret surveillance and cyber exploitation practices. Situated in the critical literature on security and surveillance, the article proposes that more attention needs to be paid to the constitutive role of transgressive practices for security communities. The article introduces a Lacanian strategy for studying transgression in the US cyber defence community. Through this strategy, a transgressive other – in this case, China in cyberspace – enters the fantasy of the US cyber defence community as the symptom that conceals more fundamental tensions in the US cyber defence. But the community's representation of China in cyberspace represents more than that; China is a fantasmatic object that structures and gives content to a desire for transgressing the official ideals of the US cyber defence. This is why the excessive cyber practices that China is criticised for conducting mirror the secret, disavowed transgressions of the US cyber defence. Transgressions, the article concludes through Lacan, provide the necessary (partial) enjoyment that sustains the US cyber defence community as a solidarity-in-guilt and the official US cyber defence discourse.

Military applications of technologies for enhancing or producing vision play a key role in composing contemporary security, as such technologies are deployed to make security sense of everyday sociality, of battlefields, and of much in between these extremes. In this article, I set out to recompose militarised techno-vision through the public detritus left by its heterogenous development, use, and appropriation. I argue that as an heterogenous and amalgamated object, military techno-vision can be composed by speaking the stories of its leftovers, and that this composition is characterised by and in turn characterises a longstanding dilemma between fact and vision – between the ambiguity that is constitutive of the human practices of visual perception and image-making, and the desire for machines that can produce visual ‘actionable intelligence’ that can underpin security decisions. Discourses, practices, and regimes of visibility are deployed alongside technologies to occlude the ambiguity of technological vision and sustain the imaginary of technologically altered vision as neutral production of military or security facts.

Drawing on postcolonial and feminist writings, this article re-examines securitization theory’s so-called ‘silence-problem’. Securitization theory sets up a definably colonial relationship whereby certain voices cannot be heard, while other voices try to speak for those who are silenced. The article shows that the subaltern cannot securitize, first, because they are structurally excluded from the concept of security through one of three mechanisms: locutionary silencing, illocutionary disablement, or illocutionary frustration. Second, the subaltern cannot securitize because they are always already being securitized and spoken for – as in this case by the well-meaning intellectuals trying to highlight and remediate their predicament. Third, the subaltern cannot securitize because the popular rendering of securitization theory as critical obfuscates and rationalises their marginalisation. This article thus reveals the ‘colonial moment’ in securitization studies, showing how securitization theory is complicit with securitizations ‘for’ that marginalise and silence globally, not just locally outside ‘the West’.

The article examines the roles of NGOs in banning cluster munitions that resulted in the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions and the campaign against landmines in the 1990s. It argues that NGOs have managed to move questions about the use of force from the closed decision-making sphere of military commanders and arms control diplomats into open public debate. Thus NGOs have simultaneously desecuritised the use of force by states, securitised certain weapons technologies, and made human beings the referent object of security. This has marked a shift from state security and strategic disarmament to human security and humanitarian disarmament, without fundamentally challenging the laws of war. However, in contrast to realist views that only militarily useless weapons ever get banned and radical critical perspectives that see new legal regimes as legitimating war and US hegemony, I argue that NGOs have engaged in immanent critique of military arguments and practices based on prevailing principles of international humanitarian law. The resulting weapon ban treaties have both restrained US policy and undermined its legitimacy. The article explores the discursive choices that underpinned the remaking of the security agenda by NGOs and their role as de/securitising actors and emancipatory agents of change.