Once women’s appearance in public space is accepted, the tensions concern how they appear. Self-representations of gender identity are performed in part through differences in hejab (required modest clothing) and bodily comportment, varying from women in chadors moving through the traditional local spaces of the bazaar to secular cosmopolitan women styling their own performance of transnational independence. But women asserting their presence in public face harassment and the threat of violence, especially when stepping into the street, using public transportation, and asserting their right to social and spatial mobility. Vigilantes (the serial killer Saeed Hanaei, the “Spider Killer”) and gangs (the “Black Vultures” and the “Wolves”) targeting women can defend their attacks as morally justifiable, while the government has initiated programs of “social security” that primarily have sought to control deviations from approved forms of hejab. Nonetheless, women insist on their right to the city and their freedom to be fully present as women in public, whether by negotiating their personal space in a taxi or challenging the arguments of their attackers face to face.

Chapter 1 analyzes the recordkeeping practices established in Kenya during the Emergency through the reorganization of colonial intelligence services. This chapter explores the connection between the British paranoia against Mau Mau fighters in particular and Kikuyu-speaking peoples in general and the administration’s anxious obsession with recordkeeping and the maintenance of Emergency secrets. Following a discussion of key terms and contexts, such as the colonial concept of information management and the Emergency period, this chapter situates the “migrated archives” in the colonial politics of concealment.

The mandate informs the mediators about key issues required to be able to design a peace accord with lasting qualities. This chapter discusses some of the procedural issues, such as the timing of ceasefires and questions of partial versus comprehensive agreements: Should all issues be negotiated or some left for future processes? A particular issue is the demand for territorial self-government or even complete independence. It seems that Nordic mediators have been influenced by previous experiences in this regard. Examples are given from the Oslo Process, Kosovo, Guatemala, Sudan, and Northern Ireland. The chapter addresses matters of power sharing and the importance Nordic mediators give to the role of women in negotiations and implementation. Human rights, justice, and security for the parties are discussed.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia provides an occasion to delve into how fiscal policy and administrative activity constitute forms of worldmaking. This chapter argues that More’s Utopia places the challenges of defining and funding security at the center of its project, both in Book One’s critique of contemporary rule and in Book Two’s thought experiment about how to govern security. Utopia, as an alternative to contemporary Europe, can be seen as an attempt to resolve the fiscal security dilemmas besetting European governments by eliminating private property and money. The presence of other polities, though, complicates the effort to imagine a world in which security is distributed equitably, a world without fiscal conflict or the violence that monarchical wealth enables. Utopia thus provides both a powerful diagnosis of the shortcomings of contemporary governmental practice and a meditation on the limits of the ability to govern security.

Chapter 6 situates John Milton’s major works – Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes – in relation to abiding conflicts over fiscal policy prompted by the Civil War and its aftermath. Milton was actively critical of the Commonwealth’s management of fiscal policy and voiced his fear about the fiscal impact of a restored monarchy. Though fiscal concerns are largely occluded from his poetry, Milton’s depiction of war and its effects continues this critique by dramatizing the disastrous consequences of security imaginaries organized around the violently expansive accumulation of wealth. Milton’s metasecurity dilemma arises in his poetry as a question about how to value people and circumstances correctly, about the relevant criteria to use to orient oneself ethically and politically within catastrophic realities. His poems thus highlight Milton’s deep uncertainty about how to define safety or about what kinds of collective security might be possible in such a disoriented moment.

Chapter 5 examines how George Herbert confronts the profound limits on human capacities to create worldly security. The security dilemmas Hebert addresses derive from a tension built into the basic organizing metaphor of his theological vision, an understanding of God as a king. On the one hand, Herbert understands faithful devotion to require a perpetual payment of praise. Herbert offers his poems as a kind of fiscal payment, a mode of praise and devotion that he wishes, in turn, to correspond with divine protective care. On the other hand, Herbert’s fiscal theology must accommodate a God whose care frequently manifests as affliction and who understands worldly security as antithetical to faith. This chapter focuses on how Herbert confronts the disconnect between these distinct definitions of security and strives to reconcile God’s sovereign concern for his subjects’ eternal salvation and the need for protection and care in this world.

In September 2023, the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) joined the numerous Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council which, over the past decade, analysed the subject of the human rights impacts of new technologies and it published a thematic study on ‘new technologies and enforced disappearances’. The Chapter briefly presents the gestation and contents of the study, but its main aim is to analyse the role played – if any – by new technologies, and in particular digital, information and communication technologies, in the regular activities of the WGEID, with a view at identifying innovative methods to carry out its mandate. The functions of the WGEID are illustrated, together with the opportunities that new technologies may offer to perform them. The challenges currently posed to the WGEID and its ‘counterparts’ by the use of new technologies in terms of security, verification and accessibility are also considered. The concluding remarks offer a reflection on how some of the findings and observations made with regard to the WGEID could be relevant also for the work of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances.

Chapter 1 is the introductory chapter. It introduces the reader to the two seemingly complementary global imperatives of ‘dealing with the past’ and ensuring non-repetition of mass atrocities. The chapter sets up a conundrum about transitional justice, ontological (in)securities, and non-recurrence. It then proceeds with a summary of the book’s key questions and core arguments. The chapter subsequently puts forward a brief history of the evolution of transitional justice as a global project, a vehicle of peace as well as security, discussing the claimed intersections between transitional justice and ‘Never Again’. This is followed by brief notes on methodology and contributions of the book. In outlining the contributions, the chapter demonstrates how the book interacts with and enriches scholarly knowledge in the field of transitional justice as well as in ontological security studies. Finally, the chapter introduces the outline of the book with brief chapter summaries.

Chapter 5 continues to explore the connections and disconnections between the transitional justice project and non-recurrence of conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). It proposes that education can make or break meaningful assurances of conflict non-recurrence. The chapter demonstrates how ethnically segregated history teaching in BiH plays a key role in the maintenance of a post-conflict status quo which has frozen certain anxieties around the uncertain future of peace in the country. Further, the chapter posits that the global project of transitional justice, while not responsible for the burgeoning ethnonationalism, has actively made bad situations worse with its short-sighted security priorities and general misunderstanding of security as lived experience. In particular, the chapter focuses on how and why the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia undertook a role of an educator of the BiH youth and public and how the advocates of the transitional justice project have ignored the complexity of the prevention needs of the BiH society.

The intense search for security has, over the past half-century, become increasingly contradictory in the context of the current global unsettling. The techno-scientific search for increased security is now generating circles of increasing insecurity. This chapter is concerned to understand the foundational unsettling of that world space and its consequences for human security in general, including increasing ontological insecurity. The earliest and most dramatic example of this process is the nuclear revolution. With the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilians towards the end of World War II, the search for an ultimate weapon of mass destruction that would end the war created the conditions for escalating insecurity. The chapter documents elements of this process but, more importantly, seeks to broaden the usual emphasis, drawing the mechanics of military security into encompassing questions of human security (see also Chapter 8 on human security). The chapter draws parallels between the areas of nuclear security, anti-terrorist security, drone assassinations, and biosecurity to document the unsettling of the meaning and practice of contemporary global attempts to securitise.

This chapter deals with cash (banknotes and coins), the oldest and most traditional form of money in existence. Cash involves a paradox: On the one hand, it is technologically less advanced that modern means of payments like cards and apps, so one could presume that it should decline in use and eventually disappear. On the other, however, evidence for almost the whole world shows that the demand for cash is increasing, although it is used less frequently for certain types of transactions like online commerce, retail stores, and restaurants. Criminal activities may explain part of the puzzle, but not much. One advantage of cash is that it can be seen and touched, therefore appealing to the senses and conveying a sense of security. Another is that it ensures absolute privacy of transactions. Other important characteristics explaining the popularity of cash are that it is simple (it requires no technology or complication whatsoever); definitive (it instantly settles any financial obligation); private and personal (it appeals to the desire of confidentiality); and self-sufficient (it does not depend on any other infrastructure functioning). We conclude therefore that physical cash is a useful complement of a robust and diversified monetary system, in which digital means of payments gradually prevail.

This chapter theorizes payment infrastructures as crucial material sites of hegemonic power in three different regards. First, the material form of payment technologies and the uneven routes of circulation produced by them are an integral part of the ways in which modern money and finance exercise power. Payment technology is not a neutral infrastructure, but a carrier of hegemonic power and potential site of hegemonic contestation. Second, payment infrastructure is inextricably connected to state security and sovereignty. State security and sovereignty were enabled and made durable with and through the payment infrastructure. Third, infrastructures are historically durable, though they may be rerouted or reinscribed. This chapter distills three elements that typify the hegemonic power of infrastructure and that can be used when taking “infrastructure” as the starting point for analysis. These elements are (1) sedimentation, (2) reach, and (3) disposition. The arguments are illustrated empirically by reference to the so-called financial war on terror, where financial infrastructures became a major but highly depoliticized site of security power. Empirically, this chapter focuses on the way in which the payment technology SWIFT and financial transactions are being appropriated for security purposes.