Security and Subversion in a Time of Monsters
A border wall. An aid bunker. An Oxford garden. These are among the disparate sites of the new security landscape proliferating across our crisis-beset world, from the militarised no-go zones at the geographical margins of capitalism right into its beating heart, which in 2020 briefly turned into the latest global danger zone amid the covid-19 pandemic. What kind of human future do we envisage in a world of perennial crisis colonised by the increasingly intrusive security capabilities of states and corporations? This lecture will examine what the dominance of crisis and security thinking says about our current political moment – and what role anthropology may have in finding new answers to, and even new subversions of, the securitisation of everything.
Bio: Ruben Andersson is Professor of Social Anthropology at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. His research has focused on migration, borders and security, with specific reference to the Sahel and southern Europe. He is the author of Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (California 2014), winner of the 2015 BBC Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award, as well as numerous articles and reports on escalating border security and its human and political consequences. His most recent book, No Go World: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics (California 2019), takes his research on security further via a comparative perspective on bunkers, borders, and the mapping of danger in international crisis interventions.
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