Publications

The volume, co-edited by J. Peter Burgess, examines the possibility of socially responsible innovation in security using an interdisciplinary approach.

Responsible innovation in security refers to a comprehensive approach that aims to integrate knowledge related to stakeholders operating at both the demand and the supply side of security – technologists, citizens, policymakers and ethicists. Security innovations can only be successful in the long term if all the social, ethical and ecological impacts, and threats and opportunities, both short term and long term, are assessed and prioritized alongside technical and commercial impacts. 

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Revue Etudes Internationales, Volume 49, Hiver 2018

Article scientifique L’écrit comme pratique de sécuritisation : analyse des évolutions législatives sur la nationalité française par Sarah Perret, issu de l’analyse comparée développée dans la thèse doctorale de l’auteure portant également sur les cas américain et allemand.

Cet article analyse le rôle de l’écrit législatif dans le processus de « sécuritisation » identitaire en France, en étudiant spécifiquement les évolutions législatives en matière de nationalité depuis la loi de 2003 « relative à la maîtrise de l’immigration, au séjour des étrangers en France et à la nationalité ». Il démontre que la loi, à travers sa dimension écrite et son cadre étatique légitimateur, agit aussi bien au commencement de la sécuritisation que dans sa finalisation. L’étude de la situation d’énonciation législative du corpus des quatre lois ayant fait évoluer les droits et les conditions d’accès à la nationalité française (2003, 2006, 2007, 2011) révèle que la sécuritisation opère un processus de légitimation à partir de mécanismes analogues au concept de « violence symbolique » de Pierre Bourdieu, c’est-à-dire à travers des actes d’énonciation sécuritisants non reconnus comme tels par l’audience.

Research article by J. Peter Burgess in Millenium Journal of International Studies

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‘Security’ is a uniquely rich object for critique. It rests on a long and noble conceptual history in Western thought. And yet the provision of security most often consists of a shoring up, through the discourses of nationality, ethnicity, political economy or even science, of what is assumed to be solid at its core but weakened through the contingencies of politics, society, ideology, and so on. The article argues that the critical force of critique stems from the fact that critique itself is a practice inescapably bound up with insecurity, and thus that the critique of security exercised since around 1997 as ‘critical security studies’ is self-replicating. By introducing concepts from Husserlian phenomenology, it attempts to show that insecurity is not a simple feature of an otherwise secure state of life, ripe for critical analysis that promises to expose its false premises. Rather, insecurity lies at the very foundation of critical thought. Building upon the bare and basic question, ‘What does it mean to mean?’, a phenomenology of security asks the straightforward question: ‘What is the security-ness of security?’ It permits one to ask what remains of security when all else is stripped away, what essential minimum must be retained in order for security to be security.

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Geopolitics of Risk Working Paper 1/2018

‘Posthuman security’ should here not be understood in distinction from ‘post-human security’. It is not a question here of marking or describing the end or the aftermath of some historical era in which ‘human security’ in its conventional use would no longer play a roll. It’s not because such a claim could not—or should not—be made. Indeed, there are indeed many voices that claim that such a need is at hand, and that just such a historical analysis would be of considerable service. If we were to attempt such a post-mortem reconstruction, we might begin with the early inspirations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, the Cold War shutting-down of the concept of ‘security’, the ‘discovery’ of the subaltern, and the new institutional challenges faced in crisis response and development work. We would surely include the break-through 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994), the creation of the Human Security section at the United Nations, the intellectual triumph, and practical ambivalence of the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. Instead, the aim of this article, is to ask the question of ‘the human’, whose security it is human security’s ambition to advance and preserve. New research and new reflexion—by anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers and others suggests that the humanity of humans is, as with most phenomena, finite, that the definition or concept that regulates it has limits, that these limits have become more tangible, and that, as a consequence, a new look at ‘human security’ is warranted.

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Surveillance, Privacy and Security: Citizens’ Perspectives, J. Peter Burgess, Michael Friedewald, Johann Čas, Rocco Bellanova and Walter Peissl, (eds)

This volume examines the relationship between privacy, surveillance and security, and the alleged privacy–security trade-off, focusing on the citizen’s perspective. Recent revelations of mass surveillance programmes clearly demonstrate the ever-increasing capabilities of surveillance technologies. The lack of serious reactions to these activities shows that the political will to implement them appears to be an unbroken trend. The resulting move into a surveillance society is, however, contested for many reasons.

Are the resulting infringements of privacy and other human rights compatible with democratic societies? Is security necessarily depending on surveillance? Are there alternative ways to frame security? Is it possible to gain in security by giving up civil liberties, or is it even necessary to do so, and do citizens adopt this trade-off? This volume contributes to a better and deeper understanding of the relation between privacy, surveillance and security, comprising in-depth investigations and studies of the common narrative that more security can only come at the expense of sacrifice of privacy. The book combines theoretical research with a wide range of empirical studies focusing on the citizen’s perspective. It presents empirical research exploring factors and criteria relevant for the assessment of surveillance technologies.

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This article revisits the concept of sovereignty in political theory by applying tools adapted from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It critically reviews the premises of political subjected assumed by sovereignty, and formulates a widened concept of sovereignty based on a general understanding of the ‘self’, ‘self-relation’ and ‘identity’ as the fundamental components of sovereignty. With this concept in hand, the article then focuses on the concept of the ‘sovereign good’ common to French histories of political thought and of particular interest to Jacques Lacan in his 1959-60 seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and his 1963 article ‘Kant with Sade’. By reinterpreting the sovereignty of the sovereign good, Lacan points to a path according to which an idealised and universalised notion of the sovereign is made possible and energised through an identification of the ‘real’ with the sovereign good. By understanding sovereignty as supported by the Lacanian real, be can better understand both the forces that drive it to self-preservation and the insecurities that make its survival and longevity powerful hindrances to its dissolution

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