In measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a ‘logistics of perception’, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking) and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders is concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has however extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light itself through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation is to be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb.
National security discourses have entered teacher’s classrooms. A strand of largely critical literature in education studies have noted that new security tasks clash with the roles of teachers. However, few studies have yet approached this audience about their views on security. This article analyses how Swedish teachers conceive of security in relation to the school system. Data consists of semi-structured interviews with teachers and principals, conducted in medium-sized municipalities in Sweden. The analysis finds that teachers maintain a conceptualisation of security that focuses on the individual. Simultaneously, teachers rarely adopt national security discourses (except regarding school violence) and several argue against emphasising the concept of security in relation to schools. The results offer an opportunity to analyse the views of teachers as audiences in relation to the extension of the security field into the educational domain.
This article contributes to our understanding of security devices by engaging with the distinctiveness of one particular and especially important device: the smartphone. Drawing from Barad’s understanding of posthumanist performativity and turning to the smartphone literature outside of security studies, it develops a conceptual account of the smartphone as a security device. The article suggests that the smartphone stands out from other comparable devices because humans have come to embody its connective features. Using the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 as an illustration, the article shows how the smartphone’s intra-action with users enable the crafting of new security practices through appropriations of embodied connectivity, especially when such appropriations are carried out on the streets. The police appropriated the smartphone to monitor social media activity and for geofencing, while the protesters appropriated it to obfuscate data and for livestreaming. By (re)locating the negotiation of competing security interests in the (extended) bodies of the protesters through the affordance of these practices, the smartphone contributed to the acceleration and intensification of a racialised spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance.
Maja Zehfuss' book War and the politics of ethics makes the claim that Western practices of war are constituted by debates and ideas of ethics, illustrated in particular through the Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Herein, this claim is assessed by drawing on Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brightons argument that in contemporary research, war tends to be conceived through secondary phenomena. The paper argues that research focusing on how war is shaped by secondary phenomena often falls back on a reductive understanding, in which war is represented as violent destruction. Moreover, that by seeing war as a multifaceted form shaped by military imaginaries centring on military theory, tactics, and operational art, we may gain a more comprehensive understanding of its ontology and practices.