scholarly journals Biopolitics of security in the 21st century: an introduction

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL DILLON ◽  
LUIS LOBO-GUERRERO

AbstractThis essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics as a dispositif de sécurité and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant biopolitics of security in the molecular age.

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-46
Author(s):  
Ionuț Alin Cîrdei

Abstract Globalization is a particularly complex phenomenon that marked the twentieth century and the beginning of the 21st century, bringing about transformations at the level of the entire human society. This phenomenon produces profound, and sometimes irreversible, changes in all areas and imposes an alert rhythm for the existence of all mankind, which must keep pace with globalization in order to maintain its chances of development in an increasingly competitive world. In the last decades, we witness the manifestation of the effects of globalization in the field of individual and collective security, with great implications on the relations between different actors of the security environment. Globalization creates new opportunities, but at the same time it gives rise to new vulnerabilities and allows the emergence of new threats that, once materialized, can have a major impact at a regional or even global level.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.


Author(s):  
Adrian Daub

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.


Author(s):  
Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo

Chapter 1 (‘A Window to Internal and External Change in Banking’) provides a wide-arch view of the themes in the book. It highlights how in spite of being deeply embedded in our culture as an object of everyday life, the interaction with ATMs is largely inconsequential for most people. This chapter also forwards a case to study the ATM to better understand the possibilities for technological change to bring about a cashless economy. Another argument put forward is that the ATM is essential to appreciate the technological and organizational challenges that gave rise to self-service banking. As a result, the case is made that business histories of the late twentieth century will be incomplete without proper consideration to the impact of computer technology on the different aspects of business organizations.


Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This chapter examines the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization on food and eating out. It draws attention to the growing standardization of food and, with greater class differentiation, to the growing diversity in eating-out venues. Class, gender, and nation are again used as lenses to understand the different eating-out habits and their symbolic significance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, pubs moved more fully towards embracing dining. However, the quality of food, in general terms, began to improve significantly only towards the end of the century, and hospitality venues also moved towards selling food from diverse national origins.


Author(s):  
Samuel Llano

This chapter analyzes the impact on the population of the expansion of nightlife in Madrid from the 1880s on. More particularly, it studies public fears raised by alcoholism and flamenco that led to this music being identified with social disorder and immorality. The Fuencarral Street murder (1888), in which a flamenco aficionado was involved, shocked the public and triggered a campaign against flamenco and the culture associated with it, known as flamenquismo. Behind this campaign, however, was fear and hatred of rural immigrants from Andalusia, who transformed Madrid’s culture and elicited the opposition of the population most affected by the rise of hunger and deprivation in Madrid. At the turn of the twentieth century, this situation led to flamenquismo being used as a catchword to designate any social problems affecting Spain in the wake of the 1898 desastre.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 1043-1055
Author(s):  
Gaby Umbach

This article1 offers reflections on the use of data as evidence in 21st century policy-making. It discusses the concept of evidence-informed policy-making (EIPM) as well as the governance and knowledge effects of data as evidence. With this focus, it interlinks the analysis of statistics and politics. The paper first introduces the concept of EIPM and the impact of evidence use. Here it focusses on science and knowledge as resources in policy-making, on the institutionalisation of science advice and on the translation of information and knowledge into evidence. The second part of the article reflects on data as evidence. This part concentrates on abstract and concrete functions of data as governance tools in policy-making, on data as a robust form of evidence and on the effects of data on knowledge and governance. The third part highlights challenges for data as evidence in policy-making, among them, politicisation, transparency, and diversity as well as objectivity and contestation. Finally, the last part draws conclusions on the production and use of data as evidence in EIPM. Throughout the second part of the reflections, reference is made to Walter Radermacher’s 2019 matrix of actors and activities related to data, facts, and policy published in this journal.


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (13) ◽  
pp. 3055-3069 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Stott ◽  
John F. B. Mitchell ◽  
Myles R. Allen ◽  
Thomas L. Delworth ◽  
Jonathan M. Gregory ◽  
...  

Abstract This paper investigates the impact of aerosol forcing uncertainty on the robustness of estimates of the twentieth-century warming attributable to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Attribution analyses on three coupled climate models with very different sensitivities and aerosol forcing are carried out. The Third Hadley Centre Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere GCM (HadCM3), Parallel Climate Model (PCM), and GFDL R30 models all provide good simulations of twentieth-century global mean temperature changes when they include both anthropogenic and natural forcings. Such good agreement could result from a fortuitous cancellation of errors, for example, by balancing too much (or too little) greenhouse warming by too much (or too little) aerosol cooling. Despite a very large uncertainty for estimates of the possible range of sulfate aerosol forcing obtained from measurement campaigns, results show that the spatial and temporal nature of observed twentieth-century temperature change constrains the component of past warming attributable to anthropogenic greenhouse gases to be significantly greater (at the 5% level) than the observed warming over the twentieth century. The cooling effects of aerosols are detected in all three models. Both spatial and temporal aspects of observed temperature change are responsible for constraining the relative roles of greenhouse warming and sulfate cooling over the twentieth century. This is because there are distinctive temporal structures in differential warming rates between the hemispheres, between land and ocean, and between mid- and low latitudes. As a result, consistent estimates of warming attributable to greenhouse gas emissions are obtained from all three models, and predictions are relatively robust to the use of more or less sensitive models. The transient climate response following a 1% yr−1 increase in CO2 is estimated to lie between 2.2 and 4 K century−1 (5–95 percentiles).


2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 279-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. Champneys

This paper represents the author’s view on the impact of the book Nonlinear Oscillations, Dynamical Systems and Bifurcations of Vector Fields by John Guckenheimer and Philip Holmes, first published in 1983 (Springer-Verlag, Berlin). In particular, the questions addressed are: if one were to write a similar book for the 21st century, which topics should be contained and what form should the book take in order to have a similar impact on the modern generation of young researchers in applied dynamical systems?


2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-10 ◽  

AbstractIn this analysis of the future of our profession, Barbara Tearle starts by looking at the past to see how much the world of legal information has evolved and changed. She considers the nature of the profession today and then identifies key factors which she believes will be of importance in the future, including the impact of globalisation; the potential changes to the legal profession; technology; developments in legal education; increasing commercialisation and changes to the law itself.


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