Security Communities in Crisis: Crisis Constitution, Struggles and Temporality

How do we approach a security community in crisis? This article theorises crisis dynamics in and on security communities. How do security communities evolve during crises, and how can we best approach such crises analytically? Responding to a lack of focus and knowledge of crisis dynamics in the literature on security communities, this article develops a methodological model to study security communities in crisis. I argue that the study of security communities in crisis could evolve around four analytical categories: processes of constituting crisis and power struggles and the temporal aspects of social action concerning situatedness and imaginaries. This move allows IR theory to rethink the dynamics of security communities in crisis beyond the endurance/decay binary and provide for more process-oriented and context-sensitive empirical work. By way of illustrating the empirical saliency of the article, I use examples from the Brexit process.

Origins and Evolution of the North American Stable Peace

Interstate relations among the North American countries have been irenic for so long that the continent is often assumed to have little if anything to contribute to scholarly debates on peaceful change. In good measure, this can be attributed to the way in which discussions of peaceful change often become intertwined with a different kind of inquiry among international relations scholars, one focused upon the origins and denotative characteristics of “pluralistic security communities.” Given that it is generally (though not necessarily accurately) considered that such security communities first arose in Western Europe, it is not difficult to understand why the North American regional-security story so regularly takes an analytical back seat to what is considered to be the far more interesting European one. This article challenges the idea that there is little to learn from the North American experience, inter alia by stressing three leading theoretical clusters within which can be situated the scholarly corpus of works attempting to assess the causes of peaceful change on the continent. Although the primary focus is on the Canada–US relationship, the article includes a brief discussion of where Mexico might be said to fit in the regional-security order.

Science, technology, security: Towards critical collaboration

Science and technology play a central role in the contemporary governance of security, both as tools for the production of security and as objects of security concern. Scholars are increasingly seeking to not only critically reflect on the interplays between science, technology and security, but also engage with the practices of security communities that shape and are shaped by science and technology. To further help this growth of interest in security topics within science and technology studies (STS), we explore possible modes of socio-technical collaboration with security communities of practice. Bringing together literatures from STS and critical security studies, we identify several key challenges to critical social engagement of STS scholars in security-related issues. We then demonstrate how these challenges played out over the course of three case studies from our own experience in engaging security communities of practice. We use these vignettes to show that there is a rich vein of developments in both theory and practice that STS scholars can pursue by attending to the interplay of science, technology and security.

Medium-Term Artificial Intelligence and Society

There has been extensive attention to near-term and long-term AI technology and its accompanying societal issues, but the medium-term has gone largely overlooked. This paper develops the concept of medium-term AI, evaluates its importance, and analyzes some medium-term societal issues. Medium-term AI can be important in its own right and as a topic that can bridge the sometimes acrimonious divide between those who favor attention to near-term AI and those who prefer the long-term. The paper proposes the medium-term AI hypothesis: the medium-term is important from the perspectives of those who favor attention to near-term AI as well as those who favor attention to long-term AI. The paper analyzes medium-term AI in terms of governance institutions, collective action, corporate AI development, and military/national security communities. Across portions of these four areas, some support for the medium-term AI hypothesis is found, though in some cases the matter is unclear.

Lacan in the US cyber defence: Between public discourse and transgressive practice

Edward Snowden exposed the discrepancy between the official US defence discourse of liberal values in cyberspace and secret surveillance and cyber exploitation practices. Situated in the critical literature on security and surveillance, the article proposes that more attention needs to be paid to the constitutive role of transgressive practices for security communities. The article introduces a Lacanian strategy for studying transgression in the US cyber defence community. Through this strategy, a transgressive other – in this case, China in cyberspace – enters the fantasy of the US cyber defence community as the symptom that conceals more fundamental tensions in the US cyber defence. But the community's representation of China in cyberspace represents more than that; China is a fantasmatic object that structures and gives content to a desire for transgressing the official ideals of the US cyber defence. This is why the excessive cyber practices that China is criticised for conducting mirror the secret, disavowed transgressions of the US cyber defence. Transgressions, the article concludes through Lacan, provide the necessary (partial) enjoyment that sustains the US cyber defence community as a solidarity-in-guilt and the official US cyber defence discourse.