Colloquium: Dr. Jonas Hagmann

IR scholars point to a rapid deepening of domestic security dispositives, their digitalization, de-territorialisation and privatization. In the new ‘society of control’, so they argue, the monitoring of everyday behaviour has become continuous and comprehensive, as the fear of terrorism empowers unprecedentedly intrusive, encompassing and exclusionary security apparatuses. Whether this analysis holds true across larger political, cultural, architectural and technological contexts yet remains unclear: Not only do most analyses of contemporary control focus on and generalise from European and North American cities. They often also come with implicit albeit powerful Eurocentric conceptions of state-society relations, governance and insecurity.

This talk identifies and problematizes these penchants. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Zürich, Marrakech, Kathmandu and Montevideo, it shows that security ensembles and state-society relations often evolve in different ways, at other speeds, and following different steering logics than what is suggested by international security studies research. Instead of pointing to universal trajectories of security politics, it thus identifies a need for considerably more contextualizing and differentiating investigations into the global (re-)configuration of urban security dispositives.