Sticky Politics: Composing Security by Advertising Tracking Devices

Date: Thursday, 17 October, 4:00 pm.

Place: ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences, Faculty Counsil Room (Room 0.100C)

The topic: In security studies and beyond, technological developments are associated with technocratic, rationalistic, transparent forms of security governed at a distance. In much of the advertising of tracking devices the associations made are very different not to say opposed to this. The advertising composes security anchored in sense-making and resonance rather than calculus and reason, working from within and below rather than from a above at distance and depending on the negotiation of opaque co-presences rather than the establishment of precision and transparency. The consequence is that advertising not only extends but deepens the grip of military/security matters making them sticky. Moreover, the heterogeneity of the elements is such that what is composed is a shifting collage rather than a stable composition. This argument makes a threefold contribution to security studies: a theoretical re-conceptualization of what it means to compose security, an empirical intervention in the debates surrounding the politics of tracking devices and a methodological intervention in favour of collaborationist research strategies.

Anna Leander is Professor of IR at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She also holds part time positions at PUC, Rio de Janeiro and at the Copenhagen Business School. She is known primarily for her contributions to the development of practice theoretical approaches to IR and for her work on the politics of commercializing militarty and security matters.