Progressive Geographies

Finally got round to looking at a copy of Anti-Security, edited by Mark Neocleous and George S. Rigakos, which came out in 2011. After a brief introduction, there is a powerful ‘declaration’ which sets out the academic and political rationale for the project. I wanted to see if it was available online, and so came across the Anti-Security Studies site devoted to the project and linked work. The declaration is available here and the opening paragraph reads:

The purpose of the project, put simply, is to show that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion. Less simply, that security is a dangerous illusion. Why ‘dangerous’? Because it has come to act as a blockage on politics: the more we succumb to the discourse of security, the less we can say about exploitation and alienation; the more we talk about security, the less we talk about the material foundations of emancipation; the more we come to share in the fetish of security, the more we become alienated from one another and the more we become complicit in the exercise of police powers. Fleshing out how we got here is the first challenge; showing how damaging this has been is an even greater challenge; doing these things in a way that contributes to a radical, critical and emancipatory politics even more so. But it is a challenge that must be made, and must be made collectively. As a start, we therefore offer the following declarations about an Anti-Security politics.