Call for Papers: Colonial Relations in Modern Techno-Securitisation

Saurabh Arora, Les Levidow, Andy Stirling and myself have just released the following call for papers for a special issue we’re editing in Science as Culture. Full papers due April 30th 2025. Get in touch if you want to submit something and have questions.

Colonial Relations in Modern Techno-Securitisation

Summary

‘Security’ has become an increasingly dominant frame in recent decades, linking issues such as climate, biodiversity, borders, energy, food and military activities. Ever-more societal issues have been framed as security problems, even as existential threats. These frames seek to justify pre-emptive management through technoscientific expert systems, imagining control over everything and fostering an authoritarian culture.

This pre-emptive techno-securitisation is situated within deeper interlinked colonial relations. They have been made and sustained over centuries through European domination over racialised peoples and their lands, regions, cultures and lifeways. These ongoing relations have been variously analysed through conceptual lenses such as Eurocentrism, coloniality, colonial modernity, settler colonialism and racial capitalism. Associated realities are now nationally and globally hegemonic, entrenching claims and enactments of superiority for particular technoscientific imaginaries and practices over other ways of knowing, making, being and doing.

Securitisation processes serve to technologise and depoliticise oppressive hierarchies which are entrenched by colonial relations. While intensely resisted over centuries, various hierarchies (such as racism, sexism, militarism, classism, hetero-normativity, and ethno-nationalism) continue to be prevalent. Resulting concentrations of power and privilege are reinforced by prevailing frameworks of knowledge and control. Colonial relations have also been extended into military-industrial-security complexes, where Big Tech is now being militarised through so-called ‘dual-use’ technology. Rooted centrally in the US, UK and EU, such complexes are especially instantiated in the Israeli Government’s settler-colonial regime, using Palestine as a laboratory for techno-securitisation.

Call for Papers

This SaC special issue will explore linkages among three dynamics: modern pre-emptive techno-securitisation, today’s active colonial relations, and the military-industrial-security complex. Specific questions are posed at the end of the full CfP (see link below). Contributions should address one or more of those questions.

See the full Call for Papers at: https://bit.ly/3YRBFkK