Description:
From the study of crime in sociology or of human security in development studies, to concerns with environmental catastrophe in climate studies and trans-national terrorism in international relations, the growth of security as a matter of academic concern is deemed a sign of our times. But what is security from a cross-cultural perspective? What does it look like from the point of view, not only of those people deemed to be under threat, but also from that of those who are deemed to pose it? Focusing on the multiple and mutually imbricated notions of, and concerns with, time involved in security practices across the globe, this volume brings together a selected group of established and upcoming scholars who conduct ethnographic research in a broad ambit of securitized contexts - from the experience of Palestinian detainees in Israel or forms of popular violence in Bolivia, to efforts to normalise social relations in post-conflict Yugoslavia and ways of imagining threat in contemporary protest movements in Europe - to chart the temporalities of securitization in a multi-polar world.
Review Quotes:
"This edited book is central to the main currents of anthropological work on politics, and to the understanding of discourses of security. It addresses these bodies of literature, uniquely and creatively in the opinion of this reader, through a consideration of anthropological work on time and temporality -- another lively and current key theme of much recent anthropology. Times of Security offers compelling ethnographies of security from a range of different geographical contexts, from South America to Europe and the Middle East, and at different scales, ranging from considerations of local contexts to nation states and even the planet in its entirety."
- Magnus Marsden, SOAS