Setha Low

Ruben Andersson and Dace Dzenovska have written a provocative article about security “protectionism,” which, they argue, is a new paradigm sweeping through contemporary politics. Like Frédéric Gros (2014) a decade ago, they declare that ours is the age of security. The ethnographic evidence supporting their claim is a linear biographical description of the shift from neoliberalism to security in Sweden and Latvia. Elsewhere, they attach the “protectionism” label to various phenomena, from social justice activism to elite university students demanding so-called safe spaces. While we applaud their venturesomeness, we are concerned that they are labeling complex processes without explaining them. Here we respond by raising three concerns: firstly, about how anthropology frames and studies security; secondly, how security is nested in political economy; and, thirdly, its relationship with freedom. We hope to provoke further discussion and encourage Andersson and Dzenovska to follow up on this article.

American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability. By Russ Castronovo. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023. 304p. 35.00 paper. - Volume 22 Issue 4

Response to Russ Castronovo’s Review of Trapped: Life under Security Capitalism and How to Escape It - Volume 22 Issue 4

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The impact of the security state is not only seen in the political and spatial restrictions on public space and the public sphere or inscribed in militarized national borders and cities, but also in the increasing penetration of the domestic and private realm of home. These securitization practices and how they work can be exposed through an ethnographic analysis of formal institutional structures as well as the affective, discursive and bodily practices that make up and regulate everyday life. Examining securitization as a scalar set of spatial practices and social processes that interlock through a desire for ‘security’ reveals how securitization is able to keep a political stranglehold not only on poor, homeless and marginalized people who are traditionally perceived to be at risk and the target of these controls, but also on middle-class social preferences, political actions, shared feelings, and daily movements. This paper explores five of these sociospatial securitization practices including spatial enclosure, surveillance, private governance, rules and regulations, and financialization of everyday life that constrict and then redirect middle-class home life in private housing regimes in New York City.

Across a diverse range of urban geographical contexts, the provision and governance of public spaces frequently generates conflicts of varying intensity involving urban inhabitants and urban authorities. A clear moral and philosophically based argument and evaluative framework is necessary for both critiquing and informing the positions that are taken in public space disputes. In this paper, we develop a model of socially just public space that could inform analysis of, and interventions in, these conflicts. In dialogue with the literatures on urban public space and on social and spatial justice, we offer five propositions about what makes for more just public space. The five propositions concern distributive justice, recognition, interactional justice and encounter, care and repair, and procedural justice. The application of these five propositions is exemplified through brief reflections on the politics of the street in New York City, and ‘broken windows’ style policing of graffiti.