Dr Ruben Andersson will present his recent research as part of our Research Seminar Series.
“Security” is proliferating from borders to the wars on terror and drugs. We urgently need to theorise its nefarious manifestations not just locally but also globally and across scales, which remains a challenge for ethnography (Burawoy 2000). In this paper, I reflect on how a relational and reflexive ethnography of systems may help us gain both an intimate and a big-picture view of security. Drawing on research for my recent book No Go World, I show how border controls, counterterror and other security interventions share certain systemic logics, foremost of which are the mobilisation of fear and the transfer of risk. Yet these interventions are also fragile, conflictive and always in the making, which opens up pathways for change. Methodologically, I argue that an extension of the participant-observation toolkit – in part via our own reflexive presence in the field – makes ethnography particularly suitable for exploring such conflictive system-making or systemization, rather than reified “systems”. Such an extended ethnography may in turn provide compelling viewpoints on how security interventions may travel and sustain themselves across scales, from the global to the most intimate.
Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist and Associate Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford.
He is the author of No Go World: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics (California 2019) and Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (California 2014), winner of the 2015 BBC Ethnography Award.
View the Michaelmas Termline up for the Research Seminar Series here.
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