Book Reviews: A Miscellany

The journal Cultures & Conflicts has become an increasingly important reference for international relations (IR) scholarship. In certain quarters of the Anglophone critical security studies field in particular, there had been a realization that ‘Paris ’ provided as constructive analytical contributions to the analysis of novel security trends and discourses as ‘Aberystwyth ’ or ‘Copenhagen ’ did (for a good review see CASE, 2007). If Cultures & Conflicts had not appeared on the IR radar screen earlier, this had more to do with linguistic barriers than with scholarly quality, this particular special volume on security technologies suggests. The special issue at hand has been dedicated to novel trends in security technologies and their utilities for threat identification and surveillance. Ceyhan’s introductory article conceptualises the central notion of ‘security dispositif ’ as a set of formal and informal, material and social institutions, discourses and processes that establish a broader national security apparatus. Central to this Foucauldian understanding of the security apparatus is its reach beyond immediate physical elements, hence its inclusion of wider social control mechanisms. Ceyhan argues that in western countries, the liberal governance dogma had