Dismantling security

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. October 2010. Major. Political Science. Advisor: Raymond Duvall. 1 computer file (PDF); x, 197 pages. Ill. (some col.)The post Cold War world witnessed the exponential growth in the range of issues and domains that became security concerns. A long list of objects--the nation, poverty, the human, health, food, the environment--is now firmly incorporated into the global security agenda. As the list of dangers expanded, security itself transmogrified into a medium through which we orient ourselves toward life, politics, and the world. In this dissertation, I argue that what is needed is not more security, but to dismantle the whole architecture of security so as to open up a space for a thought of politics that admits the fact that we can never be secure. To develop this argument, I first map out the landscape of the contemporary empire of security and then provide an overview of critical approaches to security within the discipline of International Relations, where I point out the paradoxical way in which the hegemony of security gets reproduced in these discussions despite the overarching concerns voiced about the complicity of security in the orders of power and violence. This is followed by a discussion of the meaning of dismantling security as an untimely critique. By drawing on historical materialist conceptions of time, I formulate the first sense of the untimely as a politics of time that seeks to counter the temporal structure enacted by the politics of security. Then I discuss the second sense of the untimely, which centers on the relationship between critical thinking and political time. I clarify what it means to brush against the grain of the doxa of security by being untimely in a disciplinary context and refusing to write security. I close by elaborating on three different conceptions of politics once the ground is cleared from security and formulate them as three moves that deconstruct the subject, the space, and the time of security by drawing on the works of scholars such as David Campbell, Michael Dillon, Jacques Rancière, and Jacques Derrida