Special Section Introduction: “Peripheral Visions: Security By, and For, Whom?”

Abstract

In this introduction to the special issue on “Peripheral Visions: Security by, and for, whom?”, we summarise the core themes of the special issue and outline our relational approach to peripheralisation research in security studies. We explain how and why the papers that form part of the special issue address the power geometries that result from, and contour, uneven landscapes of resilience and (in)security. Taking our cue from current scholarship that conceptualises peripheralisation and polarisation as relational socio-spatial processes, we examine how constructions of centrality and peripheralisation unfold in, and underpin, security politics. We argue that processes of peripheralisation underlie security politics in ways that make peripheralised subjects and places simultaneously central to the production and maintenance of uneven geometries of power. Adding further insights to debates on the power geometries of security, papers in the special issue explore how securitisation builds on, remoulds and (re)produces the peripheralisation of certain people and places (including their discursive construction as peripheral), how peripheralisation relates to uneven productions of (in)security, and how those whose security is most placed at risk through processes of peripheralisation qua securitisation rework dominant logics and policies in their security visions and practices. Our focus is, on the one hand, on the relations through which peripheralised actors, spaces and materialities become central to sustaining privileged securities and, on the other hand, on the everyday practices of securitisation through which risks and precarities are tackled and contested by those peripheralised.