The Security-Innovation Nexus in (Geo-)Political Imagination

Abstract

Security and innovation have become increasingly entangled at the level of political rationalities, imagination, and material practice, forming what we conceptualise as the ‘nexus of security-innovation’. The extension of and various shifts in this nexus merit critical attention, as it engenders the emergence of new technopolitical issues, conflicts, and novel sets of actors involved. This article constitutes both an Introduction and an individual contribution to a Special Issue that examines recent shifts in the security-innovation nexus and its relation to geopolitical imaginations. Here, we propose to conceptualise the nexus along three lines–as an empirical phenomenon, a set of problems confronting security actors, and as an analytical approach. We then map the tensions between security and innovation rationalities before introducing the contributions to this Issue and their individual approaches to studying the security-innovation nexus. We conclude by discussing how the ‘innovationization’ of security reshapes security practices, co-constitutes new actors, and restructures the spaces–imagined and actual–in which they operate.