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Moving beyond state-centric and elitist perspectives, this volume examines everyday security in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and written by scholars from Central Asia and beyond, it shows how insecurity is experienced, what people consider existential threats, and how they go about securing themselves. It concentrates on individuals who feel threatened because of their ethnic belonging, gender or sexual orientation. It develops the concept of ‘securityscapes’, which draws attention to the more subtle means that people take to secure themselves – practices bent on invisibility and avoidance, on disguise and trickery, and on continually adapting to shifting circumstances. By broadening the concept of security practice, this book is an important contribution to debates in Critical Security Studies as well as to Central Asian and Area Studies.
Security is a social practice, which constitutes different formations of political order. Developing a political economy of security practice, the author distinguishes these formations with a view to the actual exchanges between various providers and receivers of security services. He thus departs from a popular perspective in political science, which charts ongoing transformations in the global security landscape along a series of categorical divisions between state and non-state or between the public and the private. A more rewarding analytical perspective conceives the two most dominant security formations in the contemporary world as either based on commercial or on compulsory relations.
'Peace Report' is published jointly by peace and conflict research institutes in Germany since 1987. Scholars from various disciplines examine ongoing international conflicts from the perspective of strategies for peace. Their analyses are the basis for the Editor's Statement, which summarizes and assesses the results and formulates recommendations for peace and security policies in Germany and Europe.
Abstract: In cooperation with researchers in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, BICC (Bonn International Center for Conversion) is conducting a three-year research project on everyday security practices in Central Asia, which is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. The project was launched in July 2015. While security has become an important focus of academic work on and in Central Asia, most studies highlight the geo-strategic importance of the region and underline the threats to states posed by non-state armed groups and transnational criminal organizations. The research project proposes a radically different approach to studying security in Central Asia. As a point of departure, it understands security as an everyday practice of people that consists in identifying and engaging perceptions of existential threat. It asks: How do various groups of people deal with security issues in their daily lives? For the purpose of addressing this question, it develops and applies the innovative concept of secu
The Working Paper charts the evolution of Conversion Studies from the Cold War to the post-Cold War period and discusses some of the reasons for the de-mise of the discipline in the new millennium. Based on a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of Conversion Studies in the past, it makes some suggestions on how conversion could inform a systematic field of academic inquiry in the 21st century. The propositions put forward to this end lean to-ward a comparatively conservative approach that pays close attention to the historical legacy of conversion as a concept. In sum, Conversion Studies should be a multi-disciplinary, critical and policy-relevant field of research that advocates social change based on analyses of political economies of vio-lence, particularly in the affluent, industrialized and comparatively peaceful societies of the Global North. At the same time, it ought to abandon its past re-liance on a simple civil–military dichotomy and, instead, engage with the more complex issues raised by a focus on organized violence. This includes a continual questioning and readjustment of one’s own normative coordinates.2\
International politics have become ever more volatile over the last decade, increasing the risk of large-scale military violence. Yet the precise character of future war will depend on a range of factors that relate to adversaries, allies, technology, geographical scope and multiple domains of warfighting. Few would question that land forces will be important also in the foreseeable future. However, given that the battlefield is in a state of transformation, so is the mission, purpose and utilization of land forces. Indeed, the future conduct of land warfare is subjected to serious and important questions in the face of large and complex challenges and security threats. Advanced Land Warfare...
Foreign affairs practitioners and policy analysts claim that international arms embargoes usually fail due to the lack of political will among national governments to implement and enforce these restrictions. This book includes chapters that examine some of the complex cases of arms embargoes such as Iraq, Pakistan, Angola, and Liberia.