Security, Risk and the Biometric State PDF Download

Author: Benjamin Muller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135161402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
This book examines a series of questions associated with the increasing application and implications of biometrics in contemporary everyday life. In the wake of the events of 9/11, the reliance on increasingly sophisticated and invasive technologies across a burgeoning field of applications has accelerated, giving rise to the term 'biometric state'. This book explores how these ‘virtual borders’ are created and the effect they have upon the politics of citizenship and immigration, especially how they contribute to the treatment of citizens as suspects. Finally and most importantly, this text argues that the rationale of 'governing through risk' facilitates pre-emptory logics, a negligent attitude towards 'false positives', and an overall proliferation of borders and ubiquitous risk, which becomes integral to contemporary everyday life, far beyond the confined politics of national borders and frontiers. By focusing on specific sites, such as virtual borders in airports, trusted traveller programs like the NEXUS program and those delivered by airlines and supported by governmental authorities (TSA and CATSA respectively), this book raises critical questions about the emerging biometric state and its commitment and constitution vis-à-vis technology of ‘governing through risk’. This book will be of interest to students of biopolitics, critical security, surveillance studies and International Relations in general. Benjamin J. Muller is assistant professor in International Relations at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada. He completed his PhD in the School of Politics and International Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2005.

Author: Benjamin Muller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135161399
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This book examines a series of questions associated with the increasing application and implications of biometrics in contemporary everyday life. In the wake of the events of 9/11, the reliance on increasingly sophisticated and invasive technologies across a burgeoning field of applications has accelerated, giving rise to the term 'biometric state'. This book explores how these ‘virtual borders’ are created and the effect they have upon the politics of citizenship and immigration, especially how they contribute to the treatment of citizens as suspects. Finally and most importantly, this text argues that the rationale of 'governing through risk' facilitates pre-emptory logics, a negligent attitude towards 'false positives', and an overall proliferation of borders and ubiquitous risk, which becomes integral to contemporary everyday life, far beyond the confined politics of national borders and frontiers. By focusing on specific sites, such as virtual borders in airports, trusted traveller programs like the NEXUS program and those delivered by airlines and supported by governmental authorities (TSA and CATSA respectively), this book raises critical questions about the emerging biometric state and its commitment and constitution vis-à-vis technology of ‘governing through risk’. This book will be of interest to students of biopolitics, critical security, surveillance studies and International Relations in general. Benjamin J. Muller is assistant professor in International Relations at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada. He completed his PhD in the School of Politics and International Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2005.

Author: Shoshana Magnet
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351358
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book examines the proliferation of surveillance technologies&—such as facial recognition software and digital fingerprinting&—that have come to pervade our everyday lives. Often developed as methods to ensure "national security," these technologies are also routinely employed to regulate our personal information, our work lives, what we buy, and how we live.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309142075
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Biometric recognition-the automated recognition of individuals based on their behavioral and biological characteristic-is promoted as a way to help identify terrorists, provide better control of access to physical facilities and financial accounts, and increase the efficiency of access to services and their utilization. Biometric recognition has been applied to identification of criminals, patient tracking in medical informatics, and the personalization of social services, among other things. In spite of substantial effort, however, there remain unresolved questions about the effectiveness and management of systems for biometric recognition, as well as the appropriateness and societal impact of their use. Moreover, the general public has been exposed to biometrics largely as high-technology gadgets in spy thrillers or as fear-instilling instruments of state or corporate surveillance in speculative fiction. Now, as biometric technologies appear poised for broader use, increased concerns about national security and the tracking of individuals as they cross borders have caused passports, visas, and border-crossing records to be linked to biometric data. A focus on fighting insurgencies and terrorism has led to the military deployment of biometric tools to enable recognition of individuals as friend or foe. Commercially, finger-imaging sensors, whose cost and physical size have been reduced, now appear on many laptop personal computers, handheld devices, mobile phones, and other consumer devices. Biometric Recognition: Challenges and Opportunities addresses the issues surrounding broader implementation of this technology, making two main points: first, biometric recognition systems are incredibly complex, and need to be addressed as such. Second, biometric recognition is an inherently probabilistic endeavor. Consequently, even when the technology and the system in which it is embedded are behaving as designed, there is inevitable uncertainty and risk of error. This book elaborates on these themes in detail to provide policy makers, developers, and researchers a comprehensive assessment of biometric recognition that examines current capabilities, future possibilities, and the role of government in technology and system development.

Author: Xavier Guillaume
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135045879
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book engages the intense relationship between citizenship and security in modern politics. It focuses on questions of citizenship in security analysis in order to critically evaluate how political being is and can be constituted in relation to securitising practices. In light of contemporary issues and events such as human rights regimes, terrorism, identity control, commercialisation of security, diaspora, and border policies, this book addresses a citizenship deficit in security studies. The chapters introduce several key political themes that characterise the interplays between citizenship and security: changes in citizenship regimes, the renewed insecurity of citizenship-state relations, the emerging ways by which the political and national communities are crafted, and the ways democratic societies and regimes react in times of insecurity. Approaching citizenship as both a governmental practice and a resource of political contestation, the book aims to highlight what political challenges and contestations are created in situations where security intensely meets citizenship today. This book will be of interest to scholars of security studies and security politics, citizenship studies, and international relations.

Author: Michael Dillon
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317532678
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Taking its inspiration from Michel Foucault, this volume of essays integrates the analysis of security into the study of modern political and cultural theory. Explaining how both politics and security are differently problematised by changing accounts of time, the work shows how, during the course of the 17th century, the problematisation of government and rule became newly enframed by a novel account of time and human finitude, which it calls ‘factical finitude’. The correlate of factical finitude is the infinite, and the book explains how the problematisation of politics and security became that of securing the infinite government of finite things. It then explains how concrete political form was given to factical finitude by a combination of geopolitics and biopolitics. Modern sovereignty required the services of biopolitics from the very beginning. The essays explain how these politics of security arose at the same time, changed together, and have remained closely allied ever since. In particular, the book explains how biopolitics of security changed in response to the molecularisation and digitalisation of Life, and demonstrates how this has given rise to the dangers and contradictions of 21st century security politics. This book will be of much interest to students of political and cultural theory, critical security studies and International Relations.

Author: Annick T. R. Wibben
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113685259X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
This book rethinks security theory from a feminist perspective – uniquely, it engages feminism, security, and strategic studies to provide a distinct feminist approach to security studies. The volume explicitly works toward an opening up of security studies that would allow for feminist (and other) narratives to be recognized and taken seriously as security narratives. To make this possible, it presents a feminist reading of security studies that aims to invigorate the debate and radicalize critical security studies. Since feminism is a political project, and security studies are, at their base, about particular visions of the political and their attendant institutions, this is of necessity a political intervention. The book works through and beyond security studies to explore possible spaces where an opening of security, necessary to make way for feminist insights, can take place. While it develops and illustrates a feminist narrative approach to security, it is also intended as an intervention that challenges the politics of security and the meanings for security legitimized in existing practices. This book provides develops a comprehensive framework for the emerging field of feminist security studies and will be of great interest to students and scholars of feminist IR, critical security studies, gender studies and IR and security studies in general.

Author: Matt McDonald
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136645950
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
This book offers an examination of the role of emancipation in the study and practice of security, focusing on the issue of environmental change. The end of the Cold War created a context in which traditional approaches to security could be systematically questioned. This period also saw a concerted attempt in IR to argue that environmental change constituted a threat to security. This book argues that such a notion is problematic as it suggests that a universal definition of security is possible, which prevents a recognition of security as a site of contestation, in which a range of actors articulate alternative visions of who or what is in need of being secured. If security is understood and approached in traditional terms - as the territorial preservation of the nation-state from external threat - then it is indeed difficult to see how environmental issues would benefit from being placed on states’ security agenda. If, however, security is defined in terms of the emancipation of the most vulnerable individuals from contingent structural oppressions, then drawing a relationship between environmental change and security may be beneficial for redressing those environmental issues and prioritising the needs of those most at risk from the manifestations of global environmental change. This book takes the limitations of contemporary approaches to the relationship between the environment and security as its starting point, and seeks to do two things. First, it aims to illustrate the ways in which arguments over approaches to environmental issues can be viewed as contestation over the meaning of 'security‘ in particular political contexts. Central here is the composition and assumptions of the dominant security discourse to emerge regarding those issues: a framework of meaning for the most important forms of action on behalf of a particular group, defining the terms for meaningful contestation and negotiation about security itself within that group. As such, the book attempts to illustrate the dynamics of competition over the meaning of security with reference to environmental issues, particularly focusing on instances of political change in the dominant security discourse through which that issue is approached. In the process the author points to the central role of these dominant security discourses in underpinning the most practically significant actions regarding environmental issues such as deforestation and global climate change. The book employs methodological tools that enable a focus on how particular frameworks of meaning are constituted and become dominant; how they provide a lens through which various issues are approached; and how discourses most consistent with redressing environmental change and the suffering of the most vulnerable might come to provide the framework through which security is viewed in particular contexts. This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Security Studies, geography, sociology, IR and Political Science in general.

Author: Alan Collins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198708319
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
This book offers an introduction to Security Studies. It features an impressive breadth and depth of coverage of the different theoretical approaches to the study of security and the ever-evolving range of issues that dominate the security agenda in the 21st Century.

Author: Juha A. Vuori
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135077002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This book examines how critical approaches to security developed in Europe can be used to investigate a Chinese security issue - the case of the Falungong. The past few decades have produced a rich field of theoretical approaches to ‘security’ in Europe. In this book, the security-specific notions of securitization, the politics of insecurity, and emancipation are used as analytical approaches to investigate the anti-Falungong campaign in the People’s Republic of China. This campaign, launched in 1999, was the largest security-related propaganda campaign since 1989 and was directed against a group of qigong-practitioners who were presented as a grave threat to society. The campaign had major impacts as new security legislation was established and human rights organizations reported severe mistreatment of practitioners. This book approaches one empirical case with three approaches in order to transcend the tendency to pit one approach against another. It shows how they highlight different aspects in investigation, and how they can be combined to gain more comprehensive insights, and thereby invigorate renewed debate in the field. Furthermore, this is used as a vehicle to discuss more general philosophical issues of theory, development, and theory development and will assist students to comprehend the effects research framework selection has on a piece of research. Such discussions are necessary in order to apply the frameworks in investigations that go beyond the socio-political context they were originally developed in. This book will be of interest to students of critical security studies, Chinese politics, research methods and IR in general.