Beyond (the Subjects of) Emergency: (In)security, Mobility and Creativity

Dear Colleagues,

International Relations scholars have traditionally approached violent conflicts, refugee flows, international terrorism, global movements, environmental degradation and climate change—to name only a few—through the prism of crises, emergencies, disasters and catastrophes. Mostly, attention has been devoted to the way in which states control and govern these phenomena. No doubt, the approach that has, so far, dominated has been the security one, in which the role of the state remains the predominant one. Despite the emergence of critical perspectives that scrutinize how crises, including mobility crises, are governed through security, little attention has been provided to the subjects of security who are directly involved, shaped and affected by these global events. More specifically, while research has focused on the way in which states shape, create and govern different subjects—against whom a variety of technologies of control, surveillance, punishment and immobility has been enacted and imposed—the agentic capacity of these subjects has attracted little interest. Despite the broadening, deepening and extending of the concept of security beyond military issues (Buzan 1983, Krause and Williams, 1996), the subjects of (in)security have remained marginal to the debate.

This Special Issue aims at filling this gap by encouraging analyses that engage with the question of subjectivity and (im)mobility by investigating who the subjects of (in)security are.  The question of how to re-think the (im)mobile subjects of (in)security is extremely relevant especially in light of the ‘mobility turn’ in social science (Urry, 2016), which does not simply entail the recognition that our everyday life is organized upon a myriad of forms of mobility—walking, exercising, traveling, meeting people, going to work and back home, doing shopping, etc.—but most importantly that ‘mobility is central to what it is to be human’ (Cresswell 2006).

By engaging with the subjects of (in)security, attention will be focused on the subjectivities, personal choices and creative approaches to everyday insecurities. The concept of ‘creative subjects’—rather than the emerging concept of ‘resilient subjects’—will be privileged. Although the ‘resilient subject’ is generally conflated with agency, empowerment, capacity-building and independence, the concept of resilience, as some scholars have highlighted, is highly problematic as it does not promote any of the above (Chandler and Reid, 2016). For instance, the resilient subject that occupies a great part of the climate change debate is not a secure subject but an ‘adaptive subject’, which is a subject who lives a life that demands constant (and creative) adjustments to survive against everyday hazards. Thus, by privileging the concept of the ‘creative subjects’, this Special Issue aims at moving away from a politics of catastrophe (Aradau and van Munster, 2011) to focus instead on individuals’ capacities to use their imagination and creativity to counter insecurity and life-threatening events through a positive approach to life. This might entail moving away from (dominant) politics of fear and engage with a politics of hope (Sacks, 2000). In short, starting from the premise that people are inherently mobile—i.e., that movement is part of our daily life—this Special Issue aims to explore the many creative (mobile) modalities through which people counter, reinvent and (re)shape their lives against forced mobility and immobility, due to environmental degradation, violent conflicts or life-threatening events.

In this Special Issue, we welcome manuscripts that engage conceptually, methodologically or empirically with themes including, but not limited to, the following:

• Mobility and ontological (in)security;
• Mobility, creativity and the terrestrial;
• Climate change and (im)mobility;
• Creativity in (forced) exile;
• (Im)mobility and COVID-19 pandemic;
• Border-crossing, insecurity and subjectivity.

Dr. Raffaela Puggioni
Dr. Maria Julia Trombetta
Guest Editors

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• mobility and ontological (in)security
• mobility, creativity and the terrestrial
• climate change and (im)mobility
• creativity in (forced) exile
• (im)mobility and COVID-19 pandemic
• border-crossing, insecurity and subjectivity