IN CONVERSATION: SECURITY
Some Thoughts on the
C ritical Anthropology o f
Security
Daniel M. Goldstein
Rutgers University
The u.s. has become a dumping ground for every
body elses problem s...W hen Mexico sends its
people, theyre not sending their best. ... Theyre
sending people that have lots of problems, and
theyre bringing those problems with us [sic].
Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime.
Theyre rapists (Donald Trump, announcing his
candidacy for President of the United States, June
16,201s).1
If statements like the above are to be believed, the
homeland (as the United States now calls itself) is in
grave danger from transnational immigration. O ur
security is threatened by them, the transgressors of
international order who regularly cross our borders or
wash up on our shores. Some u.s. politicians and news
Etnofoor, Humour, volume 28, issue 1,2016, pp. 147-152
makers, for example, claim that agents of isis (the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) are conspiring to sneak
across the southern border of the u.s., to cause insta
bility and imperil the nation. Republican Governor
Rick Perry of Texas, a candidate for President in 2016,
suggested that isis agents could beexploiting the inse
curity of the border, saying I think its a very real possi
bility that they may have already crossed into the u.s.2
Even more alarming, some (for example Senator Thom
Tillis, Republican from North Carolina) have suggested
that isis fighters are planning to expose themselves to
the Ebola virus prior to crossing the border, with the
goal of infecting the u.s. population.3 Europeans are
familiar with such speculations, as the floods of refu
gees, asylum seekers, and immigrants from the Middle
East and Africa arrive at the borders of the continent,
threatening to unravel the very fabric of the European
Union. The root of the problem, it would appear, is the
threat to European security that these refugees pose,
owing to the failure of border states to regulate the
immigration flow. Macedonian president Gjorge
Ivanov complained in March of 2016, that:
Some so-called refugees are travelling through the
whole of Europe with false identities, and Greece is
simply stamping their papers so that they continue
on their journey. We have to assume that many of
these people who were travelling with forged papers
want to enter the eu via the refugee route as radical
fighters (Macedonia slams eu for failing security
in unprecedented refugee crisis2016).4
Fear of Islamic jihadists hiding among the refugees
generates fear and an existential crisis for the European
Union- the very definition of a security threat as some
would understand it (for example, Buzan et al.1998).5
It is useful to reflect on the contemporary immigra
tion/ refugee crises ongoing in the Western world as an
entre to a discussion of security, the theme of Etnofoor
27(2). The articles in that volume move beyond the
headlines and the big issues of the day, taking us to
smaller places and less dramatic moments that, never
theless, reveal themes and patterns that also map out
across broader terrains. Unlike media accounts, but also
unlike most other scholarly treatments, these articles
explore security as a multidimensional, multi-perspec-
tival phenomenon, in which not only security but its
alter, insecurity, are the objects of production and
manipulation. The Etnofoor articles address security
from angles both spatial and temporal - from above
148
and below, from situated to unrealizable, from slow
moving to tearing along at high speed. The actors in
these articles are diverse, and include in/security makers
ranging from the authorized agents of Copenhagen-
style securitization, to the securitized themselves
crossing borders or scratching out a living at the
margins of the state (Das and Poole 2004). Impor
tantly, all of the articles are grounded in ethnography
- the hallmark, of course, of a critical anthropology of
security (Goldstein 2010) - demonstrating the unique
contributions that ethnographers can make to the study
of security beyond the nation-state. The articles in the
theme issue remind us - as if we needed reminding,
floating as we are in the sea of security rhetoric like that
expressed by commentators and politicians worldwide
- that security remains a powerful diacritic of social
relations, a key point of encounter between citizens,
non-citizens, and states, and a framework within which
many forms of political, economic, and cultural life are
enacted. Ethnographic analysis enables us to under
stand how these dynamics unfold within and across
local, national, and global scales, and expand our
conception of what security and insecurity might entail.
The configuration of immigration as a security
problem mirrors the issues raised by the contributors to
the Etnofoor volume, many of whom call our attention
to the ways in which security has emerged as the prin
ciple frame within which contemporary life is under
stood, often with important affective dimensions.
Attention to in/security affects reveals the ways in
which fear and prejudice are conscripted to the service
of state and local projects (Masco 2014). Security
exhibits a logical slippage, as ordinary people (for
example migrants, or Muslims, or border crossers, or
Roma) transmogrify, emerging in public discourse and
policy making as criminals or terrorists or disease
vectors that must be brought under control. Their very
existence justifies enduring states of exception within
which states might enact emergency security measures
(Agamben 2005; de Len 2015), and the consent of
the citizenry is mobilized in support of limiting rights
and enhancing punishments. Security also exhibits a
flexible, adaptive quality, enabling its discourse and
practice to spread virally through the varied domains of
social life, infecting the quotidian realities of ordinary
living with its governing logic. Andrea Mariko Grant
(2015) calls it a metastasis: the ways in which the
forms of in/security (both big and institutional or small
and personal, what she calls quiet insecurity) origi
nating at a particular location and historical moment
spread to other situations. This in/security seepage
produces affective changes in people and social rela
tions, as previously friendly or neutral ties metamor
phose into suspicion and mistrust.
G rants article also calls attention to the often u n r
ealizable and invisible nature of both security threats
and security making. In Rwanda, state practices of
policing are invisibilized - coded, disingenuous, and
cryptic (Grant 2015: 30), but so are the threats that
quietly trouble ordinary peoples lived experience.
Mounting resource scarcity and rising crime are two
such threats that are officially denied but which
manifest emotionally and somatically in citizens lives
and bodies. Similarly, Alexandra Schwell (2015) offers
a take on the embodiment of security, which she
suggests as a counterpoint to securitisation theory and
its tendency to imagine a singular, passive, mass
audience for authorized security declarations. Atten
tion to the affective and the somaticized, Schwell
persuasively argues, can lead scholars of security to
recognize the diversity within securitized populations,
and the fundamentally relational nature of in/security
making. Critically, S dw ells article provides an anthro
pological rebuttal to those scholars who would return
the study of security to its roots in state-centric perspec
tives. Instead, attention to affective and bodily experi
ence requires us to disaggregate the populations we
study, to understand the ways in which such broad
concepts as fear are actually lived by people in secu
ritized contexts. As all of these articles demonstrate,
such work can really only be done ethnographically.
As more ethnographic attention is devoted to the
study of in/security, what we might call the vernacu-
larization of security discourse can be found occurring
at the most local of levels. As Merry (2005) has observed
about human rights discourse, security becomes local
ized in the discourses and practices of communities far
outside the domain of the state, becoming a powerful
yet unauthorized vernacular for describing and concep
tualizing lived experience, and for speaking to distant
or negligent audiences. This kind of security vernacu-
larization is evident in several of the articles. Like
Schwell, Ana Ivasiuc (2015) deploys ethnographic
evidence to counter some basic assumptions of secu
ritization theory, here examining the localization of
security discourse through her exploration of the secu
ritisation of otherness in Italy. In her study of how the
Roma are made the objects of securitized attention by
vigilante groups, Ivasiuc observes the ways in which
security discourses become mobile, moving beyond the
domains imagined for them by authorized securitizers
(those whom securitization theory imagines capable of
149
uttering securitizing speech acts). Instead, security
becomes an idiom through which anxieties in other
social domains can be expressed (in Ivasiucs case, these
include anxieties about urban decay), and the Roma,
already invested with negative stereotypes underlying
conceptions of pollution, become a scapegoat for all
the insecurities of the vigilantes (Ivasiuc 2015: 60).
Similar processes can be observed in Constance Smiths
(2015) article on how people construct security claims
in Nairobi, Kenya. In a context in which many feel that
the state is failing to provide security, people appro
priate security discourse to make appeals to the state in
a language that gets heard (Smith 2015: 135). Smiths several of the contributors to this volume also note the
argument demonstrates especially well the utility of
ethnography for the study of security, taking us beyond
state-imposed categories to what she calls the lived
terrain of security - how it is experienced in everyday
life (Smith 2015: 134; see also Goldstein 2012,2016).
Muslim residents of Delhi, India also face the daily
challenge of navigating security, as described in Kalyani
Devaki Menons (2015) article, though here it is the
spaces of the city that they must negotiate. Like the
Roma whom Ivasiuc describes, Indian Muslims in
Delhi are routinely cast as marginal, suspicious, and
dangerous, and so made the objects of securitizing
attention. As such, Indian Muslims must manoeuvre
through the securitized (non-Muslim dominated)
spaces of Delhi, while simultaneously taking refuge in
Old Delhi, widely perceived to be a Muslim place.
W hereas Smith sees Kenyans appropriations of
security discourse as empowering, Menon observes
that ultimately, as Muslims seek shelter in Old Delhi,
they also inadvertently acquiesce to a particular form of
government (Menon 2015: 126), one based on ideolo
150
gies of nationalism and belonging and that regards
Muslims as a security threat.
If we are to examine the lived experience of security
- how it manifests within the lives, bodies, and
emotional worlds of ordinary people - we must also
recognize that those people are spatially situated, and
that those spaces provide the terrain on which secu
ritizing projects are implemented and challenged. To
say that in/security moves across domains, infecting
new areas of social life with its discourse and practices,
is to inquire as to its spatiality and means of transmis
sion. Smiths article makes this abundantly clear, but
scalar dimensions of security - another important
anthropological contribution to security studies -
helping us to think more carefully about securitys
slippery logic, flexibility, and tendency to metastasize.
Tina Harris and Hasse van der Veen (2015) take scalar
dimensions of security as their principal focus, exam
ining the ways in which state-level programs and
policies on infrastructure can impact security in
subsidiary regions. W hat is more, as they show for
India and China, what authorities present as efforts to
enhance economic security at the local level may in fact
be about promoting state security at the national or
international levels. Christoph Kohls (2015) paper on
the security sector in Guinea-Bissau reveals a similar
disjuncture between state ideas of security and those of
end users, ordinary people who rely on state security
instruments to resolve conflicts and settle problems.
The scales here are intimately connected yet difficult to
bridge, as Kohl demonstrates in his review of the
history of security sector reform in the country. The
security sector in Guinea-Bissau is convoluted, person-
alistic, and tainted by an authoritarian past. Local Notes

N CONVERSATION:
people must navigate a maze of obscure rules and codes
to use the formal justice system and, unable to gain 1 Jannell Ross. Donald Trumps Big Mouth Just Taught Us a
satisfaction from the state, turn to non-state security Valuable Lesson About the Power of Latinos. The Washington
providers. International experts, meanwhile, lack the Post, 30 June, 2015.
requisite ethnographic knowledge to suggest realistic 2 Rick Perry. I ts Possible isis Has Crossed Southern Border.
reforms. The gaps between the scales of security are c n n , 21 August, 2014
such that, Kohl estimates, change is unlikely. 3 Gail Sullivan. For the Right, Ebola is the Rallying Cry for
I began with a discussion of how immigration is Closing the Mexican Border. The Washington Post, 10 October,
now perceived as a security threat in the u.s. and 2014.
Europe, a circumstance that reflects many of the themes 4 Macedonia slams eu for failing security in unprecedented
that I have highlighted in this commentary. Like other refugee crisis. 11 March, 2016, https://www.rt.com/news/
groups that the articles in the Etnofoor volume explore, 335297-macedonia-eu-refugee-crisis/, accessed April 17,2016.
immigrants are frequently constructed as threatening 5 Paul Schinkman. Security Concerns Surround Europes Refu
populations requiring special management to regulate gee Crisis, us News, 17 September, 2015, http://www.usnews.

SECURITY
and control. In a world of sovereign nations, border com/news/articles/2015/09/17/ security-concerns-surround-
crossers violate the spatial parameters that establish the europes-refugee-crisis, accessed April 17,2016.
very basis of contemporary social order. As Eileen
Murphy and Mark Maguire (2015) observe in their
review of new technologies of border control in the eu , References
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