Transecting Securityscapes is an innovative book on the everyday life of security, told via an examination of three sites: Cambodia, the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and Mozambique. The authors’ study of how security is enacted differently in these three sites, taking account of the rich layers of context and culture, enables comparative reflections on diversity and commonality in “securityscapes.”
In Transecting Securityscapes, Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway put into practice a diverse and contextual approach to security that contrasts with the aerial, big-picture view taken by many geopolitics scholars. In applying this grounded approach, they develop a method of urban and territorial transects, combined with other methods and modes of encounter. The book draws on a broad range of traditions, but it speaks mostly to political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics, stressing the need for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based approaches to conflict. The result is a sustained theoretical critique of abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security—mainstream as well as academic—that pretends to be able to know and analyze conflict “from above.”
About the Author :
Till F. Paasche (Author)
TILL F. PAASCHE is an associate professor of political geography at Soran University, Kurdistan region, Iraq.
James Derrick Sidaway (Author)
JAMES D. SIDAWAY is professor of political geography at the National University of Singapore.
Review :
Transecting Securityscapes provides a wonderful addition to the field of security studies and political geography. . . . The application of Appadurai’s notion of 'scapes' to security allows for a more complex and ‘placed’ understanding of the optics and practice of security.
Path-making as well as path-breaking, Transecting Securityscapes is at once transformational and transgressive in its experimental outings on the edges of traditional security studies. Paasche and Sidaway offer impressively observant and critically contextualized dispatches from their far-flung journeys along frontlines of international insecurity in Cambodia, Iraq, and Mozambique. And the result is a wonderfully worldly remapping of geopolitics as it is encountered, endured, and engaged on the ground in everyday spaces.
With lacework-like empirical detail, Transecting Securityscapes cuts through prescriptions and representations of security and geopolitics and through scales and accepted binaries of state/nonstate, home/foreign, urban/rural, hegemonic/subjugated, conflict/peace, and past/present. It zeroes in onto instances of security produced by kinship rather than by hierarchy and highlights fleeting yet powerful moments of revolutionary potential.
Capturing the experience of security from the perspective of those who transect 'securityscapes' in postcolonial cities and embattled territories, this study climaxes in a visceral journey across the multiple and volatile checkpoints crossing the Kurdish lands. It unfolds the passions, interests, dangers, and horrors wrought by geopolitics on the security of everyday life.
