This thesis investigates the implications of human security on global politics. While it adopts a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality and biopolitics, the thesis differs from biopolitical accounts of human security. These accounts tend to reduce human security to a coherent, totalizing, and inadvertently successful mode of governance, deemphasizing its situatedness and instability. In contrast, by complementing the Foucauldian approach to the study of human security with a Deleuzian lens of machinic assemblage in which materiality is particularly emphasized, the thesis argues that the governmental logic of human security gives rise to a multiplicity of open-ended vernacular assemblages and associated orders of governance. Though these assemblages are particular, messy, contingent systems which vacillate, undermine themselves, clash and hybridize with surrounding assemblages, this does not render them ineffective. When the object of analysis is the global, a focus on the materiality of events helps to explore how the global is localized. A focus on materiality opens up the opportunity to explore how the local materializes. This interplay between localizations and materializations disrupts the logics that underlie governmental processes. In this way, the thesis demonstrates how the intransigence of life constantly escapes and readjusts the biopolitical imperative. Empirically, the thesis traces the way human security materializes as a situated governmental strategy in emerging assemblages for managing pathogenic and illicit circulations relating to global migrant communities in Thailand and Vietnam. It shows the way the intricate and productive as well as destructive interplay of human and nonhuman elements inherent to the assemblages helped to constitute two vernacular orders of human security and associated political subjectivities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:554616 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Voelkner, Nadine Miriam Tita |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/39585/ |
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