This thesis seeks to conceptualise an anarchist response to the politics of security. Understanding security as a discourse of conceptual and political mastery, and as therefore resistant to incorporation within a framework of emancipation, it argues that anarchism offers theoretical and practical resources through which creative insurrections in the political-metaphysical fabric of security might be made. The thesis is built around an ethnography of UK-based anti-militarist activism, interpreting a variety of practices, tactics and strategies through a conception of anarchism which emphasises prefigurative direct action and a ceaseless resistance to relations and discourses of domination and hegemony. Three central interventions in the logics of security are identified. The first involves the subversion of the hegemonic ontology of agency which can be identified across both traditional and critical understandings of security; those anti-militarists under examination do not appeal to „the state‟ to redress their grievances and insecurities, preferring instead to „directly‟ engage in practices of security. The second intervention emphasises those forms of anti-militarism which can be seen to subvert the security/insecurity binaries themselves, and to open spaces and possibilities beyond the totalising frameworks which constitute our contemporary politics of security. The third examines those moments and movements where, as they subvert these binaries, anti-militarists prefigure forms of subjectivity which displace those forms of rationality and relationality which underpin the politics of security (and militarism). Together these three interventions destabilise the politics of security in ways which offer powerful opportunities for rethinking and resisting contemporary forms of political domination and violence. This also functions as an argument about the politics of resistance, which is conceptualised here not as a programmatic, strategic or confrontational posture, but a tactical, prefigurative and anarchic exploration of becoming otherwise.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:582419 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Rossdale, Chris |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/57615/ |
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