Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"Moving from North Africa through Europe to East and Southeast Asia, ranging from colonial discourse through national liberation movements into postcoloniality and globalization, this meticulously researched collection of stellar essays shows the politics of meaning-change as words cross boundaries from North to South and back, through the politics of gender and class. I am already using it in my teaching!"--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

WORDS in Motion

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction.......................................................................................3Words in Motion CAROL GLUCK.......................................................................11Words with Shadows.................................................................................21Segurana/Security in Brazil and the United States ITTY ABRAHAM...................................40Words That Expand..................................................................................67'Ada/Custom in the Middle East and Southeast Asia MONA ABAZA......................................83Words Unspoken.....................................................................................109'Ilmaniyya, Lacit, Scularisme/Secularism in Morocco DRISS MAGHRAOUI............................129Words That Cover...................................................................................151'Aqalliyya/Minority in Modern Egyptian Discourse SETENEY SHAMI....................................174Fear Words.........................................................................................199Injury: Incriminating Words and Imperial Power LYDIA H. LIU.......................................219Conjuracin/Conspiracy in the Philippine Revolution of 1896 VICENTE L. RAFAEL.....................240Words That Set Standards...........................................................................265Komisyon/Commission and Kurul/Board: Words That Rule HURI ISLAMOGLU...............................286Chumchon/Community in Thailand CRAIG J. REYNOLDS..................................................306Thammarat/Good Governance in Glocalizing Thailand KASIAN TEJAPIRA.................................327Notes on Contributors..............................................................................329

Chapter One

Segurana/Security in Brazil and the United States

Motility is as integral to words, then, as it is to human being. For words also travel and constitute a record of journeys made.... Each-the human and the word-possesses a career, describes a history, travels a measure of existence, does more than is knowingly intended and signifies more than they can know. -Michael Dillon, The Politics of Security

There are few words in our modern political lexicon as parasitic as "security." Most commonly preceded by the word "national" (meaning, in fact, the state), this traveling signifier has attached itself to nearly every scale of human activity, from the individual to the international, even to outer space; from comestible (food security), natural (environmental security), financial (security/securities), and territorial (homeland security) to virtual (cyber security); to forms of community, from Social Security to collective security, which is the principle behind the United Nations. The power of the word and its associations is such that even those critical of the emphasis on national security have taken to using the word, joining it, for example, to "human" and "ecological" as a way to say that people and nature, too, are in need of special protection. But this strategy of renaming ultimately fails because it assumes that replacing the modifier will transform the object merely by shifting the scale at which security is applied. The effort to make secure objects other than the state cannot succeed without examining "security" itself-what the word means and what it does.

Here I explore some of the meanings, movements, and practices associated with one of the most powerful words of our time between and within two countries: the United States and Brazil. To understand what makes "security" move with such abandon, the word will first be laid bare to show that it travels with an inseparable shadow, "insecurity," a word that may do more to explain its better-known modifier, national security, than is generally recognized. The weight of national security as an unimpeachable reason of state makes the extraction of the shadow word, "insecurity," both difficult and necessary. This is an act of salvage, restoring to the foreground a shadow that most often impels the movement of its better-known traveling companion. I then follow the word and its shadow as they move from the United States to Brazil and conclude with an exploration of the lateral movement of national security within each country, both outward and inward.

Michael Dillon argues for a "radical ambivalence" embedded in the meaning of "security." He notes that the highest state of security is defined in negative terms, as an absence of insecurity. In other words, the expression of security always brings with it insecurity, contained in its very meaning. Dillon reminds us that this simultaneously doubled articulation comes from the Latin origins of the word-"sine cura," in its root form, or more familiarly, "securitas" (freedom from doubt or without concern)-which is the common root of the English "security," the French "scurit," and the Portuguese "seguridade." The doubled meaning of security, with the negative conditions of doubt and concern incorporated from the beginning, provides a direct link to the ambivalence of the word today. The duality of meaning embedded in "security" is not, as Dillon points out, a dialectical struggle, leading to the emergence of one meaning over the other (and not an equal struggle, either). Rather, both are always simultaneously present, locked in a clumsy pas de deux, each circling the other, taking turns to lead and to follow. This describes a "conflict of unequal opposites which are rooted and routed together." Fear and threat, danger and uncertainty are embedded in-and are byproducts of-the process of securing the object of (in)security. "Security" is, in that sense, not a noun but a verb; not a steady state or stable condition of being safe, but a continuous process of securing safety. What we now call "national security," a desired outcome, is produced by the securing, the fixing or grounding, of the sources of national (in)security.

A number of implications flow from this-in particular, the absence of limits once the process of securing is under way. It has long been recognized in international relations that new insecurities are automatically generated by the reflexivity of security work in a world filled with nation-states, the so-called security dilemma. This is the process whereby securing one nation leads to another's insecurity and so on in an endless spiral. The security dilemma also arises from the realization that, with every new threat that is identified and secured, uncertainty persists about the extent of danger that has been contained. This leads to what might be called an "excess" of insecurity, because the process of securing can never be known to be complete. Notwithstanding the official anxiety that such a process generates, this excess of insecurity produces its own form of perversity: The most advanced national-security apparatus eventually takes pride in -and is defined by-the ability to identify more sources of insecurity than its competitors, even if in the process it makes that state more insecure than any other state. Such a process is reinforced in the nuclear age when, due to the global reach of missiles and the intergenerational effects of harmful radiation, familiar distinctions of political space...