Making security public: scandals, controversies, struggles

Abstract Security practices are often secret, obscure, and elusive. It takes the persistent efforts of investigative journalists, activists, oversight bodies, researchers, and non-governmental organizations to shed light on the inner workings of security apparatuses and open new scenes of contestation. Yet, critical security studies have paid limited attention to the forms these contestations take, how they emerge, unfold, or fail, and with what consequences. This special issue proposes to foreground scandals, controversies, and struggles as political forms and analytical lenses that help us better understand how security is made public. We approach security in broad terms that relate, among others, to warfare, policing, counterterrorism, border management, and global health. In this introduction, we situate scandals, controversies, and struggles within an interdisciplinary literature that examines social and political contestation beyond binaries of power/resistance, consensus/conflict, and order/disorder. We then outline a set of analytical sensibilities for researching how security is made public (and the failures to make it public). Finally, we ask how scandals, controversies, and struggles enable or deactivate certain critiques of security. In this regard, we suggest approaching critique through the lens of the “redistribution of the sensible,” a formulation inspired by Jacques Rancière.