Ruben Andersson

Fighting and fearing the Other: Notes for an anthropology of nefarious systems 

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ABSTRACT “Security” is proliferating from borders to the wars on terror and drugs. We urgently need to theorize its nefarious manifestations across scales, which anthropologists have started to do by examining the spatialization of security, its embeddedness in local and national narratives, and its “imperial” reach. In conversation with these literatures, I approach security through the lens of systems-making or systemization. Drawing on research among international interveners in the West African Sahel, I show how border, counterterror and other security interventions share certain systemic logics, foremost of which are the mobilization of fear and the transfer of risk. Circuits of fear and risk interact in perpetuating security systems with nefarious yet also beneficial consequences for the actors involved. The conflictive systemization of security escapes the full control of any one actor – requiring a transversal lens accounting for complexity and instability that may hold lessons for the study of other political interventions. 

BIOGRAPHY Ruben Andersson is a professor of social anthropology at the Department of International Development, University of Oxford. His research has been concerned with borders, migration and security, and he is the author of No Go World: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics (California 2019) and Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (California 2014).

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Published Aug. 30, 2021 12:45 PM - Last modified Jan. 11, 2022 10:26 AM