Security in Crisis Planetary Emergence and the Technopolitics of Crisis Management

The concept of crisis is a recurrent staple in representations of modern forms of insecurity - from nuclear proliferation to cyber-security, armed conflict, the instability of political institutions, from pandemics to risks of social and financial collapse. Amidst this seeming ubiquity and ever-presence, the onset of climate and ecological emergencies as potential planetary-scale threats to the habitability of the Earth raise particularly urgent questions for how we conceive of and deal with crisis insecurity. How these forms of planetary insecurity come to be known, understood, and managed is thus of pressing importance.

Security in Crisis seeks to provide an analysis of the complex combinations of political and technological understandings entailed in what it terms as 'planetary crisis management'. Arguing that the emergence, scope and scale of planetary insecurity and crisis management challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries of the study of International Relations and security, the book adopts an interdisciplinary outlook. It integrates ideas and approaches from across political theory and anthropology (on conceptions of crisis) including climate science and the wider study of environment and ecology in the 'Anthropocene' (on planetary insecurities and ideas of geoengineering); science and technology studies (on the 'technopolitics' of crisis management and the 'sociotechnical imagination' of planetary futures); and critical security studies (on critical approaches to the international and to security). In the process, the book considers how technopolitical 'fixes' for planetary crisis and emergency are often bound up with vexed questions of who 'we' are, and what it means to imagine and secure a planetary future.


ABOUT THE SERIES: Voices in International Relations, published under the auspices of the European International Studies Association (EISA), furthers the development of research at the frontiers of International Relations (IR). It expands the remit of the field by including innovative scholarship that broadens key debates in the discipline, but it is more interested in reconfiguring such debates by approaching them from inside and outside the conventional core. Thematically, we aim to publish research that pushes the limits of IR conventionally defined from within and connects it to debates developing outside the discipline. We are committed to furthering diversity and inclusion in terms of authorship, location, topics and approaches from both inside and outside Europe. We have an inclusive approach to neighbouring disciplines, be it sociology, history, anthropology, geography, economics, political theory or law.

Series editors: Debbie Lisle, Tanja Aalberts, Anna Leander, and Laura Sjoberg.

Columba Peoples, University of Bristol

Columba Peoples is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol, where he researches and teaches on world politics and critical security studies. He is the author of the book Justifying Ballistic Missile Defence: Technology, Security and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and, with Nick Vaughan-Williams, is co-author of three editions of Critical Security Studies: An Introduction (Routledge, 2010, 2015, 2021). His peer-reviewed journal articles have appeared in, among others, Security Dialogue, Journal of International Political Theory, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Review of International Studies, and Globalizations.