Whose security? A critical analysis of the migratory crisis in the Mediterranean
25 April 2024. From 18:30 | Conference | English | IEMed
The question ‘whose security?’ has been central to critical conversations about security. It asks who exactly is secured when governments pursue policies in the name of national or regional security. The answer is invariably states and not people. During the 2015-16 ‘crisis in the Mediterranean’, concerns with women’s security made a surprising entry into the debates, with policy-makers claiming that allowing more refugees from Syria was not acceptable for fear that this would insecure women. While it is most welcome to put women’s insecurities to put on policy agendas of states, the way it was done presumes that women’s insecurities have developed in the South/east and arrived in the North/west via unchecked human mobility. Instead, I propose to study the ‘crisis’ contrapuntally so that we appreciate how such insecurities have been constituted through contemporary geopolitical encounters. Such an approach involves adopting Edward Said’s method of ‘contrapuntal reading’, which invites us ‘[think] through and [interpret] together’ narratives from different parts of the world towards recovering ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ of humankind. More specifically, I offer a contrapuntal reading of Fatima Mernissi’s writings together with everyday portrayals of the “crisis” to point to the connectedness of otherwise differentiated experiences. What is represented as ‘before Europe’ is, at the same time, the ‘aftermath of Europe’ insofar as geopolitical encounters between North/West and South/East of the Mediterranean have been constitutive of women’s insecurities.
A conference by Pinar Bilgin, professor of International Relations at Bilkent University and a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences.
Pinar Bilgin is a professor of International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences, and president of the World International Studies Committee. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Wilson Center, Washington D.C., a visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London, senior research fellow at Käte Hamburger Kolleg in 2023, visiting professor at University of Copenhagen, and Global Fellow at St. Andrews University, among others. She has also worked as an editor and a publisher in journals such as Security Dialogue, International Political Sociology and International Studies Quarterly.
She’s the author of Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective (2005; 2nd ed. 2019), The International in Security, Security in the International (2016) and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology (2017) and Asia in International Relations: Unthinking Imperial Power Relations (2017).
Her new book (co-authored with Karen Smith) Thinking Globally About World Politics: Beyond Global IR will be out in 27th April 2024.
Session moderated by Eduard Soler i Lecha, associate professor of International Relations, UAB
This conference is in English at the IEMed conference room, Girona, 20 – Barcelona.
It can also be followed on IEMed’s Youtube Channel.
Speakers
Eduard Soler i Lecha
Associate professor of International Relations UABOrganised by
