Securing the New Middle East: A Critical Appraisal
Eds. J. Peter Burgess & Costas M. Constantinou
The recent uprisings in the Middle East have highlighted – once again and in dramatic fashion – the confluence of understandings of security, representations of danger, and legitimations of authority, violence and intervention. The political landscape of the Middle East is changing and with it many of the certainties about how things are done or ought to be done in and with the region. Local regimes of power can no longer justify to their national constituencies and international audiences the necessity of states of emergency and autocratic rule. The West confronts the hypocrisies and moral discounts of its own foreign policy objectives and choices, including how its definition of regional security supported the kind of regimes, policies and human rights violations that western states traditionally define themselves against.
Blogging and social networking have bypassed official and centrally organized forms of mass communication and representation and shown the limitations of state propaganda and public diplomacy. Protest movements and the visualization of dissent and violence have necessitated action beyond traditional crisis management processes and brought about unexpected transformations on the ground. Locally ‘elected’ or ‘accepted’ regimes, internationally recognized and often presented as models of stability and progress, are no longer credible and have been locally and internationally criminalized. 
All these major changes in a sensitive geopolitical region require sustained reflection and critical examination.
Newly voiced experiences of the political trigger new conceptualisations of security and insecurity, and reveal a new calculus of risk and uncertainty, new negotiations of values once imposed as universal, confronting conventional readings of liberalism and modernity, subjectivity, gender, the individual, the self, etc.
Security Dialogue invites theoretically advanced and empirically grounded articles that address these and neighbouring issues from any number of perspectives. Analyses utilizing methodologies of gender, identity, religion, media studies, human geography, economics, political sociology, psychoanalysis, and biopolitics will be particularly welcome.
Potential research questions include:
· In what ways has the security discourse of the major regional and global powers shifted in the face of the New Middle East?
· What is the role of diplomatic hermeneutics and UN resolution drafting in reframing what is legally and politically feasible in the New Middle East?
· To what extent have specific dangers and risks been redefined or amplified to legitimate specific forms of intervention or non-interference?
· How do the valorisation of violence and aestheticisation of freedom and protest invariably support security action or political inaction?
· How do masculinized notions of security reveal themselves through micro- and macro-level political processes?
· Which psycho-social structures emerge through the re-shuffling of discourse of freedom and individuality?
· To what degree does the liberalisation impulse put into question modernity and post-modernity in terms of their ethical, aesthetical, or gendered premises?
· How are actors responding to the ‘risks’ and ‘unpredictability’ of social networking and the electronic dissemination of threats and social problems?
Deadline Abstracts: 1 March 2012
In the event of the abstract being accepted, the deadline for submitting a complete, near publishable level, first draft is: 1 June 2012
All abstract submissions to sd@prio.no
All manuscript submissions to: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/security-dialogue
Please also consult our notes for authors available at www.prio.no/sd
