The Corporate Security Development Nexus: Assembling Security in the Post-Political Age

10 March 2015

Time: 6:00 - 7:30pm
Venue: Fogg Lecture Theatre, Mile End Campus

Speakers: Prof. Michael Williams and Prof. Rita Abrahamsen, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa

The merger of development and security is transforming the global security landscape. Militaries are engaged in tasks previously designated ‘development’; official development assistance is allocated to military restructuring and security sector reform; NGOs undertake police training and hire private security firms to protect their operations. The result has been an increasing blurring of development and security, captured by the now commonplace adage that there can be ‘no development without security and no security without development’.  This in turn has led the emergence of new security complexes, or global security assemblages involving a range of different public and private, global and local actors.

In this talk, Professor Michael C. Williams and Professor Rita Abrahamsen will focus on contemporary security assemblages in the resource-extraction sector, where novel combinations of development agencies, resource corporations, and NGOs are engaged in security provision and governance. They will argue that these assemblages represent more than simply new forms of security; they also reflect a new kind of 'post-political' politics and give rise to new forms of geopolitics.

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