Profile
Jef Huysmans is a Professor of International Politics. After completing his PhD at the University of Leuven (Belgium), he accepted a lectureship in International Relations and European Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Subsequently, he joined the Open University, where he taught Politics and International Relations and served as Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance. He became part of Queen Mary University of London in January 2016.
In 2024, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of Lapland, Finland.
He is best known for his work on the politics of insecurity, the securitisation of migration, critical methods in security studies and international relations, and International Political Sociology. Currently, he is exploring the limits of critique in catastrophic times, the implications of giving conceptual primacy to movement for security and migration studies, and transversalising the international in a post-globalisation context.
He is the co-convenor of the Research Group on International Political Sociology and co-convenes the inter-institutional research hub Doing IPS.
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Research
Research Interests:
My research focuses on the politics of insecurity. I am particularly interested in social and political processes that securitise issues and their consequences. Much of this research has been on the securitisation of migration, asylum and refuge in Europe, the relation between citizenship and security and implications for democratic politics of the diffusion of insecurities.
Currently I am developing two related research lines: (a) giving conceptual and methodological primacy to movement in the study and politics of security and (b) questioning the foregrounding of death and end-thinking in critical security studies and contemporary international politics more generally.
With Joao Nogueira from the Pontifical Catholic University Rio de Janeiro, I continue to develop conceptual and theoretical interventions in debates in International Political Sociology. Under the heading ‘Fracturing and Transversalising the international’ we explore how International Political Sociology can renew critical lineages in International Studies with the aim of understanding politics as an irrevocably open and unbounded practice of transversality and multiplicity, intent on the constant creation of heterogeneity.
Examples of research funding:
2025-2027: Principal Investigator British Academy International Writing Workshops Alumni Programme (Ref: IWWAF21\100027) International Political Sociology. Transversal Writing and Publishing II. (£29921.80)
2020: Principal Investigator British Academy’s Writing Workshops 2020 (Ref: WW20200143): International Political Sociology. Transversal Writing and Publishing. £17725
2019-2021: PI MSCA Fellowship held by Marie Beauchamps -- AFFECTS (H2020-MSCA-IF-2018-839538)
Publications
Recent publications:
Huysmans, Jef & Nogueira, Joao P. (2024) “Against resistance? Towards a conception of differential politics in international political sociology.” European Journal of International Relations. Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 359-381. DOI: 10.1177/13540661231185569
Huysmans, Jef (2023) “How to be critical of security today? Life in motion, untimeliness and the critique of end-thinking.” Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences. 4, no. 2, pp. 262-288. doi: 10.1163/25903276-bja10052
Huysmans, Jef (2023) "Governmentality and security: governing life-in-motion." In: William Walters and Martina Tazzioli (eds) Handbook on governmentality, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, pp. 187-207.
Huysmans, Jef (2023) “El movimiento fractura “lo internacional” — o, ¿qué significa dar primacía al movimiento? [Movement fracturing ‘the international’ — or, what does it mean to give primacy to movement?]” (Translated by Angela Iranzo). Relaciones Internacionales no. 54, pp. 15-37. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15366/relacionesinternacionales2023.54.001
Shindo, Reiko, Özlem Altan-Olcay, Evren Balta, Henk van Houtum, Annelies van Uden, Prem Kumar Rajaram, Martin Coward, Saara Pellander, and Jef Huysmans (2023) "Collective Discussion: Movement and Carceral Spatiality in the Pandemic." International Political Sociology 17, no. 3, pp. 1-29. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.qmul.ac.uk/10.1093/ips/olad011
Huysmans, Jef (2022) “Motioning the politics of security: the primacy of movement and the subject of security.” Security Dialogue. Vol. 53, No. 3, pp. 238-255. DOI: 10.1177/09670106211044015
Autto, Janne, Torronen, Jukka, Huysmans, Jef (2022) “Fear and insecurity in the politics of austerity.” European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 83-111. DOI:10.1080/23254823.2021.1888763
Nogueira, J., J. Huysmans (2022). "La contribución de la Sociología Política Internacional al pensamiento crítico en Relaciones Internacionales." Relaciones Internacionales (50): 85-105.
Huysmans, J. & Joao P. Nogueira (2021) ‘International political sociology as a mode of critique: fracturing totalities.’ International Political Sociology. Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 2-21. doi: 10.1093/ips/olaa017
Books
Jef Huysmans (2014) Security Unbound. Enacting Democratic Limits. Abingdon: Routledge
Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal & Nadine Voelkner (eds) (2014). Critical Security Methods. New Frameworks for Analysis. Abingdon: Routledge
Xavier Guillaume & Jef Huysmans (eds) (2013) Citizenship and Security. The constitution of Political Being. Abingdon: Routledge
Patricia Noxolo and Jef Huysmans (eds) (2009) Community, citizenship, and the ‘war on terror’: Security and insecurity. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Jef Huysmans (2006) The Politics of Insecurity. Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. London: Routledge
Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson, and Raia Prokhovnik (eds) (2006) The Politics of Protection. Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency. Routledge
Jef Huysmans (2005) What is Politics? Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Supervision
I welcome PhD proposals in the following areas:
- Critical security studies
- The politicisation and securitisation of migration and mobility
- International political sociologies of movement, motion, mobility
- Conceptual and theoretical contributions to International Political Sociology
- The social and political life of methods
- The everyday in international politics
- Democracy and security
Current PhD Students
Anastasia Barclay: The coloniality of European border securitisation: An analysis of pushbacks at Europe’s external borders
Brunno Cunha: Urban-International entanglements: geopoetics and the un/mapping of the international in everyday Rio de Janeiro
Timor Landherr: Border Politics Beyond Limits -Spatialising Externalisation and the Production of Transit States.
Madeleine Lindh: Return. Making and maintaining the (inter)national.
Dalia Saris: The impact of increased outsourcing to PMSCs by NGOs on the provision of security.
External PhD supervision
Franca Elena Kappes: “Cyber-hobos, stateless war machines, and diasporic rhizomes. Mapping milieux of differential speed in post-disaster Puerto Rico (2017-2023)” at Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.
