The Security-Innovation Nexus in (Geo-)Political Imagination

ABSTRACT

Security and innovation have become increasingly entangled at the level of political rationalities, imagination, and material practice, forming what we conceptualise as the ‘nexus of security-innovation’. The extension of and various shifts in this nexus merit critical attention, as it engenders the emergence of new technopolitical issues, conflicts, and novel sets of actors involved. This article constitutes both an Introduction and an individual contribution to a Special Issue that examines recent shifts in the security-innovation nexus and its relation to geopolitical imaginations. Here, we propose to conceptualise the nexus along three lines – as an empirical phenomenon, a set of problems confronting security actors, and as an analytical approach. We then map the tensions between security and innovation rationalities before introducing the contributions to this Issue and their individual approaches to studying the security-innovation nexus. We conclude by discussing how the ‘innovationization’ of security reshapes security practices, co-constitutes new actors, and restructures the spaces – imagined and actual – in which they operate.

Acknowledgements

This contribution is the result of a sustained and collaborative effort among the authors. The initial conceptualization was first introduced at the International Studies Association 2019 Annual Meeting in Toronto during a panel focused on Evolving Governance Challenges: Critical Ontologies. It was also presented at the EWIS Workshop on Global Reconfigurations of Science, Technology, Security in Krakow, 2019. Subsequent drafts benefited from the authors’ participation in the special issue’s workshop, Imaginaries of (In)security: Technopolitical Futures at the Nexus of Security and Innovation, organized by the authors in October 2021. More recently, the key argument was presented at the Central European University’s IR Departmental Seminar in February 2023. We extend our gratitude to Dr. Linda Monsees, Dr. Julia Sachseder, and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and insightful suggestions during the earlier drafts of the paper. Their contributions significantly enhanced the quality of our work.

We are grateful to have received support from the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna for language editing. We also express our appreciation to Kai Strycker and Harry Wynands for their meticulous proofreading and language editing, which greatly contributed to the clarity and coherence of our manuscript

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We draw on governmentality studies to conceive of political rationalities as a term to refer to the underlying principles, logic, and strategies that shape how political power is exercised and how societies are governed (Rose and Miller 2010).

Additional information

Funding

Nina Klimburg-Witjes work has been funded by the European Union (ERC, FutureSpace, project number 101076020). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.