XIX ISA World Congress of Sociology (July 15-21, 2018)

337

Security and Contemporary State-Making: The Politics, Institutionalization and Effects of Security As a Category of Public Policy

RC18 Political Sociology (host committee)

Language: English and Spanish

The political problem of internal security constitutes not only a central issue in today’s political arenas, but has impacted the contemporary state architecture in very different ways. The problem of internal insecurity got translated into institutional state-making in a variety of contexts, with a multiplicity of contents and with distinct effects.
In this regular session we will discuss empirically-based and theoretically informed papers addressing how the new political and administrative category of “security” impacted different sectors of the state, from the local to the national and throughout different regions of the world. We will dissect the ways in which the category of security gave new meaning to different state control functions (from urban policing, intelligence production, migration control to traditional common and organized crime prevention) and how it reordered penal and administrative acts and practices, integrating distinct elements – penal or other – with distinct hierarchies, and how it expanded beyond the traditional penal and control bureaucracies and generated new methods and objects of state interventions, from city design to intelligence gathering, border control or militarized urban orden maintenance. We will discuss historical, comparative or case studies that address, among other issues, the incorporation of the specific categories of security (citizen, urban, crime, public, border, security, etc.), the discoursive frames, the agents and interests involved, the institutional designs and jurisdictional extents, as well as their material and symbolic effects in political, administrative and urban contexts across the world.