Mobility and Insecurity
YCISS is collaborating with other research units as well as faculty across the university to explore the connections between human mobility and forms of insecurity. Topics include migration, borders, citizenship and exclusion, health, work and livelihoods, and environmental change. The following are specific projects involving YCISS (please contact Robert Latham for more details about this program area):
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Canadian Trends in Social Exclusion
YCISS is involved in a research initiative that explores the extent, nature, causes, and implications of various forms of exclusion of newcomers to Canada. The number of migrants coming to Canada on a temporary basis is rising; economic situations of many immigrants are deteriorating; and tendencies to frame mobility in terms of security are intensifying. This research explores the challenges these economic and political changes pose for social inclusion and exclusion of newcomers. It recognizes that the experiences of immigrants are very diverse, varying by their social location as well as the social contexts in which they live and labour.
Contact: Robert Latham |
Democracy, Diasporas, and Canadian Security in Global Perspective
In 2007, YCISS commissioned the Democracy, Diasporas, and Canadian Security in Global Perspective research project. It sought to advance innovative approaches to the study of diasporas and help foster new ways of viewing diasporas especially in terms of their political status and international peace and security. Research topics addressed in this project include links between diasporas in Canada and: emerging forms of transnational citizenship; conflict; democracy; Canadian foreign policy; human security; human rights; and Canada as a model multicultural polity. Click here
For further background on the May 2008 Conference Click here
Contact: Robert Latham
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Cultures and Security
Students of security have been paying increasing attention to the contested notion of ‘culture’ over the past two decades. Critical scholars have been motivated in part by the damage done by the pernicious notion of the ‘clash of civilisations’, and so have felt it important to explore the place of cultures of various kinds in the production of conflict, security, and insecurity. Research at YCISS focuses on the ways in which different cultures produce lenses through which security and insecurity is thought and practiced. This research includes examining cultural practices outside the ‘west’, as well as turning our critical gaze on western cultural practices, particularly popular culture. Specific projects within this program area include (please contact David Mutimer about this program area):
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Seeing Through the Terror: Latin American & Caribbean Responses to Global Survival after 9/11
The proposed research project will explore the ways in which culturally articulated conceptions of the political and the social are emerging as alternatives to hegemonic and dominant Western (Euro-American) forms. The project investigates these alternatives as they appear in Latin America and the Caribbean as critical responses to the ‘war on terror.’ Questions that direct one of the major components of the project are those pertaining to the ways in which societies of these regions produce distinct regimes of knowledge which are of crucial relevance to local cultural survival as well as global futures. Other components include the themes of international law and transgression; navigations through neo-liberalism; and the cultural visionary and imaginary. Of particular interest are modes of analysis from critical social and political theory, postcolonial theory, and 'non-Western,' indigenous, or hybrid/syncretic theoretical approaches.
Contact: Nalini Persram |
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Environmental Change, Civil Societies, and Structures of Knowledge
This program area involves work on the ways that civil societies and communities, broadly conceived, can shape and contest what happens in the ecologies they live in, from resource extraction to conservation. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between the environment and security and on the politics of knowledge as it relates to who gets to shape, generate, and use various forms of data about environments. Please contact Robert Latham about this program area.
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Ecologies on the Edge (a collaborative project with the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR), the Institute for Research and Innovation in Sustainability (IRIS), and African Studies)
The Arctic is under increasing scrutiny by researchers, policy-makers, and civil society groups as a key site for understanding the impacts of global climate change, capital-intensive resource extraction, and competing claims around territory and sovereignty. It is also home to indigenous populations, whose experiences in negotiating rapidly changing social and ecological conditions have similarly drawn considerable media attention in Canada. The contemporary situation in the Arctic is one expression of processes that are taking place in vulnerable ecological zones around the world. The intersection of vulnerable ecological conditions, rapid environmental change, intensive resource extraction, and politico-legal contestations around land can be found in many other sites around the world, specifically, in major mountainous areas (e.g. the Himalayas, the Andes), certain coastal zones (e.g., Southeast Asia, Nigeria’s delta, the Caribbean coast of Central America), and the great tropical forests of the global south (e.g., the Amazon basin, Indonesia). This project starts from the proposition that the sites in the Arctic where these social ecological processes are underway are one set among many relevant sets, and that important knowledge about all these ecologies, including the Arctic, can be enhanced through an approach that considers them together rather than apart.
Contact: Robert Latham |
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Arms Control, Disarmament, and Military Technology in Critical Perspectives
This research program examines a range of issues of traditional concern to the non-proliferation, arms control, and disarmament agenda through the lenses of critical security studies. Arms control is a particular focus of the first phases of the program. While it seems that arms control, as it was understood in the Cold War is largely dead, a wide range of practices aimed at managing arms production, transfer, and use have been developed in the past decade or more. This YCISS program will interrogate the assumptions, preconditions, and effects of arms control and disarmament practices, as well as related weapons programs such as missile defence and the weaponisation of space. Specific projects within this program area include (please contact David Mutimer about this program area):
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International Network on Arms Control
While there have certainly been specific arms control successes in the post-Cold War era, taken as a whole, the practice of arms control across a range of issues from WMD to arms exports or small arms, has not only been ad hoc but often incoherent, unconnected, contradictory, and sometimes even counterproductive. We are therefore proposing the creation of an International Network on Arms Control (INAC), which will be founded as a conference designed to rethink arms control theory for the present era. The INAC will provide an ongoing resource for scholars, students, and practitioners involved in a range of issues related to arms production, trade, and disarmament, including nuclear proliferation, DDR, and SSR.
Contact: David Mutimer |
Arms Control and Disarmament for the Twenty-First Century: Conceptual Development for a New Era
The theory and practice of arms control, broadly understood, was one of the pillars of the global security apparatus in the second half of the twentieth Century. However, in the post-Cold War era, whilst policy developments may have proceeded apace, there has been little attempt to re-conceptualize arms control in the light of contemporary shifts in discourse, practice, and material conditions. This failure to re-establish the relationship between arms control theory and practice is not only an issue of relevance to the academic community, it has also had profound policy consequences. The edited volume will address this weakness in contemporary arms control theory.
Contact: David Mutimer |
Guns and Criminal Networks
The weaponization of society thesis is that the increasing prevalence of firearms in the general population is an indication of the corrosion of social bonds. Weaponization is a response to the anxiety provoked by the fear of criminal victimization; it is a responsibilization of the individual in the maintenance of their own security which has the observed paradoxical effect of increasing the sense of insecurity. Among the issues probed by this project are the policing of local and transnational illicit gun markets; the policing of gun violence; gun violence and communities; gun violence and popular media; the global politics of gun control; and guns and transnational civil society.
Contact: James Sheptycki |
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Transforming Militaries in the 21st Century
The transformation and reframing of the military for a newly understood twenty-first century world is a project of states across the globe. The stakes are high because the outcomes will likely shape the nature of the military and conflict for much of the century. This broad centre program area will entail a large-scale comparative research effort that ultimately will be international. The aim is to generate insights into the current transformation processes with an initial focus on the following: the re-organization of the military around newly articulated identities and missions; the education of officers and enlisted troops; and the perceptions of societies regarding changes in their militaries. Please contact David Mutimer about this program area.
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Military Education and the New Security Agenda (MENSA)
MENSA is an international research program led out of the University of Tromso. It brings together a network of eight institutions, with YCISS the only participant outside Europe. The objective of the program is to investigate the ways in which issues central to the new security environment are being integrated into the systems of military education in countries presently involved in operations within this new environment. The core of these countries are European NATO members, but also include a European non-NATO member (Switzerland) and a non-European NATO member (Canada). The research will be organized around three key concepts constitutive of this new environment: gender, cultural awareness, and social competency. This first phase of the program will develop these concepts into a framework within which a second phase, involving a comparative study of military education systems in the eight countries (Canada, Norway, Bulgaria, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands).
Contact: David Mutimer |
Gender in Military Education
This project contributes a central element of the first phase of the MENSA program: developing a conceptual framework for the analysis of gender in the military education systems of the target countries. This project will review both the scholarly and practical thinking on gender and contemporary security that has grown in the past decade, as well as examine a series of cases of contexts in which Western militaries have operated, revealing the gendered nature of those contexts. The product of project will be a conceptual tool kit on gender and security which will, in turn, be used in the second phase of the MENSA project to inform the case studies of contemporary military education. As gender is only one of the three concepts that is to be developed in the overall framework, the project described below will be integrated with the other two conceptual development projects to produce an overall framework for the second phase of the MENSA program.
Contact: David Mutimer |
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