Category Archives: Blog
Susana Durão and Tilmann Heil: Care, Cordiality, and Control. Multisensorial Encounters with More-than-Security in Urban Brazil
In urban Brazil, portarias–entry halls and porters lodges–and their staff absorb the circulation of people and goods as they pass between the streets and domestic spaces. In Rio de Janeiro’s and São Paulo’s middle-class neighbourhoods, the relative calm at the portaria turns into a hustle and bustle at certain times of the day. In a […]
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen: Pots that go bang in the night: Noise and rhythm as enacting popular security amidst political protest in Mozambique
Introduction The pots and pans that were banged at night in Mozambique in late 2024 and early 2025 are now silent. However, their legacy is neither muted nor forgotten—reflecting similarly the trajectories of other forms of protest the last decades which has shaken Mozambique and, especially, its ruling party (see Bertelsen 2014). What unfolded was […]
Beatrice Jauregui: Anxious Anticipations: Border-crossing In/security and the Implosion of the US-led Global Order
Born on US soil to citizen parents, I applied for my first passport at age 12, when my grandma took me with her to visit Italy and Greece for two weeks. My biggest concern then was packing my best clothes and how the passport picture unfortunately highlighted my crooked teeth and frizzy hair. Ten years […]
Jolien van Veen: Atmospheric Security in Rio de Janeiro
When I started fieldwork in neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro’s North zone in December 2021, the first thing my Brazilian friends told me was to be very careful. The area where I was based was notorious for its high number of armed robberies and for its proximity to a cluster of favelas. Shortly before my […]
Tessa Diphoorn and Tomas Salem: Introduction: Sensing (In)Security. New Materialism and The Politics of Security
Palm Springs, mid-September 2025. The American flag flies at half-staff across the city in honour of Charlie Krik, right-wing political activist and Trump supporter who was shot and killed in Utah at the beginning of the month. While gun violence is not foreign to Americans, the assassination of Kirk is met with shock, anger, and […]
Oane Visser: COP30 and the shifting spaces for food movements at global summits
This year, COP30 took place in Brazil. Unlike last year’s COP29 in Azerbaijan, this one aimed to be an inclusive climate summit. The Brazilian COP organizers explicitly welcomed activists, while a large people’s summit was also unfolding simultaneously. Yet, the predominant trend of climate summits of the past years has been one of diminishing space […]
Astrea Nikolovska: Geopolitics Socks
In the mid-2010s, the tourist center of Belgrade was full of various souvenirs featuring the image of Vladimir Putin. T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, pins, and magnets were sold at every souvenir stand. It was not particularly surprising, given that Serbian people have long felt a particular closeness to Russia. The Pan-Slavic idea of a brotherhood rooted […]
Laura Adwan: Commentary: On fragmentation and decolonization. The demise of a collective liberation dream
Before, times like these have come before Times when we witnessed hurricanes that never stopped uprooting trees We thought that we had learned how to travel the road to the gods’ gate How to carry the burden and rise up again after the flood How to go, again If days come when we see hurricanes that […]
Omid Mehrgan: Palestine the Wound: A Report on the Iranian Reception of the Cause
A Postscript Note: I finished writing this piece prior to the Israeli-US attacks on Iranian cities and nuclear facilities, which killed over a thousand people. There is, therefore, no trace of that consequential war in the piece. Another event also took place between the time of writing this and the onset of that war: the […]
Aaron F. Eldridge: The Palestinian Cause Contra Sectarian Thinking
“History is what hurts,” stated Frederic Jameson; “it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis” (1982, 102). And the situation today in Lebanon is a painful one, indeed. For many, the settler-colonial Zionist efforts to bring about the total obliteration of Palestine and the invasion and bombing […]