Transecting Securityscapes

This book examines how security is carried out in everyday life. It works through three sites, Cambodia, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and Mozambique, paying close attention to the context and culture of each. Comparing how security takes shape in these places reveals both what they share and where they diverge, which the authors call securityscapes.

Till F. Paasche and James D. Sidaway take a grounded, situated approach to security, set against the wide, elevated view common among geopolitics scholars. To carry this out, they develop a method built on urban and territorial transects, combined with other techniques and forms of direct encounter. Although it draws on many intellectual traditions, the book is aimed mainly at readers in political geography, urban studies, and international relations research on geopolitics.

The authors call for ethnographic, embodied, affective, and place-based ways of studying conflict. Their theoretical critique targets abstract research on geopolitical conflict and security, both mainstream and academic, that claims to understand and analyze conflict from a remote vantage point.