Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Nurfadzilah Yahaya, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Since 2013 over 50 million people have been displaced making dominant state-centric models of protection and containment increasingly irrelevant. Within Europe and Asia, states have increasingly sought to “securitize” migration by subjecting asylum-seekers and would-be migrants to “biopolitical” controls designed to stop them from crossing borders. As the mass exodus of migrants to Europe from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) shows, these attempts to curb migration are increasingly futile as migrants take to land and sea in order to flee insecurity, often with tragic results. The global migration crisis, in short, forces us to rethink “security”.

The main aim of this paper is to rethink “security” along “post-secular” lines by taking into account the continued importance of culture, religion and identity to humansecurity. Specifically, the paper will examine whether religion per se can be seen as a form of ontological security. For Giddens (1991:47), to be “ontologically secure is to possess, on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness, ‘answers’ to fundamental existential questions which all human life in some way addresses”. Religion and nationalism provide “answers” to these questions in times of rapid socio-economic and cultural change (Kinvall 2004). The dislocation engendered by successive waves of neo-liberal globalization has resulted in the deracination of many of the world’s inhabitants resulting in a state of collective “existential anxiety” (Giddens 1991). Under such conditions of existential anxiety, the search for identity and community becomes paramount. However, secular conceptions of Human Security as ‘freedom from fear and want’ (Commission on Human Security 2003) fail to take into account the importance of identity for security. It will be suggested that a ‘post-secular’ understanding of Human Security (Shani 2014) is better able to provide ontological security in times of rapid global transformation.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Giorgio Shani PhD (London) is Professor of Politics and International Relations at International Christian University, Tokyo and will be Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre of International Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from May 1 2016. He is the author of Sikh Nationalism and Identity in a Global Age(Routledge 2008) and Religion, Identity and Human Security (Routledge 2014). He has published widely in internationally reviewed journals including International Studies Review and The Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Currently, he is serving as President of the Asia-Pacific region of the International Studies Association (2014-1017) and is series editor of Critical Perspectives on Religion in International Politics (Rowman and Littlefield). For more details about him including a list of publications see below: http://www.routledge.com/authors/i7881-giorgio-shani and https://icu.academia.edu/GiorgioShani.

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