Tracing Global Assemblages, Bringing Bourdieu to the Field

Abstract

In this conversation with the editors, Rita Abrahamsen and Michael Williams describe how assemblage ideas are deployed in their analysis to trace the changing configurations of global security. Relying on their experience with Security Beyond the State, they describe how theoretical work on assemblages has been useful to them in ordering their empirical investigations of security actors in Africa, where traditional Western-centred concepts have been unequal to the task of understanding the evolving nature of security provision. Assemblages, they argue, can move us beyond the simplistic notion that African state weakness is behind the rise of private security actors in the region. In their method of tracing the emerging complex global assemblages of state and non-state, public and private, global and local actors, they destabilize traditional ideas about the nature of geopolitics.