When we hear ‘homeland security,’ we often think about the aftermath of September 11th and the dramatic consolidation of domestic mass surveillance in the United States. Less well-known are the term’s origins and the subsequent efforts to reproduce it as new state form and “model” of policing around the world. Drawing on his recently published Fabricating Homeland Security: police entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel, author Rhys Machold’s seminar traces homeland security’s origins in the Zionist colonization of Palestine and subsequent efforts by Israel’s homeland security industry to ‘penetrate’ India in the course of the ‘war on terror’. The book locates homeland security as a universalizing transnational project of contemporary capitalism and empire, staged through ongoing practices and encounters across time and space. Machold tells this story by weaving together fragments gathered through more than a decade of ethnographic research across Palestine/Israel, India and the UK. By charting homeland security’s less known histories and geographies, the book raises urgent political questions about the actually existing extent of security’s self-implied universality and inevitability, even in places and societies deeply imbricated in empire and capitalist social relations.
About the Speaker
Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Through engagements with International Relations, political geography and urban studies, his research has focused on exploring regimes of power, violence and empire from a transnational perspective. He is author of Fabricating Homeland Security: police entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024). His work has also appeared across a range of leading international scholarly journals including International Political Sociology, Political Geography, Security Dialogue and Environment and Planning A as well as popular outlets like Jacobin.
