Architectures of Security

Reviews / Votes

Pushing the boundaries of critical geopolitics, architecture, design, and international politics, Muller and Mutlu's inventive and diverse collection brings a sharp and necessary focus on the border between aesthetics and control to understand how spaces, structures, and systems make the strange dangerous and the familiar seem safe. Architectures of Security is an important contribution to a series debates in critical international relations, critical security studies, human and cultural geography about infrastructure, affect, and control. -- Mark B. Salter, University of Ottawa Architectures of Security is a much-needed examination of how violence unfolds through seemingly banal formations - in buildings, machines, atmospheres, and databases. It does the very difficult - but very necessary - work of exposing how the material world often enables exclusion, dispossession, and brutality. What really makes Architectures of Security stand out is the scope of its analysis: it traces the pernicious reach of materialised security in explicit sites such as airports and borders, but also shows its less obvious manifestations in places like schools, dementia wards, and museums. This book is an important articulation of these connections and starts a number of significant conversations about the unexpected fusions between architecture and security. -- Debbie Lisle, Queen's University Belfast Security. Violence. Exclusion. Oppression. Trauma. Death. How are these phenomena designed into the architecture of every aspect of our lives today? Architectures of Security answers this question through an exceptional boundary-pushing multidisciplinary foray into how security is materially, aesthetically, and technically built-in to the world. In doing so, it not only guides us to a profound novel understanding of the status quo of security politics, but equally opens crucial new avenues for understanding the future of that politics. -- Jonathan Luke Austin, The University of Copenhagen