ABSTRACT
Pinar Bilgin looks at the conceptual links between the notions of “security” and “region.” Similar to Busse’s chapter, she argues that there is an inherent relationship between conceptions of security and the framing of regions. In this regard, she identifies one key differentiation employed by prevalent approaches to security — a temporal differentiation. Bilgin identifies a two-layered process. Through temporalising difference, one’s own contemporaries are relegated to a past where security dynamics are presumed to work differently. Then, through spatialising time, one’s contemporaries living in some other parts of the globe are relegated to a past world. These twin processes have implications for securing peoples in different parts of the world in general and the Middle East in particular. Based on an in-depth historical analysis of the trajectory of prevalent imaginaries of the Middle East, Bilgin argues that any fundamentally new conceptualisation of the region ultimately hinges on a rethinking of what security means in this geographic space from the bottom up.
