ABSTRACT
This chapter attends to the interstices between citizenship and security in order to explore how ideas of political community are crafted and contested. As Guillaume and Huysmans explain in their chapter in this book, security practices are routinely presented to us as attempts to protect existing citizens and to keep ‘outsiders’ at bay. Security practices therefore intersect with citizenship practices in that they actively participate in determining who belongs to a particular community and who does not. In this sense, we often find that migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are cast as figures that pose a threat to an otherwise ‘native’ community (Hyndman 2000; Rajaram 2007; Squire 2009). But determinations as to who does and who does not belong in a particular political community do not straightforwardly map on to those who have uncertain status in a polity. In the highly charged political context that followed the attacks on New York and Washington City on 11 September 2001, and the crashed plane in Pennsylvania, individual citizens and long-established minority communities were also routinely challenged. These challenges could be either formal, such as at airport security stops, or informal, such as those from fellow citizens, commuters and neighbours, who voiced concerns over those regarded as potentially ‘suspicious’ and asked them to explain their commitment to the political community (Butler 2004a; Grewal 2005; Puar 2007).
