ABSTRACT
International Relations and critical security studies have never ignored technology. Nuclear weapons, information and communication technologies or drones have long been high on the agenda of foreign policy observers and scholars alike when it comes to military power, geopolitical shifts, or the conduct of warfare. William Walters observes that New Materialist and Science and Technology Studies-informed approaches to security have largely been focusing on questions of governance. In doing so, they draw on a diverse pool of disciplines which creates an equally diverse and varied research program. The chapter discusses several particular moments in the emergence of security assemblages that illustrate the usefulness of socio-material approaches. Focusing on the practices and relations among human and non-human elements within an assemblage opens the black box of security governance and enables to study how actors produce a security problem, enroll technology, and lock in certain practices.
