The Security Archipelago:

Fashioning “Human Security,” Trafficking Sexualities, and the End of Neoliberalism

Book Prospectus

“Tuluolgrafia – Travesti”by Eduardo P. Lunardelli-Cimitan (1972). with artist’s permission

Paul Amar
Assistant Professor
Law & Society Program, University of California Santa Barbara
amar@lawso.ucsb.edu

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 The Security Archipelago:
Fashioning “Human Security,” Trafficking Sexualities, and the End of Neoliberalism

Book Prospectus

Paul Amar, Assistant Professor

Law & Society Program, University of California Santa Barbara
amar@lawso.ucsb.edu

Introduction

The Security Archipelago takes readers on a tour of a chain of urban “islands” in Rio de
Janeiro and Cairo that have become hubs of globalizing security campaigns and “rescue
industries.” Drawing an unconventional map of war cultures and globalization politics, this
book visits the flash points, red-light districts, five-star citadels, executive enclaves, and
gang-war zones which tested and developed the precursors of the emergent international
consensus increasingly referred to as the doctrine of “human security.”

Global security politics, today, has entered a dynamic period of collapse and creation.
Governments and activists scramble to articulate new logics in order to reorganize forms of
intensified intervention and regulatory governance. Security experts struggle to respond to
the collapsing legitimacy of neoliberalism’s laissez-faire policies and financial
infrastructures, and the backlash against neoconservativism’s wars on terror and disregard for
human rights. Whereas the Cold War and War on Terror emphasized that rights and security
are counterposed in a zero-sum game – i.e. that you must cut back on rights and the rule of
law in order to have more security -- human security argues that by strengthening human
rights, states can also enhance their safety. Whereas modernization theory and neoliberalism
insisted that economic expansion required political restrictions and repression, human
security promotes the interweaving of economic redistribution, enhanced political
participation and national development. As an explicit critique of the earlier repressive
security and development paradigms, human security promises to reconcile human rights and
national security interests, rebalance humanitarianism and militarism, and expand the notion
of politics to reintegrate social and economic justice with political development. But these
new, rebalanced, consensus subjects of the “secure” and the “human,” I argue, do not derive
transhistorically from liberal-juridical subjects of rights. Rather the subjects of human
security emerge in particular gender, racial, and transnational forms as hybrid body politics
and public spaces shaped by violent struggles around sexuality and by clashing governance
logics around culture in the cities of the Global South.

In this context, The Security Archipelago argues that rescuing trafficked sexualities and
policing degraded cultures are becoming the touchstones of an emergent intersection of
human-security political logics that seem to dodge or abject (but not critique or suspend) the
politics of religion and race, privatization and terrorization, while promoting an ambivalent
mix that both extends militarized intervention and promises social justice. In the Global
North, at the start of 2009, the discourse of human security seemed to crystallize overnight as

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the new “Third Way.” This reasonable, progressive middle course seems to reject the
extreme forms of neoliberalism and neoconservativism.

At the start of 2009, human security as a new hegemonic framework for militarized,
interventionist governance was articulated forcefully by French Foreign Minister Bernard
Kouchner (also the founder of Médecins sans Frontiers), US Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton, soon-to-be Prime Minister of Canada Michael Ignatieff, the new United
Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights Navanethem Pillay and others. But this book
argues that new formations of security politics were not generated recently in the minds of a
new set of Northern leaders in the post-Bush era. Instead, I argue that these policies were
generated, tested and mobilized in the megacities of the Global South during the past two
decades. These cities both exhaustively implemented and strongly contested neoliberalism
and neoconservativism, and never naturalized or divorced these doctrines from questions of
geopolitical domination or the militarization of daily life in the city.

Argument

This book argues that the banner of human security marks a new discursive node around
which justifications for interventionist governance and geopolitical order are being
negotiated in the aftermath of the crisis of economic neoliberalism and imperialist
neoconservativism. I demonstrate that human security and its ancestral sexual-security
paradigms and cultural-rescue campaigns represent a new complex of gendered legitimations
and logics for interventionary governance that (1) deploy para-military force to rescue
trafficked sexualities and (2) invest in cultural infrastructure to save gendered notions of
national authenticity. These actions are seen as the new natural, humane basis for rescuing
and extending both militarized power and social justice, in ways which supposedly slip
around the politicized terrains of racial identity, religious faith, and political terrorism.

This book offers three kinds of argument:

1) Conceptual: I develop theoretical models of the political logics and para-statal

formations behind sexualized and culturalist “human security” agendas that both concentrate
and dispense with neoliberalism. Whereas theoretical framings distributed between the
“posts” (post-colonialism, post-modernism, etc, aligned with the left) and the “neos” (neo-
liberalism, neo-conservativism, etc, aligned with the political right) depend on a linear notion
of imperial time and modernization that naturalizes the notion of a single hegemonic power
being on top and in the lead. Instead, I conceptually explore spatial archipelagos of power –
where security governance modalities are tested in the Global South, urban margins,
substructures of control, and shadow zones of impunity. In doing so, I transition from the
language of neo/post to the prefixes “para” and “infra” to develop guiding theories of “para-
humanism” and “infra-nationalism.”

2) Historical: My research traces how culturalized and sexualized forms of security

intervention and their associated “rescue industries” have emerged in Cairo and Rio as
explicit attempts to resist and respond to the contradictions and weaknesses of dominant
neoliberal and military-conservative agendas.

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3) Political: My findings reveal that human security is a political space of contested new
logics and articulations, not a monolithic dominant ideology. Through this critical
exploration of the sexualizing, culturally essentializing and militarizing aspects of “human
security” in urban and geopolitical contexts, this book aims to reveal moments of
incommensurability between these new logics of governance and security, allowing us to
discern dissidence and signs of emancipatory movement in these surging cities. I also work
to re-center geopolitical research at the street level, looking “up” to para-statal and
government entities. I look to innovations in security politics within the Global South rather
than in the US and Europe, and in doing so redefine how the local state operates and can be
most effectively challenged in the context of globalization.

Why Cairo and Rio?

How are militarized security models generated at the intersection of urban planning logics,
humanitarian rescue missions, and new partipatory social justice movements? How have the
sexualized and culturalized predecessors of human security politics been materially and
politically disseminated through certain sites, circuits, and forms of gendered identity? And
under what conditions do new security models and post-neoliberal political logics often fail
in spectacular ways, opening up possibilities of radical, emancipatory political change?

Rio and Cairo are exemplary sites to grapple with these questions. At first glance, these
cities seem to have so little in common as to render comparative analysis highly problematic.
Yet in fact these two cities serve as fascinating theoretical and empirical sites for a
comparative analysis precisely because they offer sharply contrasting histories of how
sexualized populations, racialized spaces, and security projects have been identified by and
incorporated into post-colonial national modernity. At the same time, they share structural
features that allow a researcher to isolate, to a certain extent, the distinct origins and
trajectories of militarization and state transformation. Rio is a capital of the war on drugs;
Cairo is a laboratory for the war on terror. Rio is the capital of Tropicalist fantasy; Cairo a
primary stage for Orientalism. In each city, policing and planning have been mobilized in
distinct forms by the ideologies supporting contemporary post-Cold War militarization. Each
preserves certain legacies of military government and reflects the continued influence of US-
backed police and military trainers; each serves as a global cultural capital and hub of elite as
well as mass tourism; and each serves as a strategically crucial site for semi-peripheral
struggles in the Global South over resistance to and accommodation of Americanization,
neo-liberalism, and globalization. Superpower geopolitics, with its domino theories and
balance-of-power calculations, has long recognized that the “loss” of Egypt or Brazil to
communism, or today to Islamism or Bolivarism, would spell the end of global hierarchies in
their current form.

Why Human Security?

The original aim of this research was, in a general sense, to compare the social and political
impact of neoliberalism in two sites: one where economic exclusion and social repression
were deployed as a war on terrorists (Cairo), and another where neoliberalism was
militarized as a war on narcotraffic (Rio de Janeiro). But, as my research proceeded, I was
continuously surprised by the extent to which security, policing and urban planning officials
in these cities did not orient themselves as often against terrorism and narcotrafficking,
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despite the fact that those terms dominated geopolitical priorities and preoccupied middle-
class and elite conversations.

This is not to say that brutality, torture, and racial and religious repression were not being
carried out by states during this period through the wars on terrorism and drugs. On the
contrary, in both Brazil and Egypt deadly state violence in these campaigns has progressively
intensified. But these campaigns had lost their generative and legitimizing power as secure
foundations for state identity, economic power, and political mobilization. Wars on terror
and drugs, embedded deeply within restructuring and privatization policies since the mid
1980s, had utterly polarized populations, Balkanized political affiliations, and segregated the
class and urban-geographic fabric of these two polities by the late 1990s.

The totalizing effect of these locally-deployed versions of neoconservative militarisms and

neoliberal shock doctrines had mobilized public fears and created hardened images of
internal enemy populations, which was indeed “useful” to certain kinds of domination and
development. But my research revealed that the productivity of local states and entrepreneurs
had become trapped or crippled by these campaigns against terrorists and narcos, and these
agendas’ rigid binarisms and exclusions. Since the 1990s, my research has followed Cairo
and Rio’s attempts to sidestep the black-and-white totalization of the drug and terror wars
without critiquing or suspending them. I have traced how public and private partnerships and
movements within and around the local state in Cairo and Rio have invented governance and
security interventions that would take advantage of spaces of liminality, ambivalence and
“perverse” creativity and conviviality to repress, rescue, and discipline them….in productive
ways.

By tracing transnational conversations, project deployments, and social mobilizations

between Cairo, Rio, the Global North and others, I have followed the emergence of new
security interventions around trafficking sexualities and rescuing cultures that identify
sexualized and culturally perverse communities. These are seen as occupying an
opportunity-rich gap between hetero-normalized consumer citizens and the demonized narco-
terrorists. As this book was being written, I began to see a flurry of discussion among newly
emergent “center-left” politicians in the Global North which suddenly seemed to pick up on
this set of sexual and cultural themes and repackage them under the framework of “human
security.”

Thus this book became reconsolidated as a history of the present. I offer a socio-political
analysis and theoretical critique of the messy, contentious origins of “human security”
doctrine, as it was forged in the streets of the globalizing cities of the Middle East and Latin
America.

Methods and Findings

The findings presented here are drawn from four years of original field research done in
Arabic, Portuguese, French, English, and in local Cairene and Carioca dialects. In the course
of this study, I gained access to previously inaccessible security documents, security training
facilities, police factions and militia groups, as well as sexually criminalized movements and
sectors. Unique in-depth findings allow me to demonstrate the origins and nature of new
forms of security discourse that have precipitated the end of neoliberal governance as we
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know it in Brazil and Egypt. The Security Archipelago illuminates a historic rupture in
modes of state formation and maps the realities of a new, massive political configuration
materializing at the grassroots and transmitting between global cities.

Case studies reveal how new urban coalitions connect to each other at the international level,
and shape the emergence of police-military hybrids and humanitarian rescue industries in the
deregulated zones of the private sector and at the para-militarized margins of the state. I trace
how and where alliances of developers and officers have articulated and pushed new “human
security” and “cultural rescue” agendas. These violent campaigns are made to seem natural,
necessary -- even liberating to some -- as they fold disenfranchisement and dispossession into
a new politics anchored in what I term “sexual security paradigms.” These paradigms
advocate armed humanitarian invasions of zones of “perverse mixing” which allegedly
trigger national-emergency conditions. I ask new questions and develop new objects of
analysis as I open a window onto the violence and paradoxical nature of these police
campaigns. Here are a few glimpses of events (all between 1999 and 2006) which animate
this study:

In Rio de Janeiro, collectives of transsexual prostitutes burned their Brazilian passports,

protesting the increase in homicidal police violence, extortion and vigilante activity. These
sex workers insisted that, since the state had refused to hold the police accountable, they
would reject their own national status, refuse to vote or pay taxes and, instead, apply for an
imagined form of international humanitarian citizenship. Police in Egypt began to tolerate,
even protect some militant Islamist organizations, creatively redeploying anti-terrorist
security services and emergency military courts to torture and punish male sex workers and
alleged homosexuals. Cairo police units originally set up to hunt down drug traffickers set
up powerful para-governmental protection rackets and turned against Sudanese, Somali and
racialized Egyptians portrayed as sex traffickers and a moral threat to Islam. In Rio, elite
militarized police units split off from their official battalions to form ‘jusitiçero’ vigilante
militias to assert moral, military, and commercial control over shantytowns that they accused
of harboring perverse forms of black youth masculinity linked to Colombian and African
cartels. And, in 2003, revealing the contradictory potential of these sexual-security patterns,
the Brazilian government and military – and, almost simultaneously, the Egyptian
government in Cairo -- intervened alongside sex workers, dancers, and community leaders in
criminalized districts as new Vice Police and international humanitarian campaigns
threatened to militarize daily life, escalate vigilante violence, and reduce revenue from
tourism.

Many observers have acknowledged that state violence against prostitutes, sexual minorities,
and racialized populations is not new. So does this mean we are simply facing a quantitative
increase in police militarization and brutality due to a cyclical crime wave? Is this a problem
that can be technically studied as problems of corruption or gaps in accountability? Are these
militarization processes simply appropriate responses to war-like drug and terror threats?
Overturning conventional wisdom on these matters, The Security Archipelago demonstrates
that the extension of militarized, “humanized” security interventions reflects a qualitative,
not quantitative shift in forms of social control, political struggle, and transnational
hegemony.

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New Starting Points

The Security Archipelago zeroes in on three objects of analysis: (1) facilities for security
training that remake racial, place-based, and sexualized identities around hardened notions of
masculinity, cultural authenticity and enmity, (2) circuits of cultural transmission between
security, para-military and outlaw groupings, and (3) logics of post-neoliberal governance at
the confluence of urban development policy, law enforcement campaigns and humanitarian
rescue missions. This book argues that cultures of war and politics of globalization can be
better understood by launching analysis at these points, in light of the wrenching
developments of the past two decades.

The Security Archipelago synthesizes findings from four years of fieldwork in this chain of
“security laboratories” to generate a new theory of neoliberalism and its limits. Conventional
accounts describe neoliberalism as the globally hegemonic, late-twentieth century political-
economic agenda that insists that the free market is the most efficient mechanism for
governing society. Neoliberal policy-makers argue that individual consumer choices and
private entrepreneurship will solve social, economic and even political problems more
efficiently and creatively than state agencies. In turn, the neoliberal state has advocated
privatization of public services and downsizing of citizen and worker rights, but,
nevertheless, has maintained at least a formal commitment to certain state functions: staging
elections, ensuring national political representation, coordinating development and
globalization policy, preventing collective actors from distorting individual or market
freedoms, and promoting (at least rhetorically) the neutral rule of law and execution of law
enforcement.

Against the grain of readings that engage neoliberalism on its own terms, I do not analyze the
political change at the nation-state scale, but rather at the municipal and trans-regional levels.
On these scales, neoliberalism takes on a radically distinct profile and speaks in different
tongues. Here, the origin and impact -- and fulcrum role – of the gender and cultural
interventions that are now articulated as “human security” become evident. We see how
police entrepreneurs, market makers, and security innovaters have appropriated the mantle of
“anti-globalization champions.” Elite security networks themselves represent the perfect
embodiment of the privileges of globalization, operating above the law and beyond
regulation. But “human security” campaigns in their various incarnations took full advantage
of international investments and transnational linkages while waving the banner of the home-
grown patriot. Police (in)security industries point the finger at urban zones stigmatized by
their association with erotic, commercialized, and ‘vulgar’ cross-national, cross-class
encounters, holding them responsible for the disruptive effects of world integration, and for
channeling the “perversions of globalization.”

These new security models have also appropriated humanitarian law, with its overt
dedication to universal standards of rights and dignity, by “humanitarianizing” distinctly
municipal and non-egalitarian agendas. Humanitarian laws govern war and conflict and
justify interventions and invasions, allying international forces to trounce sovereign nation-
state borders, in response to massive violations of human rights or to contain military
aggression. But in the hands of the police, humanitarian agendas often become tools for
municipal inquisition, not cosmopolitan justice, as they are deployed to suspend the
sovereignty of citizenship and community within their own jurisdictions. These praetorian
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forms of police humanitarianism motivate armed incursions and occupations of urban
communities, the forcible “rescuing” of stigmatized groups “from themselves,” or vigilante
missions to save the nation from its own transnationally implicated “internal enemies.” This
book also examines how certain sexually and racially criminalized groups, sometimes in
surprising alliance with factions of military, state or economic elites, generate alternative
notions of security and citizenship to successfully resist these war-like police campaigns, and
on some occasions, cause them to fail spectacularly.

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 Table of Contents

1 Human Security and the Urban Laboratories of the Global South

2 Policing the Perversions of Globalization in Rio and Cairo:

Sexual Security Politics, Contentious Urban Histories, and the Logic of
Contemporary Para-Statal Militarization

3 Natasha Invasions and Desert Phantoms in Cairo:

Sexual Security Crisis and the Re-Nationalization of Privatized Gender
Industries

4 Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro:

Policing ‘Sex Trafficking,’ Strengthening Worker Citizenship
and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in Brazil

5 Muhammad Atta’s Urbanism and the Rescue of Islamic Cairo:

Cultural Security, Gender Authenticity and the Binarocratic State

6 Saving Rio’s ‘Cradle of Samba’: Outlaw Uprisings, Racial Security and

the Progressive State in Brazil

7 Para-Humanism and Infra-Nationalism: The End of Neoliberalism,

the Subjects of Security, and the Politics of Emancipation

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Chapter Outlines

1. Introduction: Human Security and the Urban Laboratories of the Global

South

[Status: in draft. This introductory chapter is an expanded version of the text of this
prospectus. I hope to reshape this chapter in response to the suggestions of first-round
reviewers, in order to focus on the points they find the most important.]

2. Policing the Perversions of Globalization in Rio and Cairo: Sexual

Security Politics, Contentious Urban Histories, and the Logic of
Contemporary Para-Statal Militarization

How do anti-vice campaigns in Cairo (Egypt) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), reflect the
political-economic origins and cross-border transmissions of a new urban agenda for security
and development? As the legacies of Washington-Consensus economics and military-
authoritarian politics born in the 1960s and 70s were challenged in the 1980s and 90s, a
conjunction of actors in these two culturally and politically distinct cities generated
remarkably similar hybrid policing agendas married to identical economic development
plans. The hybrid sex/police project, deployed in both cities, reconfigures nationalism, while
privatizing and transforming state security and development institutions. These forces target
sex workers and sex traffickers, as well as rescue sex slaves, in order to purifying spaces of
erotic conviviality to make them safe for particular kinds of “high class” local development
and international tourism. I hypothesize that this new wave of sex/police representations and
security politics originated in a confluence of interests and ideologies between
institutionalized groupings I call “para-statal formations.” These are: (1) urban development
planners, (2) tourism investors, (3) entrepreneurial security and law-enforcement networks,
and (4) humanitarian rescue campaigns. Para-statal is a term I draw from the literature that
analyzes para-military groups, privatized mercenary companies, and protection rackets and
their impact on government. Neoliberals, and many their critics tend to use the concepts of
“uncivil society” or “corruption” or “crime” to refer to these forms of organized violence.
But I believe this approach naively reproduces the neoliberal view that states and governing
elites are not accountable for violence which stems from cultures of poverty, social
marginality, or conflicting racial-ethnic difference. In stead, I argue that the violence
imminent in today’s neoliberal order and its successor are overdetermined by para-statal
formations that stage boundaries between public and private and between global economy
and national culture to mask their overarching power and justify their cultivation of
militarism. [Status: Finished. Suggestions welcome].

3. Natasha Invasions and Desert Phantoms in Cairo: Sexual Security Crisis

and the Re-Nationalization of Privatized Gender Industries

This chapter examines the gendering of public security politics in contemporary Cairo and
the rise of “human security” para-statal rescue industries that have emerged with the collapse
of the latest round of speculative urban development. Campaigns focus on three new
categories of sexual outlaws: “perverse” populations of homeless boys, “predatory” sexual
harassers that cruise depressed shopping boulevards, and Russian immigrant women dancers
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and sex workers. These populations are seen as security threats circulating between
downtown Cairo and Giza. And they haunt Cairo’s new peripheral ghost towns – the ring of
partially abandoned gated communities and villas that sucked up investment in the 1990s, but
are now victims of the bursting speculative real-estate bubble. These ghost towns, and the
trafficked sexualities associated with them, are represented as the “perverse” icons of
globalization and its effect on landscape, gender, sexual and social norms. I analyze public
campaigns to rescue or repress Egyptian citizens associated with these forms of sexualized
threat to public security, religious-values security, and the “national security” of the nation’s
image. Research reveals how in a time of severe economic and political crisis, the
incommensurabilities of new, experimental security doctrines reveal the emergence of new
logics that articulate gendered notions of work, citizenship, and public space.
I will measure the collision and intersection of three governance logics (1) repressive,
moralizing humanitarian-rescue logic, (2) a surprisingly resilient juridical personal rights
logic, and (3) a revived anti-neoliberal, Nasserist, nationalistic workers’ “rights to the city”
logic. How these conflicting logics are contingently joined in the context of security and
economic crises leads to surprising outcomes. For example, I look at how Egypt also ended
up ‘nationalizing’ its sex workers (although without legalizing them). In the late 1990s,
Egypt’s government created a new set of laws governing private security companies meant to
route out Russian crime organizations from the private policing economy. But the Cairo
press and government continued to fret about the power and visibility of Russian women
dancers and sex workers, widely referred to as “the Natasha Invasion.” In 2003, an
extraordinary series of laws were passed by the national legislature that in effect nationalized
belly dancing (and by implication, sex work), saying that only Egyptian women perform for
pay in Cairo’s clubs. This alliance provisionally overwhelmed the ‘morality politics’ which
typically dominates discussions of cultural security and sexual rights. [Status: Draft. To be
finished April 2009]

4. Operation Princess in Rio de Janeiro: Policing ‘Sex Trafficking,’

Strengthening Worker Citizenship and the Urban Geopolitics of Security in
Brazil

This chapter develops new insights into the gendered insecurities of the neoliberal state by
exploring the militarization of public security in Rio de Janeiro 2003-2008 around campaigns
to stop the “trafficking” of sex workers. Findings illuminate the intersection of three
neoliberal governance logics: (1) a moralistic humanitarian-rescue agenda promoted by
evangelical populists and police groups; (2) a juridical “law and rights” logic promoted by
justice-sector actors and human-rights NGOs; (3) a worker-empowerment logic articulated
by the governing Workers’ Party (PT) alongside social-justice movements, including that of
police reformers and prostitutes’ rights groups. Gender and race analyses map the
antagonisms between these three logics of neo-liberal governance, and how their
incommensurabilities generate crisis in the arena of security policy. By exploring Brazil’s
fraught efforts to attain the status of “human-security superpower” through these
interventions this chapter challenges the view that the reordering of security politics in the
Global South is inevitably linked to de-secularization, disempowerment, and militarization.
[Status: Finished. Suggestions welcome]

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 5. Muhammad Atta’s Urbanism and the Rescue of Islamic Cairo: Cultural
Security, Gender Authenticity and the Binarocratic State

This study draws upon ethnography of shop workers, cultural preservation agencies, urban
development actors, community movements and policy makers, analyzes the documents of
press and religious authorities, and reveals -- for the first time -- the contents of the Master’s
thesis of urbanist-turned-September 11th hijacker Muhammed ‘Atta. As a study of the
“heritage protection politics” in urban Cairo, I trace the emergence of a powerful new
security and development paradigm centered on the splitting of “economy” from “culture.”
This project shapes security agendas characterized by blocs of internationally articulated,
semi-privatized agencies which I call security entrepreneurs, whose aim is to produce
economic wealth and discipline resistant popular-class communities by remapping gender
roles and substituting segregated sexualized gender identity for the figure of the participatory
citizen as the object of development. This chapter sees two agendas for resistance emerging
from this new gender renaturalizing “humanized” security order: one a non-violent
vernacular democratic movement that challenges the terms of the culture-versus-economy
security paradigm. Another form of resistance – which I term “Atta’s urbanism” -- accepts
this fetishized duality, generating a vision of a techno-managerial state that can restore
Islamic cultural integrity and promote modern development by segregating spaces and
scripting gender and class roles. [Status: Finished, but I will enhance the gender analysis
component here, more carefully clarify and integrate the value of Atta’s thesis, and add more
of my ethnographic data.]

6. Saving Rio’s ‘Cradle of Samba’: Outlaw Uprisings, Racial Security and the
Progressive State in Brazil

This chapter focuses on the intersections of four kinds of uprising in 2002-2004, each of
which tried to break through the racial politics that drive militarized security interventions in
Brazil. Police invasions of narco-identified communities deploy near-genocidal levels of
deadly violence that target black youth. The racialized sexualization of black drug-trafficker
masculinity, police militarism, and shantytown culture combine to dehumanize and para-
militarize these extra-legal spaces of state terrorism – a practice I call “para-humanism.” But
uprisings during this period demanded structural changes in the security sector. Each
assertion followed a distinct logic, and at their intersection we can glimpse possibilities of a
truly counter-hegemonic, race-conscious approach to bringing safety, citizenship and cultural
justice to the shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro. These four uprisings are: 1) the 2003 uprising
of prison populations and narcotrafficker cartels facilitated by striking police and prison
guards; 2) the ascent (and fall) of a new, critical wing of the Workers’ Party lead by an
evangelical leftist, Benedita da Silva, a black woman from the city’s largest favela; 3) the
almost militant assertion of a new set of “authenticist” racializing cultural-rescue projects
promoted by the World Bank and tourism developers, and 4) the rejection of many of these
other assertions by new Afro-Brazilian community organizations developing alternative,
culture-intensive security projects that explicitly counter para-humanism and infra-
nationalism. [Status: Finished. I will add a more gender analysis of gender, masculinity and
its intersection with race in the politics of “samba/security.” And I will frame with my
analysis of para-humanism. Suggestions welcome]
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 7. Conclusion: Para-Humanism and Infra-Nationalism: The End of
Neoliberalism, the Subjects of Security, and the Politics of Emancipation
[Status: In draft.]

Contributions of this Book

The Security Archipelago breaks new conceptual ground and develops innovative lines of
analysis around the terms: (1) security laboratory, (2) para-statal formation, (3) militarized
masculinity, (4) perversions of globalization, (5) praetorian humanitarianism, (6) erotic
conviviality, (7) sexuality, used as a wedge for generating post-war-on-terror security
politics, (8) para-humanism, (9) infra-nationalism, (10) the demise of neoliberal politics, as
well as exploring the particular geography of (9) the security archipelago, itself.

I present these new analytical tools as they emerge from grassroots struggles, empirical
puzzles, and in the context of compelling cases, rather than purely theoretical discourse. In
this way, the book will invigorate conversations about war cultures and globalization politics.
It will engage and attract a wide variety of academic and public-policy audiences. As is
immediately apparent, my research responds to the call by critical security studies and
constructivist international relations theory to trace the emergence and consolidation of
security politics from the “bottom up,” by providing comparative analyses of contests over
social power, cultural norms, and political-economic structure, rather than interpreting the
“realist” strategic calculus of heads of state facing internal and external enemies.1 In
addition, this work develops a framework that Stephen Graham has termed “urban
geopolitics.”2 This work also fits into my larger project that contributes to post-colonial
studies and gender/sexuality/feminist3 studies by focusing on the state politics and political-
economic history of sex work and of militarized masculinity. Political scientists, political
sociologists and anthropologists who work on elected regimes, military institutions, and the
justice sector, or on authoritarian states and transitions to democracy will find my
elaborations of neoliberalism and “para-statal governance” theory provocative, as well as my
engagements with constructivist international relations theory and critical security studies.

The Security Archipelago moves between the categories of political crime, war crime and
vice crime, between cosmopolitan justice, international human rights, and the politics of
urban erotic conviviality. Socio-legal and human-rights scholars, as well as United Nations
system and NGO specialists as well as journalists will engage with my theories on the
changing relationships between police and the law, and between police and the military. I
also engage new theoretical dialogues on outlaw figures and on extra-legal categories, as well
as on the social origins and impact of “emergency” declarations without depending on the
political philosophy of Schmitt or Agamben. The book will provide new data and lenses for

1See, among others: Booth (2005), Weldes (1999), Lott (2004), Guzzini and Jung (2004), McSweeny
(1999), Katzenstein (1996) and Kirschner (2006).

2 Graham (2004), Gregory and Pred (2006), Harvey (2006), Sassen (2006), Appadurai (2006).

3See, among others: Puar (2002, 2007), Bachetta and Power (2002), Grewal (2005), Alexander and
Mohanty (1996), Mohanty (2003), McClintock, Mufti and Shohat (1997).
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generating projects for reform in the justice, human rights, citizen empowerment, and
economic development fields.

Classroom Use

The Security Archipelago will provide an array of stimulating teaching tools for introductory
courses in international studies, global cultures, comparative politics, political sociology,
urban anthropology, and women/gender studies. It will teach younger students rich detail
about the Global South, and will challenge the way they think about power in the
contemporary world. The book will also help students gain fluency in the terminologies and
concepts necessary for recognizing and thinking critically about neoliberalism,
authoritarianism, and globalization, as well as about the challenges and opportunities for
human rights and emancipatory politics.

This book will be an important text for undergraduate seminars in sociology, anthropology,
socio-legal studies, and political science, women’s and gender/sexuality studies, as well as
for students in law schools or criminal justice schools interested in constitutionalism, rule of
law, police brutality, civil rights, state sovereignty, or international justice. This book is also
aimed at Middle East Studies, Latin American Studies, Urban Studies and American Studies.
Graduate courses on qualitative research methods, globalization, state theory, human rights,
or urban ethnography will find here important methodological models and theoretical
contributions.

Book Length, Completion Date

In March 2009 I have finished most of this book, except for part of chapter 3 and the
conclusion. I am on sabbatical in the spring and will focus exclusively on writing and
revising during the spring and summer of 2009. The book will be approximately 80,000
words, with 10 maps and 35 images.

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ANNEX 1: Security Archipelago : Paul Amar

Research Support and Educational Training

* Also see attached c.v.

Research for this project has been supported by two Fulbright grants (one to Cairo
University and another to the Federal University Fluminense in Brazil), a MacArthur
funded fellowship at the Center for Afro-Brazilian Studies, Ford Foundation funded
contracts at the Center for Security and Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro, federal FLAS
grants, University of California Academic Senate and Social Science institute grants, and
Benenson Humanities fellowship awards. I have gathered and analyzed previously
unseen public documents in Arabic, Portuguese, French, Spanish and English from state
and municipal development planners and law enforcement offices, and from international
agencies and transnational security trainers. I am fluent in these languages. I have also
gathered materials from seven Arabic-language newspapers in Egypt and six Portuguese-
language sources in Brazil. My fieldwork was enriched by my having lived for two years
in a working-class neighborhood in Cairo (Batniya/ ad-Darb al-Ahmar) that was a center
of anti-drug, vice and terrorism campaigns. And I have lived for more than two years
above a much-policed transsexual nightclub in Rio de Janeiro (in Copacabana; I also
stayed regularly in the favela of Serrinha in Madureira, and in Lapa). I have also
participated continuously in athletic training (not military training) in police and military-
related sports clubs in Cairo and Rio, allowing me to make contacts, and comprehend the
subtle distinctions between internal factions, alliances and transnational influences, and
survey changing norms and contentions.

I have a BA from Duke University, majoring in Political Science, Comparative Literature

and Arabic Studies. I also pursued social sciences at the University of Marrakech,
L’Institut des Etudes Politiques de Paris, and Cairo University. I received my PhD in
Politics from New York University in 2003, where I also took courses in American
Studies, Middle East Studies, Latin American Studies, Gender/Sexuality Studies and
Urban Studies. In the early 1990s, I attended film school in Arabic in Cairo, where I
started acting in films, and then became a journalist for the Cairo Times, assigned to the
‘urban underground’ beat. In the mid-1990s, I worked for five years in the El Salvador
and Palestinian offices of the United Nations Development Program. In 2001, I worked
as a Lecturer in Political Science at the City University of New York and John Jay
College of Criminal Justice. In 2003-2004, I was hired by the Federal University
Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro as professor of international relations and anthropology. At
UFF I co-founded Brazil’s first Center for Middle East Studies, and served as a
consultant to the state Public Security Secretariat. In 2005, I began a tenure-track position
in the Law & Society Program of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I
also serve on the advisory board of the Center for New Racial Studies and the Subaltern-
Popular Multi-Campus Research Group, and with affiliate appointments in Feminist
Studies, Latin American Studies, Global & International Studies, and Middle East
Studies.

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