Book Launch: 'Fabricating Homeland Security'

This event is a book launch and symposium on Rhys Machold’s Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, September 2024). Held at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), the event will feature an introduction by chair Nivi Manchanda (QMUL) and an overview of the book by the author followed by comments from three discussants: Adam Elliot-Cooper (QMUL), Lisa Tilley (SOAS) and Catherine Charrett (Westminster).

When we hear ‘homeland security,’ we often think about the aftermath of September 11th and the dramatic consolidation of domestic mass surveillance in the United States. Less well-known are the term’s origins and the subsequent efforts to reproduce it as new state form and “model” of policing around the world. Tracing homeland security’s origins in the Zionist colonization of Palestine and subsequent efforts by Israel’s homeland security industry to ‘penetrate’ India in the course of the ‘war on terror’, Fabricating Homeland Security locates homeland security as a universalizing transnational project of contemporary capitalism and empire, staged through ongoing practices and encounters across time and space. This book tells this story by weaving together fragments gathered through more than a decade of ethnographic research across Palestine/Israel, India and the UK. By charting homeland security’s less known histories and geographies, the book raises urgent political questions about the actually existing extent of security’s self-implied universality and inevitability, even in places and societies deeply imbricated in empire and capitalist social relations.

Host or Publisher School of Politics and International Relations