Death and Security: New Approaches to Conflict Analysis

Making a bold intervention into the literature of critical security studies, Charlotte Heath-Kelly explores the ontological relationship between mortality and security after the Death of God. Combining the mortality theories of Heidegger and Bauman with literature from the sociology of death, she demonstrates how security is a response to the death anxiety implicit within the human condition. What follows is a comparative exploration of the memorialisation of four prominent post-terrorist sites: the World Trade Centre in New York, the Bali bombsite, the London bombings and the Norwegian sites attacked by Anders Breivik. Through interviews with the architects and designers of these reconstruction projects, Heath-Kelly shows that practices of memorialisation are a retrospective security endeavour, concealing and re-narrating the traumatic incursion of death. Disaster recovery is replete with security practices that return mortality to its sublimated position and remove the disruption posed by mortality to political authority.

Death and security will be of significant interest to academics and postgraduates working in the fields of critical security studies, memory studies and international politics.