Join Simone Tholens as she presents her research at the Robert Schuman Centre's Seminar Series.
Security studies has long relegated violence to a sanitised and peripheral role, framing it as an aberration at the margins of an otherwise orderly and controlled field of inquiry. In dominant narratives, the grotesque, the violent, and the disruptive do not occupy space except as co-producers of order; violence, in this sense, serves as the ‘orientalist other’ of security.
In this seminar, Simone Tholens will present a paper that seeks to re-center violence within security studies by examining its unfolding, its role in mediating social and political relationships, and the techniques used to obscure it from public discourse. Focusing on the practice of 'security assistance,' the paper argues that both slow and spectacular forms of violence are deeply embedded in these relationships, though they are rarely addressed directly in academic and policy discussions.
Moving beyond traditional analyses based on international humanitarian law commitments or principal-agent dynamics, she will explore how violence perpetrated by recipients of security assistance is interpreted, tolerated, sanctioned, rationalised, or leveraged to reshape assistance relationships. Drawing on the cases of Israel and Hezbollah, Tholens will propose a conceptual framework for analysing the role of violence in security assistance practices and, more broadly, in the field of security studies.