Critique has political effects---security is produced through mundane practices and scholarly frames, which means making visible the practices of security can rupture their naturalization

The ‘political life of methods’ draws attention to the role that methods can play in challenging and changing dominant productions of (in)security. Methods do not just carry substantive assumptions about the world; they also have effects for social and political life. This demands that critical security methods consider not only the ‘situated-ness’ and limits of knowledge and the contestations surrounding methods, but also include a sensitivity to potentially subjugated, silenced or marginalized practices and knowledges. Unease with scientificity and the dominance it entails upon other forms of knowledge has often surfaced in critical approaches. For example, feminist scholars have rightly pointed out that scientific knowledge entails its own forms of masculine domination (Tickner 2006; Sylvester 1994). They have led a call for a methodological privileging of subordinated positions, in which knowledge about the world can be formulated from the position of those who are politically as well as epistemologically marginalized. As such, feminism has been most outspoken about developing knowledge that is grounded in the lifeworld of women who are often absent from security knowledge (Enloe 2007; Haraway 1988). Poststructuralist approaches similarly experimented with methods of intertextuality and the breaking down of disciplinary distinctions between genres of text and knowledge to demonstrate how worlds are not simply created by political and security systems and elites but are also brought into being in mundane practices that are often seen as insignificant in the security studies field, such as sports, travel writing, diaries, popular TV series and so on (see e.g., Lisle 2013; Rowley and Weldes 2012; Kiersey and Neumann 2013; Derian and Shapiro 1989). Their methods also made visible how instituted scholarly methods tend to reproduce dominant power relations and the legitimating frameworks that sustain them. Disrupting the latter by introducing genre-crossing methods aimed at creating the possibility for subjugated knowledge and practice to gain presence in the scholarly field of security knowledge.

The political life of methods thus refers to reflexivity about the power relations and habitus that methods produce and sustain. This means proactively positioning oneself through the development of methods so as to challenge familiar and instituted processes of validation of what matters for security practice and studies. A key question for critical scholars, in spite of their IR/security studies heritage, is what it means to start not here in ‘the international’ but elsewhere. Feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial approaches share this mobilizing of a distinct positioning, as does the use of popular culture and the recent experimenting with autoethnographic methods to understand international politics. For critical security scholars this can mean starting with situated practices of struggle rather than security (see Chapter 6). For example, developing critical mapping methods when analysing geopolitical security practice or the reification of territoriality through border control regimes often work by making visible the victims and injustices produced by security practices (Chapter 2). Or, it can require that critical security scholars undo security as an object and experiment with methods that analyse security practices as more dispersed and possibly not primarily intelligible as ‘security’ (see Chapter 6). Another way of taking a critical position through method is to experiment with collaboration in order to challenge the limits of individualizing forms of knowledge production in scholarly fields organized through new management practices (Chapter 8).

Critical security methods are thus also political because of their rupturing effects (see Aradau and Huysmans 2013). This may not mean ‘changing the world’ in the way that Marx (1994) called on philosophers to do (although it might); more often, critical methods mean changing worlds in local and immediate terms. When we practise methods, we talk to selected people, we go to distinct places, we interact, we are hired, we employ assistants, we buy, we consume, we introduce ideas, we collaborate, we argue, we produce and we publish. As security researchers, we interact with those affected by security practices and those responsible for security practices, and we interact with other researchers, creating new forms of knowledge and new social arrangements. In so doing, these practices can introduce turbulence into existing routines, habitus and practices. Sometimes they might resolve issues and questions, but they might also make them messier. Sometimes they also create entirely new issues and questions.