{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03190717911530094, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0032632342277012327, 'mean_word_length': 4.984815618221258, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
‘From killing to mortality? History and race in Death and Security’

Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite asks a provocative question about the field of security studies: why have we not dealt with death adequately, and how might we do so more robustly? Charlotte Heath-Kelly’s answer is to focus her attention on what she theorises is an ontological relationship between mortality and security ‘after the death of God’. From this perspective, security appears as a response to death anxiety, and thus as a means for shoring up state sovereignty in the process. This approach is then ‘tested’ against the empirical material that the book illuminates: practices of memorialisation in ‘post-terrorist’ bomb sites, from New York, to London, Norway and Bali. The book offers an alternative framework for thinking about death in International Relations, beyond existing conceptualisations. As such, Heath-Kelly challenges frameworks that draw on Agamben, Derrida or Mbembe (13–14), which, she argues, each focuses on how ‘death is placed in the hands of the state, rather than vice versa’ (14). From this perspective, she seeks to move beyond what she considers the reduction of the study of death to killing (or, more broadly, the governance of life/biopolitics versus the distribution of death through necropolitics), in favour of an approach that eschews a focus on killing in favour of one on mortality. This focus on mortality, she argues, allows us to see, via Heidegger, that ‘death comes first’: we should not only or primarily be interested in how security or the state produces life or death, but instead, that we should examine how the effacement of mortality is achieved through security. From this perspective, all kinds of practices of memorialisation can be examined. The book provides rich detail concerning the memorialisation of 9/11, the London bombings, Anders Breivik’s violence in Norway and the Bali bombing. Based on interviews with planners, architects and other stakeholders, as well as engagement with architectural drawings and built sites, Heath-Kelly is able to deploy this framework to argue that memorials (attempt to) do the work of effacing death, even as they might also publicly memorialise violence and its aftermaths. The book is on strong ground in these empirical sections. How can we evaluate the argument that we forgo the study of killing in favour of mortality (so as to understand that ‘death comes first’, i.e. that death is more aptly positioned prior to security, rather than solely a product of it)? In this review, I identify two elisions produced by this perspective, which I hope will provide broader engagement with this book. Each relates to a core problem with the perspective advanced in