The 2022 Marilyn Strathern Lecture Security and Subversion in a Time of Monsters

A border wall. An aid bunker. An Oxford garden. Amid wars and pandemics, the global security landscape is proliferating from the militarised red zones at capitalism’s margins right into its beating heart. What kind of human future awaits once security becomes the default solution to perennial crisis? I suggest that both demand for security and supply of security capabilities are escalating—and that the resulting ‘securitisation of everything’ is fast outrunning our ability to analyse, let alone control, it. A large part of this runaway change concerns how security is appropriating and colonising intimate human life while making ordinary people complicit in its operations. Anthropology, that compromised trickster-science of the human, has an important role to play in understanding and perhaps subverting this monstrous reality.