Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
land." In her work on post-Katrina New Orleans, Naomi Zack has shown how certain Americans have been defined outside of the Homeland, which can have a racial overlay. In its fixation on Unity of Effort, Homeland Security discourse delegitimizes the "Body Politic," casting political dissent and otherness as a threat. In calling for "integrated" action, "shared effort" and "shared responsibilities," during his keynote address, Tom Ridge expressed his contempt for lawyers, "policy police" and Congress. He minimized struggles between government agencies as "turf battles," rather than genuine debates over interests and values. More alarmingly, one of the private sector panelists conflated "activists" as security threats in the same sentence as "terrorists" and "gang members." Several scholars have argued that it is impossible to delink the rise of the post-9/11 Homeland Security discourse from the active destabilizing the lives of Muslim- and Arab-Americans, undocumented migrants, social justice campaigners, and other people who are considered the "threat within." It has also existed simultaneously with the exportation of extraordinary and extrajudicial violence in places considered "Awayland," such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The return of torture as a "legitimate" practice of "security" is a sobering reminder that the concept of Homeland Security is tainted by the active violation of certain people's bodies. By brooking no disunity and actively disciplining those "Against Us," the discourse of Homeland Security can be oddly myopic in its fixation on the threat of terrorism, over other risks people face, from natural disasters, economic instability, disease, or crime. Political geographer Stephen Graham has argued that the Department of Homeland Security's repeated emphasis on terrorist threats" has "simultaneously undermined the preparedness and resilience of US cities in the face of catastrophic weather and seismic events." Finally, the word "homeland," rooted in a romantic and ethno-nationalistic conception of territory, makes an imaginary separation between inside territory and outside territory that does not mirror the lived realities of many people. For example, the Haitian-American diaspora in New York City is deeply tied to its home country (as are many diasporas). This means they live in at least two homelands, circulating between the two, spanning both places. Many Haitian-Americans thus experienced both the World Trade Center bombings and 2010 Haiti earthquake as existential threats to themselves, their families and their cultures. To talk of one homeland fundamentally misunderstands the blurred, complex, networked identities of America's diasporic population. For example, I consider myself simultaneously British and American—to many dual citizens like me, the notion of a "homeland" makes little sense. By focusing on land rather than people, or national territory rather than global reality as its unit of analysis, it is a discourse unable to describe the way many people negotiate multiple identities, multiple risks, multiple security strategies. e. Human Security "Disasters are about people," remarked David J. Kaufman, director of FEMA's Office of Policy and Program Analysis, during the public sector panel at the Summit on Resilience. "Disaster management is a social process." In this brief comment we find a glimmer of an alternative discourse about risk and insecurity. It resonates with the emerging literature on "Human Security," which places humans and their societies at the center, rather than corporations or territories. Drawing on a neo-Kantian humanism, advocates of Human Security stress the fundamental equality of all people (no matter their market power, nationality or "with-us-ness"), who are holders of rights and entitled to protection from violence, structural injustice, and "downside risks" such 28