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Abstract: In the introduction to this theme section we attempt to disentangle the webs of in/visibility and in/security by tracing out their diverse iterations. We construct a series of conversations between two of the four key terms relevant to this discussion-security and insecurity, visibility and invisibility-as a means of analyzing the different ways in which their various articulations engage meaningfully in the production and reproduction of contemporary security cultures. Ethnographic examples accompany each iteration, drawn from the work of contributors to this theme section, as well as from other contemporary research. These examples not only illustrate the multiple and shifting intersections of in/visibility and in/security in today's security-minded world but also remind us of the unique contributions that anthropology can make to the critical study of security.
Keywords: ethnography, insecurity, power, security, surveillance
As a contribution to the development of the critical anthropology of security, this theme section explores the uncertain yet complementary relationships between security and visibility, or rather-to highlight the ambiguity of the connection-between in/security and in/visibility. On the one hand, security is (pan)optical. To identify threats and manage risks, states and other actors to whom security has been outsourced (Buur 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Jaffe 2013) visualize insecurity through a set of shifting categorical lenses, marking and punishing those who fall through the gaps of a normative-legal grid. However, despite the importance of legibility (Scott 1998; Trouillot 2001)-which, in the extreme, represents a hypervisualization of the social terrain-the very production of security is contingent on invisibility (Goldstein 2016). Paranoid concealment and creative camouflage are the modi operandi of contemporary security regimes (Jusionyte 2015a), and the ability to manipulate visibility and to penetrate the opaque are key technodiscursive components of ongoing state projects of security. While visibility entails accountability to the law and subjection to its enforcement, processes occurring behind the scenes are often blurry and secretive. It is within these zones of obscurity, beyond the reach of the legal and the political, that security's effective theater of operations is constituted (Agamben 2005; Masco 2014).
One of the central contradictions of contemporary security making is that, rather than providing assurance and guarantee, practices emanating from the invisibilized security zones often contribute to heightened insecurity. As the articles in this theme section...