Author meets critics on Rhys Machold’s Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements Across India and Palestine/Israel

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This author meets critics focuses on Rhys Machold’s Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements Across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024). Though the term "homeland security" is closely associated with the United States, Israel is credited with developing the first all-encompassing approach to domestic surveillance and territorial control. Today, it is a central node the sprawling global homeland security industry. And in the wake of 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, India emerged as a major growth market. Known as "India's 9/11" or simply "26/11," the attacks sparked significant public pressure to adopt "modern" homeland security approaches. Since 2008, India has become not only the single largest buyer of Israeli conventional weapons, but also a range of other surveillance technology, police training, and security expertise. Pairing insights from science and technology studies with those from decolonial and postcolonial theory, Fabricating Homeland Security traces 26/11's political and policy fallout, concentrating on the efforts of Israel's homeland security industry to advise and equip Indian city and state governments. The book details how homeland security is a universalizing project that seeks to remake the world in its image and tells the story of how claims to global authority are fabricated and put to work.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Lisa Bhungalia, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Panelists

• Rhys Machold, University of Glasgow

• Micol S Seigel, Indiana University-Bloomington

• Rupal Oza, CUNY

• Andrea L. Miller, Penn State University

• Stuart Schrader, Johns Hopkins University

• Nivi Manchanda

Biographical Information

Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Through engagements with International Relations, political geography and urban studies, his research has focused on exploring regimes of power, violence and empire from a transnational perspective. He is author of Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024) and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Studies on Security.

Micol Seigel is Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police (Duke University Press, 2018) and Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Duke, 2009; finalist mention for the Lora Romero first book prize of the American Studies Association) and editor of three collected volumes. Shorter work has appeared in American Quarterly, Social Text, Transition, Social Justice, the Journal of American History, Hispanic American Historical Review, and elsewhere. Micol has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in International Relations at the University of São Paulo and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Historical Studies, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, the Rockefeller Foundation and other entities. Micol is a founding organizer of the Critical Prison Studies caucus of the American Studies Association and a longtime member of abolitionist organizations from Critical Resistance to Decarcerate Monroe County. She is currently researching the flows of finance and human experience through the family policing system.

Stuart Schrader is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed Policing (University of California Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Blue Power: How Police Organized a Movement to Protect and Serve Themselves, scheduled to be published in 2026. He is the co-editor with Julian Go of The Imperial Entanglements of Policing, also scheduled to be published in 2026. He was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s Ralph Henry Gabriel Dissertation Prize in 2015 and the winner of the American Studies Association’s Gene Wise – Warren Susman Prize in 2014. He was awarded the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award in 2023.

Andrea Miller is Assistant Professor of Telecommunications and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, where they also direct the Feminist Technocultures Lab. They earned their PhD in Cultural Studies with a designated emphasis in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from the University of California, Davis, and a master's degree in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Georgia State University. In their research and teaching, they draw from transnational and postcolonial feminist studies, STS, and cultural studies to consider how technology, security, and empire shape sensibilities of race and gender. Their work has examined the racialized and gendered logics of drone warfare and preemption, the criminalization of online speech acts and material support for terrorism prosecutions, predictive policing and biometric surveillance technologies, and US counterterrorism policy. Their book project, Sensing the Cyber Ecosystem, examines the cyber ecosystem concept as a remediating, or sensing and sense-making, project for the US security state. Miller’s publications have appeared in journals such as Public Culture, Antipode, Gender, Place and Culture, and Small Wars & Insurgencies as well as edited collections, including Insecurity (2022), Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019) and Life in the Age of Drone Warfare (2017). Along with Cindy Lin and Tina Chen, they are currently coediting a special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias on the topic of computational environments and serve as a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Big Data & Society.

Rupal Oza is a professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Hunter College, as well as in the Earth and Environmental Studies and Women and Gender Studies Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research examines socio-political transformations in the Global South, with a particular focus on the geography of right-wing politics and the intersections of gender, violence, and political economy. Her first book, The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization (Routledge, 2006; Women Unlimited, India), explores the complexities of globalization and nationalism in India. She has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals addressing topics such as human rights in the context of global terror, rethinking area studies, the impact of special economic zones in India, and the reconfiguration of geographies after 9/11. Her most recent work draws on three years of empirical research in rural Haryana, resulting in articles published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Gender, Place and Culture. Her latest book, Semiotics of Rape: Sexual Violation and Subjectivity in Rural India, based on this research, was published by Duke University Press in 2023 and by Zubaan Books in 2024. The book received the 2024 Political Geography Research Group Book Award and was named one of the best books by women in 2024 in Hindustan Times.

Nivi Manchanda is a Reader (Associate Professor) in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. She is interested in questions of racism, empire, and borders and has published in, among other journals, International Affairs, Security Dialogue, Millennium, Current Sociology, and Third World Quarterly. She is the co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Routledge, 2014). Her monograph Imagining Afghanistan: the History and Politics of Imperial Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 2020) was awarded the LHM Ling First Outstanding Book Prize by the British International Studies Association. She sits on the editorial board of International Studies Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and Security Dialogue. She was the co-editor in chief of the journal Politics from 2018 to 2021. She is currently working on a new book entitled Thinking the Border Otherwise: Global solidarity against Settler Colonialism and Racial Capitalism. She is a 2024 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner in Politics and International Relations.

Chair
Lisa Bhungalia is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and core faculty member of the Middle East Studies Program. Their research examines evolving modalities of late-modern war, empire and transnational linkages between the US and Southwest Asian and North African region. Their first book, Elastic Empire: Refashioning War through Aid in Palestine, published by Stanford University Press in December 2023, traces the deepening entanglements of aid, law, and war in Palestine with attention to the surveillance and policing regimes produced through the embedding of counterterrorism laws and infrastructures into civilian aid flows. They are also developing new research on the social lives of terrorism databases. Their research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, and Palestinian American Research Center, among other bodies, and their book, Elastic Empire, was awarded the Middle East Studies Association 2024 Albert Hourani Book Award and the Middle East Monitor 2024 Palestine Academic Book Award. Their other published work has appeared in Politics and Space, Political Geography, Geopolitics, Small Wars & Insurgencies, Society and Space, Environment and Planning A, Middle East Report, and Jadaliyya, among other venues.