Book Talk with Rhys Machold: "Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel"

When we hear ‘homeland security,’ we often think about the aftermath of September 11th and the dramatic consolidation of domestic mass surveillance in the United States. Less well-known are the term’s origins and the subsequent efforts to reproduce it as new state form and “model” of policing around the world. Tracing homeland security’s origins in the colonization of Palestine and subsequent efforts by Israel’s homeland security industry to ‘penetrate’ India in the course of the ‘war on terror’, Fabricating Homeland Security locates homeland security as a universalizing transnational project of contemporary capitalism and empire, staged through ongoing practices and encounters across time and space. 

This book tells this story by weaving together fragments gathered through more than a decade of ethnographic research across Palestine/Israel, India and the UK. It traces the political fallout of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, often known as “India’s 9/11” or simply “26/11”, concentrating on the efforts of Israel’s homeland security to advise and equip Indian city and state governments. By charting homeland security’s less known histories and geographies, the book raises urgent political questions about the actually existing extent of security’s self-implied universality and inevitability, even in places and societies deeply imbricated in empire and capitalist social relations.

This event is a collaboration between the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) and the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) at Lund University.

About Rhys Machold

Dr. Rhys Machold is a scholar of policing, security regimes, racialization and empire, working from a transnational approach. His work has focused primarily on India and Palestine/Israel and relations between them. His current research and teaching interests engage with a number of overlapping themes and concerns: 1) state- and imperial forms of power, with a focus on security, policing, racial and carceral regimes across time and space, with a focus on wars on ‘terror’ and counterinsurgency campaigns; 2) the relational production of knowledge and expertise, inspired by engagement with geographical thinking and Science and Technology Studies (STS); 3) forms of anti-carceral, anti-imperial, anti-racist and abolitionist thought and praxis; 4) ongoing debates theory and pedagogy in International Relations, particularly inspired by anti-imperial, decolonial and feminist approaches; and 5) methodological concerns around secrecy, access, fragments and practices multi-sited ethnography.

Dr. Rhys Machold is an editor at Critical Studies on Security and an editorial board member at International Studies Review. Before arriving in Glasgow in 2018, he held research and teaching appointments at York University (Canada), the Danish Institute for International Studies, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Wilfrid Laurier University.