The reality that one’s body is subject to random acts of state brutality is an organizing tenet of everyday life under military rule. At first glance, The Security Archipelago is an account of military and police corruption and brutality on, in, and through Brazilian and Egyptian bodies. But Paul Amar has done much more than lay out technologies of rule and their hold on the individual and collective body in this dense and exhilarating work.
Through the lenses of the intensely overlapping realms of morality and urban politics, The Security Archipelago provides a new map that refigures how rule works and how it fails to work. By taking governance in Brazil and Egypt seriously, Amar exposes and critiques its heterogeneity and innovative force. For too long radical and conservative scholars of international relations and critical security studies have understood right-leaning policies and practices as unchanging. In a parallel way the...
