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Event Report

On the 26^th day of May 2021, the Nepal Institute for International Cooperation and Engagement conducted a Zoom Webinar titled “Security Practices in the Digital Age” with Prof. Claudia Aradau as its guest speaker. Claudia Aradau is a Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies in King's College London at London, England. She is a Principal Investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator Grant Security Flows (‘Enacting border security in the digital age: Political worlds of data forms, flows and frictions’). Her research interests are Critical security studies, Security practices in the digital age, International political sociology, and Critical methods in international relations.

In her initial remark she acknowledged and emphasized that the security practices in the digital age is a broad and wide-ranging topic to discuss. According to her an interdisciplinary approach, specifically the discipline of critical security studies, together with technical and methodological devices are necessary to approach the questions of security or the security practices in the digital age in particular. Furthermore, she highlighted the transformation of security in the digital age from a form of a reactive security practice to an anticipatory security practice. She described the latter form of security to be a kind of a proactive security practice rather than the former’s focus on the immediate or occurring risks and threats. In this case, the security professionals are more concerned and involved in the imminent danger brought by a possible threat in the near future. She stated that this form of security orientation is converted through the languages of risks and uncertainty together with the related application and procedure of preemptive or/and preventive measures, and simultaneously, because of this the conceptualization of a threat or risk has shifted to technology and strategy, so it could be calculated through measurement and assessment and thus capable of being administered and governed. By utilizing the produced statistical knowledge, in regard to populations [group], intelligence agencies, security professionals, armed forces, private security services, and law enforcers has the ability to prioritize and momentarily perceive or caught a glimpse of the future to consequently classify the risk/threat before it occur or happen. Additionally, in her discussion she places great importance on distinguishing the figure of the enemy, this is done by differentiating a threat from a non-threat and by identifying who is the enemy, as it is also important to note that it varies relative and depending to the professional sphere [classification] a security professional belongs and operates to [different types of enemy], as for police that is concerned on the figure of the criminal, same goes with other classification of security professional. In the course of her discussion she cited the book “Homeland Security for Emergency Management”, invoking that most of the security professionals regard terrorists in the present-day as the exact opposite of traditional and conventional terrorists in the past, as she explained that the difference between the contemporary terrorists and an ordinary citizen can even hardly be noticed to the extent of being unrecognizable, consequently, pertinent to the subject matter at hand she suggested [that the central distinction], based on her work, that the figure of the enemy should be best identified as the anomaly since the figure of the contemporary terrorist and a potential one is no longer identifiable and thus visible. In this case the masses of data collected and stored in the digital age would be processed and reprocessed in order to discover and spot a risk/threat and a potential one so that it is no longer invisible and therefore be targeted, in simple terms anomaly is the one distinct from the mass data and can be detected by spotting an anomalous event, something that is peculiar or abnormal, such as an individual using encryption, unusual language, and suspicious online activities in which she account it as a key technique of security professionals derived from computer scientists.

Lastly, on the second half of her discussion, in the question and answer portion, she had been bombarded with many technical and more specialized questions which is quite far from her research interest, like several questions regarding the law enforcement and the implementation of rules and regulation in the dark web in order to prevent illegal and criminal activities from happening and punish the wrongdoers and criminals, and questions on the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning, cryptocurrency, ransom malware or ransomware, and digital infrastructures along with other questions which can be answered and best explained profoundly and comprehensively by policymakers and especially the experts in the area or field of software security, cybersecurity, and computer science, nevertheless she still tried to answer it in the very best of her knowledge.

Prepared by John Carlo F. Potencion, NIICE Intern.