Spaces of individual/national security

Both the post-cold war moment and the intensification of processes of globalization have provided contexts in which a number of approaches have questioned and re-examined the basic parameters of security and its status as a key, if often unproblematized, concept in the discipline. [...] At the core of many forms of economic citizenship, I will argue, is a connection (a deep mutual implication) between the risk individuals face in the spaces of the market and the risks confronting nations/states in geopolitical space — forms of risk that are constitutive of both citizen and nation. [...] Cultural economy aims to interrogate the ‘cultural’ construction of the economic and of ‘economically relevant activity.’ Contrary to its self-image as a material and naturally-existing category, the economic is treated in this approach as a ‘constructed’ realm and as a site constituted in a range of practices, knowledges and discourses. [...] The discourses of economic citizenship both locate individuals directly within forms of economic risk and situate that form of citizenship as the basis of how the nation bears itself in the context of international risk/danger.21. [...] Thrifty self- government and the management of colonial bodies are parts of the same equation of government and danger: We are all part of the Government of this country, and one of the most important of our duties is to fit ourselves for the great responsibility.