Politics, International Relations & Philosophy

I joined Keele in 2007 after having taught at Lancaster University. I hold a BA in Political Science from Javeriana University (Bogota), an MA in Defence and Security Analysis fom Lancaster, and a Phd in International Relations also from Lancaster University. Prior to academia I worked as a security risk consultant in the Andean region and conducted high profile interviews for a group of communications agencies based in Madrid. I am currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

I am an International Relations and Security Studies scholar largely concerned with understanding how ideas of danger have become managed through technologies of risk in the wider liberal world.

As a way of collectively interrogating this problem I have created and led the Biopolitics of Security Network and have recently convened a conference entitled 'Problematizing Danger', a broadcast of which can be found here.

Through my individual work I explore how ideas of risk have been used to generate instruments of security such as insurance which play a central, if under-researched, role in global liberal governance. Employing a historical epistemological approach I analyze contemporary and historical forms of security provided through insurance. In the process of doing so I question traditional tenets of political, international, and security studies theory that fail to provide the intellectual elements from which to understand the importance of transforming uncertainty into risk as an instrument of governance.

To this end I have embarked on a set of projects exploring the relationship between insurance, security, and liberalism in the modern period. The projects involve the production of a trilogy of books.

The first book, Insuring Security: Biopolitics, Security and Risk (Routledge, 2010) is used to explore this problem through a genealogy of insurance. I argued that insurance practices ascribe value to life and in so doing produce a form of security which is central to our understanding of liberal governance and security. I did this by interrogating various crisis periods, looking at how new forms of insurance emerged in relation to societal changes in the Renaissance, in the 18th century, and now in the 21st century, in each case adapting to and reinforcing new values as well as new ways of thinking about risk. A central contribution of the book is a theorization of insurance as a biopolitical effect that results from a continuous negotiation between sovereign and entrepreneurial forms of governance.

I am now working on the second book (to be published with Routledge in 2012) exploring the intimate relationship between Insurance and War in the modern period taking marine insurance in Britain as the case study. Relations between insurance and war refer to the collective provision of security under conditions of uncertainty. These relations have serious implications for understandings of sovereignty with regards to security and governance through risk. In particular, they relate to the complex production of 'the international' in non-traditional ways. To make these relations explicit I analyze cases such as the interaction between Lloyd’s of London and the British Admiralty during the Napoleonic Wars, War Risks Insurance Schemes developed during the two World Wars, and the role of marine insurance as a global security provider in the post Cold War period. I finish the book by reflecting on the importance of insurance/state relations in understanding and coping with pressing security policy issues such as maritime piracy. I am advancing this project as Visiting Research Fellow at the War Studies Department at King’s College London.

The third book relates to a Leverhulme Trust project (2011-2013) analyzing the specific role of contemporary life insurance in what I call, following the thesis of the first book, the ‘capitalization of life’. By this I mean the processes through which life insurance transform an insured person’s life into investment capital and the role of this capital in securing a liberal way of life. This idea, as banal as it may appear, will help us understand the role of life insurance in making possible different forms of contemporary liberal security in advanced liberal economies.

Full Publication List

I am on research leave for the academic year 2010-2011.