Rhys Machold is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. Through engagements with International Relations, political geography and urban studies, his research has focused on exploring regimes of power, violence and empire from a transnational perspective. He is author of Fabricating Homeland Security: Police Entanglements across India and Palestine/Israel (Stanford University Press, 2024) and is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Critical Studies on Security.

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

My research sits at the intersection of a number of different fields and disciplines, namely International Relations (IR), critical security studies and political geography as well as area studies fields focused on South Asia and the Middle East. So, there are a range of current debates that are currently motivating my work and which this work speaks back to. Within IR I have been primarily inspired by postcolonial and decolonial strands of the discipline and these also thread into my contributions to critical security studies and political geography respectively, where I have been inspired by thinking about long histories of police power and regimes of security and their relationships to projects of empire broadly and settler-colonialism in particular, with a strong focus on race-making. I have also been very inspired by engagements with Science and Technology Studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT) in engaging with questions about the global and the international as well as in relation to security, policing and surveillance regimes.

In relation to political geography broadly and that on the Middle East and Palestine in particular, I have also been particularly inspired by ongoing efforts to rethink what we mean by settler-colonial formations and how these connect to but also depart from other imperial and colonial projects past and present. And because much of my work to date has centered extensively on policing, homeland security and counterterrorism in India, thinking about relations between global histories of counterinsurgency vis-à-vis post-Independence India has been particularly fruitful as of late.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

The majority of my work has been and remains contemporary in focus. But I believe what has most changed the way I think over the past few years has been my deepening engagement with historical scholarship. This is particularly in relation to how we think about global power and its relations to empire. One thing that has especially impressed me as of late as well is how prescient certain historical thinkers were in their own times and how often such insights have been long buried and forgotten. For instance, the recent recovery of Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, which was first published in 1965, provides an extremely sophisticated account of how Palestine was colonized by Zionist settlers in ways that resonate closely with what became the field of settler colonial studies later on. Yet, Sayegh’s work had until recently not received nearly the degree of engagement it deserved.

Additionally, STS and ANT have profoundly shaped my thinking and played an enormous role in enabling me to frame my first book Fabricating Homeland Security, which was published last year. These two bodies of work have enabled me to think about knowledge production geographically in ways that I simply would not have been capable of otherwise. They bring a toolbox of concepts and ways of thinking that can be deeply counterintuitive and as such, they have enabled me to find new ways to wrestle with complex and contradictory empirical dynamics in very productive and unexpected ways.

Your book presents homeland security as a global rather than purely domestic project. How does this challenge conventional understandings, and what are the broader implications for current security policies and practices?

Yes, one of the things that is most commonly conjured when you hear “homeland security” is the protection and fortressing of domestic and/or specifically urban spaces. And there is something to this no doubt. After all, many of the things that have happened in the name of “homeland security” have been domestic in their geographical remit and spatial extent. After all, things like infrastructures of mass surveillance, border walls, intelligence “fusion centers” in the United States – all things that the US Department of Homeland Security has jurisdiction over and continues to govern are (at least ostensibly) primarily domestic in character.

Yet as I completed the research for the book and began to write it, I repeatedly found that some of the main characters working in the area of homeland security, always seemed to have more expansive ambitions in their crosshairs that spanned much of the world. This can be seen in their incessant comparisons between different forms or national versions of homeland security amongst a number of countries. But it is also apparent in these characters’ more explicit attempts to bring homeland security to new places, such as India as is the case in the book. This matters greatly with respect to policy and practice because it underscores something more fundamental about police power more broadly. The frames of police power and pacification I argue offer some most adept ways........

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