The Dictionary of Human Geography

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dictate political decisions, though it may

influence the actions of individual politicians

(but see Butler, 2008).

The divergent values of the secular state and

religious groups have been a source of signifi-

cant conflict. The prohibition of headscarves

in schools in France is one example. At the

same time, different secular states are secular

to different extents and in different ways.

Thus, while the secular state in France pro-

hibits headscarves, in Canada, the secular

state protects rights to wear religious markers

in public schools.

Geographers have mostly been concerned

about the intersections of sacred and secular

in thelandscape, or how sacred and secular

ideologies impact on landscapes. Thus, in the-

ory, a strictly secular ideology that underpins

urban planning principles would not support

the use of religious principles in the location

of religious buildings, for example. However,

in reality, different degrees of negotiations

between sacred and secular ideologies prevail

in most societies (Kong, 1993a,b). lk

Suggested readings

Heelas (1998); Kong (1993a).

security Freedom from imagined or real

danger in the present or future. Geographical

orderings of security are constructed through

discourse andperformance, and play an

important role in constituting political and

social geographies at a wide variety of scales.

Discourses of security are always highly politi-

cized and often vigorously contested. They

involve the mobilization ofimaginative geog-

raphiesthat swirl around notions of collective

identityto invoke political threats, political

change and political violence. As Dalby

(2002, pp. 163–4) has suggested:

Security is about the future or fears about

the future. It is about contemporary dangers

but also thwarting potential future dangers.

It is about control, certainty, and predict-

ability in an uncertain world, and, in

attempting to forestall chance and change,

it is frequently a violent practice. [Security]

is about maintaining certain collective iden-

tities, certain senses of who we are, of who

we intend to remain, more than who we

intend to become. Security provides narra-

tives of danger as the stimulant to collective

action but is much less useful in proposing

desirable futures.

Geographies of international relations

and the inter-state system are overwhelmingly

constituted and re-made through realist disco-

urses of national and international security.

Through these,nation-stateshave traditionally

sought to reify and naturalize their existence as

‘security containers’ using discourses of

‘national security’ that depict them as singular

actors with incontrovertible national charac-

teristics, homogenous populations and natural

borders(Katzenstein, 1996). Such geopolit-

ical discussions about national security tend to

portray nation-states as facing existential

threats from the incursions or ambitions of

competingstatesandempiresor – especially

in the post-Cold War period – from non-state

terrorist or insurgent groups. The Bush

administration’s ‘global war on terror’,

launched after the terrorist attacks on New

York and Washington on 11 September 2001,

is a dramatic example (Kirsch, 2003). Research

within critical geopolitics (O ́ Tuathail,

1996b), critical international relations and

security studies (Campbell, 1998) has shown

hownationalism,militarismandwarare

constructed and entangled through the invoca-

tion of such threats to ‘national security’.

Imaginative geographies enlisted in the service

of security typically represent thehomelandas

virtuous and righteous whilst simultaneously

demonizing the space of the enemy. That space

is increasingly seen as transnational and multi-

dimensional: at once a ‘security region’ that

requires monitoring and surveillance and, in

the case of the USA, a unified combatant com-

mand pre-assigned to military intervention

there (cf. middle east; Morrissey, 2008b;

2009), and also a complex non-linear ‘battle-

space’ (seemilitary geography).

These conventional imaginations of national

and international security have been sharply

criticized for the way in which they legitimize

militaryviolenceand neglect the environmen-

tal, social and biophysical underpinnings of the

security of all human societies. In a post-cold

warworld dominated byresourcedepletion,

rapid population growth, intensifyingurbaniza-

tionand a series of deepening environmental

and ecological crises, all of them compounded

by highly uneven configurations ofmigration,

capital investment and environmental risk,

Dalby (2002) has called for conventional dis-

courses of national security to be challenged by

broader notions of what he termsenvironmen-

tal security.Addressing the ecological founda-

tions of political, social and economic security,

he urges that critical discussions about national

security ‘need a more explicit engagement with

the ecological conditions of contemporary

urban existence’ (p. 184; see alsobiosecurity).

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SECURITY