agential realism and Trinidad and Tobago's absent terrorism narrative
Subsequent Statement of Responsibility
Gentry, Caron E.
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
University of St Andrews
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2019
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
University of St Andrews
Text preceding or following the note
2019
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
This work examines the limitations of Securitisation Theory by applying it to an ethnographic case study of Trinidad and Tobago - the state with the highest per capita ISIL recruitment rate in the Western World. It examines the reasons for the absence of a terrorism narrative for that country until very recently, where one might expect a narrative to have existed for decades. It argues that securitisation thinkers must continue to extend their arguments, as gaps in the current approaches are limiting their utility. To make this argument it shows that while securitisation theory on its own, fails to explain the absence of a narrative due to ineffectively providing a means to address contextual considerations, Agential Realism is able to effectively integrate the necessary historical and cultural realities through the quantum thinking informing its diffractive methodology and its hauntological approach to time and space. In applying both securitisation theories and Agential Realism to the case, it can be seen that history and culture are deeply entangled with the security politics of Trinidad and Tobago as a post-colonial state - as they are for the many other former colonies which make up the global landscape. This work shows that conventional approaches to understanding security in Trinidad and Tobago are limited in the questions which they can answer and that if the discipline seeks to have more profound understandings of a wide range of actors and be truly 'global', it must be willing to continue to push the expanding boundaries of critical orthodoxy.