Scripts of Security between contingency and obduracy

The special issue on Scripts of Security advances interdisciplinary exchanges between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Security Studies (CSS). Whilst performativity, enactment and intra-action have opened important questions about the messiness of security practices and the contingency of their effects, there has been less attention to the obduracy of institutionalizinged agency and how continuities and asymmetries of power are stabilized and maintained. This Special Issue proposes to revisit and rework the notion of script and the related analytical toolkit to make sense of both contingency and obduracy in the technopolitics of security. The contributions gathered here make three interventions. Firstly, they update, integrate and reconfigure the notion of scripts and its associated toolbox to account for the specificities of security practices. Secondly, the articles show how such an updated notion of scripts can hold together accounts of contingency and obduracy and not jettison one at the expense of another. Finally, they account for contemporary challenges posed by the increasing securitization of diverse sociotechnical practices.