Security, ethics, and animals: towards a sentientist securitydiscourse

Abstract

This article argues that it is high time for the (extra)ordinary violence andinsecurity that nonhuman animals are subjected to in today’s world to betaken seriously in studies on security. Through a sympathetic yet criticalengagement with how animals have appeared in recent posthumansecurity scholarship, the article insists on the need to differentiatebetween sentient beings on the one hand, and other beings as well asthings on the other; the need to acknowledge and seek ways of eliminat-ing the violence and insecurity internal to entangled human-animal rela-tions; the feasibility of treating individual animals as direct subjects ofsecurity; and the feasibility of adopting a strong animal rights positiongrounded in sentience to supplement the relational or entanglementethic dominant in posthuman security scholarship. The article proceedsby developing a tentative outline of a sentientist security discourse interms of referent objects, nature of threats, security agents and securitypractices, and concludes by discussing some scholarly implications andthe potential impact of securitising existential threats to animals.