Security, ethics, and animals: towards a sentientist security discourse

Abstract

This article argues that it is high time for the (extra)ordinary violence and insecurity that nonhuman animals are subjected to in today’s world to be taken seriously in studies on security. Through a sympathetic yet critical engagement with how animals have appeared in recent posthuman security scholarship, the article insists on the need to differentiate between sentient beings on the one hand, and other beings as well as things on the other; the need to acknowledge and seek ways of eliminating the violence and insecurity internal to entangled human-animal relations; the feasibility of treating individual animals as direct subjects of security; and the feasibility of adopting a strong animal rights position grounded in sentience to supplement the relational or entanglement ethic dominant in posthuman security scholarship. The article proceeds by developing a tentative outline of a sentientist security discourse in terms of referent objects, nature of threats, security agents and security practices, and concludes by discussing some scholarly implications and the potential impact of securitising existential threats to animals.