Dans le cadre du RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2025, qui s’est tenu du 26 au 29 août 2025 à Birmingham, Teva Meyer et Audrey Sérandour ont co-organisé un panel portant sur la géographie politique de la sécuritisation des chaînes d’approvisionnement.

Résumé du panel :

From raw materials to electricity, from surgical masks to semiconductors, the security of supply chains has become a central topic in political debates, especially following the successive crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s large-scale war in Ukraine. These disruptions have prompted the development of new national and supranational security policies. Championed by both public and private actors, these efforts aim to reconfigure supply chains to reduce the risks of dependency and enhance “sovereignty” in the face of identified threats. Supply chains have been extensively examined through the lens of security studies (Judge, Maltby, and Szulecki 2018), leading to two divergent approaches. The first one focuses on defining and quantifying supply security through the development of indicators and metrics, seeking to identify what makes a supply policy secure. The second one, rooted in critical approaches inspired by the Copenhagen School of “securitization,” argues that security is not an inherent or objective reality but a political construct shaped by processes that designate certain issues as security concerns (Wæver 1999). However, recent research on energy supply security calls for greater integration of these approaches, challenging the dichotomy between “objective” and “constructed” security (Szulecki 2020). Security is neither a purely representational construct detached from material realities nor a universal metric that can be uniformly applied, but exists at the intersection of these dimensions.

This session proposes that “space” offers a valuable framework for bridging these perspectives for two key reasons. First, even though “geographers were latecomers to the critical study of security” (Kuus 2010), the interest of political geographers in this field has proliferated since then, demonstrating that space serves both as the object and the container of securitization, as well as a tool for it. Recent geographical inquiries into security issues have delved into deconstructing the practices, performances, and materializations of endangerment narratives using spatial imaginaries (Billon 2015). Security policies are produced through the categorization of space between sources of danger and sources of stability, zones of peace and zones of turmoil (Dalby 2009). Thus, security policies are space-based practices, where ‘space’ refers not only to what is being securitized or the contingent receptacle in which it occurs, but rather to what enables issues to be securitized. Second, the implementation of supply chain security policies hinges on risk analyses of the threats posed to the routes and nodes through which materials flow. These spaces—corridors and places—are marked by varying levels of fluidity and interchangeability due to their material, economic, and sociopolitical characteristics. Such variations create vulnerabilities that can lead to deliberate or accidental disruptions (Balmaceda 2021).