Debbie Lisle
Biographic Data
| ID | 269161 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Debbie Lisle |
| GIVEN NAMES | Debbie |
| FAMILY NAME | Lisle |
| SIGNATURE | LISLE D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University Belfast |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3413-5109 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 328 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Politics of Repair in a Broken World
Much of the world is currently bearing witness to major transformations to the liberal-modern geopolitical order that has defined it for some time. Amid this crisis, an array of new political orientations have been adopted by the different actors now competing for the authority to establish the agendas that will shape our future. One such orientation is repair. Repair refers to a mode of political critique that reads our present malaise as the re…
Making It Worse
This paper examines how our collective responses to global challenges like war, migration, and climate change are being shaped by the desire to transform failure into a productive experience. It argues that productive failure has become a powerful formation of “global common sense” that is prefiguring the intractable problems of global political life as always solvable. In a context of late liberalism, this formation is very difficult to contest …
Book Forum
Tourism infrastructures
Irretrievable failure
Our present is marked by multiple failures: of governance; of care; of hope. Amidst the wreckage, we see numerous attempts - real and imagined - to keep hope alive by dreaming of a better future. Such utopian exhortations are fuelled by the idea that it is not too late - we still have time to correct our failures. This secures a particular futurity for failure: we speculate on a utopian tomorrow to counteract the pressing failures of today, and w…
Forum
The International Studies Association (ISA) is widely recognized as an American-European-centric professional organization, with Global South scholars traditionally representing a minority of its membership. This pattern largely reflects the development of the International Relations (IR) discipline and its publication trends. In this Forum, we examine the progress made in the representation of Global South scholars within the IR discipline over …
A Speculative Lexicon of Entanglement
This intervention offers a speculative lexicon to help students and scholars of global politics think critically and creatively about entanglement. It is neither definitive nor complete, but instead offers some possible points of entry into a contested field. It mobilises two particular claims: (1) that entanglement always involves both human and non-human entities; and (2) that entanglement is always emergent and in process. As a whole, this spe…
(Im)moral Borders in Practice
This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically th…
How do we find out what’s going on in the world?
This chapter explores the process of communication by looking at how global politics is shaped, constructed, represented and disseminated by mass media institutions and interpreted by mass audiences. It looks at what happens to information as it moves through the media. Some form of media is necessary in any form of communication. More importantly, categorising the media as a neutral vehicle for information delivery assumes that journalists and m…
Making safe
In the Ulster Museum’s new gallery The Troubles and Beyond, the central display showcases a Wheelbarrow bomb disposal robot. This machine was invented by the British Army in Northern Ireland in 1972 and used by officers of the 321 Explosive Ordinance Disposal Squadron (321EOD) to defuse car bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). This article offers an alternative history of that machine – a dirtier history – that critically assesses it…
The many lives of border automation
Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but in…
IPS Global South Presubmission Scheme
M. grew up in Gambia. Married at twelve, to a man she did not know, she soon became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. She raised her, under abusive conditions. By the time her daughter turned eleven, M. knew her child would face the same fate of a forced marriage in Gambia. She decided to flee. She applied for asylum and managed to get protection in Brazil. Living in difficult conditions, learning a language and a set of social expectations…
L.H.M. (Lily) Ling
All of us at International Political Sociology are greatly saddened by the news that L.H.M. (Lily) Ling has passed away. Lily was Professor of International Affairs at The New School and one of our valued Associate Editors at the journal. When we assembled our editorial team in 2016, Lily was one of the first people we approached to help us consolidate and strengthen the transdisciplinary ambitions of the journal and, most importantly, to expand …
Lost in the aftermath
What happens when violence disappears? What is left in the backwash of crisis? Who attends to the emotional, material and ideational detritus of closing borders? Like many, we are working in the aftermath of the recent and deadly intensification of EU migration. We contest the widespread account that the ‘crisis’ is now over – that policymakers have effectively ‘solved’ the problem of migration by gathering undocumented subjects into infrastructu…
Failing worse? Science, security and the birth of a border technology
Despite increased attention, investment and research, the security technologies deployed at sovereign borders often fail to ‘properly’ distinguish between safe and dangerous travellers and goods. This article transposes on-site border malfunctions into the antecedent register of research and development in order to explore how failure operates in the design, construction and testing of a border security technology. Drawing from extensive ethnogra…
Holidays in the Danger Zone
Holidays in the Danger Zone traces the usually overlooked connections between warfare and tourism. It shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behaviour of soldiers in war – especially the experiences of Western military populations deployed in ‘exotic’ settings. This tourist sensibility certainly includes the familiar military rotations of ‘Rest and Relaxation’ (R&R), but also more mundane episodes when soldiers transition from the battlefield…
Exotic endurance
This paper critically examines the intersections of global tourism and fitness in the Marathon des Sables, an annual ultramarathon in the Sahara desert in which over a thousand athletes run the equivalent of five marathons in six days. It demonstrates how the globalization of health and fitness resonates with familiar Western productions of exotic cultures for the purposes of tourist consumption. Of particular interest here is how established col…
Off-Duty Resilience
Off-Duty Resilience:Reorienting Tourism, Leisure, and Recreation in the US Army BOSS Program Debbie Lisle (bio) Work Hard, Play Hard: BOSS and the Rebranding of Tourism, Recreation, and Leisure Military leaders have always understood that success on the battlefield requires the provision of recreation, relaxation, and leisure for active-duty soldiers. Certainly this includes moments of “down time” during tours of duty overseas (e.g., video games,…
Waiting for International Political Sociology
This paper uses the work of Samuel Beckett to reflect on the in-between positionality of International Political Sociology (IPS) and offers a field guide to help scholars, students, and thinkers embrace this disposition more energetically. It makes the case for a more balanced transdisciplinarity that keeps the field of inquiry open while attending to the international, the political, and the social at the same time and in equal measure. The powe…
Laboratizing the border
This article critically interrogates how borders are produced by scientists, engineers and security experts in advance of the deployment of technical devices they develop. We trace how sovereign decisions are enacted as assemblages in the antecedent register of device development through the everyday decisions of scientists and engineers in the laboratory, the security experts they engage, and the material components of the device itself. Drawing…
Rejuvenating method
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDebbie LisleDebbie Lisle is a Reader in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research explores the connections between mobility, security, violence, travel, visuality, culture and materiality
Frontline leisure
This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism respons…
Welcoming the World
London's successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games presented a diverse, cosmopolitan city opening its arms and “welcoming the world.” This article explores the apparently benign gesture of hospitality contained in London's official candidature files submitted in 2004 and asks how such a promise of inclusiveness is managed. We argue that London's depiction of itself as hospitable to every kind of visitor relies on subtle techniques of governmental…
The Surprising Detritus of Leisure
This paper explores the Late Photography of War created in the aftermath of conflict, violence, and atrocity and makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that the belatedness, absence, and ruin central to the Late Photography of War have the capacity to trouble the ethical viewing relations underscoring one of the dominant interpretive frameworks of war photography-that of pity. Rather than reproducing a familiar logic in which benevolent viewers are…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Laboratizing the border
This article critically interrogates how borders are produced by scientists, engineers and security experts in advance of the deployment of technical devices they develop. We trace how sovereign decisions are enacted as assemblages in the antecedent register of device development through the everyday decisions of scientists and engineers in the laboratory, the security experts they engage, and the material components of the device itself. Drawing…
Gazing at Ground Zero
This essay uses the temporary viewing platform at the site of the former World Trade Center to explore our fascination with violence, conflict and disaster. It illustrates how discourses of voyeurism and authenticity promote a desire for sites of horror, and examines how that desire both disrupts and reinforces our prevailing interpretations of global politics. The viewing platform at Ground Zero was initially constructed to manage the thousands …
The Surprising Detritus of Leisure
This paper explores the Late Photography of War created in the aftermath of conflict, violence, and atrocity and makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that the belatedness, absence, and ruin central to the Late Photography of War have the capacity to trouble the ethical viewing relations underscoring one of the dominant interpretive frameworks of war photography-that of pity. Rather than reproducing a familiar logic in which benevolent viewers are…
Waiting for International Political Sociology
This paper uses the work of Samuel Beckett to reflect on the in-between positionality of International Political Sociology (IPS) and offers a field guide to help scholars, students, and thinkers embrace this disposition more energetically. It makes the case for a more balanced transdisciplinarity that keeps the field of inquiry open while attending to the international, the political, and the social at the same time and in equal measure. The powe…
Consuming Danger
Lost in the aftermath
What happens when violence disappears? What is left in the backwash of crisis? Who attends to the emotional, material and ideational detritus of closing borders? Like many, we are working in the aftermath of the recent and deadly intensification of EU migration. We contest the widespread account that the ‘crisis’ is now over – that policymakers have effectively ‘solved’ the problem of migration by gathering undocumented subjects into infrastructu…
Frontline leisure
This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism respons…
Sublime Lessons
This paper examines how experiences of the sublime are regulated in the war exhibitions of modern museums. Ambivalence is a key feature of the sublime because subjects are forced to negotiate simultaneous feelings of terror and awe in the face of something unrepresentable like war. This paper analyses how war exhibitions dispel ambivalence by resuscitating a Kantian sublime full of resolution, catharsis and transcendence. In this context, potenti…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
(Im)moral Borders in Practice
This Forum aims to push existing debates in critical border and migration studies over the featuring of morals, ethics and rights in everyday practices relating to the governance of the mobility of non-citizen populations. Its contributors steer away from the actual evaluation or advocacy of the good/just/ethical, focusing instead on the sociological examination of morals and ethics in practice, i.e. how actors understand morally and ethically th…
Failing worse? Science, security and the birth of a border technology
Despite increased attention, investment and research, the security technologies deployed at sovereign borders often fail to ‘properly’ distinguish between safe and dangerous travellers and goods. This article transposes on-site border malfunctions into the antecedent register of research and development in order to explore how failure operates in the design, construction and testing of a border security technology. Drawing from extensive ethnogra…
The New Face of Global Hollywood
This article uses Ridley Scott's 2001 blockbuster film Black Hawk Down to examine the claim that popular film is the “newest component of sovereignty.” While the topic of the film – the 1993 UN/US intervention in Somalia – lends itself to straightforward politicization, this article is equally interested in the film's production history and its reception by global audiences. While initial reactions to the film focused on its ideological commitmen…
Local Symbols, Global Networks
Traditionally, the political murals of Belfast have been understood as expressions of either loyalist or republican communities, a reading that reduces the complex struggles of Northern Ireland into a simple conflict between two groups. This article rereads the murals through the specific context of the peace process, in which the “two communities” thesis is losing its relevance. It suggests that when the murals are understood through three, wide…
Tourism infrastructures
The many lives of border automation
Automated borders promise instantaneous, objective and accurate decisions that efficiently filter the growing mass of mobile people and goods into safe and dangerous categories. We critically interrogate that promise by looking closely at how UK and European border agents reconfigure automated borders through their sense-making activities and everyday working practices. We are not interested in rehearsing a pro- vs. anti-automation debate, but in…
Exotic endurance
This paper critically examines the intersections of global tourism and fitness in the Marathon des Sables, an annual ultramarathon in the Sahara desert in which over a thousand athletes run the equivalent of five marathons in six days. It demonstrates how the globalization of health and fitness resonates with familiar Western productions of exotic cultures for the purposes of tourist consumption. Of particular interest here is how established col…
A Speculative Lexicon of Entanglement
This intervention offers a speculative lexicon to help students and scholars of global politics think critically and creatively about entanglement. It is neither definitive nor complete, but instead offers some possible points of entry into a contested field. It mobilises two particular claims: (1) that entanglement always involves both human and non-human entities; and (2) that entanglement is always emergent and in process. As a whole, this spe…
Benevolent Patriotism
This article examines the role of contemporary art in a post-9/11 context through The American Effect exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2003. This exhibition displayed a range of artworks from around the world that specifically engaged with, commented upon and interrogated the USA's pre-eminent position as a global superpower. In the politically charged climate after 9/11, the exhibition offered itself as a critical …
Irretrievable failure
Our present is marked by multiple failures: of governance; of care; of hope. Amidst the wreckage, we see numerous attempts - real and imagined - to keep hope alive by dreaming of a better future. Such utopian exhortations are fuelled by the idea that it is not too late - we still have time to correct our failures. This secures a particular futurity for failure: we speculate on a utopian tomorrow to counteract the pressing failures of today, and w…
Humanitarian travels
Aside from the more mundane purpose of telling us where to eat, sleep and sightsee in foreign lands, guidebooks communicate an ethical vision that sees travel as the key to reducing cultural differences and inequalities. This article argues that Lonely Planet guidebooks in particular encourage a form of ‘responsible independent travel’ that both reflects and produces a powerful discourse of humanitarianism. By examining the controversy over Lonel…
Forum
The International Studies Association (ISA) is widely recognized as an American-European-centric professional organization, with Global South scholars traditionally representing a minority of its membership. This pattern largely reflects the development of the International Relations (IR) discipline and its publication trends. In this Forum, we examine the progress made in the representation of Global South scholars within the IR discipline over …
Rejuvenating method
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDebbie LisleDebbie Lisle is a Reader in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research explores the connections between mobility, security, violence, travel, visuality, culture and materiality
Welcoming the World
London's successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games presented a diverse, cosmopolitan city opening its arms and “welcoming the world.” This article explores the apparently benign gesture of hospitality contained in London's official candidature files submitted in 2004 and asks how such a promise of inclusiveness is managed. We argue that London's depiction of itself as hospitable to every kind of visitor relies on subtle techniques of governmental…
Gender at a Distance
This article explores the conflicting representations of masculinity and femininity in contemporary travel writing. The workings of power are quite easy to identify in texts that represent 'other' places populated by foreign and exotic people. This article adds another layer to that cartography by exploring how patriarchy is embedded in the representation of foreign lands. Using the insights of postcolonial and feminist research, it is possible t…
Off-Duty Resilience
Off-Duty Resilience:Reorienting Tourism, Leisure, and Recreation in the US Army BOSS Program Debbie Lisle (bio) Work Hard, Play Hard: BOSS and the Rebranding of Tourism, Recreation, and Leisure Military leaders have always understood that success on the battlefield requires the provision of recreation, relaxation, and leisure for active-duty soldiers. Certainly this includes moments of “down time” during tours of duty overseas (e.g., video games,…
Gender at a Distance
This article explores the conflicting representations of masculinity and femininity in contemporary travel writing. The workings of power are quite easy to identify in texts that represent 'other' places populated by foreign and exotic people. This article adds another layer to that cartography by exploring how patriarchy is embedded in the representation of foreign lands. Using the insights of postcolonial and feminist research, it is possible t…
Consuming Danger
It's Not Really about Fighting
Gazing at Ground Zero
This essay uses the temporary viewing platform at the site of the former World Trade Center to explore our fascination with violence, conflict and disaster. It illustrates how discourses of voyeurism and authenticity promote a desire for sites of horror, and examines how that desire both disrupts and reinforces our prevailing interpretations of global politics. The viewing platform at Ground Zero was initially constructed to manage the thousands …
The New Face of Global Hollywood
This article uses Ridley Scott's 2001 blockbuster film Black Hawk Down to examine the claim that popular film is the “newest component of sovereignty.” While the topic of the film – the 1993 UN/US intervention in Somalia – lends itself to straightforward politicization, this article is equally interested in the film's production history and its reception by global audiences. While initial reactions to the film focused on its ideological commitmen…
The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing
To what extent do best-selling travel books, such as those by Paul Theroux, Bill Bryson, Bruce Chatwin and Michael Palin, tell us as much about world politics as newspaper articles, policy documents and press releases? Debbie Lisle argues that the formulations of genre, identity, geopolitics and history at work in contemporary travel writing are increasingly at odds with a cosmopolitan and multicultural world in which 'everybody travels'. Despite…
Sublime Lessons
This paper examines how experiences of the sublime are regulated in the war exhibitions of modern museums. Ambivalence is a key feature of the sublime because subjects are forced to negotiate simultaneous feelings of terror and awe in the face of something unrepresentable like war. This paper analyses how war exhibitions dispel ambivalence by resuscitating a Kantian sublime full of resolution, catharsis and transcendence. In this context, potenti…
Smug Visions
Local Symbols, Global Networks
Traditionally, the political murals of Belfast have been understood as expressions of either loyalist or republican communities, a reading that reduces the complex struggles of Northern Ireland into a simple conflict between two groups. This article rereads the murals through the specific context of the peace process, in which the “two communities” thesis is losing its relevance. It suggests that when the murals are understood through three, wide…
Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing
Benevolent Patriotism
This article examines the role of contemporary art in a post-9/11 context through The American Effect exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2003. This exhibition displayed a range of artworks from around the world that specifically engaged with, commented upon and interrogated the USA's pre-eminent position as a global superpower. In the politically charged climate after 9/11, the exhibition offered itself as a critical …
Humanitarian travels
Aside from the more mundane purpose of telling us where to eat, sleep and sightsee in foreign lands, guidebooks communicate an ethical vision that sees travel as the key to reducing cultural differences and inequalities. This article argues that Lonely Planet guidebooks in particular encourage a form of ‘responsible independent travel’ that both reflects and produces a powerful discourse of humanitarianism. By examining the controversy over Lonel…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Surprising Detritus of Leisure
This paper explores the Late Photography of War created in the aftermath of conflict, violence, and atrocity and makes two claims. Firstly, it argues that the belatedness, absence, and ruin central to the Late Photography of War have the capacity to trouble the ethical viewing relations underscoring one of the dominant interpretive frameworks of war photography-that of pity. Rather than reproducing a familiar logic in which benevolent viewers are…
Welcoming the World
London's successful bid for the 2012 Olympic Games presented a diverse, cosmopolitan city opening its arms and “welcoming the world.” This article explores the apparently benign gesture of hospitality contained in London's official candidature files submitted in 2004 and asks how such a promise of inclusiveness is managed. We argue that London's depiction of itself as hospitable to every kind of visitor relies on subtle techniques of governmental…
Frontline leisure
This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism respons…
Rejuvenating method
Additional informationNotes on contributorsDebbie LisleDebbie Lisle is a Reader in International Relations at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research explores the connections between mobility, security, violence, travel, visuality, culture and materiality
Laboratizing the border
This article critically interrogates how borders are produced by scientists, engineers and security experts in advance of the deployment of technical devices they develop. We trace how sovereign decisions are enacted as assemblages in the antecedent register of device development through the everyday decisions of scientists and engineers in the laboratory, the security experts they engage, and the material components of the device itself. Drawing…
Holidays in the Danger Zone
Holidays in the Danger Zone traces the usually overlooked connections between warfare and tourism. It shows how a tourist sensibility shapes the behaviour of soldiers in war – especially the experiences of Western military populations deployed in ‘exotic’ settings. This tourist sensibility certainly includes the familiar military rotations of ‘Rest and Relaxation’ (R&R), but also more mundane episodes when soldiers transition from the battlefield…
Exotic endurance
This paper critically examines the intersections of global tourism and fitness in the Marathon des Sables, an annual ultramarathon in the Sahara desert in which over a thousand athletes run the equivalent of five marathons in six days. It demonstrates how the globalization of health and fitness resonates with familiar Western productions of exotic cultures for the purposes of tourist consumption. Of particular interest here is how established col…
Off-Duty Resilience
Off-Duty Resilience:Reorienting Tourism, Leisure, and Recreation in the US Army BOSS Program Debbie Lisle (bio) Work Hard, Play Hard: BOSS and the Rebranding of Tourism, Recreation, and Leisure Military leaders have always understood that success on the battlefield requires the provision of recreation, relaxation, and leisure for active-duty soldiers. Certainly this includes moments of “down time” during tours of duty overseas (e.g., video games,…
Waiting for International Political Sociology
This paper uses the work of Samuel Beckett to reflect on the in-between positionality of International Political Sociology (IPS) and offers a field guide to help scholars, students, and thinkers embrace this disposition more energetically. It makes the case for a more balanced transdisciplinarity that keeps the field of inquiry open while attending to the international, the political, and the social at the same time and in equal measure. The powe…
L.H.M. (Lily) Ling
All of us at International Political Sociology are greatly saddened by the news that L.H.M. (Lily) Ling has passed away. Lily was Professor of International Affairs at The New School and one of our valued Associate Editors at the journal. When we assembled our editorial team in 2016, Lily was one of the first people we approached to help us consolidate and strengthen the transdisciplinary ambitions of the journal and, most importantly, to expand …
Lost in the aftermath
What happens when violence disappears? What is left in the backwash of crisis? Who attends to the emotional, material and ideational detritus of closing borders? Like many, we are working in the aftermath of the recent and deadly intensification of EU migration. We contest the widespread account that the ‘crisis’ is now over – that policymakers have effectively ‘solved’ the problem of migration by gathering undocumented subjects into infrastructu…
Failing worse? Science, security and the birth of a border technology
Despite increased attention, investment and research, the security technologies deployed at sovereign borders often fail to ‘properly’ distinguish between safe and dangerous travellers and goods. This article transposes on-site border malfunctions into the antecedent register of research and development in order to explore how failure operates in the design, construction and testing of a border security technology. Drawing from extensive ethnogra…
Political science (27 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Law (24 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (17 works) · Art (10 works) · History (10 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works)