Dr Liora Lazarus has been awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to develop her research on Juridifying Security.  This was the second competition of this relatively new scheme from the British Academy, and 46 awards were  made across all disciplines in the social sciences and humanities with applicants accepted from all universities in the UK. The fellowship will run for 12 months from October 2012 and will enable Dr Lazarus to work full time on this research. It will also fund some of her workshops in the UK, South Africa, Israel, United States and Germany.

 

The project seeks to explore the complex and contradictory conditions in which law and security interact. It examines how the notion of security is defined and expressed in law, how security shapes and is shaped by law, and the implications of the fact that the pursuit of security so often sits at odds with legality and the rule of law. Moreover, it exposes how law can act both as a legitimation and as a prohibition on the pursuit of security, while simultaneously being both legitimated and undermined by this pursuit. Drawing on a range of disciplines and practitioner perspectives, this project explores the relationship between law and security in four ways: law as security; law as mediator between security and other social goods; law as a demand for security; and securitized law.