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Abstract
This thesis examines the security management practices of humanitarian organizations based on empirical research in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Geneva, Switzerland. I conceptualize these practices as a device which sees the urban landscape through a colonial gaze. This gaze manifests as exclusions and violences that (re)produce colonial durabilities which I investigate in different textures of the device: material boundaries, informational exclusions and epistemic violences. In drawing a parallel between my object of study and how I study it, my methods, I argue for two methodological contributions in the project: 1) including exclusions in the analysis of security management and recognizing the colonial durabilities that result from these exclusions, and 2) co-producing differently through a diffractive methodology that centers the experiences of the neighbors to IHOs in Addis and challenges the colonial gaze of the device. By taking the shadows seriously, the project centers the experiences of the neighbours and neighborhoods in Addis – thus, the project attempts to challenge the hegemonic colonial gaze in looking at it. Making whiteness strange, the collaboration allows the project to move away from the perspective of what security management does and towards co-producing knowledge differently that actively seeks to unsettle and make strange the pervasiveness of whiteness in contemporary security practices.