Mark Maguire

I am an anthropologist with expertise in security, especially counterterrorism, biometric security, abnormal behaviour, and new predictive security systems. During the past decade, I studied public behaviour during the first moments of terror attacks on major critical infrastructure sites, and I researched covert policing in airports. My research is funded by the multinational Global Foresight Project (https://www.socant.su.se/english/global-foresight/global-foresight).

My recent books are Trapped: Life under security capitalism and how to escape it (Stanford University Press, 2024) with Setha Low, and Getting through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern (Routledge 2020) with David A. Westbrook.

I have also co-edited several important volumes on security: The Anthropology of Security (Pluto, 2014), Bodies as Evidence: security, knowledge and power (Duke University Press, 2018), and Spaces of Security: ethnographies of security-scapes, surveillance and control (New York University Press, 2019). 

My background is in international migration studies. My early work explores migration through ethnographic research on everyday lives. I am author of Differently Irish (Woodfield Press, 2004), which explores the lives of Vietnamese refugees and their families, and, with co-author Fiona Murphy, Integration in Ireland: the everyday lives of African migrants (Manchester University Press, 2012).    

In 2008, I held the Fulbright Advanced Scholar’s Award, Western Institute for Irish Studies, and a coterminous Visiting Assistant Professorship in the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, California. In 2011, I returned to Stanford's Department of Anthropology as a Visiting Associate Professor and delivered a seminar on the Anthropology of Security. From 2010 to 2014, I edited Social Anthropology/ Anthropologie Sociale alongside Professor David Berliner (ULB). SAAS is the leading Anthropology journal in Europe.