“Governing (In)Security: Travel Advisories in Lebanon and Israel”

Abstract

This thesis examines how travel advisories issued by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France construct and govern risk, mobility, and political authority in Lebanon and Israel. Travel advisories are usually treated as practical safety guidance for citizens abroad. This study argues that they should also be read as official security texts that classify danger, organize space, distribute authority, and shape the conduct of travelers. Rather than asking whether advisories accurately reflect conditions on the ground, the thesis asks how they make danger legible, how they justify particular forms of guidance, and what kinds of political reality they help produce.

The study uses a comparative qualitative design grounded in Foucauldian discourse analysis. It analyzes archived travel advisories issued for Lebanon and Israel across the period 2006 to 2025. The corpus is drawn from official advisory pages and includes warning summaries, regional breakdowns, maps, route guidance, insurance language, evacuation procedures, and related instructions. The theoretical framework combines security discourse, Foucauldian concepts of security, circulation, truth, and governmentality, and regional scholarship on uneven insecurity, visibility, and political representation in the Middle East. The analysis is organized around three questions: how advisories construct danger through warning language, thresholds, and event selection; how they distribute agency, authority, and responsibility across states, institutions, and non-state actors; and how they translate violence into mobility governance through zoning, insurance, evacuation, and behavioral directives. The findings show that advisories rely on a stable official grammar of threshold, escalation, routinization, repetition, and spatial classification.They do not simply report danger. They produce it as an intelligible and manageable field.

Across the corpus, Lebanon and Israel are not represented through the same security logic. Lebanon is more often constructed as a fragile and interrupted space marked by socially diffuse danger, blocked circulation, uncertain exit, and limited assistance. Israel is more often constructed as a securitized but governable space in which severe violence is mediated through visible institutions, bounded restrictions, shelter systems, and procedural guidance. The difference is therefore not between danger and safety, but between different modalities of governability.

The thesis contributes to scholarship on travel advisories, security studies, mobility governance, and regional critical security studies by showing that travel advisories are a meaningful archive in their own right. They are routine official texts through which states classify danger abroad, represent political order, and govern mobility through differentiated realities of insecurity.