Security as emancipation

This paper argues that peace studies and the Welsh school of critical security studies both define themselves in opposition to the traditional view of security, with the only difference that the former goes through the concept of peace in voicing its critique of security. Pointing to some striking similarities in the epistemology, methodology and ontology of Johan Galtung and Ken Booth, it shows that the two studies have been driving on parallel roads and that they would profit greatly from joining forces. Being the kind of applied and anti-hegemonic science that scholars at Aberystwyth strive for, peace studies could provide the Welsh school with greater practical applicability and access to everyday life. The Welsh school, in turn, could endow peace studies with academic reputation and a solid critical foundation. This would not only put peace back on the agenda of IR, but also contribute towards the decolonization of the discipline.

Laura J. Shepherd, ed. (2013). Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 304 pp., $160.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68017-2), $54.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68016-5). Mark B. Salter and Can E. Mutlu, eds. (2013). Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction . Routledge, London and New York, 256 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53539-7), $51.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53540-3). Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit. (2013). Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 208 pp., $145.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-1-415-62046-8), $46.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-62047-5). Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner, eds. (2014). Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis . Routledge, London and New York, 230 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71294-1), $44.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71295-8). “There is a point at which methods devour themselves” (Fanon 1952, 12). Almost 20 years since the publication of Krause and Williams's edited volume Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997), critical security studies (CSS) has reached a moment in which critiques of more traditional or mainstream modes of studying the politics of war, security, and violence are supplemented by a great deal of explicit attention to their methods and methodologies for doing so. The last few years have witnessed a sudden proliferation of textbooks on methods for critical security studies that have attempted to chart the field and provide guidance for students or newcomers on methods for conducting research consistent with its values and goals. The four volumes discussed in this review essay follow on the heels of numerous other textbooks that attempt to map the terrain of security studies, such as Hansen and Buzan (2009), Peoples and Vaughan-Williams’s edited compilation of key and illustrative works (2010), Jarvis and Holland (2014), and the second edition of Karin Fierke’s Critical Approaches to International Security (2015 [2007]). In recent years, the establishment of several journals, including Critical Security Studies and particularly Security Dialogue , as well as Journal of Global Security Studies (an ISA journal) and European Journal of International Security (a BISA journal), that are dedicated to pluralistic studies of security have also suggested the popularity and continued innovation of diverse strands of scholarship that can be grouped as “critical security studies.” Furthermore, the selection of “Methods, Methodologies, and Innovation” to frame the 2014 Millennium conference and subsequent special issue also suggests a great deal of both interest and tension around the question of method and methodology for critical, interpretative, and pluralistic scholars, including the question of whether or not issues of “method” should be … lw487{at}cam.ac.uk

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

Human security suggests that security policy and security analysis, if they are to be effective and legitimate, must focus on the individual as the referent and primary beneficiary. In broad terms, human security is “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear:” positive and negative rights as they relate to threats to core individual needs. Human security is normative; it argues that there is an ethical responsibility to (re)orient security around the individual in line with internationally recognized standards of human rights and governance. Much human security scholarship is therefore explicitly or implicitly underpinned by a solidarist commitment to moral obligation, and some are cosmopolitan in ethical orientation. However, there is no uncontested definition of, or approach to, human security, though theorists generally start with human security challenges to orthodox neorealist conceptions of international security. Nontraditional and critical security studies (which are distinct from human security scholarship) also challenges the neorealist orthodoxy as a starting point, although generally from a more sophisticated theoretical standpoint than found in the human security literature. Critical security studies can be conceived broadly to embrace a number of different nontraditional approaches which challenge conventional (military, state-centric) approaches to security studies and security policy. Human security has generally not been treated seriously within these academic security studies debates, and it has not contributed much either.

This article furthers the debate between European Studies and Critical Security Studies by demonstrating how European Union (EU) single market integration functions as a security practice in the area of cybersecurity. It explores how the EU has rendered digitisation as a security concern and cybersecurity emerged as an object of EU governance by developing an analytical approach based on problematisation. Situating the problematisation approach in the genealogical tradition of Foucault, it argues that it provides us with an analytical toolbox enabling inquiry into the conditions that make contemporary security problems possible, powerful and changeable. Tracing EU security problematisations of digitisation over four decades, it shows how the single market has come to function as a security practice and stresses the political implications of it. The final part of the article re‐problematises the findings to afford insights into how they can be rethought at the intersection of European Studies and Critical Security Studies.

Every time we hear the expression ‘peace in our world’, it naturally conjures the absence of warfare and internal disorder, and the end of military or other hostilities. Throughout history, innumerable human beings have suffered from the scourge of conflict. Quite naturally they tried, often at significant costs, to protect themselves with assorted resources against all major threats to their (human) security. The human security concept continues to loom large in global policy and peace discourse notwithstanding growing doubts about the ‘effectiveness’ of its promise in a highly vulnerable modern society overloaded with weapons of mass-destruction amid other threats to peace. The bottom-line is the imperative of replacing the dominant thoughts about securing peace. This paper accentuates the theory of peace and its relationship to the concept of human security. It takes its point of departure from the theoretical framework of critical security studies (CSS) and argues that there is a specific sense in which CSS needs to comprehend peace, and that this understanding is closely affiliated with human security. The paper is arguably a theoretical exploration of the concepts of peace and security. It is not, therefore, an empirical examination of where or when there is peace or how to obtain it. It is important to emphasize that this is not a paper that answers the question ‘what is peace?’ Although a proposal of how CSS theorists should contemplate peace is made, the main aim is the theoretical relationship between peace and human security and the theoretical and possible practical gains achieved by a clarification of this relationship.

This chapter critically analyzes the counter-terrorist narrative in Morocco and argues that the perceived threat of terrorism is used by the regime in order to legitimize and normalize exceptional measures and human rights violations. The chapter analyzes discursive and non-discursive practices, overcoming the central socio-linguistic focus of Critical Terrorism Studies by borrowing sociological tools from the proponents of International Political Sociology. Moreover, Critical Security Studies’ central analyses of western securitization processes have neglected the transnational dialogue on the Global War on Terror (GWoT) in the Global South, and its elites. The use of the counter-terrorist narrative in Morocco helps us to understand the relational and political nature of the concept of security and its effect on social power relations. The paper concludes that the GWoT strengthens authoritarianism in Morocco and opens the debate on the impact that this local alignment with global securitization practices has on other global issues such as conflict resolution, democratization, or development.

Environmental security, climate change, and globalizing terrorism

O surgimento, e afirmação, de uma corrente de estudos críticos em segurança internacional plantou firmemente a idéia de que os problemas de segurança internacional não estão meramente relacionados com aspectos objetivos que ameaçam os Estados, mas esses problemas estão relacionados estreitamente com as relações entre indivíduo e emancipação humana. Assim, a condição de segurança em sentido forte tem, como precondição, a emancipação humana. Porém, em que condições esse overlap entre segurança internacional e emancipação acontece? A tese deste artigo é problematizar essas condições, que escapam ao diálogo endógeno dos critical securities studies (CSS). E que uma pista para operacionalização pode ser procurada nos diálogos entre a teoria crítica cosmopolita e a teoria liberal cosmopolita. Essa interseção, ou continuum, aponta a tese do artigo, é possível se os CSS atentam para dimensões do liberalismo político que têm sido negligenciadas, especialmente a democracia pensada em bases transnacionais e as possibilidades da sociedade civil transnacionalizada.

‘Security’ is a uniquely rich object for critique. It rests on a long and noble conceptual history in Western thought. And yet the provision of security most often consists of a shoring up, through the discourses of nationality, ethnicity, political economy or even science, of what is assumed to be solid at its core but weakened through the contingencies of politics, society, ideology, and so on. The article argues that the critical force of critique stems from the fact that critique itself is a practice inescapably bound up with insecurity, and thus that the critique of security exercised since around 1997 as ‘critical security studies’ is self-replicating. By introducing concepts from Husserlian phenomenology, it attempts to show that insecurity is not a simple feature of an otherwise secure state of life, ripe for critical analysis that promises to expose its false premises. Rather, insecurity lies at the very foundation of critical thought. Building upon the bare and basic question, ‘What does it mean to mean?’, a phenomenology of security asks the straightforward question: ‘What is the security-ness of security?’ It permits one to ask what remains of security when all else is stripped away, what essential minimum must be retained in order for security to be security.

Dutch national police recently became the world’s first force to train eagles to combat the growing rise of drones within the Netherlands. Partnering with an eagle-training security firm, Guard From Above, both organizations believe using eagles to intercept and retrieve drones is the most effective countermeasure to handle rogue drones in the skies. This paper questions whether such a police operation to increase air security respects the rights of the eagles and ensures the animals’ protection from unreasonable injury, harm and suffering. Such an examination lies at the intersection of green criminological perspectives and critical security studies’ scholarship, an intersection of which I consider more thoroughly. By implementing a qualitative media analysis, this paper examines twenty media reports detailing the facts of the Dutch ‘Flying Squad.’ I contend that police agencies in the West must seriously consider such eagle initiatives as intrusive, harmful practices. The findings suggest that conceptualizing the eagles as exceptional ‘biotechnological’ state agents may increase sky security in Western countries, but such anthropocentric logics of security minimize the concerns for ‘species justice’ and the safeguards for eagles.

Sociological studies in childhood have successfully carved out a research agenda that establishes children as worthy research subjects in their own right. This insight has impacted on international relations (IR) very late compared to similar developments throughout the social sciences given the perceived marginality of children to ‘central’ IR discussions of power, sovereignty, and security. A number of IR scholars have engaged with critical security studies and pioneered work that has justified the relevance of children to IR. This article goes a step further to build on this emergent body of important literature, advocating a Bourdieu-inspired conceptualization of child security in global politics. This approach to the study of children affected by armed conflict contributes theoretical insights for critical security studies, including the way we see civilians in conflict zones and humanitarian spaces, and pointing to the political implications of locating children in the social-political spaces of conflict and security.

ABSTRACTThis article puts forward a synthesis of work from Security Studies and Cultural Studies in order to trace the link between popular culture and security. This analysis contributes to the growing research in Critical Security Studies on the role of popular culture in the representation and reproduction of terrorism, security, and identity. It brings in approaches from Television Studies to Critical Terrorism Studies to theorise the process of meaning creation for audiences of terrorism shows on television. This synthesis enables an original contribution to the conceptualisation, theorisation, and methodology of the study of terrorism discourse, which allows me to draw together and operationalise the growing concerns with identity, emotions, and the everyday in Security Studies. It brings in examples from an analysis that applied this approach to an analysis of the television series Homeland, which considers both the meaning within Homeland and the process of meaning making by members of the show’s British audience. Using data gathered in focus groups, it shows how viewers read, reproduce, and resist the dominant narratives within the text demonstrating the utility of audience studies.

The traditionally dominant discourse of The Great White North views Canada as a land of vast wilderness and abundant resources. However, this discourse excludes growing environmental risk and prevalent insecurity felt by vulnerable populations in Canadian society, namely indigenous groups whose livelihoods are deeply dependent upon their relationship with their environments. The effect of the relationship between the physical environment and conceptions of security can contribute to a deeper understanding of traditional and critical accounts of security. This article investigates traditional Canadian environmental security discourses and alternative environmental security discourses promoted by Arctic Inuit groups. It examines how these discourses impact the analytic and normative goals of critical security studies and interprets the way in which they affect the concept of emancipation. It argues that Canadian security is co-constituted with its understanding of the environment, and that the Canadian case compels an expansion of the notion of the referent object of security to include the environment – a change which throws it into contrast with other schools of critical security, whose visions of emancipation might not, as currently theorized, be equipped to overcome these phenomena.

This chapter introduces security studies as a sub-discipline of international relatons (IR) and explains its emergence in the aftermath of World War I as a field of study to help towards the prevention future wars. The chapter examines how security dominates government priorities and academic debates, evolving from a state-centric and military focus to address diverse threats like pandemics, environmental degradation, and transnational crime. The chapter explores the shift from Cold War-era approaches to broader perspectives that consider alternative referent objects and methods of achieving security. It highlights traditional theories such as realism and liberalism alongside newer paradigms like critical security studies and human security, which challenge established assumptions and expand the discipline’s scope. Finally, the chapter underscores the need to critically engage with the complexity and interdisciplinary nature of security studies to navigate its dynamic and evolving landscape.