State Identity Formation in Constructivist Security Studies: A Suggestive Essay

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

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

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.

In exploring wars and conflicts, Critical Security Studies and Feminist International Relations (IR) use various methodologies, including nontraditional avenues of inquiry. This study follows these theoretical and methodological perspectives and suggests a methodology that will contribute to contemporary debates in IR. Specifically, the study offers an innovative application of Carol Gilligan’s method, the “Listening Guide” (LG). The research demonstrates the utility of the LG analysis in uncovering additional forms of knowledge regarding armed conflicts. The context for analysis is women in combat. The implementation of the LG assists us in uncovering various voices, representing different aspects of the women combatants’ experiences in a conflict zone. In this study, this analytical tool, applied to conduct narrative research, enabled the researchers to hear both multiple and silenced voices. We suggest that this methodology should continue to be used in future studies and incorporated into the Security Studies and IR toolkit.

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 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.

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 rise of nationalist populism, its challenge to representative democracy and the populist impact on the liberal international order have emerged as one of the most significant phenomena in international politics in recent years. This special issue brings together a group of researchers from a wide range of theoretical, disciplinary and epistemological backgrounds, including political science, populism studies, foreign policy analysis and critical security studies, to examine the international dimension of populism and the practical impact of populism on foreign policy and international security. Empirically and conceptually, it presents audiences in political science, international relations and related disciplines with a timely review of the scope of research on populism in international relations. Our specific aim is to explore and evaluate what challenges a populist mobilisation of anti-elitism and anti-globalism presents to both the contemporary study of international politics, and the structure of the international system and key actors within it.

Governmentality and biopolitics has emerged as a chief source of scholarship and debate within contemporary international relations (IR), particularly among those involved in the sub-disciplines, Critical Security Studies and International Political Sociology. Governmentality, first and foremost, is a term coined by philosopher Michel Foucault, and refers to the way in which the state exercises control over, or governs, the body of its populace. Meanwhile, biopolitics, which was coined by Rudolf Kjellén, is an intersectional field between biology and politics. In contemporary US political science studies, usage of the term biopolitics is mostly divided between a poststructuralist group using the meaning assigned by Michel Foucault (denoting social and political power over life), and another group who uses it to denote studies relating biology and political science. The foci of literatures on governmentality and biopolitics are particularly agreeable to many scholars critical of traditional IR scholarship and its distinct articulation of “world politics.” The shifty nature of both concepts, as defined by Michel Foucault and the subsequent use by various scholars, presents challenges to setting any specific account of these terms; yet the blurriness of these concepts is what makes them productive, contrary to the zero-sum, rationalist accounts of power and behavior so central to much of conventional IR.

This special forum grew out of the European Workshops on International Studies (EWIS) at the University of Amsterdam in July 2023, where a group of scholars met to discuss the meaning and significance of technologies of armed violence for global order. The impetus for the workshop was a shared observation that while critical security studies (css) has reconceptualized security and engaged in methodological innovation, and while discussion of racialization, colonialism, and the gendered character of global order is increasingly prominent across critical international relations (IR) more broadly, surprisingly little of this has translated into the study of what is commonly called the arms trade. While there have been pockets of innovation in relation to specific technologies, there has been no overarching reconceptualization of the field of study around the arms trade. In this introduction, I set out an account of the demise of debate about the arms trade in IR and css, make the case for retaining a research agenda on technologies of armed violence, set out what this agenda can learn from adjacent literatures, and briefly introduce the five articles of the forum.

Critical Security Studies (CSS) emerged as in opposition to mainstream international relations (IR) theories. Whereas the traditional IR theories perceived and analyzed security matters within a re...

This book investigates how drone warfare is deeply gendered and how this can be explored through the methodological framework of `Haunting'. Utilising original interview data from British Reaper drone crews, the book analyses the way killing by drones complicates traditional understandings of masculinity and femininity in warfare. As their role does not include physical risk, drone crews have been critiqued for failing to meet the masculine requirements necessary to be considered `warriors' and have been derided for feminizing war. However, this book argues that drone warfare, and the experiences of the crews, exceeds the traditional masculine/feminine binary and suggests a new approach to explore this issue. The framework of Haunting presented here draws on the insights of Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon and others to highlight four key themes -- complex personhood, in/(hyper)visibility, disturbed temporality and power -- as frames through which the intersection of gender and drone warfare can be examined. This book argues that Haunting provides a framework for both revealing and destabilizing gendered binaries of use for feminist security studies and International Relations scholars, as well as shedding light on British drone warfare. This book will be of interest to students of gender studies, sociology, war studies and critical security studies.

A core book of the Critical European Studies Series (CESS), the Routledge Handbook of Critical European Studies, features the most recent developments in critical European Union (EU) studies.Specifically, it aims to 'help shape the field', therefore contributing to the CESS' goal of putting forward 'alternative approaches to critical analyses' of EU politics, 'while overcoming disciplinary borders and paradigms' (p. 1).Over the last decades, critical studies went from a secondary line of research to a prolific, forefront source of theorization and empirical research in several scientific fields, ranging from International Relations and Security Studies to Political Economy.As a result, a significant bulk of literature on (or framed by) critical perspectives emerged.The study of the EU is no exception.However, this volume is appealing in two ways.First, it includes contributions from some of the most recognized scholars in the areas of EU governance and theorization.Rosamond's Theories of European Integration (2000) and Diez' (with Wiener) European integration Theory ( 2004) are just two examples of works that are still today milestones in theory-building.Second, arguably adding to the originality of the book, it combines theorization with critical analysis of specific policy areas.The volume unfolds over four sections (each opened by a separate Introduction) and 36 chapters.Cohesiveness is guaranteed by the use of critical lenses throughout the book and by a shared understanding that, despite its ontological 'polysemy ' (p.1; p. 438), critical involves a sense of non-conformation with, and therefore questioning of, the reality analysed.The chapters in Part I explore different critical theoretical perspectives on European integration, either by revisiting and building on the thoughts of influential authors (e.g., Gramsci, Habermas and Foucault) or by discussing broader debates and themes (e.g., postcolonialism, gender issues and global political justice).Manners' chapter on critical social theory acts as a sort of conclusion building on the importance of imagining 'another Europe is possible' (p.146).In the following sections, the chapters provide an overview of critical approaches to EU policies in the political economy (Part II), internal security (Part III) and external relations (Part IV) fields, with some contributions bridging areas, as happens with Bossong and Rhinard's chapter.By linking theory to the analysis of concrete contemporary EU challenges, these three sections add to the book's interest for a broader audience.

The acquisition and use of military power are perhaps the most studied subjects in the field of international relations, mainly because they have been common occurrences throughout history. It is surprising, then, that the concepts of militarism and militarization are not sufficiently well defined to command a consensus among scholars as to their meaning, let alone their causes and consequences. And as other chapters in this volume clearly document, militarism and militarization are concepts that are relevant to social relations in realms other than formal inter-state relations, which has made conceptual clarity that much more difficult to achieve. But my focus in this chapter is indeed inter-state relations, with special attention to the impact of the global arms trade on the militarization of developing states and on those states’ use of military force – behaviour that may, in some cases, derive from state policies fairly described as outgrowths of militarism.

War metaphors permeate the world we live in. From wildlife documentaries (natural war) to the curbing of academic freedom (war on woke), it seems that anything can be described in an essential likeness to warfare. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this paper investigates the ubiquity of war metaphors in critiques of violence within Critical Security Studies and International Political Sociology. The analysis focuses on three concepts recently advanced as alternatives to the shortcomings of securitization theory and its reliance on a mythological idea of liberal peace: fighting, martial politics, and struggles. The paper investigates how each of these concepts is built in relation to war metaphors and explains this as revealing of an underlying symptom, a form of ontological militarism, which these alternatives to securitization cannot properly work through. It advances the concept of ontological militarism as the attribution of heuristic privilege to war turning it into the cypher of all social relations by investment in an assumed indistinction between war/peace and war/struggle. The paper invites critiques of liberal civility in International Relations (IR) to take seriously the point whereby the resort to war metaphors becomes the symptom of an inability to escape the symbolic horizons of a violent militaristic order.