Critical Security Methods

New frameworks for analysis

Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, Nadine Voelkner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134716265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sicurezza nazionale

Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies.

It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sites of security and insecurity.

Against the familiar methdological language of rigour, detachment and procedural consistency, Critical Security Methods reclaims the idea of method as experiment. The chapters offer a series of methodological experimentations that assemble concepts, theory and empirical cases into new frameworks for critical security research. They show how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be practiced as interventions into diverse instances of insecurity and securitisation, including airports, drug trafficking, peasant struggles, biometrics and police kettling.

The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in critical security studies, politics and international relations.

1 Introducing Critical Security Methods

Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal and Nadine Voelkner

DOI: 10.4324/9781315881549-1

Theory and method in critical security studies

Critical security studies (CSS) is now an established field of scholarship. Central to CSS is the shared assumption that security threats and insecurities are not simply objects to be studied or problems to be solved, but the product of social and political practices. CSS aims to understand how those practices work and their social and political implications.

Critical security scholars have challenged the theoretical and normative assumptions of traditional security scholarship and have analysed security practices in a variety of transnational sites. They have created an intellectual space in which research on diverse theoretical and empirical aspects of security and insecurity has flourished. CSS research now covers practices as diverse as the constitution of fear in popular culture and advertising (Weldes 1999), environmental degradation (Dalby 2002), the securitization of global health and disease (Elbe 2010; Voelkner 2011), the securitization of migration (Huysmans 2006) and asylum (Lavenex 2001), the commodification of security (Leander 2005; Abrahamsen and Williams 2006), the proliferation of risk calculation and management (Lobo-Guerrero 2007; Salter 2008; Aradau and van Munster 2007; van Munster 2009; Neal 2009), or practices of surveillance (Lyon 2002), to name just a few.

The proliferation of sites of interest for CSS scholars has entailed important questions of method, of how to deploy concepts in these empirical sites. How should an analysis of securitization be completed? How does one locate and analyse particular practices as ‘security’? How does a security field relate to a field of surveillance? How can we analyse the relation between security and risk? These and many other questions require not just theoretical sophistication, but also methodological development. The debates over the conceptualization of security – as speech act, discourse, field of professionals, dispositif, or practice – have been supplemented by methodological questions. Over the past few years, a series of books have tackled the challenge of methodology, of how to analyse security practices. After having been associated with the positivism of much of traditional security studies, method is back on the agenda of CSS. This book intervenes in this new arena of debate by proposing a different understanding of method and developing new frameworks for analysis for CSS scholars.

Lene Hansen’s Security as Practice (Hansen 2006), for many years the only sustained treatise on methodology in CSS, has now been joined by Laura Shepherd’s Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods (Shepherd 2013), and Mark Salter and Can Mutlu’s collection Research Methods in Critical Security Studies (Salter and Mutlu 2012). At the same time, an increasing number of books have tackled method and methodology in international relations (IR) more generally (for a discussion, see Aradau and Huysmans 2013).

Hansen’s methodology of discourse analysis aims to ‘take methodology back’ for poststructuralist analyses of identity and foreign policy (Hansen 2006: xix). In her view, methodology is a ‘way of communicating choices and strategies that all writing, deconstructivist and poststructuralist, must make’ (Hansen 2006: xix). Critical Security Methods similarly engages in taking back method and methodology for critical security analyses. However, it reformulates the rather rationalist approach to methodology that informs most other books on methodology, even those written from a critical perspective. ‘Rationalist’ refers here not to rational choice social science but rather to the conception of methods as a rational choice that aligns a technical instrument of analysis to a theory for the application of a coherent set of procedures and techniques. We depart from this in three ways.

First, we move away from the ‘cascading path’ approach that starts with theory and moves down to methodology and then to methods. In this widespread and generally unquestioned approach, theory is the starting point where the epistemological, ontological and normative questions and perspectives are established. The stakes for critical research remain thus at the theoretical level. Subsequently, these authors discuss methodology as the set of ideas that informs, justifies and validates the aims and methods of research. And finally, they introduce methods as the tools that critical security researchers can use to conduct their inquiry on the empirical world.

The problem with the cascading approach to theory, methodology and methods is that it addresses the meaning, purpose and practice of scholarship in advance of the scholar’s use of methods in their encounter with the empirical world, separating the two. True, theoretical concerns about epistemology, ontology, and normativity inform the methods and the aims of research. And critical theoretical concerns will almost certainly influence the interpretations, conclusions and even self-reflections drawn from the research. This awareness has often moved methodology ‘up’ to meta-theoretical debates, while still relegating methods to the bottom of the hierarchy (Jackson 2011; Wight 2006). However, in existing works on methodology in CSS, theory and method are kept apart in a hierarchy linked by methodology. To question this hierarchy, we aim to reconnect method and methodology in ways that render methods significant in the research process. We do so by reconceptualizing method as practice.

Second, we move beyond the assumption of coherence that frames this cascading approach to methodology and method. Here, methods and methodology are about rational choices and selection of appropriate tools that are coherent with a particular theory and epistemology. The structure of Shepherd’s textbook epitomizes this approach: theoretical chapters are presented first, in order to inform choices about methods that follow as forms of data collection. Only then is the student properly equipped, ‘with knowledge of the theoretical foundations and techniques necessary for the conduct of independent critical research in the field of security studies’ (Shepherd 2013: 1). Instead, our book approaches methods as experimentation through the concept of methodological bricolage.

Third, we extend the critical sensibility of security analysis in CSS to methods as well. To do so, we expand the question of reflexivity to include an analysis of the effects that methods as practices have. In the third section below, we discuss the relevance of criticality for our approach and the politics of method.

This introduction addresses each of these three moves in turn, and then discusses the frameworks for security analysis that emerge out of a critical engagement with method and methodology.

Method as practice: The security life of methods

The first move we make away from the approach to treat methods as a bridge between a theory and a technical instrument of analysis is to reconceptualize method as practice. Rather than treating security as a given object or value, critical security studies has understood security as a practice through which the ‘securityness’ of situations is created. For something to become a security concern, institutional, political, technological, and various other work is performed that makes it a matter of insecurity. This process can take many forms. It can take the form of a speech act in which security is called into existence by speaking it, just like a promise. It can also take the form of professionals of security enacting security routines in areas of social and political life. Social movements can mobilize needs for security in relation to vulnerabilities created by dominant powers as a political tactic. Thus, critical security research is about understanding security as practice in the broadest sense. As well as the literal sense of practice as ‘what people do’, this includes discourses, ideas, power relationships, bodies of knowledge, techniques of government, technologies, and the linkages between them.

Method, we argue, can be understood as practice in this broad sense of ‘doing’. Method can also be understood in the more specific definition of practice as ‘embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding’ (Schatzki 2001: 2). For example, in the European Union the scope of identification with Europe is measured in regular surveys of public knowledge, sentiments and opinions about the European Union. A methodological practice – a survey – enacts ‘identity’ as a sum of individual feelings towards the EU and knowledge about it. Although a shared and instituted practice, it is not the only method through which European identity is enacted and evaluated. Identity is also enacted in the circulation of institutional discourses about Europe, for example. The methodological practice of identification then draws on rhetorical devices and use of discursive registers rather than surveys of public opinion. European identity is further enacted in deploying European repertoires of action in disputes such as European rights frameworks and institutional mechanisms. Instead of surveys or discourse analysis, identity is then constituted and evaluated through sociological registering of repertoires of action and their use.

In this understanding, methods entail a particular embodied ‘practical sense’ or habitus developed in a professional field. In recent discussions of method in CSS, methodology often also works as a form of ‘hygiene’ (Law 2004). Methodology comes to affirm ‘the moralist idea that if only you do your methods properly you will lead a healthy research life’ (Law 2004: 9). For example, in the words of Salter, the aim is for ‘good, clean…clear research design’ (Salter and Mutlu 2012: 15). There are understandable reasons for the hygienic approach. Students and researchers need ways to justify their methods to others. They are called on to affirm the rigour, credibility, seriousness and scientificity of their work. This is all the more difficult when they are trying to make practical use of a fairly new and challenging body of theory that is relatively unfamiliar and potentially disruptive to others. As a heterodox approach, they often need to negotiate their access in terms of orthodox expectations institutionalized in grant awarding bodies, supervision committees, obligatory methods classes, and peer reviewers from other methodological persuasions. Focus on and demands for clear methods have a gatekeeping function in these negotiations. In the scholarly field of security studies and IR the ‘hygiene’ of method is a habitus. It is therefore not surprising that expanding the legitimacy of critical security approaches in this scholarly field at some stage runs into the need to demonstrate methodological credentials. Although method issues have been raised from time to time, in the last couple of years the methodological question has gained a distinct momentum for both developing CSS and increasing its legitimacy within the research field. However, demanding a focus on methods is a powerful tool to neutralize the more disruptive aspects of heterodox approaches – to make them more like the existing orthodox knowledge and its ways of doing research. Therefore, the methodological stake for CSS is to import its heterodox elements into its practice of method, thus messing up the hygienizing effects by doing methods differently. An important first step is to conceptualize methods as practice rather than simply a technique that consists in applying a proper and internally coherent way of doing surveys, discourse analysis, regression analysis, and so on.

Recasting methods as practice draws attention to the fact that methods are not limited to the academic field of security studies. Methods circulate through other social spaces, can be formulated in different fields, acquire legitimacy elsewhere, or travel from the academic field to other social fields and vice versa. Transferring the analysis of security as practice to methodological thought displaces methods from a tool of representing reality to a securitizing practice. In other words, methods are not simply tools of analysis but are developed and deployed as part of security practices themselves: e.g., analysis, precaution, horizon scanning, mapping, visual representation, all make possible the multiplicity and dispersion of security practices. Social network analysis is an oft-cited example, used by security experts for the purposes of risk profiling as well as by social scientists. According to Marieke de Goede, security experts in the ‘war on terror’ redeploy methods of social network analysis that have been developed by critical social scientists (De Goede 2012). To paraphrase Law, Ruppert and Savage, methods are in and of security worlds (Law, Ruppert, and Savage 2011). We refer to these processes of circulation of practice as the ‘security life of methods’. Our coinage is inspired by the language of ‘social life of methods’ developed in sociology to ‘focus on the affordances and capacities which are mobilized in and through methods themselves’ (Savage 2013: 4; Ruppert, Law, and Savage 2013).

Our insight is that security practices themselves entail methods. For example, to return to social network analysis, security agencies have adopted and developed methods to map relationships between individuals they deem suspicious. So what does it mean to use mapping as a critical methodology (Chapter 2)? How can we research materiality when objects have been propelled to the heart of counterterrorism: critical infrastructures, ‘dirty bombs’ or ‘dangerous liquids’ (Chapter 3)? Similarly, in the UK, the Ministry of Defence has built an image database and made it available to the public. What does it mean to use visual methods in research when visual methods are widespread in the world of security experts (Chapter 4)? If methods are practices through which security agencies intervene in social life, then what do they mean for our own research?

The security life of methods means that the security practices we study in CSS are often methods themselves. These methods are found in the situated rationalities and knowledge systems that CSS researchers have always aimed to study. For example, when we study how visuality relates to security, we are n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introducing critical security methods
• 2 Mapping
• 3 Discourse/materiality
• 4 Visuality
• 5 Proximity
• 6 Distance
• 7 Genealogy
• 8 Collaboration
• Index