The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies

J. Peter Burgess

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135166199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This new Handbook gathers together state-of-the-art theoretical reflection and empirical research by a group of leading international scholars in the subdiscipline of Critical Security Studies.

In today's globalised setting, the challenge of maintaining security is no longer limited to the traditional foreign-policy and military tools of the nation-state, and security and insecurity are no longer considered as dependent only upon geopolitics and military strength, but rather are also seen to depend upon social, economic, environmental, ethical models of analysis and tools of action. The contributors discuss and evaluate this fundamental shift in four key areas:

• New security concepts
• New security subjects
• New security objects
• New security practices

Offering a comprehensive theoretical and empirical overview of this evolving field, this book will be essential reading for all students of critical security studies, human security, international/global security, political theory and IR in general.

J. Peter Burgess is Research Professor at PRIO, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, where he leads the Security Programme and edits the interdisciplinary journal Security Dialogue. In addition, he is Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (NTNU), and Research Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Brussels.

Introduction

J. Peter Burgess

DOI: 10.4324/9780203859483-1

This volume appears just as the dust begins to settle over a period of rich, productive and stimulating transformation in the field of security studies.¹ Since the late 1980s and the receding of the Cold War, a flurry of research and scholarship has nurtured new theoretical positions, generated a treasure trove of new empirical material, and developed new methodologies to unite them. Though there are signs of a levelling-out of this flood of activity, it is unlikely that the evolution of security thinking will diminish. Indeed, much suggests that this vigorous development will continue.

It is therefore a crucial time for stock-taking, a moment to pause and reflect on the newness of this new thinking, its premises and ambitions, its explicit and hidden values, its politics, the continuities and discontinuities with what remains of the Cold War tradition, and the meaning of the apparent transition from the one to the other. It is a milestone where we can ask how the field of security studies has structured itself, how certain methods are naturalized while others remain exotic, how certain theorizations of security crystallize while others resist or wane.

The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies is in this sense not intended as a survey of the latest and greatest in security studies. A number of admirable books currently play this role, and new and coming books will certainly continue to do so. Instead, this book is meant as a contribution to a self-critique of the field of security studies. It is motivated by the principle that the renewal of the field carries with it as many pitfalls as it does creative or productive moments. Like any developing field, its coherence depends on its self-reflection and self-critique.

This volume does not carry out such a critique but instead aims to provide a certain point of departure for doing so. No case for the novelty of New Security Studies will be made here. This work represents neither a school nor a movement, neither theory nor empirical field. Instead of reviewing the major theoretical positions, empirical fields and methodological schools, the volume is organized along four pragmatic or applied axes of security. Instead of trying to account for the approaches and methods of security studies, it is organized and structured according to a number of variables in the way security is enacted, given meaning through its application.

If the rapid evolution in security theory has today calmed somewhat, some scholars see a kind of regression to a new-militarization of the concept, in large part due to the nature of political responses to the attacks of 11 September 2001 (Fierke 2007: 28–9). The canonical positions of post-Cold War security theory are also well-studied. Most begin with the tried and true distinction between theoretical realism and liberalism, the bulwarks of security thinking through most of the twentieth century, formulated in the works of Morgenthau (1948), Bull (1977) and many others, critiqued and developed into a variety of forms of neo-realism and neo-liberalism by even more (Doyle 1997; Keohane 1986; Mearsheimer 2001; Oye 1986; Waltz 1959).

In the late 1980s and 1990s a sea change passed over security theory in general, provoked by the exhaustion and decline of the Cold War bi-polar security complex. During this period conventional theories of security were widely regarded as inadequate to the task of accounting for a new landscape of security issues and actors and a new set or principles began to emerge (Aggestam and Hyde-Price 2000; Alkire 2003; Baldwin 1995, 1997; Booth 2005; Brown 1997; Buzan 1991a; Dalby 1997, 2000; Buzan 1991b; Derian 1993; Dillon 1996; Huysmans 1998; Kaldor 2000; Lipschutz 1995; Rothschild 1995; Tickner 1995; Ullmann 1983; Wæver 1997, 2000; Williams 1994; Wyn Jones 1999). These interventions cover a wide range of concerns, but their uniting theme and interest is a critique of realist and neo-realist perspectives through a radical, linguistically based ‘constructivist turn’ in which social theories of security, linguistics and performativity become progressively more important to theoretical approaches. In addition, questions of identity and culture are seen as keys to understanding security and to supporting the translatability of security between social and political settings. This expansion also broadens the remit of security and links to nationalism studies, political philosophy and conflict studies.

Much of this scholarship coalesces around the advent of securitization theory that grew out of a research group at the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute in the 1980s and culminated in a number of influential works by Wæver, Buzan and others (Buzan et al. 1990, 1998; Buzan & Wæver 2003; Wæver et al. 1993). Securitization theory is a self-proclaimed ‘speech act theory’ of security that focuses on the means by which security issues are constructed through language. According to the theory, a given object becomes securitized by virtue of the pronouncement of a securitizing actor, appropriately positioned, permitting it to be shifted from the order of ordinary politics to one kind or another of exceptional politics.

The subjectivization of security through securitization theory has had distinct consequences for the objective side of the security equation. Through applications of this highly subject-oriented theory a number of new objective components of security are revealed. One important consequence of the theory is thus: that it is able to take cognizance of the broader field of security threats. The widening application of securitization theory reveals the process by which new objects of security are constituted. Thus the ‘new security objects’ discussed in this volume, and others again, are indebted to the realization that the security status of any object is a correlate of its situation within a field of political action, authority and democracy.

It is the aim of this volume to intervene in this evolution by giving it one structured presentation among several possible ones. This presentation does not have the ambition of an exhaustive coverage of themes, methods and objects of the field of security studies. Such a project is neither feasible nor useful. Instead, it organizes a selection of material in the form of four types of strategies for understanding and advancing research on the changing landscape of security and insecurity. These types differentiate and focus on (1) new concepts of security, (2) new subjects of security, (3) new objects of security and (4) new security practices.

New security concepts can be understood as ways of coupling ideas or principles of security with the empirical basis that supports them. They refer to the combinatory possibilities for synthesizing subject positions or perspectives from which security and insecurity is lived or operationalized with new empirical objects or areas of study. The chapters in this section focus on challenges of correlation. They seek to understand objects of security by making sense of how they are conceptualized, and how they are linked to those ideas, actors, institutions, etc., that have an interest in how they play out their positions. They deal with the forces of correlation and the antagonisms mobilized by conflicts between idea and world, high politics and fieldwork. This section includes five analyses all of which reflect the challenge of conceptually correlating subject positions and objects of security, perspectives and empirical scope, actors and fields. ‘Civilizational security’ (Bowden), ‘risk’ (Kessler), ‘small arms’ (Krause), ‘critical human security’ (Owen) and ‘critical geopolitics’ (Dalby) all present constellations of security thinking and the surrounding tension between how the empirical world of security is experienced as a heterogeneous challenge to the very principles of that seeing. These chapters, each in their own way, present concepts as unities of the facts they conceptualize and the principles that give them their empirical validity.

New security subjects assemble a range of subjective positions relative to the empirical world of security and insecurity. To evoke the subject of security encompasses not only the perspective of the subject, but its value premises, interests, political valence and its situation in other discourses of security that participate in governing its validity. The collection of new security subjects in this section attempts to account for the changes in subject positions from which security is assessed, asserted and treated, increasingly made between analytic positions and a changing world. The chapters in this section present six subject orientations that have emerged in recent years, giving new and alternative meanings to the security objects that have traditionally been understood according to traditional models. ‘Biopolitics’ (Dillon), ‘gendered security’ (Shepherd), ‘identity security’ (Bilgin), ‘security ethics’ (Burke), ‘financial security’ (de Goede), and ‘international law and security’ (Sandvik) advance analyses that explicitly and implicitly put into question the transparency of the security subject, and document the analytic consequences of intensified focus on the subject position in security analysis.

New security objects assembles a set of studies that document and explore the character of emerging security threats to empirical objects traditionally not considered to be under threat. The six chapters in this section explore the direct and indirect consequences for conceptual analysis of these non-traditional security objects. The contributions, ‘environmental security’ (Barnett), ‘food security’ (Slater and Wiggins), ‘energy security’ (Dannreuther), ‘cyber security’ (Dunn Cavelty), ‘pandemic security’ (Elbe) and ‘biosecurity’ (Kuhlau and Hart), thus confront conventional premises and expectations of status quo security concepts, by suggesting how securitization processes can shift focus to objects outside of conventional approaches.

New security practices gathers a series of chapters illustrating the effects of construing security as practice, as a mode of operation or of implementation of security measures through means that are themselves governed by a variety of structures and drives. In contrast to the three previous sections, which explore security as positions in a subject– object equation, these chapters regard security as a management function with in a logic of governance. These chapters, ‘surveillance’ (Salter), ‘urban security’ (Wood), ‘privatization of security’ (Leander), ‘migration’ (Walters), ‘security technologies’ (Guittet and Jeandesboz), ‘designing security’ (Weber and Lacy), and ‘new mobile crime’ (den Boer) examine security less as a strategy aimed at ideally erasing insecurity from society than as a project of overseeing and regulating insecurity in society, integrating it into the social system, and administering resources that give it a role in the overall governance of society.

Note

1. The realization of this volume has been supported through the invaluable editorial assistance of Monica Hanssen, Marit Moe-Pryce and Jonas Gräns.

Part I New Security Concepts

DOI: 10.4324/9780203859483-2

2 Civilizational Security

Brett Bowden

DOI: 10.4324/9780203859483-3

The Idea of Civilization

The idea of civilization occupies a prominent and complicated place in the history of ideas and world history more generally. It has played no small part in shaping history; the demands of civilization have long been employed to describe, explain, rationalize, and justify all manner of interventions and socio-political engineering (Bowden 2009a). The significance of civilization is captured in the suggestion that it is one of a small number of ‘essential’ ideas intimately linked to the ‘whole history of modern thought and the principal intellectual achievements in the western world’ (Benveniste 1971: 289). One might add to this claim that, while civilization is a distinctly Western idea, perhaps its greatest impact has been felt in the non-Western world, where much of the aforementioned intervention and socio-political engineering has taken place, particularly since the Spanish ‘discovery’ and conquest of the New World.

In the context of a century that gave rise to two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust, it seemed for a time as though the very idea of civilization might be rendered something of an anachronism. But that was not to be the case, for the end of the Cold War brought with it a revival in the use of the term civilization – and its plural, civilizations – as tool for describing and explaining a wide range of events and issues in the social and behavioral sciences. Nowhere was this more the case than in politics and international affairs. Given that the term civilization has been with us since the mid-eighteenth century, it is noteworthy that it was not until its post-Cold War revival that people began to think explicitly about the concept of civilization in relation to security. The catalyst for this turn in thinking can in large part be attributed to Samuel P. Huntington’s provocative article and book in which he dev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: New Security Concepts
• Part II: New Security Subjects
• Part III: New Security Objects
• Part IV: New Security Practices
• References
• Index