Critical Approaches to Security

An Introduction to Theories and Methods

Laura J. Shepherd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135127992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Freedom
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on critical approaches to security, this new textbook offers readers both an overview of the key theoretical perspectives and a variety of methodological techniques.

With a careful explication of core concepts in each chapter and an introduction that traces the development of critical approaches to security, this textbook will encourage all those who engage with it to develop a curiosity about the study and practices of security politics. Challenging the assumptions of conventional theories and approaches, unsettling that which was previously taken for granted – these are among the ways in which such a curiosity works. Through its attention to the fact that, and the ways in which, security matters in global politics, this work will both pioneer new ways of studying security and acknowledge the noteworthy scholarship without which it could not have been thought.

This textbook will be essential reading to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of critical security studies, and highly recommended to students of traditional security studies, International Relations and Politics.

1 Introduction

Critical approaches to security in contemporary global politics

Laura J. Shepherd

DOI: 10.4324/9780203076873-1

This is a book about methodology. There is a difference between theory and methodology, and there is a difference between methods and methodology. Theories, as I discuss in more detail in Part I, can be seen as packages of ideas about how the world works. Some are considered persuasive and become dominant for one reason or another; some are contested and ultimately marginalized, again for any number of reasons. All theories are, however, packages of ideas. Methods, on the other hand, are devices that we can use in the research process to collect and analyse data (or ‘stuff’, which is the highly technical term I tend to use with my own students). We can gather data (in a number of ways, as the chapters that follow demonstrate) and then analyse this data using a range of techniques (again, as shown in the following chapters). Strategies within both of these phases of research are known broadly as ‘research methods’, and all methods construct knowledge about the world (through the collection and analysis of ‘stuff’) in different ways. What is often not discussed, in the social sciences at least, is the politics of different methods, but this book aims to engage this question directly. This is why I suggest that this is a book about methodology, because the book investigates the ideas that inform the methods and techniques that we use in Security Studies. In a way, therefore, we can consider methodology as theory about method, because ‘there is no methodology without logos, without thinking about thinking’ (Sartori quoted in Gerring 2011: xix, emphasis in original). Although the book is divided into ‘Theories’ and ‘Methods’, this book is also engaged in discussions of methodology throughout, as all of the contributing authors reflect on how the ideas that they have about the world that we live in, alongside the ideas that they have about how and why and when they can or should collect and analyse data about that world, create the knowledge claims that they are then able to make. The process and publication of research is a fundamental knowledge practice, and therefore is inherently political, a view shared by all authors in this volume.

This book aims to equip you with knowledge of the theoretical foundations and techniques necessary for the conduct of independent critical research in the field of Security Studies. You may find some chapters more useful than others, depending on your own political and ethical position(s) in relation to the study of security, but each of the contributions to this volume is designed to provide an overview of the specific theory or method with which it is concerned. Each chapter shows how conducting research informed by or founded upon that theory or method allows you to include certain issues or objects of study while simultaneously making you aware of what it might exclude or marginalize. Each chapter, in short, provides a discussion of the politics of theory and/or method. This chapter is slightly different, however, as I use this introduction to provide a foundation for the chapters that follow.

In the next section, I provide an overview of the conventional account of security according to the discipline of International Relations (IR),¹ an account which is organized around the three ‘S's of state, survival and self-help. This theoretical account provides a clear indication of what should — and what should not — be ascribed the status of a ‘security issue’, although in contemporary Security Studies, a ‘sub-discipline’ of IR, scholars and policy-makers recognize a plethora of threats not only to the survival of the sovereign state but also to the survival of the human subject. As conventional theories of security have been unable (and, at times, unwilling) to engage effectively with these ‘new’ security threats, we have seen the proliferation of theories of security aimed at providing a firm theoretical platform from which to address non-traditional security issues. These are the theories we discuss in this book, theories — or ‘approaches’ — that we might term ‘critical’. In the second section of this introduction, therefore, I discuss the content of the book in more detail, in an effort to explain in the third and final section how and why both theory and method (methodologies) have a profound influence on how we (think we) know what we (think we) know about security in contemporary global politics.

On security

Political realism derives its authority and legitimacy from association with some of the great thinkers of Western modernity, including Thucydides (a Greek historian, who lived c.360–395 bc), Thomas Hobbes (a British philosopher writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (also a philosopher but from the eighteenth century). Hobbes, in particular, has been very influential in the development of Security Studies, largely due to his writings on political organization and social life in his book Leviathan. This book was the earliest expression of what became known as ‘social contract theory’, part of which was the theory that humans would agree to submit to the authority of a government if that government provided them with security. This trade-off was necessary because without a sovereign power (‘government’, monarchy or dictatorship), keeping their natures in check, people would tend to be quite unpleasant. In the absence of ‘a common power to keep them all in awe’, Hobbes famously suggested, humans were destined to live ‘in continual fear, and danger of violent death’ and life itself would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ ([1651]2008: 86).

These ideas about political authority in IRs were foundational to the intellectual development of realism in IR, which relies heavily on Hobbesian imaginings of human behaviour and, further, sees these imaginings as illustrative of state behaviour. As Robert Gilpin argues, ‘political realism itself … is best viewed as an attitude regarding the human condition’ (1984: 290). In effect, according to political realism in IR, the state is ‘man’ writ large, and behaves accordingly, engaging in wars of ‘all against all’ without an authority higher than the sovereign of each state to prevent such violence. As the object of analysis for IR realism is the state, and states by definition are sovereign, the international system is deemed to be anarchic (from the Greek anarkhia: ‘an’ [without]/‘arkhos’ [leader]), absent from any form of unifying political authority.

According to conventional representations of realist theories of security (e.g. in textbooks such as this one), the state is the object to which security policy refers, and states live in ‘continual fear’ of extinction because although within the state there may be a sovereign power, outside of the state there is no such thing. Further, it is the sovereignty of the state that defines its existence as a state. The state must remain sovereign and it must sustain territorial integrity (it must survive), or else it will cease to be a state. Security practices are therefore aimed at ensuring survival. Further, as states cannot rely on any higher authority to intervene in, mediate or manage international affairs, they must ‘chart their own courses’ (Waltz 1979: 96) and be prepared to do whatever is necessary to help themselves. The ‘continual fear’ identified by Hobbes surfaces in the writings of those that have conventionally been identified as both classical and neorealist security scholars: Hans Morgenthau, John Herz, Kenneth Waltz, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer among others.

For realist IR, survival can only be assured by the accumulation of power, leading Morgenthau (1973) to argue that the ‘national interest’ of the state can be defined in terms of power: this simply means that there can be no higher interest than the accumulation of power as power will guarantee survival. To illustrate this view, Herz's conception of the ‘security dilemma’ is explicitly premised on these assumptions regarding self-help. The dilemma

stems from a fundamental social constellation … where groups live alongside each other without being organised into a higher unity … Since none can ever feel entirely secure in such a world … power competition ensues and the vicious circle of security and power accumulation is on.

(Herz 1950: 157)

The central security issue, then, according to realism, is the threat of ‘power competition’ among all states, none of whom are able to ‘feel entirely secure’. Threats are, by definition, external to the state and derived from a very narrow conceptualization of security (as survival) and power (as defined in military terms).

The changes in the global political landscape that were produced by and productive of the post-Cold War era included the dissolution of the USSR, the emergence of the USA as a sole remaining ‘superpower’, the release of the United Nations Security Council from Cold War ‘deadlock’ and the proliferation of both ‘new wars’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’. (I would like to add a caveat at this point that these ‘changes’ are premised on a vision of IRs from the Global North [or ‘minority world’]. Their articulation presupposes several things: that the ‘Cold War’ was indeed cold, which was not the case for the populations of, to give just a few examples, the Dominican Republic, Afghanistan, Lebanon or Nicaragua; that ‘new wars’ are qualitatively different from conflict throughout history; that the UN Security Council is now functioning effectively and as intended; all of which are deeply problematic and deserving of critical scrutiny.) These shifts in IRs led to what one notable scholar referred to as a ‘renaissance of Security Studies’ (Walt 1991), as those interested in the politics and practices of security undertook the challenging task of reorienting intellectual endeavour to take into account ‘sudden’ transformations in global politics.

What's ‘critical' about critical approaches to security?

One of the key dimensions of critical approaches to security is their desire to challenge the conventions of Security Studies research. Critical approaches to security endeavour to challenge and unsettle anything that is taken for granted in the research process, including their own assumptions and politics. The process and publication of research is a fundamental knowledge practice, and therefore is inherently political, a view shared by all of the authors in this volume. Before I turn to discuss the contents of this book, therefore, I want to comment briefly on the issue of ‘critique’. In explaining what's ‘critical’ about critical approaches to security, we might first wish to examine the concept of ‘theory’, which I mentioned briefly at the beginning of this chapter.

To situate this discussion, we can revisit the foundation of IR as an academic discipline, a discipline that considers itself to be part of the social sciences, and which therefore has conventionally had a very definite view on what constitutes an appropriate theoretical approach to the study of IRs:

For the last forty years the academic discipline of IRs has been dominated by positivism. Positivism has involved a commitment to a unified view of science, and the adoption of methodologies of the natural sciences to explain the social world.

(Smith 1996: 11)

Despite over a decade having passed since Steve Smith wrote that IR ‘has been dominated by positivism’, his words still ring true. Adherence to the tenets of positivism — empiricism (the belief that reliable and ‘true’ knowledge can only be generated through rigorous and value-free observation of evidence), progressivism (the idea that social science knowledge exists to further the progression of humankind), a commitment to a secular humanist philosophy and a belief in the unity of scientific method (see Halfpenny 2001: 372–373) — had ensured that IR as a discipline has retained a very narrow view of what constitutes an appropriate theoretical approach to the subject and a similarly narrow view of what constitute appropriate research methods. Theories in IR, and in conventional Security Studies, have tended to be foundationalist (i.e. theories that assume there is an objective reality to the social world that exists independent of our perception, which acts as the foundation for our knowledge claims) and methods have tended to be quantitative (although as Laura Sjoberg and Jeffrey Horowitz point out in Chapter 9 of this book, the distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods is often over-emphasized).

In the 1980s, however, discussion about the dominance of positivism emerged into the mainstream of IR literature with the publication of an important article by Yosef Lapid (1989) titled ‘The Third Debate: On the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-Positivist Era’, and there followed extensive deliberation of the possibilities of ‘post-positivist’ approaches in IR, and by association, in Security Studies. While contributors to this debate were not agreed upon various aspects of ‘post-positivism’ nor necessarily on its ‘value’ over positivism (hence the existence of debate), there was some consensus on the ‘shared sense of critical purpose which binds together the scholarship of those otherwise differentiated by disciplinary training, emphasis and style’ (George 1989: 269–270, emphasis added). Both IR and Security Studies have continued to wrestle with these debates, questioning whose knowledge counts as knowledge, how reliable are various different methods of generating knowledge, what (if any) are the ‘facts’ on which scholars can base their theories of contemporary global and security politics. As Smith later explained, ‘[t]he stakes are high in such a debate … because of its [positivism's] role in underpinning theory and, ultimately, serving as the criterion for judging between theory’ (1996: 12–13).

The ‘third debate’, as it became known, has illustrated the imbrication of politics in theory. That is, it illustrated that theory is always political, because it always involves claims about knowledge. Far from being ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’, post-positivists (as this group became known, although ‘anti-positivist’ might be more accurate) argued that ‘theory is always for someone, and for some purpose’ (Cox 1986: 207). Since the 1980s there has been a proliferation of different approaches to the study of security politics that have all, in some way, challenged the positivist conceptualization of theory as an explanatory tool, separate from and not implicated in the political processes of everyday life. This series of challenges led to a corollary series of debates about how we should conceive of ‘theory’ in IR, which I do not have space to discuss here. However, despite their variety, the different critical theories are minimally united in their recognition of the implication of theory in the constitution of what we recognize as ‘everyday life’ (for an excellent discussion of the various conceptualizations of theory see Zalewski 1996) and the need to challenge and question these constitutive processes. This questioning is what makes critical approaches ‘critical’ and also makes sense of their variety:

It is not pluralism without purpose, but a critical pluralism, designed to reveal embedded power and authority structures, provoke critical scrutiny of dominant discourses, empower marginalized populations and perspectives, and provide a basis for alternative conceptualizations.

(Biersteker 1989: 264, emphasis in original)

As I recognize that this book also contains a plurality of voices, in the remainder of this section, I provide a very brief sketch of the book as a whole and explain how the different chapters fit together.

Part 1: Theories

The first part of the book (Chapters 2–8) is devoted to the discussion of theories. While a theory (or package of ideas that you believe in) about the world might result in certain methodological co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures, tables and boxes
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: critical approaches to security in contemporary global politics
• PART 1 Theories: How do we see the world?
• PART 2 Methods: Collecting and analysing data
• Glossary
• References
• Index