scholarly journals Assembling credibility: Knowledge, method and critique in times of ‘post-truth’

2018 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Aradau ◽  
Jef Huysmans
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Knowledge Creation ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Knowledge Practice ◽  
Knowledge Claims ◽  
Scientific Standards ◽  
Critical Lines ◽  
Scientific Accomplishment

Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards internal to knowledge practice to validate their knowledge claims. This quest for scientific standards now also operates against the background of debates on ‘post-truth’, which raise pressing and perplexing questions for critical lines of thought. We propose a different approach by conceptualizing validity as practices of assembling credibility in which the transversal formation and circulation of credits and credentials combine with disputes over credence and credulity. This conceptualization of the validity of (critical) security knowledge shifts the focus from epistemic and methodological standards to transepistemic practices and relations. It allows us to mediate validity critically as a sociopolitical rather than strictly scientific accomplishment. Developing such an understanding of validity makes it possible for critical security studies and international relations to displace epistemic disputes about ‘post-truth’ with transversal practices of knowledge creation, circulation and accreditation.

Humanitarian responsibilities and interventionist claims in international society

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex J. Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
International Society ◽  
Third World ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
English School ◽  
Humanitarian Emergency ◽  
Contemporary Debate ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Critical Approaches

This article calls for a widening of the debate about humanitarian intervention to incorporate insights from constructivism, ‘Welsh School’; Critical Security Studies, and critical approaches to Third World International Relations. After identifying a series of problems with the contemporary debate, which is dominated by the English School, it calls for a broadening of the concept of intervention and suggests a need to rethink the meaning of humanitarianism and terms such as the ‘supreme humanitarian emergency’.

scholarly journals Securitising Covid-19? The Politics of Global Health and the Limits of the Copenhagen School

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-257
Author(s):  
Daniel Edler Duarte ◽  
Marcelo M. Valença
Keyword(s):  
Global Health ◽  
Control Strategies ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Health Security ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Scientific Controversies ◽  
Copenhagen School ◽  
State Surveillance ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The One

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked controversies over health security strategies adopted in different countries. The urge to curb the spread of the virus has supported policies to restrict mobility and to build up state surveillance, which might induce authoritarian forms of government. In this context, the Copenhagen School has offered an analytical repertoire that informs many analyses in the fields of critical security studies and global health. Accordingly, the securitisation of COVID-19 might be necessary to deal with the crisis, but it risks unfolding discriminatory practices and undemocratic regimes, with potentially enduring effects. In this article, we look into controversies over pandemic-control strategies to discuss the political and analytical limitations of securitisation theory. On the one hand, we demonstrate that the focus on moments of rupture and exception conceals security practices that unfold in ongoing institutional disputes and over the construction of legitimate knowledge about public health. On the other hand, we point out that securitisation theory hinders a genealogy of modern apparatuses of control and neglects violent forms of government which are manifested not in major disruptive acts, but in the everyday dynamics of unequal societies. We conclude by suggesting that an analysis of the bureaucratic disputes and scientific controversies that constitute health security knowledges and practices enables critical approaches to engage with the multiple – and, at times, mundane – processes in which (in)security is produced, circulated, and contested.

Making amends: Towards an antiracist critical security studies and international relations

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 8-16
Author(s):  
Navnita Chadha Behera ◽  
Kristina Hinds ◽  
Arlene B Tickner
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies

scholarly journals Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Cultural Anthropology ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Critical Security Studies

This volume addresses the ‘question of power’ in current constructivist securitisation studies. How can power relations that affect security and insecurity be analysed from both a transdisciplinary and historical point of view? The volume brings together contributions from history, art history, political science, sociology, cultural anthropology and law in order to determine the role of conceptions of power in securitisation studies, which has tended to be dealt with implicitly thus far. Using conceptual theoretical essays and historical case studies that cover the period from the 16th to the 21st century, this book portrays the dominant paradigms of critical security studies, which mostly stem from the field of international relations and see the state as a major focal point in securitisation, in a new light.

7. Critical Security Studies:

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Mutimer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Copenhagen School ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Framework ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides a partial history of the label ‘Critical Security Studies’ and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It considers the primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. It looks at the 1994 conference held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies, which spawned a book called Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997b), and Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), which was published to serve as a relatively comprehensive statement of ‘securitization studies’, or the Copenhagen School. The chapter argues that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an ‘ethos of critique’ in either the study or refusal of security. Finally, it examines Ken Booth’s views on poststructuralism as part of a broad Critical Security Studies.

"This is not a cyber war, it's a...?"

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barnard-Wills
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Denial Of Service ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Theory Analysis ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Cyber War ◽  
Cyber Conflict

This paper is a political theory analysis using the conflict, attacks, and ‘hactivism’ surrounding the WikiLeaks organisations following diplomatic cable releases as a case study to demonstrate the complexity of contemporary cyber conflict. This complexity is reflected in the motivations, identities, and values of a multiplicity of (often non-state) actors. Termed ‘the first visible cyber war’ this conflict (having already drawn in states, media organisations, banks and payments companies, and loose coalitions of individuals) is one where traditional metaphors of war occlude as much as they reveal. International relations and critical security studies have developed a range of approaches to international conflict that focus on identities, values, and normative frameworks. Securitization, hegemony, and democratic demands offer a productive way of understanding cyber conflict. Distributed denial of service attacks are interpreted as an attempt to establish a dominant discursive position and to construct a coalition around political issues

Governmentality and Biopolitics

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin J. Muller
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Body ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Zero Sum ◽  
And Behavior

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.

scholarly journals Transgressing to teach: Theorising race and security through struggle

Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 026339572110606
Author(s):  
Chris Rossdale
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Panther Party ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
The Us ◽  
Self Defence

Recent interventions in critical security studies have argued that the field has struggled to account for the racialised/racist foundations of security politics. This article engages with the US Black Panther Party (BPP), arguing that the Party did important work to show how security politics is dependent on racial violence. The idea that we can theorise global politics through struggle (`struggle as method’) is becoming popular within disciplinary International Relations (IR), but has longer lineages in Black radical thought. The BPP were important advocates of struggle as method, with tactics and strategies intentionally designed with a pedagogical purpose; through Panther actions (including community self-defence and survival programmes), and the state’s response to these, the mechanisms of capitalist white supremacy were laid bare. The article therefore acknowledges BPP action as a series of theoretical interventions, which demonstrated how the terms of US/white security are rooted in and dependent on anti-Blackness. It also shows how Panther tactics prefigured alternative, radical, anti-statist approaches to security, these conceptualised as `survival pending revolution’. The article closes by arguing that scholarship on critical security studies - especially as related to the racialised politics of security - should do more to work with and acknowledge its indebtedness to struggle as method.

7. Critical Security Studies: A Schismatic History

2018 ◽  
pp. 91-110
Author(s):  
David Mutimer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Security Studies ◽  
Critical Security Studies ◽  
Copenhagen School ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Framework ◽  
The Way

This chapter provides a partial history of the label ‘Critical Security Studies’ and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It considers the primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. It looks at the 1994 conference held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies, which spawned a book called Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997b), and Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), which was published to serve as a relatively comprehensive statement of ‘securitization studies’, or the Copenhagen School. The chapter argues that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an ‘ethos of critique’ in either the study or refusal of security. Finally, it examines Ken Booth’s views on poststructuralism as part of a broad Critical Security Studies.

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