Critical Security Studies

This chapter intends to provoke the present in order to motivate an unsettling and un-settled future for Critical Security Studies (CSS). To be unsettling CSS must (continue to) commit to unconventional inquisitiveness through refusing discipline and embracing reflexive accountability. To be un-settled, CSS must do the serious work of decolonizing. The need to decolonize as an effort to support indigenous sovereignty may create the unsettling possibility that CSS does not have a future. To imagine that CSS has no future is to take reflexive account of the colonial complicities of Anglo-European scholarship, while becoming open to fostering more meaningful collaborations with Indigenous people. Being unsettled and becoming un-settled must be a collaborative effort among all knowledge producers in order to critically confront the past, present, and future problems of doing and thinking (through) security.

Regional Security Complexes and Organizations

Regional dimensions of international security have become increasingly salient since the end of the Cold War. Some groups of states have coalesced into regional formations that resemble classic security communities. Several analytical concepts have been proposed to explain this trend, including revised theories of security community, security regimes, security complexes, and modes of security governance. Regional security complexes offer a useful framework for explicating the dynamics of interstate threats and governments’ coordinated responses to external danger. The utility of the concept can be illustrated by surveying recent scholarship on the cross-border spread of civil wars and disputes over water. Regional security complexes also provide insight into the formation and resurgence of regional security organizations, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.

Liberal Approaches

Liberalism always has been concerned with the security of the individual against violence and deprivation. Liberal approaches to international security focus on institutions, or collectively held rules, as mediating between material variables and international outcomes. States are arenas of contestation among individuals and groups, and differ according to their institutions. International realms are distinguished by the number, type, and membership of institutions. The realms are linked: liberal democracies construct and maintain liberal international institutions. As the increase of peaceful, wealthy democracies since the Second World War shows, these states have relatively secure citizens and enjoy comparative international success. In the future, the liberal order could be weakened by the ongoing rise of nonliberal China; escalations of transnational terrorism; and alienation from liberalism within the wealthy democracies. Future liberal security scholarship should attend to differences among non-democracies; causal links between domestic and international institutions; and the co-evolution of states and the international environment.

Feminist Security and Security Studies

Feminist approaches use gender lenses to look for gender in international security, and observe what is then made visible. In Security Studies the word “gender,” refers to more than someone’s apparent sex; it refers to the divisions that we see and make between those understood to be men and those understood to be women and also the ways those traits operate in social and political life—at the individual level, in social interaction, in workplaces, in organizations, in politics, etc.This chapter takes stock of Feminist Security Studies, accomplishing three tasks: First, it situates Feminist Security Studies within and around security studies, substantively, intellectually, and categorically. Second, it discusses some of the major contributions of Feminist Security Studies, in general terms and with examples. Finally, it looks for the potential futures of Feminist Security Studies itself and security studies more broadly with the integration of feminist theorizing.

The Great Debate

In the wake of the development of nuclear weapons, the survival of civilization, and perhaps humanity, hinges on answering the “nuclear political question”: Which political arrangements are needed to provide security from large-scale nuclear violence? Over the course of the nuclear era, a great debate on this question has occurred in three quite different rounds. In the first round, “nuclear one world” ideas about the obsolescence of the state-system and necessity of a world state predominated, but reached both conceptual and practical impasses. In the second round, across much of the Cold War, a trinity of deterrence-centered approaches, simple deterrence, war strategism, and arms control, prevailed. In the currently unfolding third round, proliferation and leakage have weakened confidence in nuclear deterrence, while both war strategism and arms control have become more radical, offering opposite “bombs away” answers of coercive counter-proliferation and preventive war, and deep arms control and nuclear abolition.

Maritime Security

From China’s claims in the South China Sea and its dispute with Japan over Senkaku Island to Canada’s concerns over melting sea ice in the Northwest Passage and how best to secure its Arctic region, maritime security issues rest at the heart of many core strategic disputes. Maritime insecurity can also take unconventional forms, stemming from criminal threats at sea that can have an impact upon national security. Both challenges have a long history, and both intersect the crucial issues or rules, order, and ungoverned spaces. this chapter examines this nexus of challenges, providing the analytical tools needed to forecast what is and is not likely to change. The chapter concludes by considering the relationship between continuity, change, and contingency in the future of maritime security.

Constructivism

This chapter provides a brief overview of constructivist international relations theory and explores how it can help explain two of the most important transformations in international security over the last century: the growing belief that the “human” should be an object of security, and the expanding metropolis of different kinds of actors whose goal is to produce security for all individuals in the name of “humanity” and the “international community.” The introduction to the chapter provides a quick background to the sociological context that gave birth to constructivism. Section 7.2 provides a brief conceptual overview of constructivism, with particular attention paid to those attributes that might be useful for students of international security and that will be relevant for the historical analysis in Section 7.3, which concerns the expansion of international security from a state-centric exercise to a growing role for the “international community” to defend “humanity.”

The Global South and International Security

This chapter shows how areas of the global South have moved from the periphery to the center of academic and policy debates about international security. It argues that speaking about the global South as a singular, uniform unit is fraught with difficulties, analytically and politically, and that areas of the global South are occupying an increasingly central, yet ambivalent and contradictory position, within contemporary international security. On the one hand, the global South appears in the figure of the “weak state” as a major threat. On the other, the global South performs as the “intervener state” by contributing the majority of personnel to peacekeeping missions in the world’s trouble spots. The chapter seeks to capture this contradictory position of being part problem, part solution. It concludes that the global South is likely to continue to occupy a central place within international security and that the contradictions are likely to multiply.

Systemic Theory and the Future of Great Power War and Peace

Drawing from theories that examine security-dilemma spiraling and the dynamics of relative decline, the chapter shows that established theories of major war can be made relevant to the nuclear age—once they have incorporated the importance of Cold War spiraling and inadvertent war.The chapter argues that any theory of international relations that seeks to explain changes in the likelihood of nuclear war must incorporate into its causal logic the willingness of states to take actions that risk an inadvertent slide into war. While it may not be rational to initiate a nuclear war against another great power, it may indeed be rational, under certain circumstances, for leaders to switch to hard-line actions that raise the probability of a war neither side would have actively desired prior to the onset of a crisis.

Religion and International Security

This chapter on religion and international security begins by arguing that religion was largely absent from International Relations (IR) theory since its modern founding in early modern Europe, mirroring its lack of influence on actual IR during the same period. Over the past four decades, though, religion has resurged in its global political influence, while, over the past decade-and-a-half, a literature on religion and IR has appeared and developed. The chapter then looks at this literature, particularly at scholarship that argues for and against religion’s inherently violent nature; that sees religion as a force for both peace and violence; that describes and tracks trends in religious war and religious terrorism; that argues for and against Islam’s proneness to violence; and that seeks to theorize the varying political stances of religious actors. The chapter closes with an analysis of a normative debate on religious freedom.