Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory

Richard Wyn Jones

Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.

1999

Acknowledgments

 

One of the many joys afforded by the completion of this book is that it finally allows me the opportunity to acknowledge the support that I have received during its extended gestation.

First, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. I have benefited enormously from being part of such an intellectually stimulating environment. Steve Smith, head of the department, not only has been largely responsible for fostering a renaissance in this venerable department’s fortunes but has also been very supportive on a personal level. He has my grateful thanks on both counts. I am also indebted to Mick Cox and Michael Williams, who have both been the source of constant, good-humored encouragement.

A number of discussion group organizers, panel conveners, and journal editors have allowed me to try out many of the arguments contained within the book in various public forums. In particular I would like to thank participants in the Cambrian Discussion Group in Aberystwyth, the organizers of various critical security studies panels at BISA and ISA annual conferences to which I have contributed papers, Alex Danchev at Keele, and Adran Athroniaeth, Urdd Graddedigion Prifysgol Cymru. In addition, those students who have taken the critical security studies master’s option at Aberystwyth in recent years have made a major contribution, by both forcing me to clarify my own thinking and continually pushing CSS in new directions.

Some of the arguments in the book were first set out in previous articles and chapters. I am grateful for permission to draw upon material from “The Nuclear Revolution” in Alex Danchev (ed.), Fin de Siècle: The Meaning of the Twentieth Century (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995); “‘Message in a Bottle’? Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies,” Contemporary Security Policy Vol. 16, No. 3 (December 1995); “Gwleidyddiaeth Ryddfreiniol ar ôl Auschwitz: Athroniaeth Wleidyddol Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno,” Efrydiau Athronyddol Vol. 59 (1996); and “‘Travel Without Maps’: Thinking About Security After the Cold War,” in Jane Davis (ed.), Security Issues in the Post–Cold War World (Brookfield, Vt.: Edward Elgar, 1996).

Previous drafts of the book were read by Chris Brown and Mike Sheehan. Their detailed, perceptive, and encouraging comments have proven to be invaluable. Although family and other friends may have escaped reading the text, their influence has helped shape it. In particular, I wish to thank Ella and Gareth Wyn Jones, Jerry Hunter, and Rhys Jones. Eli Stamnes deserves a special mention for having both read and commented on the manuscript and put up with its author. My thanks also to Paul Williams for his assistance in preparing the index.

I want to pay special tribute to Ken Booth, who has contributed to this book in so many ways. It was he who first suggested that I combine my dual interests in critical theory and security. He may well have lived to rue that day given that he has now read and carefully commented upon more drafts of both the parts and the whole than he may care to remember. Most important, as the following pages will reveal, many of my own ideas have developed through engagement with his. He, of course, should bear no responsibility for my interpretations or elaborations.

—R. W. J.