Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory

Richard Wyn Jones

Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.

1999

Preface

 

Despite its recent origins (discussed in the Introduction), the term “critical security studies” (CSS) has become relatively familiar to those interested in the study of international relations and, in particular, security. It has been the subject of books, journal articles, and numerous conference papers. Unsurprisingly, however, given the status of international relations as a divided discipline, there has been little agreement as to what “it” is.

For some, critical security studies is little more than a typological device—a useful label to apply to all those approaches to the study of security that are not based on the narrow metatheoretical assumptions that underpin so much of security studies, especially in the United States (Krause 1998). According to this view, CSS does not constitute a distinct approach in itself, but is rather a collection of disparate approaches whose central presumptions and concerns may well be mutually contradictory. In other words, critical security studies is defined by what it is not.

For others, however, critical security studies is a distinctive project in its own right: an ambitious attempt to combine the insights of previous alternative work in the field with a particular set of metatheoretical principles and precepts to develop a new, emancipation-oriented paradigm for the theory and practice of security (Bilgin, Booth, and Wyn Jones 1998). This work falls squarely into the latter camp. In the book I outline and argue for an approach to security studies based on the work of the Frankfurt School—the originators of critical theory as that term is usually understood. Put another way, I argue that the prenomial “critical” in critical security studies should be taken seriously; that critical security studies should be developed in the shadow—or, better perhaps, in the light—of Frankfurt School critical theory.

The arguments of the book are developed through a two-part structure. In Part 1, I explore the origins of the “critical” in critical security studies by discussing the ways in which the key writings of the Frankfurt School treat the themes of theory, technology, and emancipation. This discussion then informs Part 2, in which I argue for critical theory–based understandings of security, strategy, and the relationship between theory and practice in the field of security, thus laying the conceptual foundations for critical security studies.