Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory

Richard Wyn Jones

Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.

1999

4. Theory: Reconceptualizing Security

 

Writing in 1982, an extraordinarily prescient E. P. Thompson predicted a sudden end to the Cold War, arguing:

I think we may now be living, this year and for many years ahead, through episodes as significant as any known in the human record.... There would not be decades of détente, as the glaciers slowly melt. There would be very rapid and unpredictable changes; nations would become unglued from their alliances; there would be sharp conflicts within nations; there would be successive risks. We could roll up the map of the Cold War, and travel without maps for a while. (E. Thompson 1982a: 1, 34)

Since the tumultuous events that eventually ended the stasis of Cold War, we have indeed entered an era of bewildering upheaval. As E. P. Thompson correctly predicted, this era has continued to be characterized by change, uncertainty, and conflict; it remains an era, even now, through which we are traveling “without maps.”

The concepts and theories that were the dominant source of orientation and direction during the Cold War have lost whatever limited relevance they once enjoyed. In response, the last few years have witnessed a sustained and determined attempt to rethink some of the basic categories of thought concerning world politics and to delineate the contours of this new era. As a result, much of what has previously passed muster as timeless wisdom has been fundamentally problematized and challenged. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in notions of security. Analysts of differing persuasions have entered the fray and subjected this centrally important concept to unprecedented scrutiny (the literature is enormous, but especially useful are Brown, Lynn–Jones, and Miller 1995; Lipschutz 1995; Lynn–Jones and Miller 1995; Tickner 1995; Baldwin 1997; Brown et al. 1997; Krause and Williams 1997; Bilgin, Booth, and Wyn Jones 1998; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998). In this chapter I intervene in this debate from a perspective based on the understanding of the critical theory tradition developed in Part 1. I also draw on the work of a scholar who has already begun to develop a critical theory–influenced approach to security, namely, Ken Booth (1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1994, 1995, 1997a).

Through a critical engagement with some of the most important and influential conceptualizations of security—in both traditional and more recent alternative work—I will seek to build up a distinctly critical understanding of security. It is argued that in light of the increasingly untenable nature of the scientific–objectivist epistemology underlying the traditional approach to security and the political indeterminacy of the poststructuralist–inspired interventions in the debate, it is only critical theory that can supply the necessary theoretical sophistication and normative direction for attempts at rethinking security. It is on this foundation that a new critical security studies can be developed. This critical approach has the potential not only to generate a theoretical understanding of the contemporary world and its pathologies but also to signpost possible routes through which this reality may be transcended through political practice. Thus, although we may well be destined to travel without maps, a critical reconceptualization of security at the core of critical security studies can help generate a sense of direction.

 

The Inadequacy of Traditional Security Studies

I begin this chapter by outlining the metatheoretical assumptions underlying the mainstream of postwar security studies and providing a critique of them. I should first note that the nomenclature is a potential source of confusion. Specifically, the label “security studies” has only recently become widely and internationally adopted as a replacement for “national security studies” (in the United States) and “strategic studies” (particularly in the United Kingdom). Generally speaking, this rebaptism appears to have been a typically 1990s piece of repackaging: Although the name change was intended to signify a sensitivity to the changed security environment after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the substance of the enterprise remains very much the same (Krause and Williams 1997; see also Booth and Herring 1994: 120–131). In a deliberate echo of Horkheimer’s work, I will refer to the mainstream approach to postwar security studies/strategic studies/national security studies as traditional security studies.

There are obvious difficulties and potential pitfalls awaiting any attempt to generalize about a major body of thought, let alone a body of work as vast as traditional security studies. Perhaps the main danger lies in oversimplification. It appears almost inevitable that any attempt to distill a set of arguments to their essence—an operation that is necessary in order to make generalizations—will lead to the disregard of nuance, richness, and diversity in favor of simplistic caricature. Nevertheless, it is plausible to argue that despite the often hotly contested differences that have divided traditional security studies into rival camps, the work of almost all the participants in these debates share broadly similar ontological and epistemological assumptions (M. Williams 1992a; Reus–Smit 1992; Krause and Williams 1997). That is, all have a similar view of the world with which they are trying to engage, and all share a similar conception of what constitutes knowledge about that world. In the former case, those who have adopted the traditional approach to the study of security have viewed the world from a statist perspective. In the latter case, all the arguments have been premised on a scientific objectivist understanding of knowledge (Reus–Smit 1992: 2). Therefore, the differences between various groups of strategists are actually based, whether the protagonists are aware of it or not, on a broad measure of agreement on the metatheoretical basis of enterprise in which they are engaged. In this section I will briefly explain and criticize both the ontological and the epistemological foundation of this agreement.

Statism is a view of the world that regards states—conceived in unitary and often anthropomorphized terms—as the only truly significant actors in world politics. Statism also involves a normative claim—and herein lies the justification for referring to “statism” rather than “state–centrism”—that, in political terms, states should be accorded a high, if not the highest, value in themselves. The statism of traditional security studies is a product of the fact that the whole approach is itself based on the foundations of a realist understanding of world politics. As John Garnett argues: “Perhaps the most pervasive assumptions underlying contemporary strategy are those associated with the theory of political behaviour known as realism” (Garnett 1987a: 9; see also Gray 1982a: 188). Statism is one of the central tenets—if not the central tenet—of all forms of realism. It is, however, open to criticism on both empirical and normative grounds.

Empirically, realists regard statism as being justified, indeed necessary, because this perspective reflects the reality of international relations: States are placed at the center of the analysis of world politics because they are at the center of the international stage, particularly when security issues are concerned. For realists, international relations is defined in terms of the interaction of states. Thus one arrives at the tautological argument that states are at the center of the study of international relations because international relations is about the interrelationship of states. But even leaving aside any qualms about the logical status of such an argument, we are left with a far more fundamental question. How realistic is the realists’ statism?

While very few scholars, whatever their theoretical perspective, would want to doubt the importance of states in world politics, statism, with its tendency to make unitary conceived states the exclusive focus of analysis, seems, empirically speaking, to be highly problematic. One of the major consequences of the fetishization of the state is the construction and reification of the so–called inside/outside dichotomy based on the concept of sovereignty. This dichotomy resonates throughout the realist view of international politics (Walker 1993). One of the implications of this binary opposition is a rigid differentiation between the substate and the suprastate “levels of analysis.” Although the latter is seen as the preserve of international relations specialists, the former is considered to be within the purview of other disciplines and largely irrelevant to the concerns of international relations. Realists argue that although domestic politics within a state may be interesting, one does not need to know anything about it in order to understand that state’s international political behavior. A state (any state) will behave in certain statelike ways no matter what its internal composition because of the constraining influence of international anarchy. Thus Colin S. Gray can confidently proclaim: “The strategic theorist does not know, cannot know, who will be in office, who will be aligned with whom.... But the theorist does know how statesmen behave and why they behave as they do” (Gray 1992: 627).

Although no one can doubt the elegant simplicity of this position, crucial questions remain: Is the realist’s statism analytically useful? Can the internal politics of the state be ignored, thus allowing analysts to concentrate their attentions solely on the determining influence of the international “realm of necessity”? The experience of the end of the Cold War, undoubtedly the greatest change in the international security environment in decades, suggests not.

The failure of any international relations specialist working within the realist paradigm to foresee the end of the Cold War and the remarkably peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union has been much commented upon (among the voluminous literature, see, for example, Gaddis 1992–1993; Wohlforth 1995; Waltz 1995; Mearsheimer 1995; also the symposium on the end of the Cold War and theories of international relations in International Organisation Vol. 48, No. 2 (1994), pp. 155–277). According to Gray:

The fact that most realists or neorealists did not predict the fall of the House of Lenin in the 1980s was a failure in prescience, not of paradigm. The ending of the Cold War has occurred for reasons fully explicable without strain by realist argument. (Gray 1992: 629)

Many realist writers have tried to provide ex post facto explanations for the end of the Cold War. Working from realist precepts, they argue that the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev were, in the words of Kenneth Waltz, “an externally imposed necessity” (Lebow 1994: 266). But these arguments are not persuasive. The reforms instituted in the Soviet Union after 1985 went far beyond what was necessary if Gorbachev and his colleagues were simply concerned with adjusting to relative economic decline. As Richard Ned Lebow trenchantly observes:

None of... [the realists] insisted that the Soviet Union’s relative decline demanded a leader who would introduce Western–style democratic reforms, hold relatively free elections, acknowledge the legal right of republics to secede from the Soviet Union, encourage anti–communist revolutions in Eastern Europe, agree to dissolve the Warsaw Pact, withdraw Soviet forces from the territories of its former members, accept the reunification of Germany within NATO.... Such recommendations, let alone a prediction that all this would soon come to pass, would have been greeted derisively as the height of unrealism. (Lebow 1994: 264)

The reforms in the Soviet Union were literally unthinkable for those trapped within a realist mind–set.

Quite simply, to understand the end of the Cold War, one cannot merely concentrate on state/system interaction. Rather, the focus must also embrace an analysis of events within the state and of transnational, but nonstate, interaction. Crucial to any understanding of events after 1985, for example, are the Western European peace movement, the Eastern European dissidents, and their interaction; the influence of Western alternative security thinking on the Soviet leadership; the rise of nationalism among subservient nationalities in Eastern Europe; the collapse of confidence in the shibboleths of Marxism–Leninism; and many other factors not amenable to interrogation within the traditional realist framework (Risse–Kappen 1994; see also Chapter 6). As Lebow observes, “Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev is outside the realist paradigm. To explain it, the analyst must go outside the paradigm and look at the determining influence of domestic politics, belief systems, and learning” (Lebow 1994: 268).

In a comment apparently aimed at post–Cold War critics of the traditional approach to security, Colin S. Gray states: “People who have not functioned competently as strategic thinkers on the old agenda, are simply going to perpetuate familiar means–ends errors as they transition to exciting new topics on a new agenda” (Gray 1992: 626). Considering that exponents of the traditional realist approach championed by Gray completely failed to anticipate, let alone satisfactorily understand or explain, the most significant recent transformation in the security environment, it is apparent that this charge has a somewhat double–edged quality. If the traditional approach’s statism means that it is analytically fragile in the face of such a massive, tectonic shift as the end of the Cold War, it seems highly unlikely that scholars and analysts who persist in holding to these views have anything of significance to contribute to any new agenda. (This is not of course to deny the continuing importance of states and the military dimension of world politics in the new agenda.)

A less familiar, though no less pervasive, corollary to these empirical claims regarding states is the realist assumption that states have normative value in themselves. This assumption is often left implicit by authors working within this tradition and particular proponents of its neorealist variant. Yet, as Christian Reus–Smit convincingly demonstrates, the realists’ proclivity to view the so–called nation–state as an “idealised political community” plays a vitally important simplifying role in their worldview (Reus–Smit 1992; this argument is also made in Walker 1997 and Wheeler 1996).

Reus–Smit is not claiming that the realist view of the state is analogous to the view adopted by romantic nationalist philosophers in the nineteenth century, that is, as some kind of organic entity to whose interests all individuals and all other forms of community should become instrumental and subservient. Rather, his argument is that the ideal of the state as a unified and relatively homogeneous (nationally, ethnically, and ideologically), coherent, and peaceful community “is fundamental to the logical structure and coherence” of traditional security studies (Reus–Smit 1992: 14). For proponents of this view, the nation–state is a sovereignty–bounded realm within which order, justice, liberty, and prosperity (the good life) is possible. In the well–known words of Osgood and Tucker, the state is the “indispensable condition of value” (Osgood and Tucker 1967: 284). The profound implications of this claim for security discourse are summarized by Reus–Smit:

Once the nation–state is seen as a unified political community, it is assumed that there exists such a homogeneity of interests and identification within that community that security can be reduced to a minimal conception of state survival which is seen as synonymous with aggregate individual security.... Political action... is thus explained in terms of a unity of purpose among citizens coalescing around a common desire to limit threats by maximising military capabilities. (Reus–Smit 1992: 17)

Here the important simplifying effects of the assumption of an idealized political community are laid bare. If it is assumed that there is an essential harmony of interests between individuals and their state, then analysts working within the traditional paradigm can claim that their privileging of the state is justified because state security is a precondition for individual well–being within that state. In other words, a normative justification for focusing on the state as the referent object of security discourse emerges based on the claim that states are the agents that provide citizens with security at the domestic level. According to this view, the main (existential) threat to their security emanates from other states that are perceived, in purportedly Hobbesian fashion, to view their neighbors rapaciously, ready to pounce at the slightest sign of weakness. Thus the security of the state is regarded as synonymous with the security of its inhabitants.

Once this idealized view of the state is measured against the empirical evidence, the privileging of the state that is characteristic of the traditional approach to security appears highly problematic. In much of the world, states, far from fostering an atmosphere within which stability can be attained and prosperity created, are one of the major sources of insecurity for their citizens. As J. Ann Tickner points out:

In an international system which, in parts of the South, amounts to domestic disorder and stability of international borders, often upheld by the interventions and interests of great powers, the realist assumptions about boundaries between anarchy and order is turned on its head. (Tickner 1995: 181)

Even if a very narrow, military understanding of security is applied, it is apparent that the arms purchased and powers accrued by governments in the name of national security are far more potent threats to the liberty and physical safety of their citizens than any putative external threat. This is true not only of states in the disadvantaged South but also of those in the North. When a broader definition of security that includes nonmilitary threats is applied, it is clear that many states are deeply implicated in the creation of other forms of insecurity for their own populations, for example, in such issues as food and environmental security.

Viewed empirically, apparently aberrant “gangster states” are closer to the norm of state behavior than the Eurocentric notion of the “guardian angel” state, which is central to the traditional approach to security, would suggest (Wheeler 1996). Furthermore, radical understandings of global politics suggest that those few developed states that provide their citizens with a good deal of security (however defined) can do so only because of their dominant, privileged position within the global economy (some of these arguments are summarized in Hobden and Wyn Jones 1997). However, the very structure of this global economy creates and reinforces the gross disparities of wealth, the environmental degradation, and the class, ethnic, and gender inequalities that are the sources of insecurity in the South. In other words, the relative security of the inhabitants of the North is purchased at the price of chronic insecurity for the vast majority of the world population. Radical critics also suggest that the ideological function of the statism of the traditional approach is actually to discipline those within the state who deign to challenge the status quo (Reus–Smit 1992; Campbell 1992). For example, dissident voices on both sides of the iron curtain argued that “the principal axis of the Cold War conflict lay, not between the superpowers, but between states and civil society” (Reus–Smit 1992: 22). So, far from being a necessary condition for the good life, statism appears to be one of the main sources of insecurity—part of the problem rather than the solution.

If this analysis is correct, then empirical justifications for realism’s state–centric ontology are highly dubious. Furthermore, it appears that one of the main functions of the statist discourse that lies at the heart of traditional security studies is to provide an ideological justification for the political and economic status quo. This point is particularly striking when it is contrasted with the epistemological position upheld by those who champion the traditional approach to security. This epistemology aims to describe the world “as it is,” claims to distinguish sharply between fact and value and between subject and object, and seeks objective knowledge of the world, untainted by the analyst’s own standpoint and predilections. It is not surprising, then, that the charge that a particular (pro–status quo) bias is smuggled into, or even embedded in, traditional analysis is anathema to its proponents.

Historically, there have been varying degrees of epistemological self–consciousness among traditional security specialists. However, in line with developments in the study of international relations in general, the period since the late 1980s has witnessed a growing awareness among analysts of the metatheoretical issues at stake. This increased awareness has been prompted both by attempts among mainstream scholars to develop more sophisticated theoretical underpinnings for their work (Waltz 1979 was particularly influential) and by trenchant criticism from those beyond that mainstream (see Keohane 1986; Smith, Booth, and Zalewski 1996). The net result of these developments for traditional security studies has been an increasingly self–conscious embrace of the “scientific” epistemology particularly associated with neorealism (for critical theory–inspired critiques of neorealism, see R. Cox 1981; Ashley 1981; Linklater 1995). Thus, for example, Gray has proclaimed that “strategists may be termed and should acknowledge that they are, without apologies, neo–realists” (Gray 1982a: 188).

Stephen M. Walt posits the “scientific method” as the foundation stone for his conception of the study of security:

Security studies seeks cumulative knowledge about the role of military force. To obtain it, the field must follow the standard canons of scientific research: careful and consistent use of terms, unbiased measurement of critical concepts, and public documentation of theoretical and empirical claims.... The increased sophistication of the security studies field and its growing prominence within the scholarly community is due in large part to the endorsement of these principles by most members of the field. (Walt 1991: 222)

As Krause and Williams point out, proponents of this view seek to work within the “strictures of a particular conception of science and knowledge: the search for timeless, objective, causal laws that govern human phenomena” (Krause and Williams 1997: 37). Indeed, Walt’s description of the epistemological basis of traditional security studies provides a paradigmatic example of the traditional theory criticized in Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.”

It is interesting that the case for rejecting the traditional conception of theory underpinning traditional security studies is strengthened by precisely those scientific discoveries and technological developments that gave the field its central focus. I am referring, of course, to the development of nuclear weapons; there is no doubt that nuclear weapons and their implications lie at the heart of traditional security studies. Ken Booth has correctly described the theory of nuclear deterrence as the “jewel in the crown” of postwar strategic studies (Booth 1987: 254). Ironically, the development of these weapons was made possible by a series of breakthroughs in scientific knowledge that undermined the very model of science upon which their later study was premised.

The scientific discoveries that enabled the development of nuclear weapons formed part of a paradigm shift away from the Newtonian understanding of the physical world toward the Einsteinian paradigm (the novelist Martin Amis has referred to nuclear weapons as “Einstein’s monsters” [Amis 1988]). The Newtonian paradigm posits a rigid distinction between subject and object, observer and observed, and regards the physical world as governed by cast–iron laws, which, even if not presently understood, are potentially discoverable. These are, of course, the very premises that Horkheimer associated with traditional theory: The Newtonian paradigm underpinned the conception of the natural sciences that traditional theory adopted as a model in the study of the social world. However, the new quantum physics, popularly associated with the work of Albert Einstein, rejects the Newtonian view that there is a world out there existing independently of our observations. Following Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, physicists discovered that the very act of observation influences the behavior of the object being observed. At one fell swoop this discovery undermined the rigid distinction between subject and object, and hence fact and value—or, in Horkheimer’s words, the “separation of value and research, knowledge and action, and other polarities” (Horkheimer 1972: 208)—that form the epistemological foundations of all traditional theory, traditional security studies included. Thus, even while Horkheimer was arguing against the adoption of the natural science model for the study of the social world, developments in the study of physics in the 1920s and 1930s were undermining that model even for the study of the natural sciences themselves!

There are serious weaknesses in the theoretical underpinnings of the traditional approach to security. The statism of traditional security studies not only appears to be empirically unhelpful but also to act as an ideological justification for the prevailing status quo—a status quo in which the vast majority of the world’s population are rendered chronically insecure. Furthermore, the scientific objectivist conception of knowledge adopted by the field not only is vulnerable to the critique that Horkheimer launched against traditional theory but also appears to have been undermined by the very scientific discoveries that acted as the catalyst for its development.

In the next three sections I will challenge the reified and constricted conceptualization of security that has been built on these metatheoretical foundations. I will also discuss and take issue with some of the alternative understandings that have been advanced in recent years. In these sections I argue for the deepening, broadening, and extending of the traditional concept of security.

 

Deepening Security

In addition to criticizing the attempt to draw a rigid distinction between subject and object, Horkheimer’s critique of the epistemological basis of traditional theory takes issue with the way that traditional theory tends to isolate (through cetirus paribus assumptions) particular practices from the totality of which they form a part. This procedure is institutionalized and further entrenched through the formation of academic disciplines, each with its own professional infrastructure. The result is the development of reified knowledge structures in which the dialectical interaction of the different elements of the social totality—and, in particular, their potential for change—is ignored. Traditional security studies provides a fine exemplar of that tendency to which Horkheimer objects.

Traditional security studies has tended to abstract military issues from their broader context by making a series of often implicit assumptions about that context based on realist premises, for example, those concerning the role and value of the state. It is not surprising, therefore, that analysts intent on undermining this traditional approach to the theory and practice of security have challenged this reified view of their subject. Thinkers such as R. B. J. Walker and Ken Booth stress the relationship between notions of security and deeper assumptions about the nature of politics and the role of conflict in political life (R. Walker 1990, 1997; Booth 1991a, 1991b, 1991c, 1997a). For both scholars, notions of security are derived from these deep–seated assumptions.

This connection was regarded as self–evident by some classical military theorists, most notably Carl von Clausewitz, who recognized that strategy is subordinate to political considerations and that war is a reflection of society (Clausewitz 1968: 101–168; Gat 1989: 215–250). However, despite the constant invocation of Clausewitz, this relationship became largely obscured during the development of postwar (i.e., traditional) security studies. In contrast, alternative thinkers have attempted to foreground the background assumptions of the traditional approach to security in order to subject them to appropriate critical scrutiny.

Deepening the conceptualization of security not only provides an important means for criticizing traditional security studies, but it also is a vital part of reconstructing the approach on an alternative, more critically oriented basis. R. B. J. Walker argues that attempts at rethinking security

must be harnessed to an attempt to work through more persuasive answers to those questions about the character and location of political life to which the state and states system have seemed such a natural response for many for so long. (R. Walker 1997: 63)

This, in effect, is a demand that the reconceptualization of security must be undertaken in conjunction with a deeper attempt to think through what emancipation might mean in terms of alternative institutions and practices—an issue addressed in a later section of this chapter.

In the interim, it is enough to note that those who seek to deepen the conceptualization of security point out that traditional thinking about security is all too often based on understandings of world politics that are reified and unreflective. Consequently the intimate relationship between security and political theory more generally must be restated, and critical approaches to security must anchor their work in attempts to delineate the contours of alternative forms of world politics.

The next two sections focus respectively on the key axes of the contemporary debate over the conceptualization of security: whether the security agenda should be broadened to incorporate other, nonmilitary issues and whether the agenda should be extended away from a statist view of what constitutes the correct “referent object” for security discourse. I want to note that this differentiation between broadening and extending is my own. In most of the literature, the term “broadening” is used to denote both incorporating nonmilitary issues onto the security agenda and defining the correct referent object for security discourse (for example, Buzan 1991; R. Walker 1990, 1997). Given the bewildering proliferation of categories that is characteristic of international relations and of social theory in general, it may seem somewhat indulgent to introduce yet another distinction into the literature. However, a distinction that enables a clear differentiation between these two meanings of broadening security is not only logical but, more important, analytically useful. As the following analysis demonstrates, whereas many, if not most, contemporary writers have favored attempts to broaden security by moving away from a narrowly military focus, the debate over the need to abandon the state as the referent object for consideration of security has been far more contentious. It is thus desirable to be able to differentiate clearly between both issues.

 

Broadening Security

Barry Buzan’s People, States and Fear (1991) can be viewed as the high–water mark of the traditional approach to the study of security. While remaining grounded in a scientific objectivist epistemology and, ultimately, in a state–centric ontology, Buzan produced a rich, suggestive, and sophisticated discussion of the concept of security. It is arguable that Buzan could go no further and remain tied to those metatheoretical assumptions. As Bill McSweeney has convincingly argued, Buzan’s subsequent attempts to develop some of the central ideas of People, States and Fear, in particular in his work on European security (Wæver et al. 1993), cast considerable doubt on some of the basic underpinnings of the original work (cf. McSweeney 1996b and Buzan and Wæver 1997).

This argument has been vindicated by the fact that Buzan’s most recent attempt to theorize security—in Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), written in collaboration with two of his Copenhagen School colleagues, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde—clearly represents a significant break with both the epistemological and ontological foundations of People, States and Fear. Nevertheless, given the work’s status as the high point of traditional security theory and its centrality to recent debates concerning the conceptualization of security, the next three sections will take the book’s arguments as their starting point. I will also refer to Buzan’s subsequent work when it is relevant to the alternative position that I am developing here.

In this section I will examine the basis for Buzan’s original case for broadening the conceptualization of security beyond the traditional concern with military threats. I will then examine the debate that developed in response to his argument that it is useful to view other issues and problems in world politics through the lens of security.

The arguments advanced in People, States and Fear for moving beyond a purely military focus for the security agenda are inextricably bound to Buzan’s wider attempt to delineate and define the scope of security studies and strategic studies (see also Buzan 1987; Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998; Buzan and Herring 1998). According to Buzan, strategic studies should be concerned with the study of the military aspect of the security agenda and specifically with the impact of military technology on international relations (this point is discussed at length in Chapter 5). What he terms international security studies should concern itself with more broadly defined threats to the “security of human collectivities” (Buzan 1991: 19). Specifically, Buzan identifies threats to security as emanating from five main sectors: political, societal, economic, environmental, and military (see also Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998: 49–193).

Buzan’s original call for a broader security agenda was made in less than propitious circumstances. The first edition of People, States and Fear was published in 1983, the year in which Ronald Reagan made his infamous “evil empire” speech and the Soviets appeared to live up to the sobriquet by shooting down a South Korean Boeing 747 over Soviet air space, killing all 269 people on board. The second Cold War was at its zenith. Reflecting on his own reaction to the first edition, Steve Smith comments that, despite being impressed by the intellectual argument for a broader agenda, Buzan’s concerns seemed somewhat “utopian and removed from the world that was the subject of my teaching and analysis. But,” he goes on, “Buzan was right, as the events since the publication of the first edition have proved” (Smith 1991: 325).

Certainly, there can be no doubt that, as Smith recognizes, the end of the Cold War has added legitimacy and credibility to demands for a broader security agenda: the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the numerous problems that have emerged since its demise, which have highlighted the inadequacy of adopting a narrowly military conceptualization of security. Whereas in the past calls for a broader conception were confined to (marginalized) peace researchers, world society thinkers, and a few of the more intellectually adventurous international relations scholars such as Buzan himself and Ullman (1983), they have now become commonplace in the mainstream of traditional security studies (e.g., Crawford 1991; Matthews 1989).

Most analysts are now willing, at least rhetorically, to admit nonmilitary issues onto the security agenda. In the introduction to a reader put together by the editors of the most prominent and prestigious journal in the field of security studies, International Security, Sean M. Lynn–Jones and Steven E. Miller argue that the end of the East–West confrontation has

revealed in its wake... a different set of dangers, not really new but previously overshadowed by Cold War preoccupations.... No longer will the field of international security be overwhelmingly fixated on how to deter the Soviet Union or how to reduce the risk of nuclear war between the superpowers. The newly revealed agenda is broader in its focus, giving much greater attention to previously neglected sources of conflict. (Lynn–Jones and Miller 1995: 4)

The “previously neglected sources of conflict” focused on in the text are environmental threats, threats arising from international migration, and threats emanating from resurgent nationalisms.

Of course, attempts to interlink issues of peace and war with wider questions of economic and social equity and justice are hardly novel. Indeed they have been a recurring feature in the statements of various international organizations. Article 55 of the UN charter, for example, links the creation of “friendly and peaceful relations among nations” with the resolution of “economic, social, health, and related problems,” as well as respect for human rights (Charter of the United Nations 1987: 30). However, two sets of critics have objected to current attempts to broaden the concept of security traditionally utilized in the field of security studies. On the one hand, traditionalists have argued that such a move will lead to a loss of focus; on the other hand, some commentators have pointed to the dangers of viewing as security issues problems such as those associated with environmental degradation.

The traditionalist argument has been put forward forcefully by Walt (1991). In his programmatic essay confidently titled “The Renaissance of Security Studies,” Walt criticizes Buzan on the grounds that introducing nonmilitary issues onto the security agenda undermines the field’s “intellectual coherence.” However, as Ken Booth and Eric Herring point out, there appears to be a major inconsistency in Walt’s argument. Walt’s own proposed research agenda, although wishing to uphold a restrictive conception of security, includes such issues as the role of domestic politics, the power of ideas, and the influence of economic issues. The serious consideration of any of these issues would wholly undermine the traditional, parsimonious approach he appears to advocate (Booth and Herring 1994: 126–127). Indeed, it seems inevitable that Walt will be forced into a contradictory position because of the inherent limitations of his conception of security.

If analysts adopt the narrowly military focus advocated but not apparently practiced by Walt, they will have little or no analytical purchase on many of those factors that create and accentuate conflict situations. For example, the dynamics of the (military) security situation in the former Yugoslavia cannot be understood without reference to the processes of identity formation and disintegration occurring in the region. To put it bluntly, if those who purport to be experts in security issues continue to conceptualize security in such a restrictive manner, then from Pristina to Belfast, and from Algiers to East Timor, they will continue to miss much of what is most relevant to the contemporary security agenda.

Arguments that a broader understanding of security threaten the intellectual coherence of the field are unconvincing. As Booth and Herring argue: “When studying any human phenomenon it is preferable to have open intellectual boundaries (which risk only irrelevance) rather than rigid ones (which risk ignorance)” (Booth and Herring 1994: 20). Ultimately, it is vital to underscore that all disciplinary boundaries are only a necessary convenience, valuable as a source of both intellectual and administrative orientation and organization but unhelpful if they are regarded as more than that. When these boundaries become reified, even fetishized, they can become a hindrance to the very understanding that they were intended to promote. Given that, as Adorno argues, “all reification is a forgetting” (Jay 1973: 267), it is surely right to worry more about what lies beyond the artificial borders of traditional security studies—that which has been forgotten—than about any alleged loss of focus or intellectual coherence.

A second, and perhaps more serious, challenge to scholars seeking to broaden the understanding of security has arisen from analysts who object to the securitizing of problems such as those relating to the environment and migration (e.g., Deudney 1990; Huysmans 1995). For these critics, there is a real danger involved in the process of “hyphenating security,” that is, the attachment of different appellations, such as “economic” or “identity,” to the term “security.” This danger lies in the militarization and confrontation–oriented attitude conjured up by the traditional conception of security as “national security.” For example, Daniel Deudney argues that environmental problems cannot be solved via the national security mind–set and that indeed this very mind–set is inimical to the development of “environmental awareness and action” (Deudney 1990: 461).

There are a number of possible responses to these criticisms. One response arises from arguments that emphasize the link between notions of security and deeper assumptions concerning the nature of politics. Walker, for example, argues that the concept of security will inevitably expand to include issues that are not military in nature. This expansion will occur because the questions regarding security are closely implicated in the legitimation of the sovereign state, that is, in deeper notions of politics. Thus:

In the end it has never been possible to pin security down to concrete practices or institutions with any great precision, no matter how insistent the voices of military and defence establishments might be. The whole point of concepts of security that are tied to the claims of state sovereignty is that they must expand to encompass everything within the state, at least in its ever potential state of emergency. (R. Walker 1997: 76)

As a result:

Concerns about [broadening] the practices of security policy into other spheres of political life may well be founded... but the extent to which practices of security are already part of the broader social, political, economic and cultural arenas is not something that can simply be wished away. (R. Walker 1997: 76)

The implication of this argument is that, contrary to Deudney’s view, the terrain of security should not simply be abandoned to traditional, militarized conceptualizations. Rather, because the concept of security is inevitably broadened as a result of its connection to deeper issues concerning the legitimacy of various forms of governance, its meaning (that is, what is signified by attaching the appellation “security” to a particular issue) must be disputed.

The meaning of the term “security”—its signification—lies at the heart of Ole Wæver’s innovative “speech act” approach. This approach focuses on the ways in which attaching the label “security” to a particular problem gives that problem special status and legitimates the “extraordinary measures” taken by state representatives to deal with it (Wæver 1994: 6). (Wæver’s arguments have since moved beyond their original formulation. These changes will be reviewed later.) Security discourse is used to identify some threats as being “existential,” that is, part of the “drama of survival.” In this way, “Issues [become] phrased as ‘no way back’: after we have lost our sovereignty/identity/the sustainability of the eco–system, it will be too late; therefore it is legitimate that we take extraordinary measures” (Wæver 1994: 10ff.). These measures can include state–sanctioned killing, suspension of civil rights, confiscation of private resources, and so on.

Wæver has responded directly to Jef Huysmans’s worries about the broadening of the concept of security. He argues that the intention of such a move is not to trigger a traditional security–type response to “new” security issues (Wæver 1994: 19). Rather, Wæver believes that analysts are justified in broadening security precisely because politicians already use the term in relation to problems that are nonmilitary in character but are still regarded as existential threats to the political order—the state (Wæver 1995: 51–53). In short, because state elites attach the label “security” to nonmilitary issues, analysts need to focus on their reasons for doing so. What power is signified or called upon by the use of the term? Analysts must broaden their conceptualization of security because the term has already been broadened in practice.

But that said, Wæver also seems to accept much of the force of Huysmans’s and Deudney’s misgivings. He writes:

Security, as with any concept, carries with it a history and a set of connotations that it cannot escape. At the heart of the concept we still find something to do with defense and the state. As a result, addressing an issue in security terms still evokes an image of threat–defense, allocating to the state an important role in addressing it. This is not always an improvement. (Wæver 1995: 47)

Because he regards the effects of attaching the label “security” to an issue as fixed (“a conservative approach to security is an intrinsic element in the logic of both our national and international political organizing principles” [Wæver 1995: 56–57]), Wæver advocates the “desecuritization” of as many issues as possible (Wæver 1995: passim). To desecuritize an issue is to remove it from the realm of the politics of survival and thus to render it amenable to more cooperative forms of behavior.

Although Wæver’s argument is premised on assumptions different from those of Deudney and Huysmans, he arrives at similar conclusions. For Deudney in particular, “security” cannot escape its association with the theory and practice of so–called national security. Thus the concept, with all its attendant baggage, should not be used as a prism through which other issues are viewed. For Wæver, however, “security” is already broad because it is used by state elites to justify extraordinary measures taken in a range of issues that are perceived as a threat to their political order’s survival. But Wæver also argues that it would be preferable if the term—because of its baggage—were used in relation to as few issues as possible. Thus Wæver also ultimately wishes to narrow the usage of “security” or, more correctly, “securitization.”

Politically speaking, Wæver’s strategy of desecuritization has real limitations. What of those problems that are a threat to survival? Should groups abandon the mobilization potential that is undoubtedly generated by using the term “security”? One presumes not, but then are existential threats to security simply to be abandoned to traditional, zero–sum, militarized forms of thought and action?

These questions highlight two significant weaknesses in Wæver’s original formulation of the speech act approach: (1) its state–centrism and (2) the apparent unwillingess to question the content or meaning of security.

State–centrism is the point at issue in the next section. Suffice it to say here that in his initial formulation of the speech act theory of security, Wæver attempted to yoke his insights concerning securitization to a thoroughgoing state–centrism (Wæver 1994, 1995). As we have seen, he was interested only in how states securitized issues in order to justify extraordinary measures by states: Wæver viewed the grammar of security as inherently statist. In doing so he actually undermined much of the usefulness of the speech act approach. Its (potential) great strength is that it encourages analysts to interrogate the politics of how particular threats are securitized in order to mobilize and legitimate particular responses to them.

States, or even state elites, are not the only actors who use the grammar of security in this way. All kinds of social groups, at both sub– and supra–state levels, attempt to securitize many different types of issues, often with far–reaching sociocultural, political, and economic implications. Consider, for example, how the peace movement of the 1980s identified nuclearism as a threat to security (e.g., Falk and Lifton 1982; E. Thompson 1982b) and generated massive public support for its cause despite bitter opposition from governments. Or the way in which some Welsh–language activists have identified the flow of substantial numbers of so–called lifestyle migrants from England to rural Wales as a threat to the survival of the language and thus, in their view, to Welsh nationhood.

Adopting a speech act approach to the politics of security as practiced by groups other than the state is a fruitful avenue for exploration. Yet Wæver’s state–centrism initially led him to attempt to delegitimate any effort in this direction. Significantly, however, this position has now been reversed. In his collaborative study Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Wæver and his co–authors, Buzan and de Wilde, have decoupled the speech act approach from state–centrism, correctly acknowledging the distinction between “a state–centric approach and a state–dominated field [of study]” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998: 37). ₁

It is arguable, however, that a more fundamental problem remains in Wæver’s particular understanding of speech act theory itself. Wæver seems to regard the content of security as fixed; that is, he believes that the implications of calling an issue a “security problem” cannot be challenged, only the objects to which that label is applied. In the earlier, avowedly state–centric version of speech act theory, Wæver viewed the consequences of securitization as inherently conservative: “The language game of security is... a jus necessitatis for threatened elites, and this it must remain” (Wæver 1995: 56). This broad thrust has been retained (including the state–centrism?) in the latest formulation of the theory, which argues that to securitize an issue is to render it “so important that it should not be exposed to the normal haggling of politics but should be dealt with decisively by top leaders prior to other issues” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998: 29). But the notion that the implications of securitization—the meaning of security—are fixed can be challenged at both the empirical level and at the level of the theory of language.

Empirically, there can be no doubt that the theory and practice of traditional security have come under unprecedented scrutiny over the past twenty or so years. In particular, notions of “common security” have been advanced based on the argument that there can be no long–term resolution of threats through unilateral, militarized, zero–sum action. Rather, it is only a holistic and empathetic approach to security that can hope to ameliorate threats (the emergence of such an approach can be traced through the following independent, international commissions: the Commission on International Development Issues [1980]; the Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues [1982]; the Commission on Global Governance [1995]). Moreover, the experience of the end of the Cold War demonstrates that such a conception of security can become influential (a point returned to and developed further in Chapter 6). This suggests that contrary to the opinions of Wæver or indeed Deudney, the meaning of security is not necessarily fixed but is open to argumentation and dispute.

Theoretically, this criticism of Wæver is buttressed by a Habermasian understanding of speech acts. Habermas’s “universal pragmatics,” which forms the general framework for his understanding of speech acts, was outlined in Chapter 3. His specific views on speech acts are summarized by Outhwaite:

Contra conceptions of language as just a factual representation of states of affairs, or their negative counterpart in which it is seen as mere rhetoric, [in Habermas’s approach] the three validity–claims of truth, normative rightness and expressive truthfulness or sincerity are given equal importance. (Outhwaite 1994: 131)

This understanding of speech acts has major implications for alternative approaches to the theory and practice of security. It suggests that when the label “security” is attached to particular issues, it generates validity–claims that are open to redemption or refutation through argumentation.

Thus, for example, if a state treats the continued existence of a minority language within its borders as a threat to national security (as is the case with Turkey and Kurdish, and as was the case until recently with the United Kingdom and Irish), this behavior is susceptible to critique on the grounds of truth, rightness, and sincerity. In this case, the truth of the claim that a minority language is a threat to the state may be questioned. The normative rightness of persecuting a minority culture in the name of national security may also be called into doubt, as well the sincerity of those advocating this policy (whose interests are really being served by such a claim?).

Another example of how validity–claims are brought into play through the use of the term “security” is a decision by a government to base another state’s nuclear weapons on its territory to counter a threat that it perceives as emanating from a third country (as was the case with the deployment of U.S. cruise missiles in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s). In this case the questions that might arise during the process of redeeming the validity–claims implicit in this scenario would include: Does the third country really pose a threat to the state deciding to host nuclear weapons? What is the evidence concerning both material capabilities and intentions? Could not nuclear weapons and nuclearism pose a greater threat to security than any putative aggressor? Is it right to threaten death and destruction to millions of innocents in the name of national security? Should a state be privileged in this way? Is the decision to deploy nuclear weapons a sincere response to a perceived threat, or is it a result of intra–alliance politics? Or does it reflect pressure from a self–interested military–industrial–academic complex?

As these examples demonstrate, once security discourse is viewed in terms of a series of validity–claims subject to redemption through argumentation rather than a take–it–or–leave–it package of militarized assumptions and responses, a more fluid picture emerges than the one presented by Wæver or Deudney. Understood in Habermasian terms, the speech act of security cannot simply be narrowed by prior definition to exclude all threats other than those that are military in nature—rather, the breadth of the concept is subject to debate. Similarly, the meaning—the implications—of securitizing a particular issue cannot be regarded as fixed. However, I am not arguing that it is easy to challenge the traditions that are attached to a particular concept. Simply to talk about something differently does not necessarily lead to different forms of behavior: Practice cannot simply be reduced to theory. But argumentation and disputation can have—and have had—profound effects even on the practice of security (a theme pursued in Chapter 6).

When anchored in Habermasian pragmatics, the speech act approach to security supports arguments for broadening the understanding of the concept and certainly undermines attempts at closure as a result of prior definition rather than argumentation and discussion. More generally, the focus on how arguments concerning truth, rightness, and sincerity are brought into play by security discourse provides powerful theoretical support for the project of critical security studies.

 

Extending Security

People, States and Fear is an arresting title; it is also a somewhat misleading one. “States and Fear” is a more accurate representation of Barry Buzan’s ultimate focus in that work. To be sure, Buzan does pay some attention to the security of individuals, as well as security at the suprastate levels of particular regions and of the international system itself. However, in the final analysis, his interest in these other levels centers on their impact upon states.

Buzan offers two main justifications for adopting this state–centric perspective. Empirically, he argues that the security dynamics at the international and substate levels are all mediated through the state:

It is the job of government, indeed almost the definition of its function, to find ways of reconciling these two sets of forces. The fact that no other agency exists for this task is what justifies the primacy of national [i.e., state] security. (Buzan 1991: 329)

So once again, the argument is that states should be the “conceptual focus of security” because they “have to cope with the whole security problem” (Buzan 1991: 329). Allied to this argument is Buzan’s contention that states can in fact provide individuals with security. Buzan is aware that states are often a mortal danger to their own citizens. However, he holds that the problem is not states themselves (that is, states qua states) but rather particular kinds of states. Individual security can be obtained when there are “strong states” (states with a high degree of internal stability and cohesion) coexisting in a “mature anarchy” (a developed international society) (Buzan 1991: 57–111).

Because these arguments are sophisticated variants of those discussed and criticized earlier in this chapter, the counterarguments need not be repeated here. Indeed, I have already noted that Buzan’s subsequent work has involved a marked distancing from many of the tenets underpinning People, States and Fear, including, perhaps above all, its state–centrism. In Security: A New Framework for Analysis, state–centrism is explicitly rejected as “a narrow self–closing definitional move” (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998: 37).

Interestingly, resistance to shifting the referent away from the state has also been expressed by some of those who view security from a poststructuralist perspective. R. B. J. Walker, for example, objects to the notion that the globe should be made the referent object for security through such conceptions as “cooperative or common or world security” (R. Walker 1997: 77). His objections revolve around his contention—to my mind correct—that the basic political and philosophical point at issue in arguments about referents is the relationship between the universal and the particular in politics. This argument, he believes, cannot simply be side–stepped by embracing the universal at the expense of the particular. Indeed, Walker argues: “It is because of its insistence of the absurdity of this move, in fact, that the old junker of political realism can remain on the road, and keep some of its critical potentials alive in some places” (R. Walker 1997: 77).

Walker’s general line of argument reflects the now familiar poststructuralist suspicion of the universal as an inevitable precursor of homogenization and a denial of “difference.” Proponents of common security, which may be Walker’s target, would of course refute the characterization that their position denies the value of diversity; rather, they view common security as a procedural means of coping with that diversity. They might also legitimately point out that some threats are truly global in nature, for example, global warming and the threat of nuclear winter. Whatever the merits or demerits of Walker’s arguments on this particular point, in light of his insistence that attempts at “re–visioning security” need to go hand in hand with rethinking “the political” and an understanding of the “contemporary transformations of political life,” it is hard to believe that he would object to extending security discourse away from the state to other referents.

Whatever its theoretical justification—be it realist or even poststructuralist—state–centrism has been subjected to strong criticism by those who argue that the state should not be the privileged referent object of security discourse. These critics have sought to extend the security agenda by shifting the focus away from states to other levels of analysis.

A number of alternative referent objects for security have been proposed by scholars working from an alternative defense perspective and by those engaged in the practice of social movements. Some have argued that the conceptual focus should be placed on individuals (Booth 1991a; Smith 1991). Others have suggested that the apposite focus is society, particularly some notion of civil society (Shaw 1994a; Reus–Smit 1992). Yet others have proposed that ethnonational and religious identities are crucial referents for conceptualizing security (Wæver et al. 1993). Another suggestion is that there should not be one referent object for security but rather different referents at different times, in different locations, and in relation to different issue areas. This is now the position of Buzan and Wæver (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998; also Baldwin 1997).

One of the most prominent advocates of making individuals the referent of security is Ken Booth. In his “Security and Emancipation” (1991a) he argues against privileging the state as the referent object of security on the grounds that to do so is to confuse means with ends. States are, or at least can be, a means for providing security, but ultimately it is only with reference to individuals that the notion of security has any meaning: “It is illogical therefore to privilege the security of the means as opposed to the security of ends” (Booth 1991a: 320). Following from this, Booth argues that “individual humans are the ultimate referent” (Booth 1991a: 319).

Ken Booth’s argument is an important corrective to state–centrism. It is, however, open to the charge that it is based on a kind of liberal individualism that conceives human beings in reductionist, atomistic terms (Shaw 1994a: 96–100). Such an interpretation may well be encouraged by Booth’s usage of the term “means” in relation to human collectivities. In some circumstances it may be useful to conceive such collectivities—families, communities, nations, or states—in this way. For example, when considering threats to so–called basic human needs—that is, the basic material prerequisites of life—then it may well be legitimate to view any collective group as a means by which individuals’ basic needs can be satisfied. However, there is another context in which conceiving human collectivities in such instrumental terms is unhelpful, and that is in relation to identity.

Identity is a central aspect of the human experience. Even when it is conceived in traditional terms, it is clear that questions relating to the formation, recognition, expression, and disintegration of different forms of identity—of which national identity is only one of the most prominent—should be of vital concern to those interested in security issues. When the conceptualization of security is deepened, broadened, and extended, identity is even more self–evidently important.

Moreover, identity is not simply a means in any crude instrumental sense. As the discussion of Axel Honneth’s work in Chapter 3 suggests, the successful development and recognition of an individual’s identity may be regarded as an end in itself. Furthermore, identities are by definition collective phenomena. An individual’s identity is created, negotiated, ascribed, and denied through interaction with others. As a result, to reduce questions relating to identity to individuals or aggregations of individuals—that is, to view them in terms of liberal individualism—is misleading. Where identity is concerned, the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Therefore, in relation to questions of identity—one of the key variables in any discussion of security—if Booth’s focus on individuals is taken as a form of liberal individualism, then this interpretation is problematic and limiting.

However, Booth’s emphasis on the individual as the “ultimate referent” for security is better understood in the light of the discussion of Horkheimer’s notion of emancipation in Chapter 1. Horkheimer believed that critical theory should be concerned with the corporeal, material existence and experiences of human beings. In so arguing he was not denying the importance of class, the state, or other collectivities. Indeed, it is clear that Horkheimer did not think that the existence and experiences of individual human beings could be understood without viewing them as part of such contexts. Rather, what he continually stressed was that in analyzing the various dynamics within societies and their institutions, theorists should never lose sight of their effects on and implications for individual human beings. Thus, for Horkheimer—as for Booth—the individual is always the ultimate referent for critical theory.

In this sense, the emphasis on the individual does not acquire the limiting and reductive implications that might accrue from Shaw’s false “liberal individualist” reading of Booth’s “Security and Emancipation” (and Booth 1997a suggests very strongly that this “Horkheimerian” interpretation is closer to his original intention than Martin Shaw’s reading [1994a] or that found in Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998). Apart from the normative importance of having the individual as ultimate referent, thus hopefully avoiding the tendency of traditional theorists to “concern themselves with ‘man as such’ [rather] than human beings in particular” (Schmidt 1993: 30), there are also analytical benefits. Namely, by making the individual the ultimate referent, the security analyst is encouraged to understand the various contexts that impinge upon an individual’s security and simultaneously is discouraged from their reification and fetishization.

The importance of the latter injunction is highlighted by moves of a number of contemporary theorists to make social groupings other than the state the referent object for security discourse. For example, Wæver, Buzan, Kelstrup, and Lemaitre (1993) focus on ethnonational groupings (see also Wæver 1994). Implicit in Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” is the grandiose notion that civilizations should become the conceptual focus of security (Huntington 1993). Surveying this work, Krause and Williams express the concern that a “shift... to a prima facie focus on structures of exclusionary group–identity will merely replicate the inside/outside structure of anarchy in a different form” (Krause and Williams 1997: 48; see also Booth 1991a: passim; Shaw 1994a: 100–103). However, highlighting the individual as the ultimate referent reduces the danger of reification. A focus on individuals brings the analyst face–to–face with the complexities of human identity. Identity never occurs in the singular. At a minimum, people have a gender identity and something else. The human condition is one of overlapping identities; that is, each person has a number of different identities, all (potentially) in flux, and all of which come into play at different times and in different situations. Thus a focus on individuals strongly discourages any tendency to reify human identity; it points instead to the complex, multifaceted, and even fluid nature of identity.

This discussion underlines the need for an analytical framework that is sensitive to difference and diversity but understands that such distinctions are not primordial forces: a framework that recognizes that inside/outside, self/other dichotomies—no matter how and why they have been constituted—do have a certain reality but simultaneously avoids their reification. But is such a framework possible? Is it not true that notions of group identity, even if tied to an understanding of the individual as the ultimate referent, are so vague and amorphous that it “hardly provides us with a clear capacity for thinking about security” (Krause and Williams 1997: 48)? I suggest that this worry is overstated and that once analysis moves from the abstract to the particular, what seems to be problematic at the broad conceptual level appears to be far less so in practice (a point illustrated by the analysis of southern Africa in Booth and Vale 1997).

When analysis is historicized and particularized through the analysis of specific issues in specific areas, it becomes apparent that the appropriate referent object varies from case to case. In some areas, in regard to certain issues, the appropriate referent may well be national identity or civil society. In other circumstances, these categories may be irrelevant or meaningless. Smaller, more localized communal identities may then be the appropriate referent object, or it may be far larger referents that are most apposite (e.g., it may be appropriate to consider some notion of “woman” in relation to an issue such as rape). In other words, the problem of what group to privilege as the conceptual focus of security discourse can be resolved only through concrete analysis (Booth and Vale 1997; for further theoretical support for this position, see Baldwin 1997).

To extend the concept of security in the manner advocated in this section is to initiate a radical rupture with the state–centric perspective of traditional security studies. Rather than make the state the referent for security discourse, security analysts should concentrate their attention on “real people in real places” (Booth 1995: 123), making individual human beings the ultimate referents for their discussion. However, adopting such a position is not inconsistent with believing that it is impossible to understand an individual’s security situation apart from the wider social contexts that a particular person inhabits. It is the nature of these particular contexts and the particular issue being focused upon that should define the relevant social grouping(s) that the analyst uses as the conceptual focus for her or his discussion.

Statism is the security blanket of traditional security studies. Its removal will create discomfort; familiar intellectual reference points will disappear. The picture (or pictures) of reality that will be generated once the blanket is cast aside will undoubtedly be far more complex and confusing than those drawn by traditional security studies. However, understanding this complexity is a prerequisite for bringing about comprehensive security. Statism, whether its theoretical justification is realist or poststructuralist, is a hindrance to those intent on pursuing this goal.

 

Security and Emancipation

Apart from its statism, another feature that anchors People, States and Fear firmly to the traditional approach to thinking about security is its scientific objectivist epistemology. This epistemological position is premised on a claim that it is potentially possible to draw clear dividing lines between subject and object, fact and value, description and prescription. In Buzan’s case, this position goes hand–in–hand with an explicit commitment to neorealism. Summing up his approach to security in People, States and Fear, Buzan comments:

Some might even see International Security Studies as a liberal reformulation of Realism, emphasising the structural and security–oriented approach of Neorealism, and applying it across a broader agenda. I would support such a view. (Buzan 1991: 373)

Thus, although Buzan’s position on the most apposite conceptualization of security is markedly different from that adopted by, for example, Walt or Gray, his position on what constitutes an acceptable theory of security is fundamentally similar.

There are serious problems with the epistemological underpinnings of neorealism, not the least of which is the obsolescence of the very scientific paradigm they seek to emulate. However, it is important to emphasize that these problems do not merely have repercussions at the abstract plane of high theory; in this case at least, the inadequacy of scientific objectivist epistemology has disturbing implications at a more concrete level.

In People, States and Fear, Buzan presents security as yet another “essentially contested concept.” Despite his obvious preference for strong states and mature anarchy, he offers no theoretical grounds for judging rival accounts of security nor for deciding on the relative importance of security as compared with other values (Booth 1991a: 317; Smith 1991: 335). As Steve Smith points out, this leaves Buzan “dangerously close to relativism in choosing between rival accounts of security, and close to conservatism when it comes to asserting the importance of security, as opposed to other moral claims” (Smith 1991: 335). Despite his liberal sensibilities, Buzan’s conceptualization of security provides him with no theoretical grounds for disputing, say, Radovan Karadzic’s claims that Bosnian Serb security depends on the creation of an ethically pure territory. Because Smith realizes there are political and ethical lacunae at the heart of Buzan’s project, he argues that the conceptualization of security should be based on some notion of emancipation. Given that “all theory is for someone and for some purpose” (R. Cox 1981: 128), Smith suggests that theories of security must be for those who are made insecure by the prevailing order, and their purpose must be to aid their emancipation.

During the course of this argument, Smith explicitly endorses the work of Ken Booth, one of the few scholars engaged in the study of security who have placed a commitment to emancipation at the center of their work. In his 1991 article “Security and Emancipation,” Booth describes the interrelationship of the two elements of his title:

“Security” means the absence of threats. Emancipation is the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin. Emancipation, not power or order, produces true security. (Booth 1991a: 319)

Such a formulation obviously raises at least as many questions as it answers. In particular, the issue of what people “would freely choose to do” is undoubtedly one on which social theorists of various persuasions would disagree vehemently. There is also the vexed question of the relationship between theory and practice. How does an emancipatory approach to thinking about security interact with and impinge upon emancipatory praxis (see Chapter 6)?

I raise these concerns not to call into question the validity of Booth’s explicit emphasis on emancipation (Booth [1999] outlines his thinking of emancipation in much more detail). Rather, returning to the metaphor in the E. P. Thompson passage at the start of this chapter, I do so to suggest that the recognition of the interrelationship between security and emancipation is not the end of the journey toward the development of an alternative and improved conceptualization of security. In fact, it is only a preliminary, if vitally important step. However, it is a step onto unfamiliar terrain for security analysts. Citizens and politicians are traveling without maps in the post–Cold War era; once security specialists renounce the old verities of traditional security studies and embrace a commitment to emancipation, they, too, have very few familiar markers upon which they can take their intellectual bearings. How, then, can critical security studies be developed that generates new maps—maps that can plot a way forward not only for a discipline but for society as a whole? I argue that this requires progress on two fronts.

First, those intent on developing critical security studies must embed their work in the general critical theory project. Successive generations of critical theorists have developed sophisticated and suggestive perspectives (both positive and negative) on the potential for and contours of emancipation. These provide a formidable resource upon which critical security studies can draw. The need for such an intellectual grounding becomes all too apparent when one analyzes the work of those scholars who have attempted an alternative approach to security on the basis of some form of poststructuralism. For although the critical edge, to say nothing of the intellectual coherence, of their work depends on some notion of the possibilities for progressive alternatives—that is, emancipation—the metatheoretical underpinnings upon which their work is built do not provide them with the concepts or, indeed, the theoretical language with which emancipation can be discussed. Their discussion of emancipation—what it means at either the abstract or the concrete level—is therefore left implicit or always deferred.

Consider, for example, the work of writers heavily influenced by poststructuralism who have already been discussed in this chapter. In the final paragraph—itself significant—of R. B. J. Walker’s essay “The Subject of Security” the author observes:

If the subject of security is the subject of security, it is necessary to ask, first and foremost, how the modern subject is being reconstituted and then ask what security could possibly mean in relation to it. It is in this context that it is possible to envisage a critical discourse about security, a discourse that engages with contemporary transformations of political life, with emerging accounts of who we might become, and the conditions under which we might become other than we are now without destroying others, ourselves or the planet on which we all live. (R. Walker 1997: 78)

Implicit in this passage is a notion of improving and, however contingently, the possibility of moving toward a better world than the present: that is, some notion of emancipation.

A close reading of Ole Wæver also reveals similar concerns in his discussion of the merits and demerits of securitizing and desecuritizing issues as part of what seems to be, in the broadest sense of the word, a progressive political project. In a revealing, if slightly opaque, footnote, Wæver agonizes:

For understandable but contingent institutional reasons, post–structuralists have emerged on the academic scene with the political program of tearing down “givens,” of opening up, making possible, freeing. This invites the reasonable question: opening up for what? Neo–nazis? War? How can the post–structuralist be sure that “liberating minds” and “transcending limits” will necessarily lead to more peaceful conditions, unless one makes an incredible enlightenment–indebted “harmony of interests” assumption? For someone working in the negatively–driven field of security, a post–structuralist politics of responsibility must turn out differently, with more will to power and less de–naturalization. (Wæver 1995: 86)

Again, Wæver seems to be hinting at some notion of emancipation—or, at the very least, some means beyond the purely arbitrary of deciding whether and how some forms of society are more acceptable (emancipated) than others.

There are certainly important differences between Walker and Wæver in their treatment of security, differences that should not be ignored or downplayed. However, both betray the same incapacity to go beyond these vague and oblique references to an underspecified notion of emancipation. ₂ Is this a coincidence? Is it a reflection of the fact that deconstruction is a necessary prelude to reconstruction? Can we expect more concreteness and specificity in the future? I argue not. The poststructuralist hostility toward metanarratives and the concepts of totality and the universal—coupled with the emphasis on (even fetishization of?) difference and otherness—leaves its adherents without the necessary intellectual tools to conceptualize progress, development, and emancipation.

Although many, if not most, poststructuralist–inclined thinkers have broadly progressivist political inclinations, they are not in a position to justify these commitments theoretically (this argument is elaborated in relation to the 1991 Gulf War in Norris 1992 and in the context of contemporary Welsh politics in Hunter and Wyn Jones 1995). Thus Walker and Wæver are snared in the same “performative contradiction” (the phrase is Habermas’s) as the leading lights of poststructuralism. Michel Foucault, for example, was a brave and tireless campaigner for prison reform. Yet his analysis of society (in this case, like that of Adorno) portrayed a world of unremitting and undifferentiated domination, giving him no theoretical grounds for arguing why one prison regime was preferable to another. His practice was emancipatory, but his theoretical output undermined the grounds for his actions by pointing to the alleged futility of all efforts to change society for the better.

In these circumstances, even if the argument of the preceding chapters is accepted and the arguments of critical theorists with regard to emancipation are seen as defective or incomplete, it must surely be right to anchor critical security studies in an intellectual tradition that is attempting to take this crucial issue seriously. Especially given that the main alternative involves a prior theoretical condemnation of all attempts at emancipation as merely generating new forms of domination, even though it simultaneously depends on implicit notions of emancipation to give its concrete analysis a critical edge.

In addition to anchoring critical security studies in the tradition of critical theory, the second move by which the concept of emancipation can become less of a terra incognita is through concrete analysis of particular issues and areas. After all, when the concept is considered abstractly, it is impossible to outline what form emancipation takes beyond fairly broad generalizations. Although such generalizations are necessary in that they clarify what the broad issues in question are—such as the potentialities (understood in terms of social practices) that emancipation can unleash—they are not sufficient. It is only when specific, historical examples are addressed that the discussion of emancipation can proceed to the consideration of particular institutions and forms of life.

This work is still very much in its infancy, a fact that is hardly surprising given that critical security studies itself is a very recent development. However, a number of relevant studies have already appeared, some by researchers with a specific security focus and others the work of those seeking to apply critical theory to particular aspects of the study of world politics.

Among the former, Ken Booth and Peter Vale have attempted to apply a critical security studies perspective to southern Africa (Booth 1994; Vale 1986). In a joint essay published in 1997, they apply a series of “disarmingly simple” questions to the region:

Who should be the agents for differently conceived security practices? What institutions in particular settings will best advance regional security from a critical security perspective? What should the relationships be between regional and global structures and processes? What conditions can be created to deliver comprehensive regional security?... What would a condition of comprehensive regional security look like? (Booth and Vale 1997: 329–330)

As Booth and Vale admit, their answers to these questions are “contestable and complex” (Booth and Vale 1997: 330). Nevertheless, by showing that emancipation can be considered in concrete terms even (indeed, especially) in an area that enjoys the dubious distinction of being “the most distressed and insecure region in contemporary world politics” (Booth and Vale 1997: 329), the authors provide convincing testimony that by adopting such a perspective analysts are not escaping from real–world problems but are directly addressing them.

Booth and Vale’s analysis of southern Africa ranges widely from possible force postures to the impact of migration on regional stability and the potential for regional political and economic cooperation. Given the critical stress on deepening the conceptualization of security, a process Booth describes as “investigating the implications and possibilities that result from seeing security as a concept that derives from different understandings of what politics is and can be all about” (Booth 1997a: 111), it is not surprising that the authors are also concerned about exploring the potential for alternative forms of political community in the area. In light of the failure of all sovereign states in southern Africa to provide their citizens with security—understood both broadly and in narrowly military terms—Booth and Vale discuss the possibility of encouraging the development of “nonstatist states committed to regionalism and human diversity both internally and externally,” what they term “rainbow states” (Booth and Vale 1997: 352, 353).

It is precisely at this point that the second potential source for understanding emancipation in concrete terms comes into play, namely, the work of those scholars attempting to apply the insights of critical theory to the study of world politics. Andrew Linklater is one of the foremost exponents of this approach. In his 1990 book Beyond Realism and Marxism Linklater wrote of the need “to construct a broader vision of the meaning and preconditions of emancipation,” which he characterized as the extension of the “realm of social interaction which is governed by universalisable moral principles” (Linklater 1990b: 24, 26). His subsequent work has sought both to clarify and to elaborate upon this theoretical understanding of emancipation and also to seek out and highlight the (immanent) potential for emancipatory political transformation.

Linklater’s theoretical explorations have been heavily influenced by Habermas’s “discourse ethics”; Karl–Otto Apel’s work on the subject also playing a significant supplementary role (Linklater 1996a: 85–88; 1998a: 77–144). Notwithstanding the criticism of Habermas advanced in Chapter 3, it cannot be denied that his recent study The Transformation of Political Community (Linklater 1998a) builds on these foundations to argue a powerful case for a “universal dialogic community.” Linklater contends that the development of such a community would underpin the “triple transformation” of society, that is, the development of structures and practices that are simultaneously more universal, more sensitive to cultural difference, and characterized by greater material equality. The parallel “praxeological” elements of his work relate this understanding of emancipation to changing conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship. In particular, Linklater argues that the process of European integration contains within it the possibility for a move toward a “post–Westphalian era” (Linklater 1996a: 81–85; 1998a: 179–212; 1998b).

Linklater’s work serves as an important reminder that the two approaches to understanding the interrelationship of emancipation and security—the study of critical theory approaches to emancipation and the more concrete analysis of particular political developments—should not be regarded as separate enterprises. Rather, they complement each other. The study of concrete examples generates insights that are useful on the more abstract level and vice versa. There is a dialectical relationship between both approaches from which proponents of critical security studies, as well as critical international theorists more generally, can profit.

 

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Endnotes

Note 1: In the analysis of the dynamics of securitization in the various sectors, this concession appears to be clawed back to the extent that the authors effectively seem to regard states and identity groups as being the only successful “securitizing agents,” that is, the only entities whose use of the grammar of security can generate the broader resonance needed to make the “securitizing move” successful—according to the authors’ criteria (see Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998: 49–162). In this regard, as indeed in others, the book represents a less radical departure from their previous work (in particular Wæver et al. 1993) than may first appear to be the case.  Back.

Note 2: The same issues are raised in Wæver’s recent collaborative work with Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998). In that book, the authors take great care to distance themselves from the critical security studies approach and make great play of their refusal to “define some emancipatory ideal” (p. 35). Simultaneously, however, they also proclaim the need “to understand the dynamics of security and thereby maneuver them” (p. 35) and argue that one of the benefits of their approach is that it “becomes possible to evaluate whether one finds it good or bad to securitize a certain issue” (p. 34). This confusion is almost certainly a reflection of the work’s metatheoretical underpinnings—in this case a somewhat contorted amalgam of constructivism and more traditional (in a Horkheimerian sense) approaches. But whatever its source, the resulting failure to seriously engage with the issue of why some outcomes are preferred to others means that the authors’ preference for desecuritization receives almost no theoretical support or justification. Ironically, in light of their position on critical security studies, Habermasian discourse ethics could well supply the buttress their position requires.  Back.