Broadening and Deepening Security PDF

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Broadening and Deepening Security lecture & seminar notes...

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Week 11: Broadening and Deepening Security Lecture All approaches to security make implicit or explicit claims/assumptions about: - What is security? - What can we know about security? - How can we study security? - Whose security should we prioritise? - What constitutes a security threat? - Is security possible? - Is security desirable?

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What is Critical Security Studies? - Critical/’New’ Security Studies is an umbrella term for a range of approaches which seek to challenge the orthodoxy of ‘traditional’ security studies through nuanced critique and a shift in the referent object of security”. - What do we mean by ‘critical’? - What do we mean by ‘traditional’? - What is the ‘referent object of security’? ‘Traditional Security Studies’: - Begins, flows out of and ends with the State. • Nobody ever lives, nobody ever dies, there are states, and they are what is. - Derived as a sub-field of International Relations. • Aberystwyth 1919; Woodrow Wilson Chair, funded by Davies Davies. • Inter-war period. • ‘Problem-solving orthodoxy’. • ‘The Twenty Years' Crisis 1919-1939’ – E.H Carr; Realism emerges as dominant theory of IR. • ‘Second Great Debate’, Morton Kaplan’s Behiouralism; Aspiration to Science Positivist epistemology, value-free knowledge, timeless wisdom. • Hegemony of Realism upheld throughout Cold War – see Great Debates. - Core commitments of Realism: Three Ss. • States. • Self-help. • Survival. - Security Studies develops out of this orthodoxy in 1950s and 1960s. • The ‘Golden Age’ of Security Studies. • Direct interaction between policy and academia. • Derives primarily from US; also the UK; Westerncentric? What are the challenges to traditional security studies? - The seemingly intractable nature of the Cold War sustains Realist orthodoxy of Security Studies. • Structural/Neo-Realism. • Increased levels of parsimony and the dominance of ‘scientific’ explanations of social phenomena. • Distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics. - The challenge of Barry Buzan. • People, States and Fear (1984). The end of the Cold War and the ‘birth’ of Critical Security Studies:

- The orthodoxy of Realist notions of security are thrown into crisis. • Neither traditional IR nor Security Studies approaches could adequately explain the collapse of the bi-polar order.

- Opens up a new space for alternative voices and ‘new’ conceptions of security. • Broadening. • Deepening. Broadening the security agenda: - The concept of security moves beyond purely military issues.

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- Barry Buzan: People, States and Fear (1984, 1991). Security agenda is broadened: military, political, economic, societal and environmental. The Copenhagen School and securitisation: - Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI). • Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, Jaap de Wilde, Lene Hansen (?). • Security: A New Framework for Analysis! (1997). - Security not as a thing but as a ‘speech act’; social construction of threat. - By securitising new notions of security: • They shift from the realm of low politics to ‘high politics’ for States. • Aim is to mobilise State action to rectify ‘new’ problems of a broadened security agenda. Copenhagen School and securitisation theory: - Advantages: • Broadens the security agenda beyond focus on military sector. • Entails a sense of importance and immediacy and (attempts to) elicit corrective action. - Criticisms: • States remain the primary actors. • Anarchical structure of the International System maintained as ‘natural’. • The potentially damaging lens of securitisation. Deepening security: critical security studies. - Critical Security Studies (Welsh School). - Ken Booth, Richard Wyn Jones. - Intellectual lineage to Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas etc.). - Seeks to deepen the concept of security below the level of the state. • Humans are the referent object of security. • Explicitly normative commitment to an improvement of the human condition. - ‘Security is a derivative concept’ – Ken Booth.

1. Critique of problem-solving orthodoxy in ‘traditional’ security studies. • Theory is always for someone and for some purpose (Cox, 1981). 2. Human security. • Shared reference point of security for all humanity. • Supports the logic of emancipation and of cosmopolitan progress (progression of Enlightenment thought). - Advantages: • Provides a strong challenge to the orthodoxy of the State as the referent object of ‘Security’. !3

• Provides a shared reference point for humanity and a blueprint for cosmopolitan progress. • Has had genuine influence on policy agenda: - UN Development Reports. - Responsibility to Protect (R2P). - Human Security Commission:Human Security Now (2003). • Further potential to positively affect millions of lives.

- Criticisms: • Realist Critique: - Makes the concept of security too encompassing. - Dilutes the important task of analysing military threats and inter-state conflict. • Other Critiques: - CS: Focus on deepening bypasses the inherent capacity of the powerful state to affect positive change.

- ‘Poststructuralism’/’Postmodernism’: Agrees with challenge to the State but fundamentally disagrees with notion of ‘emancipation’, ‘progress’ and Enlightenment philosophy.

- Postcolonialism – Traditional Eurocentrism? - Feminism – ‘Where are the women’? – Cynthia Enloe; Patriarchy!

Exploding security: Postructuralism and the Paris School. - What is ‘Postructuralism’/‘Postmodernism’? • Perhaps the most ‘critical’ of all the critical approaches. • Prioritisation of discourse in how we conceive of ‘reality’. !4

- There are no ‘facts’, only interpretations. - ‘Roots’ in structuralism (de Saussure, Althusser) and its subsequent critique (Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard…).

- Its programme is one of critique (like critical theory) but unlike critical theory it rejects the notion of emancipation and general meta-narratives. Postcolonialism: - Closely related to Poststructuralism and adopts some of its methods. Both counter-hegemonic; the former challenges ‘structuralism’ (Saussurrean, Barthsian ideas), the latter challenges ‘colonialism’. - Scholars mostly from former ‘colonies’; Global South. Edward Said’s Orientalism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on colonialism; Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ - Matrices of power: coloniality of power, being, knowledge. - Subjectivities, cultural hegemony of the West, binary opposition (see Deconstruction by Derrida). The Paris School: - Most directly associated with scholarship emanated out of Paris Institute of Political Studies (Science Po) but encompasses a wide-range of scholars: • Didier Bigo, Emmanuel Pierre Guittet, Jef Huysmans, Claudia Aradau, Mick Dillon. - Concern with the ‘everyday practices’ of security (e.g. Surveillance, border control etc.); How ‘security’ and ‘identities’ are performed. - Advantages: • Offers an alternative conception of security not offered by any other approach; Seeks to unearth the subversive power relations at the heart of security practices; Provides a constant source of critique. - Criticisms: • Dilutes the concept of security much too far beyond the state; Does not provide an ‘solutions’ on how to progress. Conclusions: - ‘Security’ is an essentially contested concept (W.B. Gallie, 1956). - Orthodox conceptions of security can be challenged and have been challenged through a range of critical approaches. - Critical Security Studies provides a framework for this challenge: • Copenhagen School (Broadening). • Critical Security Studies (Deepening).

Seminar

- Main themes of the week: • Moving beyond the idea that security is purely military - anything can become a security •

threat depending on who it affects etc (broadening). Deepening.

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- Blame is a factor: food security is not necessarily recognised as a security threat as it is within -

the state itself, whereas when it comes to terrorism the ‘blame’ is on someone outside the state (othering?). Security issues become securitised overtime - what security issue which is not securitised would you securitise? New means of communication (social media can contribute to the new instability of the world: disinformation, propaganda, manipulation).

Mearsheimer: “Alternative approaches have provided neither a clear explanatory framework for analysing security nor demonstrated their value in concrete research”.

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