Critical Security Studies Lecture and Seminar Notes - Lecture notes, lectures 1 - 16 PDF

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Critical Security Studies Lecture and Seminar notesLecture 1Module is about: - Different ways and contexts security has been and can be thought, practiced, and experienced. - What kind of questions have been asked, how and why? What answers, if any, have been proposed? - What kinds of practices are ...

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Critical Security Studies Lecture and Seminar notes Lecture 1 Module is about: • Different ways and contexts security has been and can be thought, practiced, and experienced. • What kind of questions have been asked, how and why? What answers, if any, have been proposed? • What kinds of practices are attached to thinking security both in academia and the policy world? Why is curiosity important? Even right now we are sitting in a web of theoretical assumptions. Such as fire exits, which are security practices. Structured by a liberal understanding of the individual and neoliberal structures as consumers of knowledge. Apparently. Time assumptions 50 minutes. Being at university is political. Assumptions are everywhere - including about what questions and answers are right/wrong. What does this mean for security? • Challenge conventional ways of thinking • Openness to discovery • The stranger in the discipline (Williams and Kreuse) • Wondering (Lobo-Guerrero) and attuning to 'mess' (Squire) • Self-reflexivity - how are we as subjects involved in the practices we study? (Foucault) • The politics of everyday life (Guillaume) Resistance and defiance doesn't necessarily require physical acts - but power sets the frameworks within which resistance can happen, and hierarchies of power can still exist within 'free' spaces. Pedagogy - Giroux saw as a principal feature of politics, because it provides the capacities, knowledge, skills and social relations through which individuals recognise themselves as social/political agents. Keeper questions - what is security? What is critique? Theory - CSS, Security - events, both of these are seen as practice - how are they political? What assumptions would encourage/discourage interventions/border actions etc etc. How to study?

• Disciplinary construct? • Policy concept? • A lived experience? • A point of access to political transformation? • • How does the discipline think? • Contested schools of thought • Traditional versus critical SS Trad: competition for power, power as coercive capacity, focus on nation-state as referent object, traditional state system etc. Narrowly defined - military sector or other issues that 'bear directly on the likelihood and character of war' (Walt) Critical - response to hegemony and failure of realist paradigm: aims at a broadening and deepening to include environmental, economic, political, societal sectors, as well as extension of referent object to include other actors bar the state such as groups of states, the human individual and the biosphere. 9/11 a further large challenge to TSS. As a policy construct: security as a political construct that translates into political actions such as border securitisation. Can translate into everyday life in things such as protecting selves from cyber attacks. As a lived experience: whose security? Example of Malala, Condoleezza Rice, but also in academic engagement Cynthia Webber's work on unsafe american citizens and how States can endanger their own citizens, further example of de Menezes, security measures can make individual citizens less secure. Banksy work can be seen as a way of resisting this paradigm. What does security mean to you? Who knows, eh. Term 1: mapping the discipline, critical theory and securitisation study, gender and feminist approaches Term 2: post structuralism, international political sociology, other, political geography, etc. Why study security? To study how the world is made and unmade • Identity - security discourses tell us who we are, what we value, and of whom we should be afraid (Campbell 1992, Dalby 2002) • Power relations and subjects - security discourses define the relationship between protector and protected - the way we talk about the primary function of the state to protect and how that

responsibility is constructed and performed affects the way we are treated and people's lives. • Action - representations of security enable or disenable political actions (Waever 2005) Need to keep questioning established orders and think of alternatives, how to find voice/engage in new forms of activism, how to intervene in everyday operations, how to cultivate modes of being and thinking towards a less threatening world

Lecture 2 Critical Theory and Security Idea of the public intellectual - figures such as Edward Said, Gramsci, Foucault, Morgenthau. Academic practice in terms of knowledge production is fundamentally political, given that knowledge imparts ways of seeing power structures. Epistemological shift between traditional security studies to critical CSS examines how we find out what we know, how we're positioned in relation to what we study, how do we negotiate the effects of our own knowledge etc. Distinction between objectivity and subjectivity - CSS very much post positivist, unpacks the social constructedness of reality, sees the student as part of the world they study. Recognises that knowledge is political, and seeks to facilitate change by uncovering the hidden. 'Insider story' - the writer etc is always embedded. Bear in mind that theory is always for someone and some purpose etc - it is also practice in and of itself in terms of a method of knowledge production and construction of a framework of engagement with the world. How can we recognise and experience theory as practice in academic life? Think about the power of particular forms of knowledge; competing claims about how the world works, disciplinary dynamics in the process of knowledge production - epistemological relationship to the world studied. Identity politics involved too - the nature of the epistemic community we exist within, and who the 'others' are. Also the way that theories and practices translate into policy and regulations. Ways of knowing - 'bringing the person back in' to international relations, in order to recognise that IR scholars are also embedded in security practices. Power struggles: disciplinary powers of both traditional and critical security studies; • Traditional - the positivist agenda, taking 'facts' and giving out policy prescriptions, theory vs practice - sees self as very practical and scientific.

• Impact of traditional: unrealistic analysis of the world, emphasis on rationality eg MAD, normativity of not being able to question the state. • Lots of identity politics - who is involved in the discourse of security studies, what counts as SS, definitional fiat, etc - even within the discipline, power relations in terms of knowledge production exist. • Linguistic problems of taking out the human experience, and speaking about issues from a divorced perspective - the conventions of how we speak in knowledge-production circles are not necessarily accessible. • Critical - circles of 'accepted knowledge' which was the establishment view and epistemology were exclusive and dismissive of other ways of doing things - this meant that they missed out on lots of insights. For example, the realist incuriosity about the contextual realities shocked Ken Booth. • Welsh school's response to neo-realism: • Critique of traditional SS' substantive claims of the world, critique of state-centrism and redefining security. • Refocusing on the social function of theory and the idea of the public intellectual - emphasis on the theory-praxis nexus, articulate a new discourse. • Promote positive progressive change • Against state centrism: • Empirically unhelpful • Justification of the status quo despite the state often being the source of danger • Often imperialist and attains security for the North at the expense of the South • Broadened and deepened security agenda - as a derivative concept in terms of the individual as the referent object - their life choices to get the good life. • Security as emancipation - brings legitimacy to so-called esoteric concerns - eg food security, environmental security, etc. CSS takes the individual as referent object, anyone can be agent, mostly civil society, means largely nonviolent and absolute sum, has a broad agenda. TSS focuses on sovereign state as referent object and agent, means as military capabilities, relative/zero sum approach, threats are interstate violence, so narrow agenda. Need to ask what is security, who is being secured, against what, and how should we attain it?

Remember the role of the public intellectual - critical security studies intellectuals committed to critical theory's injunction that it should develop emancipatory socio-cultural etc change. Important question of how to maintain political relevance and academic respectability. Seminar What is the relationship between academic debates about security and world events? - Knowledge production (term?) is necessarily political; it engenders policy in the traditional security studies model of public security intellectuals having an influence on policy, constructs epistemic frameworks and ways of seeing the world in the sense of defining what is a relevant theory to be used etc, and creates and perpetuates a variety of views and information about the world. Illustrates the inherently political nature of security studies - while TSS claims to observe and aspires to universality and objectivity (Realism), the very act of claiming universality is political in and of itself! Booth’s definition of ‘security’ as the absence of threats - emancipation is therefore the freeing from constraints imposed by threats, such as not only the traditional ideas of war and the threat of war but also poverty, oppression, and so on. Contrast in intellectual attitude between Gramsci and Adorno; Gramsci; concept of the organic intellectual, who should take active participation in political life as a ‘permanent persuader’, capitalising on the idea of social embeddedness. Conceived of power as a centaur surface-deep consent to state power, but n a deeper analysis, the coercion and violence at play becomes evident. Adorno; Argued that any attempt to engage in SQ politics only adds to structures of domination as participation legitimates them.

Lecture 3 Emancipation The Welsh school's response to neorealism: critique of state-centrism, redefining security, problematising theory as a social practice, articulating a new, socially sensitive and reconstructive approach to theory. Advocated theory as an agent of progressive social change political agenda of emancipation (what does this mean then and now), critical pedagogy, etc. Saw security as a derivative concept (who's security), individual as the referent object of security - human beings' 'corporeal, material existence and experience'. Security as survival-plus; life chances and life choices. Security as emancipation; this bring legitimacy to previously 'esoteric' concerns ie food security, environmental security, etc. Key departure of the sovereign state being also a threat to security. Foucault argues that at some point in our lives we will experience a kind of 'limit-experience', realising the violence of security practices and hierarchies. Difficulty of deciding what to do in that liminal space between, when 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born' (Gramsci). Ways we conduct social science influences what our social science is different approaches ie detached problematic. Differences in intellectual attitude between Gramsci and Adorno Gramsci argued that the intellectual must be organic, create counterhegemony and engage with system to try undermine it, whereas Adorno believed it was not possible to engage with SQ power structures without adding to them, and thus must disengage as much as possible while putting out 'messages in a bottle' - theory. Welsh School largely adopted the Gramscian approach - aimed to undermine the prevailing hegemonic security discourse and its 'naturalness'. Immanent critique through comparing justifications with actual outcomes and arguing they fail on their own terms. Also critique of intellectuals - teasing out their unexamined assumptions and drawing attention to the normative viewpoints they took as read. Wanted to also explore immanent possibilities, providing support for social movements who promote emancipatory social change (though without instruction or direction). Activism in the classroom, placing experiences of insecurity at the centre of the agenda.

How this activist agenda is conceptualised? If all theory for someone and for some purpose, CSS is 'for' the emancipation of the voiceless, unrepresented and the powerless. Sees traditional security studies as being 'for' privileged groups and strengthening their already dominant positions. Utopian realism - holistic and non-state approach. Argues that focus on power and order led to oppression and instability. Emancipation they believed would lead to less violence. Emancipation and critical theory: • Horkheimer argued that a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. Criteria of explanatory CT (what is wrong), practical (who can change it), and normative (providing clear norms for criticism and achievable practical goals for social transformation). • Habermas - emancipatory knowledge - 3 types • Instrumental - technological interest, control of environment • Practical - coordination of social action • Emancipatory - experience freedom through critical selfemancipation Welsh school not so much of a set path. Words: 'all we have'; need key words to be tough enough for generalisation and sharp enough to cut through blizzard of information. Traditional language of security studies not adequate for the modern world given their sharp-edged nature of division and exclusion, whereas the world is more porous, inclusive and interpenetrative. Problems with the idea of security as an essentially contested concept: how to achieve security if we cannot agree on a definition. Security seen as an emancipatory process - takes as an assumption that individuals aren't free until all individuals are free. Openly takes a utopian goal, the idea of a global civil society. Cites support for greenpeace, amnesty international, oxfam, etc - to what extent is global civil society an achievable goal or even a desirable one? Is it illegitimate for people to identify with other people in their given groups and want to create organs of CS to reflect that. Tensions between utopian ideas and achievability.

Booth speaks from the perspective of the global 'we' - is this a progressive step? Sees emancipation as the philosophy, theory and politics of inventing humanity. Inventing humanity - emancipatory politics is part of this - lifting people out of structural and contingent oppressions such as war and poverty. Problem of false emancipation its absract circumstances in particular. Who decides which is which? Seminar Rancière; argues that all people are equally intelligent in the sense that this is an ability to define themselves and follow its own direction posits that the education system creates pedagogical fiction. Who is to say that someone skilled with their hands is more intelligent than somebody skilled at writing essays? Clearly this is an arbitrarily defined distinction. Believes that emancipation is the act of an intelligence obeying only itself, even while the will is necessarily obeying another will for prudent reasons or so on - truly thinking for oneself. Links in to ideas of knowledge being linked fundamentally to emancipation.

Lecture 4 Human security Shift in focus with CSS from the security of states to the people living within them. UN human development report 1994 - freedom from fear and freedom from want. Relationship of no development without security and no security without development. Development extends the scope, possibility, means and time-frame of intervention to the infinite. Whose security? Aid cannot be delivered without the security of the donor. Poverty reduction subordinated to the security needs of great powers? Aid can be seen as an extension of western foreign policy? Is it a genuine concern or just by regional stability? Usually reifies some level of state power. Trajectories of 'human security' - adopted as policy framework - UNDP Human Development Report, Human Security Report, R2P, foreign policy narratives especially in Canada, Japan, Norway. And lots of academic views. Issue of 'developed' world confronted with vulnerabilities previously face by 'non-developed' countries. Anything excluded from definition of human security? Roberts: argues that wider structures are responsible for human insecurity and general public are implicated by participating. Bellamy and McDonald: human security agenda should act as a radical critique of practices and structures causing human insecurity - shouldn't try to make amenable because if buy in to existing harmful structures then become complicit. Human security in the theory and praxis nexus • Human security and the EU: • Adoption of a human security concept represents a qualitative change in the conduct of foreign and security policy. Big change for EU as it is looking to increase effectiveness and visibility as a collective global actor. • Dynamic framework; new narrative influencing policy. Who are the humans in the EU? • Double character: both protecting and empowering people but also tackling those who cause insecurity • Figure of the 'human security worker' - would be a highly trained professional, graduating from a human security academy training in military and policy skills, such as disarming

combatants, making arrests and containing angry crowds; in how to understand development concepts and practices, such as participation and gender-awareness; and in multipurpose skills such as logistical and legal knowledge. When not deployed, constantly training and exercising. Holistic approach to security and reconstruction? Supposedly EU force, with: • Human security relief worker - empowering local communities • Human security spy - hub of info for local people, increasing broad info sharing, good for security (?) • Human security soldier - analogy with a police officer - no fundamental difference between domestic law enforcement and foreign soldiering. Does this have insufficient sensitivity to local circumstances? • Human security bureaucrat - law enforcement Emphasis on law-enforcement, criminalisation, and policy primacy has considerable relevance to the kind of operations that european forces might be deployed in this idea. Seminar Is ‘human security’ a critical approach to security? Newman argues that while it has potential overlap, and the theoretical legs to become Critical Human Security Studies, the conceptual underpinnings which it operates on at the moment are largely uncritical - operates fundamentally within status quo socio-economic and political arrangements. Bear in mind that human security connects the idea of security closely with that of ‘human development’ - biopolitical resonation of the linguistics here links the idea of ‘development’ (with all the developmentalist fallacy and the construction of ‘progress’) with the idea of being ‘human’, relating it inherently to the development of the species. Underpinnings of Human Security; - Starts from the individual as the referent object and the beneficiary of the ‘good’ of security; this is a significant departure from traditional security studies. - Practical and policy-focused: origins in UNDP report in 1994; does this origin suggest that the HS discourse was co-opted from its formation and is therefore unable to reflect critically on the state apparatus and so on that constructed it?

- Seeks to challenge institutions and attitudes which privilege ‘high politics’ above individual experiences - Takes broad perspective, focusing on issues which create insecurity for largest number of people Critical critiques of HS - Unresolved debate within human security over how broad the focus should be; some HS approaches emphasise threats to individuals from traditional security threats such as armed conflict, while others focus on non-traditional threats such as HIV/AIDS - Lack of focus on and engagement with the power relations which are predisposed towards the status quo; operates as an essentially policy orientated discourse, which means that it fails to challenge the structures that enact that policy, and what sort of structures ...