Critical Approaches to International Security

Karin M. Fierke

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781509501670
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

During the Cold War the concept of international security was understood in military terms as the threat or use of force by states. The end of EastÐWest hostilities, however, brought 'critical' perspectives to the fore as scholars sought to explain the emergence of new challenges to international stability, such as environmental degradation, immigration and terrorism. The second edition of this popular and highly respected text offers a wide-ranging and comprehensive analysis of the growing field of critical security studies. All the chapters have been fully revised and updated to map the on-going evolution of debates about international security since 1989, including the more recent shift in emphasis from critiques of the realist practices of states to those of global liberal governance. Topics covered include the relationship between security and change, identity, the production of danger, fear and trauma, human insecurity and emancipation. The book explores the meaning and use of these concepts and their relevance to real-life situations ranging from the War on Terror to the Arab Spring, migration, suffering in war, failed states and state-building, and the changing landscape of the international system, with the emergence of a multipolar world and the escalation of global climate change. Written with verve and clarity and incorporating new seminar activities and questions for class discussion, this book will be an invaluable resource for students of international relations and security studies.

PART I
Context

CHAPTER 1
Definitions and Redefinitions

In the early 1990s, in a review of the field, Stephen Walt (1991: 212) defined security studies as the ‘study of the threat, use and control of military force’. Other scholars have argued that the traditional focus of security studies, and international relations more broadly, is the threat, use and management of military force (Schultz et al. 1993: 2), the causes of war and alliances, and also policy-oriented research on military and other threats (Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988: 6). These definitions prioritize the military means of acquiring security by and for the state, and the relation between statecraft and military force (Crawford 1991: 286), over the political definition of threats and objectives. The emphasis on force is compatible with assumptions that international ‘relations’ is a qualitatively different sphere of experience than domestic politics. International relations is defined by war. Politics stop at the water’s edge (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989: 39; Walker 1993, 1995).

Approached from another angle, the military and political aspects of security cannot be so easily separated. At its most basic, security is about being and feeling safe from harm or danger (Mische 1989: 391; Terriff et al. 1999: 1; Booth 2005: 13, 21). This is evident in some of the everyday or metaphorical uses of the term. A ‘security blanket’ provides a feeling of protection for a child. A ‘security umbrella’ provides protection by keeping threats away. The narrow definition of security emphasizes the means of threatening, or the use of force by a state. The end of protection is not mentioned and, while assumed, exists invisibly in the background.

The question of how or who one protects is fundamentally a political one. The relationship can be situated within alternative understandings and spatial configurations, and can be the subject of contestation (Der Derian and Shapiro 1989: 12; Huysmans et al. 2006). It is often assumed that security inside the state presupposes a threat from outside the state, yet there is no necessary relationship between the threat or use of force and the end of safety or protection. On the contrary, as Edward Kolodziej (1992: 422) points out, the emphasis on first-image international threats to the state ‘rules out by omission those security threats posed by states to groups and individuals.’ The state may be at one and the same time the protector of its population and a source of threat to it. In this respect, the concept of security may raise a question about the relationship between receiving protection and the liberty of those who are protected. During the War on Terror, which enabled the erosion of civil liberties in the name of security, the fine balance between security and liberty was a subject of public debate.

Questions about this balance were at the core of Thomas Hobbes’s classic Leviathan. In his thought experiment, which revolves around a war-like state of nature, survival has priority over liberty and requires relinquishing a degree of freedom in exchange for protection. In this process, the problem of insecurity is transferred to the relationship between states, subsuming questions of individual security to that of the state. Other formulations pose the relationship between security and liberty in a different way. Democratic peace theory (Doyle 1983; Levy 1988; Russett 1993, 2005; Brown et al. 1996; Ray 1998), which builds on the thought of Immanuel Kant, presents liberty within the state as a precondition for security between states.¹ The relative freedom of populations, and a habit of democratically resolving disputes, flows over into the relationship between democracies and is an essential ingredient of peaceful relations or the absence of war between them.

In so far as questions of security arise, paradoxically, from human freedom (Kolodziej 1992: 424), there is a political element at its core. The relationship may represent a trade-off (Ullman 1983: 130–3), as in the Hobbesian conception, or the two may be mutually constitutive, as in the Kantian. But, ultimately, the designation of threats cannot be separated from the values that are at risk or, more specifically, what people value and care about (Kolodziej 1992: 434). To say that survival is the only value of importance oversimplifies the matter. Survival, for a human community, is not equivalent to the physical survival of the individual. A community is defined by the values or shared understandings that shape its common existence, which may differ from one community to another. When leaders refer to protecting a ‘way of life’, it is not merely death that is feared, but a loss of autonomy in defining the values that underpin this life (Burgess 2011).

The relationship between political ends and military means has also been important in strategic thought. In his famous book On War, Clausewitz (1976) argued that war is the continuation of political activity by other means. He emphasized the subordination of military means to political ends and claimed that if thinking about war is separated from political life, ‘we are left with something pointless and devoid of sense.’ Clausewitz’s assertion that war is the continuation of politics by other means was the point of departure for investigations into the strategic implications of nuclear weapons (Freedman 1998: 49). Thomas Schelling (1960, 1966) emphasized the centrality of bargaining processes which make conflict and cooperation inseparable (Baldwin 1995: 137). Both of these strategists raise a question about the relationship between the political end and the military means by which security is achieved.

This discussion of politics and security raises two issues. First, it points to a political relationship at the core of security, that is, between a protector and the protected. Second, it highlights the political dimension of defining threats, including the relationship between the type or source of a threat and the best means to address it. From the acknowledgement that security is, in several respects, political flows a further acknowledgement that its meaning can change as it becomes a subject of contestation.

The meaning of security can be situated on a spectrum, depending on the extent to which political or military aspects dominate. The narrow definition of security as the threat or use of force by states exists at the military end of the spectrum. However, when placed in historical context, it becomes clear that this militarized definition, far from being timeless, represents a relatively brief period, in which political questions about the nature of security were subsumed by strategic or technical questions relating to nuclear weapons. As will be elaborated in the next chapter, this definition dominated not only a narrow historical context but a specific geographic one as well. With the end of the Cold War, a debate emerged regarding the need to broaden the narrow definition. After 11 September 2001 the narrow definition appeared once again to occupy centre stage, although, as Peoples and Vaughn-Williams (2010: 2) point out, this narrow definition is no longer accepted without question.

The purpose of this chapter is to situate the narrow definition of security in an evolving historical context and to argue that the meaning and study of security is always political, that is, always defined within a political context and subject to normative debate and change. The first section will explore the narrow definition, the realist assumptions that underpin it, and its place within the evolution of security studies during the Cold War. The second section will revisit this evolution from the perspective of the post-Cold War methodological debates from which critical security studies emerged. The final section will make yet another cut into the development of security studies, locating it within a larger historical transition from the narrow focus on states and force to a broader field of practices. The politics of security, in this broader field, involves a range of state and non-state actors and a variety of security responses. As Nye and Lynn-Jones (1988: 26) state, the tendency to conflate security studies with strategic studies ‘unduly narrows the scope of the field and cuts it off from its political, economic and historical context.’ This chapter and the next are an attempt to resituate the concept of security in several layers of context. It highlights one of the central themes of CSS which is that the critical scholar stands within a historical, political and cultural context, which is the point of departure for critique.

Realism and the Cold War

Security studies has never been as limited in scope as presumed by the narrow definition. While it has been dominated by realist thinking, a range of names have constituted the field – war studies, conflict resolution, national security studies, strategic studies, defence studies, peace research, and international security studies – each of which has a different connotation and has been used to identify and classify particular problems (Crawford 1991: 285). There are cultural differences in the use of terms as well. Nye and Lynn-Jones (1988: 8), writing in the American context during the Cold War, used the term ‘international security studies’, while others in the American context made a distinction between national and international security studies. British scholars such as Buzan (1991 [1983]) or Smith (1999) highlighted the transition from strategic studies to international security. The difficulty of pinning down the precise boundaries of ‘security’ studies only reinforces the argument that the narrow definition, far from reflecting a universal definition, is merely one piece in a more complex puzzle. In what follows, I highlight the more caricatured view of security studies associated with realism and neo-realism.

Kenneth Waltz (1979: 186), one of the most prominent neo-realists, stated that ‘Since Thucydides in Greece and Kautilya in India, the use of force and the possibility of controlling it have been the preoccupation of international political studies.’ While security studies is a recent academic pursuit, its core concept relates to a long history of war and strategic questions about the use of force. The writings of Sun Tzu, Thucydides, Machiavelli or Clausewitz are often a point of reference for contemporary security analysts who seek to generalize about the pursuit of power and the relationship between statecraft and the use of force (Crawford 1991: 288). Security studies builds on or, it is claimed, descends from a body of timeless wisdom.

During this long history, the relationship between politics and military force has, more often than not, been central to the security equation. In the narrow definition, the politics of security focuses principally on a question of how states think about the use of force. The primary concern is, on the one hand, the conditions that make the use of force likely and, on the other, an analysis of state policies regarding the preparation for, prevention of, or engagement in war. Critics have pointed to a dual problem with this emphasis (Kolodziej 1992). First, it makes the academic study of security too dependent on questions of contemporary policy. Second, it ignores broader political questions about security, above or below the state.

The narrowness of the definition was in large part a function of the realist assumptions that underpin it. Security studies emerged as an academic subfield of international relations after World War II, along with the desire to make the latter into a science. After the experience of Hitler’s expansion throughout Europe, realism took centre stage as a framework for explaining international politics. The two developments were compatible, although not equivalent, in so far as science seeks generalization across time and realism builds on a timeless wisdom about state behaviour. However, in the process of adapting this timeless wisdom to the requirements of science, rich and historically embedded analyses, from Thucydides to Hobbes, were cast in sound-bite form and reduced to a simplified set of assumptions defining security dilemmas (Kolodziej 1992: 431).

As Ken Booth (2005: 5) points out, realism’s pull ‘has remained powerful for all those students of international relations keen to speak to government officials, the armed forces and the media. Realism remains the intellectual password into the corridors of power.’ Every student of international relations or security is familiar with its assumptions. The first assumption is a pessimistic view of human nature. Human beings are selfish power-seekers and, as a result, conflict cannot be eliminated, only managed. Hans Morgenthau (1978) defined international politics, like all politics, as a ‘struggle for power’. The second is a focus on states as the main actors at the international level and an understanding of the international system as an anarchy, structured around states. Because there is no global government to provide security, no power to hold states ‘in awe’, states are constantly vulnerable to harm from other states. The absence of the security provided by law and institutions means that states have to help themselves, that is, they have to provide for their own security. Ultimately states can only rely on their own efforts to remain safe. As any state may resort to force, all states must be prepared to use force (Terriff et al. 1999: 32). Therefore, the military capability of a state is crucial to the outcome of international conflicts.

The security dilemma arises out of a situation where each state’s attempt to help itself presents a potential threat to, and erosion of, the security of other states who face the same problem. The result may be a spiral of insecurity leading to war. Balance of power provides a semblance of order within anarchy, since states, faced with a growing threat from a neighbour, will naturally join together to counter the power of a dominant player. In the best case, balance of power will prevent any kind of conflict from breaking out. In the worst case, war may be necessary to preserve the system and the sovereignty of states within it. This central concept of realism reveals a problem that forms the core of this book’s argument, that is, the pursuit of security is part and parcel of the production of insecurity. The chapters that follow explore this argument in several dimensions and with greater nuance – and to a different conclusion than the realist argument.

Contexts of the Cold War

Critical security studies emerged out of a critique of Cold War security studies and its focus on states and military security. Looking back, we may be inclined to see the Cold War as a homogeneous and stable period of international relations. Depending on how one casts its begin...