Ethical Security Studies

A New Research Agenda

Jonna Nyman, Anthony Burke, Jonna Nyman, Anthony Burke

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138912304
• eBook ISBN: 9781317431817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At a time of grave ethical failure in global security affairs, this is the first book to bring together emerging theoretical debates on ethics and ethical reasoning within security studies.

In this volume, working from a diverse range of perspectives—poststructuralism, liberalism, feminism, just war, securitization, and critical theory—leading scholars in the field of security studies consider the potential for ethical visions of security, and lay the ground for a new field: "ethical security studies".

These ethical 'visions' of security engage directly with the meaning and value of security and security practice, and consider four key questions:

• • Who, or what, should be secured?
• • What are the fundamental grounds and commitments of different security ethics?
• • Who or what are the most legitimate agents, providers or speakers of security?
• • What do ethical security practices look like? What ethical principles, arguments, or procedures, will generate and guide ethical security practices?

Informed by a rich understanding of the intellectual and historical experience of security, the contributors advance innovative methodological, analytical, political and ethical arguments that represent the cutting edge of the field. This book opens a new phase of collaboration and growth that promises to have great benefits for the more humane, effective and ethical practice of security politics.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, ethics, philosophy, and international relations.

PART I Foundations of ethical security

1 Security Critique, analysis and ethics

Vivienne Jabri

DOI: 10.4324/9781315692005-1

The intellectual pursuit of the subject of security in International Relations is perhaps second to none if measured in terms of word space, the proliferation of journals specialising in the area, and the number of book series now available for every author engaged with this work. No other subject enjoys such coverage, reinforced as this is by undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, conferences, and research funding for all aspects of what is considered ‘security’. So prevalent and hegemonic is the positioning of this area of research that even the unlikeliest research council in the United Kingdom, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has sought to get in on the act, so to speak, seeking reinvigoration through investment in a prolific and officially supported, potentially ‘impactful’ academic research area.

The stakes are therefore high, for academics, publishers, funders, and policy-makers. Intellectually, in Western political thought the problem of security goes to the heart of the social contract tradition, with conceptualisations of the ‘state of nature’ variously defined either in terms of perpetual threat or as a base from which any alternative form of being presents a distinct challenge that must be subject to regulation and ordering. Understood in Hobbesian terms, the very understanding of politics, or indeed the possibility thereof, can only be conceived in terms of the secured and territorially bound exchange between the sovereign and the people, where the latter accrue legitimacy to the former in return for a generalised security, but one framed within limits. The socio-political evolution of modern political community across the world is premised on the idea that the sovereign state’s remit is the provision of a machinery that ensures order and continuity – security in all but name. This is despite the fact that the state, either Western or non-Western, is historically associated with much violence and insecurity (Tilly 1990).

Much of the literature is divided into orthodox and ‘critical’ perspectives (see Krause and Williams 1997, and cf. Fierke 2015) where orthodoxy is associated with realist perspectives that place primacy on state security in an international context replete with insecurity. The alternative approach, critical security studies, questions ‘security’ as a concept and as a set of practices and does not take for granted the idea that the state as such can be a source of security. As Karin Fierke (2015) highlights, this perspective also includes those who seek to ‘widen’ the concept beyond ‘national security’, preferring to conceive it in relation to a plethora of issues and problem areas, from gender to the environment, to the economy and even the entirety of ‘humanity’ as such. There are also debates relating to the ontological and epistemological bases of security claims; are claimed threats real? Are they a product of ‘securitisation’ speech acts? Are they products of competitive ‘security practitioners’? Is ‘insecurity’ constituted by the very practices deemed to provide security? Might we talk of ‘ontological security’? Can security emancipate or do its practices always oppress? What form of politics does security produce? Is government enabled by the imperative of security? Is security as a technology of government a characteristic particularly of liberal governance?

The aim in this chapter is not to go over this well-worn ground; there are many other authors within ‘critical security studies’ that have covered this terrain (C.A.S.E. Collective 2007). The chapter reinforces the view, also developed by a number of other authors, that following Michel Foucault, security is by no means a self-evident concept, and nor are ‘security practices’ designed to ‘protect’; rather, a useful approach to security might view it as a technology of government, used to shape, discipline, and manage categories and populations (Neocleous 2008; Aradau and van Munster 2007; Burke 2002). At the same time, the focus of this Foucauldian-inspired side of critical security studies is on what we might refer to as the micropolitics of security, revealing the detail of discourses and institutional practices that frame what and who is to be protected and how. However, these discourses and institutional practices are not confined to the micropolitics of bureaucracy, nor are they confined to the state; they can also transcend boundaries, raising questions related to the location of politics, the limits of political community, and articulations of political subjectivity (Walker 1997). Again, as a number of authors have highlighted, security talk impacts on the political, reinforcing exceptional practices, and producing profound juridical and socio-political consequences (Burke 2001; Huysmans 2014).

To be clear, the remit of critique in security studies has always been framed by three inter-related, but distinct moves: to place the concept and the practice under scrutiny, to refuse their naturalisation, and to unravel their limits. Much of the area of research that comes under the label ‘critical security studies’ takes these moves as starting points. However, far from shifting the research ‘beyond security’ (Burke 2007), much of the ‘critical’ research agenda is focused on empirical investigations of ‘practices’ conducted in and through a complex array of institutions, directed at individuals and categories of population and at multiple sites, domestic and transnational. ¹

However, the aim of critique should also be focused on the usefulness or otherwise of a core programmatic concept for social science research. Such research might usefully reveal ‘performances’ and ‘narratives’ that take place in specific sites and by particular agents, identifiable or otherwise. The concept that is used to interpret and analyse performances and narratives at particular sites is by no means a given, though the tendency (especially in security studies of the ‘critical’ variety, surprisingly) is precisely to take for granted that practices of a particular kind come under the rubric of security. Take as an example the building of a fence aimed at deterring migrants in Calais seeking to enter Britain through the Channel Tunnel. This practice variously aims to ‘secure’ a border, but on the other hand it might seek to symbolically show to a sceptical domestic audience that action is being undertaken against migrants. At the same time it is entirely possible to interpret such a performative as one articulating racism and the politics of race. The analytical choice is obvious here: does the analyst interpret the building of a fence in Calais in terms of ‘security’, or in terms of the politics of race? If both, which concept is primary? The problem with security studies is that it always and without question places primacy with security, even though security is seemingly the concept that comes under scrutiny. The aim in this chapter is to argue that a critique should certainly unravel security as a discursive formation that comes to be taken for granted, both in academic and policy discourses. It should also reveal the functions of security talk and practice. However, in addition and much more importantly for this chapter, security should come under scrutiny as an analytical and ethical category.

The first section of the chapter considers what it means to provide ‘critique’ in the context of a research programme that focuses on security. The second section considers security as an analytic category that can potentially be useful in the explanation and interpretation of practices independently of how those practices are signified in discourse. Analytic concepts, even in critical writing, should have some distance from those taken for granted in the world of practice. Finally, the third section considers arguments that suggest security as an ethical category, one that could inform the creation of social or ecological goods and/or inform the processes that determine their distribution. In providing a critique of such arguments, the section addresses the challenge of the international as a distinct location of politics, which brings the postcolonial world into the frame and places the colonial rationality that underpins much security thinking in sharp relief. The epistemological and ontological shift to the international enables us to see this not as a realm simply of ‘orthodox thinking’, but as the location wherein the postcolonial emerges and makes its imprint. What we see emerging here is that the problems that face security as an analytic category are compounded when the concept is accrued ethical value. As will be argued, a critique of security as an ethical category does not deny either the experiential manifestations of situated threats or the requirements to variously respond to such threats. The point is to question the universalising move that comes with the conferment of legislative potential to a highly questionable concept. If security is a discursive formation that emerges from relations of power and exclusionary practices, then to universalise it as an ethical category fails to recognise the hierarchies of worth and inequalities of access governing judgements and decisions relating to goods and their distributions.

Critique and politics

What should critique mean in the context of security? This question is not so easily removed from the question of what constitutes critique in the context of politics, and specifically international politics. There has long been an assumption that questioning the orthodoxy of security studies, with its focus on military security, the state and international order – in other words, the neo-realist dependence on the notion of the ‘security dilemma’ – is adequate as a critique, or indeed as constituting a research programme called critical security studies. This particular critique opened out the remit of security studies and questioned the focus on the state; one might say it ‘liberalised’ security discourses so that concepts such as ‘societal security’, ‘human security’, food and energy security all can and have been conceived as ‘objects’ or even ‘referents’ of security. The implications were well understood by critical scholars; feminists and poststructuralists arguing against the militarisation of domains previously considered outside the remit of security (see, for example, Wibben 2011).

Perhaps the most over-used concept in security studies, now even surpassing the realists’ ‘security dilemma’, is ‘securitisation’, a concept that suggests a particular action, securitising; to interpellate an object into the domain of security (Waever 1995). The initial idea behind this move was to provide a well-grounded constructivist critique of realist discourses that placed primacy on the security of the state and on the state as the guarantor of security. The lens had shifted to the question of the ‘referent object’ of security – in other words, what could be securitised and what form of politics emerged from such securitization (Huysmans 2014). Relatedly, other questions emerged: who had the power to securitise, and under what conditions could de-securitisation take place? Irrespective of this rich trajectory of the epistemological framework, its implications have been far more profound than the original realist discourse it sought to displace, permeating the late modern government of all aspects of life, so that, for example, the concept of ‘societal security’ is now the prevalent framework through which Europe seeks to ‘protect’ and ‘govern’ its borders, not against a defined state but against non-European migrants, now well and truly securitised. ² The point here is that the securitisation model provides a critique of orthodox (read ‘realist’) approaches, but like its predecessor, it cannot escape its constitutive potentiality: security is no longer the remit of the state alone, but mobilises a diverse arena of practices enacted by an equally diverse set of agents located across a complex socio-political terrain where participation in security/securitisation generates its own capital (Bigo, 2013).

The critique suggested in this chapter can be applied as much to orthodox as to critical perspectives on security. Concepts that have emerged from the latter – for example, environmental security, energy security, food security – all suggest an ideological stake in the attachment of the term ‘security’ to its referent object, which naturalises the concept of security and takes it for granted variously as a ‘good thing’ or as an end-product that can be achieved. More importantly, the assumption is that the concept raises the stakes far beyond other alternatives; for example, the environmental impact of practices, energy efficiency, food sustainability and equality of access. Using the concept of ‘security’ might indeed raise the stakes, but it does so in a particular direction, just as these other alternatives do. Each has distinct political implications and presents particular and distinct political choices. Thus for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Introduction Imagining ethical security studies
• PART I Foundations of ethical security
• 1 Security: critique, analysis and ethics
• 2 Whose security? Ethics and the referent
• 3 World security: towards a ‘local’ research agenda
• 4 Posthuman security/ethics
• PART II Visions and debate
• 5 The promise of theories of just securitisation
• 6 Security, emancipation and the ethics of vulnerability
• 7 The promise and dangers of human security
• 8 Feminist care ethics and everyday insecurities
• 9 Pragmatism, practice and the value of security
• 10 The ethical sources of security cosmopolitanism
• 11 Ethics and ontological security
• 12 War, ethics and the individual
• 13 The decolonial option: toward an ethic of self-securing
• 14 Activism, resistance and security
• Conclusion Security as ethics: an orthogonal rotation from egoism to compassion
• Index