Critical Security Studies

An Introduction

Columba Peoples, Nick Vaughan-Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000227376
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

This textbook introduces students to the sub-field of critical security studies through a detailed yet accessible survey of emerging theories and practices. This third edition contains two new chapters – on 'Ontological security' and '(In)Security and the everyday' – and has been fully revised and updated.

Written in an accessible and clear manner, Critical Security Studies:

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• offers a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to critical security studies

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• locates critical security studies within the broader context of social and political theory

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• evaluates fundamental theoretical positions in critical security studies against a backdrop of new security challenges.

The book is divided into two main parts. Part I, 'Approaches', surveys the newly extended and contested theoretical terrain of critical security studies: constructivist theories, Critical Theory, feminist and gender approaches, postcolonial perspectives, poststructuralism and International Political Sociology, Ontological security, and securitisation theory. Part II, 'Issues', examines how these various theoretical approaches have been put to work in critical considerations of environmental and planetary security; health, human security and development; information, technology and warfare; migration and border security; (in)security and the everyday; and terror, risk and resilience. The historical and geographical scope of the book is deliberately broad and each of the chapters in Part II concretely illustrates one or more of the approaches discussed in Part I, with clear internal referencing allowing the text to act as a holistic learning tool for students.

This book is essential reading for upper level students of critical security studies, and an important resource for students of international/global security, political theory and international relations.

Part I

Approaches

1 Constructivist theories

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of constructivist theories, their application in the study of security and their relation to the field of critical security studies. Rather than portraying ‘constructivism’ as monolithic, the chapter instead makes the case that social constructivist theories of security are best thought of as a plurality of approaches that converge around some key assumptions but diverge on others. Although they might be argued to share, at a minimum, the assumption that security and insecurity should be conceived of as socially constructed, variants of constructivism differ on the precise implications and significance of that claim. The chapter reviews these issues, with a particular focus on the contributions of (critical) constructivist theories to (critical) security studies.

Introduction

Social constructivist (or now simply referred to as constructivist) theories have become an established point of reference in the disciplinary study of both international relations (IR) and security over the past two decades in particular. As the use of ‘theories' in the plural above already alludes to, though, there is a strong case to be made for distinguishing between different variants of constructivist theories. There is even an argument that a focus on social construction within the study of security is not simply limited to constructivist theories. To try and help make sense of these various issues and distinctions, this chapter begins with a general discussion of the principle of social construction, focusing initially in particular on one of the original formulations of this idea in the work of Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1991 [1966]). Although not alone in emphasising the significance of social construction, Berger and Luckmann's work remains a touchstone in this regard and introduces a theoretical lexicon that arguably still remains foundational to later variants of constructivist theories in IR and security studies. The substantive sections of the chapter then go on to outline and discuss how different variants of constructivist theories interpret and apply the notion of social construction. The particular emphasis here is on the distinguishing features of ‘conventional constructivism’ on the one hand, which arguably seeks to refine rather than fundamentally challenge key predicates of traditional security studies, and ‘critical constructivism’ on the other hand, which poses more avowedly and self-consciously ‘critical’ questions on the social construction of threats, dangers and insecurities.

On the social construction of reality

So what is social construction? Or, to put that question differently, what is it that characterises ‘constructivist’ or ‘social constructivist’ theories such that we can speak of these as relatively distinct from other theoretical approaches? At the very broadest level of categorisation, it can be argued that constructivist theories share the contention that ‘human reality’ is ‘socially constructed reality’ (Berger and Luckmann 1991 [1966]: 210–211). Those terms come from Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Berger and Luckmann's treatise takes as its main focus the ways in which ‘the intersubjective commonsense world is constructed’ (1991 [1966]: 34, emphasis in original). By this Berger and Luckmann mean that humans are, fundamentally, social beings: that is, humans exist (or more accurately coexist) within societies. How we come to apprehend the world around us, Berger and Luckmann argue, is influenced by pre-existing social conventions and institutions and is filtered and mediated via pre-existing frameworks for learning and understanding, most notably language.

By claiming that human reality is socially constructed, Berger and Luckmann do not seek to deny that all members of a social group are at the same time different and distinct as individuals; nor is the claim intended to imply that human reality is completely free or independent of humans' biological being or their surrounding physical environment. Instead Berger and Luckmann argue that the formation of individuals' identities as such is crucially forged out of an individual's engagement with the social world into which they are born. And when individuals begin to adopt, consciously and unconsciously, the norms and conventions of the social world that they engage with, they undergo a process of ‘socialisation’. Our notions of individual self-identity, Berger and Luckmann argue, thus emerge out of complex processes of intersubjective interaction and subtle and on-going processes of identity formation. In this context, the term ‘intersubjective’ means that these processes happen in the communication and interaction between different ‘subjects' or individuals, each with their own constantly developing sense of self-identity (see Box 1.1).

BOX 1.1

Berger and Luckmann on ‘The reality of everyday life’

The reality of everyday life is organised around the ‘here’ of my body and the ‘now’ of my present. This ‘here and now’ is the focus of my attention to everyday life […] [However] The reality of everyday life further presents itself to me as an intersubjective world, a world that I share with others. […] Indeed, I cannot exist in everyday life without continually interacting and communicating with others […] I also know, of course, that the others have a perspective on this world that is not identical with mine. My ‘here’ is their ‘there’. My ‘now’ does not fully overlap with theirs. My projects differ from and may even conflict with theirs. All the same, I know that I live with them in a common world. Most importantly, I know there is an ongoing correspondence between my meanings and their meanings in this world, that we share a common sense about its reality.

(Abridged from Berger and Luckmann 1991 [1966]: 36–37; emphases in original)

Berger and Luckmann do not deny that humans have certain biological drives and needs and that, for example, certain physical features of the natural environment exist. However, they take issue with the idea that these drives and physical features might determine the whole of humans' reality. You, as reader, might hypothetically feel pangs of hunger reading this text having not eaten since breakfast; but the question of what you ‘want’ to eat for lunch is not simply based on a biological need to eat. All sorts of other factors come into play: social conventions as to when lunch is eaten as distinct from other meals; as to what is ‘appropriate’ to eat for lunch (ice-cream alone, for example, might be deemed by some to be inappropriate as a lunch meal, even if a counter claim could be made that ice-cream's nutritional value would provide sufficient sustenance…). The decision of where you might go to buy lunch is not simply an issue of how far to walk and the impeding terrain (bodily and geographical factors) but of how much to you wish to pay, and when you need to get back to work in order to meet a deadline. Of the latter, financial systems that establish rates of pay, the value of particular foodstuffs, and the nature of academic deadlines can be argued to be products of social, human-made, systems as opposed to naturally occurring physical or biological features. These would all instead fall into the category of what Berger and Luckmann term as ‘socio-cultural determinants', rather than biological or physical determinants, of how humans interact with each other, and act in, the world around them (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1991 [1966]: 66–67).

Security: what states make of it?

What relevance, you might be asking, does reflecting on such apparently mundane aspects of everyday life (a technique that is used recurrently by Berger and Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality) have to the study of security? Taken as a whole, constructivist approaches to the study of security might be said to be underpinned by two key assumptions: first the observation that ‘security’ and ‘insecurity’ are categorisations that emerge out of and are applied to the realm of human activities; and second, following on from this, that many of the concepts, processes and dynamics identified by Berger and Luckmann – the social construction of reality, intersubjectivity, identity formation and socialisation – are as applicable to the study of security as they are to the study of any realm of social life.

More than this, those adopting or advocating a constructivist theoretical approach to the study of security would go further and argue that the study of security is not simply an area where the insights of social constructivism can be applied but where they should be applied. In particular, critics of ‘mainstream’ or ‘traditional’ approaches to the study of international security have argued that such approaches underestimate, marginalise or simply miss the crucial importance of social construction (Wendt 1995). Thus, for example, the editor of a key collection of essays that began to take seriously the ‘sociocultural determinants' of national and international security cast that volume's purposes as part of a broader effort to ‘[make] problematic the state interests that predominant explanations of national security often take for granted […] State interests do not exist to be “discovered” by self-interested, rational actors. Interests are constructed through a process of social interaction’ (Katzenstein 1996a: 1; 2). Katzenstein's volume, The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, advocated that ‘sociological approaches' could be used to generate new insights on the roles of culture, norms and identity formation in relation to ‘traditional’ security issue areas such as the proliferation of conventional weapons, national military doctrines, deterrence and military alliances, using ‘culture’ as ‘a broad label that denotes collective models of nation-state authority or identity, carried by custom or law’ (Katzenstein 1996a: 6). Contributing authors made the argument that, even in relation to ‘hard cases' of military security issues, mainstream (neo)realist and (neo)liberal theoretical approaches to security in particular tended to miss key pieces of ‘puzzles' in world politics such as the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union, which both (neo)realism and (neo)liberalism are both frequently accused of failing to either foresee or adequately account for (Katzenstein 1996a: 3; 1996b: 499). Mainstream approaches instead tended to predict either the continuation of the Cold War or its violent conclusion in nuclear war. Relatedly, the continuance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after the Soviet Union's demise seemed to fundamentally contradict the expectation of traditional alliance theory that military alliances dissolve in the absence of a common threat (cf. Ciută 2002; Gheciu 2005; Risse-Kappen 1996; Williams and Neumann 2002). In short, mainstream approaches to the study of international security appeared to be at a loss to explain issues and developments – the trajectory of the Cold War and the nature of military alliances – that had somewhat ironically been their central concern for several decades.

In the wake of mainstream security studies' apparent difficulties in explaining major changes in world politics – particularly the Cold War's end – multiple scholars began to advocate variants of constructivism as a superior way of understanding key issues in the study of international security. Thus, for example, Alexander Wendt argues that the ‘security dilemma’, which arguably remains at the core of ‘mainstream’ or ‘traditional’ approaches to the study of international security, can only be truly understood via a constructivist framework of analysis. The concept of the security dilemma, as set out originally in the work of realist IR scholars such as John Herz and Robert Jervis, argues that in the realm of international politics a state will necessarily compete to preserve its own existence as its principal objective, but that in doing so it will inadvertently increase the insecurity of other states in the international system (Herz 1950; Jervis 1978; for an extended discussion see Booth and Wheeler 2007). According to the logic of the security dilemma, particularly as read and rendered by neorealist approaches to the study of international politics, states exists in a condition of ‘anarchy’: that is, states are each sovereign powers within their own territorial boundaries, but exist without any overarching sovereign power above them. Traditional approaches to security, though diverse in character, thus tend to hold the baseline proposition that world politics is international politics: that is, it occurs ‘between’ separate nation-states.

Such conditions, it is argued, give rise to the security dilemma as an endemic feature of world politics. Without any external government or guarantor for protection, states are forced to look to their own means first in order to assure their protection and their self-preservation. This necessarily means, according to the neorealist theorist Kenneth Waltz, that the contemporary international system is a ‘self-help’ system (Waltz 1979): states have to be self-reliant in their own quest for national self-preservation by investing in the military means to protect themselves. The problem this gives rise to, according to the logic of the security dilemma, is that in seeking to protect their territorial security, states may inadvertently create greater insecurity for others. Material military capabilities – land armies, tanks, navies, air-forces, nuclear weapons and so on – can be used for offensive purposes as well as self-protection. Scholars such as Herz and Jervis saw this as potentially problematic, for one state could never be entirely certain that a military build-up by another was intended purely for defensive purposes. To guard against the possibility that such a build-up may actually be geared towards invasion or military expansion, the logical option would be for all states to likewise arm themselves as far as possible as a preventive measure. This in turn would lead to the same and reciprocal insecurities for other states, leading in the worst cases to cyclical and potentially disastrous arms races. The ‘dilemma’ of the security dilemma, then, is argued to be the fact that states in world politics are faced with (only) two unappealing choices: either to arm for self-defence but risk creating cyclical insecurities and having to engage in cyclical arms racing; or remain unarmed, but then be continually at the mercy of predatory states that might to choose to arm and invade.

Wendt, though agreeing with the existence of the security dilemma dynamic as a potential feature of international politics, argues that traditional approaches and (neo)realists in particular crucially misunderstand the nature of security dilemmas. According to Wendt, a security dilemma is a ‘social structure composed of intersubjective understandings in which states are so distrustful that they make worst-case assumptions about each others' intentions, and as a result define their interests in self-help terms' (Wendt 1995: 73, emphases added). Although Wendt agrees on the existence of security dilemmas between states, his qualifiers make important distinctions from traditional understandings. Wendt, in a manner akin to Berger and Luckmann, does not deny the existence of material (military) capabilities. But, he contends, ‘material capabilities as such explain nothing; their effects presuppose structures of shared knowledge, which vary and which are not reducible to capabilities' (Wendt 1995: 73). Wendt famously illustrates this point by noting that ‘500 British nuclear weapons are less threatening to the United States than 5 North Korean nuclear weapons, because the British are friends of the United States and the North Koreans are not, and amity or enmity is a function of shared understandings' (Wendt 1995: 73). Although in Wendt's illustration the material capability of the British is greater than that of the North...