Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research

Stefano Guzzini, Dietrich Jung, Stefano Guzzini, Dietrich Jung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134347230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines the development of peace research and explores its present challenges, focusing on the contribution made by the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute. The authors investigate how peace research relates to security studies and international relations, providing a comprehensive study of conceptual innovations and a discussion of secu

1 Copenhagen peace research

Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung

In recent decades, not only peace but also security has become a ‘contested’ concept. The military-focused and state-centred reading of traditional strategic studies has been put on the defence. The expansion of the research agenda by new security sectors – economic, environmental, cultural – and new security referents – societies, non-state actors, individuals – is challenging the ‘realism’ of the strategic gaze that has for so long dominated the field. This conceptual widening has led to an erosion of the walls that previously divided strategic studies and peace research. To some extent, the two fields have merged to become security studies, which covers a range from more traditional approaches (Walt 1991) to so-called ‘critical security studies’ (Krause and Williams 1997).

But this has not only been a conceptual development. There have also been major tendencies in world politics that have contributed to rendering this antagonism between strategic studies and peace research obsolete. On the one hand, the international system has faced a transformation regarding the forms of organised violence. A mixture of civil war, ethnic strife, organised crime and (trans)national terrorism could no longer be treated as purely local or domestic phenomena, but started to be linked with and, indeed, compete with the classical form of inter-state war. These forms of armed conflict, echoed by the ongoing talk about so-called ‘new wars’ (Kaldor 1999), made the former Third World the predominant theatre of war. Against the background of a rising global human rights discourse, the interventionist debate – under headings such as peaceenforcement/ making/building – again blurred the demarcation lines between peace and security studies. Finally, the identity of the European Union as a ‘security community’ indicates a remarkable departure from the classical meaning of security according to which states challenge each other’s sovereignty with military means. Thus, the process of European integration became the central empirical reference for some of the abovementioned conceptual innovations in security studies.

In this context, the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute (COPRI) developed into one of the leading European institutes in the field, despite its precarious origins and small size. Founded in 1985, it achieved a certain stability from 1988 under its first official director, Håkan Wiberg, who oversaw a handful of people on limited tenure contracts. Wiberg had two main principles for building COPRI: basic research and internationalisation. For him, to develop independent thought and to make it flourish needed a defence against external demands for short-term policy-oriented studies. But concomitantly, in order to avoid the development of a dormant and detached research institute, Wiberg insisted from the start on the necessity of internationalising COPRI, opening it to international competition. This commitment was certainly reinforced by the parallel hiring of Barry Buzan. As the ‘absentee landlord’ of the programme on ‘Non-Military Aspects of European Security’ (later, ‘European Security’), Buzan regularly flew in to chair a research seminar which socialised its members into a culture of peer-reviewed publication. At COPRI, we have all heard Håkan’s disdain towards ‘in-house publications’. Hence, COPRI’s output was to be continuously exposed and tested on the international ‘front’, where it eventually achieved a notoriety far beyond its national one, and this with, at most, a dozen full-time researchers.

In this book, scholars who have been either former researcher staff members or former board directors of the late Copenhagen Peace Research Institute use the opportunity of a Festschrift for Håkan Wiberg to take stock of the development of peace research and to explore some of its present challenges. For there is an irony of sorts showing up on COPRI’s CV. At the end of the Cold War, when it was finally established, it met a historical juncture when it seemed least needed. Now, at a time when Cold War rhetoric – of the early ‘roll-back’, not of the containment type – is again on the rise and multilateralism in decline, a governmental change in Denmark threatened to close it, and eventually merged it with other institutes under the auspices of the Danish Foreign Ministry. As the contributions to this volume testify, however, there are good reasons for scholars and practitioners in International Relations not to forget the lessons of ‘security studies’, which had come to include the insights of peace research.

Conceptual innovations of a latecomer

COPRI emerged at a particular historical and intellectual juncture. It arrived as a latecomer in the peace research community, when the antagonism with the establishment had to some extent receded, and it joined the theoretical debates in International Relations, which witnessed a major broadening and sophistication in the 1980s, further spurred by the end of the Cold War.

COPRI arrived on stage when both academic peace research and the Helsinki process had already seen their heyday. Peace research had emerged as a critique of both Cold War politics and the way security studies used to be conducted. Indeed, in the understanding of peace research, the two phenomena were linked (Senghaas 1972). On the one hand, classical security studies, with their focus on parameters of rational action as exemplified by deterrence theories, underplayed the role of structural factors, which might systematically favour an international arms race. On the other hand, peace research claimed that the Cold War was partly a result of the very mindset of scholarly observers and politicians alike: by assuming a permanent state of war, they were compelled to produce it in the first place.

With the turn towards détente policies, peace research increasingly lost this role of being a mere critique of practitioners and observers. It influenced politics when the social–democratic triad – Olof Palme/Willy Brandt/Bruno Kreisky – headed their respective governments in the 1970s. In particular, the German Ostpolitik and the Helsinki-process resulting from this had redefined the parameters of security in Europe. Furthermore, the process of European integration and the establishment of a European ‘security community’ anchored a different meaning of security, applied again in the enlargements of the EU.

Hence, in seeing some of its concepts and strategies appropriated, European peace research has been at least partly integrated into the professional reality of both academia and politics. Although they had certainly not lost all their antagonism, security studies and peace research have been affecting each other, at least in many parts of Europe. Whereas the first generation of European peace researchers fought to get on the agenda and to establish a presentable pedigree, the second generation was perhaps less radical – at least when compared with their northern neighbours (yet more comparable to German peace research). The younger generation could take some of the intellectual and political successes for granted and seek a forward-looking exchange with academic research. As a latecomer, COPRI had the typical features of a second generation, which, building on the old, was looking for new challenges.

At the same time, the discipline of International Relations was undergoing rather profound changes. After neorealism’s unsuccessful last-ditch attempt to contain the agenda of International Relations theory, IR’s theoretical debates opened up to the developments in social theory and the philosophy of knowledge. It developed an unprecedented richness and scope, from IR gender studies to international political economy. As a result, some of the classical ideas about, and issues of, war and peace shifted in their importance or meaning (cf. Senghaas and Zürn 1992). In particular, the sudden end of the Cold War begged a re-thinking of the dominant theories in International Relations (Lebow and Risse-Kappen 1995).

Hence, starting from the vantage point of a second generation during times of theoretical turmoil, COPRI had the opportunity for conceptual innovation by confronting European détente politics in the 1970s with academic debates, not of the early Cold War, but of the 1980s. Luckily for the development of COPRI, the initial research centre turned out not to be driven by short-term political concerns, but by more long-term and theory-informed research interests, which were to prove the stock from which innovative research developed. Rather than reacting to a political agenda already given, it was free to develop themes and confront them with international politics and academic discourse from the 1980s onwards.

This happened in both of the two original research programmes which got the early Center for Freds- og Konfliktforskning¹ going: ‘Non-Offensive Defence’ and ‘Non-Military Aspects of European Security’. ‘Non-Offensive Defence’ was initially headed by the late Anders Boserup, who had been not only a long-standing advocate of non-military as well as defensive defence (Boserup and Mack 1974; Boserup and Neild 1990), but also a theorist of war and conflict (Boserup 1990). Leading the same programme, and being the only scholar to be at the centre for its entire existence, Bjørn Møller worked on German security debates and other attempts to devise a different type of non-offensive military posture – an analysis which he later connected to neorealist theorising (Møller 1991, 1992, 1995).² The early days of the programme on ‘Non-Military Aspects of European Security’, initially headed by Egbert Jahn, also had a clear theoretical problematique (Jahn et al. 1987), which provided the fundament for the first ‘book’ published by the centre (Wæver et al. 1989). When Buzan took over, his reconceptualisation of security (Buzan 1983) met with the ideas of Ole Wæver (1989b, 1989c, 1995). Wæver, inspired by speech act theory, analysed the logic of Ostpolitik where political room for manoeuvre and possible change in the European theatre was achieved by successfully moving some items out of the national security agenda (‘desecuritisation’).

Contemporary security analysis: a short survey of COPRI’s research

COPRI always hosted a variety of scholarly directions and interests. It did not have only one single soul, even if it was the cradle of a ‘Copenhagen School’ of security studies and operated under the continuity of a benign patriarch, as Håkan Wiberg was often described.³ Although all researchers would relate themselves to security studies in a wider sense, some came from policy debates, some from IR theory, some emphasised conceptual and theoretical research, some analysed security in particular regions. And most did more than one of these at different points in time.

Yet, a short survey of COPRI research should probably start with the socalled ‘Copenhagen School’ of security studies (Buzan 1991; Buzan et al. 1998; Buzan and Wæver 2003; Wæver et al. 1993), since many researchers worked in or around it (for a discussion of the ‘school’, see inter alia Hansen 2000a, Huysmans 1998 and the exchange between McSweeney 1996, 1998 and Buzan and Wæver 1997). The school epitomises this scholarly equivalent of the ‘march through the institutions’ typical for a second generation. The main aim was not to establish a parallel analysis, but to influence the mainstream without making undue concessions to it. The central concept of security would be analysed, developed and re-inserted into the usual analyses – thus affecting them since this concept no longer fitted.

True, with ‘strategic studies’, now often re-baptised as ‘security studies’, moving to a less military understanding of the subject, peace research found an easier interlocutor. Yet, by and large, the mainstream still kept the basic objectivist logic of the previous studies. It made little difference whether the threat was new weaponry, rising immigration or water shortage. It was still a given threat out there, waiting to be detected by an ever-bigger cohort of security experts and ans...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Copenhagen peace research
• Part I Peace research and IR theory
• Part II Globalisation and contemporary security studies
• Part III Security analysis in the larger European context