Critical Security Studies and World Politics

Abstract

Critical Security Studies and World Politics. Edited by Ken Booth. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2005. 336p. $62.00 cloth, $24.50 paper.Ken Booth has tasked himself and his contributors (particularly chapters by S. Smith, A. Linklater, H. Alker, and R. Wyn Jones) with sorting out the menagerie of theoretical criticisms often identified as either critical or in some way as alternatives to realism, including not only those that directly engage questions of security—“securitization” theorists and constructivists—but also the various “post” (modern, structural, positivist, colonial) theoretical critiques. Though on the whole the book rejects both realism and poststructuralism, the contributors do find some common ground with and among “critical,” “post,” and “alternative” writers on the question of improving the human condition (as an implicit goal of criticism), and applauds those who engage ethical issues to the extent that criticism is undertaken in order to reveal and confront, if not overcome, oppression.