From Camps to Conversations in Critical Security Studies

Abstract

Critical Approaches to International Security. By Karin M. Fierke Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007. 288 pp., $69.95 cloth (ISBN: 978-0-7456-3292-6); $26.95 paper (ISBN: 978-0-7456-3293-3). Twenty years after the ending of the Cold War, Critical Security Studies is coming of age. Particularly in Europe, there is a thriving debate on how the concept of security should be broadened in terms of referent object (if the state is insufficient, is the answer the human, the global, women, society or the environment?), in terms of issue areas or sectors (should the political, environmental, religion, critical infrastructures, and development be added to or replace military concerns?), and in terms of the modality of security (is it constituted through threats, dangers and exceptional measures, or everyday bureaucratic routines, or emancipation?). A central sociological feature of this debate has been an increasingly detailed set of subdivisions and distinctions. The standard summary of the widening–deepening of security post-1989 thus mentions at least Conventional Constructivism, Critical Constructivism, Poststructuralism, Critical Security Studies, the Copenhagen School, Feminism, the Paris School, Post-Colonialism, and Human Security. As long-time observers of the field such as Christine Sylvester (2007) and Ole Waever and Barry Buzan (2007) have noticed, there is a tendency in Security Studies to move into camps, zoom in on differences rather than commonalities, and to insulate one's own approach from the debates and literatures of others. Hence, there is a need for Critical Security Studies to cut across these divides and to move from the tyranny of small differences to the …