Introduction: The Impunity Politics of Contested Security in Iraq

‘Critical security studies’ has come to occupy a prominent place within the lexicon of International Relations and security studies over the past two decades. While disagreement exists about the boundaries of this sub-discipline or indeed some of its central commitments, in this article we argue that we can indeed talk about a ‘critical security studies’ project orienting around three central themes. The first is a fundamental critique of traditional (realist) approaches to security; the second is a concern with the politics of security — the question of what security does politically; while the third is with the ethics of security — the question of what progressive practices look like regarding security. We suggest that it is the latter two of these concerns with the politics and ethics of security that ultimately define the ‘critical security studies’ project. Taking the so-called Welsh School and Copenhagen School frameworks as archetypal examples of ‘critical security studies’ (and its limits), in this article we argue that despite its promises, scholarship in this tradition has generally fallen short of providing us with a sophisticated, convincing account of either the politics or the ethics of security. At stake in the failure to provide such an account is the fundamental question of whether we need a ‘critical security studies’ at all.

Critical security studies

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

This study argues that the relations between the various identity groups that constitute Iraq and the developments experienced in the country after independence constitute a ‘crisis routine’ and that ‘habit through routines’ provides ontological security. In this context, the study explains ontological security in Iraq through the basic threat perceptions of social groups and the habits they have developed. It is aimed to contribute to the literature by offering a different perspective for the ontological security studies of the phenomenon of habituation, which is a concept based on psychology and sociology and rarely used in international relations. In this sense, the concept will be used within the framework of deepening the concept of routine. The study reveals that the routinization of crisis in Iraq creates a form of stability that maintains the identity of existing social actors and depends on the continuation of the crisis. Large-scale crises in Iraq, events affecting different identity groups and developments that disrupt the routine and cause uncertainty will be explained with the concept of crisis routine. The levels of habituation created by the crisis routine order in society produce various results in different segments of society. Habituation within the scope of identity will be exemplified by the ontological security perception of the Shiites, one of the country’s components. These dangerous habits also prevent the adoption of a common Iraqi identity.

Laura J. Shepherd, ed. (2013). Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 304 pp., $160.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68017-2), $54.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-68016-5). Mark B. Salter and Can E. Mutlu, eds. (2013). Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction . Routledge, London and New York, 256 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53539-7), $51.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-53540-3). Jacob L. Stump and Priya Dixit. (2013). Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods . Routledge, London and New York, 208 pp., $145.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-1-415-62046-8), $46.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-62047-5). Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner, eds. (2014). Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis . Routledge, London and New York, 230 pp., $150.00 hardcover (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71294-1), $44.95 paperback (ISBN-13 978-0-415-71295-8). “There is a point at which methods devour themselves” (Fanon 1952, 12). Almost 20 years since the publication of Krause and Williams's edited volume Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997), critical security studies (CSS) has reached a moment in which critiques of more traditional or mainstream modes of studying the politics of war, security, and violence are supplemented by a great deal of explicit attention to their methods and methodologies for doing so. The last few years have witnessed a sudden proliferation of textbooks on methods for critical security studies that have attempted to chart the field and provide guidance for students or newcomers on methods for conducting research consistent with its values and goals. The four volumes discussed in this review essay follow on the heels of numerous other textbooks that attempt to map the terrain of security studies, such as Hansen and Buzan (2009), Peoples and Vaughan-Williams’s edited compilation of key and illustrative works (2010), Jarvis and Holland (2014), and the second edition of Karin Fierke’s Critical Approaches to International Security (2015 [2007]). In recent years, the establishment of several journals, including Critical Security Studies and particularly Security Dialogue , as well as Journal of Global Security Studies (an ISA journal) and European Journal of International Security (a BISA journal), that are dedicated to pluralistic studies of security have also suggested the popularity and continued innovation of diverse strands of scholarship that can be grouped as “critical security studies.” Furthermore, the selection of “Methods, Methodologies, and Innovation” to frame the 2014 Millennium conference and subsequent special issue also suggests a great deal of both interest and tension around the question of method and methodology for critical, interpretative, and pluralistic scholars, including the question of whether or not issues of “method” should be … lw487{at}cam.ac.uk

From a critical security studies perspective – and non-traditional security studies more broadly – is the concept of human security something which should be taken seriously? Does human security have anything significant to offer security studies? Both human security and critical security studies challenge the state-centric orthodoxy of conventional international security, based upon military defence of territory against ‘external’ threats. Both also challenge neorealist scholarship, and involve broadening and deepening the security agenda. Yet critical security studies have not engaged substantively with human security as a distinct approach to non-traditional security. This article explores the relationship between human security and critical security studies and considers why human security arguments – which privilege the individual as the referent of security analysis and seek to directly influence policy in this regard – have not made a significant impact in critical security studies. The article suggests a number of ways in which critical and human security studies might engage. In particular, it suggests that human security scholarship must go beyond its (mostly) uncritical conceptual underpinnings if it is to make a lasting impact upon security studies, and this might be envisioned as Critical Human Security Studies (CHSS).

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, this article adopts the idea of a ‘rhizomatic state’ to define the struggle for impunity at the heart of contested security in Iraq. This denotes a form of decentered political system where impunity arises from radical instability in the state and the disordering of its political struggles. This perspective builds on the notion of impunity politics outlined in this Special Issue, defining a sphere of security where exemption from law and punishment reigns. This article offers a Deleuzian reading that develops in three directions: first, by decentering human subjects and rationalist agencies in favor of attention to a more structural operation of power in Iraq; second, by moving away from linear and hierarchic conceptions of power and authority to show how impunity in Iraq functions within a decentered (rhizomatic) political system; third, by thinking of impunity via the law as disrupting the Iraqi state’s authority and disordering its political struggles.

This article demonstrates the nuances of the critical security studies literature and argues for the benefits of employing a (modified) post-structuralist approach to security. The proposed “modification” is necessary to avoid the inclination within post-structural approaches to conflate epistemological commitments with ontological ones. Using Stephen K. White's arguments for the viability of “weak ontologies,” I demonstrate that a critical post-structuralist approach need not be anathema to the making of claims, nor should it be seen as suffering from a paralytic disjuncture from the “real world.” Two important points that counter familiar critiques leveled against a critical post-structuralist security studies are then introduced. First, acts of re-construction can be critical in the most fundamental ontological sense, though they need not employ the “strong ontologies” that appeal unproblematically to external grounds to make their claims. Second, acts of re-construction can emanate directly from post-structuralist commitments, where deconstruction is both a first step and an ethic to bring to engagement with the status quo. Hence, maintaining critical commitments can mean being reflexive about the indeterminacy of the claims that are ultimately made while being accountable to them.

This study dwells on the quest for a critical security perspective on international migration. Therefore, how international migration could be perceived through critical security studies is the main research question of this study. Critical Security Studies (CSS) or Welsh School of security studies emerged after Robert Cox’s debate between problem-solving and critical theories, especially after the 1990s. In this respect, CSS focus on questioning the mainstream theories and their interpretation of security. Instead of accepting the state as the referent object, critical security studies provide other elements that may be threatened, so that related to the security. On the one hand, CSS is, therefore, critical against the traditional approaches to security as realism and liberalism. Securitization, on the other hand, as Copenhagen School provided a speech act to put an issue into the field of security. International migration is one of the accurate examples of securitization. In this study, we employed CSS and securitization perspectives to international migration to understand how international migration could be assessed through critical theories.

The field of critical environmental security (CES) has been contributed to by a variety of Canadian and Canada-based scholars, and has engaged with several themes of particular significance to the political and territorial space of the Canadian state. Despite this, CES has been largely absent from the emergence of a self-consciously Canadian critical security studies (CCSS). This paper attempts to bridge these two fields, arguing that CCSS cannot be complete without taking account of the central themes of CES. The paper is organized in three main sections. First, it investigates the conceptual terrain of CES, situating it within several key turns and texts in international and Canadian scholarship. Second, it argues that CES can be characterized by inquiry into the security-related aspects of five overlapping domains: anthropogenic climate change; industry, natural resource extraction, and pollution; the lived insecurities of indigenous peoples and other non-dominant groups; the Arctic region where these three themes most notably and acutely overlap; and re-theorizations of the established literature on the environment, violence, and social conflict. The paper maps these five-issue areas within the past two decades of Canadian scholarship, suggesting that the development of CES has been marginal to the disciplinary cores of political science, international relations, and security studies. Third, it concludes that there is nonetheless a discernible field of CES that has grown within the disciplinary and publishing interstices of Canadian academia. As a result, it can be said that there is a particular heterogeneous, syncretic, and emancipatory domain of CES in Canada, and that it should form a central pillar of any understanding of a particularly Canadian approach to critical security studies.

The research aims to reveal the reasons for the shortages of water in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq, to know the extent to which neighboring countries contribute to Iraq's water scarcity, and to identify the possibility of applying water governance standards in Iraq. The importance of the research lies in the fact that it addresses a contemporary problem of water insecurity and the exploitation of Iraq's share of the water resources of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers by neighboring countries through the construction of dams and projects and changing the course of the tributary rivers within their territories bypassing international agreements. The research consists of two main sections, as well as the introduction and conclusion, in which we mention the most important conclusions and a set of recommendations. The first section included governance and water security (conceptual framework), while the second one clarified the paths of water governance to achieve water security in Iraq. One of the most significant conclusions reached by the research is that Iraq cannot change its geographical location or choose its surroundings, but it can exploit its strengths to obtain its rights to water by overcoming the obstacles and challenges that stand in the way of water.

Publics are an undertheorised and somewhat marginal presence in critical security studies. This article argues that a better understanding of publics can advance our understanding of the governance as well as the contestation of security regimes and practices. We develop this argument in three parts. First, we discuss the marginality of publics in critical security studies while highlighting those limited instances where publics have been engaged. Second, we direct attention to emerging research on publics in cognate disciplines, focusing in particular on the literature about material publics. We distil from this work some useful lessons for security studies. In a final section we suggest two research moves for promoting a stronger focus on publics within critical security studies. We conclude that a focus on material publics can furnish security studies with a better understanding of the phenomenon of politics.

This chapter provides a partial history of the label ‘Critical Security Studies’ and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It considers the primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. It looks at the 1994 conference held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies, which spawned a book called Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997b), and Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), which was published to serve as a relatively comprehensive statement of ‘securitization studies’, or the Copenhagen School. The chapter argues that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an ‘ethos of critique’ in either the study or refusal of security. Finally, it examines Ken Booth’s views on poststructuralism as part of a broad Critical Security Studies.

This chapter provides a partial history of the label ‘Critical Security Studies’ and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It considers the primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. It looks at the 1994 conference held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies, which spawned a book called Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997b), and Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), which was published to serve as a relatively comprehensive statement of ‘securitization studies’, or the Copenhagen School. The chapter argues that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an ‘ethos of critique’ in either the study or refusal of security. Finally, it examines Ken Booth’s views on poststructuralism as part of a broad Critical Security Studies.

This Thematic Issue seeks to explore critical perspectives of an international nature on social innovation (SI), social enterprise (SE) and/or social solidarity economy (SSE). The aim is to examine the grand narrative, explore the ontological assumptions of the field, challenge the normative and present alternatives that draw attention to political economy, critical theory and critical management studies. Critical perspectives emerged in social innovation (SI) literature as a concerted effort sometime in 2008. A few voices sounded from the edges of the field much earlier. Ash Amin, Professor of Geography at Durham University, inspected the new favourite of public policy way back in 2002, discarded it as a "a poor substitute for a welfare state" and never returned to the subject. There were heated debates that challenged the grand narrative of SI at the International Social Innovation Research Conferences (ISIRC) (once called the Social Enterprise Research Conference before becoming ISIRC with the involvement of the social innovation theme from Skoll Centre). The Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN) conferences picked away at the promise of unlimited performance and achievement of the upstart SE in a mature voluntary and charity network (