My Critique is Bigger than Yours: Constituting Exclusions in Critical Security Studies

Abstract

Critical Security Studies proceeds from the premise that words are world-making, that is that the ways we think about security are constitutive of the worlds of security we analyse. Turned to conventional security studies and the practices of global politics, this critical insight has revealed the ways in which the exclusions that are the focus of this conference have been produced. Perhaps most notable in this regard has been David Campbell's work, showing how the theory and practice of security are an identity discourse producing both insides and outsides, but the production of excluded others is a theme that runs through the critical scholarship on security in the past decade or more. This article turns the critical security studies gaze on itself, to explore the field's own complicity in the production of exclusions. The article reads three important instances of critical security studies for the inclusions and exclusions they produce: Ken Booth's Theory of World Securitv, the epilogue to David Campbell's Writing Security, and the CASE Collective Manifesto. The article concludes by asking about the nature of the inclusions and exclusions these divisions produce and the politics which those exclusions, in turn, (re)produce.