Rethinking the Concept of Threat: Threat Studies and the Limits of Security

CONTEMPORARY SECURITY AND STRATEGY Craig A. Snyder 2nd edition New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 285PP, US $37.95 paper (ISBN 978-0230-52096-7)International security studies has experienced a surge in the last few years. Numerous volumes have been published that attempt to explain and understand the most recent trends. No doubt, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York have given international security studies new breath. The field is now preoccupied with international terrorism and American reactions to it, weapons of mass destruction, international interventions, and human rights. The Bush doctrine, which disregards international law and justifies American unilateralism, preemptive military action, and regime change is at the centre of an epic international debate.The upside of this scholarly trend is that it has given the study of international relations - usually dominated by theory - greater public exposure. By becoming more policy-oriented, security studies have become more accessible to policymakers and the general public. The field is in desperate need of books like Snyder's that provide succinct overviews of the major issues, theories, and approaches to current debates in international security. From this perspective, Snyder's book is excellent at summarizing the main trends in international security affairs and will serve as a good reference for advanced undergraduate studies.In 1989, the end of the Cold War's overarching security rationale introduced a new level of complexity to security studies. As Lynn-Jones points out correctly in chapter two, realism dominated the thinking in the field during the Cold War. The analytical framework that most scholars and academics used was (neo) realist theory that reflected the dominant view that the international system was bipolar and featured a continuous superpower competition for influence throughout the world. During security studies' golden age in the 1940s and 1950s, research in the American-dominated field was policy- oriented and focused on rational choice theory, technology, and the improvement of weaponry. However, the Vietnam War and the recognition of the limits of rational choice theory brought the golden age to an end. Moreover, the rise of international political economy as a competing subfield of international relations gained significant academic traction in this same period. Chapter two, one of the strongest in the book, nicely traces this evolution and, more specifically, examines realism's dominance in the field.After the Cold War, the field grew in new directions, including environmental security, societal security, and the study of migration, pandemics, terrorism, human security, and the trafficking of both people and drugs. These new dimensions in turn have yielded some significant and specialized scholarship and thus have contributed to the field's expansion. Along the way, they have also revolutionized theoretical and methodological approaches to international security. …

This book explores citizens’ perceptions and experiences of security threats in contemporary Britain, drawing on perspectives from International Security Studies and Political Psychology. The empirical chapters are based on twenty focus groups across six British cities and a large sample survey conducted between April and September 2012. These data are used to investigate the extent to which diverse publics share government framings of certain issues as the most pressing security threats, to assess the origins of perceptions of specific security threats ranging from terrorism to environmental degradation, to investigate what makes some people feel more threatened by these issues than others, to examine the effects of threats on other areas of politics such as harbouring stereotypes of minorities or prioritising public spending on border control over health, and to evaluate the effectiveness of government messages about security threats and attempts to change citizens’ behaviour as part of the risk management cycle. The book demonstrates widespread heterogeneity in perceptions of issues as security threats and in their origins, with implications for the extent to which shared understandings of threats are an attainable goal. The concluding chapter summarises the findings and discusses their implications for government and public opinion in the future. While this study focuses on the British case, its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods seeks to make broader theoretical and methodological contributions to scholarship produced in Political Science, International Relations, Political Psychology, and Security Studies.

International relations (IR) and security studies lack a coherent and developed body of inquiry on the issue of empire. The central focus of IR situates discussion of imperialism and hierarchy outside the core of the discipline, and on its fringes where scholars from other disciplines engage with IR and security studies literature. Similarly, security studies focus on major war between great powers, not “small wars” between the strong and the weak. The general neglect of empire and imperialism in IR and security studies can be attributed to Eurocentrism, of the unreflective assumption of the centrality of Europe and latterly the West in human affairs. In IR this often involves placing the great powers at the center of analysis, as the primary agents in determining the fate of peoples. Too easily occluded here are the myriad international relations of co-constitution, which together shape societies and polities in both the global North and South. In 1986, Michael Doyle published Empires, a thoughtful effort to systematize the historiography of empire and imperialism with social science concepts. It is rarely cited, much less discussed, in disciplinary literature. By contrast, the pair of articles he published in 1983 on Kant and the connection between liberalism and peace revived the democratic peace research program, which became a key pillar of the liberal challenge to realism in the 1990s and is widely debated. The reception of Doyle’s work is indicative of how imperialism can be present but really absent in IR and security studies.

Security studies is again reflecting on its origins and debating how best to study in/security. In this article, we interrogate the contemporary evolutionary narrative about (international) security studies. We unpack the myth’s components and argue that it restricts the empirical focus of (international) security studies, limits its analytical insights, and constrains the sorts of interlocutors with whom it engages. We then argue that these limitations can at least partially be remedied by examining the performance of identities and in/securities in everyday life. In order initially to establish the important similarities between (international) security studies and the everyday, we trace elements of the evolutionary myth in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel – which both stand in for, and are, the everyday in our analysis. We then argue that the Buffyverse offers a complex understanding of (identities and) in/security as a terrain of everyday theorizing, negotiation and contestation – what we call the ‘entanglement’ of in/security discourses – that overcomes the shortcomings of (international) security studies and its myth, providing insights fruitful for the study of in/security. In conclusion, we briefly draw out the implications of our analysis for potential directions in (international) security studies scholarship and pedagogy.

This book provides an assessment of the legacy, challenges and future directions of Critical Theory in the fields of International Relations and Security Studies.This book provides ‘first-hand’ interviews with some of the pioneers of Critical Theory in the fields of International Relations Theory and Security Studies. The interviews are combined innovatively with reflective essays to create an engaging and accessible discussion of the legacy and challenges of critical thinking. A unique forum that combines first-person discussion and secondary commentary on a variety of theoretical positions, the book explores in detail the interaction between different theories and approaches, including postcolonialism, feminism, and poststructuralism. Scholars from a variety of theoretical backgrounds reflect on the strengths and problems of critical theory, recasting the theoretical discussion about critical theory in the study of world politics and examining the future of the discipline.Both an introduction and an advanced engagement with theoretical developments over the past three decades, Critical Theory in International Relations and Security Studies will be of interest to students and scholars of International Politics, Security Studies and Philosophy.

Why do American perspectives of international relations (IR) continue to hold sway over an increasingly diverse discipline? What actually constitutes “Americanness” in IR? Who is considered “American” in IR? These are the central questions we explore in this essay. Drawing on cognitive and behavioral insights from social psychology, we argue that there is a distinct “American approach” to international relations and security studies and that this approach is a product of Western cognitive frames. We identify three factors that represent the American approach's hyper-Westernized framing: individualism, equality, and a preference for causal rather than contextual analysis, and a preference for egalitarianism. We argue that these are reinforced by two social identity processes—academic identity and national identity. The consequences of “being American” in IR and security studies suggest not only problems of attention and accuracy, but an inherent failure to appreciate that Western—and particularly, American—ways of seeing and valuing the world are not universal.

This article deals with four fundamental epistemological and ontological questions that are relevant for theories of legislation. The two epistemological questions are: ‘To what extent is the law's model of the world based on empirical knowledge, on common sense or on something else?’ and ‘Is there a fundamental discrepancy between what we think to know from empirical sciences and how we think from the internal legal point of view?’ In this paper I argue that in order to be able to answer these epistemological questions, we need to think about legal ontology. I argue that legislators not only create legal concepts, but also the entities that these concepts refer to. The two ontological questions to be discussed are: ‘What is the ontological nature of the objects, properties and relations that legislators create?’ I also argue that some legal objects are abstract, i.e. do not exist in space. Therefore the second ontological question to be discussed is: ‘Are abstract legal objects real, and if so in what sense?’ Only when we have discussed both ontological questions, we can answer the epistemological questions. My answer to the first epistemological question is that to the extent that law creates rather than discovers entities, the law's model of the world is in an important sense not based on empirical knowledge but rather precedes it. My answer to the second epistemological question is that there is a fundamental difference between the legal and the empirical scientific point of view because even though empirical scientists create concepts to talk about objects, properties, relations and the like, only the legal point of view also creates these entities themselves.

[full article and abstract in Lithuanian; abstract in English]
 This article examines the concept of environmental security and assesses its role in international, regional and national security studies. The study is aimed at providing conceptual „mental map“ of this field, thereby giving analytical background and gui­dance for comprehensive environmental security studies, which are known for the diversity of conceptual approaches, methods and levels of analysis.The fundamental question of environmental security – how various environmen­tal factors (climate, resources, etc.) and processes can affect the security of states and societies. It examines the relationships between different environmental issues, their effects and various security problems. Environment is considered as integrated part of a security concept together with the dimensions of economic, social, energy or information security. In order to identify the main academic schools of the environmental security, this article uses four key questions, theoretically defining the core of environmental secu­rity concept: (i) what makes an impact (source of threat); (ii) to whom/what an impact is made („victim”); (iii) what kind of impact is made (threat); (iv) how an impact is made (mechanisms and “channels”). On the basis of these theoretical dimensions, five main academic schools of environmental security are identified and examined by focusing on their features and findings, methodology and critical assessment:1. Resource scarcity school examines the nexus between scarcity of renewable resources (e.g. freshwater) and various internal and international conflicts (their incidence, intensity and dynamics).2. Resource abundance school explores the relations between non-renewa­ble resources (e.g. diamonds, oil, etc.) and internal conflicts, especially civil wars.3. Climate change school focuses on nature (and human) induced environ­mental change and its implications for international security, socioeconomic development and social disruptions in various regions.4. Human security school focuses on environmental impacts on individual and “people-centered” security, which is closely related with sustainable develo­pment (food security, health and education, welfare, gender issues, etc.).5. Natural disasters school examines the socioeconomic impacts of various disasters (earthquakes, floods, etc.) with specific focus on the vulnerability and adaptive capacity of various social systems (states, communities, etc.).Analysis shows that environmental dimension becomes increasingly impor­tant element of international relations and security studies. Comprehensive security assessment, especially in developing countries, is not possible without taking into account the social and economic impacts made by resources, climate change and natural disasters.Research by 1 and 2 schools, despite various methodological problems, demons­trates the impact resources have to various internal conflicts and social disorder. Scar­city of renewable resources generates certain social effects (for example, decreased productivity of agriculture, migration, weakening of state institutions etc.), which, in turn, can fuel different types of conflicts (ethnic conflicts, coup d’état, poverty conflicts, etc.). Abundance of non-renewable resources can have various direct (for example, direct financial source for rebel groups), as well as indirect (affecting eco­nomy, political regime, separatism, etc.) impact to conflicts.Specific conditions in the developing countries play a significant role in terms of explaining the nexus between resources and security. Developing countries are often dependent on climate-sensitive agriculture and suffer from poverty. As a re­sult, various climate change effects (3 school) often amplify mechanisms, which lead to insecurity and violence, such as political instability, weak governance structures, poor economic performance, etc. This is especially relevant for those regions where several “conflict constellations” (water and food shortage, regular natural disasters, rapid demographic change, etc.) are overlapping. Environmental change also has a certain impact to international security in terms of possible increase in the number of weak and fragile states, risks for global economic development, intensification of migration, territorial disputes, etc.Generally, environmental security research (apart from the 1 and 2 schools) is based on a broad approach to security, which is not limited to military conflicts and include various elements of sustainable development and economic welfare. On the one hand, it is understandable, as interdisciplinary character of environmental securi­ty requires complex approach to security.On the other hand, research based on the concept of human security (4 school) often equates security with economic and social well-being, thus blurring the line between security and development studies. It also undermines the assessment of the impact environmental issues can have to traditional security problems (conflicts, regi­me change, political instability, etc.). Finally, securization of various social problems (AIDS, migration, poverty, gender inequality, etc.) might be used for political purpo­ses by legitimizing the use of military force or restricting human rights.Various natural disasters (5 school) have a substantial destructive power, which not only causes substantial damage (humanitarian crises, destroyed infrastructure, etc.), but also has complex socioeconomic and political effects, which affect politi­cal regimes, critical economic sectors, social stability, etc. From this perspective, a key role is played by physical and socioeconomic characteristics of vulnerability and adaptive capacity, which can absorb negative effects of natural disasters and mitigate the risk.

Over the past two decades critical perspectives on the study of the European Union have blossomed in ways unimaginable from within the intellectual straitjacket of traditional political science during the Cold War era. The multitude of vistas provided by scholars working on European Union politics across the social sciences means that I can only provide a limited view of this vast wealth of critical perspectives. What becomes clear in writing this chapter is that EU politics, as found at EU Studies Associations across Europe and beyond, represents only a small portion of a now much broader and diverse field of social science. Despite over five decades of European integration to analyse and a huge array of attempts to explain these processes, the EU is now more diverse and less well understood than ever. This is not to say that those who study EU politics are searching for one explanation or model, simply that traditional approaches based on assumptions and techniques developed to analyse political systems during the Cold War look increasingly out of touch with contemporary EU politics. As EU referenda constantly remind us, many EU citizens (and non-citizens) are critical of the EU as a neoliberal political project, similar to the way in which traditional political science fails to challenge or change existing structures of power and injustice. As the two previous chapters have demonstrated, traditional approaches are forced to make many ceteris paribus assumptions in their analysis of the EU as an arena for political and social choice. In contrast, critical perspectives question the starting assumptions of political science by constantly raising these three questions – what is being studied? (ontological questions); what can we know? (epistemological questions); and how are we going to know? (methodological questions) (Hay 2002: 61–3). For critical scholarship, the answers to these questions are always political rather than neutral, as Jupille (2006) illustrates when he uncritically seeks to naturalize rational choice theory as a metatheory. Critical scholars understand that if politics is power, then political science involves the study of the processes and consequences of the 4

Postcolonialism is a relative newcomer to the debates on national security. In part this may be due to international security studies (ISS) problematic incorporation of the non-West and in association the insecurities that intrinsic to dominant national security tropes produced by the West in relation to postcolonial selves and states. A postcolonial approach in the study of international relations (IR) and international security utilizes an intersectional lens bringing into view race, gender, class, sexuality, and other axes of difference as constitutive of hierarchical and colonizing ordering of IR. The chapter has three main parts. It has drone warfare is problematized by showing how the victims of drone strikes become voiceless, faceless, and disembodied. The chapter shows how targeted killings are rationalized. It offers a postcolonial critique as an explanation for this rationalization. While drone warfare may be subject to critical scrutiny, the hierarchical ordering of IR that enables its use in the first place is dismissed and remains unaccounted for.

The ‘English school’ and ‘ International Security Studies ’ are names that are seldom found in the same sentence. Few if any people working within mainstream international security studies would think about the English school (ES) as a body of either theory or empirical work relevant to Security Studies. If they thought about it at all, they might well see the ES, with its concerns about order and legitimacy (Bull 1977; Clark 2005), as coming from the opposite, liberal, end of International Relations theory, than from the conflict/disorder realist end of the spectrum to which International Security Studies generally relates. The classic ES approach involves seeing International Relations as composed of three elements (Buzan 2004b: 6-10): international system (realism, Hobbes), international society (rationalism, Grotius) and world society (idealism or revolutionism, Kant). These elements are in constant interplay and the nature of international relations depends on the balance between them. In principle, this opens a bridge between the ES and International Security Studies via the realism element in ES theory. In practice, however, the great bulk of ES work has focused on international and world society, and on the rules, norms and institutions that underpin the social order of international society. Few within the ES have explicitly addressed the International Security Studies agenda, and the concept of security does not play much role in ES thinking. It is therefore reasonable to ask what a chapter on the English school is doing in a volume on International Security Studies. This chapter contains three answers to this question. The next section sets out the ES as a general theoretical framing for International Security Studies comparable with realism, liberalism and Marxism. The section after that reviews the existing ES literature on international security to show where the overlaps are, and the concluding section opens up some opportunities for how the relationship might be developed further.

ABSTRACTThe complexities which beset any attempts to ascribe a foundational ethic to matters of a political stripe are well known, and continue to provoke fierce debate within studies of international relations, geopolitics and security studies. Unsurprisingly, these questions have taken on crucial import within the sub-field of critical terrorism studies (CTS), as authors grapple with the range of counter-terrorism, counter-radicalisation and counter-extremism practices enacted by the Western state as part of an ongoing ‘War on Terror.’ And while much of this scholarship has been invaluable in problematizing the concept of ‘terrorism’ per se, normative questions have proven somewhat more elusive. Through a reading of the film Eye in the Sky, along with its take on the controversial counter-terrorism practice of targeted drone assassinations, this article reiterates the case for an ethical approach which takes radical difference as the basis for any engagement with the Other. Moreover, and following international relations authors of a poststructuralist lineage, it will be argued that supplementing Levinasian ethics with Derridean deconstruction can open up new and useful ways of approaching such seemingly intractable ethical conundrums.

This article provides an insight into a new type of war - a hybrid war, which manifest itself through actions of Russia on the area of Eastern Ukraine. The author makes an attempt to classify hybrid war among other armed conflicts defined in the study of international security and relations, simultaneously trying to determine characteristic features of this phenomenon. The author hypothesize that deeper research into the problem may result in the necessity of creating new evaluative framework other than the one used for the conventional conflicts.

Security Studies cover the security of referent objects, individuals, or states. Since the Second World War, the importance and depth of Security Studies have increased. In the post-cold war period, it was seen as a purely military field and was handled within the scope of the power policies of the states. In the post-Cold War period, it emerged as a multidimensional form. This research describes prominent approaches such as Realism, Liberalism, Peace, and Critical Security Studies and the most recent essential theories. The research underlines the three pillars of The Copenhagen School, which has contributed to the academic literature on securitization/desecuritization theory, regional security complex theory, and sectoral security approach in international security studies. In the securitization theory, any subject can be non-politicised, politicised, or elevated to a national security concern level. According to the Regional Security Complex pillar, standard points, security priorities, and security dynamics must coincide with establishing a region in the security realm. Lastly, the safety of human societies is affected by factors in five primary areas - military, political, economic, social, and environmental factors. The study concludes that the Copenhagen School occupies a significant position among security studies methodologies and offers a helpful framework for examining contemporary global security concerns.

Security studies has been slow to accept critical challenges to its problematic, and these have often been met with hostility and deliberately marginalized. This article responds to some of the critiques, and outlines the main elements of a critical engagement with security studies. It discusses the intellectual and `disciplining' power of rationalist and neorealist security studies scholarship, and highlights some of the practices that marginalize critical scholarship. It then overviews the rich and diverse threads of current research within `critical security studies', and emphasizes the central themes of its research agenda: how threats and appropriate responses are constructed; how the `objects' of security are constructed; and what the possibilities are for the transformation of `security dilemmas'. It summarizes the six central claims (concerning the constitution of the actors of world politics, its dynamic and constructed nature, the concomitant epistemological claims and methodological tools, and the purpose of theorizing) that are the hallmark of a critical approach to security studies. Finally, it clarifies what these claims do and do not entail for research and practice in international security studies.