Review: Contemporary Security and Strategy

Abstract

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. …