Risk analysis – A field within security studies?

Abstract

The academic environments of risk analysis and security studies had hardly ‘spoken’ to one another until recently. The two fields of study were defined within different academic disciplines: security studies a matter for International Relations (IR), and risk studies a matter for sociology, economics and the natural sciences. Increased focus on catastrophic events (terrorism, climate change, etc.) seems to have given the fields of security studies and risk analysis a common empirical theme and highlighted the need for a common research agenda. This article explores the intersection between these two fields of study, as it investigates how the ‘old’ disciplinary debates on risk have been translated ‘into’ security studies — to predict, criticize or evaluate the current political practice of security. Such analysis provides a much-needed overview of the risk debates within security studies and brings out the limits of this debate in light of the broader and much more historically settled risk debates within sociology, economics and anthropology.