Towards a Beirut School of critical security studies

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis collectively written work offers a map of our ongoing efforts to work through critical approaches to the study of security and global politics with a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, engaging both experiences and voices of scholars from and working in the region. The unique contribution of the project, we suggest, is threefold. First, we reflect on our commitment to decolonial pedagogy, and how our collective experiences organising a Beirut-based summer school on critical security studies for graduate students and junior scholars living and working in West Asia, North Africa, and the Levant are shaping the project. Second, we affirm and extend the contributions that postcolonial international relations and critical approaches to security have made to scholarship on the region, and to our own work. Third, we take inspiration from the C.A.S.E. collective’s interest in ‘security traps’ and address how and to what extent security discourse may risk colonising other fields in the pursuit of interdisciplinary scholarship. The article concludes with a transition to individual reflections by the authors to highlight the plurality of approaches to the project.