Routledge Critical Security Studies – serie

This volume provides researchers and students with a discussion of a broad range of methods and their practical application to the study of non-state actors in international security.All researchers face the same challenge, not only must they identify a suitable method for analysing their research question, they must also apply it. This volume prepares students and scholars for the key challenges they confront when using social-science methods in their own research. To bridge the gap between knowing methods and actually employing them, the book not only introduces a broad range of interpretive and explanatory methods, it also discusses their practical application. Contributors reflect on how they have used methods, or combinations of methods, such as narrative analysis, interviews, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), case studies, experiments or participant observation in their own research on non-state actors in international security. Moreover, experts on the relevant methods discuss these applications as well as the merits and limitations of the various methods in use. Research on non-state actors in international security provides ample challenges and opportunities to probe different methodological approaches. It is thus particularly instructive for students and scholars seeking insights on how to best use particular methods for their research projects in International Relations (IR), security studies and neighbouring disciplines. It also offers an innovative laboratory for developing new research techniques and engaging in unconventional combinations of methods.This book will be of much interest to students of non-state security actors such as private military and security companies, research methods, security studies and International Relations in general.

This book seeks to interrogate how contemporary policy issues become ‘securitized’ and, furthermore, what the implications of this process are. A generation after the introduction of the concept of securitization to the security studies field, this book engages with how securitization and desecuritization ‘works’ within and across a wide range of security domains including terrorism and counter-terrorism, climate change, sexual and gender-based violence, inter-state and intra-state conflict, identity, and memory in various geographic and social contexts. Blending theory and application, the contributors to this volume – drawn from different disciplinary, ontological, and geographic ‘spaces’ – orient their investigations around three common analytical objectives: revealing deficiencies in and through application(s) of securitization; considering securitization through speech-acts and discourse as well as other mechanisms; and exposing latent orthodoxies embedded in securitization research. The volume demonstrates the dynamic and elastic quality of securitization and desecuritization as concepts that bear explanatory fruit when applied across a wide range of security issues, actors, and audiences. It also reveals the deficiencies in restricting securitization research to an overly narrow set of issues, actors, and mechanisms. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of critical security studies, international security, and International Relations.Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book offers a critical inquiry into the framing of health and disease as a security issue. In particular, the book examines what happens in the United Nations when the ostensibly ‘low’ politics of global health meet the ‘high’ politics of security, and when the logic of security comes to shape global health initiatives. It offers a critical re-assessment of efforts in the United Nations system to position HIV as a security threat with the hope that this would attract greater attention and resources for the global HIV response. The book advances securitization theory by presenting a new framework for studying HIV as a policy process, uniting several theoretical strands into a single, powerful model for empirical application. It uses this model to draw attention to important, understudied aspects of HIV securitization, including the role played by discourses about Africa, and the evolution of ideas about HIV and security as actors learned over time. On the basis of this empirically grounded assessment of how securitization works as a theory and a political strategy, the book suggests that securitization is inherently limited, and perhaps dangerous, as a strategy for ‘securing’ social change. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, global health, development studies, and IR in general.

This book seeks to interrogate how contemporary policy issues become ‘securitized’ and, furthermore, what the implications of this process are. A generation after the introduction of the concept of securitization to the security studies field, this book engages with how securitization and desecuritization ‘works’ within and across a wide range of security domains including terrorism and counter-terrorism, climate change, sexual and gender-based violence, inter-state and intra-state conflict, identity, and memory in various geographic and social contexts. Blending theory and application, the contributors to this volume – drawn from different disciplinary, ontological, and geographic ‘spaces’ – orient their investigations around three common analytical objectives: revealing deficiencies in and through application(s) of securitization; considering securitization through speech-acts and discourse as well as other mechanisms; and exposing latent orthodoxies embedded in securitization research. The volume demonstrates the dynamic and elastic quality of securitization and desecuritization as concepts that bear explanatory fruit when applied across a wide range of security issues, actors, and audiences. It also reveals the deficiencies in restricting securitization research to an overly narrow set of issues, actors, and mechanisms. This volume will be of great interest to scholars of critical security studies, international security, and International Relations.Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license https://www.routledge.com/Securitization-Revisited-Contemporary-Applications-and-Insights/Butler/p/book/9780367150372

The challenges that space poses for political theory are profound. Yet until now, the exploration and utilization of space has generally reflected – but not challenged – the political patterns and impulses which characterized twentieth-century politics and International Relations. This edited volume analyses a number of controversial policies, and contentious strategies which have promoted space activities under the rubric of exploration and innovation, militarization and weaponization, colonization and commercialization. It places these policies and strategies in broader theoretical perspective in two key ways. Firstly, it engages in a reading of the discourses of space activities: exposing their meaning-producing practices; uncovering the narratives which convey certain space strategies as desirable, inevitable and seamless. Secondly, the essays suggest ways of understanding, and critically engaging with, the effects of particular space policies. The essays here seek to ‘bring back space’ into the realm of International Relations discourse, from which it has been largely removed, marginalized and silenced. The various chapters do this by highlighting how activities in outer space are always connected to earth-bound practices and performances of the every day. Securing Outer Space will be of great interest to students of space power, critical security studies and IR theory.

This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective.Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist security studies and security studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics. This book will be of interest to all students of critical security studies, gender studies and International Relations in general.Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a Phd in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California and is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007)

This book defines the relationship between gender and international security, analyzing and critiquing international security theory and practice from a gendered perspective.Gender issues have an important place in the international security landscape, but have been neglected both in the theory and practice of international security. The passage and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (on Security Council operations), the integration of gender concerns into peacekeeping, the management of refugees, post-conflict disarmament and reintegration and protection for non-combatants in times of war shows the increasing importance of gender sensitivity for actors on all fronts in global security. This book aims to improve the quality and quantity of conversations between feminist security studies and security studies more generally, in order to demonstrate the importance of gender analysis to the study of international security, and to expand the feminist research program in Security Studies. The chapters included in this book not only challenge the assumed irrelevance of gender, they argue that gender is not a subsection of security studies to be compartmentalized or briefly considered as a side issue. Rather, the contributors argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security. They do so by critiquing and reconstructing key concepts of and theories in international security, by looking for the increasingly complex roles women play as security actors, and by looking at various contemporary security issues through gendered lenses. Together, these chapters make the case that accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship of international security cannot be produced without taking account of women’s presence in or the gendering of world politics. This book will be of interest to all students of critical security studies, gender studies and International Relations in general.Laura Sjoberg is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. She has a Phd in International Relations and Gender Studies from the University of Southern California and is the author of Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq (2006) and, with Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (2007)

In recent years debates about the nature and future of the West have been high on the political agenda. Prognoses of the West’s imminent demise have been countered by those arguing for its continued relevance, or those arguing that while the West will survive its nature, and the balance of power between its constituent units, is transforming.This book argues that understanding contemporary developments requires subjecting the very idea of the West to critical scrutiny and in particular asking what kind of concept it actually is. Locating the West as a discursive concept the book argues attempts to save, fix or reclaim the meaning of the West are illustrative of political agendas rather than indicative of accurate claims about the essential nature of the West. In contrast, the book argues that as a concept the West is impregnated with various discursive legacies, the most embedded of which are those of a civilisational, modern and political West. However, while attempts to define the West’s essence are therefore doomed to fail, given the concept’s historical and discursive flexibility, such attempts reaffirm the legitimising role which claims to the West continue to perform.Beyond this, the book challenges traditional genealogies of the West, which overwhelmingly depict the West as an inside-out concept. In contrast, the book argues that historically outsiders have played an important role in defining the nature of the West and constituting it as a political subject; processes that remain evident today.This book will particularly interest students of critical security studies, critical geopolitics, European politics, American politics and IR theory.

This book aims to engage with contemporary security discourses from a critical perspective. It argues that rather than being a radical, analytical outlook, much critical security theory fails to fulfil its promise to pose a challenge to contemporary power relations.In general, 'critical security' theories and dialogues are understood to be progressive theoretical frameworks that offer a trenchant evaluation and analysis of contemporary international and national security policy. Tara McCormack investigates the limitations of contemporary critical and emancipatory theorising and its relationship with contemporary power structures. Beginning with a theoretical critique and moving into a case study of the critical approaches to the break up of the former Yugoslavia, this book assesses the policies adopted by the international community at the time to show that much contemporary critical security theory and discourse in fact mirrors shifts in post-Cold War international and national security policy. Far from challenging international power inequalities and offering an emancipatory framework, contemporary critical security theory inadvertently ends up serving as a theoretical justification for an unequal international order.This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, international relations and security studies. Tara McCormack is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester and has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster.

This book critiques the conceptualization of security found in mainstream and critical theoretical debates, and applies this to the empirical case of the 2003 Iraq War. The Iraq War represents one of the most puzzling, complex, and controversial events in the post-Cold War era. The manner in which the Bush administration finally decided to hold Saddam Hussein accountable through military intervention provoked a worldwide outcry due to the narratives they constructed to justify the "pre-emptive use of force" and "enhanced interrogation techniques." Responding to constructivist and post-structuralist scholars' calls for a turn to discourse, and aligning its argument with critical security studies, particularly the Copenhagen School (CS), this book conceptualizes language as a pivotal mechanism of power. Adopting a Wittgensteinian approach, it moves away from thinking about the nexus between security and language from a single action, or speech act, to a series of actions or interactions. To illustrate this new approach, the author examines two cases in particular: the UN inspectors' finding that there was no credible evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in early 2003 and the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004. Both events show that the boundaries and relations between securitized rules and environments are not pre-given but produced in a particular language game. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, US foreign policy, and IR in general.

This book maps the increasing convergence of US domestic and international security regimes, analyzing the trend towards global pacification in the name of 'security'.The dream of liberal world peace after the Cold War is on the verge of collapsing into permanent global pacification – not only in the global south but also in pockets of the ‘Third World’ within the territory of Western states. In this volume, the author explores the ways in which regimes of security have been extended into increasingly large aspects of social life and shows that their expansion has been driven by a constant broadening of the notion of 'war'.Filling a gap in the literature, the book demonstrates how US security agencies have sought to develop indeterminate security capabilities aimed at distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate flows of people and resources. This analysis of regimes of security is tied to a more general discussion about the persistence, or even multiplication, of illiberal forms of power within liberal governmentality. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations in general.

This book interrogates the philosophical backdrop of Clausewitzian notions of war, and asks whether modern, network-centric militaries can still be said to serve the 'political'. In light of the emerging theories and doctrines of Network-Centric War (NCW), this book traces the philosophical backdrop against which the more common theorizations of war and its conduct take place. Tracing the historical and philosophical roots of modern war from the 17th Century through to the present day, this book reveals that far from paralyzing the project of re-problematisating war, the emergence of NCW affords us an opportunity to rethink war in new and philosophically challenging ways.This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, social theory, war studies and political theory/IR.Manabrata Guha is Assistant Professor (ISSSP) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India.

This book provides a rigorous critical analysis of how the US military operates in Iraq, exploring the spatial practices of violence.Contemporary critical analyses of the United States’ involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan emphasise the hegemonic nature of the US military experience, while conventional military analyses focus on fixed categories such as ‘counter-insurgency’ or ‘network-centric warfare’. Drawing on fieldwork examining the use of a new command and control technology by 1st Cavalry Division (US Army) in 2004-2005, this book elaborates a more nuanced understanding of US military violence by exploring the changing (and sometimes incoherent) spatial practices through which violence was exercised. The author combines fieldwork with a spatial vocabulary of violence from the work of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and methodological inspiration from the micro-observations of material semiotics in Science and Technology Studies to conclude that the US Army’s experience in Iraq has been neither as circumscribed nor as easily defined as critical theorists and conventional military analysts alike would suggest.This innovative book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, strategic studies, military studies, social and spatial theory and IR in general.Caroline M. Croser is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy, where she teaches defence studies.

This book examines the relationship between women, gender and the international security agenda, exploring the meaning of security in terms of discourse and practice, as well as the larger goals and strategies of the global women's movement.Today, many complex global problems are being located within the security logic. From the environment to HIV/AIDS, state and non-state actors have made a practice out of securitizing issues that are not conventionally seen as such. As most prominently demonstrated by the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2001), activists for women's rights have increasingly framed women's rights and gender inequality as security issues in an attempt to gain access to the international security agenda, particularly in the context of the United Nations. This book explores the nature and implications of the use of security language as a political framework for women, tracing and analyzing the organizational dynamics of women's activism in the United Nations system and how women have come to embrace and been impacted by the security framework, globally and locally. The book argues that, from a feminist and human security perspective, efforts to engender the security discourse have had both a broadening and limiting effect, highlighting reasons to be sceptical of securitization as an inherently beneficial strategy. Four cases studies are used to develop the core themes: (1) the campaign to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325; (2) the strategies utilized by those advocating women's issues in the security arena compared to those advocating for children; (3) the organizational development of the UN Development Fund for Women and how it has come to securitize women; and (4) the activity of the UN Peacebuilding Commission and its challenges in gendering its security approach.The work will be of interest to students of critical security, gender studies, international organizations and international relations in general.Natalie Florea Hudson received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton. She specializes in gender and international relations, human rights, international security studies, and international law and organization.

The challenges that space poses for political theory are profound. Yet until now, the exploration and utilization of space has generally reflected – but not challenged – the political patterns and impulses which characterized twentieth-century politics and International Relations. This edited volume analyses a number of controversial policies, and contentious strategies which have promoted space activities under the rubric of exploration and innovation, militarization and weaponization, colonization and commercialization. It places these policies and strategies in broader theoretical perspective in two key ways. Firstly, it engages in a reading of the discourses of space activities: exposing their meaning-producing practices; uncovering the narratives which convey certain space strategies as desirable, inevitable and seamless. Secondly, the essays suggest ways of understanding, and critically engaging with, the effects of particular space policies. The essays here seek to ‘bring back space’ into the realm of International Relations discourse, from which it has been largely removed, marginalized and silenced. The various chapters do this by highlighting how activities in outer space are always connected to earth-bound practices and performances of the every day. Securing Outer Space will be of great interest to students of space power, critical security studies and IR theory.

This book interrogates the philosophical backdrop of Clausewitzian notions of war, and asks whether modern, network-centric militaries can still be said to serve the 'political'. In light of the emerging theories and doctrines of Network-Centric War (NCW), this book traces the philosophical backdrop against which the more common theorizations of war and its conduct take place. Tracing the historical and philosophical roots of modern war from the 17th Century through to the present day, this book reveals that far from paralyzing the project of re-problematisating war, the emergence of NCW affords us an opportunity to rethink war in new and philosophically challenging ways.This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, social theory, war studies and political theory/IR.Manabrata Guha is Assistant Professor (ISSSP) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India.

This book will be the first systematic examination of the role that ethics plays in international security in both theory and practice, and offers the reader a concrete ethics for global security. Questions of morality and ethics have long been central to global security, from the death camps, world wars and H-bombs of the 20th century, to the humanitarian missions, tsunamis, terrorism and refugees of the 21st. This book goes beyond the Just War tradition to demonstrate how ethical commitments influence security theory, policy and international law, across a range of pressing global challenges. The book highlights how, from patrolling a territorial border to maintaining armed forces, security practices have important ethical implications, by excluding some from consideration, presenting others as potential threats and exposing them to harm, and licensing particular actions.While many scholars and practitioners of security claim little interest in ethics, ethics clearly has an interest in them. This innovative book extends the traditional agenda of war and peace to consider the ethics of force short of war such as sanctions, deterrence, terrorism, targeted killing, and torture, and the ethical implications of new security concerns such as identity, gender, humanitarianism, the responsibility to protect, and the global ecology. It advances a concrete ethics for an era of global threats, and makes a case for a cosmopolitan approach to the theory and practice of security that could inspire a more just, stable and inclusive global order. This book fills an important gap in the literature and will be of much interest to students of ethics, security studies and international relations.

This book critically investigates the discourses and practices of human security and aims to delve below the stereotypical imageries representing them. Drawing on Foucault and Deleuze, the author approaches human security from a new perspective, with the aim of ascertaining what has been behind and underneath a certain spatio-temporal articulation of human security, and with what political implications and consequences. Each human security assemblage is composed of messy discourses and practices which are loosely related and sometimes even disconnected. This book examines the Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security and establishes the kinds of structural terrains have enabled, shaped, or blocked the unfolding of these versions of human security. The pivotal contention of the book is that Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security have been different because they have grown from completely different domestic economies of power governing the relationship between the state apparatus and the non-profit and voluntary sector. While the Canadian human security assemblage has been shaped by transformations in the country’s advanced liberal model of government, the Japanese has been shaped by the continuities of Japan’s bureaucratic authoritarianism. A novel approach is employed for the related process-tracing: a general series linking structural conditions with actual articulations of the human security projects, and their further development, including analysis of their unintended consequences. This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Security Studies, human security, global governance, foreign policy and IR/Security studies.

This book provides a framework for analysing the interplay between securitisation and foreign affairs, reconnecting critical security studies with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations. What happens to foreign policymaking when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state behaviour on the basis of a reflexive framework of insecurity politics, and argues that governments act on the knowledge of international danger available in their societies, but that such knowledge is organised by markedly varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across European history and space, these case studies show how securitisation has projected evolving and often contested local ideas of the organisation of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics have then conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. With its focus on insecurity politics, the book provides new perspectives for the study of international security. Moving the discipline from systemic theorising to a theory of international systematisation, it shows how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by IR theory. By the same token, by depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others.This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, European politics, foreign policy and IR, in general.

This book critically investigates the discourses and practices of human security and aims to delve below the stereotypical imageries representing them. Drawing on Foucault and Deleuze, the author approaches human security from a new perspective, with the aim of ascertaining what has been behind and underneath a certain spatio-temporal articulation of human security, and with what political implications and consequences. Each human security assemblage is composed of messy discourses and practices which are loosely related and sometimes even disconnected. This book examines the Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security and establishes the kinds of structural terrains have enabled, shaped, or blocked the unfolding of these versions of human security. The pivotal contention of the book is that Canadian and Japanese articulations of human security have been different because they have grown from completely different domestic economies of power governing the relationship between the state apparatus and the non-profit and voluntary sector. While the Canadian human security assemblage has been shaped by transformations in the country’s advanced liberal model of government, the Japanese has been shaped by the continuities of Japan’s bureaucratic authoritarianism. A novel approach is employed for the related process-tracing: a general series linking structural conditions with actual articulations of the human security projects, and their further development, including analysis of their unintended consequences. This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Security Studies, human security, global governance, foreign policy and IR/Security studies.

This book examines the relationship between women, gender and the international security agenda, exploring the meaning of security in terms of discourse and practice, as well as the larger goals and strategies of the global women's movement.Today, many complex global problems are being located within the security logic. From the environment to HIV/AIDS, state and non-state actors have made a practice out of securitizing issues that are not conventionally seen as such. As most prominently demonstrated by the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (2001), activists for women's rights have increasingly framed women's rights and gender inequality as security issues in an attempt to gain access to the international security agenda, particularly in the context of the United Nations. This book explores the nature and implications of the use of security language as a political framework for women, tracing and analyzing the organizational dynamics of women's activism in the United Nations system and how women have come to embrace and been impacted by the security framework, globally and locally. The book argues that, from a feminist and human security perspective, efforts to engender the security discourse have had both a broadening and limiting effect, highlighting reasons to be sceptical of securitization as an inherently beneficial strategy. Four cases studies are used to develop the core themes: (1) the campaign to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1325; (2) the strategies utilized by those advocating women's issues in the security arena compared to those advocating for children; (3) the organizational development of the UN Development Fund for Women and how it has come to securitize women; and (4) the activity of the UN Peacebuilding Commission and its challenges in gendering its security approach.The work will be of interest to students of critical security, gender studies, international organizations and international relations in general.Natalie Florea Hudson received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Connecticut and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton. She specializes in gender and international relations, human rights, international security studies, and international law and organization.

This book will be the first systematic examination of the role that ethics plays in international security in both theory and practice, and offers the reader a concrete ethics for global security. Questions of morality and ethics have long been central to global security, from the death camps, world wars and H-bombs of the 20th century, to the humanitarian missions, tsunamis, terrorism and refugees of the 21st. This book goes beyond the Just War tradition to demonstrate how ethical commitments influence security theory, policy and international law, across a range of pressing global challenges. The book highlights how, from patrolling a territorial border to maintaining armed forces, security practices have important ethical implications, by excluding some from consideration, presenting others as potential threats and exposing them to harm, and licensing particular actions.While many scholars and practitioners of security claim little interest in ethics, ethics clearly has an interest in them. This innovative book extends the traditional agenda of war and peace to consider the ethics of force short of war such as sanctions, deterrence, terrorism, targeted killing, and torture, and the ethical implications of new security concerns such as identity, gender, humanitarianism, the responsibility to protect, and the global ecology. It advances a concrete ethics for an era of global threats, and makes a case for a cosmopolitan approach to the theory and practice of security that could inspire a more just, stable and inclusive global order. This book fills an important gap in the literature and will be of much interest to students of ethics, security studies and international relations.

In recent years debates about the nature and future of the West have been high on the political agenda. Prognoses of the West’s imminent demise have been countered by those arguing for its continued relevance, or those arguing that while the West will survive its nature, and the balance of power between its constituent units, is transforming.This book argues that understanding contemporary developments requires subjecting the very idea of the West to critical scrutiny and in particular asking what kind of concept it actually is. Locating the West as a discursive concept the book argues attempts to save, fix or reclaim the meaning of the West are illustrative of political agendas rather than indicative of accurate claims about the essential nature of the West. In contrast, the book argues that as a concept the West is impregnated with various discursive legacies, the most embedded of which are those of a civilisational, modern and political West. However, while attempts to define the West’s essence are therefore doomed to fail, given the concept’s historical and discursive flexibility, such attempts reaffirm the legitimising role which claims to the West continue to perform.Beyond this, the book challenges traditional genealogies of the West, which overwhelmingly depict the West as an inside-out concept. In contrast, the book argues that historically outsiders have played an important role in defining the nature of the West and constituting it as a political subject; processes that remain evident today.This book will particularly interest students of critical security studies, critical geopolitics, European politics, American politics and IR theory.

This book aims to engage with contemporary security discourses from a critical perspective. It argues that rather than being a radical, analytical outlook, much critical security theory fails to fulfil its promise to pose a challenge to contemporary power relations.In general, 'critical security' theories and dialogues are understood to be progressive theoretical frameworks that offer a trenchant evaluation and analysis of contemporary international and national security policy. Tara McCormack investigates the limitations of contemporary critical and emancipatory theorising and its relationship with contemporary power structures. Beginning with a theoretical critique and moving into a case study of the critical approaches to the break up of the former Yugoslavia, this book assesses the policies adopted by the international community at the time to show that much contemporary critical security theory and discourse in fact mirrors shifts in post-Cold War international and national security policy. Far from challenging international power inequalities and offering an emancipatory framework, contemporary critical security theory inadvertently ends up serving as a theoretical justification for an unequal international order.This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, international relations and security studies. Tara McCormack is Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester and has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Westminster.

This book critically analyses the changing role and nature of post-Cold War humanitarianism, using Foucault's theories of biopolitics and governmentality. It offers a compelling and insightful interpretation of the policies and practices associated with ‘new humanitarianism in general, as well as of the dynamics of two specific international assistance efforts: the post-2001 conflict-related assistance effort in Afghanistan and the post-2000 Chernobyl-related assistance effort in Belarus. The central argument of the book is that ‘new’ humanitarianism represents a dominant regime of humanitarian governing informed by globalising neoliberalism and is reliant on a complex set of biopolitical, disciplinary and sovereign technologies. It demonstrates that, while the purposes of humanitarian governing are specific to particular contexts, its promise of care is more often than not accompanied by sovereign and/or biopolitical violences.Making an important contribution to existing scholarship on humanitarian emergencies and humanitarian action, on biopolitics and governmentality, this book will be of much interest to students and scholars of humanitarianism, critical security studies, governmentality and International Relations generally.

This book explores how non-traditional security (NTS) issues are reshaping the political and strategic landscape in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).Moving beyond conventional state-centric and militarised approaches, the book analyses how environmental stress, food and water insecurity, public health vulnerabilities, gender and societal insecurity, migration, and demographic pressures have become central to national policy agendas in the MENA region. Drawing on extensive regional case studies from the Gulf, the Levant, and North Africa, it examines how governments, communities, and non-state actors (NSAs) interpret and respond to these multidimensional challenges. The book highlights why some states in the region securitise NTS threats, why others pursue governance-based responses, and how globalisation, conflict, and climate change intensify existing structural pressures. Accessible and empirically grounded, this book provides a systematic framework for understanding NTS in a region undergoing rapid political, social, and environmental transformation.This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, Middle Eastern studies, and international relations.

This book analyses how banks implement counter-terrorist financing measures and experiment with technologies to assess risks and make security decisions.Banks have become private security actors. As “gatekeepers” of the financial system, they are legally obliged to conduct customer research and monitor bank accounts for unusual or suspicious transactions. Given the sheer volume of financial transactions that banks process daily, detection of financial crime heavily relies on digital security technologies that help analysts categorise and identify risky customers and financial transactions. Drawing from theories at the intersection of International Relations and Science and Technology Studies, the book advances the concept of ‘de-scription’ to offer a framework for analysing experimentation with security and digital technologies in practice. The research is based on fieldwork conducted in the financial crime sector in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. It explores how political and ethical choices materialise at the human-technology interface and analyses the production of customer risk profiles, the design and use of transaction monitoring systems, and the emergence of public-private partnerships to counter terrorist financing.This book will be of interest to students and researchers in International Relations, Science and Technology Studies, and Critical Security Studies.

This book maps the increasing convergence of US domestic and international security regimes, analyzing the trend towards global pacification in the name of 'security'.The dream of liberal world peace after the Cold War is on the verge of collapsing into permanent global pacification – not only in the global south but also in pockets of the ‘Third World’ within the territory of Western states. In this volume, the author explores the ways in which regimes of security have been extended into increasingly large aspects of social life and shows that their expansion has been driven by a constant broadening of the notion of 'war'.Filling a gap in the literature, the book demonstrates how US security agencies have sought to develop indeterminate security capabilities aimed at distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate flows of people and resources. This analysis of regimes of security is tied to a more general discussion about the persistence, or even multiplication, of illiberal forms of power within liberal governmentality. This book will be of much interest to students of security studies, war and conflict studies and international relations in general.

This book provides a framework for analysing the interplay between securitisation and foreign affairs, reconnecting critical security studies with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations. What happens to foreign policymaking when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state behaviour on the basis of a reflexive framework of insecurity politics, and argues that governments act on the knowledge of international danger available in their societies, but that such knowledge is organised by markedly varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across European history and space, these case studies show how securitisation has projected evolving and often contested local ideas of the organisation of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics have then conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. With its focus on insecurity politics, the book provides new perspectives for the study of international security. Moving the discipline from systemic theorising to a theory of international systematisation, it shows how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by IR theory. By the same token, by depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others.This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, European politics, foreign policy and IR, in general.