My Critique is Bigger than Yours: Constituting Exclusions in Critical Security Studies

Abstract

Critical Security Studies proceeds from the premise that words are world-making, that is that the ways we think about security are constitutive of the worlds of security we analyse. Turned to conventional security studies and the practices of global politics, this critical insight has revealed the ways in which the exclusions that are the focus of this conference have been produced. Perhaps most notable in this regard has been David Campbell's work, showing how the theory and practice of security are an identity discourse producing both insides and outsides, but the production of excluded others is a theme that runs through the critical scholarship on security in the past decade or more. This article turns the critical security studies gaze on itself, to explore the field's own complicity in the production of exclusions. The article reads three important instances of critical security studies for the inclusions and exclusions they produce: Ken Booth's Theory of World Securitv, the epilogue to David Campbell's Writing Security, and the CASE Collective Manifesto. The article concludes by asking about the nature of the inclusions and exclusions these divisions produce and the politics which those exclusions, in turn, (re)produce.

Las Autodefensas Gaitanistas de Colombia como grupo armado politizado

“…Por tanto, se traen a colación citas textuales puestas en el contexto histórico y social en el que fueron emitidas, confiando en que la intención comunicativa de sus autores está en lo dicho y no en lo pretendido. Así, asumiremos que lo político de las AGC está contenido en su discurso, en cuanto el discurso es también una forma de construir identidades (Fierke, 2007;Mutimer, 2009).…”

Making amends: Towards an antiracist critical security studies and international relations

“…Although one would be hard pressed to settle on a single definition, given the diversity of objectives and theoretical lenses from which its distinct strands are derived, 'critical security studies' emerged in the mid-1990s, primarily in Europe; largely mirrored meta-theoretical debates within international relations between positivism/post-positivism and rationalism/reflectivism; and aimed at 'de-essentializing and deconstructing prevailing claims about security' through the inclusion of a number of different perspectives deemed outside the 'mainstream' (Krause and Williams, 1997: xiv, xi). In consequence, most approaches share common features: (1) they challenge the ontology of conventional security studies in terms of both the 'what' and the 'who' of security; (2) they are interested in the politics of knowledge and the links between security theory and practice; (3) they share a post-positivist stance that questions the a priori existence of the world and its problems, and that deems reality a social and discursive construction largely linked to power; (4) they seek to question the status quo and to transform existing political and social orders as they relate to security; and (5) they are concerned with distinct forms of violence derived from security practices and with those actors affected by these (Mutimer, 2009;Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2015).…”

State Security, Societal Security, and Human Security

“…Booth contends that individuals can follow emancipation in what they research, in how they teach, and in how much they support Greenpeace, Amnesty International, and Oxfam (Booth 1991, cited in Peoples and Williams 2010; 28). Thus, Booth (2007, cited in Mutimerd 2009: 12) explicitly believes in reason that is resulted in emancipation. However, recently emancipation has been restated by Jones, who believes that emancipation is an ongoing process that does not stop at one point, but rather there is always a window for improvement.…”