Should Homeland Security Studies Survive?

Abstract

A few years after the end of the Cold War, Richard Betts argued that a specter was haunting the field of strategic studies, “the specter of peace,” and asked whether that field should survive the new era. Today, more than two decades after the 9/11 attacks that stimulated the field of homeland security (HS) studies, we could ask a similar question about that field. Should it survive as an academic field of study, and if so, how should it adapt and change in an era in which concerns about terrorism have in large part been overtaken by great power competition, climate change, AI, pandemics and a host of other asymmetric threats? Is it/can it be an academic discipline? A profession? What questions does it ask and what contributions does it make to practitioners, policy makers, or society? This article reviews the state of HS studies today and what sub-fields and disciplines it touches. It examines HS publication and education in the United States and evaluates the contributions that HS studies have made to date. This review suggests homeland security studies should indeed survive, as a meta discipline that serves a valuable purpose by addressing the question of how governments and societies should best prepare for and respond to threats to their security that can range from local to global in scope, from small to large in scale, and from tame to wicked in character.