CHAPTER 2

SECURITY AND
“SECURITY
STUDIES”
Conceptual Evolution and
Historical Transformation

KEITH KRAUSE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

2.1 INTRODUCTION
THE quest for security is one of the most powerful dynamics of
modern politics. Few claims are as politically potent as those cast
within the imperative of “security,” and few can mobilize such
enormous political, social, and economic resources. In the pursuit of
“national” security, more than one trillion US dollars are spent
worldwide each year on military institutions and instruments, with
many billions more on police and paramilitary institutions. In the
name of national security covert and often extra-legal operations of
intelligence services are undertaken and justified, immune from
public scrutiny. And in the most extreme case, governments can
demand that individuals kill and die in the name of security. Yet the
term “security” is not restricted to the realm of military affairs and
national security. One of the confounding aspects of the concept is
the way in which it has been attached to an array of domestic,
international, and transnational issues. Programs of social security
are associated with the welfare state, while calls to promote
environmental or economic security, or individual concerns with food
security or health security all foster the impression that the search for
security is omnipresent, and that the concept can be applied to areas
far removed from the realms of war, conflict, and violence.
To ask “what is security and security studies?” is thus to grapple
with an ambiguous, contested, and controversial concept and
discipline. What one person, group, society, or state perceives as a
threatening source of insecurity, another may not. To some,
widespread individual ownership of firearms furthers their security,
while to others it is a source of insecurity. To one state, the
possession of a specific weapons system is essential to its defense,
to another it appears deeply threatening. For one social group, the
right to educate their children in a particular faith or language is vital
to their cultural survival as a group; to their neighbors it may appear
as a threat needing to be suppressed. Even if one restricts analysis
to the realm of national security, the complexities do not disappear.
The question of the security of the nation—of who belongs and who
does not—has been at the heart of many recent conflicts and wars.
This relativity of security—of who or what is being threatened, and
from what or whom—has important consequences for understanding
security relations between states, within states, and between non-
state actors.
The indeterminacy and ambiguity of security has led some to view
any attempt to discuss so broad and multi-dimensional a concept as
futile (Wolfers 1952; Buzan 1991; Baldwin 1997). Yet the ambiguities
of security are no different than those of other contested political
concepts, such as freedom, democracy, or power. Contrasting
visions of what it is and how it ought to be achieved are essential
elements of political debates and decisions, and the central place of
security in political life makes it too important to ignore. Rather than
despairing at conflicting or imprecise definitions, or seeing these as a
result of fuzzy thinking, our aim in this chapter is to trace some of the
shifting meanings, practices, and institutions of security to show how
and why these have changed as part of a complex historical process
of dealing with the place of violence and order in modern political
and social life. Our goal is to avoid imposing an anachronistic
contemporary vision of what security is or ought to be, and instead to
uncover and explain some of the different understandings that
individuals, societies, and ruling elites have had of security at
different times and places.
To capture these different understandings while avoiding
presenting an account of the progressive development of the
discipline, the chapter is organized around three themes: movement,
rupture, and dissent. The first captures the mainstream account (and
history) of the progressive development of the discipline of security
studies; the second captures the breaks with previous scholarship
that are reflected in the literature; the third captures the always-
present dissenting voices that resisted the disciplining dimension of
the mainstream account. In parallel, we briefly trace the symbiotic
but not always tight relationship between the conceptual (“security
studies”) and the socio-political (institutions and practices) realms of
security, best pictured as a loose strand of DNA, with different
“bonds” of connection, some distant, some close. The chapter thus
traces some of the main moments in the history of security practices
and security studies, attempting to highlight moments of greatest
convergence and divergence in the two evolving strands. It briefly
reviews pre-twentieth-century contributions to highlight some of the
antecedents to contemporary debates, and concentrates on the
twentieth century in greatest detail. Given the future-oriented nature
of this volume, the past (distant and recent) is presented with an eye
to the near-future, both in terms of expected continuities and
transformations.

2.2 ANTECEDENTS
The language of security has deep Roman and Greek roots
(Rothschild 1995; Arends and Frederik 2008) connected with images
of freedom from care or concern, but the crystallization of a distinctly
modern preoccupation with security coincides with the rise of the
modern state. Security, for Thomas Hobbes, is a precondition for civil
and law-governed life, and requires political institutions to provide
that which individuals in the state of nature cannot obtain, since “we
cannot expect security from others, or assure it to ourselves”
(Hobbes 1998 (1651): 26).
This conceptualization of security did not produce a discipline of
security studies; rather, it provided an explanation and justification
for the increased centralization of state power and its growing
monopoly over the legitimate use of force. What did emerge,
however, was systematic thought on strategy and warfare at the
service of this new form of state power. “Strategic studies” can thus
credibly claim to be a precursor of mainstream security studies,
defined by one of its foremost proponents as “the study of the threat,
use and control of military force … [that is] the conditions that make
the use of force more likely, the ways that the use of force affects
individuals, states and societies, and the specific policies that states
adopt in order to prepare for, prevent or engage in war” (Walt 1991:
212, emphasis in original). The tight bond between the development
of state power, the increasing scope and scale of warfare, and
strategic thought was reflected in the close relationship of strategic
thinkers and the “science” of war to actual state policies and
practices. This covered such diverse domains as the seventeenth-
century development of fortifications to secure borders (Vauban) and
systematic forms of training and drill for soldiers (Maurice of
Nassau), battlefield deployment and tactics in the Napoleonic era
(Jomini), or the importance of twentieth-century military innovations
such as air power (Douhet) (Mead Earle 1944; Paret 1986; Parker
1996).
By the late nineteenth century strategic thought began to take on a
more conceptual or theoretical cast, as well as a simply practical
one, with the development of geopolitical doctrines that attempted to
explain the underlying forces shaping nation states, conflict between
states, and the evolution of world politics. These ranged from the
more purely geographic ideas of continental versus naval powers
(Halford Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahan), to the racially-tinged,
Social Darwinist and Hegelian ideas of German geopolitical thought
that fused state power to the destiny of peoples (Friedrich Ratzel,
Karl Haushofer). Dissent from this vision of strategy at the service of
the state was not absent, however, and the increasing scope and
scale of modern warfare spurred humanist thinkers to posit “peace
projects” on a grand scale. These ranged from the early fourteenth-
century projects of Dante and Dubois, nostalgic for the hegemonic
unity of Latin Christendom, to those of scholars such as William
Penn, the Abbé de St Pierre and Immanuel Kant who attempted to
reconcile the anarchic nature of the state system with an end to war
(Arcidiacono 2011). While these projects did not form a discipline of
“peace research,” they served in important ways as the backdrop to
twentieth-century efforts at security governance and institution-
building that explicitly claimed this heritage, in particular under the
umbrella of collective security within the League of Nations (Kennedy
1987).
This external vision of securing the state against external military
threats, linked tightly to strategy and policy, was facilitated by
increasing levels of domestic safety and public order, generated by
the growing administrative power of the state (Eisner 2003). From
the French Revolution forward, as the state mobilized and subjected
greater numbers of its citizens to the risks of violence from warfare in
the name of the national and territorial state, it also assumed greater
responsibility for their well-being and protection and a larger role in
the management of society and the population. This increasing
concern with “policing” society in its narrow sense implicated
institutional development and differentiation in three ways: the
expansion of the police as an institution (Bayley 1975), the slow
elimination of the armed forces’ role in providing domestic order, and
the “pacification” of the state’s relations with its subjects (rule of law,
elimination of arbitrary exercises of state power such as punishment,
detention, torture, and deprivation of rights). More broadly, it involved
the development of what Michel Foucault termed the “conduct of
conduct”: the shaping of forms of subjectivity and social action, and
the development of new forms of governing the self and society
(“governmentality”) that had the security of populations as their heart
(Foucault 2003). Policing in this broader sense is not only about
“negative security” (preventing people from acting in certain ways
and punishing them if they do so), but also about fostering the
creation of particular kinds of individuals and social orders.
All of these (external, internal, state-society) dimensions of
security practices can be presented both as trade-offs between
liberty and security, but also as productive; as part of complex
processes of structuring conceptions of freedom and agency in ways
that support specific visions of security. Consider, for instance, the
elimination of duelling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This prohibition involved much more than the development of state
capacities to prevent or punish duelling. It also involved a
marginalization of heroic conceptions of aristocratic honor, a shift
which made duelling seem uncivilized, illegitimate, and even absurd,
in addition to being illegal. “Policing” society here combined with the
evolution of the police to bring about a shift in security practices that
was itself symptomatic of much broader processes of state
consolidation and social and political transformation. Such a process
was fundamental in the consolidation of the capacity for violence in
the hands of the state during the process of state formation in
Europe. While institutional developments in security provision were
complex and diverse, they all involved a centralization of security
structures (policing) within the state, an extension of state power and
surveillance throughout a given territory, and a growing distinction
between the institutions of internal security and those responsible for
external security.

2.3 MOVEMENT: CONSOLIDATING COLD WAR SECURITY STUDIES

The early twentieth-century study of security is most easily identified
as a rupture with nineteenth-century strategic thought, and the
ascendance of two strands of work that presaged (and influenced)
subsequent scholarship. The first strand is best described as
analyses into the conditions of peace, much of which—associated
with the League of Nations experiment in collective security and
various forms of disarmament—was normatively oriented and tightly
linked to the concerns of particularly internationalist policy elites
(Webster 2006). Although it broke definitely with nineteenth-century
strategic thought and great power diplomacy, regarded as in part
responsible for the tragedies of the Great War, the foundations of
such conceptual and institutional innovations as collective security
were in fact extensions of earlier thought about the balance of power
(Niemeyer 1952; Ashworth 2006). Later work on security regimes
(Jervis 1982) and security communities (Adler and Barnett 1998) can
be seen as following in these footsteps, albeit with a much more
scholarly focus. The second strand focused on the problem of war,
and its major contribution, Quincy Wright’s collaborative A Study of
War (Wright 1942), was “notable for its inattention to problems of
national strategy and national security” (Fox, quoted in Baldwin
1995: 120). It arguably stands along with Lewis Richardson’s
Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (Wilkinson 1980) at the origins of what
its proponents now call the “scientific study of war” (see Section 1.6).
The only major strategic studies contribution (Mead Earle 1944) was
predominantly historical (except for the epilog on the Nazi concept of
war).
The mainstream of security studies that emerged in the early Cold
War period was not, however, an extension of these two strands. It
emerged out of the matrix of the Second World War and geopolitical
confrontation between East and West, was in part a reaction to the
failures of multilateral security institutions of the interwar period, and
narrowed its focus of security primarily to the security of the state
(and its citizens) from external military threats (Baldwin 1995). In one
sense, this was coherent with the nineteenth-century vision of state–
society relations and of domestic order/international anarchy. More
importantly though, early scholarship was predominantly America-
centric and policy driven, and cohered will the geopolitical rise of the
United States and the crystallization of the concept of “national
security,” which made its first appearance in the late 1940s (Bock
and Berkowitz 1966). By 1947 national security had been
institutionalized in the American National Security Act, the National
Security Council (NSC), and the “national security state,” in which
domestic “security” concerns were occluded by the predominance of
an externally-oriented focus for the word. As Daniel Yergin noted, “at
certain moments, unfamiliar phrases suddenly become common
articles of political discourse, and the concepts they represent
become so embedded in the national consciousness that they seem
always to have been with us” (Yergin 1978: 195)—so it was with the
phrase “national security.”
 The subsequent evolution of mainstream security studies in the
four decades until the mid-1980s has been sketched by Steven Walt,
David Baldwin, and others (Walt 1991; Kolodziej 1992; Baldwin
1995). Security studies scholarship focused on such topics as
weapons proliferation, nuclear deterrence theory, military strategy in
counter- insurgency wars, arms control, the security dilemma,
alliance formation and dynamics, the offence–defense balance, and
other such topics (for examples, see Snyder 2007; Shiping 2010;
Williams and Viotti 2012). Research by communities of scholars in
each of these areas ebbed and flowed according to broader
developments in International Relations theory and methods.
Deterrence theory occupied center stage in the 1950s and 1960s
(Schelling 1980; Kaplan 1991; Morgan 2003); arms control was a
focus in the 1970s; alliance theory re-emerged at the end of the Cold
War, and so forth. Although scholars such as Walt celebrated this as
a “renaissance,” associated with increasing rigor, methodological
sophistication, and theoretical inclination in research (Walt 1991:
211), others took a more skeptical view of these claims, highlighting
the narrowness of the conception of security that underpinned this
work, and its implicit claim for the primacy of security (as a
precondition for political and economic life, and not subject to
diminishing margin returns). As Baldwin put it, security studies “has
tended to focus on one set of means by which security may be
pursued … military statecraft,” and has “tended to assert the primacy
of military security over other goals” (Baldwin 1995: 129, 127,
emphasis in original).
While the broad outlines of mainstream security studies
scholarship are captured by this account, the narrative obscures at
least three issues. First, to scholars working outside the United
States, the curious conflation of American national security concerns
with the scholarly discipline of “international security studies” (treated
synonymously, as in the title of a major journal in the field) smacked
of academic imperialism, and obscured the way in which mainstream
security studies was deeply enmeshed with current American policy
concerns: deterrence, counter insurgency, arms control, terrorism.
Second, the subjects covered by security studies tended to occlude
much scholarship that directly concerned “issues of war and peace”
or the use of force, but was not directly oriented toward immediate
political concerns. This was especially the case for the large
literature on the “causes of war” (Levy 1998; Levy and Thompson
2011), and the scholarship associated from the early 1960s with the
Correlates of War project (COW) (Suzuki et al. 2002). Mainstream
security studies resembled much more a revival of nineteenth and
early twentieth century geopolitics (with an admixture of strategic
thought), stripped of its tainted legacy and presented as a form of
“grand strategy” to analyze the competition between the rival
superpowers and their blocs. Finally, “dissent” was confined to the
margins, with peace research and disarmament advocates in
particular effectively cut off from the mainstream of the discipline
(Rogers and Ramsbotham 1999), and pursuing their own intellectual
agendas through such bodies as the International Peace Research
Association, the Journal of Peace Research (both launched in 1964),
or the publications of the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute (founded in 1966).

2.4 DISSENT: BROADENING AND DEEPENING SECURITY STUDIES

The past three decades have seen wide-ranging debates over how
security should be studied, understood, and practically provided
(Kolodziej 2005; Williams 2008; Buzan and Hansen 2009; Collins
2010; Bourbeau 2015). At the core of these debates has been
dissent: questioning whether the mainstream way of studying
security (of the state, from primarily external military threats) in
International Relations is adequate. While the mainstream view of
security studies was always contested, two aspects of the post-Cold
War critique were most telling. The first pointed out that in the name
of “state security” the security of individual citizens is most often
threatened. This is clearest when the individual is compelled to go to
war, and the security of the state requires the sacrifice of the security
of the individual. This paradox is even starker in situations where the
state—in the name of “national security”—declares certain
individuals or citizens as threats. In many places, the major threats
to individuals come from the security institutions of their own states
(from the intelligence and “security” services, or from militaries
aligned with one social group, political faction, or regime) rather than
from any external sources (Davenport 2007).
The second challenge argued that the focus of traditional security
studies on states and interstate war fails to capture many of the most
intense dynamics of contemporary security relations: in the areas of
national identity and culture; with the security of groups, individuals,
or the biosphere; with questions of state stability or fragility; with
economic dislocation, and global flows of people and information;
and with structures and institutions of security cooperation.
Environmental, economic, demographic, and other transformations
posed significant threats to the well-being of states and peoples for
which military force was largely irrelevant, and that traditional
conceptions of security were ill-equipped to recognize. In his classic
work, People, States and Fear, Barry Buzan argued that “a notion of
security bound to the level of individual states and military issues is
inherently inadequate” (Buzan 1991: 29). He, and a legion of
subsequent scholars, went on to develop an expanded agenda for
security studies that included different sources of insecurity, including
economic and environmental dynamics, as well as political and
military factors (Buzan 1991, and for an overview of one issue
Brauch et al. 2008; Floyd and Matthew 2013). Broadening security
studies thus refers to the need to address threats and sources of
insecurity beyond the military security of the territorial state, the most
prominent of which have been environmental or economic
challenges, but which have also included issues such as
transnational migration, global health, food, energy, or human rights.
As the criticisms of “narrow,” traditional views of security gathered
force, proponents of these views argued that the concept of security
needed also to be deepened to include different referent objects
including individuals, sub-state groups, states, regions, the global
system, and the biosphere, to capture the complexity of
contemporary security dynamics and the political and ethical issues
involved in studying and practicing security. Deepening the security
agenda involves moving away from an exclusive focus on the state,
toward individuals or social groups below the level of the state
(societal or human security) (Buzan et al. 1998; Hanlon and Christie
2016), or to institutions and structures above it (regional security
arrangements, or wider cooperative security mechanisms) (Buzan
and Waever 2003; Neack 2017). In each case, shifting the referent
object for security (what is being secured; from what threats) reveals
new and important elements and dynamics of contemporary security,
yet also reveals the difficulty in analyzing these dynamics: “if
everything that causes a decline in human well-being is labelled a
‘security’ threat, the term loses any analytical usefulness and
becomes a loose synonym of ‘bad’ ” (Deudney 1990: 463–4).
A further extension of the broadening/deepening argument holds
that the negative view of security as threat is too conservative.
Precisely because security is so evocative, and because it captures
vital vulnerabilities of the human condition as no other term does, it
is crucial that it be understood positively, defined broadly, and
mobilized politically. Conditions of insecurity defined as threats to life
or well-being are everywhere: poverty, disease, environmental
degradation (Booth 2007). On this account, the promotion of security
has an emancipatory dimension, liberating people from various
forms of physical and structural violence, empowering them to
control their own futures (Nunes 2012).
The challenge presented by broadening and deepening the
concept of security has generated significant debate. The most
straightforward reaction from mainstream security studies has been
to argue that “in considering the problem of security in international
politics, the place to start is with war” (Morgan 2006: 1). This reaction
may reflect the power of entrenched scholarly (and policy)
paradigms, or an ahistorical and unquestioning acceptance of the
fusion of security and war. It is also, however, underpinned by a dual
theoretical and practical claim: while new issues might represent
important problems, they do not represent threats that warranted
being labeled as security issues; and that if security is broadened to
refer to issues beyond the security of the state from military threats,
it could be expanded to mean anything. This would not only lead to
analytic anarchy, it would also mean that security studies would be
unable to contribute to understanding the most important issues on
its agenda, those of war and peace (Mearsheimer 1994). Both of
these concerns represent important challenges that have not always
been taken seriously by advocates of a broadened or deepened
agenda.

2.5 RUPTURE: SECURITIZATION THEORY

A second, radically different, reaction both to “broadening and
deepening” and to mainstream security studies came in the
development of securitization theory (Buzan et al. 1998; Balzacq
2011). Unlike those who rejected the ambiguities of security by
retreating to the supposedly secure foundations of prevailing
orthodoxies, securitization theory embraced the apparent
indeterminacy of the concept and sought to transform it into a basis
for theoretical clarity. To do this it is necessary to relinquish the idea
that security has an essential meaning or fixed condition: what are
considered security issues in different times by different people is
variable. But this does not imply that security is a meaningless term
or that security studies is condemned to conceptual chaos. On the
contrary, in securitization theory, security represents a “speech act,”
involving the naming of particular phenomena as “existential threats,”
and having that declaration accepted by a relevant audience. The
concept of security is not important for what it means; it is important
for what it does: for the way it marks an issue as one of survival,
requiring the adoption of emergency measures and the suspension
of normal rules of social and political life.
While securitization theory retains elements of the traditional view
of security, particularly its association with existential fear, extreme
situations, and the potential for violence, it delinks the concept from
any specific object to be secured (such as the state), or a specific
type of threats (originating solely from external, military forces, for
example). Anything can in principle be an object to be secured: for
instance, the government, the territorial state, and the nation are
analytically separable referent objects that connect and conflict in
practice and that often need to be distinguished in order to
understand how they are combined in specific situations. In the
same way, the economy, social identity, and the environment can be
threatened referent objects and international corporations, migrants,
HIV/AIDS, or global warming can represent threats. The analytic
question thus becomes what security claims (speech acts) are
made, by whom, and with what success in a given context. Security
analysts recognize that these processes are underway when an
actor invokes “existential threats”—processes in which mainstream
conceptions and traditional institutions of state security have
considerable power in setting the security agenda—but they are not
exclusive, unchallengeable, or unchallenged.
Unlike much of mainstream security studies and many of its critics,
securitization theory does not necessarily regard security as a
positive thing in which “more is better.” Since defining a security
issue casts it within logics of fear, extremity, and emergency,
securitizing an issue carries significant risks to groups such as
refugees or migrants, for example. Accordingly, issues should only
be securitized with a full appreciation of the potentially negative
implications of doing so, and great caution should be exercised.
More positive action involves removing an issue from the security
agenda: “desecuritizing” it, and placing it within the sphere of
“normal” politics where debate, negotiation, and compromise, rather
than the politics of fear and emergency rule the day (Aradau 2004).
This vision of security, and particularly its division between
“security” and “normal” politics provides another opening onto
contemporary debates about security governance and the
management of risk by networks of security professionals distinct
from political elites and policy-makers. The divide between normal
and securitized politics has become increasingly blurred by the rise
of mentalities, technologies, and practices to manage risk and
forecast security threats. Risk management practices are partly a
response to the changing landscape of global security, with analysis
including non-traditional as well as traditional sources of threat: to
airline passengers on commercial flights as well as modern air
forces; to computer hackers as well as columns of tanks; to self-
radicalized violent extremists and organized terrorist groups; and to
transnational non-state actors as well as state militaries. As a
consequence, massive intellectual and material resources are now
directed toward data collection and analysis, toward developing
profiles and algorithms that can render this expansive and complex
new security terrain visible and manageable.
In this way, the focus on concepts of risk in security studies opens
up another of the fundamental conceptual and practical distinctions
that has traditionally underpinned security studies, the divide
between security inside and outside the state. As security issues and
threats have become globalized, so too has the practice of policing
stretched beyond borders, and as domestic threats are linked to
transnational networks, domestic policing has become increasingly
militarized. The two faces are often entwined, as for instance when
drug trafficking, illicit arms supplies or transnational terrorism are
involved; or when foreign fighters return to their “home” states and
“home-grown” extremists act with global connections. Contemporary
security challenges often thus cut across and partially erase the
conceptual and institutional divides between internal and external
security concerns. One could even argue that the post-9/11 security
condition is one in which the external has become the internal: the
War on Terror, and the very name and function of the Department of
Homeland Security is about external threats having intruded into the
sphere of domestic political, social, and economic life.

2.6 RETRENCHMENT: “WHAT HAS WAR GOT TO DO WITH THIS?”

Both the “dissent” and “rupture” outlined above occlude or even
exclude questions of war and violence. Yet even mainstream security
studies, despite a commitment to studying the use of force is
increasingly isolated in scholarly terms from research and analysis
on actual wars and armed conflicts (with the exception of terrorism)
—representing a decisive rupture with the heritage of strategic
studies. Current mainstream research concentrates more on what
could be called geopolitics or grand strategy, focusing (from the
webpage of International Security) on topics such as: the causes and
prevention of war, ethnic conflict and peacekeeping, terrorism and
homeland security, European, Asian, and regional security, US
foreign policy, arms control and weapons proliferation, International
Relations theory, and diplomatic and military history. One reason for
this can be found in the changing nature of warfare itself: the decline
of great power and interstate wars has meant that actual war-fighting
takes place predominantly in the global South, involves a range of
state and non-state actors, and/or is asymmetric in nature (Münkler
2005; Kaldor 2013). Even within the dissenting strands of security
studies, only recently has attention been paid to the study of war as
a phenomenon and “in a world made in no small measure by
ongoing histories of organised violence, we lack a social science of
war.”
One result is that the study of the organization for and the conduct
of wars and armed conflict is increasingly the preserve of scholars
working within the tradition of the “scientific study of international
conflict.” Work regarding the recruitment and dynamics of armed
groups, the logic of civil wars, mass killing and genocide, civilian
victimization and the analysis of factors leading to violence is
published, for example, in outlets such as Civil Wars, or Terrorism
and Political Violence; the Journal of Peace Research; or the Journal
of Conflict Resolution. These examples cover the ends of the
spectrum ranging from contemporary strategic issues to research on
peace and post-conflict peacebuilding; and much of this scholarship
is driven by a concern with data-driven or model-based methods of
social science, directly drawing upon the groundwork laid by the
Correlates of War and the work of Nordic peace researchers in the
1980s and beyond (Urdal et al. 2014). For a discipline whose
mainstream is oriented around “the study of the threat, use and
control of military force” (Walt 1991: 212), this result is at best
paradoxical, and has seen the rise of calls from more critical
sociological approaches to return war to a more central place in
security studies (Barkawi and Brighton 2011).

2.7 ON (FUTURE) SECURITIES

As even this brief survey shows, the field of security studies is now
rich in both its theoretical perspectives and empirical concerns. This
diversity is both a strength—in that research covers a wide array of
topics from diverse approaches—and a weakness—in that there is
no agreed core to the discipline, and perhaps even “two solitudes” of
security studies as the wide gulf between mainstream and other
approaches testifies (see Hayes 2015). Any attempt to map its
present and future contours would thus likely result in failure. In this
final section we can only offer clues for thinking about the future of
security studies, based on the diverse understandings of security
and security studies outlined in this chapter.
To begin, our account highlights that security is a historically
shifting set of social and political practices, not an objective condition
or fixed set of perceptions. Who is being secured, from what, and by
what means, has evolved throughout history. Security studies has
ebbed and flowed along with these shifting practices, and the
orientation it takes cannot be separated from them. Security studies
is not “basic research.” Embedding an analysis of security within the
broader evolution of the relationships between states, societies, and
institutions of organized violence leads us to scrutinize the
foundations of any particular conception of security, rather than to
declare one of them correct for all times and places. Nor can security
be reduced solely to the existential threats to an individual, a state,
or a society. While these are important, it is crucial to examine the
ways in which risks are transformed into threats, and how particular
issues become accepted as security issues. And it is equally
important to examine the conditions under which security issues
become de-intensified to the point where they are considered only to
be challenges to be met through normal politics; in short, how
relations of insecurity can be transformed into stable and pacific
relations and systems.
The study of security will also not be reduced to violence and
warfare, but war, as the ultimate expression of the potential for
organized violence, is central to how security has been understood
and practiced. But this needs to be set in a wider context of the
processes by which individuals and communities determine what—or
who—constitutes threats to their safety and well-being, since these
processes tell us much about an individual’s (or a community’s)
vision of themselves, their identity and their values—and of what
they are willing to fight, kill, and die for. Traditional issues of
interstate war and peace continue to present challenges that will be
central to security studies. However it does not follow that this
requires scholars and analysts to restrict the analysis of security only
to these issues. It recognizes the many different forms of
contemporary organized violence (large and small; highly or loosely
organized; materially or politically motivated), shares mainstream
security studies’ concern with the institutions and instruments of
coercion, but looks beyond the military, beyond war, and beyond the
external exercise of force by states (Barkawi 2011).
In an increasingly globalized world, the question is also not
whether the state should or should not be the focus of security
studies, but rather how security provision came to be synonymous
with the state, and how contemporary social and political challenges
and transformations have an impact on that specific historical
resolution. This is important in those parts of the globe where fragile
states never provided security to their citizens, and where predatory
rule represented the greatest source of insecurity. It also applies
within states where the historically formed practices and processes
through which internal and external forms of security provision
became institutionally and politically distinct are eroding or being
challenged. Too narrow or timeless a vision of security restricts our
understanding of the role of the state as a political institution with a
certain relationship to a community that may be emancipatory,
protective, or repressive. It also hinders us from analysing many of
the most important aspects of contemporary insecurities, and
potentially developing creative or effective responses to them that
are not bounded by the state.
Finally, treating security as a concept that has a history and that
exists within a wider social and political field means that the
evolution of the concept and practice of security, and the relationship
between the two, is an important subject of inquiry in itself. Stressing
the connections between theory and practice does not mean either
that theories drive reality, or that they are simply a reflection of it.
Bringing the two into a clearer relation and showing how different
understandings of the concept of security are historically contingent
can illuminate both changes in the concept and in the practices of
security. Ultimately, the powerful “sign of security” serves to structure
the mentalities, values, conceptions of the self, of social order, and of
the condition of security that are embedded in institutions that we
encounter on a nearly everyday basis. In this way, debates over
security and the scope and ambit of security studies are connected
to broader values and political judgments about desirable forms of
domestic and global order.

REFERENCES
Adler, E. and M. Barnett (eds.) 1998. Security Communities. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Aradau, C. 2004. Security and the Democratic Scene: Desecuritization and
Emancipation. Journal of International Relations and Development, 7(4): 388–
413.
Arcidiacono, B. 2011. Cinq types de paix: une histoire des plans de pacification
perpétuelle (XVIIe–XXe siècles). Paris: PUF.
Arends, J. and M. Frederik 2008. From Homer to Hobbes and Beyond—Aspects of
“Security” in the European Tradition. Globalization and Environmental
Challenges, 3: 263–77.
Ashworth, L. M. 2006. Where are the Idealists in Interwar International Relations?
Review of International Studies, 32(2): 291–308.
Baldwin, D. 1995. Security Studies and the End of the Cold War. World Politics,
48(1): 117–41.
Baldwin, D. 1997. The Concept of Security. Review of International Studies,
23(01): 5–26.
Balzacq, T. (ed.) 2011. Securitization Theory. London: Routledge.
Barkawi, T. 2011. From War to Security: Security Studies, the wider Agenda and
the Fate of the Study of War. Millennium, 39(3): 701–16.
Barkawi, T. and S. Brighton. 2011. Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, Critique.
International Political Sociology, 5: 126–43.
Bayley, D. H. 1975. The Police and Political Development in Europe. In C. Tilly and
G. Ardant (eds.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, pp. 328–
39. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bock, P. G. and M. Berkowitz. 1966. The Emerging Field of National Security.
World Politics, 19(1): 122–36.
Booth, K. 2007. Theory of World Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bourbeau, P. 2015. Security: Dialogue across Disciplines. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Brauch, H. G., O. Ú. Spring, C. Mesjasz, J. Grin, P. Dunay, N. C. Behera, B.
Chourou, P. Kameri-Mbote, and P. H. Liotta (eds.). 2008. Globalization and