Dissertation Proposal- Critical Security Studies and Terrorism

Research Question - Introductory Essay

Do 'Critical Security Studies' approaches offer important insights when theorising about the 'War on Terror'?

Introduction

I will argue that 'Critical Security Studies'(CSS) offer many important insights when theorising about the 'War on Terror.'(WoT) In this introduction I will outline what I mean by traditional approaches to Security Studies to help us understand what is different about CSS. Many of the theoretical insights into the WoT offered by CSS come from three sources; the rejection the state as the sole referent object of security; the rejection of a focus on security as simply threat and military response; and the acceptance of the social construction of security. I will work from the understanding that CSS share many philosophical and theoretical orientations but then diverge on many points making it hard to define in any one concrete way. The diverse influences of these approaches and their different orientations suggest to me that for clarity CSS can be loosely grouped into three sub-divisions, the Copenhagen School, the Welsh School and the Post-structuralists. I will outline these sub-groups to illustrate some of the central insights of these approaches for the WoT. First, the concept of 'Securitization' from a group of constructivist theorists known as the Copenhagen School. This will be followed by the insights from the Welsh School such as thinking of the production of knowledge as being a social process, proposing the denaturalisation of the state based in Frankfurt School Critical Theory traditions and a move towards the possibility of security as an emancipatory project. Finally, the Post-Structuralist stress the importance of rejecting positivist grand narratives, further problematising the state and a suggestion derived from French philosophy, particularly the work of Michel Foucault, illustrating the importance of power/knowledge in the creation of discourses. This approach shows the use of a 'discourse of danger' within US Foreign Policy, presenting a dangerous 'other' as helping to construct the identity of the 'self'.(Campbell, 1998)

Traditional Security Studies

Security Studies(SS), formerly Strategic Studies, has traditionally been regarded as the sub-disipline of International Relations(IR) that exclusively focused on military planning, threat assessment and 'national security' issues. This location of SS within a state-centric view of security is still dominant today and I think that the following quote sums up well how traditional SS views the subject.

"Security Studies may be defined as the study of the threat, use, and control of military force. It explores 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)

With the end of the Cold-War the status-quo of the bi-polar world system had been upset by the collapse of the Soviet Union. This, along with other important world events illustrated other dimensions of security, failed states, genocidal civil-wars, environmental degradation, famine and disease provided an opportunity for more 'critical' IR theories to attempt to illustrate what they saw as the inherent theoretical limitations of the hegemonic state-centric world-view. Since then 'critical' approaches from many different social science disciplines have been applied to almost all sub-disciplines of IR. This work is about the nexus between Security Studies and these 'critical' approaches within the context of theorising the War on Terror. CSS's starting point is asking questions about the foundational assumptions around the ontology and epistemology of dominant security discourses. One of the key ideas of CSS is the 'global/alternative we'. More traditional approaches would use the pronoun 'we' to represent the state as the referent object of security but CSS broadens this out to multiple levels of security right up to global security.

What is CCS?

I am going to be dealing with a label, Critical Security Studies (CSS), but I will not attempt to define it in one exclusive way, I will share in treating it as 'more of an orientation toward the discipline than a precise theoretical label.'(Williams and Krause,1997) Through an exploration of the themes, sub-divisions and alternative orientations of the field's chief theorists I will aim to come to a general understand of this orientation and the diverse academic work it has produced. Central to understanding CSS is their rejection of the dominant positivist approaches to IR and SS within policy making circles. This can be understood through the definitions Robert Cox gave us about the difference between positivist 'Problem Solving Theory' and post-positivist 'Critical Theory.'(Cox, 1981) Within the groups of CSS theorists outlined above I will look at the concept of 'Securitization'(Weaver,1998) in the WoT to place an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of security discourses. This will involve critical analysis of the 'speech acts' of 'securitizing agents' within the WoT. The influence of the Welsh School helps us look at CSS as a project for emancipation aimed at 'developing more promising ideas by which to overcome structural human wrongs.' (Booth, 2005) Finally using Post-Modern, Post-Colonial and Critical Feminist approaches CSS in the WoT highlight the constructed nature of language, the role power plays in knowledge formation, and where these ideas are cross-fertilised between all these grouping, illustrating thematic areas of conflict and cohesion within the field.

Copenhagen School

The 1998 the book 'Security: A New Framework for Analysis' by Barry Buzan, Ole Waever and Jaap de Wilde can be seen as the clearest articulation of the 'Copenhagen School' approach to CSS. It is a combination of an updated version of Buzan's ideas of a sectorial approach to security from his earlier book 'People, States and Fear' and Weaver's work on 'Securitization.' Buzan stressed that whilst security in its military context was still important there were also four other sectors to security; environmental security, economic security, societal security and political security. The concept of 'Securitization' is the most widely known offering from the 'Copenhagen School.' Briefly, this theory suggests that issues can be 'Securitized' by the speech acts of 'securitizing actors' stressing that '"Security" is thus a self referential practice, because it is in this practice that the issue becomes a security issue- not necessarily because a real existential threat exists but that the issue is presented as such a threat.'(Buzan, Weaver, de Wilde 1998:24) I will look at the role of 'Securitization' within the WoT. The Copenhagen School try to refine the broad church of CCS by suggesting that the approach 'want to challenge conventional security studies by applying post-positivist perspectives, such as critical theory and poststructuralism. Much of this work 'deals with the social construction of security, but CSS mostly has the intent(known from poststructuralism as well as from constructivism in international relations) of showing that change is possible because things are socially constituted.'(Buzan Weaver and de Wilde,1998)

Welsh School

The reasons for me leaving the definition of CSS open for interpretation is because many of the 'Schools' within CSS try to define it in a way that often marginalizes the other schools in favour of their own particular approach. This can be seen in the way the 'Welsh School' locates CSS in the specific theoretical tradition of Neo/Post-Marxist Critical Theory. Ken Booth suggests that 'there are times when lines need to be drawn'(Booth 2005: 260) and by this he is articulating a rejection of the broad church for CSS like Krause and Williams presented (1997) in favour of CSS being defined as coming from a similar critical background to himself with influences from the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory and neo-Gramscian approaches. It is the influence of Habermas who came from the Frankfurt tradition that the 'Welsh School' locate CSS in terms of an emancipatory project. They agree with Robert Cox when he says that theory is never neutral, that it is 'always for someone, and for some purpose.'(Cox, 1981)

Post-Structuralists

The final CSS sub-label I am working with here is the 'Post-Structuralists.' They share with 'post-moderists' a rejection of grand positivist meta-narratives and draw their influence from French philosophy. They are influenced by the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Within this group the most important text for theorising about the the War on Terror is 'Writing Security: United States foreign policy and the politics of identity' by David Campbell. It is in this work where he illustrates how a 'discourse of danger' about some foreign 'other' has helped to shape the identity of the USA and recreates itself through it own practices. These discourses work to create fear and suppress dissent. (Giroux, 2002) CSS is committed to an ethos of critique and as Campbell said 'decisions must be taken only to be simultaneously criticised and taken again, and to enact the Enlightenment attitude by a persistant and relentless questioning in specific contexts of the identity performances, and their indebtedness to difference, through which politics occurs.' (Campbell, 1998:227) Other important texts in this field look at how a crisis like the events of September 11th 2001 are used to construct new discursive narratives that are then reproduced through cultural absorption like in movies and television (Croft, 2006) and the role of language in constructing what has become known as the 'War on Terror' security discourse (Jackson, 2005).

Conclusion

I have argued that by looking at CSS through three sub-groups of theorists, the Copenhagen School, the Welsh School and the Post-structuralist, it is possible to generalise about the insights offered on the WoT. The label CSS means slightly different things to each of these groups but they also share central core sets of ideas. The first two are rejections of the traditional SS assumptions that first, puts the state as the sole referent object of security and the second related idea is that SS should be conceptualised as thinking about threat assessment and possible military responses. The third is a far more complicated and far reaching idea, that security is a socially constructed concept that we play a role in creating/recreating. The way that dominant security discourses are constructed in the WoT is also a theme that will be looked into in much more detail to try show how a reconceptualisation of 'security' could lead to the possibility of looking at it as an emancipatory project based on the Enlightenment ethos of a constant critique.

Sebatian O'Brien