(1999) Security Studies: Theory/Practice

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Security studies: Theory/practice
Pinar Bilgin ${ }^{a}$
${ }^{a}$ PhD candidate, Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

Online Publication Date: 01 March 1999
To cite this Article: Bilgin, Pinar (1999) 'Security studies: Theory/practice ', Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 12:2, 31 - 42
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Security Studies:
Theory/Practice*

Pinar Bilgin
PhD candidate, Department of International Politics, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

Abstract

Despite the recent proliferation of works ‘re-thinking’ security, most of the literature critical of Cold War approaches remains dedicated to conceptual issues, often to the detriment of practice and the theory/practice relationship. Re-thinking security requires a re-conceptualisation of the theory/practice linkage thereby opening up security in both theory and practice. Two interrelated arguments will be made. First, that a Critical Security Studies approach which reflects upon the theory/practice divide, conceiving theory as a form of practice is the way forward for Security Studies. Second, that equal attention needs to be paid in security thinking to issues of practice. A Critical Security Studies approach that embraces both ‘thinking about thinking’ and ‘thinking about doing’ will be called for.

There has been much rethinking of ‘security’ since the end of the Cold War. In the last decade or so numerous debates have burgeoned on broadening or updating security, ‘securitization’ and ‘desecuritization’, future security agendas, methodological and epistemological issues, and the appropriate title, Strategic or Security Studies, under which security should be studied. ${ }^{1}$ Despite the proliferation of academic work devoted to re-thinking security, most of the literature critical of Cold War approaches to security remains dedicated to conceptual issues, or ‘thinking about thinking’ as Ken Booth has put it. ${ }^{2}$ What remains largely untouched is the issue of practice, or ‘thinking about doing’, and the theory/practice relationship. The aim of this article is to return to the issue of security practices and the theory/practice linkage - issues initially raised by Critical Security Studies but yet to be taken up by other participants in these debates. ${ }^{3}$

Critical Security Studies: theory is a form of practice

Critical Security Studies represents a convergence of numerous trends which have emerged since the 1960s. These include Peace Research which has broadened the concepts of violence and peace, ${ }^{4}$ ‘alternative defence’ thinkers who focus on ‘common security’ and mitigation of the security dilemma, ${ }^{5}$ alternative practices

promoted by groups such as the US ‘Freeze’ movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and European Nuclear Disarmament (END), ${ }^{5}$ the efforts of Third World specialists who emphasise the structure of the international economic system as a source of insecurity,'feminists who underline the relationship between the personal, political and international, ${ }^{8}$ and post-positivist approaches to International Relations. ${ }^{9}$ Perhaps the most central has been the work of Frankfurt School Critical Theorists ${ }^{10}$ in challenging traditional conceptions of theory, outlining an approach explicitly oriented towards human emancipation. ${ }^{11}$ For what distinguishes Critical Security Studies from other critical approaches (deconstructions) is an interest in emancipatory practices (re-constructions). ${ }^{12}$

There is no single approach to Critical Security Studies. It is rather an umbrella term covering a number of approaches critical of Cold War Security Studies. ${ }^{13}$ James Der Derian, for instance, stresses the impossibility of being ‘secure’, calling for a strategy to ‘celebrate’ the anxiety and insecurity of the contemporary world. ${ }^{14} \mathrm{Ole}$ Wæver questions the usefulness of a broader security agenda, making a case for ‘desecuritization’ instead. ${ }^{15}$ The specific approach adopted here favours broadening and deepening our conception of security in the attempt to achieve ‘stable security’ conceived as a process of emancipation. ${ }^{16}$

Re-thinking security does not simply mean adding more issues to governments’ security agendas, but opening up security to provide a richer picture that includes all issues that engender insecurity - social, physical, political as well as military constraints – and prevent individuals and groups from carrying out what they would freely choose to do. ${ }^{17}$ This requires working towards a sociologically adequate conception of security that takes into account how different actors (agents and referents) are constituted, interact over time, and may change in the future. In this sense, the referents for security, such as states, social groups, or individuals, are never taken as given, as black boxes or finished projects like states were, and to a certain extent still are, taken to be during Cold War Realist approaches to security.

Questioning the statism of Cold War Security Studies, and asking basic (yet crucial) questions such as ‘what is security?’ and ‘whose security should we be concerned with?’ is central to Critical Security Studies. In the words of Ken Booth:
[i]f security is conceived in terms of a wide variety of threats to human life and well-being then it is necessary to consider not just the threats which are relevant at the state level, but at all the levels appropriate for individual and group living. ${ }^{18}$

Added to the concerns for the security of individuals and groups is the record of ‘gangster’ states that restrict their own citizens’ rights thereby becoming a source of insecurity. ${ }^{19}$ In this sense, privileging states irrespective of their record in fulfilling their duties is confusing means and ends. This is why Critical Security Studies is concerned with 'placing the experience of those men and women and communities for whom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security, at the centre of our agenda. ${ }^{20}$ Security achieved and maintained through

the threat of war or at someone else’s expense cannot be stable. ${ }^{21}$
Re-thinking security also requires us to deepen our understanding of security regarding the links between security theories and the political philosophies from which they derive. ${ }^{22}$ Concepts such as ‘national security’, ‘security policy,’ and ‘security studies’ are inter-subjectively constituted. Different world views and political philosophies deliver different views and discourses about what ‘security’ is or may be. ${ }^{23}$ In this sense, rethinking security requires re-conceiving the links between theorists, security theories and security practices in light of critical theories. Starting with Robert Cox’s maxim 'theory is always for someone and for some purpose, ${ }^{24}$ Critical Security Studies lays bare the normative projects embedded within Cold War security theories which otherwise masquerade as objective. ${ }^{25}$ Uncovering the normative character of theories helps us reveal the linkages between theorist and theory, and theorising about security and acting for security. Whether they are self-conscious and open about it or not, all approaches to security have embedded normative concerns such as the maintenance of the status quo or the promotion of state sovereignty even to the detriment of individual and group rights. Critical Security Studies, on the other hand, favours an explicitly normative security agenda based on human emancipation, in opposition to Cold War security agendas which, in the guise of objective theories, have privileged the security of states in general and some states in particular.

Having laid bare the normative character of theories and the theory/practice relationship in Cold War Security Studies, Critical Security Studies makes a second move towards re-conceptualising practice: theory becomes a form of practice. By informing our practices, theories help shape the world in line with their tenets. In contrast to the traditional Security Studies conception of theory as an explanatory tool, theories do not just explain but are constitutive of ‘reality’. This is not to suggest that theories create the world in a philosophical idealist sense of the term, but that theories help organise knowledge which, in turn, enables, privileges, or legitimises certain practices whilst inhibiting or marginalising others. Different security theories produce different security discourses by laying down the rules which enable one to ‘write, speak, listen and act meaningfully’. ${ }^{26}$ Depending on the theory or theories employed, discourses close off certain possibilities whilst opening others, and lay the groundwork for the practices of politicians, soldiers and ‘ordinary people’ by providing the assumptions on which they operate and the norms with which they judge. ${ }^{27}$ Realism, for example, assisted the production of mainstream Cold War discourse in the United States. The statist norms provided by Realism helped legitimise statist security practices whilst marginalising the calls for ‘common’, ‘cooperative’, or ‘global security’.

Critical Security Studies aims to re-conceptualise security practices via a two-pronged strategy. First, it points to possibilities for change immanent in world politics. The aim is to represent the ideas and experiences of 'the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless, ${ }^{28}$ and to underline existing alternative practices that are non-statist, non-militarised and non-zero sum in character. Second, is to offer a normative basis to criticise the existing practices and conceive emancipatory alternatives.

Theory and practice in Cold War Security Studies: worlds apart?

Security is a relatively new concept in International Relations. The term ‘national security’ was used in the aftermath of the Second World War in the United States and Great Britain, where the academic field of security studies originated. In the United States, security was studied under the title ‘National Security Studies’, ‘Strategic Studies’ in Britain. The focus on states as the core subject of security, an emphasis on military matters, and the privilege accorded to the maintenance of the status quo as the endpoint for security united the two academic traditions.

Not all approaches to security were in unison during the Cold War. ${ }^{29}$ However, mainstream or Cold War security studies derived from political Realism, with its state-centred, military-focused outlook, and objectivist conception of theory and the theory/practice relationship. Corroborated by an empiricist epistemology, ${ }^{30}$ the state-centred outlook introduced a degree of neatness and clarity to the complexity of international phenomena. As with all simplifications, however, many crucial aspects were missed in the process. The military focus manifested itself in a search for military solutions to problems that were essentially political in character. This objectivist conception of theory and the theory/practice relationship resulted in an essentially normative theory of security studies masquerading as an ‘objective’ approach to international phenomena (theory viewed as ‘knowledge’) whilst the explicitly ‘normative’ approaches of their critics were presented as 'propaganda. ${ }^{31}$ John Garnett illustrates how contemporary strategic thought can still fail to reflect upon the normative character of strategic theorising. Garnett maintains that the ‘moral aspects of military power’ is:
a quite separate subject from strategic studies in that it requires a quite different expertise, and it is therefore unfair to blame specialists in the latter for their lack of competence in it. ${ }^{32}$

Though research in a subject does not necessarily imply approval of it, and strategists should not be blamed for the 'deadly’33 character of their subject, it would be wrong to overlook the normative baggage strategists bring to their subject. For issues of morality are not optional extras to be left, as Garnett suggests, to the 'theologians, philosophers, and political scientists ${ }^{34}$. By choosing to privilege state security, often to the detriment of individuals and groups whose security the state, in theory, is there to provide for, statist approaches already have moral choices intrinsic to them. The moral choice is not in choosing to study nuclear strategy or not, but in deciding what to say about it; and decisions always have moral choices embedded in them.

Moreover, the objectivist conception of the theory/practice relationship adopted by Cold War security studies, not only helped gloss over the normative character of strategic theorising but also proved crucial in not revealing the mutually constitutive relationship between the two. ${ }^{35}$ Perhaps the best example of the constitutive relationship between security theories and practices is the symbiotic relationship between security studies and the Cold War. As argued above, security studies is a product of the Cold War. It developed as a specific answer to the

problems of that era and attempts to understand its evolution requires an awareness of the context in which it originated and, in turn, shaped. ${ }^{36}$ For the academic field not only originated in but thrived upon the Cold War environment. The concepts, assumptions and findings of Cold War security studies helped sustain the Cold War.

Mary Kaldor’s The Imaginary War, ${ }^{37}$ is an excellent illustration of how Cold War discourse expressed and legitimised power relationships worldwide, and helped maintain social cohesion within the two blocs thereby sustaining the conflictual relationship in between. Kaldor stresses the role played by strategic theories, explaining how they became representations of politics instead of playing an objective or neutral role assigned to them by Realism, and that 'evolving strategies did not necessarily bear much relation to actual military capabilities. ${ }^{38}$ The role theories play, however, should not be over-emphasised. The growth of actual military capabilities was also influenced ‘by institutional factors such as interservice rivalry, technological innovation or industrial pressure’ ${ }^{39}$ that fed into strategic theorising via institutions such as the RAND Corporation. ${ }^{40}$ Kaldor ends on the note that 'the very unreality of strategic discussions contributed to the imaginary nature of the East-West confrontation, allowing it to become a deep, ongoing, unrealisable fear. ${ }^{41}$ Uncovering the mutually constitutive relationship between security theories and security practices, in this sense, is more than an intellectual exercise. Our task is not only to uncover the workings of the theory/practice linkage of days past but also be self-conscious about the mutually constitutive character of the relationship between the two when theorising about and acting for security in today’s world.

Not all authors re-considering Cold War history reach the same conclusions as Kaldor. Colin Gray, for instance, blames the propagation of ‘erroneous’ or ‘shoddy’ ideas, such as stable deterrence, collective security, and arms control, for what he terms Cold War policy ‘errors’.42 In contrast to Kaldor’s starting point, that ‘any explanation of natural and social phenomena…is partial’,43 Gray views the theory/practice relationship solely as one of the prior informing the latter. Accordingly, he sees the academic study of strategy as an objective enterprise that ‘can and should provide knowledge useful for official practitioners of strategy’.44 Consider the following statement by John Garnett: 'We need more, not less, objectivity if we are to survive. ${ }^{3}{ }^{36}$ Gray concurs: 'Strategic study (unlike the strategist) is value-neutral and topic-indifferent. ${ }^{45}$

Gray and Garnett’s positions regarding the theory/practice relationship are similar to that of their conception of theory. Both authors are in favour of and open about the role theories play in informing practice. Their conception of practice, however, is restricted because they understand practice as policy-making and implementation at governmental level. This is a narrow view of politics, concerned only with governance at the state level; those who do not engage in issues directly relevant for policy-making are not engaging with practice. Security Studies, in this sense, is supposed to deal with issues that are deemed problematic by policymakers, ${ }^{47}$ leaving untouched other issues, such as structural violence, that do not make it to governmental agendas. This flows from the objectivist position where the

study of strategy is viewed as a politics-free zone. This is a powerful move, for once an approach is regarded as ‘objective’, those critical are immediately labeled at best ‘subjective’ or in a derogatory sense ‘political’, and at worst ‘propagandist’. Once this objective/subjective dichotomy is posited there remains no room for a ‘critical distance’ favoured by the proponents of Critical Security Studies. Garnett and Gray’s view of theory is restricted because they conceive theory as ‘problem-solving theory’;48 theory is to assist policy-makers in solving problems. ${ }^{49}$

Strategists, even if adopting a critical stance, would not make much difference argues Garnett:

If a conflict-oriented view of international politics has caught the public imagination…this is not because it is propagated by strategists but because it offers the man in the street a more plausible interpretation of international reality than any of the alternatives to which he has been exposed. ${ }^{50}$

This statement is another manifestation of Garnett’s restricted notion of theory. After all, what the ‘man in the street’ views as ‘a more plausible interpretation of international reality’s is shaped by the dominant theories and discourses. ${ }^{52}$ Garnett’s statement also hints at an underestimation of the power of theories in informing not only governmental policies, but also the individuals’ conceptions of the world. Such conceptions constitute what Gramsci calls ‘common sense’, which helps sustain the status quo by ‘making situations of inequality and oppression appear to them as natural and unchangeable’. ${ }^{53}$ To go back to Kaldor’s argument regarding the Cold War, it was the ‘imaginary war’ discourse of Realist Strategic Studies that informed men and women in North America and Western Europe of the relevance, legitimacy and inescapability of power politics, tough responses, and brinkmanship. Objectivist conceptions of theory and the theory/practice relationship, restricted notions of theory as ‘problem-solving theory’ and practice as governmental policy-making have sustained an underestimation of the role theories play in constituting ‘reality’ and narrowed the ethical and political horizons of security thinking and practice. Contra-Garnett, the role of theories from a Critical Security Studies perspective, is not to take these conceptions as given but to challenge common sense and present a critical understanding.

Theory/practice in critical approaches to security

The post-positivist turn in international theory has challenged the Realist conception of theory as a tool which can explain social phenomena in an objective manner. Post-positivist approaches, especially Critical Theory, emphasise the normative character of the theory/practice relationship. As Steve Smith reminds us, 'theories do not simply explain or predict, they tell us what possibilities exist for human action and intervention; they define not merely our explanatory possibilities but also our ethical and political horizons. ${ }^{34}$ It is through uncovering the normative character of the theory/practice relationship that Critical Security Studies aims to undermine Cold War security studies, its claim to knowledge, and its hold over practice.

Providing a critique of existing approaches to security and uncovering their hidden assumptions and normative projects is only a first step. As Booth has put it:

Thinking about thinking is important, but, more urgently, so is thinking about doing. For those who believe that we live in a humanly constituted world, the distinction between theory and practice dissolves: theory is a form of practice, and practice is a form of theory. Abstract ideas about emancipation will not suffice: it is important for critical security studies to engage with the real by suggesting policies, agents, and sites of change, to help humankind, in whole and in part, to move away from its structural wrongs. ${ }^{55}$

Accordingly, this approach aims to re-conceptualise security in both theory and practice by pointing to possibilities for change immanent in world politics and call for alternative practices. It is this concern with practice that distinguishes the ‘Welsh School’ of Critical Security Studies from other critical approaches to security. For, as post-positivist approaches have helped uncover the normative character of theory and theorising, the danger surfaces of over-reliance on thinking about conceptual issues to the neglect of issues of practice. ${ }^{56}$ Although ‘thinking about thinking’ and critical self-reflection are forms of practice, it is still necessary to pay attention to ‘thinking about doing’. If re-thinking security is to go beyond solely broadening the security agenda (after all, even the US Central Intelligence Agency broadened its agenda while maintaining traditional practices) we need to start thinking about acting and consider referents other than the state such as individuals, social groups, and world society, in a more rigorous manner. ${ }^{57}$

Turning our gaze to the ‘Middle East’ with a Critical Security Studies lens, leads us to inquire about Iraqi strategic culture and the reasons behind the invasion of Kuwait. This enables us, not only to ‘know one’s enemy’ in a traditional sense, and to overcome an opponent by incurring minimum losses, but also to solve problems before they become intractable. ${ }^{58}$ Furthermore, we become curious about the individuals in the streets of the ‘Middle East’ who expressed support for Iraq throughout the 1990-1991 crisis by holding demonstrations. They did so not necessarily because they condoned Iraq’s actions, but because they constituted ‘a deserved blow to the status quo (with all its domestic, political, socio-economic, and international dimensions)…which Kuwait was seen to symbolise’: we ask what ‘security in the Middle East’ meant for them. ${ }^{59}$ A Critical Security Studies approach also requires a reconsideration of what is meant by peace in Israel/Palestine in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. Simona Sharoni questions the presentation of ‘peace’ and ‘security’ as the absence of violence at the inter-communal, group or state level, oblivious to the lack of security for women in their daily lives. She argues that for women 'the morning after’60 may not necessarily bring security at the individual level. ${ }^{61}$

Sharoni’s work on Palestinian and Israeli women in the peace movements is a powerful expression of the significant role women’s agency has played in bringing about a peace agreement, and how, so far, it has been overlooked in state-centred

accounts. ${ }^{62}$ Not all approaches otherwise critical of mainstream security studies are immune to the tendency of producing state-centred analyses. Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde’s latest collaborative work, for instance, presents a detailed analysis of the implications of broadening security by looking at its economic, societal, environmental, political and military dimensions. ${ }^{63}$ This study, critical of the 'primacy of the military element and the state in the conceptualisation of security ${ }^{164}$, ends up with a state-centred conception of security due to the lack of attention to issues of practice and agency. To be fair, the authors do not start from statist assumptions. Rather, they end up focusing on the state because it has been, in their words, 'generally privileged as the actor historically endowed with security tasks and most adequately structured for the purpose. ${ }^{165}$ Furthermore, they maintain that their position 'acknowledges the difference between a state-centric approach and a state-dominated field. ${ }^{166}$ The argument here is not to deny that the state has been privileged over time by traditional practices, that security studies has been dominated by a state-centric outlook, or that states are currently the actors best endowed to provide security, especially in terms of military institutions and defense. On the contrary, the argument is that its current status as the best endowed security agent does not require state’s security to be accorded undue attention to the neglect of other referents and agents. Buzan et al. present a state-centred analysis because they fail to address the issues of agency and practice and to discuss the alternative (nonstatist, non-military, non-zero sum) practices of non-state actors to meet a broader security agenda. Our task should be to question why security studies has become a ‘state-dominated field’ instead of taking it as given. A critical security studies approach would require us to pay attention to security agents other than the state. These could be social movements, international governmental and nongovernmental organisations, whose practices focus on providing emergency aid, food, shelter, health provisions and education when the state fails to deliver; and individuals such as intellectuals who try to represent the ideas and experiences of those who are working towards constituting alternative futures.

Conclusion

Re-conceiving practice is crucial to the project of re-thinking security unless we are to resort to traditional practices when coping with a broader range of threats. Neglecting the issue of practice, or over-reliance on ‘thinking about thinking’ and critical self-reflection as forms of practice, would not enable us to fulfill the potential of broadening security. This involves re-thinking security in different parts of the world, shifting our focus to regional security thinking, and emphasising the role played by non-state actors in drawing up alternative security agendas. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ actors alike should endeavour to meet the new agendas via alternative practices, and incorporate issues such as human rights into our security agendas whilst paying due attention to strategic issues. It also involves being self-conscious and open about the normative and mutually constitutive character of the theory/practice relationship when theorising about or acting for security.

• I would like to thank Adam David Morton for comments on earlier versions of this essay. This work is based on a larger research project on security in the Middle East.

1 See inter alia Barry Buzan, People, States and Fear: an Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, 2nd ed., London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991 [1983]; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, ‘Redefining security’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 68, no. 2, Spring 1990, pp. 162177; Ken Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, Review of International Studies, vol. 17, 1991, pp.313-362. J. Ann Tickner, ‘Re-visioning Security’, in Ken Booth & Steve Smith, eds., International Relations Theory Today, Oxford, Polity Press, 1995, pp. 175-197. For an introduction to the concepts ‘securitization’ and ‘desecuritization’, see Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie Lipschutz, ed., On Security, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 46-86.
2 The distinction between ‘thinking about thinking’ and ‘thinking about doing’ is from Ken Booth, ‘Security and Self: Reflections of a Fallen Realist’, in Keith Krause & Michael Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, London, UCL Press, 1997, p. 114.
3 For the theory/practice nexus, see Richard Wyn Jones, "Message in a bottle’? Theory and Praxis in Critical Security Studies’, Contemporary Security Policy, vol.16, no.3, December 1995, pp. 299319; also see Ken Booth ‘A Security Regime in Southern Africa: Theoretical Considerations’, South African Perspectives, vol. 30, February 1994; Ken Booth and Peter Vale, ‘Critical Security Studies and Regional Insecurity: the Case of Southern Africa’, in Krause and Williams, Critical Security Studies, pp. 329-358. For exceptions, see endnote 56.
4 Kenneth Boulding, Stable Peace, Austin, Texas, University of Texas Press, 1978; Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6, no. 3, 1969, pp. 167-192.
5 Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, Common Security:A Program for Disarmament, London, Pan, 1982.
6 David J. Dunn, ‘Peace Research versus Strategic Studies’, in Ken Booth, ed., New Thinking on Strategy and International Security, London, Harper Collins, 1991, pp. 56-72.
7 Abdul-Monem M. Al-Mashat, National Security in the Third World, Boulder & London, Westview, 1985; Caroline Thomas, In Search for Security: the Third World in International Relations, Boulder, CO, Wheatsheaf, 1987.
8 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990; J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Perspectives in Achieving Global Security, New York, Columbia University Press, 1992.
9 R.B.J. Walker, ‘Security, Sovereignty and the Challenge of World Politics’, Alternatives, vol. 15, no.1, 1990, pp.3-28; David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1992; Bradley S. Klein, Strategic Studies and World Order, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994.
10 Throughout the essay ‘critical theory’ refers broadly to post-positivist approaches to international relations, one of which is ‘Critical Theory’ of the Frankfurt School tradition.
11 Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, New York, Continuum, 1992, pp. 188-243; Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations, London, Macmillan, 1990; Jürgen Haacke, ‘Theory and Praxis in International Relations: Habermas, Self-reflection, Rational Argumentation’, Millennium, vol. 25, no. 2, 1996, pp. 255-289.

12 Pinar Bilgin, Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones ‘security studies: the Next Stage?’ Naçãoe Defesa, vol. 84, 1998, p. 157.
13 Some would like to keep it as such, see Krause & Williams, Critical Security Studies.
14 James Der Derian, ‘The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, Baudrillard’, in Lipschutz, On Security, pp. 24-45.
15 Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’.
16 The parallel is drawn with Boulding’s ‘stable peace’; a condition defined not only by the absence of war, i.e. ‘negative peace’ but by the absence of ‘structural violence’ in the Galtungian sense of the term (See endnote 4). ‘Stable security’ may be understood as a condition maintained not because of the threat of war but because of mutual satisfaction with the existing situation. This understanding of security does not treat security as an endpoint; it is rather conceived as a process, ‘a condition of becoming’ as Booth put it in ‘Three Tyrannies’, in Tim Dunne & Nicholas J. Wheeler, eds., Human Rights in Global Politics, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, p. 61.
17 Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, p.319. For an extended exploration of what emancipation might mean, see Booth, ‘Three Tyrannies’.
18 Booth, ‘A Security Regime in Southern Africa’, p. 4.
19 Nicholas J. Wheeler, ‘Guardian Angel or Global Gangster: the Ethical Claims of International Society Revisited’, Political Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, March 1996, pp. 123-136.
20 Wyn Jones, ‘Message in a Bottle’, p. 309.
21 Boulding, Stable Peace. Also see endnote 16.
22 Booth, ‘Security and Self’, p. 111. Also see Ken Booth, ‘75 Years On: Rewriting the Subject’s Past - Reinventing Its Future’, in Ken Booth, Steve Smith and Marysia Zalewski, eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge, PolityPress, 1996, p. 337.
23 Booth, ‘Security and Self’, pp. 110-112.
24 Robert Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory’, Millennium, vol. 10, no. 2, Summer 1981, pp. 83-119.
25 See, for example, Colin Gray, ‘New Directions for Strategic Studies? How Can Theory Help Practice?’ Security Studies, vol. 1, no. 4, Summer 1992, pp. 610-635; Stephen Walt, ‘The Renaissance of Security Studies’, International Studies Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, June 1991, pp. 211-239. It should be noted that not all strategists make objectivist pretences. Edward Luttwak, for instance, has put it as follows: ‘Strategy is not a neutral pursuit and its only purpose is to strengthen one’s own side in the contention of nations’. See his Strategy and History: Collected Essays, vol. II, New Brunswick & Oxford, 1985, xiii, quoted in Booth, ‘Security and Emancipation’, p. 318 .

26 John Agnew & Stuart Corbridge, Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and International Political Economy, London & New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 45.
27 Simon Dalby, Creating the Second Cold War: the Discourse of Politics, London, Pinter, 1990.
28 Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual - The 1993 Reith Lectures, London, Vintage, 1994, p. 84.
29 See Hedley Bull, ‘Strategic Studies and its Critics’, World Politics, vol. XX, no. 4, July 1968, pp. 593-605, for a discussion of and response to some of the criticisms brought against academic strategists during the 1960s. For those whom Gray termed as ‘unfriendly’ critics, see Phillip Green, Deadly Logic: The Theory of Nuclear Deterrence, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 1966, and Anatol Rapoport, Strategy and Conscience, New York, Schocken, 1964.

30 The traditionalist vs. behaviouralist debate of the 1950s and 1960s focused on methodology thereby neglecting epistemology and ontology. See Hedley Bull, ‘International Theory: The Case for a Classical Approach’, in Klaus Knorr and James N. Rosenau, eds., Contending Approaches to International Politics, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 20-38. For a critique, see Steve Smith, ‘The Self-Images of a Discipline: A Genealogy of International Relations Theory’, in Booth & Smith, International Relations Theory Today, p. 17.
31 John Garnett, ‘Strategic Studies and its Assumptions’, in John Baylis et al., Contemporary Strategic Problems, vol. 1, 2nd ed., New York, Holmes & Meier, 1991, p. 23. For a critical account of positivism in International Theory, see Steve Smith, ‘Positivism and Beyond’, in Booth, Smith and Zalewski, International Theory, pp. 11-44.
32 Garnett, ‘Strategic Studies and its Assumptions’, p. 13.
33 Ken Booth, ‘Teaching Strategy: An Introductory Questionnaire’,Survival, March-April 1974, p. 79, quoted in Garnett, ‘Strategic Studies and its Assumptions’, p. 3.
34 Garnett, ‘Strategic Studies and its Assumptions’, p. 13.
35 See Michael C. Williams, ‘Identity and the Politics of Security’, European Journal of International Relations, vol. 4, no. 2, 1988, pp. 204-225, for an elucidation of the adoption of an objectivist conception of theory by the neo-realists as a political practice constitutive of a world in line with their wishes.
36 See Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years, New York, New Press, 1997, for a collection of essays on the impact of Cold War environment on US academic life.
37 Mary Kaldor, The Imaginary War: Understanding the East-West Conflict, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990.
38 Kaldor, The Imaginary War, p. 192.
39 Kaldor, The Imaginary War.
40 See Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, NewYork, Simon & Schuster, 1983.
41 Kaldor, The Imaginary War, pp. 192-193.
42 Gray, ‘New Directions for Strategic Studies?’, p. 612.
43 Kaldor, The Imaginary War, p. 7.
44 Gray, ‘New Directions for Strategic Studies?’, p. 611.
45 Garnett, ‘Strategic Studies and its Assumptions’, pp. 22-23.
46 Gray, ‘New Directions for Strategic Studies?’, p. 626.
47 Steve Smith terms this as ‘the tip of the iceberg’, see ‘Power and Truth: A Reply to William Wallace’, Review of International Studies, vol. 23, no. 4, October 1997, p. 509.
48 Cox, ‘Social Forces, States and World Orders’.
49 Gray ‘New Directions for Strategic Studies?’, pp. 629-631.
50 Garnett, ‘Strategic Studies and its Assumptions’, p. 22.
51 Garnett, ‘Strategic Studies and its Assumptions’, p. 22.
52 For an exploration of this process within the Middle Eastern context, see Edward Said, Orientalism, London, Penguin, 1995, [1978], and Edward Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World, rev. ed., London, Vintage, 1997.
53 David Forgacs, ed., A Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1988, p. 421.
54 Smith, ‘Positivism and Beyond’, p. 13.
55 Booth, ‘Security and Self’, p. 114.

56 There are exceptions: OleWæver, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup & Pierre Lemaitre et al. Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe, London, Pinter, 1993, and Barry Buzan, OleWæver and Jaap deWilde, Security: A Framework for Analysis, London, Lynne Rienner, 1997, both engage with the empirical but not the theory/practice relationship. David Campbell’s works Writing Security and Politics Without Principle: Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the GulfWar, Boulder & London, Lynne Rienner, 1993, engage with both the empirical and the theory/practice linkage. The latter work includes a discussion on alternative ways of ‘ethical engagement’, pp. 98-99. Mark Hoffman’s ‘Agency, Identity and Intervention’ in lan Forbes & Mark Hoffman, eds., Political Theory, International Relations and the Ethics of Intervention, Houndmills, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 194-211, which dwells upon all issues of concern here, is an exception by all accounts.
57 See the end of this section for an elaboration on this critique. Also see Bilgin, Booth and Wyn Jones ‘Security Studies: the Next Stage?’
58 For alternative accounts of the GulfWar, see Mohamed Heikal, Illusions of Triumph: An Arab View of the GulfWar, London, Harper Collins, 1992, and Campbell, Politics Without Principle.
59 Walid Khalidi, Palestine Reborn, London & NewYork, I.B. Tauris, 1992, p. 204.
60 Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.
61 Simona Sharoni, ‘Peace as Identity Crisis: Gender and Political Change in Israel/Palestine and the North of Ireland’, paper presented at the 1998 Millennium Conference, Gender and International Studies: Looking Forward, 13-14 September 1998, LSE.
62 Simona Sharoni, ‘Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Accord: Feminist Approaches to International Politics’, in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Gendering the Middle East: Emerging Perspectives, London & NewYork, I.B. Tauris, 1996, pp. 107-126.
63 Buzan et al., Security.
64 Buzan et al., Security, p. 1.
65 Buzan et al., Security.
66 Buzan et al., Security.