This article provides the first excavation of the foundational role of racist thought in securitization theory. We demonstrate that Copenhagen School securitization theory is structured not only by ...Eurocentrism but also by civilizationism, methodological whiteness, and antiblack racism. Classic securitization theory advances a conceptualization of ‘normal politics’ as reasoned, civilized dialogue, and securitization as a potential regression into a racially coded uncivilized ‘state of nature’. It justifies this through a civilizationist history of the world that privileges Europe as the apex of civilized ‘desecuritization’, sanitizing its violent (settler-) colonial projects and the racial violence of normal liberal politics. It then constructs a methodologically and normatively white framework that uses speech act theory to locate ‘progress’ towards normal politics and desecuritization in Europe, making becoming like Europe a moral imperative. Using ostensibly neutral terms, securitization theory prioritizes order over justice, positioning the securitization theorist as the defender of (white) ‘civilized politics’ against (racialized) ‘primal anarchy’. Antiblackness is a crucial building-block in this conceptual edifice: securitization theory finds ‘primal anarchy’ especially in ‘Africa’, casting it as an irrationally oversecuritized foil to ‘civilized politics’. We conclude by discussing whether the theory, or even just the concept of securitization, can be recuperated from these racist foundations.
This book is an open access book. Many scholars have wondered if a non-Western theory of international politics founded on different premises, be it from Asia or from the “Global South,” could ...release international relations from the grip of a Western, “Westphalian” model. This book argues that a Buddhist approach to international relations could provide a genuine alternative. Because of its distinctive philosophical positions and its unique understanding of reality, human nature and political behavior, a Buddhist theory of IR offers a way out of this dilemma, a means for transcending the Westphalian predicament. The author explains this Buddhist IR model, beginning with its philosophical foundations up through its ideas about politics, economics and statecraft.
This Special Issue explores Latin America’s recent wave of militarism across countries, the militarization of the rule of law, and its consequences on everyday life. It draws on the region’s recent ...history of giving militarized responses to seemingly intractable social, political, and economical problems. We argue that the presence of military values, beliefs, and mentalities have permeated processes in which nations absorb and aspire to military practices, modes of organization, and martial discourses that require greater scholarly attention. The articles address a series of issues including various forms of militarism and the militarization of family, culture and education, diplomacy, policing, and public security in urban and rural settings. The contributions engage systematically with the roots of militarism and give evidence of militarization at the individual, national, and international levels, including a variety of case studies from across the Western Hemisphere.
Abstract
This article returns to the original forum question “What is Global Security Studies?,” looking at it in relation to the theme of inclusion and exclusion to point out that security studies ...scholars exclude feminist scholarship on (everyday) security at their own peril. Showcasing the increasing body of feminist security studies scholarship, the article then highlights not only what scholarship might be included in a truly global security studies, but also the important insights (e.g., about the continuum of violence that spans peace- and wartime) that are missed without it. The article ends with a reflection on the need to also include a wider range of approaches as eminently valuable to global security studies.
Algorithms, biometrics and body scanners, computers and databases, infrastructures of various kinds, ranging from what is commonly referred to as ‘hi-tech’ to ‘low-tech’ items such as walls or paper ...files, have garnered increased attention in critical approaches to (in)security. This article introduces a special issue whose contributions aim to further these approaches by questioning the role and political effects of security devices. It proposes an analytics of devices to examine the configuration and reconfiguration of security practices by attending to the equipment or instrumentation that make these practices possible and temporally stabilize them. The aim here is not to advance devices as a new unit of analysis, but to open new forays in ongoing debates about security politics and practices, by asking different research questions and developing new research angles. We start by outlining what is at stake when thinking of and analysing security practices through devices, or shifting from the language of technology and ‘technologies of security’ to security devices. The remainder of the article then specifies how an analytics of devices involves a more varied vocabulary of performativity, on the one hand, and agency, on the other.
Critical approaches in security studies have been increasingly turning to methods and standards internal to knowledge practice to validate their knowledge claims. This quest for scientific standards ...now also operates against the background of debates on ‘post-truth’, which raise pressing and perplexing questions for critical lines of thought. We propose a different approach by conceptualizing validity as practices of assembling credibility in which the transversal formation and circulation of credits and credentials combine with disputes over credence and credulity. This conceptualization of the validity of (critical) security knowledge shifts the focus from epistemic and methodological standards to transepistemic practices and relations. It allows us to mediate validity critically as a sociopolitical rather than strictly scientific accomplishment. Developing such an understanding of validity makes it possible for critical security studies and international relations to displace epistemic disputes about ‘post-truth’ with transversal practices of knowledge creation, circulation and accreditation.
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