Explore the vast range of titles available.

This new Handbook gathers together state-of-the-art theoretical reflection and empirical research by a group of leading international scholars in the subdiscipline of Critical Security Studies. In today's globalised setting, the challenge of maintaining security is no longer limited to the traditional foreign-policy and military tools of the nation-state, and security and insecurity are no longer considered as dependent only upon geopolitics and military strength, but rather are also seen to depend upon social, economic, environmental, ethical models of analysis and tools of action. The contributors discuss and evaluate this fundamental shift in four key areas: New security concepts New security subjects New security objects New security practices Offering a comprehensive theoretical and empirical overview of this evolving field, this book will be essential reading for all students of critical security studies, human security, international/global security, political theory and IR in general. J. Peter Burgess is Research Professor at PRIO, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, where he leads the Security Programme and edits the interdisciplinary journal Security Dialogue. In addition, he is Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (NTNU), and Research Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Brussels.

‘Security’ is a uniquely rich object for critique. It rests on a long and noble conceptual history in Western thought. And yet the provision of security most often consists of a shoring up, through the discourses of nationality, ethnicity, political economy or even science, of what is assumed to be solid at its core but weakened through the contingencies of politics, society, ideology, and so on. The article argues that the critical force of critique stems from the fact that critique itself is a practice inescapably bound up with insecurity, and thus that the critique of security exercised since around 1997 as ‘critical security studies’ is self-replicating. By introducing concepts from Husserlian phenomenology, it attempts to show that insecurity is not a simple feature of an otherwise secure state of life, ripe for critical analysis that promises to expose its false premises. Rather, insecurity lies at the very foundation of critical thought. Building upon the bare and basic question, ‘What does it mean to mean?’, a phenomenology of security asks the straightforward question: ‘What is the security-ness of security?’ It permits one to ask what remains of security when all else is stripped away, what essential minimum must be retained in order for security to be security.

This article revisits the concept of sovereignty in political theory by applying tools adapted from Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. It critically reviews the premises of political subjects assumed by sovereignty and formulates a widened concept of sovereignty based on a general understanding of the \"self\" \"self-relation,\" and \"identity\" as the fundamental components of sovereignty. With this concept in hand, the article then focuses on the concept of the \"Sovereign Good\" common to French histories of political thought and of particular interest to Jacques Lacan in his 1959-60 seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and his 1963 article \"Kant with Sade.\" By reinterpreting the sovereignty of the Sovereign Good, Lacan points to a path according to which an idealized and universalized notion of the sovereign is made possible and energized through an identification of the real with the Sovereign Good. By understanding sovereignty as supported by the Lacanian real, we can better understand both the forces that drive it to self-preservation and the insecurities that make its survival and longevity powerful hindrances to its dissolution

This volume brings together insights which look at the intersection of governance, culture and conflict resolution in India and the European Union. Two very different but connected epistemic, cultural and institutional settings, which have been divided by distance, colonialism and culture; yet have recently been brought closer together by ideas and practices of what is known as liberal peace, neoliberal state and development projects. The differences are obvious in terms of geography, culture, the nature and shape of institutions, and historical forces: and yet the commonalities between the two are surprising. This is the first book to compare contemporary Indian and European Union approaches to peace and is based on strong case studies and rigorous analysis. Postgraduate students, peace and conflict researchers, policy-makers and practitioners will benefit immensely from insights provided in this book.

While critical security studies largely concentrates on objects of security, this book focuses on the subject position from which ‘securitization’ and other security practices take place. First , it argues that the modern subject itself emerges and is sustained as a function of security and insecurity. It suggests, consequently, that no analytic frame can produce or reproduce the subject in some original or primordial form that does not already reproduce a fundamental or structural insecurity. It critically returns, through a variety of studies, to traditionally held conceptions of security and insecurity as simple predicates or properties that can be associated or not to some more essential, more primeval, more true or real subject. It thus opens and explores the question of the security of the subject itself, locating, through a reconstruction of the foundations of the concept of security, in the modern conception of the subject, an irreducible insecurity. Second , it argues that practices of security can only be carried out as a certain kind of negotiation about values . The analyses in this book find security expressed again and again as a function of value cast in terms of an explicit or implicit philosophy of life, of culture, of individual and collective anxieties and aspirations, of expectations about what may be sacrificed and what is worth preserving. By way of a critical examination of the value function of security, this book discovers the foundation of values as dependent on a certain management of their own vulnerability, continuously under threat, and thus fundamentally and necessarily insecure. This book will be an indispensible resource for students of Critical Security Studies, Political Theory, Philosophy, Ethics and International Relations in general. J. Peter Burgess is Research Professor at PRIO, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, where he leads the Security Programme and edits the interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal Security Dialogue , and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for European Studies of the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Introduction: Security as Ethos and Episteme Part 1: Theory of the Ethical Subject 1. Nietzsche, or Value and the Subject of Security 2. Foucault, or Genealogy of the Ethical Subject 3. Lacan, or the Ethical Subject of the Real 4. Butler, or the Precarious Subject Part 2: Holding Together 5. Identity, Community and Security 6. Insecurity of the European Community of Values 7. Psychoanalysis of the National Thing 8. Security Clture and the New Ethos of Risk 9. Intolerable Insecurity Part 3: Geopolitical Rationalities of Europe 10. The Modernity of a Cosmopolitan Europe 11. The New Nomos of Europe 12. A Federalist Europe between Economic and Cultural Value 13. Justice in Political, Legal and Moral Community 14. War in the Name of Europe and the Legitimacy of Collective Violence. Conclusion: The Many Faces of European Security

Security happens in the future. Threats to our security concern the potential of a future event, of possibility and uncertainty. Fear, omnipresent in popular culture is thereby non-uniform. Like time itself, it intensifies and softens, accelerates and slows, and disrupts and destabilises as a function of many variables. This article re-interprets the phenomenon of insecurity by reading it together with Heidegger’s analytic of time as a function of our proximity to being as fundamental ontological question, one which unfolds in the form of a threatening future.

In this article, I explore the relationship between 'value' and 'security' in the conceptualization of European construction and its transformation in recent years through the anti-terror effort. I suggest that the landscape of human values, and the way it is correlated with security, is discontinuous and fragmented. In the post-Madrid/London era, variations in cultures of law enforcement, border control, intelligence and diplomacy, and, not least, new cultures of fear and prudence, render this landscape increasingly complex. The value-laden nature of security and insecurity has contributed to a fragmented evolution in European approaches to the challenge of security. The politics of harmonization and standardization of European security reveals not a singularity in security, but the contrary, namely multiple securities. I thus develop a counterargument to both realist and social constructivist understandings of values and the role these play in security thinking. I affirm, in a typical constructivist vein, that values matter in the formation of security policy. However, I reverse the typical constructivist position that sees security as the embodiment of ideas, arguing instead that the European selfunderstanding is itself the product of its own constellation of security and insecurity.

Introduces a special journal issue on \"The global governance of security and finance.\".