The politics of protection: Sites of insecurity and political agency (original) (raw)
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What happens to foreign politics when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state’s international behavior based on a reflexive framework of insecurity politics. It argues that governments act on knowledge of international danger available in their societies, and that such knowledge is organized by varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across European history and space, these show how securitization projected abroad evolving – and often contested – local ideas of the organization of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. With its focus on insecurity politics, the book provides new perspectives for the study of international security. Moving the discipline from systemic theorizing to a theory of international systematization, it shows how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by IR theory. Depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others.
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Generally speaking, the traditional approach of security mainly regards states as a sole referent object of security and refutes any attempt to broaden the concept of security. This understanding is known as a realist approach. This approach, however, has been recently challenged by the Copenhagen School, the Welsh School, and the human security approach. The Copenhagen School assumes that there is now a duality of security: state security and societal security. However, both the Welsh School and the human security school look at individuals as a sole referent object of security. This article critically reviews the traditional approaches of security, the Copenhagen School, the Welsh School, and the human security approach. This article finally argues that the Copenhagen School could successfully broaden the concept of security, and therefore, it is more convincing when compared to other schools.
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IR Scholars have frequently associated the impact of globalization with the threats of state’s sovereignty. As a result, the concept of state sovereignty has come under growing scrutiny. This essay is a description of a theoretical analysis of ongoing debates on the issue of state sovereignty in the study of world politics. For this reason, this essay shall contest on how threatened is the concept of state sovereignty in the modern world by identifying some conceivable modern threats based on scholar’s perspective. In order to demonstrate this, this essay is divided into several sections. First of all, the essay reviews a number of existing literature on the concept of state sovereignty. Secondly, the essay argues that there is a shifting conception of threat, from the idea of old ‘military’ threats to the notion of modern ‘asymmetric’ threats by defining the definition and addressing some evidence of its threats. The final part of the essay will discuss the role of state’s non-military components to response the asymmetric threats.
Subordinate, Subsumed and Subversive: Sub-national Actors as Referents of Security
Springer eBooks, 2008
Identity politics, the politics of difference, is always intrinsically and intensely relational. We define who we are, and who we are not, by either linking ourselves with, or differentiating ourselves from, those around us.1 Coping with difference has always been an important aspect of human and social life. Sometimes difference is enriching, at other times merely functional; often, however, it is ominous and menacing. When difference seems to be, or indeed becomes, threatening, what emerges is a securitization of difference. It is this dimension of security — how the state deals with the threat of difference within itself, and how sub-national actors position themselves vis-a-vis the threat posed by the state — that is the principal theme of this chapter.
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