The Evolution of International Security Studies, Barry Buzan
and Lene Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 400 pp., $99 cloth, $30.99 paper.
Ken Booth (Reviewer)
The Evolution of International Security Studies is an attempt at an intellectual
history of something the authors call "International Security Studies"
(ISS). It is done from a recognizable mix of Copenhagen and English School viewpoints,
which means that there is altogether too little about war, and altogether too
much about the niceties within constructivist and poststructuralist discourses.
The label "ISS" is not a popular one for the titles of books, journals,
or university programs. It is hardly surprising, then, that Buzan and Hansen
use the first three chapters (out of eight substantive ones) somewhat defensively
defining their view of this "subfield's" boundaries, key questions,
and driving forces. On the boundary issue, the authors accept that delineation
"is complicated by the fact that as time goes by we get a different perspective
on what falls in [ISS] and what does not" (p. 8). Their defensive approach
is also apparent in the concluding chapter of the book, where the authors note
that while it is "possible to see ISS as moving towards becoming one conversation,"
others see only "fragmented self-centred camps" (p. 257). My money
is on the latter. Be that as it may, I would have preferred the balance of discussion
to have favored the intellectual content of International Security Studies rather
than subfield navel-gazing.
In particular, the book would have benefited from saying much more on the Strategic
Studies dimension of international security. Nobody involved in the evolution
of its debates can be satisfied by the book's treatment of what for so long was the dominant subfield of International Relations. Strategic Studies
is allotted only one chapter, "Strategic Studies, Deterrence and the Cold
War." The same goes for the short decade since 9/11, even though the book
was completed in 2008. Strategic Studies, therefore, is an undercooked part
of the book. An intellectual history should have more to say about its most
historic intellectuals.
Further, while the historical approach adopted in the book is effective, it
suffers somewhat from presentism. Thus, one finds references to numerous recent
writers who have not produced substantial works, developed any original approaches,
or inspired groups of followers, while key figures in the evolution of thinking
about international security who achieved all those things are ignored. It is
certainly possible to find references to some of the intellectual beacons of
Strategic Studies, but one gets no sense of the intellectual stature of such
scholars as Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, Henry Kissinger, and Thomas Schelling,
to name but a few. Likewise, in terms of scholarly influence, one looks in vain
for mentions of James E. King (who nurtured so many significant contributors
to thinking about strategy in the United States), John Garnett (the first person
to be appointed to teach Strategic Studies in the UK—and before the Cuban
Missile Crisis), and Philip Windsor (a true strategic thinker in a world of
strategic talkers). The influence of each of these figures was in inverse proportion
to their published writings, but an intellectual history should let readers
know such things. From another corner of the subfield, the considerable influence
of the highly productive Richard Falk is also not recognized appropriately.
While incomplete, the chapter on deterrence and the cold war is generally authoritative.
This is not the case with the key chapter on newer approaches to thinking about
security. Entitled "Widening and Deepening Security," this chapter
loses purchase as a result of its strange conceptualization of "deepening."
This is evident, for example, in remarks that imply that the move involves the
"deepening of the referent object beyond the state" (p. 189). This
is not how any "deepeners" I know conceive the move. As we "deepeners"
have explained for a long time, the move involves seeing security as a derivative
concept; this means exploring security thinking and practices, as R. B. J. Walker
has put it, in relation to "the most basic questions of political theory."
Deepening, in other words, is about drilling down to the political core of all
security thinking and practice.
The deepening move is also misunderstood in relation to the discussion of the
individual as a referent for security. The authors seemingly endorse the critics
of this view, who assert that "an exclusively individual referent object
is...impossible" (p. 207). Who could disagree? Those (like me) who talk
about individual humans as the ultimate referent in theorizing security do not
imagine people removed from a collective context: "community," for
example, is an absolutely crucial theme for "critical" approaches
to security. Our argument is simple and logical, and indeed was expressed with
perfect clarity in a key work of the English School canon. In The Anarchical
Society, Hedley Bull wrote: "World order is more fundamental and primordial than international order
because the ultimate units of the great society of all mankind are not states
(or nations, tribes, empires, classes or parties) but individual human beings,
which are permanent and indestructible in a sense in which groups of them of
this or that sort are not" (p. 22). The argument is logical, not (antistatist)
ideological, but critics appear unable to grasp it.
The Evolution of International Security Studies is always challenging,
for it asks its readers to think about where they stand, and why, while questioning
the viewpoints advanced by the authors. "they conclude, ¡§will
continue to evolve not just in keeping pace with new security concerns, but
also in developing new ways to think about them" (p. 272). But wait! If
security is a "speech act," making threats "objective" (pp.
33-34), as the Copenhagen School claims, should this final sentence in the book
be changed to read: "security concerns will develop by keeping pace with
ways in which security is spoken"? But this is not ambitious enough, either.
We surely want to know what is doing the work all the way down. What constructs
the speech acts—and even more important, the acts of silence—that
create the insecurities that determine peoples' lives (which in turn make the
search for security so critical)? Without the deepening move, security theorizing
will remain a modest business. I therefore hope that readers of Ethics &
International Affairs will prioritize drilling down into those "basic
questions of political theory" which alone help us to understand why the ideas making up world order do not work for so many fellow human beings
and so much of the natural world on which we all depend.
—KEN BOOTH
The reviewer is Director of the David Davies Memorial Institute of International
Studies at Aberystwyth University (UK).
