Renteln, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Third Edition), 2022 The Security Council ‘Critical’ implies a perspective that seeks to stand outside prevailing structures, processes, ideologies, and orthodoxies while recognizing that all conceptualizations of security derive from particular political/theoretical positions critical perspectives do not make a claim to objective truth but rather seek to provide deeper understandings of prevailing attitudes and behavior with a view to developing more promising ideas by which to overcome structural and contingent human wrongs.Īlison D.

Security is conceived comprehensively, embracing theories and practices at multiple levels of society, from the individual to the whole human species. This heightened interest, though, has been accompanied by demands for a redefinition of the field’s concerns to include a broader range of issues related to human security and not just state security.Ĭritical security studies is an issue-area study, developed within the academic discipline of international politics, concerned with the critical knowledge about security in world politics. This academic subfield has at the end of the Cold War spawned an increased interest in the field among scholars, particularly those in US institutions. Security studies as an academic discipline is a subfield of ‘international relations’ concerned with the issue of how nation-states handle threats to their territorial integrity and quality of life. Rennison Lalgee, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition), 2008 Security is conceived comprehensively, embracing theories and practices at multiple levels of society, from the individual to the whole human species.īrenda L. Critical security studies is an issue-area study, developed within the academic discipline of international politics, concerned with the critical knowledge about security in world politics.

This heightened interest, though, has been accompanied by demands for a redefinition of the field's concerns to include a broader range of issues related to human security and not just state security.

Security studies as an academic discipline is a subfield of “International Relations” concerned with the issue of how nation-states handle threats to their territorial integrity and quality of life. Rennison Lalgee, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Third Edition), 2022 Abstract But few doubt that military power is still a critical restraint on the freedom of nations to act internationally, and particularly to act in ways that threaten the vital interests of the possessor of military power.īrenda L Horrigan. Non-realists may disagree with the vehement emphasis on security. Realists argue that security is a prerequisite for almost anything else that nations want to achieve in world politics. But the clarity of focusing on security in a narrow sense as territorial integrity and political autonomy is diluted by stretching the definition. Environmental interests are not necessarily any less important than security interests. The war potential of other nations would play a small (although not insignificant) part in an analysis of US environmental security. The broadening of the realm of ‘security’ makes thinking and theorizing about it as a dependent variable of anything a much more complicated task. There may be instrumental political reasons to import metaphors from the security debate into these other important areas of national interest, but there are intellectual costs as well. The discourse of international politics (both popular and scholarly) now embraces concepts like economic security and environmental security. One important complicating factor is simply that security has come to mean much more to many people than the core issues of territorial integrity and political autonomy. Steven Weber, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 The Meaning of ‘Security’

Territorial integrity