No emancipatory alternative, no critical security studies

Abstract

We offer a provocation – that we should stop appending ‘Critical’ to ‘Security Studies’. Critical security as an academically and politically contested terrain is no longer productive of emancipatory alternatives. In making this claim, we seek to reflect upon the underlying dynamics which drove the boom in critical security studies in the 1990s and the early 2000s and its pale afterlife in the recent years. To support the argument empirically, the attention is paid to the role of emancipatory agency at the heart of critical security understandings. As we argue, the current state of ‘critical’ security theorising is no longer informed by the emancipatory impulse of the 1990s and the critical claims have been much damaged by the retreat of liberal internationalism and rise of non-emancipatory and post-emancipatory approaches. The critics that remain in the field thus articulate much lower horizons with regard to policy alternatives and conceptualise no clear agency of emancipatory possibilities. Ironically, ‘critical’ security theorists today are more likely to argue against transformative aspirations – rather than in favour of them.

Keywords:

• critical security studies
• Welsh School
• Copenhagen School
• Paris School
• Manchester School
• emancipation
• evolution of security
• post-liberalism

Acknowledgements

The authors thank reviewers and the editor of Critical Studies on Security for their comments and suggestions. Funding provided by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (grant no. P408/12/P970) is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.

Notes

1. It is clear that CSS is still growing in interest and impact, illustrated by the launch of the Taylor and Francis journal Critical Studies on Security at the start of 2013.

2. We use ‘generation’ here to heuristically indicate a series of overlapping temporal shifts from ‘critical’ emancipatory theorists, dominant in the 1990s and the early 2000s, heavily engaged in policy advocacy, to a second, transitional generation of ‘non-traditional’ CSS as epitomised by the Copenhagen School, to the ‘third generation’ focused upon the deconstruction of emancipatory claims, and the remaining ‘fourth generation’ of much more limited ‘post-emancipatory’ understandings.

3. While we use Waever's tripartite description of CSS schools, we understand them in geographically and intellectually more dispersed and networked ways (see CASE 2006, 444).

4. We use ‘Critical Theory’ with capital letters to denote the Frankfurt School and ‘critical theory’ with small cases when speaking about wider critical social and political theory.

5. Deconstruction is not critique, as Derrida famously argued (Derrida 1985, 3; see also Critchley and Mooney 1994, 365). There is explicitly no emancipatory alternative for either Foucauldian theorists or their successors, following Deleuze or Latour.