Critical Studies on Security: an introduction

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Notes

1. To be precise, the conference was hosted by the York Centre for International and Strategic Studies. The Centre's name was changed in 1996 in response to the same political and intellectual developments that gave rise to Critical Security Studies.

2. Perhaps the most striking instance of the difficulty of mixing forms was William Wallace's ‘Truth and Power, Monks and Technocrats’ (Wallace 1996). The talk developed an elaborate metaphor of monastic orders to talk about the divisions and orthodoxies of International Relations. As with any such metaphor, the further it was pushed, the more it would break down. For an after dinner speech, pushing it some distance was quite funny; however, the article which followed found its important, and still influential, argument tarnished somewhat by the vestiges of the monasticism.

3. One of the most important moments in the emergence of critical International Relations more broadly was the publication in 1990 of a special issue of International Studies Quarterly, the lead house journal of the International Studies Association, edited by Richard Ashley and RBJ Walker titled: ‘Speaking the Language of Exile’ (Ashley and Walker 1990).

4. Peace Research, which grew in through the 1970s and into the 1980s to become a dominant site of opposition to traditional strategic studies, is an obvious exception, as it quite explicitly engaged with the dominant discourse with that discourse's own quantitative tools. See the Journal of Peace Research, throughout its history, for examples of this excellent work.