Opening security: recovering critical scholarship as political

Abstract

This article proposes that highlighting the theoretical and political challenges of ‘doing security’ is key to critical scholarship on security. In addition to broadening and deepening security, an opening of security is necessary to generate new security imaginaries. The article argues that an opening, which calls the frame into question and emphasizes everyday security enactments, is latent in existing scholarship but has not been explicitly named and explored. Paying attention to the epistemological and ontological implications of critical interventions – asking what, how, and who can know – is key to challenging security politics more deeply. It is essential to simultaneously examine what frames are enacted, how, by whom, when, where, and to what end. Drawing primarily on feminist, but also on poststructural and postcolonial scholarship, opening security moves us beyond adjusting the technologies of security and engages, as its central concern, the politics of security.

Keywords:

• critical theory
• feminism
• security politics
• epistemology
• securitization

Notes

1. E.g., Aradau (2012), Barkawi (2012), Ciutǎ (2009), Hynek and Chandler (2013), McCormack (2010), Mutimer, Grayson, and Beier (2013), Nunes (2012), Peoples (2011), Wæver (2011), and Williams (2011). Note also that I am referring broadly to the critical security studies and securitization literature. Given the many debates over labels themselves, this will always be awkward and an approximation of sort. As will become clearer below, however, it is not the specific distinctions among ‘schools’ that is at stake, but their general orientation toward furthering a critical project.

2. There has been a veritable explosion of feminist work in the past decade (e.g. Gentry and Sjoberg 2015; Hoogensen and Rottem 2004; Hudson 2005; Shepherd 2008; Wibben 2011). For a recent overview of feminist contributions, see also Stern and Wibben (2014).

3. Acknowledging knowledge as contextual (embedded in praxis) is also a key trait of critical theory as I’ll detail below.

4. Barry Buzan’s work (1991) on security as an essentially contested concept is an example of such a view – he recognizes that security does not simply have one meaning, but retains the idea that security could be defined apart from the contexts within which it is being examined (see Huysmans 1998a, for a critique).

5. Many have commented on the profound indebtedness of the Copenhagen School not just to realism, but also to variants of liberalism (Huysmans 1998b; Williams 2011).

6. Bilgic (2015) identifies three main themes around which the Abersytwyth School has been criticized, though he does not look at the question of critical theory itself. For some of these critiques and broader engagements with the Aberystwyth School around the question of emancipation, see also Aradau (2004), Basu (2011), Basu and Nunes (2013), Browning and McDonald (2013), Nunes (2012, 2014), Peoples (2011). This is an important related debate, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

7. The problematique of ‘giving voice to the voiceless’ is one that feminist scholars of various persuasions have long debated – fruitful conversations could thus ensue here (see also Jabri 2004; Wibben 2011, 110).

8. Arguably it is the capitalist state within which the individual is a citizen that is secured, thus securing individual property/ies.

9. This speaks also to a key critique of the Aberystwyth School; that ‘it neglects the oppressive dimension of security [in its] equation of emancipation with security in emancipatory security theory without a consideration of how the concept of security is used for control and oppression in liberal governmentality’ (Bilgic 2015, 275).

10. Formulated differently, as a first step, this requires paying attention to the praxis of security (see below also).

11. Nick Vaughan-Williams and Daniel Stevens (2015) provide an interesting (non-feminist) foray into examining the ‘everyday’ by drawing on focus group research about UK citizens’ perceptions of in/security.

12. The rules are the other side of the coin here, they instantiate the theoretical formations; Huysmans draws our attention to the everyday praxis of security.

13. Basu (2011) and Bilgic (2015) talk of moments of emancipation – while this is beyond the scope of this article, it would be interesting to see whether common ground can be found here.

14. While not the focus of this paper, it is important to note that Horkheimer reserves a place for traditional theory, arguing that it can advance certain kinds of knowledge.

15. Translation by the author.

16. Browning and McDonald (2013, 248), similarly see ‘the need to develop understandings of the politics of security that are context-specific.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annick T.R. Wibben

Annick T.R. Wibben is Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco (USA), where she also directs the Peace & Justice Studies program. She is the author of Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (Routledge 2011) and editor of Researching War: Feminist Methods, Ethics & Politics (Routledge 2016). She can be reached at [email protected].