ABSTRACT

The ‘English school’ and ‘ International Security Studies ’ are names that are seldom found in the same sentence. Few if any people working within mainstream international security studies would think about the English school (ES) as a body of either theory or empirical work relevant to Security Studies. If they thought about it at all, they might well see the ES, with its concerns about order and legitimacy (Bull 1977; Clark 2005), as coming from the opposite, liberal, end of International Relations theory, than from the conflict/disorder realist end of the spectrum to which International Security Studies generally relates. The classic ES approach involves seeing International Relations as composed of three elements (Buzan 2004b: 6-10): international system (realism, Hobbes), international society (rationalism, Grotius) and world society (idealism or revolutionism, Kant). These elements are in constant interplay and the nature of international relations depends on the balance between them. In principle, this opens a bridge between the ES and International Security Studies via the realism element in ES theory. In practice, however, the great bulk of ES work has focused on international and world society, and on the rules, norms and institutions that underpin the social order of international society. Few within the ES have explicitly addressed the International Security Studies agenda, and the concept of security does not play much role in ES thinking. It is therefore reasonable to ask what a chapter on the English school is doing in a volume on International Security Studies. This chapter contains three answers to this question. The next section sets out the ES as a general theoretical framing for International Security Studies comparable with realism, liberalism and Marxism. The section after that reviews the existing ES literature on international security to show where the overlaps are, and the concluding section opens up some opportunities for how the relationship might be developed further.