ABSTRACT
From the early 1990s, the discipline of Security Studies has witnessed the growth of a literature inspired by continental thought. Initially labelled ‘post-structuralist’ (Hansen 1997), this literature draws more largely on ideas and concepts from twentieth-century continental philosophy to challenge both realist understandings of security and the emerging constructivist consensus. While the term ‘continental philosophy’ is largely an artefact that works in opposition to ‘analytic philosophy’ and only entered the Anglo-Saxon world after the end of the Second World War, twentieth-century continental thought shares a series of ideas such as the historical and cultural embeddedness of subjects, the role of practice and the critique of present conditions (Critchley 1998). Drawing on continental philosophy more generally has allowed security scholars to challenge dominant understandings and practices of security and add new dimensions to the post-structuralist questions about the significance of identity construction and discourse analysis, particularly by focusing on ‘unmaking security’ (Huysmans 2006). Concerned predominantly with the defence of the state, scholars in strategic studies
never question the effects of framing issues in terms of national security. However, poststructuralists have pointed out that the stories produced by security scholars were not so much objective accounts about threats in the world ‘out there’ as a set of theoretical and political demarcations of what constitutes reality (Walker 1993). For example, Klein’s (1994) seminal analysis of strategic studies showed how the latter, by taking the state as its ‘natural’ point of departure, contributed actively to the process of state formation and maintenance. Traditional Security Studies confirm the realist image of the international arena as an anarchic system of states where progress is an impossibility and security a necessary quest for survival. Despite its manifest discontent with the ontological and epistemological assumptions of realism, a broadly conceived constructivist approach has simply added adjectives to security, producing a ‘grab bag of issue areas’ (Krause and Williams 1997: 35). Societal, environmental, economic and human security have become new categories that expand the realm of security without challenging its dominant meanings. Thus, constructivist Security Studies have often run the risk of reinforcing either the extension of security (by arguing that other issues should be included as security problems) or the dominance of realism (by arguing against such extensions).
