ABSTRACT
The concept of societal security originated in Barry Buzan’s classic People, States and Fear (1983) and became a cornerstone of what is widely known as the Copenhagen School in International Relations (IR) (Wæver et al. 1993). In the period since, it has stimulated an impressive body of commentary, criticism and refinement. For many critics and proponents alike, societal security has become one of the most important challengers to state-centric and ‘objectivist’ conceptions of security in International Relations. This chapter suggests that the societal security concept resides at the intersection of
several theoretical turns in IR that had gained momentum in the early 1990s: a partial move away from the state as object of analytical and normative concern; a growing focus on identity; and, more broadly, the rise of social constructivism as an explanatory paradigm. Its absorption of such diverse theoretical movements helps account for the popularity of societal security as an analytical concept. At the same time, it exposes societal security theorists to many of the criticisms these broader theoretical movements have attracted. Many of these criticisms pertain to how terms such as ‘society’, ‘identity’ and ‘securitization’ should be defined, put into operation and applied to the real world. Over the past decade, different writers have taken the societal security concept in
increasingly divergent and in some cases mutually incompatible theoretical directions, with a widening gap between more post-structural and more mainstream social constructivist interpretations. This diversity has made it harder to attribute a single meaning to societal security, but it also testifies to the concept’s continued theoretical vitality. In that sense, societal security represents an evolving conceptual project in IR more than a unified new paradigm. This chapter first outlines the concept of societal security as proposed by the Copenhagen
School. The subsequent section focuses on a range of theoretical gaps and ambiguities in contemporary societal security theorizing and on possible ways of addressing them. By way of doing so, it also highlights directions for further research and development.
