ABSTRACT
Few would contest the claim that the study of security is prima facie inseparable from international matters, that it engages politics in one way or another and that it engages social issues. And yet the contentiousness of these three categories – the international, the political, and the social – the assumptions on which they rest, the discourses that are mobilized in their names, the empirical fields that nourish them, the scholars, policy-makers and practitioners who make claims to legitimate oversight over their practices and jurisdiction over their practical implications, invite a critical pause in their increasingly rapid development. Security as a scholarly field, as a set of actors, institutions and practices, has evolved at a pace that has put its supporting concepts and practices under considerable pressure. This concerns both the way that the academic discipline of security studies, and those in proximity to it, have evolved and the way that research-based (and non-research-based) security practices have themselves become producers and consumers of security knowledge.
