Critical Approaches to Security in Europe:
A Networked Manifesto
C.A.S.E. COLLECTIVE*
In the last decade, critical approaches have substantially reshaped the
theoretical landscape of security studies in Europe. Yet, despite an
impressive body of literature, there remains fundamental disagree-
ment as to what counts as critical in this context. Scholars are still
arguing in terms of ‘schools’, while there has been an increasing and
sustained cross-fertilization among critical approaches. Finally, the
boundaries between critical and traditional approaches to security
remain blurred. The aim of this article is therefore to assess the evolu-
tion of critical views of approaches to security studies in Europe,
discuss their theoretical premises, investigate their intellectual ramifi-
cations, and examine how they coalesce around different issues (such
as a state of exception). The article then assesses the political implica-
tions of critical approaches. This is done mainly by analysing processes
by which critical approaches to security percolate through a growing
number of subjects (such as development, peace research, risk man-
agement). Finally, ethical and research implications are explored.
Keywords critical theory
•
security studies
•
collective intellectual
•
sociology of IR
Introduction
T
HIS MANIFESTO IS THE RESULT of collective work. The ‘author’ of
this article, referred to as the c.a.s.e. collective, is a network of both
junior and senior researchers who share an interest in critically examin-
ing contemporary practices of security. The aim of the article is to collectively
assess the evolution of critical views of security studies in Europe, discuss
their theoretical premises, examine how they coalesce around different
issues, and investigate their present – and possibly future – intellectual
ramifications. The specificity of this text thus lies in the very way it has been
thought and written through a networked collective.
1
© 2006 PRIO, www.prio.no
SAGE Publications, http://sdi.sagepub.com
Vol. 37(4): 443–487, DOI: 10.1177/0967010606073085
1
The initiative was taken in Paris in June 2005, at a workshop entitled ‘Critical Approaches to Security in
Europe’. The initiative for gathering those who were interested in the changing landscape of security the-
ory in Europe was strongly inspired by a piece by Ole Wæver (2004a) on this theme, entitled
‘Aberystwyth, Paris, Copenhagen: New “Schools” in Security Theory and Their Origins Between Core
The article is driven by two broad motivations. First, the authors share the
view that, over the past two decades, important innovations in the study of
‘security’ have emerged among European scholars in particular (Wæver,
2004a). Although the genesis of these innovations involves scholars on both
sides of the Atlantic, these approaches have arguably gained momentum and
density in Europe, leading to the emergence of distinctive European research
agenda(s) in the traditionally US-dominated field of ‘security studies’.
Consequently, it was felt that the time had come to evaluate these ‘European’
approaches, both in order to increase their exposure and to push them
further in specific directions. Second, the aim of working and writing as a
collective, a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a
common perspective, is based on a desire to break with the competitive
dynamic of individualist research agendas and to establish a network that
not only facilitates dialogue but is also able to speak with a collective voice.
In this sense, the article can be read as a ‘manifesto’.
2
The article is organized as follows. It begins by reviewing the emergence
of a heterogeneous corpus of critical literature within the field of security
studies in the 1990s, along with the moves that led to its structuration in what
has been called the ‘Copenhagen’, ‘Aberystwyth’ and ‘Paris’ schools (Wæver,
2004a).
3
It argues, however, that this categorization can be misleading if
taken too seriously. Indeed, rather than pinning down these schools geo-
graphically, the section shows how Aberystwyth, Copenhagen and Paris are
dispersed locations associated with specific individuals and debates much
more than unitary schools of thought. As such, the article will show how the
dialogue between different scholars has shaped the conceptual discussion
through a set of encounters, producing the appearance of ‘schools’ talking to
each other.
This is followed by a more detailed discussion of the clusters of innovations
associated with the three ‘schools’, outlining their main contributions, intel-
444 Security Dialogue vol. 37, no. 4, December 2006
and Periphery’. The conference took place under the sponsorship of COST Action A24 on ‘The Evolving
Social Construction of Threats’, and was organized in collaboration with the CHALLENGE programme,
the CERI and the Centre d’Etudes Européennes at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. For more
information, see http://critical.libertysecurity.org.
2
In order to understand the composition of the text, we believe it is important to briefly explain its genesis.
After the COST Paris Training School, paper-givers and additional doctoral candidates gathered and
elaborated a first draft of the current article. One, two or three members of the collective wrote each sec-
tion of the article, regularly exchanging comments and suggestions. At various subsequent stages, drafts
were read, commented upon and amended by Didier Bigo, Jef Huysmans, Michael Williams and Ole
Wæver. The article then came back to the students, who were responsible for the final shape of the arti-
cle. In addition, we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers, as well as Felix Berenskoetter
and Rob B. J. Walker, who have been instrumental in commenting upon and editing this manifesto.
3
Wæver (2004a) lists ‘hard-core postmodernists’ and ‘feminists’ under ‘other participants’. Because we
begin from the suggestive classification that informs Wæver’s analysis, this article necessarily works
within, but also seeks to problematize, both geographical and theoretical limits. Although very interest-
ing work drawing on Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Jacques Rancière (such as that of Benjamin
Muller, Peter Nyers, Patricia Molloy, Lene Hansen and Roxanne Doty) is not directly discussed, such
work needs to be considered within a conversation that is now rapidly expanding.
lectual context and cross-fertilization. By pointing to some of the theoretical
insights, and dilemmas, that have emerged out of these ‘schools’, the section
opens up for the main part of the article, which deals with new paths to
explore for critical approaches to security in Europe.
The third section draws attention to how the analytical innovations out-
lined previously can be used to investigate issues such as the spread of
the security label to other fields of research and practice, questions about
exceptionalism, governmentality and risk, as well as the politics of belonging
and the privatization of security. We also show how these new fields of
enquiry provide new problematizations and add to the literature in terms of
conceptual articulations and theoretical implications.
In the fourth section, we provide one possible answer to the persistent
interrogations raised by constructivist/reflexive approaches, such as about
how critique provides useful insights not only for analysis and critique, but
also for active engagement in international politics. This question plugs
into a wider debate over the status of producers of knowledge, the role of
‘security’ intellectuals, and modes of intervention in politics. What under-
pins critical approaches to security in Europe is the identification and
denunciation of depoliticization, both in the social realm and in the realm of
academia. The present article is therefore to be understood in part as a call
for the return of a certain number of issues to the realm of politics. We con-
test a vision of research as detached from political contingency and action,
as well as the scholastic illusion that tends to inform critical work, the
critique of texts does not produce, per se, either political effects or resistance.
This manifesto can therefore also be read as an argument against research
without politics, which we believe can be tackled by a collective engagement
and work.
Critical Approaches to Security:
A History of Encounters
Theories in the social sciences do not occur in a vacuum. They are tied to and
developed in relation to specific socio-historical (external) and intellectual
(internal) contexts in which they emerge and/or to which they are applied. In
terms of intellectual context, ‘critical turns’ in security studies have to be
understood through the intellectual transformations occurring in social and
political theory (see, for example, Ashley, 1984). CASE
4
was influenced by
and part of a critical literature contesting a political and social science
C.A.S.E. Collective Critical Approaches to Security in Europe 445
4
When broadly referring to the critical/reflexive literature on security, we will use the capital initials CASE
(Critical Approaches to Security in Europe). ‘CSS’ refers to the precise ‘Critical Security Studies’ project,
and ‘c.a.s.e. collective’ refers to the group of scholars who have contributed to this manifesto.
that thought of itself as value-free and looked at its research object from an
impartial Archimedean point. This critical literature emphasized the impact
of socio-political processes on the emergence and structuration of political
questions and institutions and the immanent presence of normative political
choices in social science and political theory. In terms of socio-historical con-
text, the emergence of the new social movements of the late 1970s and the
1980s, the formation of an internal security field in Europe, the second Cold
War and Détente in the 1980s, and the end of the Cold War are among the key
historical events that were important for the development of CASE.
However, to establish a direct causal link between the development of
CASE and the internal and external contexts of its emergence without attend-
ing to the actual practices of and encounters between the actors of the field
during that period would amount to an exaggeration of this relation, leading
to an overly simplified narrative of what actually happened in the security
studies field in the 1980s. As Ken Booth (1997: 98) reminds us, ‘there is a tend-
ency to assume that changed conceptions of the world are, for academics,
either the result of being persuaded by a decisive book or being shocked by
major events in world politics. People seem determined to make us either
simply disciples or positivists’. Instead, personal encounters, material condi-
tions or the very contingency of life itself also play an important role in the
emergence of certain ideas and approaches. An examination of the trajecto-
ries of security scholars, their interactions, influences and transformations,
would provide us with a more complex understanding of the configuration
of the field.
CASE has developed through two series of encounters between what have
been construed as schools of thought (Wæver, 2004a). The first encounters
took place between scholars associated with the Aberystwyth and Copen-
hagen schools. Both schools have strong roots in political theory, as well as in
IR debates and their repositioning in relation to peace research and strategic
studies. The third group of academics, referred to as the Paris School, has its
roots not in IR but in political theory and the sociology of migration and
policing in Europe. The second series of encounters that were constitutive for
CASE was between this third group of people and people associated with the
Copenhagen and Aberystwyth schools of thought. These two sets of encoun-
ters have resulted in an increasingly institutionalized platform for discussing
security issues.
However, it would be a mistake to reduce CASE to these three schools
of thought. As a result of individual engagements and, probably more impor-
tantly, their institutionalization via European research projects and the
founding of the International Political Sociology section and journal in the
International Studies Association, CASE has expanded. Despite its strong
European intellectual roots, in terms of people, CASE has included a number
of researchers who are not usually directly associated with any of the three
446 Security Dialogue vol. 37, no. 4, December 2006
schools of thought. Most notable are Rob Walker’s crucial ventures at the
crossroads of political theory and security studies in IR through his writings
and his editing of the journal Alternatives.
While we largely focus on the ‘European’ densification and singular struc-
turation of critical perspectives on security studies, this point is an opportu-
nity to stress the strong yet oft-overlooked connections between CASE and
the ‘dissident’ modes of thought (Ashley & Walker, 1991) that emerged in the
mid-1980s through a set of encounters between mostly North American
scholars. These encounters related to and produced an important corpus of
literature, lying at the intersection between critical social theory (Ashley,
1987; Campbell & George, 1990), political theory (Walker, 1980, 1987) and a
variety of critical perspectives on the discipline of international relations,
including contributions by Richard Ashley (1981, 1984), David Campbell
(1998), Michael Dillon (1996), James Der Derian (1987), Jim George (1989,
1994), Bradley Klein (1990), Josef Lapid (1989) and Michael Shapiro (Der
Derian & Shapiro, 1989), among others. These ‘dissident’ perspectives engaged
at the general level with the way in which Western social sciences were
embedded in the specific political narrative of modernity, turning to inter-
national relations to stress its ‘backwardness’ (George, 1994) and its depend-
ence upon the sovereign account of the possibilities and limits of political life
(Walker, 1993). Beyond specific inputs on strategic and security studies
(Klein, 1990; Walker, 1983, 1988; Chilton, 1985), and their contribution to a
critical engagement with the modern concept of the political, the power/
knowledge nexus, the production of security discourses, the traditional dis-
ciplinarization of the academic field, and the political consequences of schol-
arly production, constitute a significant part of the conceptual background of
CASE. We will come back to these aspects in the next section. But, first, we
need to return to the encounters that informed the formation of a European
configuration of critical outlooks on security.
In Europe, the existence of various perspectives on peace and security –
such as alternative defence and peace research during the Cold War, and the
works of scholars such as Johan Galtung and Dieter Senghaas – makes it
somewhat misleading to point to the 1980s as the historical phase during
which an intellectual ‘rupture’ from orthodox approaches to security occurred.
Giving more credit to this intellectual inheritance in the development of con-
temporary rethinking of security studies, Ken Booth (1997: 86–87) notes that
while the end of Cold War, as a historical event, provoked an intellectual
crisis for strategists adopting an orthodox approach to security, it was less
disturbing for those who had already raised their concerns about the weak-
nesses of the dominant approaches to security in IR. This partly explains why
peace research institutes were important loci of new approaches to security
during the 1980s and the 1990s in IR (Wæver, 2004b).
From its establishment in 1985 to its closure in 2004, the Copenhagen Peace
C.A.S.E. Collective Critical Approaches to Security in Europe 447