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ALAN COLLINS
Contemporary
SECURITY STUDIES
FIFTH EDITION
OXFORD
fctical Security Studies: k Schismatic History
David Mutimcr
Chapter Contents
. Introduction; 'Follow the sign of the gourd1 92
• Toronto desire: Critical Security Studies 93
• Copenhagen distinctions
? Aberystwyth exclusions 97
• Constructing security J
• Everyone's other: poststructuralism and security   102
• Beyond divisions? CASEing the joint or returning the gift?   106
• Conclusion 108
con-
£
the, has
Reader's Guide
This chapter provides a part;al history of a label. It is partial both in that it is not, and cannot be, complete, and in that 1 am both the author of, and participant in, the history. It is therefore partial in H all other history is partial. The label is 'Critical Security Studies'. The chapter tells a story of origin of the label and the way it has developed and fragmented since the early 1990s. It sets out primary claims of the major divisions that have emerged within the literatures to which the label has been applied: constructivism, critical theory, and poststructuralism. Ultimately, the chaptersug-psts that Critical Security Studies needs to foster an 'ethos of critique' in either the study or refusal Of security, and that the chapter is an instance of that ethos directed at Critical Security Studies itself.
David Mutimer
Critical Security Studies: A Schismatic History
Introduction: 'Follow the sign of the gourd'
Very soon after being identified as the Messiah in Monty Python's Life of Brian, Brian is chased by a growing crowd of would-be followers. In his haste to get away Brian drops the gourd he has just bought and loses one of his sandals. Several of the followers remove one of their shoes and hop about on one foot, convinced this is what their newly found Messiah has told them to do. One follower picks up the shoe and shouts 'Follow the sign of the shoe/ Another picks up the gourd, shouting'Follow the sign of the gourd/ Perhaps predictably, within seconds, those hopping are fighting those who are following the shoe who are fighting those who arc following the gourd. Brians 'ministry' has splintered into sects before it has even had the chance to establish itself as a ministry. The Python gang were, of course, satirizing the tendency of religious movements to fragment, as they had at the outset of the film satirized the similar tendency of political movements: 'Are you the Judean People's Front?' 'Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea .. .JudeanPeople's Front. .. SPLITTERS!'
Sadly, perhaps, this all too human tendency to fragment into ever-smaller and more exclusive and exclusionary clubs affects academic movements every bit as much as it does religious and political. Any society of ideas is, in addition, a potential source and expression of power, It provides the intellectual resources around which to mobilize people and resources of other kinds: whether these are tithes/alms, ballots/ arms, or even tenure/articles. None of this should be in any way surprising to those who work within the area covered by this chapter. While the chapter will show the divisions into which Critical Security Studies rapidly fell, one of the shared commitments of the wrork it will discuss is to the political potency of ideas. The social world is produced in and through the ideas that make it meaningful, which are themselves necessarily social. A consequence of this observation is that study of the social world is inextricably bound up with the world it studies; it is part of the productive set of ideas that make the world.
This chapter provides a partial history of a label. It is partial both in that it is not, and cannot be, complete, and in that I am both the author of and a participant in the history. It is therefore partial in the way all other history is partial.The label is 'Critical Security Studies'.1 It is a label that has (one of) its origins in a
conference held at York University in Canada in« As a label it has been fought over rather more i has been applied. It does not denote a coherent! views, an 'approach' to security; rather it ind desire. It is a desire to move beyond the strictur curity as it was studied and practised in the Col and in particular a desire to make that move ir, of some form of critique. It is a desire artioj the first line of the first book bearing the title ' Security Studies': 'This book emerged out of I to contribute to the development of a self-consdc critical perspective within security studies' (WjJ| andKrause 1997: vii).
The form of security studies against which ( Security Studies was directed has been neatly i by one of the proponents of the traditional appro^H
Security studies may be defined as the study of th^^H use, and control of military force. It explores thec^H tions that make the use of force more likely, the way^H the use of force affects individuals, states, and social and the specific policies that states adopt in orderto^B pare for, prevent, or engage in war. Walt (1991: 212)
military
The focus on the threat, use, and control of force imposed a series of important strictures oi^| study of security in this period. Military forces^H generally the preserve of states, and, what is mfl there is a normative, assumption that they should bit the preserve of states, even when they are not. Indeed our common definition of the stare is that institution which has a monopoly on the legitimate means of w lence. Therefore, by studying the threat, use, andefl of military force, security studies privilegfi^B position of the state. Furthermore, such an apprflM implies that the state is the primary object thata^ be secured—that is, the state is the referent obj(H security. Finally, and most obviously, thinking ofl curity as the threat, use, and control of military reduces security to military security, and rendersodli forms of security as something else.
The various scholars who followed the desire J wards a critical security study were troubled bjj three of these major assumptions underlying
1 When I refer to the label or to the 'field' of enq' is increasingly gathered under that label, I will c Critical Security Studies. Otherwise, I leave the term* lowercase.
litjlixe the
I   .   a] gtucjy of security They wondered, first «*r*nn   her ou: concern needed to be only on the | iis security- What of the security of people lrll states' The standard assumption of se-Bttstudies is that the people are secure if the state l"U^I", '    but those drawn towards Critical Security ^wondered about those times when this was U the case: when states ignored the security of some "f their people- when they actively oppressed some of °    pgople, or when the state lacked the capacity to 1 "vide security for its people. They were therefore wonder whether we should be thinking about objects other than the suite.
Questioning
the referent object of security leads
texorably to questioning the exclusive focus on the. threat, use, and control of military force. Large, powerful, stable states such as those in which 'security studies" tended to be practised—the USA, the UK, or Canada- may be seriously threatened only by war. On the other hand, other potential referent objects, particularly people and their collectives, can be threatened in all soils of ways. Therefore, once you question the referent object of security, you must also question the nature ami scope, of security, and thus of security studies.
Not everyone who questioned the referent object and the nature and .scope o! security would be drawn to a desire for a critical security study, however. That desire was driven ty z recognition of the power of ideas, and thus a discomfort with the way traditional security studies focused on the state. The concern was not that there were other objects to be secured toother ways, but rather that the effect of studying security as the threat, use, and control of military force tended in and of itself to support and legitimate the power of the state. While other scholars sought to broaden and deepen security studies to consider other referents and other threats, those whose desire ran to a selfconsciously critical perspective' were centrally Concerned with the politics of knowledge. Security studies, as it had been practised, provided intellectual and, ultimately, moral support to the most powerful oistitution in contemporary politics: the state. Those **wn 10 a critical security study sought a different security politics as well *s a different security scholarship.
The remainder of the chapter traces what happened "scholars acted on this desire for a self-consciously ?JCal secur'ty study. In doing so, it sets out the major ^U1 'nes that have emerged among those initially ani-tCd b>'this shared desire. The signs that have driven
these fault lines are not simply Monty Python s signs of the shoe and the gourd, but rather represent disagreements about the nature of critique and thus of different forms of critical security study. Thus, while the chapter outlines the sects into which critical desire has fractured, it also sets out a range of answers to the question of what Critical Security Studies might be. My history of these splits begins in 1994.
Toronto desire: Critical Security Studies
In May 1994, a small conference was held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies in Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies. It brought together from around the world a variety of scholars, both junior and senior, with interests in security and with a concern about the direction of security studies in the early post-Cold War era. It was in the course of the discussions at and around that conference that the label 'Critical Security Studies' started to be applied to the intellectual project that drew the participants to the conference, and it was used as the title of the book, edited by Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, that the conference produced: Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (1997b).
The conference and book were an expression of the desire for self-consciously critical perspectives on security, but they both worked extremely hard to avoid articulating a single perspective in response to that desire: 'Our appending of the term critical to security studies is meant to imply more an orientation toward the. discipline than a precise theoretical label (Williams and Krause 1997: x-xi). The book therefore served to launch the label Critical Security Studies, but not to fill it with precise content (see Key Quotes 7,1 for some of the ways in which Critical Security Studies has come to be defined). Metaphorically, it threw open the doors of the church of critical security and tried to welcome the followers of the shoe and the gourd, and even those hopping around on one foot.
In their contribution to that volume, Krause and Williams aimed to set out the scope of a critical security study, and it has served as a touchstone in the further development of Critical Security Studies. They began their case for Critical Security Studies from the concerns with the traditional conception of security I have recounted. In particular, Krause and Williams began by questioning the referent object of security:
94
David Motimer
KEY QUOTES 7.1  Definitions: Critical Security Studies
Critical Security Studies has proven reasonably resistant to clear definition. This has been largely intentional, as the predion of a definition is limiting n a way that those behind the Gritfaof Security Sttxiics text wshed to avoid. Nevertheless, there are some definitions m the literature 'Our appending of the term critkai to WCUffy studies is meant to imply more an orientation toward the discipline than a precise theoretical label, and we adopt a small-c definition of cnvcal.     Perhaps the most straightforward way to convey our sense of how cr<vcai should be understood in this volume is Robert Cox's distinction between problem-solving and critical theory the former takes "preva ling social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organ.zed , . as the given framework for action, while the atter calls them into question uy concerning itself with their origins and how they m.ght oe m the process of t hanging" Our approach to security studies . . thjs begins from an analysis of the claims that make the discipline possible—not |ust ts claims abojt the world but jlso its underlying epistemology and ontology, -vhich prescribe what it means to make sensible claims about the wor'd.' MMam ana Kmuh (1997: x-xi)
An emerging school of "critical securrty studies" (CSS) ymntl to challenge conventions' neurit) studies by applying postpositive perspectives, such as critical theory and poststructuralism Much of this work .  . deals with the social construction of security, bul CSS mostly has the intent (known from poststructuralism as well as from constructivism r internation.il relations) of showing that change is possible because things are socially constituted.' Buzon. WSfver and <Je WiWr (1998 31-5).
"Critical security studies deal with the social construction^B of security. The rhetorical nature of "threat discourses" 1 ,s examined and criticized. . Critical security studies J consider not only threats as a construction, but the obi^H of security as well Critical security studies . . have^H emancipator) goal
E/iksson (1999 3 IB). 1 'Critical security studies is a suo-field within the academic B discipline of intcriaticna' politics concerned with the punl of critical know edge .Lbout security Critical knowledge ■ implies understandings that attempt to stand outside pnefl mg structures, processes, ideologic--, and orthodox es whilfi recognismg thai all conceptualisations of security derive V from particular political.theoretical'histoncol perspectiv^B Critical theonsm^ does not make a < laim to objectivity I but rather seeks to provide deeper understandings of O^B pressive attitudes and behaviour w ih a view to developing promising ideas by which human society might overcotl^H structural and contingent human wrongs Security is co^P ceived comprehensively pmoi c;n; irn-oi i?-s and practice relating to multiple referents, multiple t/pe^ ot threat, am multiple levels of analysis.' Booth (2007: 30) 'There is no singular definition of what it means to be critical in security studies—and any rigid definition q^B term critical security studies will tell you more about 1 the position from which that definition is attempted thanj anything else
Bootes anri vfci.gha'i-VVifi'rarrs (3010 3)
who or what is to be secured. The traditional answer to this question is that the referent object is the state: security refers to protecting the state from external threats, and the people living within the territory of the state are considered secure to the degree that the state is secure. As Krause and Williams put it, such a view largely reduces security for the individual to citizenship: "Yet, while to be a people without a state often remains one of the most insecure conditions of modern life (witness the Kurds or the Palestinians), this move obscures the ways in which citizenship is also at the heart of many structures of insecurity and how security in the contemporary world may be threatened by dynamics far beyond these parameters' (Krause and Williams
1997a: 43). If the focus on state as a referent obj insufficient, what if we adjust our focus to the vidual human being, or perhaps to the commun^H which humans live- What, indeed, if we ask about^L security of humanity as a whole, beyond rather^B within the states in which most of us now find selves? These are the questions Krause and Wiffl^H pose as the foundation of Critical Security Studies.I^B argue that posing such questions opens a broa^H complex agenda for security studies, an agenda largely hidden by the traditional focus on the state^B the military. Suddenly wc can ask about the ways^H pose threats to their own people, as well as askingalH the responsibility for providing security
does not. This question of the responsibility of StatL'ternational community for the security of those *P-14 \ state cannot be seriously posed within tradi-
studies, and yet only a tew years after
rional security i
h Toronto conference, an International Commission ' 6 Intervention and State Sovereignty proclaimed a onsjbility to protect' those subject to radical inse-within their own slates (see Chapter 22).
While an imp'11
the broadening of the security agenda was tant feature of the foundations that Krause
■ dliams were attempting to lay, rather more significant were the cpistemologkal impHcations they drew from the challenges to the traditional conception of security. They argue that by looking at individuals and particularly the communities in which they live I critical security study has to take seriously the ideas, norms, and values that constitute the communities that are to be secured. Traditional security stud-ts its referent object as just that: an object. The su;i. ^ a thing' that is found, out there in the world, and subject to objective study by security analysts. By i, Krause and Williams argue that thinking of the varied communities in which people live requires an interpretative shift, a recognition that ideas (at least in part) constitute communities and that therefore the ideas of analysts are not entirely separable from the objects srudied.
Having opened the doors of what they hoped would be a broad church, Krause and Williams set out the agenda of what would attract scholars to the service. Critical Security Studies would:
• question the referent object of security: while states were clearly important, human beings were both secured and rendered insecure in ways other than by states and military force; Critical Security Studies would engage in research that recognized this and explored its implications;
• consider security as more than just military security: once the referent object was opened up, so too were the questions of what rendered referents insecure, and how security was to be achieved, both for the state and for any other referent objects; and change the way security was studied, as the
^-Objectivity assumed by traditional approaches to security is untenable; indeed, once you consider the *ay human communities arc constituted by ideas, DOrms-and values, it becomes clear that this applies the state, and so Critical Security Studies ' becomes a post-positivist form of scholarship.
Critical Securrty Studies: A Schismatic History
With the Critical Security Studies text, a range of scholars responded to this agenda in a variety of different ways, laying the foundations for the variation in Critical Security Studies we continue to see.
When students and scholars discuss the breadth of the initial desire of Critical Security Studies, they will often make almost immediate reference to Mohammed Ayoob's contribution: "Defining Security: A Subaltern Realist Perspective' (Ayoob 1997). Ayoob focuses on the first of Krause and Williams' challenges, and questions the assumed nature of the state in traditional security studies. He argues that the state in traditional security studies is the state of the advanced, industrial North. He seeks to expand that notion of security to account for the security concerns of the majority of the world's states, concerns that 'mirror the major security concerns evinced by most Western European state makers during the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries' (Ayoob 1997: 121-2). Thus, while Ayoob questions the nature of the referent object of traditional security studies, he docs not introduce alternative possibilities, nor does he enquire very far into other means of providing security, and he certainly does not contest the epistemological nature of security study.
R. B. J. Walker's contribution to the volume is exemplary of a much more radical break with the traditions of security studies understood as the threat, use, and control, of military force. Walker seeks to understand the conditions that make possible certain ways of thinking and speaking about security, and in doing so explores the intimate connections between security and the histoiy of the modern state. Ultimately, he argues that to think seriously about security in the present is to think about the reformulation of politics broadly: 'If the subject of security is the subject of security, it is necessary to ask, first and foremost, how the modern subject is being reconstituted and then to ask what security could possibly mean in relation to it' (Walker 1997: 78). This is a profound challenge, but one that has been taken up by a range of scholars who assemble around the label of Critical Security Studies, as we shall see later.
In. between the avowed realism of Mohammed Ayoob and the radical political philosophy of R. B. J. Walker, the Critical Security Studies text showcased a number of responses to Krause and Williams's challenges (see Key Ideas 7.1 for one of the more intriguing), which drew on a range of theoretical traditions and explored concrete problems of contemporary
96     Dav:d Muiimer
jgj KEY IDEAS 7.1  Security and Ken Booth
One of the most interesting and unusual contributions to Cntizal Security Studies \s Ken Booth's chapter 'Security and Self: Reflections of a fallen realist1 (3ooth 1997). Booth came to Critical Security Studies as a well-established practitioner 0f traditional strategic studies—in his own words, a realist. That tradition trains you to keeo yourself out of your research and writing, because its cpistemology instructs the strict separation between the object of analysis and the analyst. Critical Security Studies emerged from a tradition that rejected that separation, and in 'Security and Self Booth explores the consequences of that change through what he describes as 'an expe'.ment in
autosooology' He examines the way   which the field has 1 functioned as a discipline, to produce students and teachers of a particular type and to create a field of questions and ■ Bmitthe types of answer that can be given to those questions. The conclusion He reaches is 'thatthere is a critical relationship between the me/I as a theorist of security and what it ■xeans tc study secyiLy. T he a~gumentj has been thai the meaning o~ studying security is not simply or necessarily created by Lite : hanges out there in the world, but by the changes—or lack of them—in here I (who we think we are, and what we think we are doingY^B (Booth 1997; 112).
The Critical Security Studies label emerged from a 1994 conference in Toronto, and was then used as the title for the book that conference produced. The initial agenda of Critical Security Studies was set by a series of challenges to the traditional conception of security: the state was not a sufficient referent object for security; thinking more broadly about referent objects required thinking more broadly about the sources of both insecurity and security; these forms of rethinking required an epistemological move beyond the empinost positivist traditions of security studies. Critical Security Studies tried to create a broad church for the critical study of security, seeing critical' as an orientation rather than a unque theoretical perspective
The desire for a critical security study initially drew scholars from a range of theoretical perspectives, including constructvism, poststructuralism, and pest-Marxism.
security. Several chapters drew on the constructivism that was making an important mark more broadly in international relations. Others were more inclined to draw theoretical inspiration from the heterogeneous products of twentieth-century continental philosophy that are often lumped together as 'poststructuralism'. In addition, Ken Booth and Peter Vale, in considering critical security in the southern African context, began a journey that would lead ultimately to the post-Marxist Frankfurt School (see the section Aberystwyth exclusions').
Krause and Williams expressed the desire that led first' to Toronto and then to the Critical Security Studies volume as seeking a 'critical perspective' on security i They worked hard to ensure that this critical perspective was not monopolized by a single theoretical approach, and so opened the conference and the volume to a range of theoretical positions. Nevertheless, the] desire for a (single) perspective somehow remained as scholars responded to the challenges they laid down in creating their foundation for Critical Security Studies. Thus, despite their claims to Catholicism, Krause and Wilhams create the conditions for schism—the schisnjl I continue to trace. In doing so. one ol the key questions I consider is: 'If Critical Security Studies is notfl perspective, not a position, what is it?' The first answer to this question was given by those of the so-called! Copenhagen School.
Copenhagen distinctions
The year after Critical Security Studies had appeared Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, andjaap dc Wilde published Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998). TB book was intended to serve as a relatively compifl hensive statement of what has come to be known aS 'securitization studies', or the Copenhagen SchQ^M
led
will not discuss Copenhagen in detail, as it is cr«
2 Bill McSweeney (rt)y6) is generally credited with cO&i ing the label 'Copenhagen School' to refer to the wofl^l
Buzan, Wa>ver, and a series of collaborators.
re in this volume (see Chapters 12 and 15), but <*Sett U us a short sideline, for it has made two impor-^^tributions to the history I am tracing. 13,11 C  ■ ,. 4 tfew Framework for Analysis is built around trtant conceptual developments in the study-
two imp01 of security
,. Buzan's notion of a sectoral analysis of nd WiEver's concept of 'securitization' (see 12) Roth of these ideas have helped to in-
pecunty
Chaplt'r form the
E jt iS the notion of securitization that has been more theoretically important. 'Securitization' is hips the most significant conceptual development [hat has emerged specifically within security studies in io ;hc epistemological challenge Krause and Williams note. Essentially, Warver suggests that we rreat security as a speech act: that is, a concrete action that is performed by virtue of its being said. 'Securitization' raises a number of very interesting questions that have informed critical security study since Waiver introduced the concept.
Despite thi: influence on Critical Security Studies, the Copenhagen School has sought to distance itself from Critical Security Studies. In part, this is a function of an incoherence inherent in the approach between the sectoral analysis of security and the concept of securitization. While securitization opens the possibility of the radical openness of social life, the sectoral approach, as it had developed before merging into the Copenhagen School, draws on a largely objectiv-ist cpistemology In other words, the epistemological underpinnings of the concept of securitization do not cohere with those of the sectoral analysis of security. It is the epistemology of securitization, however, that does cohere with that called for by the desire to form a critical security study. In Security: A New Framework for Analysu., the authors argue that Critical Security Studies is informed by poststructuralism and constructivism and thus is open to the possibility of social change. By contrast, they suggest that the Copenhagen approach recognizes the social construction of social life, but contends that construction in the security realm is sufficiently stable over the long Hro that it can be treated as objective. In other words, they resolve the incoherence by assuming long-term ability and so enabling a largely positivist epistemol-°gy (Buzan etal. 1998: 34-5)." The explicit separation of the Copenhagen School
°m Critical Security Studies did more than simply jounce that Copenhagen is sui generis. One func-
°n of thc Le^ has been to create 'Critical Security
Critical Security Studies; A Schismatic Hir.ory 97
Studies' as something more concrete and less heterogeneous than the original desire. The Copenhagen authors talk of Critical Security Studies as 'an emerging school', and they shorten it to CSS. What is more, they ascribe to this emerging school two specific theoretical positions, poststructuralism and constructivism. This text, then, marks an important moment in the creation of Critical Security Studies as something other than an orientation towards the discipline, and also effects conceptual exclusions that are the subject of contestation, not least by scholars at Aberystwyth University, who have considerable institutional claim to the Critical Security Studies label.
KEY POINTS
• Security: A New Framework for Analysts (Buzan, Wsver, and de Wilde 1998) sets out a distinctive position on security studies, often known as 'the Copenhagen School', blending Buzan's 'security sectors' with Waiver's securitization'.
• There is an epistemological incoherence at the heart of the Copenhagen School between the epistemology of sectoral analysis and that of securrtizaticn.
• The Copenhagen School resolves its incoherence by arguing that the social production of security is sufficiently stable to be treated objectively.
• Security: A New Framework for Analysis seeks to distinguish between its approach and Critical Security Studies, and in doing so tends to produce Critical Security Studies as an emerging 'school'.
Aberystwyth exclusions
Rather ironically, the most aggressive attempt to produce a coherent approach for Critical Security Studies—to marshal all adherents to the sign of the shoe or the gourd, but not both—has been made from a position largely excluded by the Copenhagen School's characterization of Critical Security Studies as being informed by constructivism and poststructuralism. The attempt has been focused around scholars based in Aberystwyth (indeed, Steve Smith (2005) calls it the Welsh School), and has found its most complete expression to date in two volumes: Smith's Critical Security Studies and World Politics (2005) and Theory of World Security (Booth 2007).
David Maimer
Central to both of these books is the work of Ken Booth, who edited the first and wrote the second. Indeed, Theory of World Security is intended to be a fairly definitive statement of Booth's thirty-year research programme leading to a critical theory of security (Booth 2007: xvii-xviii).
In both these texts, Booth is explicit in arguing that not everyone who would consider themselves working within Critical Security Studies will accept his orientation to a critical security theory. In other words, he is making a clear case for a restrictive understanding of critical security theory—he is saying to us, follow the sign of the gourd, and means it. He argues, in tact, that the formulation of a singular 'critical security theory' is the second stage of Critical Security Studies work. Booth's intervention, therefore, is an unapologetic desire for fragmentation. As he says: 'There are times when definite lines have to be drawn' (Booth 2005a: 260). He distances himself sharply from the Krause and Williams of Critical Security Studies, rejecting the broad church in favour of a single tradition aimed at giving rise to a coherent critical theory of security.
In his first cut at elaborating a critical theory of security in 2005, Booth followed his Aberystwyth colleague Richard Wyn Jones, who had drawn on the Frankfurt School tradition to think about security theory in his 1999 book Security, Strategy, and Critical
Theory. Both see the Frankfurt School traditio centrally important to the development of a < theory for security studies (see Think Point 7,] an example of the sort of security analysis this t ition can produce). In Critical Security Studit World Politics, Booth throws his net slightly than Frankfurt in identifying the tradition, addH Gramscian, Marxist, and Critical International Relj,! tions to the Frankfurt School. In other words. Boo« drew on the range of post-Marxist social theqfl particularly as it has been drawn into Internatio^B Relations, with pride of place to the work of tfjl Frankfurt School in general and Jürgen HahernJ in particular.
The theoretical net of Booth's critical theory of curity was expanded still further with his 2007 Tfofl of World Security. Here he Look an explicitly eclectic* approach to theory building, engaging in what he terms Perlenfischerie (pearl fishing), following Han-nah Arendt, picking theoretical pearls from a range of schools and perspectives. His first set of pearlsJ the same set he drew from the post-Marxist oyster bdl in 2005, and still with the Frankfurt School the firs among them. To this he adds a second, lesser, setcl| ideas: world order, peace studies, feminism, historical] sociology, and social idealism. 1 le calls the whole of the string of pearls that his fishing produced emancipa-, tory realism.
THINK POINT 7.1  The persistent puzzle of national missile defence
The approach to security which starts with Frankfurt School Critical I hcory has. as yet at least not produced a great deal of scholarship which seeks to analyse contemporary issues or practices of security. One notable recent exception is Colurnba Peoples'justifying SdffiSttC Missile Defence (2010). which began life as a PhD dissertation at Aberystwyth University under the supervision of Richard Wyn Jones. Peoples' book explores the (remarkably) long debates in the USA over ballistic missile defence, asking how supporters maintained their justification of successive missile defence programmes in the face of both scientific and strategic critiques. He argues that the supporters are able to draw on a cultural common sense' to maintain that justification, t he idea of common sense as hegemonic discourse he draws from Gramsci, while he uses the Frankfurt School's ideas on technology to analyse the content of the American common sense. The result is one of the only detailed discussions of a
central issue of military, or indeed other form of, securifl
from an avowedly pest Marxist Critical Security StudJQH perspective.
Peoples' book is worth reading in conjunction with anO^H volume that appeared shortly before it. Natalie Borman^T National Missile Defence and the Politics of US Identity (2Q(^B In this text, Bormann also ta'<es up the (puzzling) persistenM of ballistic missile defence in US political discourse, de^M^ as she puts it, a case that does not add up Bormann 1 provides, in the words of her subtitle, a post-structurM cnlitque', drawing in particular on the work of M chel Foucault and her supervisor David Campbell. The twOT make interesting companon pieces, tackling very si problems while working out of the two leading theort traditions which have informed critical scholar ship m si studies, and beyond: German post-Marxism and Frera structuralism.
L would such a critical security theory look
Booth argues
that there are eight themes that can
HOT from rhe collection of post-Marxist theory 'to a critical security theory (the eight are summed in Key Ideas 7.2). He begins with the central 0f the Frankfurt School, that all knowledge is a
fcfrl process
but
there arc
_that is, knowledge is not simply 'there',
Lther is produced socially, and thus politically, and interests of knowledge'. Knowledge benefits
me and disadvantages others; it is, in the noted words l^Eobert Cox in International Relations, always for someone and for some purpose'. A critical security theory therefore, must reveal the politics behind seeming neutral knowledge. Such a conception of knowledge implies a critique of traditional theory, including BJtional security theory, which, by not recognizing leal origins and content, tends to a naturalism, assuming the ability to maintain a rigid division between the analyst and the social world she is analysing. If Critical Theory, therefore, reveals the false naturalism of traditional theory and the political content of all knowledge, it provides the basis for social change— indeed, for progress. This third theme, of the possibility of progress, leads to a fourth: that the test of a social theory is us capacity for fostering emancipation. Change :, and progressive change is emancipatory.
KEY IDEAS 7.2 Themes of post-Marxist i Critical Theory
owledge is a social process.
■adrtions1 :hsor i promotes the flaws o' naturalism and klCtionism.
tical theory offers a basis for pol tical and social igress.
Stest of theory is emanc ipation. man society is its own invention, pessive theo-ies have dominated poltt cs among nations. ! state and other institutions must be denaturalized, pessive word order values should inform the ans and ends of an international polrtics committed snhann-g world security 05a: 268).
The first four themes Booth derives from the broad Critical Theory tradition in social theory To these
* hc adds fou^ gathered from the specific, emergent ™Cal edition in International Relations. The first at human society is irs own invention. Indeed, this
Critical Security Studies: A Schismatic; History
is a necessary condition for the operation of his earlier themes, ibr only if society is a social invention can know-1 edge serve as the basis for social change and open the possibility of emancipation. The second theme that Booth derives from critical IR is a particular claim about contemporary world politics: that regressive theories have dominated the field. If all knowledge is for someone and for some purpose, regressive theories arc. the ones that are for those presently in power with the purpose of maintaining their dominance. Critical IR theory has shown how the mainstream theories, including security studies, serve just this purpose. If this is true, then, the final two themes Booth develops are aimed at overcoming the regressive nature of world politics. The first is that the state and other international institutions must be denaturalized, so as to open the possibility of change, and finally that, in effecting that change to global (security) practices, politics must be governed by emancipatory values.
These themes enable Booth to argue that a critical security theory can serve as the basis for answering three sets of crucial questions in relation to security:
• First, what is real? If we reject naturalism, which assumes that the social wTorld can be treated as objective in the same fashion as the natural world, then we cannot assume that the social world we investigate is 'rear in the same sense as the physical. Critical Theory's focus on knowledge provides a way into understanding social ontology, and thus the creation of social facts.
• Second, Critical Theory of this kind provides a means of thinking about knowledge, or the epis-temology of social life. It directs our attention to the interests that underlie knowledge claims, and leads us to ask whom particular forms of knowledge are for, and what function they serve in supporting the interests of those people or groups.
• Finally, it suggests asking the old Leninist question, what is to be done? Critical Theory is a theory of praxis, a step in a process of political engagement designed to transform the world. As Marx put it: the point is not to understand die world; the point is to change it.
These reflections provide the basis for a specific critical theory of security (see Key Quotes 7.2 for Booth's definition of this theory). It draws on a relatively coherent body of social thcoiy and its application to International Relations, and aims to inform scholarship and political practice in the future. While developed largely in parallel to the critical tradition in International Relations,
Davie Mutimer
KEY QUOTES 7.2 Critical security theory
In his resent work, Booth (2007) has a'gued ■or the develop?! lent of a distinrtive critical theory of security, and proposed the following definition of such a theory, beginning from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory: 'Critical security theory is bolh a theoretical commitment and a political orientation concerned with the construction of world security. As a theoretical commitment it is a framework of ideas deriving from a tradition of critical global theorising made up of two man strands: critical social theory and radical international relations theory  . . As a political orientation it is informed by the aim of enhancing world security through emancipatory politics and networks of communities at all levels, including the potential community of all communities—common humanity' Booth (2007; 30-1).
Booth's critical security theory is quite clearly designed to provide a specific dieory of security within critical IR. What this means is that Booth and his colleagues in the Welsh School have provided a clear answer to the question posed at the end of the discussion of Critical Security Studies: critical security study should be guided by a single, specific theory, and that theory should be informed by Critical Theory, with capital letters.
Tn order to make the case for exclusion as forcefully as possible, once he has set out the elements of a critical security theory, Booth (2005a: 269-71; 2007: 160-81) distinguishes it from other possible sources of critical security study. He explains, in other words, what is wrong wirh following the sign of the shoe or with taking off our shoes and hopping around on one foot. In particular he distinguishes critical security theory from four pretenders: feminism, the Copenhagen School, constructivism, andpoststructuralism.
The exclusion of feminism is the most troubling to Booth's position in some ways, but in others the easiest to achieve. As most feminist writing will freely admit, there are various feminisms that draw in their turn from a wide variety of social theory traditions in developing analyses of gender. These traditions include the Critical Theory tradition from which Booth proceeds. Therefore, gender analysis can be considered already to be within Critical Theory, and thus within a critical security theory; however, other forms of feminist theorizing are as antithetical to critical security theory as their theoretical traditions are to Critical Theory more
broadly The Copenhagen School is similarly disn. with relative ease. The near-naturalism of the Co hagen approach to society—so stable it can be t as objective—leaves it 'only marginally "critical"- a in Booth's eyes (2005a: 271) suffers the same forms c incoherence I have already noted in this chapter.
There remain two challengers to die critical sec theory Booth champions, the same two that the Cop, hagen School identified in Security: A New FramewaM I for Analysis. The first is constructivism, which Booth! (2007: 152-3) argues is not a theory at all, but rathes an orientation to world politics that serves as a basis! on which to reject traditional theories. While Booth's! argument maybe true, it ignores the possibility which 11 will explore later, that there are within that orientation various constructivist theories that do have something I to say about security-just as other orientations, nv| eluding Booth's, contain a number of specific theories I within them. For Booth (2005a: 270), that leaves only I poststructuralism, which is just too dangerous with its I toxic mix of 'obscurantism, relativism, and faux radi- J calism'. In other words, Booth (2007: 177-8) argues, I poststructuralism provides no basis for political action. I
As might be imagined, and as Booth freely admits, the dismissal of constructivism and poststructuralism I as elements of Critical Security Studies is not shared by all. These two theoretical positions represent, in fact, I the conceptual underpinning of most ol what might be drawn under the label, understood as the broad church. But even among them the sign of the shoe ill defended against those hopping around on one foot.
KEY POINTS
■   Ken Booth, Richard W'yn Jones, and their Welsh SchoqM colleagues argue for a specific critical security theory.H
• The tradition within which they develop this theory^^M
the post-Marxist trad: Lion identified with Gramscian I and other Marxist International Relations and, particS^H lady, with Frankfurt School Critical Theory.
• The elaboration of the Critical Theory tradition gives rrsaM to eight themes and a definition of critical security theor^B
• Critical security theory provides the possibility of I answering three key questions: what is real, whatis ■ knowledge, and what is to be done'
-  Ci tical Security Studies should be organized aroundl this critical security theory, and should not include feminism, the Copenhagen School, construct.vsm, a™ particularly poststructuralism.
Constructing security
exclude the Copenhagen School and feminist Writing5 on
security.1 and further if we watch those Knitted to a critical theory of security build a hard-
C°d fast line between themselves and the rest of what m ' * be considered Critical Security Studies, what m\-e left wltn? Keiril K1^1150- Provid-ed an answer in are ,jeW 0f the research programme of Critical Secu-* Studies in 1998, and it is the same answer to which B^th came: constructivism and poststructuralism. Indeed, as with Critical Security Studies, Krause's (1998) iew largely elides any difference between these two positions—the church is still broad, and so you can follow the sign of the shoe or take off your shoe and hop around on one foot if you like.
In an attempt to impose some order on the studies that compose Critical Security Studies, without resorting to the definitional strictures employed by both Booth and the Copenhagen School, Krause organizes arange of lite-ature into a broad research programme. The effect of this move is to provide a characterization of Critical Security Studies, which, while still inclusive, dearly privileges constructivism. He organizes the scholarship of Critical Security Studies under three headings: the construction of threats and responses; the construction of the objects of security; possibilities for transforming the security dilemma. Krause explicitly does not intend these headings to capture the full range of critical security scholarship, nor docs he suggest that scholars will tend to treat these issues separately Nevertheless, the effect, particularly appearing at a time in which the Critical Security Studies label was being established, and coming from one of the editors of the Critical Security Studies volume, was to mark the character of Critical Security Studies as
The exclusion of feminism in the production of the Critical Security Studies label is a truly fascinating issue, worthy of complete treatment on its own. As we have seen, Ken Booth effects this exclusion through arguing that feminism is a broad church in its own right and that certain feminist analyses of gender form an important element of Critical Theory. Keith Krause (1998: 324 11.4) effects a similar exclusion in his review of the scholarship of Critical Security *udies: 'I have not treated the principal themes of feminist or gender scholarship on security as a separate category, "ese are dealt with in detail by [others].' Lene Hansen Woo) has reflected on this same exclusion in the case of the Copenhagen School.
Critical Security Studies; A Schismatic History
concerned with 'the social construction of security' (Eriksson 1999: 318).
There are two important features of Krause's review in the story of the creation of the Critical Security Studies label. The first is that it demonstrates the impressive array of research that is being conducted and published to which this label could be attached, countering, as Krause (1998: 316) notes, 'the oft-heard charge that critical scholarship is inevitably sloppy or unsystematic'. Second, he is able to derive from the review a characterization of Critical Security Studies that is far more specific than that provided by Critical Security Studies, and is clearly distinct from Booth's critical security theory. Krause suggests that there are six claims that tie Critical (Security) Studies together:
1. Principal actors (states and others) arc social constructs.
2. These actors are constituted through political practices.
3. The structures of world politics are neither unchanging nor determining because they too are socially constructed.
4. Knowledge of the social world is not objective, as there is no divide between the social world and knowledge of that world.
5. Natural-science methodology is not appropriate for social science, which requires an interpretative method.
6. The purpose of theory is not explanation in terms of generalizable causal claims, but contextual understanding and practical knowledge.
A pair of books by Alexandra Ghcciu illustrate the approach Krause sets out and demonstrate the sort of rigorous scholarship that is possible within the research programme. In NATO in the New Europe (2005b) Gheciu explores the socialization of former Eastern Bloc states by NATO in the years after the end of the Cold War. Socialization is an important idea in social construction, because it is the means by which actors are constructed to become members of a particular social system or community. Gheciu provides a detailed account of the way in which NATO socialized the Czech Republic and Romania to become 'Europeans' in a sense that allied with the liberal democratic notions of what it meant to be European in the 1990s. Furthermore, she shows how this socialization was an explicit security strategy which she terms a Kantian
102   David Mutirne'
or 'inside* approach to security—the formation of the state as a particular kind of state and thereby productive of security (Gfieciu 2005b: 7-9). In Securing Civilization (2008), Ghedu explores the 'inside' approach to security further, by looking at the ways in which three key European security institutions—the EU, NATO, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)—respond to the post-9/11 threat of international terrorism. At the heart of these responses is the constitution of members as civilized/ secure and those outside as barbaric/'threatening (Gheciu 2008: 5).
The focus on the social construction of agents and structures, together with a commitment to interpretative method, contextual understanding, and practical knowledge, marks Krause's account of Critical Secur ity Studies as largely rooted within the tradition of constructivism in International Relations, a tradition Gheciu (2005b), for example, then explicitly claims. Constructivism clearly shares homologies with both post-Marxist Critical Theory and poststructuralism, but it is not the same as either. Those following the sign of the gourd are welcome, as are those hopping around on one. foot, but they may feel that they are then expected to join in following the sign of the shoe.
KEY POINTS
• Social constructivism forms an important strand within Critical Security Studies.
• Constructivism takes agents and structures as constituted m and through political practices.
• Constructivism denies the division between the social world and the analyst, and thus seeks an interpretative rather than a naturalist methodology.
• While attempting to maintain the broad church, the constructive account of Critical Security Studies privileges social constructivism
have been called prolix and self-indulgent (Walt li and accused of having no research programme (' hane 1988). For examples of the kind of research.^ is actually conducted by scholars labelled post sc rural, see Think Point 7.2. The virulence of the re tion of poststructural work reflects, f would sugged its radical promise. It shares with the rest of the wojJ discussed in this chapter a pair of key commitmei^H rejection of positivist epistemology and hence metj odology, and commitment to social critique. HowevJ unlike any of the other forms ul critical scholarship! have thus far discussed, it docs not stop short of thj radical implications of these commitments. Indeed J crucial commitment shared by poststructural schoM arship but not by other iorms of critical theory is J rejection of overarching grand narratives, and thus J acceptance that knowledge claims are always unstable and contingent. As a fairly sympathetic critic has put it: 'it is for this reason that most social constructiviJ and critical security studies writers are at such pains to establish the difference between their work and tha of poststructuralists. Put simply, poststracturalisf deny the form of foundations for knowledge claind that dominate the security studies debate. As can be imagined, this has led to much hostility toward post-structuralism ...' (S. Smith 2005: 49)
The work that is generally labelled postsrructuralB and, as with the other labels wc are discussing, is mord commonly applied by others than by a scholar to he! own work draws on a series of intellectual traditions largely having their roots in French philosophy, (as opposed to the German philosophy that animates the Welsh School, for example). While the work draws on an eclectic collection of writing, the mod common points of departure are the work of Jacqud Derrida and Michel foucault.The rejection of gram
Everyone's other: poststructuralism and security
Ken Booth's antipathy to poststructural approaches to International Relations in general and security studies in particular reflects a common, and commonly virulent, reaction. In addition to obscurantist, relativist, and faux radical, approaches labelled poststructural
4 In his attack un poststructural 1R, Booth suggests most of those in IR who work from Foucault use his on psychiatry, and then goes on to dismiss the IR through criticisms of this early work of Foucault To knowledge, lew working in poststructural security sto draw extensively on Madness and Civilization, an earlyi Foucault called 'archaeology', but rather on the laterges logical work, particularly Discipline and Punish, ThenU of Sexuality, and two incomplete elements of a larger] gramme on politics and war, Society Must Be Defended 'Governmentality'. See, among others, Campbell Ú9S Gusterson (1998), Rdkins (2003), Duffield (2007), Dilloffl Lobo-Gucrrero (2008), and Grayson (2008).
wort
such as those of progress' and 'emancipa-together with the d eclectic theoretical inspirations for postal work, means that there are no simple sum-or sets of bullet points that can be adduced, as
Cried an LllCtui manes
I        Oere i
th the other approaches. Ultimately, to borrow an vwoii, the only way in is through, and many of texts caJled poststructural demand close and care-Erf reading.' Therefore rather than providing such a mary I consider a number of important authors and texts that arc routinely cited, and thus form important part or the story of the production of . e critical Security Studies label—even though few, tf any. f f these authors would slap the label on their own work
One of the first of these works is Bradley Klein's 1994 book Strategic Studies and World Order. In terms of the history of Critical Security Studies, the importance of the text is that it took on one of the central problems that motivate the later development of the label: what ate the political consequences of traditional security studies—that is, strategic studies? Klein considered strategic studies as a discourse constitutive of the global state and military system it purports to study. His approach to that discourse is informed by FoucaultJs work, which Foucault discusses as a history of the present, or a genealogy. Genealogical work seeks to reveal the historical trajectory that gave meaning to particular discourses and how they then function in the present. Famously, Foucault provided such genealogies—for example, of criminal punishment and Western sexuality. Klein turns this form of investigation on strategic studies, and in the process makes a compelling case for one of the founding
^Bfc °f" the concerns with much of the criticism directed
ltpos:siruciu:-iil work in IK generally is that it is not always founded on such <■: reading of the texts it purports to criti-David Campbell (1998a: 210) notes: 'What is most interesting about the conventional critics of "postmodernism" i> the unvarnished vehemence that adorns their attacks. Accused of self-righteousness", lambasted as "evil", castigated for being "bad IR" and "111 eta-babble", and considered con-gemially irrational, "posimodernists" are regarded as little I   iter than unwelcome asylum seekers from a distant war ^ne. Ol course, had the criiics reached their conclusions a considered reading of what is now a considerable litera-
m International Relations, one would repay the thought With a , -
Aere is
* careful engagement of their own arguments. Sadly "~ not much thought to repay.'
Critical Security Studies: A Schismatic History   103
assumptions of Critical Security Studies: that theories about the world constitute that world, and thus that theory, including security theory, has political effects. What Klein shows is that strategic studies is productive of the very system that makes contemporary global violence possible.
Simon Dalby s first book, Creating the Second Cold War (1990), similarly turns the poststructural gaze on a central problem of conventional security studies: in his case, the renewed Cold War confrontation under the Reagan administration in the USA. Dalby explores the intellectual underpmmngs of US security policy, or, as he puts it in his subtitle, the discourse of politics. As a geographer, Dalby (1990) is particularly concerned with the ways in which geo-politics serves as a discourse underpinning the militarism of Reagan's international policy, and it is a concern with geo-politics as discourse which has then animated much of the rest of his work. In 1998 he teamed with Gearoid O Tuathail to edit Rethinking Geopolitics, which sought 'to radicalize conventional notions of geopolitics through a series of studies of its proliferating, yet often unacknowledged and under-theorized, operation in world politics past, present and future' (Dalby and 6 Tuathail 1998: 2). More recently Dalby has turned his attention to security studies more explicitly, and explored the effects of geo-political discourse in relation to attempts to 'securitize' the environment, and the environmental effects of this discourse when it largely ignored the environment {Dalby 2002).
Perhaps the most widely cited of the scholars working within these traditions is David Campbell, and for good reason. As Steve Smith (2005: 50) notes, 'David Campbell has written some of the best empirical work in poststructuralist security studies.' The first of these works is Writing Security (1998a), in which Campbell explores the manner in which the USA has been produced in and through discourses of danger. Me asks of US Foreign Policy some of the same questions, inspired by Foucault, that Klein used to think about Strategic Studies. In the book, he shows how Foreign Policy discourse is inseparable from what he terms foreign policy (the capitalization is the key)—that is, the production of an American self and a (dangerous) other, or a (secure) domestic and a (threatening) foreign. As with Klein's work, the contribution to Critical Security Studies thinking is clear. In the case of Campbell's work, both what Critical Security Studies will call the referent object and the agent of security (the state in both instances) is shown to be produced in its own practices.
104   David Mutimer
Critical Security Studies: A Schismatic History
THINK POINT 7.2 Traditional subjects in a poststructural gaze
Poststructural writing can take on subjects that on the ;u:       io:ar T.o U tn; samc-.i; those   1 vd in t'-aditional security studies. What the poststructural traditions provide, however is often a radically different way of asking questions and providing answers. He^ are two examples the first 'about' nuclear weapons: and the second. Canadian policy towards missile defence.
Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites (1998)
Gusterson is a social anthropologist whose discplme privileges a particular kind of ficldwork leading to ethnograph.c writing. Traditionally such ethnographies are written about others' cultures, often the cultures of Indigenous populations that have been (largely) untouched by European expansion (Fortunately for the anthropologists, such cultures are often found on south Pacific islands!) Gusterson is part of a movement in anthropology turning the ethnographic gaze on his own society. In Nuclear R.;es. he engages m an ethnograph.c stuoy of the scient'Sts at one of the US nucicar weapons laboratories. Making use of both ethnographic method and Foucault *> notions of discipline he investigates the ways in which the laboratories function to create the conditions of possibility forthe building, testing, and deployment of
The principal objection Ken Booth (20U5a: 270) raised to poststructuralism as part of a broad Critical Security Studies church was its supposed inability to inspire a politics, and in particular its inability to "'shape up" to the tent of Fascism as a serious political challenge'. This is, of course, a serious criticism of any form of critical theory that sees itself in any sense part of a politics of change, as it is difficult to imagine a politics more in need of change than Fascism. It is also an argument repeatedly raised by critics of post-structural scholarship, regardless of how many times it is answered. In Campbell's case, his most extended answer came in his 1998 book National Deconstruc-tion: Violence, Identity, andjustice in Bosnia (1998b). The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s posed exactly the sort of challenge alluded to by Booth, as it appeared to mark the return to Europe of the kind of violent Fascism to which all had said "never again' in 1945. (For a number of responses to Bosnia, sec Think Point 7.3.) In a sophisticated and compelling text, Campbell engages directly with the question Booth demands to be answered: 'What is to be done?'
D
THINK POINT 7.3 Researching Bosnia
nuclear weapons. As the title suggests, seme of what he finds is that the des-gn. bui.dng. testing anr: deployment of ' nuclear weapons have evolvec ,nto a ritualized culture among the scientists that has Ittle or nothing to do with stories we tell ourselves about the neccs of ceterrence aryjfl defence
Marshall Beier, 'Postcards from the Outskirts of Security' (2001)
In his study. Beier reflet:ts on a study trip he took wrth a J number of other Canadian scholars to visit the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) headquarters, % NOKAD is located in the middle of a mourtain. usually ] identified as bemg or the outskirts cf Colo-r.do Springs. It is actually c!oser to the small town o1" 'Secur ty' Colorado, ancjH Beier uses this observation as the startirg point for a reflection on the ways in which semiotic markers can affect group dynamics and contribute to the disciplining of dissent I le examines the ways in which opposition to missile defence was silenced within the tour, and considers the A implications for the decision the Canadian government na^H tc take cn whether and hew to oart cipate in the US miss^T defence programme
Campbell's answer (1998b: 196) to the questioS of politics demands to be read, and read closely, but centres around fostering the ethos of democracy™ 'Democracy is not a substance, a fixed set of values, J particular kind ul community, or a strict institurioniB form... what makes democracy democratic, and what I marks democracy as a singular political form, is a particular attitude or spirit, an ethos, that constanthrj^H to be fostered.' This is nor an answer that many find I comfortable, because it provides no simple blueprint™ no single strategy. Fostering the ethos of democrats does not mean that when you hold a competitive a^H tion and anoint a 'democratic' government yourwoill is done, and so the politics that is demanded by Catnpj bell's accounts of responsibility and democracy *H profoundly more difficult and challenging than
found in most areas of security studies, eve
1 Critical
Security Studies. The difficulty has leu, in fact, toJ| concerted effort among a number ol scholars working j in a poststructural tradition to consider issues ofeujj ics and responsibility in relation to 'the worst. of their work draws its philosophical inspiration^*
^■challeigc of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, ferticuladv nine wv.' h Bosn a. attracted the attention of a RLnber of scholars in the poststructural trad.tion. The Vthical and pen:  1 cnallen^ of .ne violence is central to Wiese worxs be. whr slso e merger is L- Loncern with the yJxe of Weiter" scholarship, and the nature of the research i*nterpn=e In oiderto estab sh his aliment about the political pcienta' c r dec or su-union. Campbell (1998b) first
pro
ides a deconstructs reading of the violence in Bosn;a
■te explores the production of identities in Bosnia that cabled trie v o'c^rce ::' the war's auc then attendant 'ethnic 'deansmij' ^2Kuvi use cf DerndYs nol:on of bntopo'ogy', he ^'explores the prodjC-ion uf u.lenu. es t cd to place in such a Iwythat fie othe-ccl c no' be allowed even to inhabit Hpin spaces without undermining the self. He then turns llothe responses, pjrticu'c- i> the intent ion jl responses, to fete violent e. and shows ho.v various 'Western c scoarses [(including security -jiiuies) uxvted the renditions that made Bie genoodai violence in Bosnia possible ■While crrtrca. o~ some ol irr -itel'e* ..«al moves Campbell makes Elizabeth D.-i.nnnee Ukc_- up similar themes in her book. The E'Jks of Researching War Looking for Bosnia (2005. Dauphinee too is concer ->ed with the piece of Wfester-i discourse: n he vic'cnce of Bosn a, but sne docs ■pt limit herself to an impersonal account of scholar1), influence. Rathe--, she tuns me -.cnolarly gaze on her own feceasrese.-.xhei .js-:ui^ .vha: it rie(!'i: that, in tne words
with wnich she opens the text 'I am budding my career or the ioss ol a man named Stcijan Sokolovic (and on the loss of many millions of Oth6TS who may or may no: resemble him)' (Dauphrnee 2008: I) Her answer takes senojsly the poststructural recognition that the observer is never and can never be, detached mom what she observes, and in doing so provides a telling account of the limits of our etnics, and our research
Questions of researcn are also central to Lene Hansen m her Secunty us Plodte UsOQUf se Ana'yS's and the SasTton War (2006) The book also picks up the themes Campbell developed in both Wiring Securrty (1992) and Notional PwiWtfrurtiWi (1998b). as I lansen develops a poststructural account of identity and foreign policy, and then uses that account to inform an analysis of Wfcslem policy in response to the Bosnian War Where Campbell analyses Bosnia m part to answer the critics' challenge tail poststruc turalism provides no politics, Hansen analyses the same war m part to answer the challenge that poststructu^alism does not engage n rigorous research Hansen sets 0;Jt a detailed method of analysis, drawing on, among others. Foucault and Demda, which she then applies to Bosnia Indeed, she concludes by compar rg ner analysis tc Campbell s m an attempt to ooen an 'ntra-pcst-struciural st debate', but holds true to her starting point by doing =0 not to determine who is right and wrong, but nither to explore the analytical effects of methodological choces (Hansen 2006 217-20).
part, from the work of Emmanuel Levinas. as did Campbell in developing his arguments about a politics in response to Bosnia.
The idea of fostering an ethos is also central to the notion of critique in muchol the writing labelled post -Structural. Both Welsh School critical security theory and cunstractivist Critical Security Studies provide an answer to one of the questions 1 posed at the outlet: what is meant by 'critical7. For the Welsh School, it involves revealing the interests behind knowledge Claims, with a goal of social change. Similarly for the constructivism, it is reaching a contextual and practical understanding to know whom knowledge claims serve. Both of these are relatively static conceptions of critique: they can be done in a finite sense. J^st as Campbell argues democracy is never reached, tot rather is an ethos ever to be fosrered, so too is critique. Poststructural writing sees its critical purposes * fostering an ethos of critique, always working to stabilize 'truths', revealing their contingency and
the nature of their production. It is not a finite project, however but rather a process in which to be constantly engaged. As with its politics, the poststructural conception of critique is difficult for many to accept, because again it is not easy. It does not allow for finite claims and finished projects, and. as students of society, we are trained to provide 'findings' and test them in a settled fashion.
Neither Bradley Klein nor David Campbell—nor indeed a number of others often also included in a posistrucrural security studies list, such as James Der Dorian, R. B.J. Walker, Cynthia Weber, or even Michael Dillon- applies the label 'Critical Security Studies' to their work. They are surelv and avowedly engaged in critical scholarship—that is the fostering of an ethos of critique—and much of their workis centrally concerned with security. Michael Dillon {1996). for example, has written an extended political philosophy of security out of the tradition of French social theory and his more recent work explores Foucault s notions of biopolilics
David Mutimer
in relation to the post-9/11 security strategies of the USA and other western powers (Dillon 2006; Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero 2008; Dillon and Neal 2008). Similarly, R. B. J. Walker is one of the leaders of a large research programme on 'Liberty and Security', in relation to the contemporary practices of the war on terrorism.
While most of these scholars have not entered the broad church of Critical Security Studies, their work has inspired some within it to take off a shoe and jump around on one foot. In doing so, some have hopped right back outside again, wondering what applying the label Critical Security Studies to their work adds to the project in which they are engaged. Indeed, the ethos of critique that work of this kind aims to foster demands that we turn our critical gaze on the very scholarly practices in which we are engaged. It demands that we ask about the politics of our own labelling, including the Critical Security Studies label, one of whose stories I am telling.
KEY POINTS
• 'Poststructuralism' is a marker for a diverse set of writing inspired by a number of, general!y Trench, philosophers including Michel RoucauM and Jacques Dernda.
• A number of works in this tradition within International Relations arc claimed by Critical Security Studies, most notably those of Bradley Klein, David Campbell, R. B. J. Walker, and Michael Dillon.
• Despite criticism to the contrary, poststructural work does provide answers to questions of political action, just not the kind of comfortable answers many are seeking.
■  Central to the political and rntical nature of post-structural writing is the idea of fostering an ethos of democracy and an ethos of critique. These a^e never finite, never reached, but something for which we must constantly strive.
Beyond divisions? CASEing the joint or returning the gift?
As we approach a quarter of a century since the Toronto conference, what can we say of the state of the Critical Security Studies label, and the divisions into which it has been broken? Et certainly seems well
established within the global security studies munity, with courses and even whole degrees offe: as well as finding mention in most collections on range of approaches to security, and even havin growing number of hooks dedicated to its iniroduc tion (see Fierke 2007; Peoples and Vaughan-Williaj 2010). There have also been moves to transcend thj label, the first by healing the schisms which have riven the broad church of Krause and Williams; the second] by recommending that we jettison not only Critical I Security Studies, but security itself!
in 2006, a group of scholars attempted to recon>1 struct the broad church of Critical Security Studies that had been central to the original Toronto de-! sire. These scholars met first in Paris, and gathered] together students of security from across Europe who shared a commitment to some form of critical scholarship about security, broadly conceived. Out of this meeting was produced an article later published in Security Dialogue as 'Critical Approaches to| Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto', with] the author given as 'The CASE Collective'. The goat of the collective was explicit in aiming to overcome precisely the sorts of divisions I have outlined in thai chapter: 'the aim of working and writing as a coll lective, a network of scholars who do not agree on everything yet share a common perspective, is basedi 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' (CASE Collective 2006: 444). Specifically, they sought to bridge the, gaps they saw between the 'Copenhagen', 'Welsh', and 'Paris' schools (with the latter a largely post-! structural position centred around Didier Bigo at Science Po in Paris).
The near impossibility of constructing a broad church is clearly demonstrated in the responses thej CASE Collective generated. In a scries of rcjoindenj published by the journal, Andreas Bchnke, Madl Salter, and Christine Sylvester look the Collective tJ task lor a series of exclusions they effected even ioj their attempts to forge an inclusive network (rSehnkej 2007; Salter 2007; Sylvester 2007). Bchnke and SalteM take the Collective to task for its 'European too* asking both what is meant by ' Europe' (Behnke 2007: 106), and what about the critical scholars who aia clearly not European in any sense, but still involved! in the critical security project (Salter 2007: 114)1 Behnke (2007: 108) also wonders about the exclusion
f theoretical positions from this reformed church, as there seems no room for his interest in Carl Schmitt, for example. Sylvester makes a similar, and even more damning critique, in asking where the feminists are • this network—even a poststructural feminist se-rity scholar such as Lene Hansen, who actually work's in Copenhagen, but whose work is missing from this broad network (Sylvester 2007). Salter and Miguel de Larnnaga then went further to build on the critique of the narrow European focus of CASE in'Cold CASE: A Manifesto for Canadian Critical Security Studies', which appeared as the lead article in [ a special issue of Critical Studies on Security exploring Canadian critical approaches to security (Salter and de Larrinaga 2014: 1-19). Despite the criticisms, the goal of the CASE collec-I (jyg js dearly to draw at least some of the fractious followers of different signs together in a common critical security effort. A more recent intervention which might reach a similar end through a very different means was published in Critical Studies on Security in2013. Anthony Burke, notesthar 'Cosmopolitanism' has a long history of thinking and practice in international politics, 'I ylet it has rarely been applied to questions or practice of security' (Burke 2013: 13). From this starting point, Hurke attempts to refound the on-' tological and ethical framework within which we can think and act security in cosmopolitan terms. Starting as it does from an ethical rather than analytical assumption, security cosmopolitanism holds out the possibility of an ecumenical joining across some, though by-no means all. of the divisions I have sketched. Burke's proposed framework has proven controversial, gen-; erating significant criticism and debate. At one end, Mar\' Kaldor commends the attempt to move beyond "human security' while recognizing the transnational human subject (Kaldor 2013: 42-5). Significantly less sympathetic are Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner, who ■lee Burke's framework as a critical-sounding gloss to put on the violence of liberal intervention ism (Cooper ftodTurner2013: 35 41)!
I The attempt to overcome divisions within critical studies of security is certainly not the project underpinning Mark Neocleous' book, despite its title: Critique of Security [ZOOS). Neocleous comes to his critique not from security studies, critical or otherwise, |>«t from the study of the state in general and the Nice' in particular. Indeed, his question is 'What if security is little more than a semantic and semiotic
jWackhole allowing authority to inscribe itself deeply
Critical Security Studies: A Schismatic History
in human experience^' (Neocleous 2008: 4). The answer is suggested by the very form of the question, and in a relentless and powerful text, Neocleous shows how security functions as 'a political technology . . , through which the state shapes our lives and imaginations' (Neocleous 2008; 4-5). He begins by showing how security, not liberty, is at the heart of liberalism, and so, contra Booth, emancipation is not the flip side of security, but rather it is oppression. From there he traces this technology of government through the practices of the twentieth century, concluding with a sustained critique of the role played by the 'security Fuckers' (Kelrnan, quoted in Neocleous 2008: 1), the professionals who make their living from security, including the academics who lay claim to the Critical Security Studies label. His conclusion is that we must 'eschew the logic of security altogether', something that 'could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual' (Neocleous 2008: 185). He calls on us to go far further than any of the adherents of any of the signs 1 have discussed to this point, to 'return the gift' of security, and not to seek to put anything in its place (which would simply be the far easier, and common, task of 'rethinking' sccurirv).
While Neocleous' conclusion is radical, it is hardly out of keeping with the desire that animates Critical Security Studies. That desire was spurred, at least in part, by the recognition of the ways in which security and its study supported the prevailing order. To point to a complicity so profound that 'security' itself is ir redeemable is a logical potential consequence of that originating insight. Wrhat happens, though, if we turn the ethos of critique not on 'security', but on Critical Security Studies, or even critical security studies? In what ways are those of us who have responded, in whatever fashion, to the desire for selfconsciously critical perspectives on security also complicit in the violence and oppression that we (nominally) seek to overturn? The answers to this question are profoundly unsettling for critical security studies. To take one very important example, much of the critical scholarship in security, at least in English, is produced by scholars working in settler colonial so cieties—Canada, Australia, and the USA. Settler colonial societies are those that were violently inscribed over the territory and peoples who lived there when the Europeans arrived. Those societies are only now beginning to come to terms with the implications of the ongoing colonialism of these societies; societies
David Mutimer
of which universities and their (even critically inclined) employees are a privileged part. A colleague and I recently considered the future of Critical Security Studies, and argued: 'For non-Indigenous critical security scholars living and working in North America, the violent securing of the settler-colonies . .. cannot be ignored. To work with and for a future that supports Indigenous sovereignty over land, language, and creative practice, CSS must become unsettled. An un-settled CSS works for decolonisation' (Hendershot and Mutimer 2018). In order to start to become unsettled, Critical Security Studies must
Conclusion
This chapter has been unlike many in a textbook of this kind. 1 have not provided clear and unproblematic answers to questions such as 'What is Critical Security Studies?*, 'What is meant by "critical" and "security"?*, 'How do you "do" Critical Security Studies?' Rather, I have tried to turn the ethos of critique that should animate a critical study of security on the very label I was asked to discuss. 1 have told a story of the short history of the label and its politics, a story that attempts to reveal how" Critical Security Studies came to be what it is, and what the effects are of that coming. Questions of history and politics are the questions—though by no means the only questions— that an ethos of critique leads us to ask, and the kind of story told here is one of the ways—though, again, by no means the only way—that they can be answered.
Since the conference in 1994 with which I began this story, the issue of 'security' has taken on a greatly renewed significance. During the Cold War, the Soviet-American rivalry and the ever-present possibility of nuclear war lent an urgency to questions of security that seemed to have been lost With the fall of the Berlin Wall. Such a decline in urgency was surely to be welcomed, and led, indeed, to the possibility of an idea like Critical Security Studies taking hold. Many of the concerns that animated the conference and the book had been articulated before the end of tire Cold War, but that historical context made it impossible to follow them through. Critical Security Studies was a label ripe for reception at the moment it was spoken. With the events of 9/11, security regained its urgency.
In the context of a war on terrorism, wars in Iraq and Syria against a self-styled 'Islamic State', annual
acknowledge and accept its own complicity in^H violent colonialism it must now seek to undo, whi<3 is an unsettling idea indeed! While critical securjj studies, and even Critical Security Studies, may have I a future as we turn to un-settle our academic and^| litical lives, wc must always be open to the possibili J that wc must return the gift of security studies, alonj with that of security. The church can be as broad ai I it likes, bur it may still need to be dismantled, for aj with any other institutionalized religion, it may qJ too deeply entwined with ongoing oppression to be allowed to go on.
updates of 'anti-terror' legislation, the reorganizs1 tion of government to provide 'homeland security',1 and the growing recognition that supposedly civilized I states are resorting to torture in the name of security I security studies has never had it better (this thought! alone should give us pause, as it bolsters Neocleous** case about the close connection of security studies to i such extravagant violence). What is the state of the I label Critical Security Studies in this present context?! It seems the broad church is edging toward institu-l tionafization, and the dangers that entails. There are] now courses taught in universities on Critical Seo>! rity Studies, and departments advertise for special-1 ists under this label. As you know from reading this I chapter, textbooks include Critical Security Studies ill I their lists of approaches. Journals have refocused them scope, and even been created, in order to house criticall security work together. Perhaps because of this, the I followers of the sign of the gourd are still squabbling! with those following the .sign of the shoe and par-l ticularly with those holding their shoes and bopping 1 around on one foot. The stakes in this contest overthel label are now higher: jobs are at stake, as are author! ships of chapters.
Nevertheless, in an age in which security is so impo*"*B ant, and some of the practices of security so troubling to those committed to liberty and justice—to the ethofl of democracy—secunly study demands an ethos oil critique. The question that remains, and the one wit™ which I will end, is whether such an ethos demand*! Critical Security Studies or, rather, the refusal of security! altogether.
Critical Securily Studies: A Schismatic H;sto
9
QUESTIONS
1. If you were It: become a ;ri„u ,il security scholar which sign would you ~bl ow and why?
2. Why did Krause and Williams aim tc create a 'broad church' of Critical Security Studies? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such a conception? Who does it favour, and who coes it marginalize?
3. What arc the various understandings of the term 'critical' that are found in the literature on Critical Securily Studies? Which one do you nnd the most convi.-iC.inf-?
4. Should the Critical Security Studies label apply to the Copenhagen School?
5. The Welsh 5chool suggests that Critical Secun^ Studies should oc gu.dcd by Critical Theory, which is the theory developed by the Frankfurt School. This suggestion makes intuitive sense; do you agree with it?
6. What is the cifferencc between 'constructivism" and 'poststructuralism' in security studies? Does it make a difference?
7. Do an ethos of critique and an ethos of democracy provide sufficient gi dance for a progressive politics of security in the contemporary world'
8. Have we -eached the ere of Critical Security Studies?
9. How does the rendition of a 'partial history of a label' differ f-om Other ways of presenting approaches to security studies? What difference docs it make?
further reading
Constructing security
Krause, Keith (1998). 'Critical Theory and Security Studies: I he Research Programme of "Critical Security Studies"", Cooperation and Conflict. 33/3: 298-333. In this artice, Krause provides a useful overview of the oroad church o' Critical Secur Ty Studies and the literature to which the label may be applied.
• Krause, Keith and Williams, Mícnael C. (1997), Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. I his edited volume launcned the label 'critical security studies' and continues to be a Standard reference.
There are a number of good rexrs rhat apply explicitly amstructiviSt theory lo important contemporary questions of security: Alexandra Gheciu (2005b). \ATO in the New Europe: The Politics of Socialization after the Cold War, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press (a constructivist account of NATO enlargement); Alexandra Gheriu (2008), Securing Civilization: The EU, NATO, and the OSCE in the Post-9/11 World, Oxford: Oxford University Press (the re-configuration of European security to confront the 'thread of terrorism); Jennifer Milliken (2001) The Social Construction of the Korean War: Conflict and Us Possibilities, Manchester: Manchester University Press (an account of the decision making around the Korean conflict); Juna Weldes (1999b), Constructing National Interests: The United States and iht Cuban Missile Crisis (an account of the decision-making around the Cuban Missile Crisis).
The Copenhagen School
ňalzacq, I hierry (ed.) (701 '), Securitimiian Theory. How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve, London: Routledge. Balzacq is one of tne leading scholars of securitization scholarship that has grown from the early Copenhagen School work, and this book provides a useful overview of both current theoretical thinking arc its use as an analytic approach to contemporary secur ty problems.
Buzan, B„ Waiver, O, and de Wilde. J. (1998), Security; A New Framework for Analysis, Boulder, CO: Lyme Rienner.This work is the most elaborate statement of the Copenhagen School approach, and clearly distinguishes it from CSS.
I 10   David Mutimer
Thc Welsh School
Booth, Ken (2005a), Critical Security Studies and World Politics, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner; and Booth, Ken Qj Theory of World Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. These are the most explicit statements (J Welsh Schoo of Critical Security Studies, with Booth's own contributions arguing Tor a specific critical theory, rather than the broad church.
Wyn Jones, Richard (1999), Security, Strategy ana Giik.ai Theory, Boulder, CO: Lyni most philosophically elaborated statement of the Welsh School approach.
Rienner Wyn Jones's book
Für one of die few avowedly Welsh School treatments of an issue in contemporary security, see Columbia Peoples (201 Justifying Ballistic Missile Defence: Technology, Security and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poststructuralism and security
■
Ira* on I tftJ offl
■ Daiby, Simon (1990), Creating the Second Cold War. New Yor<: Guilford Press; and Kleir, Brad ey (1994), Sfjoj, Studies and World Order, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. These two books are among the first to drav poststructural philosophy to think about the areas of conventional security studies, and in particular the politics I
the study of security itself.
Campbell, David (1998a), Venting Security; United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of identity, rev. edn, Minr-eapj^H University of Minnesota Press. Campbell's fi-st book is a touchstone for virtually all poststructural security sttKJ^H iterature. The epilogue to the second edition provides a very useful account of the distinction between ooststructc^^B
IRand constructivism.
Campbell, David (1998b), National Deconstruct/on; Violence. Identity, and justice in Bosnia, Minneapolis: UniversJ^^M Minnesota Press. In National Deconstruct/on Campbell responds to the standard criticism of poststructuralism that^H cannot stand up to Fascism.
There   i:_ a number of books that use poststcucttiral theory Uj consider questions of contemporary security; Simon I Dalby (2002;, Environmental Security, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (looks ar the relationship between th^H environ me vit and sreur-iy ;i:id shows how iKinking abor.t gco politics has shiipcd this d.isi tis.-'.uue: tlizabeth Dauphinie 12008!, 'i'lieEthhs of licscajiiiuiv War: Looking lor Bosnia, Manchester: University of Manchester Press (considers ihc place of rhe academic and West more generally in violent conflict); Benjamin Muller (2010) Security, Risk and tii.c Biovmrie State: Governing Borders dml ?>oiV.?..i. 1 .nndon: Rout edge (examines rhe instennauon o_ security in ' virtual herders' through the institution of biometric technologies); Kyle Grayson (2017) The Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing: On Drones, Cdinij^H V'S'-'r^aicy, and Violence, London: Routledge (explores rhe ways in which targeted killing   what used to be known is 'assassination'-—became possible in contemporary liberal democratic: regimes.)
Visit the online resources that accompany this book for lots of interesting additional material: www.oup.com/uk/collins5e/
8
Poststructural Insights: Making Subjects and Objects of Security
J. Marshall Beier Chapter Contents
• Introduction   I 12
• Secret agents and power bases    I 14
• The subject of 'smart' bombs   I 16
• Complicated subjects: children   I IS
• Indigenous peoples and a cautionary tale 121
• Conclusion 123
Reader's Guide
Taking its main cues from poststructuralists' approaches to Critical Security Studies, this chapter asks some unconventional questions about somewhat unconventional subjects for a field that has traditionally been more inclined to centre states in its investigations. In so doing, it brings to light Bte concealed political commitments that are a part of any attempt to theorize security and which fix arbitrary limits on whom and what gets foregrounded in the security stories we tell. Placing particular emphasis on recovering agency and political subjecthood, we are able to see the crucial part played by other actors in both the everyday practices of security and how we have come to define ft. We are also led to better appreciate both the problems and promise of our own roles in producing security—and insecurity—in the ways we approach it as students and scholars.
ter Contents
duction 380 Health and human security 380 Health and national security 383 Health and bio security 388 inclusion 391
er's Guide
can diseases also pose threats to security? This chapter explores three links between health security that are now widely acknowledged by scholars and policy-makers. First, some diseases been identified as threats to human security. The human security framework draws particular Ion to diseases—such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis—that are endemic in many low-me countries. Such diseases continue to cause millions of deaths annually and pose substan challenges to the survival and well-being of individuals and communities. Second, some recently ^rging infectious diseases, such as SARS, pandemic flu, and Ebola, have also been identified as "ts to national security because their rapid spread could cause high death tolls and trigger sig cant economic disruption. Given the contemporary speed and rate of international travel, even with more elaborate public health infrastructures feel vulnerable to new infectious diseases may initialiy emerge outside their borders. Finally, some diseases have also been identified as nar-T threats to bio-security within the context of international efforts to combat terrorism. Here erns have focused on the spectre of a terrorist attack using a disease causing biological agent as anthrax, smallpox, or plague. The chapter concludes by contrasting two different ways of erstanding this health-security nexus: as an instance of securitization or medicalization.
380   Stefan Elbe
Health and Security   38 I
Introduction
Health issues are back on the international agenda-—and not just as a matter of low politics. They are 'back' in the sense that they had already become die subject of international diplomacy as early as 1851, when delegates of the first International Sanitary Conference gathered in Paris to consider joint responses to the cholera epidemics that had overrun the European continent in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet during the twentieth century the pertinence of controlling potentially pandemic microbes was gradually overshadowed by the more pressing concerns of avoiding the spectre of renewed wars, and die ever-present potential for a nuclear confrontation. The twentieth century's deep addiction to war, coupled with its important advances in medicine, reinforced the view in the West that the world was moving in a direction in which infectious diseases would eventually be controlled—exemplified so quhitessentially by the confident declaration made in 1948 by US Secretary of State George Marshall that the conquest of all infectious diseases was imminent. This confidence has been profoundly shaken.
At the outset of the twenty-first century, there is once again considerable international anxiety about a host of potentially lethal 'rogue' viruses circulating the planet—including relatively new ones such as pandemic flu (H5K1 and HlNl), the corona viruses responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), and Ebola. Other infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria remain endemic in many developing countries and have made devastating comebacks—often in drug-resistant forms. At the same time, many states remain apprehensive about the consequences of a potential terrorist attack using biological weapons. Collectively, these concerns have displaced the optimism of the twentieth century, and given way to a renewed sense of microbial unease. Nothing reflects this more poignantly than the fact that the responses to these health issues are increasingly articulated in the language of security—culminating in the rise of the notion of health security
Health and human security
Thclinksbetween health and security were initially identified within the context of the push towards strengthening human security   a framework pioneered by the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in jJ 1994 tinman Dcvdovmcj.nt Report. The. human sen i framework seeks to redress the perceived iml^^H in security thiriking that has predominated during decades. By developing a 'people-centric' account of curity revolving around the needs and welfare of 0rdj nary individuals, rather than predominantly around the protection of sovereign states, human security activists wish to challenge the narrow twentieth-century equj. tion of security with the absence of armed conflict he tween states. Specifically, the Human Development Report
ble 25.1 Reg'Onal HIV statistics. 2015
People living with HIV (all ages)
New HIV infections (all ages)
outlined sewn areas or components of humai
security
where policy-makers should devote greater attention and political capital: economic security (poverty, home lessness); food security (famine, hunger); health security (disease, inadequate health care); environmental seen*! rity (ecological degradation, pollution, natural disasters); personal security (physical violence, crime, traffic accidents); community security (oppression, discrimination); and pohrical security (repression, torture, disappearance, human rights violations) (UNDP 1994:24-5). As part of this broader approach to security, the report also highlighted the considerable burden that infectious diseases continue to pose in the developing world-including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. It is estimated that these three diseases alone cause between! two and three million people to die every year.
Whilst the initial Human Development Report did not define the notion of 'health security' in greater detail, the subsequent 20D3 report of the Commission on Human Security—Human Security Now—filled this gap by devoting an entire chapter to 'health security*. 'Good health', the report (Commission on Human Security 2003: 96) argued, 'is both essential and instrumental to achieving human security'. It is essential in the sense that human security is ultimately about protecting lives, and this is not possible to achieve without also reducing the scale of a range of lethal diseases. The report further argued that health is also 'instrumental' for human security because it allows sick adults to resume work, helps secure the mater ial well-being of families, allows children to stay in school, and so on. Endemic diseases are thus sirt^H neously direct threats to human security because they can cause death, and also broader, indirect threats to human security because, where the burden of disease is significant, this has knock-on ramifications fbrSM eral other dimensions of human security-
Perhaps no disease illustrates those links between health and human security more poignantly than
Eastern and southern Africa Micfdle East and North Africa I Asia and Pacific.
' Latin Ame-ica and the Caribbean
Eastern Europe and central Asia
1 Western and central Europe and l^jorth America
Eastern Europe and Central Asia Western and central Africa Global
19.0 million 230,000 5.1 million 20 milJIicn
1.5 million
2.4 million
1.5 million
6.5 million. 36.7 million
Q6D,00 21,000 300,000 100,000 190,000 91.000
190,000
410,000 z.l million
Source: UNAIDS (2016: 2)
[global AIDS pandemic. As rates of HIV/AIDS increased dramatically during the 1990s, the disease began to pose immense human security challenges for many developing countries- so much so that the former director of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/ AIDS (UNAIDS) argued: As a global issue ... we must pay attention to AIDS as a threat to human security and ■redouble our efforts against the epidemic and its impact' KPiot 2001). UNAIDS is the specialized United Nations agency tasked with addressing the international spread Ipf HIV/AIDS. Established in 1995, UNAIDS is located J at the centre of a complex network of various United _ Nations programmes and affiliated organizations, in-duding the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Its political objectives are to mobilize leadership for effective action against the spread of HIV / AIDS, to monitor and evaluate its spread, and to support an effective response. As such, UNAIDS also collates international statistics about the extent of the AIDS pandemic. Hp actually very difficult to determine exactly how I many people are living with HIV/AIDS in the world |»dhow many arc dying from AIDS-relatcd illnesses. Generating such data would not only be impossible in (the light of immense financial and logistical constraints, h"w°uld also necessitate testing virtually every mem-ol the human population for HIV—raising difficult i tthical questions around compulsory testing.
Nevertheless it is estimated by UNAIDS (2016) that around 1.1 million1 people die annually of AIDS-related illnesses, while a further 2.1 million people2 continue to become newly infected with the virus every year (see Table 25.1). Contrary to widespread belief, HIV/AIDS is not at all confined to sub-Sahar an Africa. Every region of the world currently has a significant number of people living with HIV/AIDS. The large burden posed by HIV/AIDS on individuals and societies was therefore central to the rise of the human security agenda, and represented precisely the kind of issue that this human security agenda wished to draw more attention to. Access to life-prolonging medicines has since become more widespread in many low-income countries. However, the early experiences of millions of people living with HIV/AIDS prior to the international roll-out of such medicines remain one of the starkest illustrations yet of how, beyond their direct mortality, infectious diseases can also have further ramifications for a range of other dimensions of human security
1 i.i million in 2015, stated in UNAIDs 2016 Global AIDS Update—-http:/ /www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/ media_asset/global-Af US-update-2016_en.pdf
2 2.1 million in 2015, stated in UNAIDs 2016 Global AIDS Update—http://www.unaids.org/sites/default/files/ media_asset/global-AIDS-update-2016_cn.pdf
382   Stefan Elbe
Health security
Amidst rapidly rising rates of HIV/AIDS at the outset of the twenty-first century, analysts observed that the disease was also beginning to affect health security more generally by placing additional stresses on health-care facilities, which are frequently already stretched in the first place. An early study of the impact of HIV/AIDS on the health sector in South Africa found that the AIDS epidemic was having several negative impacts, such as causing the loss of health care workers and generating increased levels of absenteeism, with just under 16 per cent of the health care workforce in the Free State, Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, and North West provinces being HIV-positive. It also found that the rise in the number of HIV/AIDS patients seeking clinical care, had led to an increased workload for health care staff, as well as lowering staff morale. With some 46.2 per cent of patients in public hospitals being HIV-positive at the time, the study concluded that at times non-AIDS patients had even been 'crowded out' of the system in order to accommodate patients living with HIV/AIDS (Shisana et al. 2003). A study from Kenya conducted around the same time, and based on a sample of hospitals, detected similar trends—with an increase in AlDS-rclated admissions and 50 per cent of patients on medical wards living with HIV/AIDS. Focus-group discussions conducted in the context of that study also revealed that one of the reasons why the Kenyan health care systems had such high levels of attrition, with scores of personnel leaving the sector, was a fear of becoming infected with HIV (in addition to high workloads, poor remuneration, and poor working conditions) (Cheluget et al. 2003). Another study of the impact in Swaziland in turn subsequently estimated that up to 80 per cent of bed occupancy in the medical and pacdiatric wards was related to HIV/AIDS (Kober and van Damme 2006). Those studies showed that, especially without access to life-prolonging medicines, the human security ramifications of infectious diseases like HIV/ AIDS are not confined to the direct mortality caused by the illness, but also result from the ripple effects of the disease through much wider social structures—including health care systems. That phenomenon was again seen again during the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak, as stretched health care systems struggled to cope with the rise in demand for health care, meaning that odier health services—such as those treating malaria or offering maternal services—suffered as a result.
Economic security
Defined as 'an assured basic income—usually]
productive and remunerative work, or in the 1
sort from some publicly financed safety net' i'UN|rj"
1994: 25)—economic security is another import
component of human security affected by widespn^j
infectious diseases such as HIV/'AIDS Over i-k
lj Lne past
decade, household studies have suggested that imp to be twofold. Households affected by HIV ^VIDS were likely to experience a reduced earning capacity as persons are unable to work, or are tied down to car' ing for the affected family member. For example an early comparative study of rural and urban hou seholdi in South Africa conducted by Booysen and Bachman (2002) showed that those households affected by HIV/ AIDS had on average only 50-60 per cent of per-capita income of non-affected households. HIV/Ainj^^W tionally generated new costs for treatment and. in the case of death, additional funeral expenditures, legal costs, medical bills, and so forth (Drimie 2003). Other studies carried out by the World Bank amidst escalating rates of HIV infection at the time similarly suggested increased expenditure by these households on medical care and funerals, as well as a reduction in spending on non-food items (see Barnett and Whiteside 2006: 203-5). These early and difficult experiences of HtV/ AIDS over the past decade thus show how infectious diseases can have an additional impact on human security in that it can undermine the ability of individuals and households to ensure their economic security— especially when medicines are not widely available.
Food security
The experience with IIIV / AIDS even showed that the spread of new infectious diseases could affect food security; defined as requiring 'that all people at all times have both physical and economic access to basic food. "flal requires not just enough food to go round. It requires that people have ready access to food' (UNDP 19W: 27). The crucial point here is that the physical availability of food is only part of the equation when it comes to food insecurity. Even when such food is physically available, people may still hunger and starve if they do not have access or entitlement to this food. Dunng many famines, the problem it, the lack of purchasing power and the poor distribution of food, rather than the absence of food itself. This distinction is cruciaLj^B HIV/AIDS can generate food insecurities by sfefl
1
I access of certain individuals and groups to food. At EL height of the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, negative impact of HTV/AIDS on food security Looted the famine researcher Alex de Waal to ad-r"ce a new-variant famine' thesis, which argues that EpS attacks exactly those capacities that enable peo-. t0 re.sist famine. AIDS kills young adults, especially F jnen—the people whose labor is most needed' (de flfeal 2002). A study carried out by the Food and Agri-Inlture Organisation (FAO) of 1,889 rural households Ljiorthcrn Namibia, southern Zambia, and around 1^ Victoria in Uganda later found that households affected by HIV/AIDS, particularly if they are headed L women, were finding it increasingly difficult to en-lure their food security (FAO 2003). Another study of fifteen villages in three districts of Malawi carried out fa Shah et al. (2002) found that many households af-iUed by HIV/AIDS experienced loss of labour (70 percent), reported delays of agricultural work (45 per lent), leaving fields unattended (23 per cent), changing pop composition (26 per cent), hut much of the impact depends on when the disease arrived (that is, pre- or post-harvest), the existence of other stress factors, and tfae relative economic status of households. Although HIV/AIDS is, therefore, unlikely to create a 'supply-ihock' in terms of food production in and of itself, an infectious disease like HIV/ AIDS can nevertheless have pegative implications for households by interacting in complex ways with their ability to secure access to food Be Waal 2006: 89-92; Gillespie 2006).
In all these ways the challenging experiences with the AIDS pandemic over the past decade serve as a prk reminder of how a widespread, lethal infectious isease can not only represent a direct threat to human Kcurity, but can also shape additional dimensions of numan security—including health security, economic Kcuriiy, and food security. Taken in conjunction with Ire large number of lives the disease claims annually, many in fact still consider HIV / AIDS to represent one m the world's most pressing contemporary human security threats even today. It is precisely one of those pucial contemporary issues that the human security Patnework wishes to highlight and where its advocates POuldlike to see increased international coordination • terms of scaling up the prevention, treatment, and PR for people living with HIV/AIDS, as well as for j*°ple affected by other endemic diseases such as ma-and tuberculosis. This emphasis on health issues *tthin the framework of human security renders the
Health and Security 383
politics where health issues are increasingly being discussed, deliberated, and responded to in the language of security—albeit in a context in which the meaning of security is itself significantly expanded and redefined. Considering health issues as threats to human security is, in the end, just as much a matter of definitional fiat, and of redefining security, as it is of making substantially novel empirical claims about the impact of these diseases in low-income countries.
KEY POINTS
• A number of health issues have been given renewed prominence within the framework of human security.
• The AIDS pandemic is widely perceived as one of the most serious and on-going human security threats, with more than thirty million people currently estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS. Malaria and tuberculosis also remain endemic in several developing countries and continue to claim many lives every year.
■ In addition to posing a direct security threat to peoples' lives, diseases also represent indirect threats to their security.
latter
one of the principal sites in contemporary world
Health and national security
Further links have been identified between health and national security. Here, too, the AIDS pandemic has been instructive in showing how infectious diseases can simultaneously bear upon both human security and national security concerns. Within the state-centric perspective of national security HIV/AIDS has received further attention from policy-makers over the past decade, because it was feared that the disease could have a detrimental impact on the armed forces of the worst-affected countries. Evidence about the impact of HIV/AIDS in the armed forces is very patchy, subject to considerable controversy and continuously evolving. Yet there is some evidence that the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS initially posed considerable challenges to the operational efficiency of several armed forces in sub-Saharan Africa (see Case Study 25.1). The impact of new infectious disease outbreaks on the armed forces raises concerns not just for human security but also for national security.
Although HIV/AIDS was the first infectious disease to be identified as a threat to national security in the twenty-first century, it is not the only one.
384   Stefan Elbe
Health and Security 38b
CASE STUDY 25.1 The South African National Defence Force (SANDF)
The impact of new infectious disease outbreaks or. the armed forces also gives health an important national security dimension. Again, the intitial spread of HIV/AIDS— especially in sub-Saharan Africa—is illustrative of this link. Information about the impact of HIV/AIDS on Africa's armed forces is extremely difficult to obtain because of its sensitive nature. Even in those militaries that test soldiers for HIV/AIDS, officials have been extremely reluctant to make such information public, as it may well point to potential weaknesses in the arm.ed forces. Over the past years, some ■nformation has nevertheless begun to emerge about the ways in which HIV/AIDS was initially perceived as a serious threat to the operational efficiency of the South African National Defence Force (SANDF).
South Africa is already home to one of the largest number of persons living With HIV/AIDS in Africa. As HIV prevalence rates row dramatically in the country, the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) claimed at the time that HIV prevalence in the armed forces was around 23 per cent, which was slightly higher than the civilian population and amounted to roughly 16.000 soldiers. Many analysts suspected at the time that in reality this figure could be much higher, perhaps as high as 40 per cent, which would put the number closer to 28,000 (Hemecken 2001; Meyer 2004). Even the official figure was high enough, however, to prompt the USA and SANDF to set up a programme aimed at establishing the rate of HiV infection in the armed forces more conclusively and evaluating the effects of anti-retroviral treatments on SANDF Because of human rights considerations, SANDF could not force its soldiers to be tested, but SANDF did set up a programme where soldiers could come forward voluntarily to be tested. Initially 1,089 soldiers came forward to be tested, of whom 947 (89 per cent) tested positive. The average age of those who tested positive was 34 years, and 60 per cent of them were married. Although this figure was not representative of SAN DF as a whole (most of those who came forward to be tested probably suspected that they were HIV-positive
ah eady) 1 let' no doubt that the issue of HIV/AIDS ha^l been a very serious one for i nany armed forces in Afrir*H over the past two decades.
In the light of these figures, senior officials in SANDF '1 expressed serious concerns about the impact of HIV/Alf^M on the military's combat readiness because of the hiohul of absenteeism the illness induces. They estimated thar^H soldier in the ea-ly stages of illness would oe absent on M average 20 days a year, rising to 45 days fo- soldiers J displaying symptoms. Soldiers who had developed full-hk^B AIDS were estimated to be absent on average fbra 1 minimum of I 20 days per year. SANDF therefore believefl that it wouid lose between 336,000 and S6C.000 worldj^H days annually because of the illness. SANDF was further concerned with the fact that many of those most affec^H by HIV/A IDS r-. SANDF a-e in the dge group, of 23-32J which is the age group from which most of the operationally?? dcployaole soldiers, officers non-comm'ssior.ed officerS^B and highly skilled members of the armed forces aredraM^B The perceived danger here was that over the course O^H several years. HIV/AIDS could hollow- out th s middle rank, -J creating gaps and shortfalls within the armed forces. This ■ impact on SANDF was all the more significant because d^H Soui'hi Afi-cas eadenhip role on the African conlincntand I because the country wishes to play an expanding role ir^H African peacekeeping operations, wmch it can only dowitha" healthy military Ahnoug- many AIDS-reiated medicines are now more reacily available, the initial experiences of th^H SANDF with HIV/AIDS illustrate very well that newly I emerging infectious diseases can also have important « ramifications within the realist conception of securityq^M creating new challenges for the armed forces in particutajH Tothis day, the questior oi how io protect the armed forces from infectious disease outbt eaks thus remains an ongoj^H concei r for- military medicine, and many militaries also, J continue to carry out research and surveillance or infectious: disease outbreaks   giving infection- diseases in particu^B another signficant security dimension.
High-income countries have also expressed considerable unease about how new infectious diseases threaten their populations and economies within the context of increased globalization and rapid international travel. An influential report issued in 1992 by the Institute of Medicine in the USA entitled Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States warned that the emergence of the AIDS pandemic illustrated how 'some infectious diseases that now affect people in
other parts of the world represent potential threats to the USA because of global interdependence, modem transportation, trade, and changing social and cultural patterns' (Lcderberg et al. 1992; v). By the end oi the decade, these anxieties had reached a sufficient lew for parts of the US government to officially design** such infectious diseases as threats to national secunty The United States National Intelligence Council, *
example, produced an influential and wi
dclv cited
bóonal Intelligence Estimate entitled The Global In-woiis Disease Threat and its Implications for the United kates The findings of the report, declassified in Janu-W2000, confirmed many of these fears by pointing that, since 1973, at least thirty previously un-nown disease agents have been identified (including Ljie tor which there is no cure such as HIV, Ebola, natitis C, and the Nipah virus). It also found that this same period at least twenty older infectious s have re-cmerged, frequently in drug-resistant -most notably amongst them tuberculosis, iilaria, and cholera. The report concluded: 'New Lj re-emerging infectious diseases will pose a rising I alobal health threat and will complicate US and global I security over die next 20 years. These diseases will en-1 danger US citizens at home and abroad, direaten US armed forces deployed overseas, and exacerbate social and political instability in key countries and regions in which the United States has significant interests' (Na-■jonal Intelligence Council 2000). 1 By their very nature, infectious diseases lend them-I selves particularly well to such securitizations. They are usually caused by microbes that are imperceptible to the ľ human eye. Consisting, in the case of viruses, merely of apiece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of ptotein, they exist at the very margins of our conceptions of life. Human beings could be exposed L to them at any time without knowing it, and yet suffer a quick and violent death not long thereafter. They I are, in this respect, silent' and 'invisible' killers. Perhaps nothing is more frightful to many people than a lethal danger they have no way of detecting. Even the famous microbiologist Louis Pasteur, who explored the germ theory of disease, eventually developed an obsessive _ fear of microbes, refusing to shake hands with people, Carefully wiping his plates before eating, and on more tfian one occasion even examining food served at dinner Iparties with his portable microscope. As in other areas of life, uncertainty tends to breed anxiety. It is this innate and all too human rear of microbes that makes them particularly amenable to being portrayed not just asim-pottant health issues, but as national security threats as well. Over the past decade, three infectious diseases in particular have been portrayed as such national security ' "teats, each discussed in the following sub-sections,
BARS
Widely regarded as the first infectious disease epi-B^c of the twenty-first century, SARS is thought
to have emerged in the Guangdong Province of China in November 2002—a region known for its lively markets where humans and livestock mingle in close proximity. Symptoms of the new disease included a high fever, a dry cough, and shortness of breath or breathing difficulties. However, it was not until 11 Február}' 2003 that the Chinese Ministry of Health forwarded reports of 305 cases of acute respiratory syndrome to the World Health Organization, by which time at least five deaths had been reported in Guangdong Province. The new disease appeared to confirm all the earlier fears about how a newly emerging infectious disease could rapidly spread across the globe through modern ttansport infrastructure. Perhaps nothing exemplified this more clearly than the fate of Dr Liu Jianlun, a local Chinese doctor who initially treated patients infected with the new disease. He subsequently travelled from Guangdong Province to I long Kong in order to attend a wedding. He stayed on the ninth floor of the four-star Metropole hotel (in Room 911), where the disease quickly began to spread to other guests staying on that floor of the hotel. In epidemiological terms he is now referred to a 'super-spreader'; the World Health Organization ultimately attributes more than 4,000 worldwide cases of SARS to this doctor alone (National Intelligence Council 2003: 10). Those who became infected by him subsequently travelled as far as Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Ireland, Canada, and theUSA, where they, in turn, infected more than 350 people directly or indirectly. Another doctor who had treated the first cases of SARS in Singapore also reported symptoms before boarding a flight from New York back to Singapore on 14 March, and had to disembark prematurely in Frankfurt, Germany for immediate hospitalization and isolation.
Wide-ranging international cooperation amongst scientists and laboratories revealed diat SARS is caused by a new coronavirus, which is believed to have crossed over from the animal to the human population. This is because evidence of infection with the coronavirus could also be found in several animal groups, including Himalayan masked palm civets, Chinese ferret badgers, raccoon dogs, and domestic cats.
By the time the last human chain of transmission was broken in July 2003, there had been 8,098 reported SARS cases, causing 774 deaths in 26 different countries. SARS killed about 10 per cent of those infected, although the chances of survival in the event of an infection were heavily dependent upon the age of the victim. Less than 1 per cent of persons aged 24 years
386   Slcfan Elbe
or younger died from the disease, up to 6 per cent of those aged 25-44 years old died, and up to 15 per cent of persons aged 44-64 years old died. The greatest risk was for persons aged 65 or older, of which 55 per cent succumbed (National Intelligence Council 2003: 16). Geographically, SARS left its deepest mark in Asia, with China, Taiwan, and Singapore accounting for more than 90 per cent of cases, although notable outbreaks also occurred in Toronto. Moreover, the effects of the SARS outbreak were not confined to these deaths done.
The disease also caused widespread fear amongst populations around the world, especially as there was no cure readily available, and its transmission patterns remained unclear for a considerable period of time. People thus began to wear masks covering their noses and mouths, began to avoid p ublic places such as restaurants and cinemas, and ceased to travel. In conjunction with the decision of many investors to put investment plans in the region on hold, the SARS outbreak also had considerable economic consequences for the region. The travel and tourism sectors were particularly badly hit, with room bookings and airline seat bookings in several cases being down by more than 50 per cent on previous years. In countries such as China, Singapore, and Canada, public health agencies also implemented quarantine and isolation procedures, restricting the movements of those perceived to be at risk of being infected with the virus. Some countries even introduced thermal scanners at airports in order to detect people with symptoms of fever. Although it ultimately proved possible to contain SARS through quarantine andotherpublichealth measures, many policy-makers felt that the writing was now clearly on the wall and that things could have been much worse, especially if the coronavirus had achieved more efficient human-to-human transmission. For many, the SARS episode thus represented a warning of what could happen if a renewed flu pandemic ravaged the human population in the twenty-first century.
Pandemic influenza
There were three such human flu pandemics in the twentieth century alone—in 1918, 1957, and 1968. The first of these was particularly severe, breaking out within the harsh conditions of the First World War and leading to the deaths of tens of millions of people around the world. Policy-makers at the World Health Organization and in several national governments remain concerned today that the H5N1 strand
of avian flu has the. potential to evoly
c eventu
such a renewed pandemic, and are framing a as a threat to national security. Writing in the N Times in 2005, Senators Barack Obama and Lugar argued:
When we think of the major threats to our nart, curity, the first to come to mind are nuclear
j i i i Pro||fera. tion, rogue states and global terrorism. But another kj of threat lurks beyond our shores, one from nature humans—an avian flu pandemic. An outbreak couj^^l millions of deaths, destabilize Southeast Asia [its tikehi place of origin), and threaten the security of governnjM around the world. Obama and Lugar (2005)
The US National Security Strategy (2006) further pointed to the dangers posed by public health challenges like pandemics (HIV/AIDS, avian influenza) that recognize no borders', arguing that 'the risks to social order are so great that traditional public health approaches may be inadequate, necessitating new strategies and responses' (White House 2006:4^^H National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom (Cabinet Office 2008) similarly cited pandemics alongside terrorism and weapons of mass destruction as pan of a 'diverse but interconnected, set of threats and risks, which affect the United Kingdom directly and also have the potential to undermine wider internatij^B stability' (Cabinet Office 2008: 3). Pandemic threats also continue to reside at the top of the UK national risk register and are identified as a (top) Tier 1 threat in the latest National Security Strategy (Cabinet^^^B 2010: 27). Most recently pandemic threats were srill flagged up in France's 2013 White Paper setting out French national security policy tor the period 2^^H (Kittelsen 2013: 7; Livre Blanc 2013), and in the 2016 annual threat assessment of the US Director of National Intelligence (Coats 2017: 14)
The scenario that policy-makers are particularly concerned about is that of a zoonic (aniinal-to-human) transmission of an influenza virus that subsequently recombines or mutates to achieve efficient human-to-human transmission. If such a virus emerges, it will in all likelihood be spread through coughing and sneezing, and people will probably be infectious before they actually become aware of any symptoms. This latter facte crucial and would make a future flu pandemic much more difficult to contain, than SARS, where people mostly became infectious only after developing symptoms. The first step in this chain—the zoonic 'leap
the animal to human populations—was already merited in 1997 in Hong Kong. Officials sought to with this danger quickly and at great cost to the 1 population by ordering virtually the entire pouf population of Hong Kong (some 1.5 million birds) be destroyed. Although these measures appeared pessful, there was a further outbreak in February of Lg3 again in Hong Kong. By June 2008, there had been - confirmed cases of bird flu (H5N1) according to the pjnrld Health Organization, of which 243 died. The fatality rate for human cases of avian influenza is thus Cinch higher than in the case of SARS, with more than ' fň per cent of infected persons dying. Again the region I    st seriously affected is Asia, with China, Indonesia, llliailand, and Vietnam (but also Egypt) accounting for die majority of cases. On rare occasions, it has also been Kossible for H5N1 to become transmitted between peo-ple but usually only in situations of very close contact with this person during the acute phase of the illness, I and even when this spread has occurred, it has not gone Beyond one generation of close contacts. I   Despite the anxieties that these developments gen-' crate, it is worth bearing in mind that, given the wide geographic spread of the virus in birds, as well as the high number of cases of infection in poultry, the num-Ifcers of human infections are at the moment comparatively 'low', which indicates that the virus does not 'jump' the species barrier that easily If it does, the esti-I mates used by the World Health Organization and the ■Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the USA indicate that there could be between 2 million I and 7.4 million deaths worldwide, with many more becoming ill and requiring hospitalization. Vaccines need ■Ď be virus-specific, and therefore it is very difficult to create effective vaccines in advance of a pandemic; we Btímply do not yet know exactly what such a virus might IJook like. Policy-makers have therefore focused their ■Efforts on stockpiling antiviral medicines, and drawing up lists of who should receive priority access to such I medicines in the case of a renewed pandemic. Many Bpiestions still remain, however, about the efficacy of these drugs, and governments are therefore also trying í to increase the worldwide capacity for producing vac-ones so that, once the latter are developed, more doses Hhbe manufactured and distributed more quickly.
ISbola virus disease
louring 2014, renewed international alarm was trig-S^ed by a novel outbreak of Ebola virus disease in
Health and Security 387
West Africa. The World Health Organizations (WHO 2015) reports that during the Ebola outbreak of 2014-15 there were at total 28,616 confirmed cases of Ebola infections in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone—the three West African countries most heavily affected by the outbreak. WHO further reported 11,310 deaths from the disease, making it both the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in history.
The scale of the 2014-15 Ebola outbreak in West Africa caught many experts by surprise. Earlier outbreaks of Ebola had mostly been detected in other parts of Africa, had been very sporadic, had mostly occurred in rural settings, and had led to comparatively low numbers of deaths. '1 ticrcfore national and international institutions did not immediately recognize the significance of the new outbreak in West Africa. Non-governmental organizations like Medians Sans Frontieres (MSF) initially provided the majority of international assistance on the ground, but such organizations alone could not prevent the spread of Ebola into major urban areas, and thus a much larger proportion of the population also becoming effected.
As the scale of the outbreak continued to grow in the second half of 2014, and the magnitude of the challenge became more widely appreciated, several leaders of influential institutions began to describe the outbreak in terms of a crisis and security threat. The director of the US CDC referred to the situation in West Africa as 'spiraling out of control'. The Senior UN System Coordinator for Ebola Disease echoed that 'the outbreak is moving beyond our grasp'. Organizations on the ground concurred, with the International President of Doctors Without Borders arguing that 'the world is losing the battle to contain it | Ebola j. Leaders are failing to come to grips with the transnational threat* and the Director General of the World Health Organization simply but plainly describing Ebola as 'a global threat' (Morrison 2014). By October 2014, the international concern about Ebola had reached such heights that the influential Economist magazine could lead with the daunting headline of 'The War on Ebola'.
Recasting the Ebola crisis as a transnational and global security threat also enabled the issue to be discussed by the United Nations Security Council. When the Security Council convened on 9 September 2014 to discuss the crisis, Ebola became only the second disease in its history to be discussed by the Council— with HIV/AIDS having set the precedent in 2000. The Liberian Defence Minister briefed the Security
388   Stefan Elbe
Health and Security 389
Council that his country lacked 'infrastructure, logistical capacity, professional expertise and financial resources to effectively address this disease'. He also said that 'the deadly Ebola virus has caused a disruption in the normal functioning of our state1 (BBC News 2014). This echoed earlier warnings issued by leaders of other heavily affected countries like Sierra Leone, whose president had similarly claimed that 'The very essence of our nation is at stake' (Gostin et al. 2014). On 18 September 2014, the UNSC formally declared the Ebola outbreak in Africa as a 'threat to international peace and security' as part of Resolution 2177.
Framing the Ebola outbreak as a security threat also paved the way for a much stronger military involvement in the international response. Humanitarian organizations working on the ground, which were historically quite reluctant to call for outside military intervention, began to see no other way of getting on top of the outbreak than to involve the armed forces. MSF and Oxfam thus began to call for troops to be sent to West Africa. Peter Piot, who had earlier been involved in drawing links between HTV7 AIDS and security whilst Executive Director of UNAIDS, and who had helped identify the Ebola virus in 1976, similarly called for a 'quasi-military' intervention.
The rationale behind these calls was that humanitarian aid alone would not suffice to control the spread of the disease, and that humanitarian organizations were simply overwhelmed with what was unfolding on the ground. In the absence, of an available medical treatment for Ebola, the response had to rely predominantly on traditional public health measures like isolation, quarantine, and so forth. Here it was hoped that military capabilities in terms of logistics, bio-hazard response, and so forth could help to meet the challenge. Their call was eventually heeded when the governments of the USA, the UK, France, and China announced that they would soon be making military deployrnents to the region to assist with the response.
Although the lfnks between health and security helped to mobilize these resources, the drawbacks of this approach also became visible. Framing Ebola as a security threat risked facilitating the disproportionate use of force and privileging short-termism. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone all declared states of emergency, including curfews and executive orders that allowed for arrests without court orders. The UK, the USA, and other countries issued airport screening and quarantines, whilst vital international flights to the region were suspended and dramatic media coverage
fuelledpopular fears far beyond West Africa Mo
the militarized response has raised difficult ch i^"^^
for already stretched armed forces, whilst at the^65
time jarring with much longer and often painful
des of outside military intervention iri thp re„- 1 i     , .,       ,      .   ' _ ultrefi'on.yvu
the while, and as with previous infectious dis*^
ws^3se out-
breaks, the sustainability ol this emergency respo remains uncertain. Although linking Ebola to sec 1 concerns was powerful in mobilizing resources in th short term, experience has shown that ihcy arc diffi cult to maintain in the long run (Elbe 2006).
KEY POINTS
• Since the turn of the century t.any policy-makers ■ have also come to view newly emerging n'ectious ■ diseases as threats to their national security.
• The SARS outbreak of 2002- 3 confirmed many of ■ these fears, showing how d new infectious disease can] rapidly spread across the globe, causing widespread ' fear amongst populat ons and generating serious t economic consequences.
■  Although the SARS outbreak was contained. stronrfB
concerns remain about the spectre of a more lethal 1 and infectious flu pandemic emerging in the future. A
• The slow international response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa shows that significant gaps in global health security remain.
Health and bio-security
Some diseases have also acquired a greater security salience because terrorists or other political groups might attempt a mass casualty attack by deliberately releasing a disease-inducing biological agent. Such agents could enter the bodies of civilians through inhalation if the agent is successfully transformed into an aerosol lorm. Alternatively, they could enter the human body by means of ingestion if, for example, food or water supplies are contaminated with such an agent. Two events have raised the concern of governments about such a scenario. The attacks of 9/11 showed that terrorists—if capable- might not shy away from using such weapons. Indeed, from the perspective of a terronst group, many characteristics of a biological agent may be deemed advantageous. First, several of these agents are naturally occurring and can thus be more readily
I njred. Second, they would require only small quan-I ■ ;es to have substantial effects. Third, these agents are I ot perceptible to the human eye; once released, they I ujd initially evade the human senses of smell, taste, I d so on, and would therefore allow a potential ter-I ris^tuTie ro escaPe undetected. Finally, the very same I ualitv that has long made biological weapons of dubi-I ons military use—namely, their inability' to differenti-I |e between civilians and combatants—are unlikely to Kjeter would-be terrorists. However, these advantages I also need to be balanced with some disadvantages as-I LjQated with the use of biological agents, including Bthe ri5^ t^at t^ie terrorist might become infected as I well, the technical difficulty involved in successfully
stabilizing and weaponizing these agents, and the fact I that attacks with biological agents are heavily suscepti-I'ble to weather conditions such as wind, levels of cloud I cover, and so on (Ryan and Glarum 2008: 35). Expert
opinion thus remains divided as to how probable such Ian attack actually is.
I  Another event that substantially increased anxieties about the possibility of such a scenario materializing I was the discovery that anthrax letters were being sent [ in the USA in 2001—a time when the country was still reeling from the attacks of 9/11. There were probably two separate batches of anthrax letters sent from mail boxes in Princeton, New jersey. The first batch, thought to consist of approximately five letters, was f sent around 18 September 2001 to media offices, including American Media Incorporated, broadcasters and editors in New York City, and to a tabloid publisher in Boca Raton, Florida. These letters were initially dismissed as hate mail and/or left unopened. A second batch of letters was then mailed on 8 October I 2001, two of which went to Democratic senators in Washington, DC. The first of these was opened on ■the morning of 15 October in the Hart office building of the Senate majority leader Tom Daschle. It would take a week before it was established that these second round of infections had come from letters, I hy which time many more had become, exposed. It was later also discovered that the anthrax used was lot the Ames strain, which had been used for several years in the US biological weapons programme (Guil-kmin 2005: 173-6). Although the attacks of 9 /11 and I the letters laced with anthrax were a crucial catalyst |W terms of placing the comhat of terrorism at the heart of the international security agenda, anxieties labour such a biological attack actually pre-date 2001. 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan had already
released Sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway (see Case Study 25.2).
All these events contributed to a climate in which it was felt that more concerted efforts needed to be undertaken to protect populations in the event of such an attack. In the USA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were charged with drawing up a list of the biological agents that might be used in such an attack. Its list consists of Category A agents, which are highly infectious, have high mortality rates, can be easily disseminated, and are difficult to treat medically They would thus have a highly disruptive effect if used in a biological attack. Examples of such agents are anthrax, botulism, plague, smallpox, tularemia, and viral hemorrhagic fevers (for example, Ebola, Marburg, Lassa, Machupo). Category B agents, in turn, comprise those agents that cause lower mortality rates, have moderate morbidity rates, and can be treated more readily. They include brucellosis, epsilon toxin of Clostridium perfringens, food-safety threats (for example, salmonella species, Escherichia coli Ol57:H7, Shigella), glanders, melioidosis, psittacosis, Q fever, Ricin toxin, Staphylococcal enterotoxin B, typhus fever, and viral encephalitis (for example, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, eastern equine encephalitis, western equine encephalitis), and water-safety threats (for example, Vibrio cholerae, Cryptosporidium parvum). Finally, Category C agents refer to emerging pathogens with potential for future weaponization, such as Nipah virus and hantavirus.
In the USA, two new initiatives were also launched to respond to potential attacks with these agents: projects BioWatcb and BioShield. BioWatch consists of a network of sensors (or stations) in thirty-one cities that analyse particles in the air through a filter system. These filters are collected daily and analysed at the CDC for traces of six agents: anthrax, brucellosis, glanders, meliodosis, plague, smallpox, and tularemia. This process has a turnaround time of at least thirty-six hours (Ryan and Glarum 2008: 262). Project Bio-Shield, in turn, was designed to increase the 'medical defences' of the USA against a range of possible pathogens. At a cost of around US$5.6 billion over a ten-year period, Project BioShield included the purchasing and storing of significant stockpiles of medicines as well as vaccines. It also seeks to fund research into developing new medicines and vaccines to protect populations against such agents. Both programmes have ultimately proved controversial and have encountered significant difficulties in meeting their objectives.
390   Stefan Elbe
g| CASE STUDY 25.2 Aum Shinrikyo attacks in Tokyo
In 1995. the Aum Shinrikyo cut in Japan received widespread media attention when it released Sarin nerve gas into the Tokyo subway system The attack was carried out with a rhem'ral rather than a moiogiral substance. It was also not a very sophisticated operation, effectively relying on the use of an umbrella to poke holes into plastic bags. Nevertheless, the release killed twelve people, and hospitalized around 1,000. with thousands more needing to seek medical care. The 1995 operation was also not the first time the cult had struck. A similar attack had occurred in the town cf Matsumoto eight months earlier, killing seven people (Guillemm 2005: 156).
The Aum Shinrikyo cult was first established in 1984 by Shoko Asahara as a countermcvemcnt to the perceived decadence of modern societies. The cult ultimately hoped to create a new type of society and eventually grew in size to between 10,000 and 60.000 members (Rosenau 2001 291). The cult was operating internationally, with various contacts in post-Soviet Russia Australia, Germany, laiwan, and the former Yugoslavia. It even had an office in New York City. It was also well financed, with funding m the range of an estimated US$20 million (Guiliemin 2005: 159). The cult had intended to use biological weapons such as anthrax, Q fever. Ebola, and botulmum toxin on ten separate occasions (Ryan and Glarum 2008: 16). After being arrested, the head of their germ development. Senchi tndo, later revealed that from 1990 to 1993. the cult had released aerosolized anthrax and botulmum toxin on several occasions at japan's legislature (the Diet), the Imperial Palace, as well as several other places in Tokyo and even at the US military base of Yokusaka (Zubay et al. 2005: 134-5). Fortunately for those involved nobody became infected, most probably because the strain used was similar to that
used in animal vaccination, which is of little danger to rt.mans and has low vrulcncc (Zubay et al. 2005: 135) The precedents set by Aum Shinrikyo prompted a growifl cl nateoffeai in wn ch r was felt that more concerte^H effoi ts needed tc be undertaken to protect DopJationsgB the event o:'such an attack Long before the tumultuous ■ evei its of the autumn of 2001 those in< idents u~owedtl^| bioterronst attack is mo^e than just a hypothetical possib it/--ever if the attempt to place a more precise I probability on such an attack occurring is fraught with 1 difficulties.
Others, however, have also taken heai l from tie far. that thai Aum Shmnkyo group ultimately failed tc procure bologiqfl weapons- -despite rts clear intentions of < loing so. In many m ways, the group fulfilled most of the idea conditions that^B ought to have led to success in terms of oroducing such ■ weapons, including net.-.'Orl- 1 >f fi o it vjinpanies possessing! ke> staff nd ng ;l fficicnt time, and so forth ArthoughitB difficult to come to firm conclusions given the classified M nature of much of the information surrounding the cultilfl activities, the group encountered at least three significa^^l difficulties: (I) acquiring sufficiently lethal strands of key M biological agents such as anthrax bacilli: (2) challenges in tefl of fmdng office"! -.■av, :r'<Hiv'jn in:.l (.■i'Jpci"irg:heageni an< (3) interna organizational difficulties (Rosenau 200n_H 293). Even a well-funded, non state group like Aum ShinriJ thus encountered considersbC ..l-: v.-. cs ■■■■ developing viabtj biological weapons showing thai—in prartire—orocuril|^H and developing biological weapons remain a complicated^B process, which requires selection of the desired biological fl agent, obtaining this agent, 'hen working upon thisagentl^H such a manner that it can become weapomzed. before abdH creating a method for disseminating it.
KEY POINTS
■ Since the late 1990s, many policy-makers have focused on disease-causing biological agents within the context of their efforts to combat domestic and international terrorism.
•  The activities of Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, as well as the person(s) responsible for sending letters lacec with anthrax in the USA, highlighted a perceived lack cf
jreparedne3b amrrg?: many ro. rtnes tc: deal witrlttjB
effects of a terrorist attack using such an agent. Some governments have launched si.bstartial programmes to mease the speed witn which such an . outbreak could be cctcctcd jrd ways to respond to J
such an attack.
|onclusion
ftrtys chapter outlined the ways in which health issues
lijjve acquired a greater security salience in the context three competing security frameworks: human secur-t national security, and bio-security. How, then, is this I rgjng of health and security to be understood? Many Lpah'srs have followed the broad tenets of securitization theory (sce Buzan et al. 1998) and have identified this I-merging health-security nexus as the 'securitization' l«f health. In this view, health issues have now become the latest in a long line of wider social issues—such as ■drugs, migration, the environment, and so on—to be-Ifcome securilized—that is, framed as existential threats requiring the adoption of emergency measures. Tbis I framing generates debates about whether such a secur-[ity framing is appropriate to a field like global health llbat also reflects many humanitarian considerations, I whether the security framing might begin to distort I health priorities on the ground, but also whether this Icould be a useful way of garnering more attention and pesources for global health issues in future. That, however, is not the only way in which the emerging health-pecurity nexus can be conceptualized. !t can also be understood from the opposite perspective.
Healtn and Security   39 I
For years scholars outside the discipline of Security Studies, most notably in sociology, have also been tracing the progressive 'medicalization of societies, whereby more and more social problems are considered and responded to as health problems, and where the medical professions (along with pharmaceutical companies) have seen substantial material benefits as well as enjoying an enhanced social position (Conrad 2007). Viewed from this perspective, the recent merging of health and security could be understood not just as the securitization of health, but also as a wider manifestation of the medicalization of security. Put differently, these three debates on health and security arc also sites in contemporary world politics where security itself becomes partially redefined in medical terms, requiring the greater involvement of the medical professions. This generates further debate about the political and social effects of such an extension of medical knowledge, strategies, and approaches into the field of security. The deeper question that the emerging health-security interface gives rise to, therefore, is whether it is best understood as the securitization of health, or as the medicalization of securitv.
e
QUESTIONS
1. What is the relationship between health and human security?
2. What are the implications of HIV/AIDS for human security?
3. To what extent are infectious diseases also a threat to national security?
4. What can be core to reduce the spread of infectious diseases :n the context of rapid international travel?
5. What, if anything, s gainer, by referring to diseases as security issues, rather than as health or medical issues?
6. WhaL lessons can be learned from the securitization of health theory"
7. What lessons can be learned from the SARS outbreak of 2002-3?
8. A^e the threats of bioterrorism and an influenza pandemic exaggerated?
9. Do non-infec jous diseases have security implications as well?
10. Is the health -security nexus a marifestaticn cf the securitization of health, or of the medicalization c' security'
FURTHER READING
Chen, Lincoln, Leaning, Jennifer, and Narasimhan, Vasant (eds) (2003), Qob'J Health Challenges pr Human Security, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This volume contains a range oJ" chapters covering the concept of human security and how it relates to several contemporary global health issues.
392   Stefan Elbe
Devies, Sara, Kamradt-Scott, Adam and Rushton, Simon (2015). Disease Diplomacy: international Norms Health Security. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. A book looking at the role of norms in re|# global health security with a □articular focus on the Internal onal Health Regulations.
de Waal. Alex (2006), ACS and Rawer: Why There is No Publico! Gists—Yet, London: Zed Books. This book Lse["ul overview of what is known about the links between AIDS and security, and also questions many wicjfl assumptions about the security implications of HIV/AIDS.
Elbe. Stefan (2010). Security end Ootia! Health. Towards the Medicailzation of insecurity Cambridge: Polity Pr^mt book provides a comprehensive overview of the links between nealth and security an:l advances a new
conceptualizing the health security interface as the 'medicaiization' of security.
F diet. David (2004), SARS: Governance and the QoixAzation of Disease, Mew York: Palgrave. Tins book analyj implications of the SARS cn^is for the global governance o" heakh and contemporary world politics. Many ofl
insights are also relevan; to tne governance cf infectious diseases more generally!
111 .1 )avid and Gostin, Lawrence (2008), Blosccurity in the Global Age: biological Wri-i/mins, Public Health and of law, Stanford. CA: Stanford University Press. A book analysing tne security threat posed jointly by the spread J
infectious diseases ana b ological weapons.
* Guillemm, icanne (2005), &alogical Weapons: From the Indention of Szcte-SDo-.sored iro^-oms to CtrtemponJ B&terrorsrrti New York; Columbia University Press. This book offers a comprehensive account of the histcviql evolution of biological weapons, inducing the challenges involved n responding to the threat of bioterrorism. |
Kamradt-Scott. Adam (2015), Manttgitig Global Health Security. The Wend Heakh Orgar.iz::cn and D'secse OuttmM Control. London: Palgrave, A book looking specifically a1 the roie of the World Health Organ zaticn ir global hearts
security.
• Price-Smith, Andrew (20CI), Tne Health of Nations: Infectious Ciseuse l/'v.-u, ■,/7--=\-,r.,:i C'-.-.i.-j^:, or,? '.V>i Ltfects <M National Security and Development, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, One of the first books systematically to set out th»
relationships between health issues and national security,
Rushton. Simon and Ycx.de, Jeremy (eds) (20 K). Hoa<_ie(Jgt> He:.-<•'.<...'•• ■.:■: Co:.-:;.; Sear/iy, Oxford: Rr>'it ledge. Ths|| an edited collection containing £ wide range cf dela led artcles and perspective on the Irks oetween hea,th and security
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/globalhealthpolicy/ The website of the Centra for Giobal Health ?olicyat tneUntver* of Sussex.
http://www.criathamhouse.org/research/global-health   The website of the Centre on Global Hea'th Secun^M
Chatham House.
http://www.who.int   The website Of the. World Health Organization, which nas in'oTnation on most of diseases discussed in this cnapter.
http://ec.europa.eu/health/preparedness response/hsc/index_en.htm   The website of the Health Set "■'
Committee cf the European Commission.
http://www.ghd-net.org/   Tne website of the network on Global Hea'th Diplomacy,
Visit the online resources that accompany this book for lots of interesting additional material: www.oup.com/uk/collins5e/