Overview of CSS

Today almost any social or political problem can be legitimately framed in terms of dangers, risks, disasters or pending catastrophe. This development has been reflected in security studies and International Relations, where research now covers practices as diverse as the constitution of fear in popular culture and advertising, environmental degradation, the security implications of migration, the security claims of refugees, the commodification and privatisation of security, the spreading of risk calculation and management, and the increase in surveillance technology.

What are the consequences of increasingly rendering a vast range of policies in security terms, of people making sense of their everyday living together, both locally and globally, in terms of dangers and insecurities, of deploying surveillance technologies across a vast range of activities, from shopping over migration to monitoring environmental effects of industrialization? This interest in how security practice changes social and political relations has led to critical security research that analyses the nature of security language, institutions and technologies and the consequences of applying them in various sites, ranging from the household, over neighbourhoods to states, regional complexes and global relations. In International Relations, this move away from threat analysis to an analysis of the nature of securitising practice is known as ‘critical approaches to security’.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of scholars and especially early career scholars and doctoral students have moved to studying insecurities along these lines. They rely on an innovative body of theoretical and conceptual tools that were developed in the 1990s. These theoretical and conceptual developments have continued since and produced new theoretical work on the transformation of security language and practice. At the same time, however, early career researchers and PhD students are increasingly defining their research around specific sites of security practice, so that we could speak of an explicit empirical turn in critical security studies.

This empirical pursuit has made clear that a gap exists between an increasingly sophisticated theoretical debate and existing methodological resources that can be mobilised for the detailed study of specific empirical processes of securitising. To address this gap, critical security studies needs to develop adequate methodologies. So far, the field has been quite weak in turning its conceptual and theoretical innovations into methodological inquiry that would consider how particular methods impact upon the object of research and specifically what a critical methodology could mean for critical security studies and the research developed since the 1990s.