the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

48 the driving forces behind the evolution of issdecision was based on the fact that our main research question was totrace and offer an explanation of the evolution of ISS as a general subfieldof IR, but that we would not attempt to cover national variationsin any great detail. But since ISS was founded in the US and most of theconventional Cold War literature was driven by a US great power politicsagenda, we do pay attention to specific American societal factors throughthe driving force of great power politics. It is true that part of the storyof ISS is the evolution of distinct European and American approaches,but this is a difference that we can explain through the five driving forceswithout elevating societal factors to the status of a distinct driving force.Europe and the US have been situated differently in terms of great powercapabilities and politics. Both during the Cold War and after, the US hashad technological capabilities that Europe did not and it has been able toshoulder the costs of technological innovation in a manner that Europecould or would not afford. There were, furthermore, significant eventsthat impacted the US and Europe differently (Vietnam, German unificationand 9/11 to mention just a few), and there are different academictraditions, particularly in terms of epistemology, in the two parts of theWest that again are linked to processes of institutionalisation. The fiveforces and particularly their interplay can in short explain the Europe/USdifference especially as ‘events’, ‘great power politics’ and ‘internal academicdebates’ open up space for incorporating societal and politicaldifferences.Although we hold that all five forces are significant for understandingthe evolution of ISS, and that they are distinct in that they each constitutedifferent lenses or forms of explanation, it is also the case that they arederived deductively from six decades of ISS literature and that not allforces may therefore be equally significant at all times. The advent ofPoststructuralism in the mid-1980s was, for example, clearly connectedto the general influence of Postmodern and Poststructuralist philosophyfirst on the humanities and later on the social sciences. Here, the drivingforce ‘the internal dynamics of academic debate’ was clearly a stronginfluence. Human Security, by contrast, was not linked as much to internalacademic debate, but made it from the field of policy into academe (seechapter 7).To theorise the five forces as interplaying rather than as distinct andfree-standing variables implies that we may identify a transformation thatstarts with one, or more, force(s) which then has implications for, or atleast raises questions concerning, the others. The complicated interplaybetween the forces implies that there is not a simple domino effect between