the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

102 the cold war challenge to national securityLiberal tradition of critically scrutinising the relationship between citizensand the institutions of authority and sovereignty described in chapter 2.Peace Researchers of the 1960s and 1970s did not, however, go throughthe concept of security in launching their critique of Strategic Studies,but through the oppositional concept of ‘peace’. Peace Researchers furtherdivided ‘peace’ into positive and negative peace. Negative peace wasdefined as the absence of war, large-scale physical violence or personalviolence and opened up a research agenda on military security (Galtung,1969: 183). Positive peace had multiple connotations. In the 1950s and1960s, it was defined as ‘the integration of human society’ (JPR, 1964:2), but towards the end of the 1960s, it was reformulated to include‘structural violence’, which emphasised social injustice and inequality(Galtung, 1969: 168, 171, 175). Successful academic concepts often owetheir popularity to their ability to encapsulate a body of existing or burgeoningresearch while simultaneously outlining a conceptually focusednew research agenda. Structural violence fitted this formula perfectly.It provided an anchor for work on development issues, imperialism,domestic conflicts in Western as well as Third World societies, environmentalresources, human rights and economic exploitation. It incorporatedparts of a critical Marxist agenda while not endorsing the radicalMarxist call for violent revolution. Yet, in a premonition of post-Cold Warwidening debates in ISS, this expansion of ‘peace’ beyond the absence ofwar/conflict was criticised, not only by Strategic Studies, but from withinPeace Research itself.Like Strategic Studies, neither Arms Control nor Peace Research explicitlyforegrounded ‘security’, featuring instead complementary, parallel andoppositional concepts: détente, arms control, peace, structural violence,basic human needs and social justice. In 1983, Buzan (1983, 1984a) couldthus describe security as ‘an underdeveloped concept’, but as the decadewore on, ‘security’ appeared as a concept bridging the fields of StrategicStudies and Peace Research. The concept of common security, coinedbythe Palme Commission in 1982 linked arms control and broader concernsfor the livelihood of people across the globe and became a popular conceptconnecting the policy world and the critical parts of ISS. Articles whichexpanded the military conception of security into environmental andeconomic security began to appear in such prominent journals as InternationalSecurity (Ullman, 1983) and International Organization (Buzan,1984b). Finally, two new academic perspectives, Poststructuralism andFeminism, which had made an impact on the social sciences and thehumanities in general, grew out of Peace Research to establish themselves