the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

from peace to security 135From peace to security: Common Security, Feminism andPoststructuralismDuring the 1980s there is a gradual shift from ‘peace’ to ‘security’ asthe guiding concept of approaches critical of the Strategic Studies mainstream.Gleditsch notes in 1989 that ‘most authors avoid the word peace,possibly because it sounds too grand and pretentious’ (Gleditsch, 1989:3). At the close of the 1980s, it seems thus as if Buzan’s (1983, 1984a) callfor changing the status of ‘security’ from underdeveloped to the conceptualcommon ground between Strategic Studies and Peace Research hasbeen heard. This section explores three approaches – Common Security,Feminism and Poststructuralism – which grew out of early 1980s PeaceResearch, yet, particulary in the case of the latter two, intersected withsocial, political and feminist theories that propelled them away from themainstream of Peace Research as the Cold War ended.Foregrounding ‘security’Picking up the concept from Wolfers’s old article on security as an ambiguoussymbol, Buzan (1983: 6) looked back on thirty years of ‘security’ asan unexplored and essentially contested concept. This was unfortunate,argued Buzan (1983, 1984a), because ‘security’ had the ability to act asa conceptual meeting ground between the extremes of Realist StrategicStudies ‘power’ on the one side, and the ‘peace’ of Peace Research onthe other. Moreover, Buzan pointed to ‘[t]he hazards of a weakly conceptualised,ambiguously defined, but politically powerful concept likenational security’, which ‘offers scope for power-maximising strategiesto political and military elites, because of the considerable leverage overdomestic affairs which can be obtained by invoking it’ (Buzan, 1983: 4,9). Since ‘security’ was already in widespread high-politics use, one wouldfor academic as well as political–normative reasons be better off engagingit directly.Coining the terminology of ‘referent objects’, Buzan stressed the interlinkagesand tensions across levels of analysis. As the subtitle of his bookPeople, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in InternationalRelations indicated, ‘national security’ stood at the centre of the analysis,but it was simultaneously stressed that ‘people represent, in one sense,the irreducible basic unit to which the concept of security can be applied’(Buzan, 1983: 18). Echoing the view of security as always an individualisingand a collectivising concept laid out in chapter 2, Buzan (1983:20, 31) held that there was a tension between the state as the protector