the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

136 the cold war challenge to national securityof ‘its’ citizens’ security and the state as a threat to its own individuals,and that this was an inherent one rooted in the ‘nature of politicalcollectivities’. This did not mean that individual security should not betaken into account, but rather that there would be no abstract ‘individualsecurity solution’ that could be laid out a priori. Security scholars neededtherefore to theorise the relationship between individual and collectivesecurity and to analyse its empirical manifestations. Building on this tension,Buzan opened up the concept of the state to see it as constitutedby its physical base, the idea supporting it and its institutional expression.A central point here, which was later developed into the theory onsocietal security, was to stress that the idea of the state might be more,or less, accepted and that questions of nationality might either support it(in a nation-state) or weaken it (in multinational states where minoritynations feel repressed or maltreated). National security thus has an ‘insidedimension’ and unless this is relatively stable, ‘the image of the state as areferent object for security fades into a meaningless blur’ (Buzan, 1983:69). The question of the weakness/strength of the state should thereforebe separated from the question of the power that a state wields againstother states. On the outside, international security is dependent upon thecharacter of the international system, not only, as Neorealists pointed out,on the polarity of the system, but also on whether its character is one ofimmature anarchy (an unmediated Hobbesian world) or a mature anarchywhere states have developed in Bull’s terms an international societyof norms, rules and institutions to mediate the effects of the anarchical,fragmented system (Buzan, 1983: 96). Buzan’s conceptualisation of securityas individual, national and international pointed to a deepening ofsecurity along the axis of referent objects. The second significant expansionadvocated by People, States and Fear was along the axis of sectors,where the traditional military sector that Strategic Studies had concentratedon should be widened to include the economic, the political andthe ecological.In parallel with this new agenda, criticism of traditional national securityrhetoric triggered a discussion about new concepts: Common Security(Independent Commission on Disarmament and Security Issues, 1982;Väyrynen, 1985; Windass, 1985; Buzan, 1987b; Dewitt, 1994) and comprehensivesecurity (Chapman et al., 1983; Akaha, 1991; Dewitt, 1994).Comprehensive security, particularly linked to thinking in Japan, but alsoelsewhere in East Asia, retained a national security focus but widened theagenda away from just military security to other concerns, particularlyeconomic, political and environmental threats.