the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

from peace to security 143thinking in that actors or identities were no longer stable and given entitiesto which Peace Researchers or security theorists could refer. Nationalsecurity was not, in short, something that could be assessed throughan analysis of which threats a nation confronted, but rather a processthrough which ‘the nation’ came to be produced and reproduced with aparticular identity. Threats themselves were therefore also discursive: toconstitute something as threatening was to invoke ‘discourses of dangerand security’, and to situate that ‘something’ as of a particular importanceto the threatened Self (Dillon, 1990: 102). Drawing upon Foucault,Poststructuralists furthermore emphasised the significance of power andknowledge, of security discourses as ‘plays of power which mobilize rules,codes and procedures to assert a particular understanding, through theconstruction of knowledge’ (Dalby, 1988: 416). Knowledge in turn wasnot free of value judgements, and the claim to objectivity that Classicalpositivists and ISS traditionalists espouse was thus problematised.Security politics, argued Poststructuralism, was fundamentally aboutthe construction of a radically different, inferior and threatening Other,but also, since identity is always relational, about the Self. The focus on theconstitution of the Other broadened the scope of traditional security analysisin that Poststructuralists argued that security policies were directednot only against an external Other – usually other states and alliances –but also against internal Others as these were ‘located in different sitesof ethnicity, race, class, gender, or locale’ (Campbell, 1990: 270). Linkingback to the central questions at the heart of ISS laid out in chapter 2,Poststructuralists advocated a critical scrutiny of the ways in which policydiscourse as well as (parts of) Realism and Strategic Studies pointed tothe need for societal cohesion as this ‘need’ produced the objects of fearand difference which were to be eradicated or transformed.Poststructuralism in the 1980s explored these themes through two –sometimes intersecting – routes: one which dealt with security as anabstract practice situated within the larger structures of state sovereignty,and one which engaged the political context of the antagonistic superpowerrelationship. As one of the key theorists in the first tradition, Walkertraced the historical evolution of state sovereignty and its link to modernconceptions of security (Walker, 1987, 1990). Walker held that the principleof state sovereignty provided a very powerful answer to the problemof political identity in that it offered a spatial solution, where citizenswere located within the sharply demarcated territory of the state, anda temporal solution, where progress and ‘universalizing standards’ werepossible on the inside, whereas power and conflict made global, universal