the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

internal academic debates 163article on gender, Poststructuralism, or Post-colonial approaches, andKolodziej’s Security and International Relations (2005), which effectivelysummed up and spoke to the traditionalist-widening agenda of the 1990s,defined Conventional Constructivism (see chapter 7) as the most radicalwidening perspective to be addressed.Why did traditionalists stick by their state-centric military guns? Inaddition to subscribing to Realist ontological assumptions about theinability of states to transform the anarchical international system – orin the case of Peace Research making this a testable research question –traditionalists pointed to the need for a concept that was analyticallyclearly defined. Probably the clearest statement of this position was madeby Walt in his 1991 article on the state of the field of Security Studies,where he pointed to those wanting to broaden the concept of security ‘toinclude topics such as poverty, AIDS, environmental hazards, drug abuse,and the like’. Such calls were important, argued Walt, in that they showedthatnonmilitary issues deserve sustained attention from scholars and policymakers,and that military power does not guarantee well-being. But thisprescription runs the risk of expanding ‘security studies’ excessively; bythis logic, issues such as pollution, disease, child abuse, or economic recessionscould all be viewed as threats to ‘security.’ Defining the field in thisway would destroy its intellectual coherence and make it more difficult todevise solutions to any of these important problems. (Walt, 1991: 213)Walt’s repudiation of widening approaches echoed Kenneth E. Boulding’s(1978) defence of negative peace thirteen years earlier, and was basedon a combination of ontological, analytical and political considerations:the state was considered the best defence against external and domesticinsecurity in an imperfect world, and the threat of military force afact that ISS should be devoted to studying (Betts, 1997; Williams, 1998)and a coherent subject around which expertise could be accumulated.This, however, did not mean that traditionalists were uncritical of theway in which security policy was conducted, or more specifically of therelationship between policy-making and the academic institution of ISS.Walt (1991: 212–213) was adamant that ISS should be devoted to ‘centralpolicy problems’ and ‘phenomena that can be controlled by nationalleaders’. But he was equally concerned with the academic quality of thework that went on inside think-tanks or was supported by defence contractorsand the US Defense Department. Much of it was ‘propaganda’