the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

egional security and non-western events 177related themes in this literature were the rise of interventions and peacekeeping(Sesay, 1995; Howe, 1996/7; Glynne, 1997; Freedman, 1998/9)and ‘humanitarian wars’ (Roberts, 1996), as a result of various attemptsby the West to intervene (or sometimes not) in the name of human rights.In this section we focus on the regional international events that beganwith the US-led war against Iraq in 1991, through the wars accompanyingthe dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the humanitarian intervention inSomalia, up to, but not including, 9/11. As with the shift in the nuclearagenda towards the Third World, here, too, one sees that a main consequenceof the disappearance of bipolarity was that regional and localsecurity problems gained in prominence. The ‘two worlds’ formulationnoted above seemed to split the world into a peaceful core, where perhapsthe traditional agenda was no longer relevant, and a turbulent periphery,where the old rules of the game carried on. This formulation itselfexplains much of the turn of the military security agenda towards theThird World. It also explains the two themes that emerged, one with theThird World as the focus of concern in its own right, as for example inthe concerns about nuclear proliferation in South Asia, or humanitariancrises in various places; and the other, especially with the rise of the roguestate and terrorism agendas in the US, about the possible threats from thezone of conflict to the zone of peace. As noted above, worries about roguestates and terrorists were strongly linked to the issue of proliferation ofWMD.Within this was another literature calling for ISS to pay more specificattention to the regional level of security itself as something that wasneglected (or subordinated to the global level) during the Cold War,and which post-Cold War was of increasing importance (Buzan, 1991a:186–229; Alagappa, 1995: 363; Ayoob, 1995: 56–59; Lake and Morgan,1997; Maoz, 1997: 2–8; Buzan et al., 1998; Buzan and Wæver, 2003;Hettne, 2005: 553–554). Even some hard-line Neorealists took up theregional implications of unipolarity (Hansen, 2000). Regional securityas something reflecting indigenous dynamics additional to superpowerinterventionism had been a persistent, if relatively marginal, topic in ISSthat went well back into the Cold War (Buzan, 1983: 105–115; Väyrynen,1984; Ayoob, 1986). As well as this more theoretical literature stressingthe importance of the regional level generally, there was of course a greatdeal written about the security affairs and dynamics of specific regions.Some of this literature has already been noted in the discussion of nuclearproliferation, particularly for East and South Asia and the Middle East. Butthere was much more that was not specifically connected to proliferation.