the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

7Widening and deepening securityThe previous chapter showed how traditionalists repositioned themselvesafter the end of the Cold War and how they argued that their military,state-centric agenda had in no way been harmed. Yet this claim was notuniversally accepted by ‘wideners’ and ‘deepeners’, some of whom grewout of positive Peace Research, Poststructuralism and Feminism (laid outin chapter 5), and some of whom came to ISS as the Cold War ended.To those seeking to expand the concept of security, the narrowness of themilitary state-centric agenda was analytically, politically and normativelyproblematic. Such things as the peaceful ending of the Cold War, thegrowth in intra-state conflicts, Western societies’ fear of immigration, thedecaying environment and the acceleration of the HIV/AIDS epidemicdemonstrated that traditionalism was unable to meet the challenges of thepost-Cold War era. Moreover, wideners and deepeners held that the 1990sfailed to produce a constitutive military event or a defining great powerproblematic that traditionalists could claim should take centre-stage.To challenge military-state centrism was, of course, not new, but whatreconfigured the terrain of ISS in the late 1980s and 1990s was thatchallengers were no longer identified as ‘Peace Researchers’ – and thusas having a particular political position on the contested academic andpolitical landscape of the Cold War – but as people doing Security Studiesor IR. Some more specific labels – Poststructuralism and Human Securityin particular – were politicised within ISS, but this rarely translated intobroader non-academic circles, as Peace Research had done. ISS became asa consequence more of an even playing field and the fact that the mediaand policy discourses in many countries and global settings articulated awider security agenda provided further support for widening–deepeningapproaches within ISS. If we look to processes of institutionalisation, therewas a steady stream of books, conferences, PhD theses, journal articles –and even journals – on why and how security should be expanded beyondthe military and the state-centric. If we look to the sociology of academicdebates, the perceived need for traditionalists to engage broader187