the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

200 widening and deepening securityBeyond the (Western) stateThe Constructivists dealt with in the section above did not explicitlyadvocate an expansion of the referent object beyond the state or outline atheory that went beyond the military-political sector. This is not to say thatConstructivism cannot be critical: to point to the ability of transcendingthe Realist view of security politics and interstate relations goes to the coreof central normative debates in ISS. But Constructivism’s scope differsfrom those widening approaches that explicitly engage the concept ofsecurity, and this section deals with the latter, particularly those whichclaimed the need for an expansion of the referent beyond the (Western)state: Post-colonial approaches (to which some Critical Constructivistscontributed), Human Security, Critical Security Studies and Feminism.With this widening of the referent object came also a widening of thesectors or areas to which security analysis should be applied, addingdevelopment, the environment, economics and social-welfare issues.Post-colonialismThe status of the Western state has been an issue in ISS since the 1970s.More traditional security scholars, such as Ayoob (1984, 1997), pointedto the specificities of the Third World while insisting on the need fora strong state and maintaining it as the referent object. Critical PeaceResearchers, on the other hand, employed Marxist and dependencia theoriesto their analysis of the economic, political and cultural exploitationthat the Liberal world order entailed. In the 1990s, the calls for criticalscrutiny of the Western-centric conception of the state at the heart ofISS became more frequent and an explicit Post-colonial ISS perspectivebegan to crystallise. This was in part a consequence of the advent andgrowth of Post-colonialism in the social sciences and humanities morebroadly (Said, 1978; Spivak, 1999; Grovogui, 2007), in part supportedby the overlap between Post-colonialism and other widening approacheswhich drew upon each other to generate critical momentum.Post-colonial theory comprises a broad range of perspectives(Grovogui, 2007), and one body of Post-colonial ISS overlapped withsocial theory and historical sociology, and hence with Critical Constructivism,in pointing to the need for conceptualisations of security thatacknowledged the specificity of the Third World. Drawing on the workof Charles Tilly, Krause (1996), for example, held that the state-centricconcept of security advocated by traditionalist Realist approaches was