the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

eyond the (western) state 201based on a particular European history of state formation. The Europeanstate had been built on an understanding of security as oriented towardsexternal threats, and rested upon ‘a strong identification of the securityof the state with the security of its citizens’ (Krause, 1996: 320, emphasisin original). This understanding of security implies that state-centricconceptions of security provide neither an analytical nor a normativeposition from which to identify the threats that regimes may pose to theirown citizens.Post-colonialism holds that the non-Western state has followed a differenttrajectory, but takes issue with the view of this as ‘failed’ or ‘underdeveloped’.The failed states literature discussed in chapter 6 looked at the‘failed’ state as lacking in some respects in comparison with the West, andhence in need of ‘catching up’. Post-colonialists argue in response thatthese ‘failures’ are ‘the after-effects of the unequal encounter with Westerncolonialism’ (Niva, 1999: 150; Barkawi and Laffey, 2006) and thatthere is a recurring economic, social and military unequal relationshipbetween the West and the rest. This line of Post-colonial ISS emphasises‘the material and ideological struggles of historically situated agentsin a neoliberal world order’ (Agathangelou and Ling, 2004: 518) andresonates with critical IPE as well as with Marxist Peace Researchers’accounts of imperialism and structural violence in the 1960s and1970s.Another strain of Post-colonial theory diverged from 1970s MarxistPeace Research by emphasising the discursive constitution of identitiesrather than material structures. In this literature, Post-colonialism andPoststructuralism drew upon each other, pointing to the Western politicaland academic construction of ‘the Southern’, ‘the Oriental’, the ‘underdeveloped’and the ‘failed’ Other (Doty, 1996; Muppidi, 1999; Niva, 1999).These inferior identities assume ‘an unchanging “precolonial” culturalessence’ that can be mobilised by the West, for instance in argumentsagainst nuclear proliferation to the Third World (Mutimer, 1998; Niva,1999: 150; Biswas, 2001; Grovogui, 2007: 240–241), but also by the non-Western elites seeking to boost their position domestically and abroad(Niva, 1999: 150–152). A crucial implication of Post-colonialism is thusthat a different understanding of the non-Western subject appears, andsince identity is relational, of the West itself (Bilgin, 2008). This means thatother referent objects may come into analytical focus, but also that ‘security’itself may be constituted in distinct non-Western terms that requirethe adoption of new epistemologies and methodologies (Grovogui, 2007:232–233).