the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

202 widening and deepening securityPost-colonialism’s reconstitution of the referent object and its deploymentof a broader set of contextualised epistemologies concur with callsfor bringing Anthropology to bear on ISS. This call was prominentlymade by a group of Critical Constructivists in Cultures of Insecurity:States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Weldes et al., 1999)which, as indicated by the title, was an explicit attempt to define a CriticalConstructivism that differed from that of The Culture of National Security(Katzenstein, 1996a). Weldes et al. argued more specifically for a researchagenda focused on the production of insecurity across multiple levels ofanalysis, across different sectors, and as applicable to collective referentobjects below and across state boundaries (Weldes et al., 1999: 1–10).This perspective was brought to bear not only on non-Western contexts(Litzinger, 1999; Muppidi, 1999; Niva, 1999) but also on domestic, Westernsettings, as in Masco’s (1999) account of how different ethnic groupsaround Los Alamos, New Mexico, confronted the economic consequencesof the downscaling of nuclear facilities at the end of the Cold War. Thesegroups articulated societal, economic and environmental security concerns,thus linking security across a wider set of sectors.Anthropologists working from a Post-colonial perspective warn againstassuming that a universal, globally shared concept of security exists. Theyargue that ethnographic field studies can identify local constructions ofsecurity that differ from what is commonly assumed in (Western-centric)ISS, that ‘[it] cannot, for instance, be assumed that the objective of securityis to ensure the survival of either the individual or the state’ (Kent, 2006:347; see also Bubandt, 2005). These differences are not simply semanticbut indicate profound variation in how societies are organised and howkey political principles such as governance, violence and legitimacy areunderstood. These local constructions also have significant implicationsfor the epistemology and methodology of security analysis, particularlyfor discursive approaches, in that the word ‘security’ may not identifythe ‘logic of security’ as we know it from Realist definitions of nationalsecurity and, vice versa, that ‘logics of national security’ might be invokedby other concepts and practices (see also the discussion of the CopenhagenSchool below).Human SecurityPost-colonial approaches draw attention to the specificities of the non-Western state, to global economic structures and hence also to developmentissues. A more straightforward expansion of security to include