the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

206 widening and deepening securityMunster, 2007). In the mid-1990s a broader definition of Critical SecurityStudies which also covered Poststructuralism and Constructivism was putforward by Krause and Williams (1997), yet this never gained hold andthe narrower ‘Aberystwyth definition’ of Critical Security Studies became(re)established (Booth, 2005b; CASE, 2006). Critical Security Studies hasmade a significant impact on the widening discussions in that it has beenthe perspective to most explicitly pick up the Critical Theory FrankfurtSchool tradition that was part of Peace Research in the 1970s. This, however,did not happen as an explicit engagement with the latter literature,but through a reading of the Frankfurt School itself. Conceptually, CriticalSecurity Studies argued that ‘individual humans are the ultimate referent’for security, as states are unreliable providers of security and toodiverse to provide for ‘a comprehensive theory of security’ (Booth, 1991:319–320). To Wyn Jones (1995: 309), Critical Security Studies implies‘placing the experience of those men and women and communities forwhom the present world order is a cause of insecurity rather than security,at the centre of our agenda’. Critical Security Studies’ vocal call for anindividual referent object is furthermore linked to an empirical–politicalassessment of interstate war as far less real and threatening than ‘environmentalsecurity, food security and economic security’, and to a viewof the vast majority of states as generating insecurity rather than stabilityand prosperity (Wyn Jones, 1995: 310).This makes for a very pessimistic view of global security: states makeindividuals insecure and the Neoliberal economic structure further exacerbatesthis condition. Booth (2007: 395 ff.) speaks of a ‘new twentyyears’ crisis’ to be soon followed by a range of environmental, politicaland humanitarian disasters which he labels ‘the great reckoning’, unlessradical changes are made in many basic aspects of human conduct. Thetransformation of individual/global security away from this pessimisticaccount of the present is facilitated by the concept of emancipation. Emancipationfunctions as the goal of individual security as well as the analyticaland political engine, and is defined by Booth (in terms reminiscent of Galtung’sstructural violence) as ‘the freeing of people (as individuals andgroups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carryingout what they would freely choose to do’ (Booth, 1991: 319). This,in Booth’s view, is a highly desirable situation: if people are emancipated,what they freely choose to do is peaceful. The emancipated solution at thelevel of individual security therefore has positive consequences at the levelof collective security: ‘individual security’ is deeply connected to ‘globalsecurity’, which is when all individuals and groups have been emancipated