the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

224 widening and deepening securityby their preference for the European Journal of International Relations, ageneral IR journal published from 1995, rather than Alternatives (morePoststructuralist and Post-colonial) or Security Dialogue (more ‘Europeansecurity debates’, Copenhagen School, Critical Security Studies,Feminism, Poststructuralism and Human Security). The steady streamof North American Critical Constructivists moving to the UK in the1990s – perhaps in response to the privilege bestowed upon positivistepistemologies in US Political Science – complicates, however, a clearUS–European distinction.Figure 7.4 shows how the driving forces have impacted the evolution ofwidening–deepening approaches within ISS. As with Figure 5.3, since the‘widening–deepening’ box at the centre comprises the complex mappingof Figure 7.3, what is presented is a general overview.ConclusionsThis chapter has traced the growth and evolution of the widening–deepening side of ISS after the ending of the Cold War. These approacheswere already making their mark during the 1980s, but the ending of theCold War opened up analytical and political space that benefited theirgrowth. This chapter has shown that there were crucial and deeply helddifferences in how these approaches constituted referent objects, the sectorsto which security is applicable and the possibility of moving froma Realist logic of security and into a more cooperative one. There is, inother words, no one shared definition of what ‘expanding security’ shouldentail.In terms of the driving forces, internal academic debates were crucialinsofar as they were the primary key to how debates were organised. Crucialdifferences between European and American approaches meant thatConstructivists came to ISS through general IR debates, Europeans cameto it from Peace Research and ISS itself; Constructivists did not explicitlydiscuss the concept of security, while this was what drove Europeandebates. The disappearance of the Cold War as a meta-event might haveexacerbated this tendency in that there was no longer one overarching conflictthat all ISS approaches had to engage. This meant that some perspectiveswere driven by a mixed ‘events agenda’, especially Poststructuralismand Feminism. Towards the other end of the spectrum, Constructivistswere much more concerned with engaging epistemological IR debates andwere therefore more prone to pick historical case-studies. Great power politicsand technology played – with the exception of Poststructuralism – less