the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

254 responding to 9/11: a return to national security?chapter 7, a significant part of the widening debate was concerned withtheoretical and conceptual issues driven by internal academic debates notmuch impacted by 9/11. Yet, as this chapter has shown, there was also asignificant concern with the way in which ‘the event’ of 9/11 impactedgreat power politics and technology and what the consequences should befor the concept of security, assumptions about ‘security actor rationality’and the role that ISS scholars should adopt. Within ISS itself the status of9/11 is debated, some seeing it as a revolution (Der Derian, 2004), othersas a continuation of older paradigms (Kupchan, 2004; Wæver, 2008).In terms of the four questions that structure ISS, the GWoT questionedthe state as the referent object insofar as ‘terrorists’ operate in ways that differfrom the sovereign rational state with a well-defined decision-makingcentre. But the policies put in place were also widely seen as reinforcingthe state, hence the need to critically examine discourses of national security.A similar logic applied to the question of internal/external threats, inthat terrorism worked precisely through an ability to transgress borders.Yet the GWoT was simultaneously about states trying to secure not onlyphysical borders, but biometric and digital ones. In terms of the wideningof security, military security certainly held a prominent place, while othermore empirical widening lines of analysis continued on their own tracks,particularly in the areas of gender security, environmental security, societalsecurity, and religion and security. Whether the GWoT should be readas a testimony to the inevitability of Realist security dynamics or not was,as always, debated.Looking to the future, whether the GWoT will define a new era ofinternational security remains an open question. The case that it doesrests on whether or not the GWoT will be deep and durable enough as anew global macrosecuritisation to replace the Cold War. If so (and at thetime of writing the possibility is still plausible, though by no means certain,or even the most likely probability), then the GWoT could provide a newcore framing for ISS of a kind that has been absent since the ending of theCold War. The situation, however, is nothing like that at the early stagesof the Cold War, when the identity of ‘the enemy’ crystallised quickly andattracted broad support in the West. The GWoT itself, and particularlythe characterisation of ‘terrorism’, and the identity of ‘terrorists’, remainheavily contested, and the Bush administration’s portrait of it/them hasdone as much to divide the West as to unite it.Against the idea of a new era in ISS is the fact that its traditionalpreoccupations with great power politics and technology remain independentlystrong. The ongoing debate about US grand strategy dating