the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

the changing shape of iss 259and negative Peace Research, in terms of agreed focus on military security,armament and conflict. The main disagreement lay in the basicbelief among Peace Researchers in the possibility of overcoming Realistdynamics. ‘Positive’ Peace Researchers, by contrast, focused on integrationdynamics, within and across societies, and later in a more criticaltradition on structural violence. Looking back upon the evolution ofISS, this positive Peace Research tradition was significant for Liberal andConstructivist scholars who picked up the Deutschian sociological traditionand its concern with international institutions, communicationand the patterns of civic interaction below the state level. Scandinavian,German and Neo-Marxist Peace Research was equally important as aninput into the critical widening literature – Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism,Feminism and Critical Security Studies – which by the mid-1980s started to shift the conceptual terrain from ‘peace’ to ‘security’.Most of what was written in ISS during the Cold War did not explicitlygo through the concept of security. After the first seminal conceptualarticles by Wolfers (1952) and Herz (1950), the concept was largely takenfor granted – security was national (state) security; it was about militarythreats, capabilities and the use of force; it was about external threats;and it was to be achieved through the balance of power, or simply theoverwhelming display of power – and hence was not much discussed.Significant concepts – and theories to match – came instead in the formof general ‘parallel concepts’ (most prominently power and strategy) thatlinked into general IR Realism. Or, they were more specific, ‘complementaryconcepts’, such as ‘deterrence’ and ‘containment’. Peace Research,on the other hand, was constituted around ‘peace’, an oppositional concept,although as just argued, the distance between ‘security’ and ‘negativepeace’ was often not as wide as perceived by participants at thetime.What ties Peace Research into ISS, and what ties ISS together, is firstof all a commonality in concepts. But when such commonality is not tobe found because different concepts (e.g. ‘peace’ versus ‘power’) play theparallel, supporting or oppositional role, the convergence stems from ashared concern with the four structuring questions laid out in chapter 1:how the referent object is defined, whether threats are internal or external,whether the military is the sole security sector or others are included, andwhether or not there is a belief in the transformation of internationalrelations beyond Realist recurrence of war and conflict. Of course, thefact that these are questions rather than givens is only brought out asdifferent perspectives, first Strategic Studies and Peace Research, later the