the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

driving forces reconsidered 261been travelling on the same river without knowing it, while after the ColdWar the expanding delta is recognised, mapped and discussed to a muchlarger extent.As ISS has become wider, deeper and more multi-channelled, this haschanged not just the sub-field of ISS itself, but also how it relates to thewider field of IR. Some boundary zones and crossover points remain prettystable, e.g. Strategic Studies and (Neo)realism, and Strategic Studies andarea studies. The old links between Peace Research and both Liberalismand Marxism have mainly been taken over by Critical Security Studies,Post-colonialism and Human Security, and the latter threaten/promise tomove a chunk of the IR agenda (human rights, development) into ISS.Some new crossover points have been created, e.g. with Feminism, theenvironment, development and identity, and ISS is much more concernedwith philosophy of knowledge questions than it was during the ColdWar. The boundary/crossover between ISS and IPE remains, on the otherhand, relatively weak, still largely focused on a few ‘strategic’ resources,principally oil. This reflects the ongoing institutional power of the splitthat took place within IR between ISS and IPE during the 1970s.Driving forces reconsideredRecall that we set up our framing of driving forces at the beginning onthe basis of a pragmatic mix of general ideas from sociology of knowledgewith our empirical sense of what factors were particularly influentialwithin the specific domain of ISS. In a general sense, one would expectthe evolution of any body of thought to be influenced by standard factorssuch as money, power, ideas, history and institutionalisation. Given thesubject matter of ISS, and the history out of which it emerged, it didnot seem controversial to focus on great power politics and technologyas specific factors of relevance to this sub-field. Neither, given the strongcommitment to engage with public policy questions that has been a featureof ISS since the beginning, did it seem controversial to give a specific placeto events. In general, we think the framing of our discussion in terms offive driving forces has worked pretty well to explain why and how ISS hasevolved as it has. Our confidence in this approach is sufficient that wewill use it below to stick our necks out a bit in thinking about where ISSmight go from here. Our general conclusion is that the operation of thefive driving forces has remained visibly in play throughout, and that thereis no reason to expect that this will change as the main background to ISS.That said, however, the mix and impact among them have changed over