the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

262 conclusionstime. As we hope is clear from the preceding chapters, different drivingforces have been more or less dominant at different times. Great powerpolitics and technology were very strong during the Cold War, and weakerduring the 1990s. Academic debates became more prominent during the1980s and 1990s than they had been before. Events assumed particularprominence from 2001.Although we think this framing has worked, it has not been withoutsome problems of application. It proved difficult, for example, to drawclear lines between ‘events’ and various movements within the great powerpolitics and technology headings. In some senses, the ending of the ColdWar was an ‘event’, as were various technological breakthroughs such asthe launching of Sputnik and the spreading of nuclear weapons to Chinaand India. Although problematic for us in deciding how to locate differentdiscussions, we do not think that this problem has posed any fundamentaldifficulties for our analysis of the evolution of ISS.The state and future of ISS: conversation or camps?Telling the story about the evolution of ISS from the present vantagepoint makes it possible to conceive of it as a conversation. One may saywith Foucault’s genealogy that history is always a history of the presentwhere the past is constructed and hence reconstructed as the presentchanges. But one may also just point more concretely to how changes inthe conceptualisation of security and the shift from ‘peace’ to ‘security’that began in the 1980s reconfigured the way in which ISS is constitutedand how it constitutes its past. We would get quite a different answer to thequestion ‘what is ISS?’ in the 1960s, where ‘ISS’ meant Strategic Studiesand deterrence theory, and ‘Peace Studies’ meant positive–negative peacedebates over concepts as well as epistemology. The bringing together ofwidening–deepening perspectives on the one hand and the traditionalistconcept of security on the other after the Cold War means that ‘security’to a much larger extent becomes the conceptual and disciplinaryterrain of both. The history of ISS therefore also changes: Peace Research,particularly ‘positive peace’ research in both the Marxist and the Liberaltradition, is a crucial ancestor connected through complicated strains ofliterature to present widening approaches. Had there been, on the otherhand, no conceptual convergence between the two main Cold War fields,telling the story of ISS today would have been a different thing: it wouldhave been one of two fields nursing (to a larger extent than today) distinctidentities, debates and institutions. It would have been more appropriate