| ID | 117765 |
| Title Proper | Of camps and critiques |
| Other Title Information | a reply to security, war, violence |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Barkawi, Tarak |
| Publication | 2012. |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | This is a very difficult piece to reply to as it engages so minimally with the substance of my original article, 'From War to Security: Security Studies, the Wider Agenda, and the Fate of the Study of War'. Instead, Claudia Aradau appears most concerned to defend Critical Security Studies from critique. Apparently, among other things, I homogenise Critical Security Studies through 'a technique of ambiguous equivalences'.1 It may come as some surprise to readers of 'Security, War, Violence' that my article hardly mentions Critical Security Studies.2 Rather, I was primarily concerned with traditional security studies, on the one hand, and the 'wider agenda' - the idea that anything can be 'securitised' - on the other. My argument was that, in International Relations (IR), the study of war was largely a casualty of the debate between these two positions. Traditional security studies dealt with strategy not war, while the wider agenda was concerned with the logic of security itself. As a consequence, a discipline that imagines itself as centrally concerned with questions of war and peace does not in fact study war, part of a larger elision of war in the Enlightenment organisation of social and political inquiry. I go on in the article to outline the astounding absence of the Second World War in IR scholarship and then map out some ways in which the critical study of war leads us to think differently about the 'international' as a distinct space for inquiry. I was seeking to outline a 'critical war studies' for IR, to frame and enable a new direction for research. |
| `In' analytical Note | Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 41, No.1; Sep 2012: p.124-130 |
| Journal Source | Millennium: Journal of International Studies Vol. 41, No.1; Sep 2012: p.124-130 |
| Key Words | Critical Security Studies ; International Relations Theory ; Securitisation ; Violence ; War |