Summary/Abstract |
If one trend characterizes the study of foreign and security policy over the past several decades, it may be the search for concepts that assist in addressing the complexity of global politics.2 We embrace that complexity and reimagine security as a social phenomenon that interweaves between social collectives, bleeding across boundaries and tying collectivities together as they seek to reconcile different systems of security meaning-making. At its core, security is a socially constructed system for making sense of danger and threat (Buzan et al. 1998). Thinking about security as a phenomenon of linked social constructions opens the field of inquiry up to a massive amount of complexity and interactivity. We offer two concepts as a possible basis for thinking about the ways in which security systems interact with and influence the operation of other security systems: multidirectionality and anticipated reaction.
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