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Collins: Contemporary Security Studies

Chapter 04

Instructions

Choose your answers from a-d by clicking the radio button next to each choice and then press 'Submit' to get your score.

Question 1

What meaning or interpretation can we generally understand to infer from the label "Critical Security Studies"?

a) Critical Security Studies is understood to refer to a move beyond the limitations of the preferential position afforded to the state as the referent object of study, as the institution which has the monopoly of violence, and the reduction of security to military security, as the standard assumption. Critical Security Studies thus reflects a concern with the effect of studying security, as the threat, use, and control of military force tended in and of itself to support, and legitimate the power of the state.

b) The study of security is generally understood to denote the questioning of the referent object. The desire not so much residual in the ideas of the effect of studying security as the threat, use, and control of military forces but rather displayed a concern with the traditional study of the state and that there were other objects to be secured in other ways.

c) Critical Security Studies is understood to define the study of the threat, use, and control of military force, and the exploration of the conditions that make the use of force more likely. Critical Security Studies was the endeavor to understand the ways in which the use of force was to affect individuals, states, and societies and the policies that states adopt for engagement or prevention of warfare.

d) A critical security study was a representation of the desire of scholars to separate the field of security studies from the power of ideas and ideologies which distorts the central concern of the state as the referent object of study. By questioning the nature and scope of security studies, and the discipline in itself, to devalue the only salient feature of the international system, that the state retains the monopoly of control over violence.

Question 2

In what way does the UN document 'The Responsibility to Protect' fit with a broadening conception of Security Studies?

a) The 'Responsibility to Protect' document reaffirmed international society's commitment to the principle of inviolability of sovereignty. The state as the referent object of security is secure to the extent that it is free from arbitrary military intervention and responsible for the internal protection and development of its inhabitants.

b) The conception of security is essentially the relations between the state and the individual, the extent to which the individual is secure dependent on citizenship, and the security of the structures that give the community form grounded in citizenship.

c) Security is dependent on the reactive capability of the state to defend itself against instability and to intervene militarily should stabilization require military reinforcement. The reactive security agenda implies that security can only be attained from the position of strength. The study of security is therefore the analysis of the use, threat and control of military power.

d) Traditional preference of the state as the referent object of study obscured the issue of security. Where the state-centric approach failed was the reduction of security from individual to citizenship whereas the parameters of security should be moved to examine the ways in which citizenship produces structures of insecurity. Thusly, the proposition of a broad agenda for security studies is the adjustment of the focus beyond the state to the human being.

Question 3

What was Krause and Williams' contribution to Critical Security Studies?

a) Krause and Williams established an epistemological position by which the communities to be secured could be separated from the ideas and subjective constitution of their subject. By recognizing that the interpretive shift requires treatment of the referent object as a "thing" an objective unit of analysis, Critical Security Studies could establish a scientific methodological approach.

b) Critical security altered the way in which security was to be established. Whilst it was recognized that the way in which communities were constituted by ideas, norms and values, and thus would reveal a degree of divergence between different communities, the community could remain an identifiable sphere of analysis from the state objectively studied by the analyst without fear of subjective tainting.

c) Krause and Williams established an epistemological position that, in contrast to traditional security studies of the analysis of the referent object as an objective study, argue that by thinking of the different communities in which people live requires an interpretative shift, in which analysts recognize that ideas, in part, pattern communities. Therefore, the ideas of analysts are not entirely separable from the objects studied.

d) Krause and Williams established Critical Security Studies as an epistemological approach that recognized that communities were an extension of the state. Communities were patterned by the form of the state and thus dictated that scholarship required positivist methodological analysis for the interpretation of shifts in norms, and ideas that constitute the domestic communities. State security was thus intimately interrelated with the ways in which a community could be secured.

Question 4

In what ways has the Copenhagen School made important conceptual developments to the question of how security studies is to be defined?

a) Rather than security being concerned with force or deterrence, the military sector could be expanded to include the political, economic, and societal factors that determine policy production and operations. The sectors have contributed vastly to broadening the ways in which we think about the security: defined as security as the threat, use, and control of military force.

b) Sectoral analysis of the hierarchical conceptual ordering of the way in which we think about security provided an organizational scheme for the ways in which security, as freedom from the threat of force, is prioritized in the policy-making community, preference given to the degree of threat posed to the state.

c) Security is a referential practice brought into the public sphere as a security issue because of the manifestation of an existential threat to the state. Securitization of an issue can not be considered to have occurred by virtue of its presentation as a threat.

d) Security is a self-referential practice not necessarily because an existential threat exists but because the issue has been made into a threat by policy. The issue of securitization has lead to questions regarding the way in which security issues, policies have come into being as they are, and therefore what the politics is of that production.

Question 5

Why has the Copenhagen School been separated from Critical Security Studies?

a) The Copenhagen School has facilitated the emergence of a distinct and uniform framework of analysis which deserves to be treated as separate from the Critical Security Studies school of thought. This is a function of the unification in the epistemological approach between the sectoral analysis of security and the concept of securitization.

b) Authors of the Copenhagen approach contend that Critical Security Studies is informed by post-structuralism and constructivism and thus open to the possibility of social change whereas the Copenhagen approach recognizes the social construction of social life and that construction within the field of security, if sufficiently stable over a period of time, can be treated objectively within a positivist epistemology

c) Securitization and the sectoral approach open up the possibility of opening up sectoral life. The epistemological underpinnings adhere to what is desired by Critical Security Studies, whereas the Copenhagen School has to some extent disillusioned the vision that guided its emergence, by drawing on predominantly objectivist epistemology.

d) The Copenhagen approach recognizes that social life is a social construction and that construction in the security realm is insufficiently stable to be treated as objective. The Critical Security Studies School whilst recognizing the social construction of social life, contend that the security sphere is sufficiently stable in the long run and this enables a largely positivist epistemology.

Question 6

In what ways have the themes of post-Marxist critical theory been linked to a critical security theory in Booth's considered opinion?

a) Booth in Critical Security studies and World Politics makes a clear attempt to link Critical Security Studies to a specific theoretical tradition: Krause and Williams' Critical Security Studies. Booth rejects the analytical tradition of trying to give rise to a coherent and uniform theory and favoring the broad church school.

b) Booth regards human society as its own social invention, in which regressive theories have dominated the field serving to perpetuate existing power relations. A critical international relations theory must therefore be developed with the aim of overcoming the regressive nature of world politics governed by de-naturalization and emancipatory values.

c) Booth argues that all those theorists perceive themselves to be working within critical international theory and that work is an extension of Critical Security Studies; and secondly, that the Copenhagen school is central to the development of a critical theory for security.

d) Booth contends that a critical security theory must reveal the politics behind natural knowledge implying a critique of traditional theory. Revealing false naturalism provides the basis for progress, the capacity for emancipation will always be an illusory goal

Question 7

What elements of security studies does Booth distinguish Critical Security Theory from?

a) Critical Security theory has a theoretical commitment to the embracement of a set of ideas and to the continual exploration of the ontological, epistemological, and praxis of security, community, and emancipation in world politics. Constructivism is rejected on the grounds that it is an orientation and but not a theory.

b) Critical security has a political orientation that should be informed by the aim of enhancing security through emancipatory politics and multi-level networks of community activity grounded in common humanity. Post-structuralism is therefore inadequate because it provides no basis for political action

c) Feminism can be excluded from consideration because it can already be considered within Critical Theory, and thus within a critical security theory, having the theoretical commitment to the exploration of the question of what is real and what is knowledge and for examining the ways in which emancipation can be achieved. Feminism is regarded as a broad church in its own right.

d) All of the above

Question 8

What is the contribution to Krause to the construction of an understanding of the themes that "make" security studies?

a) Krause distinguished a methodological coherence that bound theorists under the broad school of Critical Security Studies. Knowledge of politics and the social world is objective, based on the conceptual premise that there is a divide between the social world and knowledge of that world. Natural science methodology is therefore transferable to the social sciences, the purpose of theory essentially being explanation in terms of generalized causal claims.

b) Krause was able to determine the conceptual underpinnings of critical literature; firstly that principal actors, e.g. states are not mutually constituted through social life and political practices; and secondly that the structures of world politics are unchanging and determining having distinct interests. Krause was thusly able to distinguish Critical Security Studies from being tainted by constructivism.

c) Traditional security studies take both threats and responses as given and the precondition for security analysis, the state as the referent object. Critical Security Studies research program analyses the way in which threats, and responses to threats, are constructed socially, an extension of which is the exploration of the construction of the referent object.

d) Military responses to security threats are considered to be natural, an inevitable feature of the unchanging structures of world politics. Threats and responses are given and those givens produce the need for security analysis: there are threats, which are military in nature, and the responses are military responses. It is at this point that security studies becomes possible as the study of threats, use, and control of military force, either to pose a threat, potentially or actually, or to respond to an existential threat.

Question 9

What are the themes that make post-structuralism a different field of study and why is it criticized?

a) One of the founding assumptions of Critical Security Studies: that theories about the world constitute that world and thus that theory, including security theory has political effects. The consequence is that theory is the product of the system, and that analyses of the agent of security and the referent object is produced by its own practices.

b) Central to the political and critical nature of post-structural literature is the idea of fostering an ethos of democracy and an ethos of critique which is finite and attainable. It is to this end that we must strive, but one that can only be met under the conditions prescribed, that of true democracy.

c) A central notion of critique is to provide an answer to the problem of what it means to be critical. This invariably raises the question of revealing the interest behind knowledge claims with the goal of social change, what is accepted as the end of theory: that the practical and contextual understandings inform to whom knowledge claims serve.

d) Post structuralism accepts the form and foundations for knowledge claims that dominate the security studies debate by embracing overarching narratives and accepting the fact that knowledge claims are always unstable and contingent. This has brought it into confrontation with the critical studies community, having little to contribute to the understanding of the ways in which knowledge is constructed.

Question 10

In what ways might the idea of a democracy and ethos of post-structuralism provide guidance for a progressive political security in the contemporary world?

a) Central to the purpose of post-structural writing is the critical purpose of fostering an ethos of democracy. Destabilization of truths, and the unveiling of the contingency and nature of production was the critical means by which true democracy could be attained.

b) The idea of fostering an ethos of democracy is central to the notion of critique: the attainment of contextual and practical understanding of who knowledge claims serve. Only then can the purpose of the critique be realized

c) The idea of fostering an ethos of democracy is central to the notion of critique in the post-structuralism project. The critical process however provides the answer of what it means to be critical by revealing the interests behind knowledge claims to realize the goal of emancipation and social change.

d) Just as democracy is an elusive project to attain, it is an ethos to be fostered. Post-structural writing regards its critical purpose to be the fostering an ethos of critique, always working to destabilize accepted truths, and unveiling their contingency and the nature of their production. It is not a finite project but a process in which to be constantly engaged.

Oxford University Press, Online Resource Centre, Chapter 04.