1 Defining International Security Studies International Security Studies (ISS) grew out of debates over how to pro- tect the state against external and internal threats after the Second World War. Security became its watchword (Wolfers, 1952; Yergin, 1978), both distinguishing ISS from earlier thinking and the disciplines of War Studies and Military History, and, as it evolved, serving as the linking concept connecting an increasingly diverse set of research programmes. Look- ing back on more than sixty years of academic writing on international security, the first pertinent question for an intellectual history of ISS is to define what makes up the sub-field and where the boundary zones between it and adjacent academic disciplines are located. To delineate ISS is unfortunately not as straightforward an exercise as one might wish. The label 'international security' was not adopted from the outset, but only gradually became accepted, and there is no univer- sally agreed definition of what ISS comprises, and hence no accepted archive of 'ISS-documents' that define our object of study. As this book will demonstrate, not only is there a large body of ISS literature, it is one whose themes, discussions and participants change across time and place. The composition of ISS has mainly been taken for granted, with the con- sequence that little self-reflection on what made up ISS or its boundaries has been produced. The absence of a universal definition of what makes up ISS means that ISS has at times become a site for disciplinary politics with different perspectives arguing that they should be included while others (usually different sorts of widening perspectives) should not. Copyright @ 2009. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. The delineation of ISS is complicated by the fact that as time goes by we get a different perspective on what falls in and what does not. To paraphrase Foucault's genealogical understanding of history as always being told from the point of the present, the fact that we tell the story of ISS from a 2008 perspective means that we look at a field which has some strikingly different preoccupations, both substantive and epistemological, from those that dominated it in, say, 1972. And it would have been easier to delineate ISS had it always been explicitly centred on the concept Buzan, Barry, and Lene Hansen. The Evolution of International Seci&ity Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/anu/detail.action?docID=461087. Created from anu on 2019-01-15 02:36:31.
DEFINING INTERNATIONAL SECURITY STUDIES 9 of security. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Indeed, after its first decade of explicit theoretical and conceptual innovation, the field's mainstream carried out its work without much conceptual reflection (Baldwin, 1997). During the 'golden age' of Strategic Studies it would have been easy to think that 'strategy' was the dominant concept, albeit strategy now dominated by civilian rather than military thinkers. Thus in 1983, Buzan (1983: 3) could point out that security was an 'underdeveloped concept' and 'seldom addressed in terms other than the policy interests of particular actors or groups, and