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This chapter explores what a critical approach to UN peacekeeping entails and highlights the valuable contributions of Critical Security Studies (CSS) to capture the nature and significance of peace operations in international politics. It shows how CSS questions the values and representations that inform UN peacekeeping and the political order that peacekeeping interventions shape, promote or sustain. It further discusses how CSS unpacks peacekeeping (often mundane and daily) practices and their political and social implications and takes into account non-traditional security issues. The chapter then relies on CSS theoretical and methodological tools to study the specific case of the rise of environmental practices in UN peacekeeping. Drawing on the concepts of securitisation and environmentalisation, it demonstrates how UN peacekeeping has been framed as relevant to environmental policies, while contributing to a broader process of securitisation of the environment.

Security Studies: An Introduction, 4th edition, is the most comprehensive textbook available on the subject, providing students with in-depth coverage of traditional and critical approaches and an essential grounding in the debates, frameworks, and issues of the contemporary security agenda.

AbstractFrom a critical security studies perspective – and non-traditional security studies more broadly – is the concept of human security something which should be taken seriously? Does human security have anything significant to offer security studies? Both human security and critical security studies challenge the state-centric orthodoxy of conventional international security, based upon military defence of territory against 'external' threats. Both also challenge neorealist scholarship, and involve broadening and deepening the security agenda. Yet critical security studies have not engaged substantively with human security as a distinct approach to non-traditional security. This article explores the relationship between human security and critical security studies and considers why human security arguments – which privilege the individual as the referent of security analysis and seek to directly influence policy in this regard – have not made a significant impact in critical security studies. The article suggests a number of ways in which critical and human security studies might engage. In particular, it suggests that human security scholarship must go beyond its (mostly) uncritical conceptual underpinnings if it is to make a lasting impact upon security studies, and this might be envisioned as Critical Human Security Studies (CHSS).

Barry Buzan & Lene Hansen (2009) note that the first glimmer of concern with women and security within international relations and peace studies was a site of tension: in the 1970s and into the 1980s, women were not on the agenda of international relations at all. Peace theorists embraced the concept of structural violence but also excluded women from their discussions. There are now new inclusion/exclusion tensions within feminist international relations and its security wing. In this article I address two tensions: (1) concern to maintain the stance that security is a peace issue as some venture systematically into feminist war studies, and (2) a tendency to issue harsh judgements of feminists whose views challenge the accommodation of cultural difference. I briefly consider examples of these two tensions and suggest ways to work with and beyond the structure of international relations to 'evolve' (feminist) security studies further.

This textbook introduces students to the sub-field of critical security studies through a detailed yet accessible survey of emerging theories and practices. This 3rd edition contains two new chapters - on 'Ontological Security' and '(In)Security and the everyday' - and has been fully revised and updated. Written in an accessible and clear manner, Critical Security Studies: offers a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to critical security studies locates critical security studies within the broader context of social and political theory evaluates fundamental theoretical positions in critical security studies against backdrop of new security challenges. The book is divided into two main parts. Part I, 'Approaches', surveys the newly extended and contested theoretical terrain of critical security studies: Constructivist theories, Critical Theory, Feminist and gender approaches, Postcolonial perspectives, Poststructuralism and International Political Sociology, Ontological security, and Securitisation theory. Part II, 'Issues', examines how these various theoretical approaches have been put to work in critical considerations of environmental and planetary security, health, human security and development, technology and warfare, migration and border security, (in)security and the everyday, and terror, risk and resilience. The historical and geographical scope of the book is deliberately broad and each of the chapters in Part II concretely illustrates one or more of the approaches discussed in Part I, with clear internal referencing allowing the text to act as a holistic learning tool for students.

This reader brings together key contributions from many of the leading scholars in the field, offering students an informed overview of the most significant work in security studies. The editors chart the development of the key theoretical and empirical debates in security studies in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, introducing the ideas of the most influential 'past masters' and contemporary thinkers on security in the UK, US and elsewhere.

This reader brings together key contributions from many of the leading scholars in the field, offering students an informed overview of the most significant work in security studies.The editors chart the development of the key theoretical and empirical debates in security studies in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, introducing the ideas of the most influential 'past masters' and contemporary thinkers on security in the UK, US and elsewhere. The book is divided into five areas: What is Security? Security Paradigms Security Dimensions and Issues Security Frameworks and Actors The Future o

A concluding chapter outlines a critical theory of security that has the potential to meet the challenges of today's complex world. The conceptual framework is based on the critical theory tradition established by the Frankfurt School & the radical tradition in international relations theory. Four themes that emerge from critical theory tradition are: 1) knowledge is a social process; 2) there are serious flaws in naturalism & reductionism; 3) critical theory provides a basis for political/social progress: 4) the test of theory is emancipation. Four themes that emerge from radical international relations tradition are: A) human society is its own invention; B) politics among nations has been dominated by regressive theories; C) the state & other institutions must be denaturalized; D) progressive world order values should inform an international politics committed to improving world security. An examination of the contending approaches of feminism, postmodernism/poststructuralism, securitization studies, & constructivism is followed by a look at the importance of pluralism & the policy-relevant nature of this framework of critical security theory. J. Lindroth

Security Studies: Critical Perspectives introduces the analysis of security from critical and interdisciplinary perspectives. Taking a student-centred approach to understanding contemporary security themes and cases, it provides an accessible set of analytic steps so that students develop the critical thinking skills and confidence to ask important questions about security and our worlds in contemporary politics. Common-sense security assumptions that reproduce forms of oppression and domination are revealed and their justifications decentred while perspectives inclusive of class, gender and sexualities, ethnicity and race, religion, disability, culture and ideology, political belonging, and the global south are introduced. In doing so, the authors combine critical analysis with concrete empirical issues that connect students to the social and political worlds around them.