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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.