Lecture: Post Structural security: subjectivity and identity (01/9, kl 10-12) Room 419

This lecture will further discuss post structural understandings of security (and of warring). Emphasis will be placed on how security and subjectivity (and identity) can be seen as co-constitutive. Which subjects are seen as threatening and which as 'enemy''? How do discourses of danger work? Can an identity ever be secured; can a subject ever be secured? If not, how then can we think about the promise of security or of peace?

HT2022 1231 Post structuralism security PP.pdf

Study questions:

Bilgin (2010) discusses different "approaches to the study of identity/security dynamics" . Discuss some of these. How are they alike? How are they different?
Explain what David Campbell means by 'foreign policy' in relation to the workings of 'discourses of danger' (as explained by Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2021).
Discuss the workings of 'discourses of exceptionalism' (as explained by Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2021).
Stern (2006) writes about the ’paradox of (in)security’. How can we understand this paradox? And how does this understanding differ from a traditional understanding of 'security dilemma'?

Mandatory Reading:

Bilgin, Pinar (2010). “Identity/Security” in J. Peter Burgess (Ed) The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies., Routledge: 81-89.
Peoples, Columba & Nick Vaughan-Williams (2021). Chapter 3: “Post Structuralism and International Political Sociology” in Columba Peoples & Nick Vaughan-Williams. Critical Security Studies. An Introduction. 3rd edition. L ondon: Routledge.
Stern, Maria (2006). ‘We’ the subject: The Power and Failure of Insecurity. Security Dialogue37 (2): 187-205.

Suggested Reading:

Bousquet, Antoine, Jairus Grove, and Nisha Shah. (2020) ‘Becoming War: Towards a Martial Empiricism.’ Security Dialogue, 51(2–3), pp. 99–118. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010619895660.
Roe, Paul (2004). “Securitization and Minority Rights: Conditions of Desecuritization”, Security Dialogue35 (3): 279-294