The enormous changes and instability generated by the end of the Cold War are triggering new mass movements of people across the globe. These refugee exoduses are commanding the attention of high-level policy-makers not only for humanitarian reasons and because of the increasing numbers involved, but also because of the serious consequences that mass displacements have for national stability, international security and the emerging new world order.
(Loescher 1992: 3) The revolutions of 1989 were precipitated by mass people movements from East to West. Within the next two decades not only East-West, but also South-South and South-South-North migration seem set to become an increasingly acute concern. … Uncontrolled mass migration (…) could threaten social cohe-sion, international solidarity, and peace.
(Widgren 1990: 749)
In the early 1990s security studies turned some of its attention away from arms control, nuclear deterrence, the role of conventional arms, the rise of the electronic battlefield, military alliances, etc. to include a wider range of policy questions.
The environment started featuring prominently. Also migration and refugee flows got a fair share of the attention, as the quotations above indicate.
These changes mirrored the transformation in Western political agendas at the end of the Cold War. But they were also part of a debate about what kind of secu-rity issues have priosecu-rity in the study of international relations and how they are to be researched. This debate was not new but gained a new momentum in the 1990s. The combination of changing political agendas, a search for a less military and inter-state focused understanding of security in strategic studies (e.g. Buzan 1983; Haftendorn 1991; Krause and Williams 1997b; Matthews 1989; Nye 1989;
Nye and Lynn-Jones 1988; Tickner 1992; Ullman 1983), and epistemological debates in international relations theory (e.g. Keohane 1988; Smith et al. 1996) resulted in an identity crisis in strategic and security studies.
The question of what security means was a contentious issue in this context.
Some conceptual analysis of security saw again the light of day (e.g. Baldwin 1997;
Buzan 1991; Huysmans 1998c; Wæver 1995) but the central stake of the debate was what kind of threat relations could be covered by the concept of security. This debate became known as the widening debate in which people argued for or against moving beyond inter-state relations and including non-military security questions, such as population movement and environmental degradation (Krause and Williams 1997b). However, some tried to shift the question of what security meant away from its focus on acceptable threat definitions and towards the question of what it actually meant to apply security language in these non-military policy areas (e.g. Dalby 1997; Der Derian 1993; Dillon 1996; Wæver 1995). While the widen-ing debate largely focused on the implications of addwiden-ing the environment and migration to the security agenda for the concept of security, they concentrated on the implications of using security language for the definition and governance of migration and the environment. The focal point moved from threats to the ratio-nality or logic of rendering events intelligible as security events. Security was con-ceptualized as a discourse that could (re)frame policy questions in a security way.
This chapter sets out both the background against which the question of the meaning of security became a contentious issue in the study of international rela-tions and the two different interpretarela-tions of what this question was about. While the widening debate has played an important role in opening up the field of security studies and in giving the question of the meaning of security the prominence it deserves, the chapter supports the idea that the meaning of security does not pri-marily depend on the kind of threats one includes but on the nature of the framing that security practice applies.
Identity crisis in the field of security knowledge
Until recently it would have been unusual for policy-makers even to consider classifying population movements and refugee flows as national security prob-lem. The common perception was that these were humanitarian concerns, demanding a humanitarian response. It is now clear, however, that we are living in an era in which fundamental political and economic changes in the international system result in large-scale movements of people which affect political, economic and strategic developments world-wide. Indeed, it was the flood of refugees from East to West Germany in 1989 which helped to bring down the Berlin Wall and generate the most significant transformation in international relations since World War II.
(IISS 1991: 37–38) In 1991 this was a surprising statement coming from an international security think tank. For decades strategic studies had focused almost exclusively on the doctrinal and strategic aspects of conducting war, military alliances, and manag-ing military threats in the international state system. Findmanag-ing migration in a lead-ing yearbook in security thinklead-ing is kind of unexpected. The real surprise, however, is how it introduced migration as a security question. It uses the role of East German refugees in bringing down the Berlin Wall to raise an awareness
that population flows can pose a threat to the security and stability of both nation-states and the international order (also e.g. Weiner 1995). Now, more than a decade and a half later selecting this particular example may read as one among many. But at a time when many were celebrating the breakdown of the Berlin Wall and concentrated on building a new era of democracy, peace and unity (e.g.
CSCE 1990), turning this symbol of liberation into an index of a new security threat was bewildering.
It is not exceptional for security thinking to do this but it does raise the question of why this field of knowledge so easily turned forces of liberation into indications of new destructive developments. Is it a typical step for a field of study that made worst-case analysis and prudence its professional code? Certainly. But there is more to it. The relation between freedom and security is an uneasy one in Western societies. There is an assumption that there is always a trade-off between them: too much freedom leads to increased insecurity while too much security reduces freedom (see chapter 6). Security experts in international relations tend to worry more about the former direction of the tradeoff. They are predisposed to turning radical manifestations of freedom into questions of disorder and increased insecurity.
More important for this chapter, however, is that turning one of the most pow-erful symbols of a new era of peace and democracy into a symbol of new dangers is a potent move if one seeks to legitimate the continuous relevance of security thinking. After the end of the Cold War strategic studies indeed experienced an identity crisis. Not only NATO, the CSCE (Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and other security institutions of the Cold War faced a need to rede-fine themselves (Fierke 1998, 1999). More generally, the field of knowledge within which many security experts worked faced a crisis about its raison d’être (e.g. Bigo 1995). The bipolar world characterized by a military-ideological split between East and West was the taken for granted background against which many of the experts had professed their knowledge for decades. The possibility for war between the Eastern and Western alliance and especially its nuclear dimensions functioned to a large extent as the ground from which the key security questions emerged (Klein 1994). This made it possible, for example, to characterize the Cold War as ‘the long peace’ (Gaddis 1986), despite hundreds of thousands of people dying in wars in ‘The Third World’.
After 1989 this framework rapidly faded. With the danger of a confrontation between Western and communist armies vanishing, military aspects of security questions lost their prior dominant status. The hierarchy of threats in the security field broke down thereby opening the field for a redefinition of core security con-cerns. With it the narrative through which the field of security experts reproduced its identity broke down. The bipolar setting offered the field a background history and implicit understanding of its expertise and what it contributed to this history.
After the dramatic transformation in the main empirical references of this narra-tive – e.g. the Soviet Union as a superpower – it could not be reproduced in an unproblematic, quasi-ritualistic way. Pretending that nothing fundamentally had changed – as many in the security studies community largely succeeded in doing
for almost the entire second half of the 1980s by interpreting the changes Gorbachev instigated as new tactics for an old strategy – was no longer possible without raising serious debate within the field.1
The study of military aspects of security did not fully disappear but a complex and rapid reorientation of the political and intellectual field happened in the wake of the Cold War. These changes were of course not simply driven by changes in the political agendas and public debate. They were interwoven with strong per-sonal and institutional interests. What were security experts going to write about after the issues that had been taken for granted, such as arms control of strategic nuclear weapons, became rapidly outdated – or, at least moved down the list of political priorities? How could think tanks and academic research apply their knowledge to new security terrains? Was a career in strategic studies still a viable strategy? What kind of security knowledge has the best chance of attracting research funding?
These questions are not introduced here to suggest that the ‘new’ security experts necessarily consciously and/or cynically introduced new threats as means of saving or building a career. The field of knowledge in which they operate often requires of them to identify threats and to work relatively close to and with the people who politically define security agendas. It is part of their job to identify new security phenomena and define strategies to cope with them. Therefore they are often trained and, thus, predisposed to looking for security questions.
Rather these questions are important as an indication that the collapse of an institutionalized understanding of the security environment generates a complex game of producing new, legitimate security knowledge. ‘Legitimate security knowledge’ refers to security knowledge which one can profess as a security expert with a degree of seriousness and without being labelled an idealist or a fool.
Although the pressure for including non-military threats such as environmen-tal issues, migration and economic vulnerability gained momentum after 1989, the intellectual ground for it had been developed before. Throughout the 1980s several attempts were made in academic and non-academic milieu to explicitly question the dominance of military threats in the field of security knowledge.
These moves followed the development of peace research since the late 1960s (e.g. Guzzini and Jung 2003; Lawler 1994) and the emergence of questions of economic vulnerability and complex interdependence after the oil crises of the 1970s (Keohane and Nye 1977). In the academic environment, Barry Buzan’s work of the 1980s is among the most exemplary. From the early 1980s onwards Buzan argued for developing security studies as a new, separate area of research (Buzan 1983, 1984). On the one hand, it would cover a wider range of security issues than the dominantly military and technological agenda of strategic studies (Buzan 1987). On the other hand, it would be narrower than peace research which tended to extend security issues to the progressive securing of a better social order (Galtung 1969). This academic push for a wider interpretation of security ques-tions dovetailed nicely with the pressure for including non-military dimensions of security coming from critical social movements and other political actors (Wæver et al. 1989; Walker 1988).
These developments provided some of the intellectual and political groundwork for the rapid widening of the security concept in security studies after 1989.
A number of people who had worked on or were interested in widening quickly acted on the opportunities which were created by shifts in both political and insti-tutional agendas in the early 1990s to push their case. A good indication of this was the swiftness with which Buzan’s timely second edition of People, States and Fear (1991) became a new classic in the field.
The intellectual, institutional and political developments outlined so far were the background against which the question of the meaning of security began to show up more sharply. After the end of the Cold War the field of security knowl-edge and institutions in international relations found itself in an identity crisis.
For some this was an opportunity to seriously reframe the field in the direction of a much wider understanding of the security problematique in international rela-tions. For others widening their interests was a necessity if they wanted to survive as security experts or institutions in the new political climate. For still others the crisis was an unfortunate development that should be contained as much as pos-sible. At the heart of it all was a contest of what security meant in international relations. The next section shows how attempts to widen security knowledge move the meaning of security from a largely unproblematic issue to a key question in the development of security studies.
Widening security: Stakes in a contest of concept definition
Despite being a central issue of concern in the study of international relations, there have been very few conceptual analyses of ‘security’ before the late 1980s.
In 1991 Buzan could still title a section of the introduction to People, States and Fear ‘Security as an underdeveloped concept’ (Buzan 1991: 3). David Baldwin, looking for a conceptual analysis of security, writes as late as 1997: ‘It would be an exaggeration to say that conceptual analysis of security began and ended with Wolfers’ article in 1952 – but not much of one’ (Baldwin 1997). Ken Booth remarked that ‘ “security” had always been the transcendent value of strategic studies, but it was an essentially unexplored concept’ (Booth 1994: 112).
This absence may sound remarkable but the meaning of a defining concept of research is not a problem as long as experts share an implicit understanding of the legitimate forms of security research. This seems indeed to have been the case in security studies. Michael Williams and Keith Krause observed that ‘to be a member of the security studies community has traditionally meant that one already knows what is to be studied’ (Williams and Krause 1997: ix). This con-sensus implied a wider philosophical and theoretical framework (Booth 1979;
Klein 1994; Williams 1992, 1993) but at its heart was the view that theirs was an expertise about the nature of military threats to citizens of a state or to an alliance of states in an anarchical interstate system (Krause and Williams 1997b:
36–43).
Raising alternative views on the nature of threats has the potential to make this implicit consensus visible. If done successfully it can turn the unspoken agreement
about the meaning of security into an explicit question. To clarify this, let’s start from a few examples of how refugees and immigrants can be presented as a security question. First example: the refugee community of Rwandese Tutsis who were forced into exile after 1959 turned into a militant force fighting the Rwandese regime.2Here the security question resembles closely traditional understandings of national security. Refugees are an armed threat to a political regime and its sovereignty claims. Second example: In the US and the EU some frame Muslim immigrants as a cultural threat. They are interpreted as representatives of a com-peting civilization whose values and everyday manners risk undermining Western civilization. This form of threat analysis is more difficult to accommodate within the traditional consensus. The threat is not primarily of a military kind. The focus is on the expression of values in everyday life, such as the ritual slaughtering of sheep, the wearing of a veil, etc. Neither is the physical life of citizens or the sov-ereignty of the state threatened. It is rather a pre-supposed cultural homogeneity of Western societies that is challenged by the immigrants.3 Third example:
refugees who fear persecution or whose daily life has been suddenly disrupted knock on the metaphorical door of the European Union. Here the danger shifts from a community facing an external or internal threat to individuals whose human security is threatened.4The ones in danger are not the citizens of the member states of the European Union but individuals fearing starvation or persecution on the basis of race, religion or political opinion.
While these examples identify quite distinct security questions, in ordinary lan-guage it is not problematic to refer to them in security terms. Using the notion of security to refer to events that do not directly concern military threats to states and their citizens seems to happen all the time. One could argue that for security studies including such a diversity of threat relations would not necessarily have to be a problem either as long as the security studies community is willing to accommo-date them as legitimate objects of research. Such an argument, however, ignores that indiscriminately expanding an area of research has unfortunate consequences for a field of knowledge. Is the knowledge required for each of these three exam-ples the same? How does understanding an armed insurgence of a refugee com-munity compare to interpreting refugees claiming asylum or the everyday life of immigrants challenging cultural patterns of an established population? Is there any equivalence between the security modality of these developments? These questions indicate that expanding the concept of security to a wide range of sub-stantively different problem areas makes it difficult to identify the specific kind of knowledge that the community of security experts develops. One of the central arguments against widening the security concept to non-military threats (e.g.
migration, global warming) and non-state referent objects that were threatened (e.g. humanity, cultural identity, individuals) was indeed that it undermined the intellectual coherence of the field of knowledge (Walt 1991: 213).
Disintegration has also an impact on the status of the knowledge it produces.
Its political and intellectual status depends to a considerable degree on being able to institutionally delineate a specific kind of knowledge, which is defined by the fault lines of the debates, the key concepts that inform the discussion, the policy
areas to which it relates, etc. This aspect can be seen at work in an interesting way in Marc Levy’s argument for a more narrow understanding of environmental security so that it would be possible to integrate it in the established security studies agendas.
He criticized Norman Myers’s attempt to formulate an environmental security agenda around a concept of ‘inner security that ultimately forms the bedrock of our being’ (Myers 1993: 16) in the following way:
It is possible to imagine such constructions of security, but they would take the discussion so far from the mainstream as to forswear any hope of linking environmental issues to the conventional security agenda.
(Levy 1995: 43–44) Levy’s article can be interpreted as a move to make environmental security acceptable to the traditional field of security studies so as to protect this field from the disintegrative effects of widening the concept of security. In addition it bene-fits environmental security knowledge by letting it share in the expert status that this institutionalized field can confer on ‘new’ security knowledge.
(Levy 1995: 43–44) Levy’s article can be interpreted as a move to make environmental security acceptable to the traditional field of security studies so as to protect this field from the disintegrative effects of widening the concept of security. In addition it bene-fits environmental security knowledge by letting it share in the expert status that this institutionalized field can confer on ‘new’ security knowledge.