ASTK12140U Security Studies: Approaches, Debates, Cases

Security Studies is one of the main subfields of the discipline of International Relations, but it is also a field that draws upon other disciplines, including History, Economics, Development Studies, Anthropology, and Political Theory. Security Studies is devoted to the study of threats, violence and force, and when it was founded in the years following the end of World War II, it focussed on states, alliances and military threats. In the 70 years that have passed since then, Security Studies has grown to include approaches that study non-military threats across a wide range of issues, for example, the environment, the economy, religion, gender, cyber issues, and national identity. One also finds approaches that move from the security problems that states face to the insecurity issues of individuals, ethnic groups, women, the Global South, and other non-state entities. Security Studies is impacted by events in the real world, but also by trends and debates in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Like in the Social Sciences more generally, a key question in Security Studies is that of epistemology: how do we know whether something is a threat? And what solutions should be devised once a threat has been identified?

This course provides an introduction to the field of Security Studies, the context from which it arose, and the factors and challenges that have impacted its evolution. The course emphasizes that Security Studies is home to a wide range of approaches, many of which disagree passionately on how security should be conceptualized, who ‘security’ should be for, and how it should be studied. The course will also provide an introduction to the main issues on the contemporary Security Studies agenda, for example, conventional military issues such as nuclear proliferation, epidemic diseases like HIV/AIDS, the security-development nexus, and the role of the media in representing threats and insecurity.