Guest editors’ introduction: practices of security and the political

Autor: Stephan Davidshofer, Francesco Ragazzi
Rok vydání: 2007
Předmět:
Zdroj: Journal of International Relations and Development. 10:327-331
ISSN: 1581-1980
1408-6980
Popis: More than 2 years have passed since the first ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe’ conference was organized in June 2005 in Paris and the moment in which this special issue of the Journal of International Relations and Development (JIRD) goes to press. In the meantime, what was initially conceived as a one-time training school for both junior and senior academics interested in critical scholarship on security has developed both into a research network and a collective author. The author — the ‘c.a.s.e. collective’ — has published a first article (c.a.s.e. collective 2006) that has already generated a set of responses (Behnke 2007; Salter 2007; Sylvester 2007; Walker 2007) and a response to the critics (c.a.s.e. collective 2007). The collective article, co-written by a group of 25 scholars and conceived as a manifesto, proposed an overview of the main developments in the field of critical scholarship on security, proceeding from the encounters that occurred between a set of like-minded academics throughout the 1990s. The piece argued that these encounters, combined with a set of institutional factors, provided for the constitution of a mostly European space for critically engaging with contemporary practices of (in)securitization (c.a.s.e. collective 2007). Four broad lines of research were suggested: the study of the effects of the so-called widening of the security agenda to encompass other fields of practice (such as development), the relation between the management of insecurity and the management of risk, the political implications of security practices with regard to the question of exceptionalism and relations between security practices and the ‘politics of belonging’ (c.a.s.e. collective 2006: 460–72). Parallel to these lines of research, the manifesto develops a reflection on the position of the ‘critical’ scholar within what is termed the ‘science-policy nexus’. This special issue of JIRD intends to develop some of these lines of reflection. The featured articles constitute either direct outputs of the initial 2005 conference (Jeandesboz 2007; Olsson 2007), or correlated reflections
Databáze: OpenAIRE