Doctoral Training School “Critical Approaches to Security in Europe", 16-19 June, 2005, Paris
Tuesday, 23 August 2005
In the 1990s critical approaches to security changed the debates in security studies. They introduced a rich conceptual debate about the meaning of security and the political construction of insecurity. Distinctively European approaches to security emerged focusing on the concept of security as an object of reflection rather than as a given. They shared a broad sociological and political approach and were all based on a reflectivist and constructivist epistemology. Their research interests ranged from the discursive construction of security issues (securitisation) to the merging of internal and external security, and emancipation from the concept of national security.
To further the development of these critical approaches to security in Europe we organized a 3-days European doctoral training school in Paris in June 2005. The School was part of COST Action A24 on ‘The Evolving Social Construction of Threats’ and was organized in collaboration with CHALLENGE and the Centre d’Etudes Européennes at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. The European Scientific Fund’s COST Action A24 is a network of researchers working on the social construction of threats in the areas of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and privatization of security. It draws on researchers from 17 European countries (http://www.cost-a24.info). CHALLENGE is a framework VI programme researching developments in security and liberty in the European Union. 21 institutions participate in 14 work packages (http://www.libertysecurity.org). The Centre d’Etudes Européennes is the Center for European Studies associated to Sciences Po Paris. It is directed by Prof. Renaud Dehouss.
32 doctoral students based at universities in 11 different European Countries participated. 18 of them gave papers. Seven researchers of the COST Action A24 network and three non-COST experts were discussants.
The school opened with four short keynote introductions. Ole Wæver discussed differences in the security studies field in Europe and the US. Didier Bigo set out the sociological, philosophical and conceptual questions that the different critical approaches share. Jef Huysmans and Michael C. Williams related the social and political construction of insecurity and the way these processes are theorised to political developments. While Jef Huysmans located differences between the critical approaches in security studies within distinct understandings of the nature of politics in the European Union, Michael C. Williams contextualised their political importance in relation to the development of neo-conservatism in the US.
Two days and a half of presentations and discussions followed the keynote lectures. The papers discussed limits of and opportunities for progressing European critical approaches to security. They covered a wide range of highly topical political and conceptual questions:
Language and context in the social construction of insecurity
Three schools of security studies and their understanding of politics
The role of experts and expert knowledge
EU, internal security and migration
Neighbourhood policy and securitization
External security policy and the notion of field
Security, citizenship and minorities
Citizenship and security
Power/knowledge: theory and practice, scholars and politics.
The training school explored the genealogy and the structuration of the security field as a specific domain at the crossroad of International Relations and Political Sociology which can be labelled International Political Sociology. Opposed to the naturalised and unquestioned discourse of the ‘national interest’, the critical approaches discussed in this training school focus their analysis on uncovering taken for granted processes of social construction of threats and risks.
Both the emergence of leading European critical approaches to security, their applications and new conceptual developments were discussed at length. The different security approaches were also used to great effect to discuss the social construction of European security issues. These debates focused on the mutually constitutive relationship between security and identity, as sustained by the definition of threats and risks, on social processes of making and unmaking of boundaries, and on the ordering processes, read through securitization and/or governmentality. The discussion touched upon a number of key questions that define critical social constructivist analyses of insecurity. Who has what capacity to define threats and/or risks? Which acts, processes and technologies sustain conceptions of insecurity? Whose insecurities are responded to and whose remain marginalised?
Also the political and normative dimensions of studying the social construction of threats and risk received a good deal of attention. Here the debates covered question like: how are the critical approaches inscribed by different understandings of political and governmental power and practice? How to analyse the relationship between politics and academic analysis? How can critical approaches to the study of the social construction of insecurities translate into public knowledge and compete with or offer additional knowledge to the way in which think tanks and other public policy bodies approach security questions?
The COST Training School turned out to be an excellent format to sustain the development of a European intellectual framework for the critical study of the political and social construction of insecurity. Its combinations of lectures, papers by young scholars, open discussion and opportunities for contacts worked extremely well. We have set up a website and discussion forum to support a more continuous debate on these issues. If you would like to access the forum, please send an e-mail to
or
or visit the website http://critical.libertysecurity.org.
Didier Bigo, Stephan Davidshofer, Jef Huysmans, Francesco Ragazzi.
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