Contesting Security (PRIO New Security Studies)

This book aims to address the issue of what the extent to which the 'logic of security', which underpins securitization, can be contained, rolled back or dismantled.

One obstacle to studying how and whether security can be contested is perhaps the entrenched discussions between proponents of desecuritization and students of emancipation. Moreover, within each camp, scholars disagree, often strongly, upon the meaning of the concept they use and upon what it entails in practice. Recently, two new concepts have been invoked in order to capture different modalities of contesting the logic of security, namely resistance and resilience. As useful as such concepts might be, though, they put forward their own interpretations and generally ignore others. One aim of this volume is to bring different approaches that aim to counter security logic to confront one another and substantiate their respective analytical value, through empirical evidence.

The book comprises four sections, each investigating one specific modality of contesting security: desecuritization, emancipation, resistance and resilience. The overriding objective of this volume is to clearly map out the different ways in which a dominant register of meaning that shapes a specific security formation is debased. These strategies are examined, compared and assessed, in different political and cultural environments.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, securitisation theory, social theory, and IR in general.

Thierry Balzacq is Professor of Political Science at the University of Namur and Visiting Professor at the University of Louvain, in Belgium. He is editor of Securitization Theory (Routledge, 2011) and The External Dimension of EU Justice and Home Affairs (2009).