ULUSLARARASI GÜVENLİK - Deneme Sınavı - 13

• Politics is governed by objective laws which have their root in human nature.

• The key to understanding international politics is the concept of interest defined in terms of power.

• The forms and nature of state power will vary in time, place and context but the concept of interest remains consistent.

• Universal moral principles do not guide state behavior, although this does not rule out an awareness of the moral significance of political action.

• Moral aspirations are specific to a particular nation; there is no universally agreed set of moral principles.

• The political sphere is autonomous

In May 1994, a small conference was held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies and Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies. It brought together from around the world a variety of scholars with interests in security and with concern about new security studies in the early post-Cold War era. This conference title was used as the title of the book, edited by Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams. In their 1997 book, Critical Security Studies: Concept and Cases, Krause and Williams suggested a broad definition of critical security studies which covered all “new approaches” from Constructivism through Feminism and “Copenhagen School” to Poststructuralism. 

Krause and Williams helped shape critical security studies as a pluralistic field. In addition, they pose such questions to open a broad and complex agenda for security studies. Questioning the referent object of security, ‘who or what is to be secured’, Krause and Williams challenged the traditional state-centric understanding of security and instead put forward the individual as the object of security.

The term Critical Security Studies is also used to refer to the coherent theoretical school created mostly by the endeavor of Professors Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones, Andrew Linklater and their colleagues from the Aberystwyth University. Booth and Wyn Jones developed a brand of ‘Critical Security Studies’ that challenged the definition of security in terms of military threats to the state, and instead linked the study of security to human emancipation.

Critical Security Studies contributes to security studies by broadening and deepening the concept of security. T

Referent Object: It is an object that is taken as the focus for analysis in security studies. As to this concept, there are two main approaches to the security: state-centric security (the state is the referent object) and human-centric approach (human is the referent object).

Traditional Security Studies: It refers to Realist, Liberal, Peace Studies and Strategic Studies perspectives in the study of security. All of them prioritize the state as the referent object of security and focus on military threats to the security of the state.

Broadening: The broadening security agenda refers to Barry Buzan’s sectoral analysis that the security agenda includes not only military sector issues but also political, economic, societal and environmental issues.

Deepening: The state is not only the referent object of security but it also includes human individuals, institutions and groups.

Positivism: It claims that social sciences can be built upon the same model as natural sciences. Scientific principles such as objectivity, verification/falsification, and generalization can adapt to the study of society.

Post-Positivism: It rejects the idea that it is possible to analyze the natural world and the social world in the same way. There is no objective view

Bary Buzan is a scholar from the Copenhagen School.