Academic literature on the topic 'Critical security studies'

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a comprehensive challenge to dominant conceptions in Security Studies. Security has been approached as a political phenomenon, resulting from political assumptions and having political effects. The politicization of security has been pursued by a number of so-called ‘critical approaches,’ including ‘security as emancipation.’ The latter argues that security consists in removing or alleviating constraints upon the lives of individuals and groups – such as poverty, ill health, or lack of education. This thesis asks two questions: firstly, can the ‘security as emancipation’ approach, in its current formulation, deliver on its claims and promises, in the context of the effort of politicization in Security Studies? And secondly, if it is shown that there are weaknesses, in what ways can the analytical and normative outlook of security as emancipation be strengthened through an engagement with other resources in the literature? Chapters 1 and 2 establish the context in which the merits of security as emancipation must be judged. They conclude that an engagement with this approach must focus on the way it conceives the multiple connections between security and politics. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 pursue this insight, by focusing on the notions of reality, threat and power respectively. In each of these themes, the argument identifies gaps in security as emancipation and suggests theoretical reconsiderations based on an engagement with approaches and ideas – in the critical security literature and in social and political theory – that so far have been neglected or not examined sufficiently by this approach. This thesis aims to re-establish security as emancipation as a valid interlocutor within critical debates about security. It also aims to show that the dialogue between critical approaches is, not only possible, but beneficial to understanding the politicization of security.

This is a study of regional security in the Middle East from a Critical Security Studies perspective. The main aim of the thesis is to provide an account of the pasts, presents and futures of regional security in the Middle East cognisant of the relationships between the three in one's thinking as well as practices. This is achieved through the threefold structure of the thesis, which looks at Cold War pasts (Part I), post-Cold War presents (Part II) and possible futures (Part III). The thesis also has a set of more specific aims. First, it aims to present a critique of prevailing security discourses in theory and practice with reference to regional security in the Middle East and point to unfulfilled potential immanent in regional politics. Second, the thesis aims to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions and theories and practices of security. And finally, it aims to show how Critical Security Studies might allow one to think differently about the futures of regional security in the Middle East. The overall thesis is that the Critical Security Studies perspective presents a fuller account of regional security in the Middle East; it offers a comprehensive framework recognising the dynamic relationships between various dimensions and levels of security, as voiced by multiple referents.

<p>Utilizing Critical Theory, through its neo-Gramscian and Frankfurt School dimensions, as the theoretical framework, this study aims to explain how the institutions, such as the United Nations, of an international system transform together with the structure – the international system. More specifically our aim is to explain the lack of transformation of only one body, the Security Council, of that specific institution, the United Nations.</p><p>Analyzing the press releases of the United Nations General Assembly in 1996, 1997, 2000, and 2006 and examining 337 statements from the Member States through Critical Theory to be able understand and explain how and why it hasn’t been possible to reform, or transform, the United Nations Security Council in the last 14 years since the establishment of the Open-Ended Working Group as a group to particularly deal with the question of reform. The analysis suggests that the current debates in the United Nations concerning the reform of the Security Council is unable to produce a successful transformation of that body because it is not possible for an institution to finalize its own transformation independent from that of the structure as a whole.</p>

Security is widely recognized as an important property that is tightly interdependentwith safety in safety-critical systems. The goal of this thesis is to conduct case studies on the implications that security attacks may have on the safety of these systems.In these case studies, we formally model the design of a robot arm system, verify itssecurity against some potential attack scenarios, propose mitigation techniques andanalyze their effectiveness. In order to achieve a thorough knowledge about the current formal verification approaches and select a proper modeling language/tool, weconducted an extensive literature review. We performed this review following a wellknown approach proposed by Barbara Kitchenham. The procedure and outcomes ofthis review are detailed in this thesis. Based on the literature review, we chose TRebeca, (a timed extension of Rebeca), as the formal language to model the robot armsystem, attack scenarios and mitigation techniques. Rebeca is an actor-based modeling language with a Java-like syntax that is effectively used to model concurrent anddistributed systems. This language is supported by a full-featured IDE called Afra,which facilitates the development of (T)Rebeca models and verification of correctnessproperties (such as safety and security) on them. Among several functions providedby a robot arm system, we chose two important functions i.e., Stand Still Supervisionand Control Error Supervision, which we believe would be interesting for attackerstrying to get control over robot movements. In particular, attackers may maliciouslymanipulate the parameter values of these functions, which may lead to safety issues.In order to find suitable attack scenarios on these functions, we studied the mostimportant security protocols used in safety-critical industrial control systems. Weobserved that these systems are vulnerable to several attacks, and man-in-the-middleattack is among the most successful attacks on these systems. Based on this study,we devised two attack scenarios for each function and modeled them with TRebeca.To mitigate these attacks, we proposed a redundancy technique, whose effectivenesswas also assured by Afra.

This master's thesis analyses the roles that private security companies (PSCs) assume during United Nations (UN) peace missions. Following a literary review and contextual development of the PSC industry, this thesis makes use of a qualitative desktop study to examine five UN peace mission case studies in Africa in which PSCs were contracted to provide multiple roles for the UN. The case studies include UNAVEM, UNAMSIL, UNMIL, UNAMID, and MONUSCO. Each case study features a historical overview of the country's conflict, the UN mandate-related developments prior to and during the UN peace mission, the roles performed by PSCs in the peace operation, as well as a critical analysis of such PSC involvement. A subsequent discussion on the UNs use of PSCs finds that contracting provides the organisation with cost savings, more efficient operational capabilities, and the evasion of domestic sensitivities with regards to member state involvement in peace missions. The use of contractors, however, does also highlight the UNs vetting deficiencies in terms of the use of illegitimate companies, procurement issues - especially favouritism and corruption, and grave accountability problems associated with criminal prosecution mechanisms and the use of force by PSCs in the field. The thesis concludes that the reliance on contractors impacts the UNs peace mission endeavours in terms of increased militarization, a neo-colonial facet, and a gradual move towards privatized peacekeeping.

This paper seeks ways of understanding the new challenges of a rapidly changing world, and does so by attempting to resist the disciplinary power of orthodox research methodology, by critically and reflexively inquiring into the politics of (in)security, and ultimately, by seeking novelty. It begins by first declaring its ethical and methodological starting points, then draws out an assemblage of contemporary security problematics. This leads over and narrows down into an inquiry into how to understand the developing structure of information and cyber security in Sweden. Drawing from critical security studies and feminist research ethics, it sketches out an analytical story of power and knowledge in an age of boundless risk, security and information. It furthermore argues for the need of security scholars, practitioners and politicians alike to move beyond simplistic understandings of the world, and to revision it as shaped by more complex dynamics and flows of the global, digitalized and virtual reality of the world.

As Kingsley Davis stated, ‘the study of population offers one of the unique and indispensable approaches to an understanding of world affairs’ (Davis 1954, p.vii). In the discipline of International Relations, valuable security and political implications have been yielded by examining how population growth constitutes violent conflicts in traditional security studies (e.g. Choucri 1974; North and Choucri 1971). Non-traditional security (NTS) also develops its own problem-solving approach, e.g. human security, to solve demographic-related issues encountered by humankind such as famine and unemployment (UNDP 1994). Despite both traditional and NTS studies having established their material approaches, the ideational relationship between security and population dynamics has yet to be studied in detail. Specifically, this dissertation examines how ideational relationship is/can be established by ‘securitising’ population dynamics, i.e. how to rhetorically make population dynamics a security threat. The thesis adopted a combined analytical framework of the Copenhagen School and the Paris School in the case of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to identify how the ideational relationship between security and population dynamics was established. It first adopts the securitisation framework to examine how the PRC rhetorically constructed population growth as a security threat and introduced its emergency measure, i.e. the one-child policy. The dissertation then reveals the politics of the prolonged securitisation by evaluating the one-child policy as a technique for governmentality of unease and demonstrates how this constitutes the shift from securitising population growth to population decline. This dissertation argues that population dynamics can be constructed as (the cause of) numerous security threats through a successful securitisation. With the case of the PRC, the thesis demonstrates the de facto politicisation of population growth before the late 70s, and how the de jure securitisation was adopted in a Communist manner to legitimise the world’s strictest population policy, i.e. the one-child policy, as its emergency measure to solve various existential threats posed by population dynamics. In addition, the study of politics of securitisation in the case of the PRC further unfolds the struggles of priorities among different actors, which brings us political, practical and relational implications about this governmentality of unease that lasted for almost 4 decades. A deeper understanding of how our ideas of demography shape what we call ‘security threats’ sheds lights on how states formulate comprehensive security agendas by taking population dynamics into account due to its immense importance to threat construction. Other security actors such as international organisations, private sectors, and even individuals can more easily convince relevant audiences to legitimise the securitisation of the specific demographic-related threats they are facing. As Sciubba put it, ‘population dynamics could be a challenge or an opportunity’ (Sciubba 2011, p.3). Accumulating knowledge of the ideational connections between security and population dynamics increases the ability of various security actors to confront these challenges through a successful securitisation, which contribute to preventing numerous demographic-related threats from happening or at least easing these pains of humankind.

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the use of narratives informed by the discourse of human security in the context of the Colombian conflict during the government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez (2002-2010). Its main contribution is to map the transformation of these narratives from the site of their formulation in the international institutions to the site of their appropriation into domestic settings; and then consider their role in the formation of the actors' strategies and the construction of the subjectivities of the individuals affected by the conflict dynamics. The research proceeds to this analysis through an investigation of the policies for the internally displaced and those relating to the rights of the victims informed by the framework of transitional justice. It shows that, with a combination of narratives of empowerment and reconciliation, they fulfill complementary roles in the construction of the subjectivities of individuals affected by the conflict in Colombia. The dissertation also concludes that the flexibility of the human security discourse allowed the Uribe government to reinforce its position.