Thinking Globally About (the Study of) Security

This chapter zooms in on one of the two main subfields of International Relations (IR), namely (International) Security Studies, to further highlight different ways of thinking globally about world politics. The chapter begins with the observation that international security has not always been studied in a manner true to its name. Second, lest it seems that Eurocentrism only limits the study of those parts of the world other than ‘Europe’, the chapter looks at the study of militarism, highlighting the ways in which the study of security in ‘Europe’ too has suffered. Next, the chapter turns to Critical Security Studies (CSS) and focuses on how CSS scholars have treated the Eurocentrism of ISS as an ‘absence’. Finally, the chapter explores one way of thinking globally about security by utilising the notion of ‘constitutive outside’, so as to see how those who have been outside of our ISS narratives have been constitutive of security in theory and in practice.