The Present IR Paradigm and Security Studies: Knowledge Disobedience and the Critical Turn

In analyzing the subfield of security studies in IR, this chapter shows that the latter has a formidable realist underpinning. It is this realist orientation that makes possible the normalization of war and conflict within IR’s paradigmatic corridors of knowledge. Prevailing IR norms such as national interest, state interest, survival, power, anarchy, and sovereignty itself, all underwrite the view that militarism holds the key to achieving and maintaining state security and ultimately a more secure world. Against this backdrop, I highlight the crucial contribution of the critical turn within IR and of its historical origins and genesis, with a view to demonstrating the manifold ways in which critical security studies/scholars problematize and question the warmongering orientation of the discipline. In order to reveal the breadth, depth, and scope of the critical turn, this chapter also highlights its multifaceted contribution to security studies, including those made by scholars writing under the theoretical banners of poststructuralism, cultural studies, postcolonialism, international political sociology, and the Beirut and feminist Schools. I further map out how each forges its distinct epistemic resistance to the paradigmatic knowledge relation in IR security studies that normalizes war, conflict, and militarism as the natural order of things. The critical turn’s knowledge contribution, it is asserted, will prove crucial for bringing about a paradigm shift in IR studies.