Challenges of Central European Security: Critical Insights

Abstract

A former security bureaucrat who has fled the world of security professionals in order to make sense of it, his research focuses on two interconnected issues -first, security discourses and everyday, as well as ceremonial practices of Central European security professionals under post-socialism; and second, urban marginality and the relationships of marginalization, ethno-racial stigmatization and class reproduction to the spread of frames of insecurity and practices of surveillance, repression, and punishment in Central Europe. Contact: lubomir.luptak@gmail.com. Diāna Potjomkina is a Research ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSFrom the position of authors responsible for the editorial work on this volume, we would like to thank several people who commented on its drafts at various stages. Dagmar Rychnovská, Tomáš Karásek, and Marian Majer contributed with their valuable reflections and helped to improve the quality of individual chapters as well as the whole publication as such. We also appreciate the contribution of Mirka Pavlíková, who helped us with the finishing touches of the text and Matt Rees, who was responsible for the proofreading and copyediting. This publication is the second one in the Global Politics Special Series and in this regard we would like to thank Aleš Karmazin for his work on the previous publication in the Special Series, which paved the way for this one. Our thanks go also to the rest of editorial board of Global Politics. Furthermore, we would like to express our gratitude to the director of the International Institute of Political Science (IIPS) Prof. Vít Hloušek, and the head of the Department of the International Relations and European Studies at Masaryk University, Dr. Petr Suchý -as well as other staff at these institutions -for their long-standing support of Global Politics in general and the Special Series in particular. Especially the help of Lucie Mořkovská from the IIPS was essential and the books of Special Series would perhaps never been published without her.Obviously, the authors of this volume declare that they are wholly responsible for any possible inaccuracies or mistakes. Jan Daniel and Richard Turcsányi V VI SUMMARYThis book employs various theories of contemporary security studies to explore some of the most important and most common security issues in Central Europe at this time. Individual chapters of the book adhere mainly to European branches of critical and constructivist security studies, through which they look at some of the salient topics of Central European security politics.The distinction between internal and external security issues is employed throughout the book for analytical purposes. Under this framework, alliance building, security guarantees, "special relationships," the relational politics of identity, and relations with major powers -documented in the book on the case of Latvia's relations with United States -are examples of external security issues. Various pressing domestic security challenges, illustrated on the case of Hungarian far-right movements and the...