Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology

Abstract

When compared to traditional approaches to security studies, critical approaches to security studies are often presented in terms of a deepening and widening of the security studies' agenda (Krause and Williams 1997). In that version of disciplinary history, traditional security studies scholars are represented as people focusing on state-centric approaches with a more solid ontology; with a clear understanding of key concepts such as national interest, national security, and so on, and their implications on international politics, as well as a less flexible epistemology. From that standpoint, critical approaches to security studies are seen as a disruption of that existing agenda. As part of the deepening/widening meta-narrative of critical approaches to security studies, the contributions of these approaches are represented in terms of the inclusion of different scales (human security, cosmopolitan security, urban security, etc.) as well as different issue areas (borders, environment, immigration, maritime security, etc.) into security studies' agenda. Our chapter concentrates on introducing how international political sociology has helped developed the critical agenda in security studies; we move away from a deepening/ widening perspective that is common in such review chapters and instead present a review of some of the thematic contributions in an international political sociology to security studies, in the form of a discussion of such concepts as materialities, practices, relationalities, reflexivity and the micro-politics of the everyday (for a broader reflection about security, see Burgess in this volume).International political sociology seems to enjoy an organic relationship with security studies, considered in the broader sense of the concept to include approaches that focus on discourses, practices and technologies of security. Most notably, those scholars interested in the political sociology of international security seem to focus on the everyday over the exceptional, as well as on the 'everydayness' of the exceptional in their studies of what counts as security today through reflexive lenses that regularly questions the ontological and epistemological assumptions of security's concepts and theories. This preference makes an international political sociology approach particularly engaging within the context of contemporary security studies scholarship. A majority of the all-time most-cited articles published in the journal International Political Sociology have a security focus (Dillon 2007;Salter 2007; Huysmans 2008, among others), yet unlike traditional approaches to security, these publications focus on the new materialities, practices, relationalities, reflexivity and the micro-politics of security in an attempt to see the effects of 'security' on the everyday. More specifically, a common theme is on the (in)security practices of security actors in