Critical Security Studies: The Theory That Challenged Traditional Security Thinking
What If Security Was Never Really About The State?
For much of the twentieth century, the study of security in International Relations rested on a remarkably stable assumption: the state is the primary object of security.
To think about security meant thinking about sovereignty, territorial integrity, military threats, deterrence, alliances, nuclear weapons, and the strategic calculations necessary to ensure state survival. From classical realism to structural realism, the dominant question remained essentially unchanged:
How do states survive in an anarchic international system?
This way of thinking shaped an entire generation of strategic scholarship, particularly during the Cold War, when security studies became deeply intertwined with military power, nuclear deterrence theory, balance of power politics, and the management of interstate rivalry.
And yet, toward the late twentieth century, a group of scholars began asking a profoundly unsettling question.
What if we have misunderstood security itself?
What if the problem is not simply how to secure the state — but rather why we assume the state should automatically be the primary object worth securing in the first place?
This question gave rise to what we now call Critical Security Studies — an intellectual movement that fundamentally challenged orthodox approaches to security.
At its core, Critical Security Studies argued that traditional security thinking had become too narrow, too state-centric, and too focused on military threats. A state may appear secure in conventional strategic terms while millions of people within that state continue to experience profound insecurity through poverty, authoritarianism, political exclusion, structural violence, surveillance, displacement, or systemic inequality.
In other words:
State security and human security are not always the same thing.
One of the most influential strands within this tradition emerged from what is often called the Welsh School also known as the Aberystwyth School, associated most prominently with Ken Booth.
Booth introduced one of the most radical ideas in contemporary security thinking: security should be understood as emancipation.
This was a profound departure from traditional strategic thought.
Security, Booth argued, is not simply protection from external military threats. Real security means freeing human beings from constraints that prevent them from living meaningful and autonomous lives. These constraints may take many forms: war, poverty, authoritarian governance, structural inequality, discrimination, or institutionalized violence.
In Booth’s formulation, security was no longer merely a strategic condition.
It became an ethical project.
A second major intellectual shift emerged through the Copenhagen School, associated with scholars such as Ole Wæver and Barry Buzan.
Their argument challenged one of the most intuitive assumptions in politics: the idea that threats are objective realities waiting to be discovered.
Instead, the Copenhagen School argued that threats are often politically constructed through what became known as Securitization Theory.
Issues do not naturally become security threats.
They become security threats when political elites successfully frame them as existential dangers requiring extraordinary political action.
Migration, religion, identity, terrorism, climate change, or even economic instability can become “security threats” not because they are inherently existential, but because political actors choose to present them that way.
This insight transformed how scholars think about power.
Security was no longer simply about responding to threats. It was also about understanding who has the authority to define what counts as a threat in the first place.
A third important strand developed through the Paris School, most closely associated with Didier Bigo. Where the Copenhagen School focused on political discourse, the Paris School shifted attention toward everyday institutional practices.
Its central argument was unsettling.
Security is not only produced through speeches by political leaders or grand strategic doctrines.
It is also produced through bureaucracies. Surveillance systems. Border management institutions. Intelligence networks. Policing technologies. Administrative procedures. And perhaps most importantly, institutions that claim to provide security can simultaneously generate insecurity.
In this view, modern security is inseparable from the everyday exercise of power.
Taken together, these traditions forced scholars to confront a deeper reality.
Security is not a neutral concept.
It is political.
It reflects choices about whose lives matter, what threats deserve attention, who gets protected, and who may become vulnerable in the process.
For decades, traditional security studies asked:
How do states survive external threats?
Critical Security Studies asked far more difficult questions:
Who defines security?
Who benefits from security policies?
Who becomes insecure in the process?
And should protecting the state always take precedence over protecting human beings?
These questions remain deeply relevant today.
In an era shaped by surveillance technologies, border securitization, cyber governance, identity politics, internal repression, climate insecurity, migration crises, and widening global inequalities, security can no longer be understood solely through the lens of armies and borders.
Perhaps the most radical insight of Critical Security Studies is deceptively simple.
Sometimes the greatest threats to human security do not come from external enemies. Sometimes they come from the very institutions claiming to provide security.
And that forces us to confront a difficult possibility.
Maybe the most important question in security studies is no longer how to protect the state.
Maybe it is who we believe deserves protection in the first place.