Description: International Security Studies (ISS) has changed and diversified in many ways since 1945. This book provides the first intellectual history of the development of the subject in that period. It explains how ISS evolved from an initial concern with the strategic consequences of superpower rivalry and nuclear weapons, to its current diversity in which environmental, economic, human and other securities sit alongside military security, and in which approaches ranging from traditional Realist analysis to Feminism and Post-colonialism are in play. It sets out the driving forces that shaped debates in ISS, shows what makes ISS a single conversation across its diversity, and gives an authoritative account of debates on all the main topics within ISS. This is an unparalleled survey of the literature and institutions of ISS that will be an invaluable guide for all students and scholars of ISS, whether traditionalist, 'new agenda' or critical.
Brief description: Barry Buzan is Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Honorary Professor at the Universities of Copenhagen and Jilin. His books include: The United States and the Great Powers: World Politics in the Twenty-First Century (2004); Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (2003, with Ole Wæver); The Arms Dynamic in World Politics (1998, with Eric Herring); Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998, with Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde); People, States and Fear: The National Security Problem in International Relations (1991) and An Introduction to Strategic Studies: Military Technology and International Relations (1987).
Review Quotes: "In this important new contribution to International Security Studies (ISS), Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen provide the field's first disciplinary history...The book offers a very broad approach to the field that incorporates traditionalists, those who call for the widening and deepening of security on the one hand, and those, such as peace researchers and advocates of critical security studies, who have sometimes criticized the whole endeavour of ISS or its associate, Strategic Studies, on the other. This approach helps capture and contextualize the field and identify some surprising elements of continuity and overlap."
Alex J. Bellamy, The University of Queensland, Australia, International Affairs