ABSTRACT
For nearly five decades, the various disciplines of national security studies have been dedicated to defining and applying the complex codes of containment at the various economic, military, political, social, and strategic fronts of the struggle between, as these rhetorics of power framed it, capitalism and communism, the West and the East, democracy and totalitarianism, the United States and the Soviet Union. From Yalta to Malta, the frozen tundras of bloc politics provided a peculiarly fixed terrain, which the disciplinary readings of national security studies could somewhat reliably map with their antiCommunist/antitotalitarian codes of containment. During 1989-1991, however, tremendous changes, working from above and from below, have upended the fields of reference and zones of difference that once anchored the disciplinary reach of security studies to the strategic projects of Cold War-era containment. With the velvet and violent revolutions in Eastern Europe as well as perestroika in the Soviet Union, these frozen terrains of Cold War combat are melting into far more mushy, if not totally fluid, expanses of almost inchoate confusion.
