ABSTRACT
Although the origins of critical security studies as a distinct school of thought go back to the early 1990s, the ideas and struggles it feeds upon have been around for much longer. Citizens, social groups and movements, intellectuals and activists have long called for thinking beyond the Cold War categories that restricted ways of ‘thinking’ about and practising security. Examples include the Non-Aligned Movement whose underlying principle reminded the world that there existed insecurities other than the United States-Soviet Union
standoff; the calls for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s which underscored that the North-South tension was of no less significance for world politics than East-West rivalry; contributors to the World Order Models Project who during the 1960s and 1970s outlined visions of alternative and sustainable world orders; the ‘Alternative Defence’ school that helped transform security relations across ‘Europe’ during the 1980s through informing various social movements including the US-based ‘Freeze’, UK-based CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and END (European Nuclear Disarmament); the disciples of Mahatma Gandhi who have sought nonviolent ways of practising security and contributed to academic peace research; women’s movements that have pointed to the ‘arms vs. butter’ dilemma as a cause of disproportionate suffering for women; feminist scholars who have underlined the relationship between the personal, the political and the international; and students of North/South and ‘Third World’ security who turned on its head the prevalent assumption that the inside/domestic realm was one of security whereas the outside/foreign realm was one of insecurity by pointing to the ways in which ‘national security projects’ imported from (and supported by) the West have had a mixed record in the rest of the world.
