ABSTRACT
Security studies has been, overwhelmingly, an American subdiscipline, dominated by a series of major debates (in the sense that they have been frequently cited) between key figures. True, not all of those figures have been American by birth or even by citizenship; there has been a significant European strand. But the size of the American intellectual market has been such that the subdiscipline has been largely one in which North American concerns have been in the ascendancy. One of the stories those in security studies (that is, those who are connected to the discipline of IR) tell about themselves is that it has been a subdiscipline that has ‘evolved’ in a fairly linear way (for a critique, see Smith 1999). Three steps can be identified in that contemporary narration of the subdiscipline.
