ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how theoretically oriented security studies provide a useful analytical lens for in-depth research on the practice-oriented energy security field. It draws on the literature on securitization, security logics and security contexts in order to establish an original contextual approach to energy security analysis. First, some critiques of the Copenhagen School framework’s reliance on a single security logic and the resulting problems with accounting for security contexts are discussed. Second, the chapter provides a definition of security logic and builds upon Felix Ciută’s and Olaf Corry’s typologies of security logics/grammars to develop an analytical blueprint for the study of logics that drive energy security debates and policy developments in Germany, Poland and Ukraine. Third, the chapter operationalizes context within the triangle of distal factors (socioeconomic, historical and cultural backgrounds), the embeddedness of security mechanisms (how easily different understandings of energy security are articulated and acted upon) and a constellation of actors (variety of stakeholders in the domestic energy security setting). It is then discussed how this contextual approach can be efficiently applied to the analysis of European energy security by adopting the interpretivist methodology grounded in hermeneutics.
