ABSTRACT
The study of security in the global context is a sub-discipline of the wider subject usually still referred to as International Relations. International Relations is the study of all political interactions between international ‘actors’, which include: states, international organizations and, to a lesser extent, some influential private individuals. The main paradigms of International Relations offer alternative conceptual frameworks for comprehending the complexity that emerges from attempting to study the huge volume of interactions between actors that makes up the contemporary global political system. Realists are the traditionalists in International Relations and Security Studies and the dominant paradigm, both academically and in the ‘real world’ as the approach favoured by most governments in conducting their foreign policies. The security of one’s own state is likely to be enhanced at the expense of another state in what has been termed the ‘security dilemma’.
