ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a brief overview of the security communities approach as developed by Karl Deutsch. It explains the constructivist twist Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett gave to the security communities approach and discusses the potential for the creation of a security community within the Middle Eastern context. An alternative approach to security could inform alternative practices, thereby helping to constitute a new region in the form of a security community. The revamped literature on security communities also busied itself with the creation of pluralistic security communities. In an attempt to understand the emergence and development of security communities, E. Adler and M. N. Barnett developed a three-tier framework: precipitating conditions, facilitating conditions, and necessary conditions. Adler and Barnett's revamped version of the security community approach is also rooted in a rather narrow conception of security.