ABSTRACT
The chapter outlines some ways in which ‘traditional’ approaches to anarchism might be useful in the context of Critical Security Studies. It argue that advocating a more emancipatory approach to security, anarchism can be more radically employed to undermine the very conceptual and political foundations of security and insecurity, to unsettle their grip on modern political life, and to generate ways of being that disrupt rather than reproduce political authority. Feminist approaches to security studies have exposed the patriarchal foundations upon which the politics of security rest. The desire for security reveals and represents a contemporary political imagination which is willing to go to extraordinary, sometimes even genocidal, lengths in order to preserve an image of the social order. War and the threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, and political oppression and so on.
