ABSTRACT
In the years of euphoria that followed the end of the Cold War, the contributions of these groups were more or less forgotten not only by those who claimed ‘victory’ on the part of the Ronald Reagan administration in the USA (to the neglect of a variety of other factors and actors that helped to bring the Cold War to an end) and returned to business as usual (with an admixture of constructivism in some cases), but also by the more theoretically oriented students of critical security studies who have pursued the task of rethinking security on mostly metatheoretical grounds, thereby failing to challenge existing ways of ‘thinking’ about and ‘doing’ security. The September 11, 2001 attacks and other al-Qa’ida-linked bombings that shook various parts of the world were tantamount to a wake-up call in more ways than one. For students of security studies who were sceptical of the contributions of critical perspectives, 9/11 served as a reminder that prevalent approaches to security are far from being able to account for let alone address the world’s current insecurities. For students of critical security studies, 9/11 underscored the need to engage directly with issues related to war and peace, hard and soft power, state and non-state actors in world politics. It is in this context that the call for rethinking security (in theory and in practice) has gained new urgency.
