Introduction

Our core motivation behind this project was a desire to champion clear research design and rigorous method in critical security studies. As a reflexive field, engaging with security practices and mainstream academic accounts of these practices, critical security studies have placed more emphasis on being critical of the established paradigms and practices and less emphasis on clarity and method. With this book, we wanted to start seriously thinking about two questions: “How do we do the kind of research we do?” and “How can others produce similar research projects?” To answer these questions, as editors, we pushed the contributors to focus on four general areas of designing critical inquiry: The object of research, research question, research design, and results and challenges of conducting of research.