ABSTRACT
Brendan McQuade and Stuart Schrader draw from Terence Hopkins’ world-systems methodological insights to demonstrate how to avoid the “security trap,” in which good-faith attempts to critique the security apparatus result in conclusions that reinforce it. They argue that studies of security fail to offer an adequate critique if they begin from security as an analytic category. Instead, one must draw from world-systems analysis to recognize that “analyst and object of analysis are co-produced” and that a genuine “critique of security requires seeing security studies itself as a process-instance of security, which then demands historicizing its emergence.” They offer a review of how to accomplish such a task via Terence Hopkins’ directives, beginning with a small, single “security” program, and moving outward to construct the social relations that unfold around it—offering glimpses of the totality of historical capitalism and its constituent relations along the way.
