ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the concept of culture has traditionally figured in security studies, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. It presents a culturalist concept of security culture, focusing on the meaning and practice of security. The chapter outlines a research program for analyzing the transformation of security culture, including the paradox and pathologies that accompany this process. It argues that recent conceptual shifts are indicative of social and political transformations. These transformations reveal specific contradictions existent within the liberal national and international order. Constructivists explain divergence in national security policies by pointing to the variety of national cultures; on the other hand, convergence is explained by referring to the uniformity of world culture. One way of framing the security paradox is to distinguish between two kinds of insecurity, ontological and epistemological. The policing of terrorism is only one example of how sub-systems interrelate in adverse ways to reinforce threat perceptions and contribute to the transformation of security culture.
