ABSTRACT
Governance, it seems, is everywhere. It has been applied to different geographically defined levels or spaces (local, national, regional and global) and to different issue areas (environment, climate, energy, economy, etc.) (Enderlein et al. 2010). In positive terms, such usage reflects the widespread acceptance of a concept which connotes (at least, by implication) a distinct set of meanings and analytical features. Yet, more negatively, this very ubiquity could be said to drain the concept of meaning, thereby limiting its descriptive and analytical usefulness as well as forestalling any claims to theoretical or conceptual significance. Governance has over the last decade been applied to international security and an identifiable body of work now exists trading under the label of ‘security governance’. This literature is now of sufficient standing to have attracted both critique and refinement. Christou et al. (2010, p. 343) have noted that ‘three waves’ of literature have developed, with the first dedicated to matters of definition, the second to debate among the protagonists of the concept, and the third to its application to European security policies. A fourth wave can also be said to exist, involving attempts to transport the concept to both extra-European regions and the global level (Sperling 2003, 2008; Kirchner and Domínguez 2011b; Breslin and Croft 2012a). Yet as a route to analysis and understanding, security governance remains problematic largely because the promise of
the so-called first wave remains unfulfilled: security governance has still some way to go before it obtains clear definitional precision, conceptual clarity and a standing that is distinct from other more time-honored concepts in the Security Studies lexicon. In this light, it is surely not insignificant that recent surveys of the subdiscipline do not engage with the security governance literature (Buzan and Hansen 2009, Cavalty and Mauer 2010); thus, if that body of work is to be consequential its inherent difficulties still need to be addressed.
