ABSTRACT
Within the larger field of security expertise, a particular role is played by ‘security studies’ as an academic specialization with recognizable publications, courses, curricula, debates, and analytical frameworks. 1 It is a specialty taught and researched in university departments and military academies, and it is an intellectual reference point in think tanks and other centres of policy research to the extent that they care about theory or cumulative scholarship at all. From its birth in the late 1940s until the 1980s, security studies (sometimes known as ‘strategic studies’) could roughly be encapsulated in an implicit agenda of managing military matters. 2 Since the 1980s, the operational understanding has rather been something like ‘the study of major threats and how to meet them’. A number of critical approaches (mostly developed in Europe) would add to this ‘definition’ of ‘how to get security’ the reflective question of ‘what security does’, i.e. what characterizes policies and practices of security including their problematic ‘side effects’. Today, security studies is most often seen as a subfield within the discipline of international relations, which is in turn a constitutive subdiscipline within the discipline of political science. 3 As the present chapter will demonstrate, the field actually emerged as thoroughly interdisciplinary (or sui-disciplinary), and only gradually (mostly in the 1970s) anchored within IR. Studying the formation of security studies more separately from IR than in the standard narrative is important particularly in the present context exploring the relationship between expertise and academia.
