ABSTRACT
In this chapter we discuss the value of genealogy as a critical method to study security. A genealogical method would treat security not simply as an object of research, but as something embedded in historical struggles over truth, knowledge, authority, expertise and power. This is more complicated than it seems. The aim is to avoid assuming that we know what security is. This is especially important today. We are witnessing the proliferation of knowledges, practices and technologies that are somehow associated with security but that also destabilize the analytical categories through which we had come to make sense of ‘security’, such as the internal and the external, war and peace, the national and the international, law enforcement and the military.
