ABSTRACT
‘Security’ has many different connotations. Taken here to be a concept central to both the practice and study of international relations, its meaning has traditionally been associated with threats of a largely military nature; military threats, that is, directed against the state and against which the state has been obliged to respond with strong countermeasures such as armed defence, espionage, subversion and so on (Booth and Wheeler 1992: 4). In the post-1945 period this was a view of security that ran parallel to the reality and practices of the Cold War. Although a contest with a strong ideological flavour and one, moreover, which pitted two quite different systems of social organisation one against the other, the Cold War’s most pressing material component was that of the nuclear arms race – and this, in turn, effectively narrowed the security agenda to military matters (Buzan 1997: 6).
