ABSTRACT
This chapter is organised into five sections. The first offers a sketch of the term ‘poststructuralism’, but warns of the inherent difficulty of referring to ‘it’ as a coherent position or approach. The second introduces two thinkers associated with the poststructural turn in political philosophy – Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault – to give a flavour of the range and diversity of thought under consideration. The third considers the impact of this turn on security studies via a discussion of seminal poststructural works influenced by Derrida and Foucault. The fourth offers a survey of more recent research informed by poststructural thought associated with international political sociology (IPS) and the so-called ‘Paris School’. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the possible limitations of poststructural approaches within security studies.
