Barkawi, Tarak and Mark Laffey. "The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies". Review of International Studies, Vol.32, No.2 (2006): 329-352.

Barkawi, Tarak and Mark Laffey. "The Postcolonial Moment in Security Studies". Review of International Studies, Vol.32, No.2 (2006): 329-352.

• Generally conceptions of foreign policy have been based in understanding the security relations between great powers and the underlying security situations which led to the rise or fall of great powers. The conventional understandings of security derived from these histories fail to provide a substantial policy for combating groups like Al-Qaeda, non-state networks which meet none of the great power requirements (329-330).
• The primary reason for the inadequate ability of security studies to cope with the challenges raised by Al-Qaeda, is that the historical basis for contemporary security studies is Eurocentric and ignores the security issues facing the global South. Better understanding the dynamics of conflict in the global South, of which Al-Qaeda is a Southern group, will provide richer analysis to solving new security issues (330).
• The basic assumptions in international relations [IR] are still Eurocentric, assuming that Europe and the West have a special position in the world, and their interests and relations are paramount. The most common representation of this is the assumption that the 'end-point' of development in the contemporary state of Western modernity (331).
• The most popular theory of IR remains the Realist school, which focuses on the great powers, who are overwhelming, and until recently, exclusively in Europe and the West. The Liberal school as well focuses on institutions dominated and created by Western great powers, and is based on intellectual assumptions with roots in the Western enlightenment and its profoundly imperialist thinkers. Although better, Constructivist theory draws from the same traditions (331-332).
• Eurocentrism complicates attempts to explain contemporary security trends because it is so heavily based in historical traditions of great power conflict, with little history or study of lower ordinance conflicts in the global South. As a result, understandings of Southern conflicts are derived from great-power experiences and based on Cold War conceptions of the Third World, which delegitimizes all non-state actors and discourages attempts at true understanding (332).
• The Eurocentric focus on great power actors at the expense of weak states, which are dismissed as marginal in most political accounts. They are viewed as 'empty spaces', which can either be subjects of liberal intervention or sources of instability, but never subjects of security studies in their own right (332-333).
• The modern field of security studies developed out of the aftermath of the Second World War and the continued supremacy of the Realist school of IR theory. The primary debates have since been between the Realist and Liberal schools of IR, with the Constructivist school becoming a serious competitor later on, but all share a Eurocentric vision of IR (333-334).
• The historical examples and periodization from which the theories of security studies are drawn come from exclusively European sources, focusing on the Council of Europe, the rise of Germany, and the East-West conflict following the Second World War as the primary areas of historical examples, ignoring contemporaneous phenomenon and events in the non-Western world (334).
• The extend of Eurocentric influences on IR can be gleaned from the contents of canonical texts in security studies, such as the Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Edward Mead Earle. The modernity of war discussed in the book is theorized as an entirely European concept, and the book solely discusses European events and wars, with the exception of Japanese naval strategy and French colonial strategy (335).
• The Western and imperial viewpoint taken in this book is openly expressed in its dedication to the concerns of Western and American policy-makers. The security concerns discussed are entirely the concerns of the Western powers, not the strategies or goals of their non-Western rivals, less the strategies of anti-imperialist guerrillas (336).
• Security studies fails to conceive of the Third War states as actors, as demonstrated by the discourse around Cuba during the 1952 missile crisis. Studies of crisis management view the affair as a superpower conflict, with Cuba either as an extension of Soviet policy or an 'empty space' where competition took place (336-337).
• The inability of Western policy-makers to conceive of Cuban agency damaged the ability of politicians to accurate construct a policy to avoid crisis. The influence of Fidel Castro was entirely ignored, and Cuban interests were ignored, leaving the US unable to appropriately respond to the crisis. It was not until the 1990s, when the agency of the Cubans was 'discovered' to be critical in the Cuban crisis (337).
• Even after the 1990s, the dominant narratives of Cuban agency in the 1952 Missile Crisis were constructed to deny their rationality as compared to the 'rational' American position of self-defense. The Cubans were assumed to be emotionally driven out of irrational nationalism and political ideology, meaning their interests were not taken seriously (337-338).
• Scholarly opinion on the Second World War in security studies is conceptualized as a 'good war', in which totalitarianism was defeated and the 'good guys' led by the USA, with some minor help from the Soviet Union, won the war. The view among colonized people was sharply different, where the war was essentially between three imperialist blocs which sought to maintain systems of oppression and colonization (338-339).
• Western conceptions of the Second World War as a 'moral' campaign against an unethical enemy, epitomized by the Holocaust. The Holocaust sets the standard for unacceptable behavior, as opposed to previous colonial brutalities of other empires. The focus on the Western role in liberating Nazi-controlled areas also reinforces the self-image of the West as enlightened, civilizing, and a 'force for good' (340-341).
• Contemporary historical narratives around the Holocaust, and the atrocities of the Soviet regime, 'otherize' these regimes from the 'enlightened' West, ignoring the obvious roots of fascism and communism within the same Western enlightenment ideas and traditions which created the West (341-342). Furthermore, the European nature of the Holocaust served to make it unique from the countless genocides and atrocities in European colonies (343).
• Security studies is based on a number of Eurocentric institutions and mindsets which assume a Western political perspective and Western interests, assume that agency resides solely in 'great powers', and presupposes that the West is an ethical actor despite its brutal and murderous history (343).
• Many scholars in security studies would argue that, despite the flaws inherent in the Eurocentrism of IR, its basic conclusions are still true. After all, superpowers remain the most influential actors, the West did play a dominant role in connecting the world, the main battles in WWII were between great powers, and perhaps the ethical systems of the West do provide the best chance of a peaceful world, despite their hypocrisy (344).
• The dangerous posed by this conception of history and IR is that it allows the continuation of misconceptions about the Third World, either otherize the actors there or assuming that they are identical to the West, in both cases denying them agency and ignoring crucial unique histories (346).
• The relationship between periphery and metropole is substantially more complex and interrelated that typically understood in IR literature. The identities of colony and metropole are self-reinforcing and the identity of Europe cannot be understood without reference to the colonized 'other'; neither can the power of Europe (346-347).
• The threat posed by Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks cannot be properly understood by the simplistic dichotomies between the West and the Muslim World or between Islam and Modernity. Rather, it must be understood that Al-Qaeda has come from a long history of interactions between the West and the non-West, and that Al-Qaeda is advancing its own form of modernity. Failure to do so leaves the potential for creating the conditions for groups like Al-Qaeda to gain support (347).
• Al-Qaeda and the jihadi ideology driving the movement are both products of different modernities and Western ideologies. The philosophy of the group borrows from Islam in addition to Marxist-Leninism, and Enlightenment thought. The structure of its organization depends heavily on modern technology or contemporary models of cell-based organization (347-348).
• The authors stress the importance of understanding the mutual affects of different regions on each other's politics, bridging the gap between IR theory and Area Studies, to demonstrate the domestic affects of foreign policies. This means that histories and political theory will have to focus much more on the inter-relational nature of identities (348-349).
• Despite the presence of significant discussion of critical IR theory in many important security studies forums, the field as a whole remains Eurocentric. This is because even when theory is recognized as Eurocentric, the solutions towards perceived non-Western interests require Western action or intervention. Even when emancipation of the subordinated non-West is the goal, the savior is still assumed to be the West (350).
• Contemporary, and past, discourse on the asymmetric violence used by non-state actors delegitimizes these actions by creating distinctions between the 'rational', 'ordered' and 'noble' forms of professional warfare used by the West and the 'cowardly' actions of terrorists in the non-West -- despite the rationality of asymmetric violence for many armed groups in conflict with powerful states (350-351).
• The distinction between legitimate Western force and illegitimate non-Western force serves to further Western interventions under the guise of morality. All Western imperialism has been undertaken for moral purposes, to civilize barbarians or to given humanitarian assistance from a position of moral superiority. Any violence which is taken against these 'legitimate' and 'moral' actions is designated 'illegitimate' and 'terrorist' (351).  
• The authors argue that the commonality of security studies projects serving the interests of the great powers and West requires some sort of scholarly equality. Drs. Barkawi and Laffey propose the equal legitimacy of constructing strategies and security projections for weak actors, such as the Tamil Tigers, Chechen rebels, or Iraqi resistance (352).