Buzan, Barry, and Lene Hansen. "Defining International Security Studies". In The Evolution of International Security Studies, by Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, 8-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Buzan, Barry, and Lene Hansen. "Defining International Security Studies". In The Evolution of International Security Studies, by Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, 8-20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

• The academic field of international security studies is marked by four primary questions: should security studies be solely or primarily focused on the state?; should security studies look at internal threats or only external threats?; should security studies only look at the use of force by militaries or develop a wider scope?; and is the concept of 'security' is inherently tied to ideas of emergency and urgency? (10).
• The first question is essentially about whose security is being studied and discussed: i.e., the state, the nation, individuals, an ethnic group. For most of the Cold War, the state was the dominant subject of the field, based on the assumption that national security would also secure everything else (10-11).
• Originally, security studies focused on domestic threats, likely economic depression or social disorder. By the 1940s, however, scholars created a division between national and international security studies. With the end of the Cold War, this distinction between national and international security studies is being questioned (11).
• The third question is about whether to expand the concept of 'security' beyond military security, the focus which dominated the field during the Cold War. Since the 1980s, scholars have pushed for concepts of economic and environmental security, as well as new areas like health security (12).
• The fourth questions refers to the continued applicability of the Cold War assumption that security studies was a response to the immediate and present threat posed by the Soviet Union to the USA. Now that the Cold War is over, some scholars have argued that security concerns no longer need to imply urgency or focus exclusively on emergency situations (12-13).
• The authors choose to place the concept of 'security' within a framework of other concepts. They claim that security is associated with three other kinds of concepts: oppositional concepts, like 'peace' or 'risk'; complementary concepts which point to a specific aspect of security, like 'deterrence' or 'strategy'; and parallel concepts which connect security studies to IR, like 'power' or 'sovereignty' (14).
• During the Cold War, the general division between security studies and international relations was that security studies only dealt with the use of military force by one state against another. With the expansion of the concept of security since the 1970s, however, this definition is increasingly untrue and unhelpful (16).