Hansen, Lene. "Poststructuralism and Security". In The International Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Denemark and Renée Marlin-Bennett. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Hansen, Lene. "Poststructuralism and Security". In The International Studies Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Denemark and Renée Marlin-Bennett. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

• Poststructuralism moved from the other humanities departments to IR theory during the 1980s. The critical focus of poststructuralism was well suited to challenging the dominant realist views of IR and the policies of the Reagan administration.
• During the early 1980s, poststructuralism was primarily influenced by the work of the Frankfurt School, but came to be focused on the work of Michel Foucault instead. Dr. Foucault's ideas on knowledge and power were used to argue that military exercises and other security measures were performances to reinforce the idea of the state.
• In the late 1980s, poststructuralism began to be interested in the work of Jacques Derrida on the artificial division of the world into dichotomies using language. Poststructuralists applied these ideas to seminal IR theory texts, pointing out the key assumptions in these works.
• The end of the Cold War upset the field of security studies, as most research had gone into the conflict. Poststructuralists during this period focused on whether state identity could remain without Communist rivalry. Poststructuralists focused much of their attention during this period of ongoing conflicts in Bosnia, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and Kosovo, and how victim narratives were constructed to justify these conflicts.
• Discussions on the reformation of state identity after the Cold War, particularly the work of David Campbell, were criticized by other poststructuralists for failing to consider that states could adopt less antagonistic identities that were not dependent on oppositional conflict.
• Poststructuralists looked, in particular, at the role of media and technology in the wars of the 1990s. The use of games to train soldiers, media coverage of conflict, and the invention of remote targeting were all interesting to poststructuralists. 
• Throughout the 1990s, the range of topics covered by poststructuralist security studies expanded. Whereas previously poststructuralism had focused on only state security, it now expanded to cover the security of other groups, including women, individuals, and societies.
• After the 9/11 attacks, poststructuralists focused on the ways in which terrorists and terrorism were discussed and how it drew on orientalist terminology and dichotomies, reinforced Western identity, and how these categorizations justified tactics like torture and extrajudicial detention.
• Poststructuralists also looked at how the War on Terror was being used to justify the expansion of domestic surveillance and more intensive security measures. This has also included discussions of how new technologies have altered politics and the creation of cybersecurity as a concept.
• Poststructuralism, represented by authors James der Derian and Bradley Klein, is a post-positivist field of IR theory that rejects the idea that IR theory can produce scientific laws or observe political facts. Poststructuralism is particularly interested in the political effects of the different subjective categorizations and theories by IR theorists.
• Security is not an objective field to poststructuralists, as both the state and security threats are artificially constructed concepts. For security threats to be identified, somebody first has to use language to conceive of a nation-state and then justify why some fact constitutes a threat to that state.
• Poststructuralists argue that the process of generating the ideas of security threats and nationhood are acts of power that discipline people into thinking as a collective and demonize those not included in that same group. Factors like race, class, religion, and gender are influential in where the lines are drawn between 'us' and 'them'.
• Work by R. B. J. Walker looked at how realist IR theory created these artificial categories by creating strong divisions between internal and international politics and claiming that international cooperation or harmony was impossible. Dr. Walker notes that this leads to the conception of security on a national level, ignoring the possibility of global or international security.
• Poststructuralism challenges and seeks to subvert the traditional understandings of international politics by studying the core conceptions of mainstream IR theory and exposing their artificial and subjective nature.