Nunes, João. "Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies". Security Dialogue, Vol.43, No.4 (2012): 345-361.

Nunes, João. "Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies". Security Dialogue, Vol.43, No.4 (2012): 345-361.

• "The challenge posed by critical security studies to the dominance of realism was achieved primarily by framing security, and the study of it, as political phenomena. This meant seeing security as something more than a natural response to a self-evident threat, and security studies as something more than just the provider of expert knowledge to tackle threats ‘out there in the world" (346).
• In the period following the Second World War until the 1980s, security studies mainly reacted to contemporary politics and the theoretical school of Neorealism became prominent. In that school's quest for parsimonious theory, it ignored key cultural and political issues, limiting the scope of potential actions and scenarios within the theory (346).
• From the late 1980s, and blossoming with the work of Dr. Buzan in the early 1990s, critical theory became more prominent, questing the assumptions of Neorealism and exposing the political assumptions behind theory. The main quest of this movement was to make the baselines of measuring security questionable, rather than assumed (347).
• The politicization of security occurs at several different points: the vocabulary used by security studies experts, the theoretical assumptions based on political ideas, and political biases in journals and universities controlling the subject of security papers (348).
• Critical security studies has managed to 'deconstruct' security, by challenging its base assumptions, but has failed to 'reconstruct' the field based on normative statements of what security should look like (348).
• Common assumptions in contemporary critical security studies are made that security is a term applied to topics to avoid democratic balances or consensus, by making them 'too important for public opinion'. In this light, security has been generally viewed by the critical security studies community as anti-democratic, restrictive, and exclusive (349).
• This idea that security is always a gateway for state violence, repression, and non-democratic decision-making is a fault in contemporary literature, as it represents the same kind of essentialism that critical studies were supposed to eradicate. This idea also ignores and endangers those vulnerable groups who require additional security, because their 'good' security is not recognized in the expert community (350).
• The idea of security as a form of emancipation is primarily advanced by the Aberystwyth School -- or Welsh School, because honestly who can spell or pronounce that?! -- and views security as a way of alleviating the individual oppression by restricting their actions in accordance with rules which guarantee the freedom of all (350-351).
• Unlike other traditions in security studies, the Aberystwyth School focuses on actual evidence from places of insecurity for its assumptions about securitization. Individuals and their perceptions are the primary focus of research, and security is defined in terms of what the general population views as security issues (351).
• The Aberystwyth School still recognizes that security is a political concept, and that population views of security are distinctly shaped by politics. However, the School would argue that recognizing these factors just allows for a better analysis of what security constitutes in different locations, so that sometimes increasing security requires physical changes and other times it requires changing attitudes about security (351).
• One of the big differences between the Aberystwyth School and other traditions in critical security studies is that the School does want to actually produce change in security situations and improve the security of the individuals being studied. Originally this was also the goal of the rest of critical security studies, but that was abandoned (352).
• An area of critical security theory that the author believes could be expanded on by the School would be the definition of what constitutes a security problem. Namely, where is the boundary between insecurity and inconvenience (353).
• There was been a flurry of criticism of the Aberystwyth School of their 'emancipatory security', expressed in a source mine, accusing the movement of exporting Western values and being a pretext for imperialist domination and intervention (352).
• Contrary to this criticism, the members of the Aberystwyth School argue that the reframing of security to focus on the individual and their experiences leaves the study less vulnerable to Western biases and assumptions, because the views of local people are used to generate definitions of security, rather than definitions invented in Western universities (353).
• A source mine of critical security perspectives, especially those relating to individuals as a unit of study and the nature of power in politics and society, is available from page 534 to page 536.