Critical Security Methods ─ New Frameworks for Analysis

Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies.

It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practice methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sites of security and insecurity.

Against the familiar methdological language of rigour, detachment and procedural consistency, Critical Security Methods reclaims the idea of method as experiment. The chapters offer a series of methodological experimentations that assemble concepts, theory and empirical cases into new frameworks for critical security research. They show how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be practiced as interventions into diverse instances of insecurity and securitisation, including airports, drug trafficking, peasant struggles, biometrics and police kettling.

The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in critical security studies, politics and international relations.

Claudia Aradau is Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of War Studies, King's College London, and is author of Rethinking Trafficking in Women (2008) and co-author, with Rens van Munster, of Politics of Catastrophe: genealogies of the unknown (2011).

Jef Huysmans is Professor of Security Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) and Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance at the Open University (UK). He is author of Security Unbound (2014), The Politics of Insecurity (2006) and What is Politics? (2005), and editor of several volumes.

Andrew Neal is Senior Lecturer in Politics & International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, and author of Exceptionalism and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism (Routledge 2010) and co-editor, with Michael Dillon, of Foucault on Politics, Security and War (2008).

Nadine Voelkner is Assistant Professor, Department of International Relations and International Organization (IRIO), University of Groningen.