Security: The State (of) Being Free From Danger?

Abstract

With the demise of the Cold War, policy-makers claimed to recognize a plethora of new security threats - a veritable ‘dysplasia’ of the global body politic (Manning 2000: 195). In the face of rogue states, loose nukes, international organized crime and global terrorism, among other menaces, government and non-government organizations devoted considerable time and resources to addressing new insecurities. Academics too have tried to rework the concept of security. As David Baldwin wrote in 1997, in the fields of International Relations (IR) and Security Studies, “[r]edefining ‘security’ has recently become something of a cottage industry” (Baldwin 1997: 5), although the difficulty in defining ‘security’ had already exercized the minds of scholars over several decades.1