Security community: A future for a troubled concept?

Abstract

This article offers first a brief commentary on Karl Deutsch and his collaborators’ development of the concept of security community, before moving to a critical review of constructivist attempts by Adler, Barnett and their colleagues at resurrecting it. The article makes the case that while the serious effort to give security community a new life is laudable, the appropriation also renders the concept at once theoretically complex and methodologically superficial. Drawing constructive lessons from the previous research, it seeks to demonstrate the potential of the security communities research provided that it (1) restores the Deutschian ethos of rigorous, transparent, collective and transdisciplinary research; (2) takes seriously the challenge to the realist paradigm by zooming in and out of the modern state when thinking about security community; and (3) in addition to processes of integration investigates more thoroughly also the processes of disintegration.