Critical security in the Asia-Pacific: an introduction

Abstract

Ten years ago, Anthony Burke and I published an edited book: Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (Manchester UP, 2007). The book endorsed a broad conceptualisation of critical security that encompassed both deconstructive and reconstructive approaches, while contributors applied these approaches to issues in the Asia-Pacific region as diverse as the North Korean nuclear program, Australian foreign and security policy, Indonesian separatism and the role of the military in southeast Asia, among others. This special issue, arising from a series of papers presented at the ISA Asia-Pacific conference in Hong Kong in 2016, is not an attempt to ‘update’ what was never intended to be a genuine survey of Asia-Pacific security dynamics from a critical perspective. It is, rather, an attempt to once again illustrate the utility of critical approaches in making sense of, and potentially changing, security conceptions and practices in the region, through a disparate range of case studies. This introductory paper outlines the contours of the special issue while also examining the take up of critical approaches to security in scholarship in and about the region since 2007, and reflecting on the implications of changing regional security dynamics for the future of critical approaches to security. Ultimately, I suggest that the papers in this special issue, like the book a decade before, serve to illustrate the continued purchase of critical approaches in helping us understand, and potentially change, the way security is conceived and practiced in the Asia-Pacific.