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What is the value of security? Contextualising the negative/positive debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2016

Jonna Nyman
Jonna Nyman*
Affiliation:
Teaching Fellow, Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester
*
*Correspondence to: Dr Jonna Nyman, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, LE1 7RH. Author’s email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Review of International Studies has seen a debate over the value of security. At its heart this is a debate about ethics: concerning the extent to which security is a ‘good’ and whether or not security politics produces the kind of world we want. More recent contributions focus on the extent to which security is ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. However, this article argues that the existing debate is limited and confusing: key authors use the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in different, and, at times, contradictory ways. The article clarifies the roots of the existing debate, and then draws out two different uses of the terms positive and negative: an analytic frame and a normative frame. In response, it proposes a pragmatist frame that synthesises the existing uses, drawing on pragmatism and practice-centred approaches to analyse the value of security in context. The contribution of the article is thus twofold: it both clarifies the existing debate and suggests a solution. This is key because the debate over the value of security is crucial to thinking about how we want to live.

Keywords

Critical Security StudiesSecurityEthicsPragmatismEmancipation
Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , December 2016 , pp. 821 - 839
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2016 

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References

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23 Roe, Paul, ‘Is securitization a negative concept? Revisiting the normative debate over normal versus extraordinary politics’, Security Dialogue, 43:3 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar provides an interesting critique relevant to this article. See also Nyman, Jonna, ‘Securitisation theory’, in Laua Shepherd (ed.), Critical Approaches to Security: Theories and Methods (Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Williams, Michael C., ‘Words, images, enemies: Securitization and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47:4 (2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McDonald, Matt, ‘Securitization and the construction of security’, European Journal of International Relations, 14:4 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hansen, Lene, ‘The Little Mermaid’s silent security dilemma and the absence of gender in the Copenhagen School’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 29:2 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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27 See, for example, McDonald, Matt, Security, the Environment and Emancipation: Contestation over Environmental Change (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar and Nyman, Jonna, ‘Rethinking energy, climate and security’, Journal of International Relations and Development (forthcoming, 2016)Google Scholar.

28 Key authors include Paul Roe, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv and Rita Floyd (see following sections).

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78 Ciută, ‘Security and the problem of context’, p. 314. This also raises the question of the possible dissolution of security if security can mean whatever actors want it to mean: there is not space to go into this in depth here, but Ciută deals with it in more detail (see pp. 320–22).

79 Ciută, ‘Security and the problem of context’, p. 322.

80 Ibid., p. 323.

81 Ibid.

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84 I draw loosely on McDonald’s framework here, developed in Security, the Environment and Emancipation, pp. 24–35.

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