The Quest for Security

Madhan Mohan Jaganathan, Amna Sunmbul and Gaurav Saini

South Asian Survey, 2014, vol. 21, issue 1-2, 77-89

Abstract: Why does the quest for security lead to insecurity? In its quest for becoming secure, mainstream international relations (IR) has weaved a fictitious web that hardly lives up to its promise of providing security to the international community. It is through the vocabulary of securitisation that the freedom to resist and express dissent is nipped in the bud. Security is premised on a flawed assumption. The insistence on the usefulness of assumptions instead of their truthfulness is not just misleading but a theoretical sleight of hand. Security seems to have flourished owing to a unidimensional view of human nature and a unilinear extrapolation of anarchy, which is considered as the central facet of international political structure. This article contests these assumptions and argues that the construction of security is tantamount to a façade that gives a false impression of security, thereby concealing and camouflaging the hegemonic nature of such an endeavour.

Keywords: Global South; critical security studies; international relations; emancipatory project; politics of security; ethics of security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:soasur:v:21:y:2014:i:1-2:p:77-89

DOI: 10.1177/0971523115592491

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