Strausz, Erzsebet. “Foucault, Critique and Security/Studies” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association Annual Conference “Global Governance: Political Authority in Transition”, Le Centre Sheraton Montreal Hotel, MONTREAL, QUEBEC, CANADA, Mar 16, 2011 . 2011-01-25
Abstract:
This paper investigates the implications of a Foucauldian perspective for interrogating both practices of security and the (academic) ways of addressing them. Foucault described critique as a particular limit-attitude that marks out the position of the critiquing subject/self on the border of her historical conditioning in the present and calls for reflection on the characteristics of this particular conditioning. This juncture permits questioning actual practices as well as the ways in which the self/subject relates to them in the contemporary episteme. In this context theory and the ways of studying a particular segment of this reality appear as practices which feed into the economy of these epistemic relations. Concepts, rhetorical patterns and narrative images in academic thinking engaging with ‘security’ create particular power-effects across the discursive and non-discursive planes, i.e. by channelling political imagination in different ways or offering particular forms of knowledge for policy-making and political action. This understanding envisions critique in security studies as a way of reflecting on and problematizing the relations created and sustained by discursive and non-discursive practices of ‘security’. Drawing on examples from the ‘human security’ discourse and pushing them to their ‘limits’ the paper seeks to make a case for a Foucauldian approach.
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