This book develops a new approach to research methods and methodology in critical security studies (CSS).
The volume proposes moving away from understanding methods as a matter of tools that help bridge the gap between theory and empirics, and instead defines methods as both an object of security analysis and a site of critical interference in security knowledge and practice. Taking its cue from the understanding that methods are part of social worlds and are performative, the book's methodology becomes a framework for analysing not just research epistemology and design but also how methods are used in security practice and the effects they constitute. The book, thus, has a two-pronged aim: (1) to respond to a need for literature on methodology in critical security studies; and (2) to take CSS further by showing the importance of method for both security practice and academic research. To that end, the book proposes a series of methodological innovations that make possible critical analysis of security methods and practices, and develops these in five areas in which methods operate under the dual rubric of practice and interference: mapping, visuality, discourses/materialities, proximity, and genealogy. . These areas are defined here as 'substantive problematizations of security methods': 'substantive' in the sense that these areas are constituted through an engagement with concrete security practices, and 'problematization' in that these engagements and the security practices themselves implicate and perform methods in some way. Approaching methods like this takes us away from methods as 'solutions' to the challenges of empirical research, to methods as entanglements with 'problems'.
To sum up, the book's chapters converge around three arguments. First, it argues that research in critical security studies requires frameworks for analysis that incorporate 'critical methods'. This is even more important in the contemporary world, where methods circulate between security practitioners and scholars. Second, it proposes that methods are not simply pre-given tools. If methods are part of the social construction of security threats, then 'critical methods' require negotiation and experimentation with concepts and empirical sites in order to challenge these performative effects. Third, it shows how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be conducted in an array of sites which have raised problems of insecurity and securitisation: including, airports, urban spaces and governance, counter-terrorism, drug trafficking, and biometrics.
This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, research methods, politics and IR.
Industry Reviews
'The contributors to Critical Security Methods show us why talking about methods is engaging. All of us digging into security's myriad manifestations puzzle over what we are doing out there in the mythical "field". Here is a book that joins us in that candid, valuable puzzling.' -- Cynthia Enloe, Clark University, MA, USA
'Breaking free from the conventional strictures of methodology, Critical Security Methods offers readers a wonderful panoply of new approaches for thinking about method, methods and methodology.... A generous service to the community of scholars engaged in thinking through the aporias of contemporary security policy.' -- Stefan Elbe, University of Sussex, UK
'Through three distinct moves that complicate rather than separate the relations between theory and method, this book offers a new critical sensibility to questions of method. By providing an analytic framework that attends to methods as practices, experiments and performative, it is not only relevant to CSS but critical methods in the social sciences more generally.' -- Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
