On Cultures of Insecurity

Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, eds. Jutta Weldes,
Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duval, University of Minnesota Press (1999)

Introduction: Constructing Insecurity (Weldes, Laffey Gusterson, and Duvall)

1. The Cultural Production of Crises: U.S. Identity and Missiles in Cuba (Weldes)
2. The Politics of the Past: Redefining Insecurity along the “World’s Most Open Border”
(Ballinger)
3. Intervention and Identity: Reconstructing the West in Korea (Milliken)
4. Postcoloniality and the Production of “International Insecurity: The Persistent Puzzle of U.S.-
Indian Relations (Muppidi)
5. Contested Sovereignties and Postcolonial Insecurities in the Middle East (Niva)
6. Peacekeeping, Indifference, and Genocide in Rwanda (Barnett)
7. States of Insecurity: Plutonium and Post-Cold War Anxiety in New Mexico, 1992-96 (Masco)
8. Adding an Asian Strand: Neoliberalism and the Politics of Culture in New Zealand, 1984-97
(Laffey)
9. Colonizing Cyberspace: “National Security” and the Internet (Saco)
10. Reimagining the State in Post-Mao China (Litzinger)
11. Missing the End of the Cold War in International Security (Gusterson)
12. In/Security and the Politics of Disciplinarity (Mowitt)

The essays collected in Cultures of Insecurity should, according to the book’s editors, be

considered a manifestation of the post- Cold War (re)discovery of culture—i.e. increased

scholarly interest in issues of nationalism and ethnic conflict—in the social sciences generally,

and in International Relations in particular (1). But the editors hold that, contra the approach

found in the influential 1996 volume The Culture of National Security,1 culture must not be

viewed simply as a new variable; the end of the Cold War “do[es] not signal culture’s return but

only make[s] it easier to see what has been the case all along: all social insecurities are culturally

produced” (Ibid.).2

1
The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein, Columbia
University Press (1996).
2
We are informed on the first page that, “[f]or the authors in this volume, insecurities are cultural in the sense that
they are produced in and out of the context within which people give meanings to their actions and experiences
and make sense of their lives” (Ibid.).
 The book’s introductory chapter is cogent, and it is worthwhile to highlight here some of

the purposes, theoretical points, and analytical commitments that inspire, animate, and guide the

essays. Taking seriously the interpretive and linguistic turns in the social sciences, the authors

seek collectively to encourage a conversation between scholars of sociocultural anthropology

and IR, and between critical constructivist scholars in these two groups and their more

mainstream (usually rather positivist) colleagues. This is no easy task, since a critical

constructivist analysis is a more deconstructive, emancipatory endeavor—rather than a problem-

solving one—that thus seeks to “make strange” the familiar; to question the received wisdom and

common sense of privileged (usually statist, often imperial and/or oppressive) discourses.3

The analytical commitments entailed by such a critical constructivist approach are, we

learn,threefold: (a) “what is understood as reality is socially constructed; (b) constructions of

reality reflect, enact, and reify relations of power…some agents play a privileged role in the

production and reproduction of these realities”, and; (c) “a critical constructivist approach

denaturalizes dominant constructions, offers guidelines for the transformation of common sense,

and facilitates the imagining of alternative life worlds; it also problematizes the conditions of its

own claims; that is, a critical constructivism is also reflexive” (13).

The object of study for the essays here are discourses of insecurity. Discourse, though,

cannot be conceived of as purely linguistic; it must instead be associated with more

encompassing “codes of intelligibility,” which facilitate and essentially delimit, at least initially,

thought and concomitant conceptual possibilities (13-4). Yet discourses are always evolving,

imperfect and incomplete systems; they contain internal contradictions and lacunae that allow

3
And, at a foundational level, we can thus observe that critical security studies takes seriously postpositivist
philosophy of science (4).
their contestation and perhaps conversion: meanings are never fixed, but instead must be

produced and continually reproduced (13-17). Critical constructivism in security studies seeks to

call into question the reified categories of traditional statist security studies, or at least to show

how they work; that they are not given, “natural” referents for inquiry.

I find the critical constructivist approach presented here to be an important, even

essential, strand if IR scholarship. Theoretically, I find it quite compelling, and it is a breath of

fresh air compared to the rationalist-materialist mainstream that seems to subscribe, as the editors

note, to a correspondence theory of language (17), rather than a more poststructural theory based

on relationalism and difference. I appreciate the books antidisciplinary bent (26), and I am

increasingly interested in postcolonial thought, particularly as Himadeep Muppidi’s chapter

provides a well-argued illustration of its implications for world politics.4 Jutta Weldes’s chapter

was particularly bold; I think that she was more successful in showing the cultural construction

—rather than the necessity—of the relevant events as a crisis than perhaps many readers. While

Mark Laffey’s chapter was perhaps more conventional in comparison to the former, it is rich in

detail and explains well New Zealand’s changing discourses and concomitant behaviors

regarding national identity and regional economic integration. Finally, I would add that Jennifer

Milliken’s contribution stands out for me as a nice piece of scholarship that illustrates well how

terms of collective identity more encompassing than the country of even the region can be drawn

upon in order to facilitate collective (military) action.

4
Muppidi also does an admirable job of illustrating the structuration of security imaginaries and the practices that
they produce, and vice versa (131-2). Steve Niva’s chapter likewise is for me an example of effective postcolonial
scholarship.