INT204: International Security

According to G.H. Mead, the psychology of an individual is made of the ‘me’ i.e., the socially constructed element of society and the ‘I’, i.e., the element that enacts the social role assigned to the individual. Ken Booth believes that these elements of the individual colour their interpretation of reality, and by extension, security.  As an Indian upper-caste cis-het male, my privileged upbringing largely influenced my worldview. Being the son of an officer of the Indian Air Force also adds a dimension to my perceptions of national security. The self-identity has very well been central to my view of security over the years, as proponents of the Aberystwyth School would argue. I recognize 2019 as a tipping point in this sense, where I moved to college and my immediate social environment vastly changed, and along with it came a transformation of my political conscience. Past that point, ‘I’ struggled heavily with revelations that came as I met individuals whose lived experiences ...

                                                            The powerful silence Growing up in Ayodhya, I had seen revolts, demonstrations, and rallies go up every time a religious incident erupted in any part of the country. Thus, as an echo of my surroundings, I have been highly vocal about my views on a certain topic, always having a view on everything around me gave me the sense of self, an identity that is defined by my views. I grew up on the belief that ‘explicit’ is the norm. Being antagonistic and demonstrative is what I believed activism and fighting for a cause meant. But as Ken booth explains “self is an unfinished journey” and that “the social world is constructed by the phenomenon of believing is seeing” I had chosen to see only what I believe in and there was more to activism than my past ‘self’ was aware of. There’s o...

    (Source: Outlook Images)   “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”- Aristotle This quote by Aristotle seems attractive and satisfying too, but how does one get to know herself/himself and have wisdom? Who we are, comes when we look around and find ourselves different from others in many aspects and relatable in certain ways too? When we go out, interact, and observe, we get along with many perspectives that are way different from ours and help us shape our view about how we see things in general and certain issues in particular. I think my perspective about security and insecurity has been largely in terms of military and war until recently when I realized how broad this term is and encompassed so many issues far from the militarized world. As and when identity is discussed, we know that we were constructed out of the interaction between individuals and various social structures in which we have spent our time. (Booth, 1994,4). Terrorism appears to be a mil...

“Sab Gol Maal Hai ”- a phrase from a popular Hindi movie - seems to be best positioned to describe the disciplines of International Security and International Relations. The English translation (‘everything is a confusing and sinister problem’) doesn’t quite cover the hilariousness of the phrase, but the astounding ambiguity and confusion that these disciplines house would indeed sound quite funny to the common observer.  In his piece titled “Security and Self: Reflections of a fallen Realist”, Ken Booth gives us a detailed account of how the ‘self’ governs our understanding of the world. Booth starts off as a Realist and then ends up disillusioned with the theoretical constructs of Realism. He links his changing perspectives with his own evolution as a person. The professor begins as a student in the early years of the Cold War, an era where Realists dominated the classrooms of the West. He is deeply influenced by his times and his own Childhood (growing up in the Cold War era in ...

  My self-understanding (shaped by worldly experiences) interprets & constitutes the reality out there. Humans through a different understanding of self, make sense of reality. It is also true for the understanding of security. Previously, due to exposure to dominant views (dominant knowledge production), I had limited & less inclusive understanding. The course structure first introduced us to realist theories focusing on state, military & war. It viewed security in a negative sense (absence of threats). But with time, exposure to critical theories talking about inequality, bias & hierarchy I gained an inclusive understanding of security which is much more positive. Hailing from a village (in Lakhimpur Kheri) in the Terai region of the Indo-Gangetic plain, I have witnessed deprivation among the people around me (tribes/ Banjaras & Dalit community in my village) as part of my childhood experiences. I thought these hardships were normal. But when I moved to Luckno...

Not much unlike what Ken Booth talks about in his paper 'Reflections of a Fallen Realist' with respect to the impact his evolving sense of self has had on his understandings of security, my own ever changing sense of self has definitely impacted the way I view security myself, and I'm entirely sure that this is an experience that most if not all people go through. However not all of them might actively realise it.  As a kid security would just be that no one kidnaps me on the way to and from school or maybe a friends house, the countermeasure being a simple lesson from our parents to not take, say chocolates for instance, from strangers. As we grew up it became about not just our own security but those of the ones around us as well, and slowly transitioning into the digital world. Today the security of data stored on digital sources, information about us, about insider corporations has become a lot more of a concern than the physical safety of human beings. Even if looked a...

  Security, at the basest of its providence, has the individual at its centre. Sure, there are other issues, entities and non-physical objects that might need to be securitized, but it all begins with the self. This is exactly what Ken Booth roughly propounds in his rendition of locating the self in security in the book ‘Reflections Of A Fallen Realist’. Booth deals with the issue of formation of the self through social interactions and inherited personality traits, which eventually leads to making one’s identity. He further mixes the idea of one’s identity with one’s role integrated into the bigger picture of society and superposes the need to have the representation of the non-state identities in the workings of international relations. Booth’s post-positivist attitudes provokes to look at security issues through the impact they have on the individual, who has a certain unique identity and role, that may not be shared by the socio-political actors (or those few who have a voice ...

  Russia’s recent call of war on Ukraine has drawn all the attention of the international community in anticipation and preparation for Russia’s next move. The move of declaring war and attempting to secure a state through physical means is the scenario meant to be avoided by all international global organizations. These developments are going to transform and redefine the way states respond to security threats and put to test the understanding of security studies. A big part of the attacks led by Russia on Ukraine includes a cyber element. The recent attacks on the department websites of the Ukrainian government, “Earlier on Wednesday the websites of Ukraine's government, foreign ministry and state security service were down in what the government said was another denial of service (DDoS) attack. "At about 4 p.m., another mass DDoS attack on our state began. We have relevant data from a number of banks," said Mykhailo Fedorov, Minister of Digital Transformation, adding t...

  TITLE: Locating the ‘self’ in the Russian- Ukraine crisis/war         Type of security- Geographical Security and Territorial Integrity.                                                                           Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto   As students of International Relations, I’ve noticed that while making policies around security, it becomes important for us to move away from the mainstream state-centric approach and look at security through various lenses in order to bring about a favorable solution that targets the ultimate referent object (which, according to Ken Booth’s view, becomes an embedded individual, women, and other gendered bodies in Cynthia’s view). While various theorists give us various reasons why it is necessary ...

In this piece, I will try to bring in the larger point that the ’international’ system is gendered by using emancipatory and feminist theoretical frameworks to security. If we try to locate gendered violence in security studies, it is very significant to look at the constitution of gender itself and how it came about. My understanding of self and security has been greatly influenced with the emergence of critical security studies since it broadens my contours of studying international security. Although it challenges the statist conception of security,  I suppose it is still pertinent to consider a few dimensions of Realism as well primarily because the state continues to be one of the key actors in international politics. Through this post, I want to apply my notions of identity, self and security in the context of gender ( carrying forward my previous post). First of all, my self-reflective account of security questions the disciplinary myopia of IR. Its obsession with Realism ...