Security Studies: Critical Perspectives - Paperback

by Xavier Guillaume (Author), Kyle Grayson (Author)

The only introduction to critical security studies to take a question-centred approach, with a unique emphasis on equipping students with the knowledge and skills to think, analyse, and debate using critical perspectives. Security Studies: Critical Perspectives introduces the analysis of security from critical and interdisciplinary perspectives. Taking a student-centred approach to understanding contemporary security themes and cases, it provides an accessible set of analytic steps so that students develop the critical thinking skills and confidence to ask important questions about security and our worlds in contemporary politics. Common-sense security assumptions that reproduce forms of oppression and domination are revealed and their justifications decentred while perspectives inclusive of class, gender and sexualities, ethnicity and race, religion, disability, culture and ideology, political belonging, and the global south are introduced. In doing so, the authors combine critical analysis with concrete empirical issues that connect students to the social and political worlds around them.

Online resources

- Extensive cross-references to encourage students to link elements, draw connections and identify similar logics, questions, and approaches.

Digital formats and resources

Security Studies: Critical Perspectives is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats, and is supported by online resources.

The e-book offers a mobile experience and convenient access along with additional case studies, introductions to theoretical approaches, a bank of useful web links, and questions for further reflection.

Author Biography

Xavier Guillaume is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands and has also taught at the Université de Genève, the University of Edinburgh and Sciences Po Paris. A citizen of Geneva, Switzerland, Xavier was born and raised in Geneva's suburbs by a poor, divorced, working mother. Xavier specialises in security and international issues connected to the mundane ways by which people constitute their identities in relation to others, the state, or to other international actors.

Kyle Grayson is the Head of the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University UK and Professor of Security, Politics, and Culture. A Canadian-British dual-national, he was born and raised on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. He is the third successive generation in his family to have migrated for economic reasons. Currently, he is Co-Editor in Chief of the academic journal International Political Sociology and Vice-Chair of the British International Studies Association.