York Centre for International and Security Studies

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/1302

The York Centre for International and Security Studies pursues a triple mandate of research, graduate teaching, and outreach. We undertake critical and theoretically-informed research that is guided by: a) a concern with the ethical-political dimensions of international security policies; and b) the assumption that the pursuit of security, defence, peace, and social justice requires the study of transnational and global forces in relation to local contexts and a range of social groups. The Centre, a research unit of York University, works and partners with academics, policymakers, practitioners, and activists across Canada and around the world. Our members include York faculty and graduate students, and visiting scholars from inside and outside Canada.

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Open Access
Blackened Faces and Ticker-Tape Parades: Situating the Leviathan in Lakota and Euroamerican Conceptions of War
(YCISS, 1998-10) Beier, Marshall
It is in seeking to draw out the essential functional differences between the blackened faces of the Lakota warriors and the ticker-tape parades of the Euroamerican ones that we encounter some important implications for security studies. As R.B.J. Walker has observed, what is at stake for adherents to mainstream theoretical approaches to security studies is, fundamentally, “the constitutive account of the political that has made the prevailing accounts of security seem so plausible.” Imperiled in any contestation of the appropriateness of the state as the referent object of security, then, are deeply-held commitments with regard to the possibilities of political order itself — possibilities which are presumed to begin and end with the state. Thus, Michael C. Williams and Keith Krause propose that this is “perhaps the central reason why the orthodoxy of security studies has been so resistant to taking account of current transformative trends (usually by denying their relevance) that seem to challenge its analytical assumptions.” If what is most jealously guarded in traditional conceptions of security is, as Williams and Krause put it, “not simply a claim about the historical centrality of the state” but “a particular understanding about how the state resolves the problem of political order itself,” then an array of traditional Native North American knowledges and lifeways are doubly at odds with the orthodoxy of security studies: not only do they (re)present alternative — that is, non-state — possibilities of political order, but the denials of such possibilities which persist in mainstream constructions of their collective identity have been essential to state-building in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, many of the same assumptions which underpin the orthodoxy of security studies and its more fundamental political commitments may be found at the root of traditional anthropological and historiographical claims about Native North Americans which cast their pre-Columbian condition in terms of a Hobbesian state of nature. It is therefore instructive to consider some of these accounts and to assess both the integrity of the evidence upon which they rest and the extent to which they can or cannot be reconciled with the traditional worldviews and lifeways of the peoples to which they refer. Finally, the insights garnered from this exercise will be brought to bear in support of the proposition that the mainstream theoretical approaches to security studies are themselves implicated in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of advanced colonialism.
Open Access
Extradisciplinary Approaches to Security: A Selected Bibliography
(YCISS, 1999-08) Arnold, Samantha; Beier, Marshall
What follows is not intended as a comprehensive pointer to extradisciplinary writings having a direct bearing on the subject matter(s) and core conceptual concerns of Security Studies. Rather it is meant to provide something of the flavour of the varied approaches to security developed beyond the pale of its dedicated discipline. Accordingly, there is certainly much more of relevance to be found in each of the disciplines surveyed, to say nothing of those which are not explored herein. Drawn solely from explicit references to “security” in the subject indices of a number of disciplinary abstracts spanning the period 1985-1998, this compilation has been confined to articles published in English-language scholarly journals. Some will be familiar to scholars working in Security Studies; many will not. Though we do not wish to impute disciplinary affiliations to particular authors (to say nothing of journals) and are equally reluctant to reify often-arbitrary disciplinary boundaries, the bibliography is organized under the disciplinary headings of Anthropology, Development Studies, Human Geography, Sociology, Urban Studies, and Women’s Studies. These affiliations are based on the enumeration of individual works in the comprehensive abstracts of these disciplines, and are in no way intended to suggest their exclusivity to any particular academic realm. Rather, the point is to underscore the highly problematic nature of precisely these designations inasmuch as they have the effect of foreclosing engagement between scholars working in areas of obvious mutual relevance.
Open Access
Priming for Ethnographic Fieldwork: A Selected Bibliography
(YCISS, 2001-02) Beier, Marshall
This bibliography has been compiled with two principal aims. First, it is intended to facilitate introduction not only to the literatures on ethnographic research but to the myriad practical and ethical considerations that attach to fieldwork endeavours as well. Secondly, it is hoped that some of these works might contribute to stimulating greater interest in these issues amongst International Relations scholars whose research interests lead them to (re)invest human subjects with ontological significance and to seek through their writing to represent them, their knowledges, and their ways of knowing. In service of these aims it is, to be sure, a most modest step, and should therefore be received more appropriately as a call for greater attention to the problems and promise of ethnographic International Relations scholarship than as anything more than a most prefatory gesture in that direction by itself.

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