Strategic (Security) Studies

Within the discipline of political science, the study of security was, until the 1990s, dominated by strategic studies. The end of the Cold War dealt a significant blow to the legitimacy of strategic studies as the centerpiece of the study of security, resulting in the transformation of the field into what we now know as security studies. This entry traces the history of that transformation, beginning with the evolution of strategic studies, its challengers, and the emergence of security studies as the new moniker for the field. It begins with the so-called golden age of strategic studies, in which the central concepts of Cold War security and defense were elaborated, and in particular, intellectual work was performed to integrate nuclear weapons into the discussion on national defense. It then considers the other two periods of Cold War strategic studies: the first characterized by the operationalization of arms control in the period of détente and the second coincident with the period known as the Second Cold War. As the Second Cold War swiftly gave way to the rapid transformation of Europe and the Cold War's end, the criticisms of strategic studies that had been voiced throughout its history gained greater purchase within the discipline. The entry traces first the emergence of security studies in the 1990s as a reformed study of security after the Cold War's end and then the changes wrought to the field by the events of September 11, 2001. The final section in the entry considers the state of the field today.

The close connection of the periodization of strategic and security studies with the major events of the postwar world is no accident. Security studies is a policy science and was intimately connected to the creation of the national security state in the United States following World War II. The close connection of academic disciplines and the security state is by no means unique to strategic studies and has been particularly noted in the creation of area studies within political science, but the ties were particularly overt in the case of strategic studies. While strategic studies developed as a recognized academic discipline within the universities, it was always closely tied to military institutions, as in the case of the RAND Corporation, formed to [Page 2542]conduct research for the U.S. Air Force. As a policy science with a military focus, strategic studies was underpinned theoretically by the political realism that emerged in the 1950s as the dominant approach to the study of international relations (IR) in the English-speaking world. Even as the marginal variant of realism, liberal institutionalism, grew in importance in the 1970s and 1980s, strategic studies remained largely immune, and was, indeed, at the heart of the reassertion of a parsimonious “neorealism” in the period. With the development of security studies, theoretical pluralism has developed in the field, with the various theoretical traditions of IR reflected in security studies. This pluralism has included the development of what has become termed critical security studies, drawing the traditions of critical social theory into the study of security—which has, in turn, led to the suggestion that security itself be abandoned.

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