Reflecting on Security Dialogue at 50

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

(Dante, Inferno, Canto 1)

Our journal is a material trace of a community of readers, a spirit of engagement, a bounded but changing set of shared values, common tropes, mutually comprehensible discourses, and codes for inclusion, exclusion, fairness and exchange, as well as value-added propositions that can be parsed in intellectual, social and market logics. Each issue of Security Dialogue also represents the visible trace of a great deal of invisible labour: researching, thinking and feeling, writing and rewriting, reviewing, re-reviewing, editing, typesetting, proofing and back again. To recognize that labour and that community, to maintain the journal’s vitality, and to mark the occasion of our 50th year of publication, we have undertaken some soundings of our community on its missions, its methods and its modalities. Our intention in this collective project was to structure our projections – that is, to examine what and where we might throw forward from where we stand and upon which foundations we are building. Michael Murphy (2019) has written a concise history of the journal itself. Then, we asked members of the editorial board and sympathizers with the intellectual project of the journal three questions: In the field of security and security studies, what is constant, what is changing, and what is constantly changing? Plainly, our goal is not to present a singular, definitive, Archimedean view of the collective judgment of this diverse group of scholars about the past, present and future of security studies, but rather to curate a diverse collection of positive, affirmative, more-or-less programmatic statements about the state of the art, the values and stakes of contestation, and possible futures.

As a community of social scientists and social theorists, we are caught in this contemporary moment sailing between the Charybdis of modernist, scientistic knowledge production and the Scylla of flat, critical theorizing. The focus of Security Dialogue over the past 10 years – and, indeed, one might argue the past 50 years – has been a trajectory between these two centres of gravity: moving from very specific bespoke practical ‘peace proposals’ to the more general structural and theoretical arguments about the nature of security epitomized by securitization theory and the ‘responsibility to protect’ or human security. The first tendency leads towards cases that are deep and rich, singular and individual – knowledge that is immediate. The move towards actor-network theory and the local turn in peacebuilding is illustrative of this mode. The second tendency is towards generalizable models of security that might be tested, refined, proved or disproved – knowledge that is cumulative. Securitization theory and human security are both illustrative of this latter mode: abstract and parsimonious theories that are driven by normative commitments. We can observe this dynamic in the ebb and flow of specificity in the object of study in milestone articles: peace processes versus this particular village’s peace process; abstract securitization theory versus this particular securitization dynamic; the impact of technology on security versus this particular technology, say, drones. Within the framework of this horizon scan, we have contributors from many different points on this spectrum: those who make abstract claims about the normative commitments to security studies – what we must study and must not – and those who put forward very specific and precise interventions about particular issues, cases or lines of thought that must be followed. We understand our core audience to be concerned with theoretical innovation and new empirical material in the broad subject of security.

In my tenure at Security Dialogue as associate editor and now editor, I have been energized by the open nature of the editorial conversations at the highest level. While there is a concern that new pieces speak to our sense of the community’s concerns (or communities’ concerns), we remain a theoretically agnostic journal, open to a variety of different ontological and epistemological positions, disciplinary origins, and methodological approaches. This predisposition towards innovation puts pressure on our authors and the editorial team to stay permanently engaged with wider debates across not just international relations but also cognate fields.

As a child of the late Cold War, I was convinced that the end of bipolarity and the emerging structure of the post–Cold War order would be the defining theme for security studies. And then after the 11 September 2001 attacks, I was equally convinced that it would be the war on terror. And now, global tectonic plates appear to be shifting again underneath our feet. Globalization has proliferated in unexpected ways; climate change and its attendant crises are radically reshaping the earth itself, its biomes and inhabitants, and our assumptions about energy consumption and the attendant market capitalism upon which it relies; and the rise of competitor hegemons has opened up the possibility of radical geopolitical instability. The academy itself is transitioning, with the forces of neoliberalization and the quantification, privatization and changing social mediatized marketplace of ideas that accompany it rendering our assumptions about knowledge production and engagement obsolete. Slow, steady, dispassionate critical inquiry often seems at odds with the pace of empirical and political change.

As Murphy (2019) reports, the original intended function of the Bulletin of Peace Proposals was to act as an empirically minded and practical counterpart to the Journal of Peace Research, the flagship academic journal published by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). As it transitioned into a more externally oriented and academic journal, changing its name to Security Dialogue, the genre of interventions published in the journal shifted from specific plans for the solution of particular conflicts to more theoretically inclined interventions. The critical intention of real, effective change between the two names of the journal has remained the same, but the mode in which critical arguments are made has evolved. I would argue that Security Dialogue is as practical in its outlook as the Bulletin of Peace Proposals was at its inception; it is simply that what we understand to be practical has changed. The object of intervention remains steadfastly the question of security and peace. The feminist, sociological and post-critical turns – the move towards theory-in-action, practice and ergonomics – are each illustrative of this mode. While not frequently referenced in our published articles, I would count teaching, providing policy or political advice, and public advocacy as practical, political interventions that also characterize this critical spirit.

Since the emergence of critical international relations theory in the late 1980s, and even earlier in the behavioural revolution of the 1960s, questions of methods and methodology have constituted the primary battlefield between disciplinary camps: historical versus positivist, postmodern versus positivist, mainstream versus feminist, anticolonial, decolonial and postcolonial. Early work on the Third Debate mobilized Thomas Kuhn’s (2012) model of paradigms and paradigmatic shifts, but downplayed Kuhn’s own descriptions of the social and professional motors of those intellectual paradigm shifts. For example, during periods of ‘abnormal’ science, when multiple paradigms with their incommensurable assumptions, questions and methods are competing, Kuhn argued that paradigmatic competition is as much social as intellectual, manifest in conference programmes, publications and the changing nature of the professoriate through hiring, promotion and professional recognition. The field of security studies itself needs a field analysis, because the daily practices of research, writing, teaching and publication are underestimated and underanalysed, even in the currently faddish sociologies of the discipline. In addition to looking at the disciplinary measures of the discipline in terms of theoretical pluralism, mainstream hegemony, method fetishism or geocultural epistemic communities, we should examine the actual daily practices of security studies scholars to understand how the international field operates, particularly when that field is so overdetermined.

In contrast to approaches that might focus entirely on discourse or the production of knowledge per se, Bourdieu’s practice theory is concerned with practices and the circulation of different forms of capital – not simply economic, but also social, cultural and political capital (see Bigo, 2011). Bourdieu argues that social capital is not perfectly fungible, but rather has limits. Thus, my academic qualifications might open certain doors in university circles and grant me certain access to a faculty club or policy workshop, but will not affect my taekwondo belt test results. Bourdieu insists that we should not fall prey to the temptation to reduce all explanations to an internal logic – as if the field were completely isolated from all other structures or institutions – or to an external logic – as if the field were simply the effect of other structures or institutions. The field in which social, cultural and political capital circulates is not ever delimited by national, institutional or professional boundaries. This description seems particularly apt for the discipline international relations and the field of security studies, where the field includes individuals, institutions and structures that transcend the disciplines of political science, international studies, international affairs, sociology, geography and global studies and are not geographically homogeneous or contained in particular institutions. Bourdieu argues that agents within the social field are characterized by relationality and position-making – that is, while the limits of the field can be understood as the limits of the fungibility of capital generated in that field, actors within the field understand their positions to be structured by a number of logics (competition, differentiation, hegemony, cooperation, external) and by each other.

Methodological and theoretical innovation play into a logic of differentiation in the field of security studies – scholars are differentiated by their methods, theories and empirical cases, and so there is a constant pressure to innovate. The pressure to innovate and thus differentiate both pushes the frontiers of knowledge and reinforces the disciplinary mainstream. But, that need to positively differentiate each scholar from their peers often obscures failure. Failure is a necessary machine that produces capital in the academic field. However, that failure is often also obscured in the official account of the theoretical or empirical evolution of the subject.

In each aspect of the security professor’s professional world, failure is ubiquitous and productive. Professors teach: in many systems, they are expected to dedicate 40% of their time/attention/work towards teaching and, with adjunct or non-regularized faculty, that figure can be higher. Failure is productive in that teaching space: whether a student fails or passes, it does not impact the structure of the classroom, which is dependent on other institutions, rules, authority and governance. The fear of failure motivates students, no doubt. But, the capacity to fail, to make fail, without having that failure to learn, or that failure to teach, impact the authority or position of the professor indicates the way that failure is productive: it works to create particular relations of power – the ability to judge the failure to learn as distinct from the failure to teach is constitutive of the professor as an evaluator/teacher. Failure is not just a motivator for students, but the capacity to make fail without failing is constitutive of the professor’s authority to judge students. And that failure to teach is never recorded in anything but student evaluations, which are crude instruments. The failure of one’s doctoral students to obtain a job is likewise not recorded or audited, and so our professional training is likewise only reported when successful. To take writing, which is only ever measured by publication, the number of desk rejects for an article is largely invisible once the article gets published – as indeed are the reviews themselves, except for a (sometimes disingenuous) thanking of the anonymous reviewers in the first footnote or acknowledgements, which simultaneously insists that the persistent errors are ‘the author’s own’. Every article fails to move perfectly through the peer-review process. In other words, as authors, we accept and even expect that we have failed to present our argument in the first instance of submission – and that peer review is necessary to illuminate what kind or level of failure is acceptable for publication. Journals in our field mark their quality by their degree of failure (top rank journals sometimes publish their acceptance rates) and the speed by which they can render a decision (on average 60 days). Similarly, the failure of a policy advocate to achieve governmental or legislative approval does not constitute a failure of thinking, and indeed that failure to convince state or governmental agencies might be capital neutral or it might generate capital. In short, in relation to having a policy ‘impact’, while it is crucial for some contemporary evaluations (particularly in the ‘Research Excellence Framework’ in the UK), the impact is not necessarily measured in success in terms of winning the battle of ideas but, rather, impact is simply encounter, even if the encounter produces no positive change. Engagement with the audience is key, and not necessarily the convincing of that audience. Similarly, in terms of administration or academic service, which account for 20% of an academic’s time in the Canadian formula, the failure of an academic to launch a new programme or course, or to gain graduate students, or to become dean, or to carry the mood of the departmental meeting, or to win a hiring or tenure vote – none of those failures in our professional daily activity is how they defend the value of their saved social capital.

A personal reflection on failure: Early in my career, I was the subject of death threats in the course of my normal university duties. And there is something different about teaching in front of large classes, walking through the university or writing alone in your office when you have been threatened that someone is going to stab you. However much I understood myself to be marginal in the discipline at that time, being made hyper-aware of my physical vulnerability and institutional weakness in the face of that threat, I understood my marginality on a different bodily register, and it radically affected my professional position. It led to my leaving that university, and I understood the death threats as a professional failure, and that catalysed my desire to achieve tenure at a ‘safer’ university and to be visible in ways that would gain recognition. It is at this very insecure moment that my academic research took a dramatic turn towards security studies. What others have termed resilience, I understood in terms of professional failure, precisely because of my lack of personal security that has now informed my thinking about security politics in general. What I want to argue is that these plural narratives of failure are profoundly related to our positionality, which is largely hidden from view in professional contexts. The question of failure is profoundly related to subterranean experiences, structures or dynamics that are part of the warp and weft of publications.

We might focus on the positive impact of failure as much as the negative impact. As Austin et al. (2019) argue about companionship, I think that my personal experience of failure and insecurity has led me to promote a different culture of generosity and safety in the academy, or at least in the small areas that I can influence, which leads me to focus on the gatekeeping that happens through praise, best-practices, innovation and generosity, rather than moaning about another ‘turn’ or faddish expressions of fatigue.

Security Dialogue aims to be a safe intellectual space from which critique might be made of ‘security’, understood in a generous and ecumenical sense, and that goal is enacted through our editorial processes. In addition to following a rigorous double-blind process of peer review, our diverse editorial team meets monthly to discuss all new submissions that fit the journal in style, format and subject. Articles are shepherded through the peer-review process through associate editors or the editor, on the basis of the collective discussion of the team.

One of the neglected aspects of Kuhn’s description of paradigm shift, and perhaps sociologies of the field in general, is the sociological dynamic of knowledge production: relationships, connections, emotions, happenstance, grievances and gratitude. Friendships, romance, family, co-location, supervisor–supervisee relationships, the circulation of resources and credit are all powerful engines for citation and academic knowledge production. In the contemporary university, in addition to the historical and persistent dynamics of gender, class, race, colonialism and national context that might constrain the collegium, the casualization of academic labour further complicates the accessibility of research funding, space, collaboration or publication. The attempt to quantify all manner of academic production and success through impact factor, altmetrics, publions and other tools is indicative of a general governmentalization of academe. These topologies make access to the processes of production, authorization and validation of knowledge sometimes invisible or difficult to trace, and so part of the quest of our editorial team is to enact processes and policies that meet with our values of safety, generosity and inclusion. One of our persistent goals has been the pluralizing our community in intellectual, sociological and geopolitical registers.

In social science, we have developed and enacted precepts and rituals of peer review in order to empower the better angels of our nature in order to cultivate an ethos of equal parts generosity and rigour. In addition to a philosophical theory that knowledge claims are stronger when tested, there is a social theory that blind peer review produces the most honest or least compromised critical judgments that attempt to obviate the differences of power, class, institution and language, and focus simply on the theory, the method, the data, the argument, the conclusion. The very affective, social and intellectual ties that create the community are mitigated through the mechanism of anonymous review. The knowledge that is produced, and then measured through citations, impacts and engagement, is a commodity that can be marketized by journals and mobilized by researchers for their own advancement. The economy of academic journals has been well established. Even since the advent of the internet and the possibility of online publication, and the very different way in which articles are now sought after and cited, the intellectual justification for a journal as a centre of a particular scholarly community remains robust. Within our current scientific-business model, only some parts of the value chain are remunerated, and the production of peer-reviewed articles requires the labour of reviewers and editors who, at best, are indirectly compensated through recognition.

In our contemporary moment, during the 50th anniversary year of Security Dialogue, the intellectual and business model of the peer-reviewed journal is being challenged by the open-access movement. The ideological argument for open access is that the market-oriented model of contemporary publication, including the quantification of success through impact factor, distorts the intellectual market of ideas: when journal publishers are oriented towards profit through charging for readership, then knowledge production is distorted through existing structures of privilege. An open-access model, however, places the responsibility for publication with the author, and so, once published, knowledge is free to consume. A consortium of funding bodies, Coalition S, has agreed to the principles of Plan S – that is, to fund the publication of research in completely open-access journals. Those journals will be financially supported through article-processing charges (APCs), which ideally should be supported by funding agencies or universities and should not limit the capacity of authors to submit and publish. This revolution poses two challenges to our current success. From an economic perspective, limited APCs cannot support our current levels of author support from manuscript management to language editing to publicity and marketing. I will leave the economic evaluation of the publishing model to others. From a sociological level, becoming the first significant open-access journal in the field might grant first-mover advantages, but might also marginalize our authors and minimize our publication’s impact. My estimation is that part of the goal of Coalition S is precisely to disrupt the concentration of structural power evident in journals, impact factors and citation rankings. I think it is important, particularly at this moment, to set out what the stakes are for journals – why we might still want journals – as quantified, hierarchical and ossified as they are – in the next 50 years.

The value-proposition of a journal, or at least of Security Dialogue, is that the establishment of procedures and processes that we understand as the codification of certain values of knowledge production and critical judgement leads to confidence and trust in the published product, and we hope that the social capital that is generated by editors, reviewers and managers is valued by the readers. Editorially, we strategically spend that social capital when we push the boundaries or question the foundations of our academic field by introducing new authors, new theoretical frameworks, new methodological tools, new empirical cases. And for a critical journal that is constantly challenging the norm, we benefit from the distributed risk and collective responsibility of the editorial team. But, that capital is also available for authors – particularly authors who are challenging dominant paradigms. What I would argue, in fact, is that Security Dialogue, because of its critical disposition, embedded in both our aims and scope but also in our particular editorial process and community, works to expand, diversify and pluralize the field.

The interventions by editorial board members in this horizon scan exemplify this spirit, highlighting the normative tensions in our community, the ethical commitments to our studies of peace and security, and the stakes of critique. Our short, positive interventions offer reflections on the evolution of the community and the discussion, as well as questions about the ethics and vectors of future critique, and drill down to some important empirical issues that require thought and action.