Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

 Throughout this book the authors use the word "securitization" as the name of a process, or "securitize" as a verb. To securitize an issue X is to come to regard X as a security issue or threat. The process of securitization brings a nation-state's decision-making elite to this point: X is a threat.  Once in a while, too, a desecuritization takes place.  What had formerly been considered a threat ceases to be so, not because it disappears but because it fades into the status of a background fact.  Their use of these two words can be a little confusing for someone accustomed to the very different use of "securitization" in financial news: an asset or income stream is "securitized" by being used as the basis for the sale of securities. But over time I did become accustomed to their use.  Simply by using the word in this way, they have suggested that what is or is not a security issue is not a given -- that it is, to a great extent, a matter of...

More on the book on RSC Theory I discussed here a bit as my New Years' Day entry. [By way of review, RSC Theory means a theory of international relations that looks at the globe from the bottom up -- from the circumstance of particular regions regarded as each a "security complex" in its own right, to their relationship with each other and so to the Big Global Picture. This, as expounded in the 2003 book REGIONS AND POWERS, is in accord with the old Machiavellian realist approach to the subject and averse to top-down views such as the "end of history" or "clash of civilizations" theorists.]  I'd like to quote a striking passage about matters of cause and effect in this book. "For much of history, only one scenario appears as relevant ... because development has turned onto one of the tracks that becomes self-reinforcing. At crucial moments of historical change, the situation is open and several scenarios become possible, though, as we have see...

I haven't been reading books at all like THIS since I was a political science major at an undergrad college in the late 1970s. Barry Buzan & Ole Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (Cambridge UK 2003). I've discussed the underlying idea before on this blog.  Buzan and Waever pursue RSC Theory, a form of international relations realism that focuses on states as primarily members of regional groupings. My previous comments on the theory were offered at second hand. Now I'm finally reading the theorists themselves. I propose to write a series of posts on the subject, beginning with this one (hence the Roman numeral in the title). Start with this.  "A handful of states at the top of the power leagues play a truly global game, treating each other as a special class, and projecting their power into far-flung regions. But for the great majority of states, the main game of security is defined by their near neighbors....The binding theme of ...

Some thoughts from a veteran of political-science classes of the late 1970s. We learned of the difference between two foreign-policy  realisms: classical and structural. Classical versus structural.  Classical realists took the policy maker himself to be the chief object of interest/study. Machiavelli was the font of this approach. James Burnham was a self-conscious adherent. A classical realist won't talk, without qualifications, of a state (a city, in the font's context) as having goals, but will think of the people and  factions who hold or are contending for power - a city's Prince or those who would be Prince -- have goals, and their goals become those of ‘the state’ when they achieve positions of command. Those decisions may involve deliberate absorption of the state by a neighbor, or even indifference as to whether the state survives or not.  Structural realism speaks of states as having goals, determined by their history and systemic features of their decisi...