Barry Buzan - 2/5 - What is Security?

Dr. Barry Buzan discusses the concept of security.
www.dfait-maeci...
Transcript:
"Since the ending of the Cold War, there have been a lot of changes. The military agenda, the traditional security agenda, dropped down in salience very greatly and various other sorts of things emerged and got more prominence. There were a lot of talk about societal security, identity, nationalism, religion and all of those kinds of things. There were more talks about economic and environmental security. So during the 90s, there was a considerable broadening out of the agenda - which had been visible before - a move away from security as being principally about military things, and a move towards accepting a wider range of things as being part of what the security discourse was about.
There are, of course, some people who think that security is just military and that the two things define each other. Im not a fan of that position because it seems to me that the military isnt intrinsically about security issues. My sense of a security issue is that it goes along with a certain kind of formula, that there has to be an existential threat, a big threat to something - a referent object which is highly valued by a group of people - and that that combination of things leads to call for extreme measures, or emergency measures of some sort. That to me is the kind of formula for identifying whats a security issue and whats not. In other words, its an attempt to take things out of the realm of normal politics and attach to them an emergency type of priority, saying we have to do something about this, and we have to do it now and quickly because if we dont, something we value, maybe us, is going to disappear or be seriously damaged in some way. That to me is what differentiates security politics from normal politics. And it could be military stuff, but it could not.
If you think of security in that way, then aspects of military stuff arent security. The fact that the Danes sent peacekeepers to Bosnia, or wherever, isnt a security issue for Denmark. Its normal politics. Its part of their foreign policy. I think its important to break the link between the military and the security agenda, and to look at it instead in terms of this formula that Ive set out. My colleague Ole Waever calls it panic politics. Its about emergencies and how to deal with them."

[@subsens]

And special thanks for transcript! :))

[@user-ed1qi9ul9t]

Thanks for this useful lecture

[@stbandaro]

Thank You for sharing... Great Course online... :)

[@paulhaube]

Why re-defining the concept of security when it is epistemologically defined in ancient time? Why use a word that has to do with "protection against" and/or "safety from" in real terms (i.e., loss). Food security, human security, economic security and all these adjectives are not security issues since they stem from politico-soci-economic decisions where there is an un/acceptable level of risk of loss/gain. In other words, if the problem is caused by the owner of the object at stake, it is not a security threat where there is intent to harm, but more a (bad) business risk where there is a chance, a gamble with assets. Post-modernists are good at mixing concepts, like art, health care and education and social issues. Leaders and academics nowadays have insufficient life experience to posit anything durable.

[@kubilayguven]

Bağcılar ulaaaaan