Critical Security Methods

Critical Security Methods offers a new approach to research methods in critical security studies. It argues that methods are not simply tools to bridge the gap between security theory and security practice. Rather, to practise methods critically means engaging in a more free and experimental interplay between theory, methods and practice. This recognises that the security practices we research are often methods in their own right, as forms of surveillance, data mining, visualisation, and so on, and that our own research methods are themselves practices that intervene and interfere in those sites of security and insecurity. Against the familiar methdological language of rigour, detachment and procedural consistency, Critical Security Methods reclaims the idea of method as experiment. The chapters offer a series of methodological experimentations that assemble concepts, theory and empirical cases into new frameworks for critical security research. They show how critical engagement and methodological innovation can be practiced as interventions into diverse instances of insecurity and securitisation, including airports, drug trafficking, peasant struggles, biometrics and police kettling. The book will be a valuable resource for students and researchers in critical security studies, politics and international relations. Review: 'The contributors to Critical Security Methods show us why talking about methods is engaging. All of us digging into security's myriad manifestations puzzle over what we are doing out there in the mythical field . Here is a book that joins us in that candid, valuable puzzling.' -- Cynthia Enloe, Clark University, MA, USA 'Breaking free from the conventional strictures of methodology, Critical Security Methods offers readers a wonderful panoply of new approaches for thinking about method, methods and methodology... A generous service to the community of scholars engaged in thinking through the aporias of contemporary security policy.' -- Stefan Elbe, University of Sussex, UK 'Through three distinct moves that complicate rather than separate the relations between theory and method, this book offers a new critical sensibility to questions of method. By providing an analytic framework that attends to methods as practices, experiments and performative, it is not only relevant to CSS but critical methods in the social sciences more generally.' -- Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK