Yes / International Relations (IR) has increasingly paid attention to critical pedagogy. Feminist, post-colonial and poststructuralist IR scholarship, in particular, have long been advancing the discus-sions about how to create a pluralist and democratic classroom where ‘the others’ of politics can be heard by the students, who can critically reflect upon complex power relations in global politics. Despite its normative position, Critical Security Studies (CSS) has so far refrained from join-ing this pedagogical conversation. Deriving from the literatures of postcolonial and feminist pedagogical practices, it is argued that an IR scholar in the area of CSS can contribute to the pro-duction of a critical political subject in the 'uncomfortable classroom', who reflects on violent practices of security. Three pedagogical methods will be introduced: engaging with the students’ lifeworlds, revealing the positionality of security knowledge claims, and opening up the class-room to the choices about how the youth’s agency can be performed beyond the classroom. The argument is illustrated through the case of forced migration with specific reference to IR and Pol-itics students’ perceptions of Syrian refugees in Turkey. The article advances the discussions in critical IR pedagogy and encourages CSS scholarship to focus on teaching in accordance with its normative position. / The research was partly supported by HM Government funding to MK Dhami.

This thesis is situated at the intersection of Feminist International Relations, Critical Security Studies and Gender Studies. It takes as its starting point – and offers a challenge to – the feminist contention that soldiers cannot be peacekeepers due to hegemonic constructions of military masculinity associated with the skills and practices of combat. It problematises this assumption by investigating whether involvement in the practices of conflict resolution on Peace Support Operations (PSOs) influences the construction of military masculinities. The thesis also questions the rather monolithic accounts of masculinity which are found in feminist arguments that peacekeeping soldiers reinforce neo-imperial oppression, and argues that such critiques neglect the potentially more progressive aspects of employing soldiers as peacekeepers. Using the British Army as a case study to explore these conceptual issues, the thesis utilises a novel methodological approach derived from R W Connell’s framework of gender relations and social constructivist discourse theory. It analyses both official and unofficial sources of British Army discourse on PSOs, including military doctrine, recruitment material and autobiography, and finds evidence to suggest that ‘peacekeeper masculinity’ offers a challenge, albeit incomplete, to the hegemonic masculinity associated with combat. The thesis argues that, despite the limited nature of this challenge, peacekeeper masculinity represents an important development because the privileging of conflict resolution practices it embodies involves disruptions to traditional gendered dichotomies and the construction of ‘regendered soldiers,’ with important implications for both international peace and security and gender relations. Finding conflict resolution practices such as negotiating and building consent, moderating the use of force and humanitarian activities manly rather than emasculating is crucial if soldiers are to take PSOs as seriously as they do war. Moreover, associating masculinity with practices that require building relations of sensitivity, mutual respect and empathy has implications beyond the success of PSOs. Such associations not only challenge current models of hegemonic masculinity in the military, but – through replacing relations of dominance with more democratic relations – challenge the entire hierarchical structure of gender relations in western culture and language. As such, in exploring the concept of regendered soldiers, this thesis contributes significantly to theories of change in gender relations as well as to feminist International Relations scholarship on military masculinities, peacekeeping and security.

This is a study of regional security in the Middle East from a Critical Security Studies perspective. The main aim of the thesis is to provide an account of the pasts, presents and futures of regional security in the Middle East cognisant of the relationships between the three in one's thinking as well as practices. This is achieved through the threefold structure of the thesis, which looks at Cold War pasts (Part I), post-Cold War presents (Part II) and possible futures (Part III). The thesis also has a set of more specific aims. First, it aims to present a critique of prevailing security discourses in theory and practice with reference to regional security in the Middle East and point to unfulfilled potential immanent in regional politics. Second, the thesis aims to explore the mutually constitutive relationship between (inventing) regions and theories and practices of security. And finally, it aims to show how Critical Security Studies might allow one to think differently about the futures of regional security in the Middle East. The overall thesis is that the Critical Security Studies perspective presents a fuller account of regional security in the Middle East; it offers a comprehensive framework recognising the dynamic relationships between various dimensions and levels of security, as voiced by multiple referents.

As Kingsley Davis stated, ‘the study of population offers one of the unique and indispensable approaches to an understanding of world affairs’ (Davis 1954, p.vii). In the discipline of International Relations, valuable security and political implications have been yielded by examining how population growth constitutes violent conflicts in traditional security studies (e.g. Choucri 1974; North and Choucri 1971). Non-traditional security (NTS) also develops its own problem-solving approach, e.g. human security, to solve demographic-related issues encountered by humankind such as famine and unemployment (UNDP 1994). Despite both traditional and NTS studies having established their material approaches, the ideational relationship between security and population dynamics has yet to be studied in detail. Specifically, this dissertation examines how ideational relationship is/can be established by ‘securitising’ population dynamics, i.e. how to rhetorically make population dynamics a security threat. The thesis adopted a combined analytical framework of the Copenhagen School and the Paris School in the case of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to identify how the ideational relationship between security and population dynamics was established. It first adopts the securitisation framework to examine how the PRC rhetorically constructed population growth as a security threat and introduced its emergency measure, i.e. the one-child policy. The dissertation then reveals the politics of the prolonged securitisation by evaluating the one-child policy as a technique for governmentality of unease and demonstrates how this constitutes the shift from securitising population growth to population decline. This dissertation argues that population dynamics can be constructed as (the cause of) numerous security threats through a successful securitisation. With the case of the PRC, the thesis demonstrates the de facto politicisation of population growth before the late 70s, and how the de jure securitisation was adopted in a Communist manner to legitimise the world’s strictest population policy, i.e. the one-child policy, as its emergency measure to solve various existential threats posed by population dynamics. In addition, the study of politics of securitisation in the case of the PRC further unfolds the struggles of priorities among different actors, which brings us political, practical and relational implications about this governmentality of unease that lasted for almost 4 decades. A deeper understanding of how our ideas of demography shape what we call ‘security threats’ sheds lights on how states formulate comprehensive security agendas by taking population dynamics into account due to its immense importance to threat construction. Other security actors such as international organisations, private sectors, and even individuals can more easily convince relevant audiences to legitimise the securitisation of the specific demographic-related threats they are facing. As Sciubba put it, ‘population dynamics could be a challenge or an opportunity’ (Sciubba 2011, p.3). Accumulating knowledge of the ideational connections between security and population dynamics increases the ability of various security actors to confront these challenges through a successful securitisation, which contribute to preventing numerous demographic-related threats from happening or at least easing these pains of humankind.

Since the initial stages of 1980s, the global world faced the huge shift. Many security scholars try to challenge and review the mainstream security studies that derived from a combination of Anglo-American, statist, militarized, masculinized, methodologically positivist, and philosophically realist thinking. ¡§The Welsh School¡¨ of Critical Security Studies is one of the most important approach. The Welsh School thinks about security as developing in the light of the Frankfurt School, and brings the tradition of ¡§critical¡¨, ¡§epistemology position¡¨, and ¡§emancipation¡¨ to the security studies. The Welsh School separate the core of critical security studies(CSS) into three concepts: security, emancipation, and community, therefore, this study try to explain and review these concepts. Firstly, CSS tried to ¡§deepen¡¨ the concepts of ¡§security¡¨, deconstruct statism and bring the referent to individual, and then ¡§broaden¡¨ the agenda of security to discuss the traditional and non-traditional issues in the globalization world. Secondly, CSS emphasize the relationship of theory and practice, and expect to achieve their goal-¡§emancipatory politics¡¨. Via the construction of emancipatory community, people could released from contingent and structural oppressions, and create a free and equal environment. Despite the states still the major referent in international institution and security environment, and the main concept of The Welsh School still not practice in contemporary politics, but the first task of CSS is to bring a revision of the world, and then create a comprehensive and humanity security thinking.

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the use of narratives informed by the discourse of human security in the context of the Colombian conflict during the government of President Alvaro Uribe Velez (2002-2010). Its main contribution is to map the transformation of these narratives from the site of their formulation in the international institutions to the site of their appropriation into domestic settings; and then consider their role in the formation of the actors' strategies and the construction of the subjectivities of the individuals affected by the conflict dynamics. The research proceeds to this analysis through an investigation of the policies for the internally displaced and those relating to the rights of the victims informed by the framework of transitional justice. It shows that, with a combination of narratives of empowerment and reconciliation, they fulfill complementary roles in the construction of the subjectivities of individuals affected by the conflict in Colombia. The dissertation also concludes that the flexibility of the human security discourse allowed the Uribe government to reinforce its position.

This thesis rethinks the security dilemma within the context of the Cyprus problem. It analyzes and problematizes the established political discourses and societal insecurities in Cyprus. It basically contends that the Cyprus problem should be reconceptualized from a critical security perspective, utilizing the fatalist, mitigator and transcender logics of insecurity. In that regard, it advances the idea that the security paradox in Cyprus should be rethought with the aim of transcending it through reconciliation and trust-building. The thesis takes attention to the scope of human agency, both at the state and human society levels, in the processes of reconciliation and trust-building, and concludes that these processes are key in transforming the two communities in the island into a post-national and pluralistic community of Cyprus.

This paper seeks ways of understanding the new challenges of a rapidly changing world, and does so by attempting to resist the disciplinary power of orthodox research methodology, by critically and reflexively inquiring into the politics of (in)security, and ultimately, by seeking novelty. It begins by first declaring its ethical and methodological starting points, then draws out an assemblage of contemporary security problematics. This leads over and narrows down into an inquiry into how to understand the developing structure of information and cyber security in Sweden. Drawing from critical security studies and feminist research ethics, it sketches out an analytical story of power and knowledge in an age of boundless risk, security and information. It furthermore argues for the need of security scholars, practitioners and politicians alike to move beyond simplistic understandings of the world, and to revision it as shaped by more complex dynamics and flows of the global, digitalized and virtual reality of the world.

International actors from International Organizations, Western States, Think tanks, risk management consultancies, NGOs, and private security companies understand borderless threats like clandestine migration, drug trafficking, and international terrorism to emanate from ‘ungoverned spaces’ in the Global South. The Sahelian sub-region of West Africa has taken a prominent place in global discourses of insecurity and borderless threats. These non-traditional security concerns have been translated into an expanding array of transnational governance initiatives that bring together the activities and practices of a wide range of state and non-state, global and local, and public and private actors in efforts to deal with the challenges that borderless threats are assumed to present. This dissertation argues that attempts to govern drug trafficking in the Sahel are producing global assemblages of security intervention: shifting, multi-scalar, institutional orders that reorient and reconfigure the security practices, knowledges, mentalities, technologies, and priorities of multiple sets of governance actors across disparate jurisdictional spaces. The effects of the transnationalized security governance and capacity-building initiatives that unfold in simultaneous, connected spaces of intervention amplify and alter positions of social power and prominence in local fields of conflict. Through the practices and projects of global security experts and capacity-builders in the Sahel, new forms of international capital are introduced and become realized in local settings that intensify rivalries between local, national, and regional security institutions over the question of the recognition of their authority over security matters. In their relationships with international capacity-builders and other global actors, sets of local recipients of security governance interventions practice forms of extraversion whereby their structural positions of dependence and differentials of power and resources are leveraged to accumulate forms of international capital that they then use to dominate the fields of power in which they are embedded. The dissertation examines three components of the assemblages of security intervention in West Africa: the effects of the transnational field of capacity- building in the Sahelian interior; the establishment and operation of the UNODC Airport Communications drug interdiction project (AIRCOP) at Dakar’s International Airport, and the joint UNODC/World Customs Organization Container Control Programme operating at the port of Dakar. It advances new empirical material from these case studies, and makes contributions to debates in three sub-fields of International Relations: critical security studies, global governance, and international statebuilding.

This dissertation explores the ways in which media, visuality, and politics intersect through an analysis of contemporary war photography. In so doing, it seeks to uncover how war photography as a social practice works to produce, perform and construct the State. Furthermore, it argues that this productive and performative power works to constrain the conditions of possibility for geopolitics. The central argument of this project is that contemporary war photography reifies a view of the international in which the liberal, democratic West is pitted against the barbaric Islamic world in a ‘civilizational’ struggle. This project’s key contribution to knowledge rests in its unique and rigorous research methodology (Visual Discourse Analysis) – mixing as it does inspiration from both quantitative and qualitative approaches to scholarship. Empirically, the dissertation rests on the detailed analysis of over 1900 war images collected from 30 different media sources published between the years 2000-2013.