Network analysis

Book synopsis: Focusing on critical approaches to security, this new textbook offers readers both an overview of the key theoretical perspectives and a variety of methodological techniques. With a careful explication of core concepts in each chapter and an introduction that traces the development of critical approaches to security, this textbook will encourage all those who engage with it to develop a curiosity about the study and practices of security politics. Challenging the assumptions of conventional theories and approaches, unsettling that which was previously taken for granted – these are among the ways in which such a curiosity works. Through its attention to the fact that, and the ways in which, security matters in global politics, this work will both pioneer new ways of studying security and acknowledge the noteworthy scholarship without which it could not have been thought. This textbook will be essential reading to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of critical security studies, and highly recommended to students of traditional security studies, International Relations and Politics. Chapter Abstract: Social thinkers today are taking important steps from conceiving the social world in terms of substances and ‘things’ toward conceiving it in terms of processes and unfolding relations. Network approaches are at the core of this movement toward relational thinking. The chapter discusses social network analysis as more than a mere ‘method,’ and argues that it belongs to a family of analytical strategies for the study of how resources, goods, events, or positions flow through a particular configuration of social ties. We show how the critical potential of network analysis grows from: (1) (re)-materialisations; (2) interstitial thinking; (3) thinking across scales and strata of reality. In International Relations, the potential of network thinking rests in its creative disturbance of to state-centric visions

Methodological forum: creative and critical sociology for the twenty-first century: foreword

Methodology does not unfold as a separate domain of scholarly practice, isolated from epistemology and ontology. It is not a technical domain. While it is often construed as autonomous, it remains a site of struggle, of conflict and alliance, where both the opening and the foreclosure of thinking space can occur. In this forum, we chose to treat it as a site for expressing our sociological imagination, rather than a site for an organised exercise of technical skill, implicated in the construction and confirmation of epistemic authority. The pursuit of an integrated view on methodology, epistemology and ontology, and the affirmation of methodology as one of the domains of the sociological imagination are not without critical stakes. The link from methodology to precision, in the sense of following strict protocols for generating and organising evidence, is a positivist route, and it often produces deeply impoverishing consequences for the sociological endeavour. Therefore, a critique of positivism, and of its institutional, intellectual, and emotional modes of operation is part and parcel of this revisiting of what methodology is and what it can be