Fear and Faith: Religion as an International Security Issue

The University Archives has determined that this item is of continuing value to OSU's history.Since Sept. 11, it has become fashionable to talk of a “clash of civilizations” between the West and Islam. The world may now be standing on the brink of a long conflict, perhaps a new “cold war” that features small-scale, but spectacular violence. Ole Waever argues that there is a real danger that the West will once again see only what is wrong with the “other,” and will be unable to discern the overall nature and pattern of the conflict. In order to engage in constructive dialogue, he said, it is crucial that we make an effort to understand what drives the clash in the international arena and why both sides feel so threatened by one another.Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security StudiesEvent webpage, MP4 video, photos, lecture summar

Macrosecuritization and security constellations: reconsidering scale in securitization theory

The Copenhagen school's theory of securitisation has mainly focused on the middle level of world politics in which collective political units, often but not always states, construct relationships of amity or enmity with each other. Its argument has been that this middle level would be the most active both because of the facility with which collective political units can construct each other as threats, and the difficulty of finding audiences for the kinds of securitisations and referent objects that are available at the individual and system levels. This article focuses on the gap between the middle and system levels, and asks whether there is not more of substance there than the existing Copenhagen school analyses suggests. It revisits the under-discussed concept of security constellations in Copenhagen school theory, and adds to it the idea of macrosecuritisations as ways of getting an analytical grip on what happens above the middle level. It then suggests how applying these concepts adds not just a missing sense of scale, but also a useful insight into underlying political logics, to how one understands the patterns of securitisation historical, and contemporary

Conclusión: mundos donde alguna vez estuvo el oeste

What have we learned after taking this global tour of International Relations scholarship? Each of the chapters offers a number of fascinating and unique insights into the ways in which IR has evolved and is practiced in distinct sites around the world. These different snapshots, in and of themselves, are invaluable, especially given the paltry state of knowledge about the discipline in nearly all corners of the globe. Furthermore, although a fair degree of literature actually does exist about the political, social, and economic environments that characterize these diverse countries and regions, exploring the ways in which their varying geocultural traits inform and condition scholarly activity in International Relations serves our dual purpose of stretching the field’s boundaries (thus doing justice to its “international” label) and contributing to greater self-reflexivity within it