Security Dialogue 42(1) 105 –110 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0967010610393776 sdi.sagepub.com
Corresponding author: Maria Stern
Email: [email protected]
Mapping security–development:
A question of methodology?
Maria Stern and Joakim Öjendal
School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
The critical and considered response by Simon Reid-Henry (2011) reinforces our sense that the widespread attention being given to the ‘security–development nexus’ in the realm of policy warrants careful and critical scrutiny. Perhaps most significantly, Reid-Henry’s review article draws attention to the need to engage in the difficult – and often overlooked – questions of methodology: how can we creatively study the different ways in which the ‘nexus’ is being practised, negotiated and resisted in distinct sites – and to what effect? His comments therefore add much to our collective (yet necessarily disparate) efforts to develop an array of creative methodologies for the study of the ‘nexus’. Continuing the spirit of constructive critique, we engage with some of his main lines of argument. It is vital, we believe, to remember that there are many ways of exploring the politics of security–development, each requiring different road maps. Furthermore, as Véronique Pin-Fat reminds us, even the astute and committed pursuance of any given map may blind us to ‘finding’ what we are looking for.
Keywords
security–development nexus, peacebuilding, security, human security, violence
We read with great interest the intervention by Simon Reid-Henry (2011), which picks up some of the threads laid down in our introductory article to the special issue of Security Dialogue on ‘the Security–Development Nexus Revisited’ (Stern and Öjendal, 2010). In our introduction, and in the special issue as a whole, we aimed to call attention to the politics of the security–development
nexus by mapping some of the ways in which the ‘nexus’ has been and is being imbued with
We therefore welcome the critical and considered response by Reid-Henry, which reinforces our sense that the widespread attention being given to the ‘nexus’ in the realm of policy warrants care-ful and critical scrutiny. Reid-Henry delivers a series of sympathetically critical comments and an alternative mapping, and calls for further steps towards a more comprehensive engagement with the politics of security–development. Perhaps most significantly, his review article draws attention to the need to engage in the difficult – and often overlooked – questions of methodology: how can we creatively study the different ways in which the ‘nexus’ is being practised, negotiated and resisted in distinct sites – and to what effect? His comments therefore add much to our collective (yet necessarily disparate) efforts to develop an array of creative methodologies for the study of the ‘nexus’. Continuing the spirit of constructive critique in which we believe his article was written, in the paragraphs that follow we will engage with some of the main lines of argument set out in Reid-Henry’s reading of our article.
Let us first state that we agree with much of our critic’s remarks. As he has argued, we would do well to develop, hone and implement our mapping in order to further understand and challenge the workings of power at play in the stories about, implementation of, negotiations of, resistance to and effects of the ‘nexus’. Indeed no such mapping could ever serve as a definitive or complete tool for understanding the world ‘out there’, or for doing anything about the vast injustices and violence that distinct security–development problems (or solutions) produce. Hence, our introductory essay is certainly not enough; nor does it pretend to be. It performs an initial literature review, makes an inventory of various (meta-)theoretical positions in the literature and illustrates its points with some cursory observations from global policy discourses. However, it only lightly touches upon the global discourses in this field, and, as our critic rightly points out, it hardly scrutinizes the underlying political economies that inform different articulations of the nexus. Furthermore, it does not engage in relevant case studies. All of the above are indispensible endeavours (and the ensuing articles in the special issue, in their own way, pursue such endeavours more deeply.) Hence, we see our initial intervention as a necessary introduction to a wider and longer process, rather than as a comprehensive inventory, mapping or analysis of the politics of security–develop-ment as played out in particular sites. As such, it was not only an introduction to the thematic issue, but also a crucial exercise in a broader intellectual journey. That may not be obvious to the reader, so we welcome very much this chance for a rejoinder where we can both respond to our critic’s comments and air further ideas for the future.
Relatedly, Reid-Henry correctly points out that there is relatively little empirical underpinning of many of the arguments we make (other than a pertinent reading of the literature). To us, this critique makes good sense. Our response relates distinctively to the point above: we have not made a claim as to what the ‘nexus’ could, should or has entail(ed) in any particular site, because, in part, we have not yet conducted a thorough and systematic empirical investigation of its actual usage in distinct con-texts – either through a full-bodied analysis of its discursive construction or through a reading of how
it is being practised – or of its effects. We are currently working on developing the next stage of our inquiry – that is, a discursive reading of the usages of the nexus among global policymakers, as well as an in-depth investigation of its application and effects in a limited number of relevant cases; this further research agenda will allow us, in due course, to deliver empirically underpinned arguments. For us, empirically based ground research is vital for further developing theoretical and methodologi-cal positions. The dearth of such research (despite some excellent exceptions, many of which are referenced in Stern and Öjendal, 2010) acted as the impetus for our conception of the special issue.
the ‘nexus’ should be the ‘geographical indexing of lives’ and its effects (Reid-Henry, 2011: 000), and he invites us to pay closer attention to the politics of spatial relations. We appreciate the ways in which Reid-Henry fleshes out these ideas and read his suggestions for alternative mappings of the nexus with great interest and a notepad in hand. Indeed, a biopolitical reading is a methodologi-cal and theoretimethodologi-cal frame that we readily adopt (this may indeed be apparent throughout our article).
Despite our decidedly critical stance, we chose in our introductory article to tell six distinct nar-ratives about security–development as though we were speaking from within different discursive fields in order to highlight the seeming cohesion of the different plots and the logics that underpin them. Hence, Reid-Henry may have misunderstood us slightly when reading our discussion of ‘The Security–Development Nexus as Modern (Teleological) Narrative’. He claims that we ‘fail to consider’ that the nexus (according to this narrative) should fail in order to achieve its ‘depoliticiz-ing work’; that the failure of security–development so conceived achieves the ‘real aims’ of power (Reid-Henry, 2011: 000; emphasis added). It seems here that he expects an explicit critique of this narrative in our re-telling of it. We state:
‘The nexus’ so understood creates ideally a double-bind where security and development mutually reinforce each other. However, in contexts where neither security nor development (understood according to the storyline above) is attainable, the mutuality crumbles. In most of the ‘developing world’, these preconditions have not been met, rendering ‘the nexus’ dysfunctional. (Stern and Öjendal, 2010: 18)
It is not that we have failed to consider the depoliticizing work of this narrative; we just do not discuss it here (we do believe we have addressed it in our account of ‘Security–Development as Technique of Governmentality’, albeit only cursively). Here, we neither take a meta-theoretical position nor a normative one, but instead we recount the logic of this particular story (as we do with each particular story) in what we see as its own terms.
By juxtaposing different seemingly cohesive stories, we highlight the lack of unity among them and call into question the ultimate authority of any one of them. The approach in our article was therefore to temporarily distance ourselves (to whatever extent possible) from any particular posi-tion (including a ‘critical’ one) in order to underscore the political purchase of the ‘nexus’ and reveal the multitude of meanings with which it is (possibly) imbued even within a limited reading.
How one endeavours to map the politics of the ‘nexus’ empirically involves a related, yet different, set of questions.
have been acutely aware (see, for example, Stern and Zalewski, 2009). Hence, Reid-Henry is right to warn us to be cautious. (Such caution is also the reason why we initiate a broad, explicitly limited mapping as a point of departure.)
Our firm belief, nonetheless, is that rendering visible hidden logics and ‘making the familiar strange’ through laying bare the assumptions that allow a story to make sense (a well-established method of critique) clears room for alternative political imaginaries to take form. This is why we are a bit confounded by the distinctions that Reid-Henry (2011: 000) draws when he argues that the nexus must be seen as ‘a constitutive part of a broader assemblage of logics, rather than merely the product of different discursive approaches to a particular problem’. In our article, we aimed to call attention to how (in)security–(under)development are being produced as problems through a broader assemblage of logics that render certain discourses intelligible.
Reid-Henry (2011: 000–000) offers an alternative mapping that places in high relief the ‘geo-graphical indexing of life itself’ and considers ‘how the nexus is given form and meaning in and through prior geographical imaginaries’, through two main moves: (1) an examination of ‘how [the nexus] is variously promoted or resisted in different places and settings (cultural, institutional, legal, political and economic) and across and between different scales of action (the home, the region, the nation)’; and (2) an examination of how the nexus ‘is being taken up within ongoing struggles over space itself’. He also makes a crucial point in underscoring how the nexus means ‘different things at different scales of action’, not just to different people. In addition, he argues convincingly how, in different registers, ‘the nexus becomes a nexus in the first place’ and then is employed to various effects. All of these excellent points bring us smack into the middle of very difficult ethico-political questions of methodology.
While we are quite sympathetic towards Reid-Henry’s cartography, we would like to point out (a point that Reid-Henry also acknowledges) that any road map will be both insufficient and limit-ing. The trick, as we see it, is to develop an approach that allows for attention to the logics that underwrite prevailing discourses about security–development; the ways in which security–devel-opment is being imbued with meaning in these discourses; the ways in which the nexus means different things at different scales of action and to different people – in all spaces of the globe; the shifting politico-economic interests among and between different actors; the ways in which the ‘nexus’ is being negotiated, resisted and reformed in distinct sites; and its various effects on the lives of people and the planet. Incorporating all of these aims into a viable research agenda, one that takes seriously the methodological implications of its theoretical framework, is not an easy – or maybe even a doable – task. Nonetheless, it is one that should, we believe, remain as a guidepost in our further critical scrutiny of the politics of the ‘nexus’.
While noting many of these coordinates, the mapping that Reid-Henry lays out (in its current form) provides us with large brushstrokes, yet leaves us not much more prepared for embarking on grounded research. Like ours, it is both (necessarily) incomplete and limiting. Careful exploration and analysis of the workings of the ‘nexus’ in distinct spatio-temporal contexts, we aver, must occur if we are to both advance theory and attend to the violence that the politics of the nexus both addresses and (re)produces. While the proposed approach may be intellectually rewarding on its own premises, and certainly provides us with very valuable lessons, it is not our journey.
global security assemblages provides one such example. Learning from Abrahamsen and Williams, we might begin to think of global security–development assemblages as a starting point from which to begin to fulfill the vastly ambitious aims mentioned above in the further critical explora-tion of the ‘nexus’. Abrahamsen and Williams (2010: 000) state:
Drawing on recent analyses of globalization, we argue that security privatization is part of a wider process of partial state ‘disassembly’ and a concomitant emergence of ‘global assemblages’ that link national and global structures. In security, a result of these shifts is the emergence of what we call global security assemblages – transnational structures and networks in which a range of different actors and normativities interact, cooperate and compete to produce new institutions, practices, and forms of deterritorialized security governance. These assemblages are reflections and components of important transformations in social and political power.... In particular, we suggest that Bourdieu’s understanding of fields of practice provides analytic categories that help clarify the resources available to public and private, as well as global and local security actors, allowing us to examine the shifting forms of power and contestation at work within global security assemblages.
Such a focus might allow for a careful and close empirically grounded research agenda that responds to many of the salient points raised by Reid-Henry and continues the careful scrutiny to which we aspired in our inchoate introductory mapping.
That said, it is vital, we believe, to remember that there are many ways of exploring the politics of security–development, each requiring a different road map. Furthermore, we would do well to recognize that even the astute and committed pursuance of any given map might blind us to ‘find-ing’ what we are looking for (Pin-Fat, 2010). The importance of this reminder prompts us to cite Pin-Fat at length. In her exploration of different mappings of ‘the universal’, she draws on Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ to explain the ethico-political value of being wary of the promise inscribed in any map:
The Hunting of the Snark is the tale of a crew of eight men who sail the sea in search of a Snark. A character called Bellman captains them. Bellman has a map. It is a sheet of paper that is ‘a perfect and absolute blank’. In the end, the crew don’t capture a Snark. It turns out that the Snark was a Boojum. That’s the tricky thing about Snarks. Until you encounter them, you can’t tell if they are the sort of Snark which are, in fact, a Boojum. And if you do find yourself face to face with a Boojum ‘you will softly and suddenly vanish away, and never be met with again’ (Carroll 1891). (Pin-Fat, 2010: 123)
Maps, unless they are Bellman’s, literally consist of lines that represent the world accurately. So accurate are they that they provide the means to locate one’s destination, where one is, and perhaps most of all, chart the most direct course towards the destination one seeks. (Pin-Fat, 2010: 123)
Bellman’s map of the Ocean, the blank sheet of paper, is a beautiful reminder that as soon as we begin to draw hard lines and believe that we have, indeed, mapped the world, the subject and our course, we may have lost our way and with it our ability to find quite what we are looking for. (Pin-Fat, 2010: 129)
References
Abrahamsen R and Williams MC (2010) Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reid-Henry S (2011) Spaces of security and development: An alternative mapping of the security–development nexus. Security Dialogue 42(1): 000–000.
Stern M and Öjendal J (2010) Mapping the security–development nexus: Conflict, complexity, cacophony, convergence? Security Dialogue 41(1): 5–29.
Stern M and Zalewski M (2009) Feminist fatigue(s): Reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarisa-tion. Review of International Studies 35(3): 611–630.
Pin-Fat V (2010) Universality, Ethics and International Relations: A Grammatical Reading. London: Routledge.
Maria Stern is Associate Professor in Peace and Development Studies at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. She is the co-editor (with Jacqui True & Brooke Ackerly) of Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and the author of Naming Security – Constructing Identity (Manchester University Press, 2005).
