Security Studies: Widening the Agenda to Include Food Security, Migration, Poverty, Health Security, and Women's Concerns

Running head: SECURITY STUDIES
1
SECURITY STUDIES
Name:
Institutional Affiliation:
Date:

SECURITY STUDIES
2
Security Studies
Introduction
Security matters. It is almost impossible to make real sense out of a word deeply
enthroned on politics without referring to security. A body in power either in a monarch,
dictatorship or democracy has to provide security lest it fails. Every single day, people in
different regions in the world are starved, killed, impoverished, tortured, raped, displaced, denied
education, imprisoned all in the name of security. The concept of security in this case saturates
the contemporary society globally by littering the speeches of pundits and politicians, radio
waves, and newspaper columns that are full of it as well as the images of insecurity that flash
across the internet and television screens constantly. All these factors have accorded security a
fascinating, deadly, and important subject in academia. To many, security is viewed as a symbol
of protection from the emanating threats posed by hunger, disease, crime, unemployment,
political repression, social conflicts, and environmental hazards. However, the concept of
security remains a pillar that is widely contested through a logomachy that has given rise to
different schools of thought that empathize on differing nuances. In this paper, I will address the
extent to which the agenda of security studies needs to be widened and the rationale behind the
need to include issues such as food security, population migration, poverty, health security, and
the concerns and security of women in this broader picture.
Background
Security studies have over the past decades grown out of debate especially over the
measures that need to be deployed to protect the state against internal and external threats
following the aftermaths of the Second World War. Security has in this case turned out as a
watchword by distinguishing security studies from the early thinking on this discipline and

SECURITY STUDIES
3
military history, as it evolves, thus serving as a linking concept that connects a diverse set of
research studies. Referring back to the last sixty years of research on matters international
security, the first proverbial question remains in defining the elements that make up this sub-field
in an effort to comprehend the boundary zones that lie between it and other adjacent disciplines.
According to Magyar & Air University (2001), security is stipulated simply as the study of
diplomacy and war as confined primarily to a state-centric analysis. Biersteker (2014) therefore
considers the state as central in the discourse on security studies. This consequently denotes the
need to undermine the neo-realist assumptions in an effort to argue that security studies is more
than the mere balance and control of military powers and forces. However, the ideologies that
security should be defined from the perspective of safety found within a state are primarily born
from the anarchic life and the Hobbesian idea.
Security has been a subject of study for as long as the existence of human societies. As
studies from the world’s etymology reveal, security means different things to people depending
on the place of human history and time. According to Abrahamsen & Williams (2011), the field
has over time enjoyed a golden age since 1950 when the civil strategists benefited widely from
closer connections with the Western regimes and governments as well as other foreign security
policies. During this period, the Western governments relied on conceptual innovations,
academic institutions, practical proposals, hard research, and other willing recruits in establishing
security policies.
Until the 1980s, the aspect of strategic studies was viewed as a discipline primarily
responsible in the study of security matters, an aspect that reduced the element of military affairs
in this discipline. Since this period, security studies have turned out to be particular globally, an
aspect that is attributed to the widespread labels that intricate the discipline as responsible for

SECURITY STUDIES
4
studies on security (Ingwe, 2014). Such turns were to a larger extent informed by the critical
approach in which classical paradigms were questioned and new approaches of thinking on
security matters advanced. Underlying in these majorities of new methods lays the idea that
security remains a mere technical aspect that should not only be left for experts to discourse, but
deeply embedded in practice and that requires a careful look.
From 1980 onwards, especially in relation to the period that followed after the
culmination of the Cold War, studies on security started to broaden their agenda in an effort to
include issues that were previously considered as out of reach such as terrorism, migration,
environment, food security, health security, poverty, and the concerns of women in its broader
picture (Ingwe, 2014). At this same time, studies on Peace and Conflicts shifted their focus to
include emergent ethnic conflicts as well as other new conflicts emanating from the environment
and globalization as its parts. Curiously, the broadening of the agenda of security studies to
different areas has furthered the studies on security studies.
Environmental Security Concerns and its Reasons
Environmental security in the twenty-first century has taken on a new meaning as an
approach aimed at gaining sustainability and the protection of natural resources: an aspect that is
currently essential in foreign policy and national security. During the post-Cold War epoch, the
national security committees treated environmental security with contempt, considering it as a
domain related with the contaminations caused by military activities thus posing a threat to the
economic and human health from improperly maintained pollution resulting from industries and
nuclear weapons (Elliott, 2015). Throughout this period, the focus of environmental security was
directed on the use of ozone-depletes of substances and the manner in which this cross-border
contaminations issues that include water and air pollution may be addressed