Historicizing Security - in Europe and beyond

Course goals

In this course, students will learn to:

• Trace the beginnings of the secularized concept of security around 1800 in Europe and beyond by the method of ‘historicizing’ security
• Identify how security is always dependent on temporal and spatial contexts and branched out and was diversified in different sectors in the 20th century and beyond (including societal security, political security, environmental security, economic security and political security)
• Understand and apply the concept of security culture in relation to the emergence of the modern nation state and the notion of national security
• Distinguish historical perspectives from other disciplinary approaches. 
• Develop a micro history of security, based on an operationalization of the ‘security culture’ concept

Content

This course applies a conceptual history approach, unpacking genealogies of security and its ramifications through time. It does so in combination with notions from public administration, law, cultural studies, and sociology (for example by also working with adjacent concepts as sovereignty, legitimacy, state of emergency, defence, and intelligence). The course provides a brief inquiry into the meaning of the concept ‘security’ as a travelling concept through time, both in its tandem with ‘the national’ and ‘the international’. When, why and how did security emerge as a dispositive of national and international governance? We will follow the genealogy of security in discourse and practice from the Age of Revolutions, the ‘Sattelzeit’, when it lost its more transcendent dimension and became connected to state and interstate policy. We will analyse how ‘security’ was embedded and communicated as part of a new security culture in Europe, after 1815, and how – via transimperial dissemination – was expanded into the outer European world. Throughout the 19th and 20th century, European security cultures clashed with non-Western conceptualisations of security. Moreover, throughout global revolutions the dispositive of security became contested, overturned, constitutionalised, and combined with new notions of civil rights and – in the 20th century, revisited through the lens of human security. In this course, we will adopt a historicizing perspective on security, but we will combine this with elements from political science, public governance, and critical (security) studies.

Additional information

This is course is part of the minor Security. 

Please note: the time slot shown here is not yet final and may still be modified until the 3rd Wednesday in September.