The British International Studies Association turns 40 this year, and its annual conference provided a great venue to celebrates the anniversary. The conference held in London also provided the opportunity for the EJIS team to present the journal to a larger audience and discuss the state of security studies. At two roundtables we discussed the rationale of the journal, and what role it will play in shaping the discipline.
The first roundtable featuring Tim Edmunds, Ruth Blakeley, Adrian Hyde-Price, Tony King and Christian Bueger focused on the question of how international security can best be researched and analysed. As the presentations highlighted security studies has in the past decade played the role of the engine room for the broader discipline of International Relations. If in the 1970s and 1980s the discussion of regimes and international organizations was a prime source of innovation, since the 1990s it has been security studies where innovative theory and methodology was developed. The debate centred on the question whether we can fix the meaning of security and hence determine the boundaries of security studies, what role realism and traditional theory still plays today and in what way connections to other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology and science and technology studies can enrich the empirical basis and theoretical vocabulary of the study of security.
The second roundtable focused on issues and problems of security. Tim Edmunds, Vincent Pouliot, Christian Bueger, Theo Farrell and Alexandra Gheciu discussed what the major issues on the current agenda are. The presenters foregrounded Cyber security, maritime security, illegal and forced migration, as well as conflicts in Western Asia and the Middle East as core challenges. As the vivid discussion made clear security studies are becoming more important given the increasing uncertainty in the world. In scholarly terms we will have to pay more attention to the question of how the issues of security can be studied, how we can get closer to the problems and draw on new methods and new forms of data.
EJIS will play a core role in fostering these debates in connecting different types of security studies and providing a forum for new issues, methods and theoretical vocabularies. Members of the EJIS team will next visit the annual conference of the American Political Science Association and the conference of the European International Studies Association.
Chrsitan Bueger for the EJIS
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