Of camps and critiques: a reply to 'security, war, violence'

In this article, the author analysed on two aspects of concerns: 1) traditional security studies, and 2) the wider agenda - the idea that anything can be 'securitised'. The author argues that in International Relations (IR), the study of war was largely a casualty of the debate between these two aspects. Traditional security studies dealt with strategy not war, while the wider agenda was concerned with the logic of security itself. As a consequence, a discipline that imagines itself as centrally concerned with questions of war and peace does not in fact study war, part of a larger elision of war in the Enlightenment organisation of social and political inquiry. The author outlines the astounding absence of the Second World War in IR scholarship and then map out some ways in which the critical study of war leads one to think differently about the 'international' as a distinct space for inquiry. He seek to outline a 'critical war studies' for IR to frame and enable a new direction for research.