Review of International Studies (1997), 23, 241–250 Copyright © British International Studies Association

Slippery? contradictory? sociologically

untenable? The Copenhagen school replies*
B A R RY B U Z A N A N D O L E WÆ V E R

In the January 1996 issue of the Review, Bill McSweeney argues that our 1993 book,
Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (IMNSAE), ‘subverts’
the analysis of Buzan’s People, States and Fear (PSF) ‘without enhancing our under-
standing of the problem of security’ (p. 93).1 Of the many charges that McSweeney
brings to bear we will address three. First is that societal security is merely a trendy
response to current concerns about nationalism rather than a more theoretically
considered move. Second—and this seems to be the core of his complaint—is that
the view we take of ‘identities’ is far too objectivist and not (de)constructivist
enough, and that our approach makes it impossible to consider the process of iden-
tity formation as part of the politics of security. Third, he says that Buzan’s
association with IMNSAE contradicts strong positions he developed in PSF and
that his analysis has therefore become incoherent.
McSweeney’s second and third points themselves seem contradictory: PSF is
much more objectivist than IMNSAE, and IMNSAE quite constructivist. Our next
book2 is even more constructivist, and goes much further than IMNSAE towards
opening up many more kinds of referent objects for security. This we believe to be
defensible because we have developed a way of specifying security as an extreme
form of politicization (in whatever sector) and thus of avoiding the proliferation of
securitizations that has tended to accompany the wider security agenda. Given that
development, and since McSweeney’s article raises, but does not satisfactorily
answer, several issues central to security studies, we felt that it required an answer.3

* We are grateful to Lene Hansen, Eric Herring, Jef Huysmans, Richard Little, Heikki Patomäki and
Michael C. Williams for comments on an earlier draft.
1
Bill McSweeney, ‘Identity and Security: Buzan and the Copenhagen School’, Review of
International Studies, 22 (1996), pp. 81–93; O. Wæver, B. Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre
Lemaitre with David Carlton et al., Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe
(London, 1993).
2
Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder,
CO, 1997).
3
Identity, Migration and especially its central concept of ‘societal security’ is controversial. We are
aware of several good critiques: Didier Bigo, ‘The New Field of Security in Europe: Mixing Crime,
Border and Identity Controls’, in Anne-Marie Le Gloannec and Kerry McNamara (eds.), Le
Désordre européen [working title] (forthcoming); Ken Booth, book review in International Affairs, 70
(1994), p. 171; Lene Hansen, ‘The Conceptualization of Security in Post-structuralist IR Theory’
(MA thesis, University of Copenhagen, 1994); Jef Huysmans, ‘Migrants as a Security Problem:
Dangers of ‘‘Securitizing’’ Societal Issues’, in R. Miles and D. Thänhardt (eds.), Migration and
European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion (London, 1995); Janus Mortensen,
‘Sikkerhed som talehandling: En kritisk gennemgang af Wævers sikkerhedsbegreb’ (Security as
Speech Act: A Critical Examination of Wæver’s Concept of Security) (unpublished paper, Institute
of Political Science, Copenhagen); Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Revisiting the

241
242 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver

1. The place of societal security in security theory

McSweeney criticizes us for raising societal security as a response to ‘the pressure of

events’ rather than as a result of theoretical considerations (p. 81). This is a charge
that can be laid at the door of nearly all IR theory, from Idealism and Realism to
Interdependence and IPE, and we do not deny following that well-trodden path.
But our move was also a response to a theoretical challenge. Most ordinary people
if asked about European security will start talking about nationalism, ethnic conflict
in East-Central Europe and possibly about migration. And they would be greatly
surprised to learn that such phenomena have no place in classical security theory. This
was a theoretical challenge, because these issues were not simply absent in the sense
that classical security studies did not care; they were radically absent because they
could not be represented in the classical state-centric theory. Rather than abandon
existing theory and mainstream debate by taking the reductionist path to individual-
based security logic (on which more below), we saw it as a challenge to devise a
theoretical conception of identity-related security issues that was at the unit level, and
therefore interoperable with classical security theory. As argued by Lapid and
Kratochwil, some other neorealists assimilated identity and nationalism into classical
theory by simply treating nations as states, and identity as one more resource, thus
avoiding any revision of the basic theory.4 We tried instead to revise the basic,
traditional conception of security so that it could still say the old things but also
include the new things in their own right. We tried to show how ‘societies’ defined in
terms of identity could be seen as the referent object for some cases of securitization,
where that which could be lost was not sovereignty but identity. The two share the
role of being the definition of existential threat: for a state, sovereignty defines when a
threat is existential, because if a state is no longer sovereign, it is no longer a state;
and similarly identity is the defining point regarding existential threats for a society
because it defines whether ‘we’ are still us. In the tradition of security studies with its
focus on the interaction of units and their concern for others’ threat to their survival,
it was crucial for us to be able to define a new kind of unit in order to grasp the way
other things than states had become referent objects for security discourse.

2. Objectivist and (de)constructivist approaches to identity and societal security

McSweeney states that ‘The analysis of collective identity can be approached from a
deconstructionist, sociological angle, which focuses on the processes and practices by
which people and groups construct their self-image. Or it can be approached from the
more common objectivist viewpoint’ (p. 82) Why does this choice have to be a hard
either/or? If one studies only the processes by which identities are formed, then

‘‘National’’: Toward an Identity Agenda in Neorealism?’, in Yosef Lapid and Friedrich Kratochwil
(eds.), The Return of Culture and Identity in IR Theory (Boulder, CO, 1996), pp. 105–26; Martin
Shaw, Global Society and International Relations: Sociological Concepts and Political Perspectives
(Cambridge, 1994). We appreciate the opportunity to take stock of critiques, reflect self-critically on
our work, and put forward some further arguments at this later stage of the debate.
4
Lapid and Kratochwil, ‘Revisiting the “National”’.
 Discussion: the Copenhagen school replies 243

identity never becomes a ‘thing’ at all: there is never a product as such. And
conversely, if one studies the politics around the established identities (as we do), why
does that have to mean positing identities as God-given, immutable, and intractable
by sociological, ‘deconstructionist’ analysis? Why can one not think of identities as
definitely being constructed by people and groups through numerous processes and
practices, and that when an identity is thus constructed, and becomes socially
sedimented, it becomes a possible referent object for security? As we see it, one can
choose to place the analytical emphasis on either end of the spectrum. Doing so
produces different kinds of inquiry, probably for different purposes. But there is no
reason to picture either approach as unable to accept the existence of the other.
The main weight of McSweeney’s accusation is that we impose a rigid,
‘objectivist’, ‘near-positivist’ view of identity on society (p. 83); but he ignores the
explicitly constructivist approach to society (and even more to security) set out in
chapter 2 of IMNSAE. To take something as being more than the sum of its parts
does not make it ‘immune to process inquiry’ or make its values and vulnerabilities
‘objective’ in the positivist sense (p. 84). Because we talk of individuals actually
identifying themselves as members of society, and because we talk about how
societies reflect on threats to, and defence of, what they take to be their identity,
McSweeney concludes that we project ‘ ‘‘society’’ and ‘‘identity’’ . . . as objective
realities, out there to be discovered and analyzed’ (p. 83).5
There are no statements to this effect in the book, and a number directly to the
contrary. McSweeney must therefore assume that, since we treat identity in some
specific situations as an object of security concern (that which is to be defended), we
think that identity is always a thing, and an immutable one at that. This is not a
logical conclusion, nor is it a correct description of our position. To take identity as
a possible object of securitization, one has only to assume that it holds a social
power that makes it efficient to invoke it, and that it has a form which makes
security discourse possible (i.e., it has a claim to survival as well as a clear image of
what non-survival would mean). Usually this demands that the referent has become
relatively stabilized in social practice.
This is our view. The state is not a constant either, yet there is a lot of security
policy to defend it. France has changed over the centuries, but there is a French
security policy. There are actors who mobilize security policy in the defence of
something which is ‘thingish’ enough to be invoked in this way. Identities too can be
defended. This does not imply that identities do not change, only that we should not
expect everything to change all the time: certain things stay the same throughout the
period relevant for an analysis. A very big part of social science is about what to
take as relatively more fixed than what.6
5
On objectivist, subjectivist and intersubjectivist approaches to security, see, most thoroughly, Jef
Huysmans, ‘Making/Unmaking European Disorder: Meta-theoretical, Theoretical and Empirical
Questions of Military Stability after the Cold War’ (Ph.D. thesis, Catholic University of Louvain,
1996), pp. 48–57, 84–6.
6
For McSweeney there are constructed things—identity—and real things—the state, security!
Identity he argues is peculiarly fluid and therefore not to be treated as an object. This he argues by
various contrasts to how other things are tangible, measurable and to be ‘challenged by evidence’.
We prefer to take a social constructivist position ‘all the way down’. However, identities as other
social constructions can petrify and become relatively constant elements to be reckoned with.
Especially, we believe security studies could gain by a constructivism that focuses on how the very
security quality is always socially constructed: issues are not security issues by themselves, but
defined as such as a result of political processes.
244 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver

McSweeney tells us: ‘Identity is not a fact of society; it is a process of negotiation

among people and interest groups. Being English, Irish, Danish is a consequence of
a political process’. We agree. He continues: ‘and it is that process, not the label
symbolizing it, which constitutes the reality that needs explication’ (p. 85). Maybe,
but we doubt that this would be a very effective approach for security studies. One
could study process, just as one can study the historical origins of a state to explain
why it is there as object of security policy, rather than studying its current security
policy. But to understand an identity as a possible referent object for security policy,
one actually has to understand the label symbolizing it. McSweeney asks for a
deconstructionist approach to identity. That means precisely that one has to under-
stand powerful symbols, labels and the discursive structure of political moves that
surround them. Security discourse always uses a symbol or a concept—as all other
discourse, it is unable to grasp the thing or people as such. A label surely can be
securitized.
McSweeney sees social identity as permanently mutable and unstable: ‘never more
than a provisional and fluid image of ourselves as we want to be’ (p. 90). We agree
that identity is socially constructed, but see it as often solidly sedimented.
Furthermore, the knowledge that an identity is never fully stabilized, that it is always
problematic, should not lead us to just denounce the possibility of doing security in
its name. Quite the contrary, this lack is often the key to understanding its vulner-
abilities, restlessness and security efforts. If we want to understand the peculiarities
of the branch of security policy that is conducted on behalf of identity, it is indeed
helpful to investigate the inherent paradoxes of acting in defence of an identity
which is never simply constant in itself, but always contains a longing for a desired
self. Collective identities of this sort can never be more than a series of partially or
temporarily successful, but ultimately impossible, closures.7
Our rejection both of McSweeney’s characterization of our position, and of his
either/or choice about analytical method has two roots, one normative and the other
ontological. Both issues are important to how security studies is pursued, and are
worth investigating a little more closely.

Ontological issues

Here the problem seems to be our preference for methodological collectivism versus
McSweeney’s for methodological individualism. The issue is much bigger than
methodology, the underlying question being whether to reduce security to the level
of individuals. This is an ontological issue: is society the sum of the individuals or
does it have group qualities that go beyond the sum of its parts? Even Durkheim,
who held that society had sui generis features that were to be located as attributes of
society as a whole, actually studied societal processes and vigorously defended
individualism. Just because we are methodological collectivists, does not bar our

7
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical
Democratic Politics (London, 1985); Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time
(London, 1990); Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor
(London, 1991); Ole Wæver, ‘Insecurity and Identity Unlimited’, in Le Gloannec and McNamara
(eds.), Le Désordre européen.
 Discussion: the Copenhagen school replies 245

engagement with questions about how collective identities are shaped. The argument
of McSweeney, as of many critical theorists and peace researchers, seems to be that
if one wants to open up to a world beyond the state, one has to take a bottom-up,
individualist (and/or small-group) perspective. In this individualist perspective,
identity is indeed one ‘among the countless values which people are concerned about
and which can be attributed to the collectivity of society’ (p. 84), in which case it
seems problematic to single it out above the numerous other values. McSweeney
prefers an analysis of all the individual values that can be threatened, and is here
taking over formulations verbatim from peace researchers such as Johan Galtung
and Jan Øberg. He seems to want to define a priori that all security is reducible to
individual security.
As we argued in IMNSAE (pp. 20–7), to move down to the individual level has
severe consequences. It is possible to take the individualist, aggregate view of
security, but as far as we can see, unless one is extremely careful, this becomes
another mono-unit ontology, where all security is ultimately individual security and
the security of the state has to be measured and discussed on the basis of how it
influences the aggregate security of ‘its’ individuals. We resist this turn because the
state cannot be reassembled from individual-level attributes; it has sui generis state-
level attributes and one has to see the state itself as a unit reality. Individual security
can be studied from our perspective, because we are interested in all action that
fulfils the criteria of being a security speech act. Doing this in the name of indivi-
duals is, however, much more difficult than action in the name of limited
collectivities or on behalf of general principles. In our securitization perspective,
identity is not a ‘value’ (i.e. the individual’s), it is an intersubjectively constituted
social factor.
To us it seems that the two approaches are complementary: each can do things
that the other cannot. The individualist approach is not able to grasp a lot of the
securitization that takes place, which mostly has various limited collectivities—states,
nations or, as we show in our next book, specific principles at the international
level—as referent objects. Neither is it able to manage larger interactive form-
ations—for instance, regional security complexes—as our more Realist and
reactionary approach can. Conversely, we cannot answer critical and emancipatory
questions about the ‘real’ security of marginalized groups who do not articulate
security demands in any powerful way. This critical thrust in McSweeney’s enterprise
underpins the normative problems that separate our positions, and allows us to put
the charge of objectivism back at his feet.

Normative issues

McSweeney more than hints that the purpose of studying process is to discredit as
political manipulations at least some claimed identities. As an antidote to nationalist
attempts to present identities as necessary or innocent, it is politically important to
expose the tainted roots of all identities. But this neither sorts problematic or
artificial identities from ‘authentic’ ones, nor identities from more ‘real’ political
referents. Is there any state whose current existence does not depend on centuries of
violence, selective memory and politically motivated identity politics? As Derrida
246 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver

argues: ‘You cannot object to a unity simply because it is the result of a process of
unification . . . [T]here are no natural unities, only more or less stable processes of
unification, some of them solidly established over a long period of time’.8
Against our allegedly static, objectivist concept of identity, McSweeney rather
disturbingly proposes that identity be ‘corrected’, and calmly goes on from there to
call for someone to take on ‘the task of speaking ‘‘objectively’’ for the society’
(p. 88). According to McSweeney (p. 87), ‘perception and fear of threats to security
can, in principle, be checked by observing and evaluating the facts external to the
subject’. McSweeney feels able to assess security perceptions for their objectivity. We
do not, so we designed a security theory that is much more radically constructivist.
As against McSweeney’s traditional, critical approach, with its ‘objective’ require-
ment for understanding of security, our approach has the advantage of insisting that
any securitization always rests on a political choice. Security can never be based on
the objective reference that something is in and of itself a security problem. That
quality is always given to it in human communication. And when securitization is
seen as a political choice, there is less chance that security gets idealized as the
sought for condition, and more chance that the path to desecuritization—taking
things back into normal politics—stands out more clearly.9 This is the starting-point
that McSweeney missed in IMNSAE. He therefore imposed a false reading on all
the rest, leading to the paradoxical accusations that we are too objectivist.
But why would McSweeney counter our approach with one ‘correcting’ identities,
why expect security analysts to be able to arbitrate between competing identity
claims (p. 88)? McSweeney’s scepticism towards societal security seems to stem from
a concern that identity is often not the root cause of conflicts but rather an
instrument used by (nationalist) elites (p. 86). Others have also spotted this problem
with an identity approach to security. As argued above, we are sceptical about
attempts to judge which identities are authentic and which not, because all are
constructed and all are shaped by politics. Once mobilized, identities have to be
reckoned with as something people perceive that they belong to, and act upon as
objective, given. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not solved by exposing the
contingent nature of both identity groups. It might be a part of conflict resolution to
stimulate collective redefinition in each group to change the constellation away from
complete incompatibility, but no solution is viable that denies either group a right to
survive.
There is a consistent, though in our view often unhelpful, alternative to our
approach in the stand taken by most post-structuralists (and some radical con-
structivists): to question all identities, celebrate contingency, and generally aim for
weaker, more self-consciously fragmented identities: a ‘politics of disturbance’.10
McSweeney’s suggestion seems to be less radical than this but also less theoretically
consistent. He wants ‘criteria for legitimizing decisions about identity’ (p. 90); he
wants to be able to correct identity claims.
To correct can either mean just to change as a result of debate, or it can mean to
righten, to approach to the true. We address these separately as corrections 1 and 2.
8
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality’ (interview), Radical Philosophy, 68 (1994),
p. 41.
9
Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New
York, 1995), pp. 46–86.
10
William E. Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY,
1991), and The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, 1995).
 Discussion: the Copenhagen school replies 247

Correction 1 means to engage in debates over how ‘we’ define us, and there should be
no doubt that this will often be a major issue in any specific security conflict involving
identity. We cannot claim to be able to tell what is the ‘correct’ identity, but we hope
to be able to predict some consequences of one or the other self-definition due to the
way different identities will interact in security mode. This seems an appropriate task
for the security expert. With Durkheim we could say: ‘Yet because what we propose
to study is above all reality, it does not follow that we should give up the idea of
improving it.’ 11 More specifically, we suggest in IMNSAE a focus on how con-
stellations form with identities at different levels and how to assist developments
where these become mutually compatible (pp. 193ff. and the case-study of Europe,
ch. 4). We think that one can and should engage in critical debates over how
communities construct their identities. But we think it is too optimistic to think this
will solve all the problems. There will still be the issues we were concerned with arising
from security that actually gets articulated in the name of threatened identities.
Correction 2 is some form of reasoned intervention telling what is the right
identity. We are sceptical of correction 2 because we are unable to follow
McSweeney into ‘objective’ security. To be able to tell people that they are not what
they think they are demands an objectivist conception of identity. McSweeney
rightly criticizes us for being relativist: ‘we are stuck with every other community’s
account of its identity’ (p. 87). In the good classical Realist tradition, a major task
for security analysis is to help actors understand how others construct their con-
ception of security. This should not be replaced by a demand that others think
‘correctly’ in accordance with some scientific theory of security (which usually
means how we would like them to conceptualize themselves in ideological terms that
suit us). He is worried that our position leads to something like: ‘We may not like
who they are, but if they think that way, so be it’ (p. 87). Classical Realists as well as
post-structuralists will prefer this to the universalism and harmony-of-interest
assumptions necessary to avoid such situations. There will be others who are
different; if we can’t live with that, we will certainly have security problems.
McSweeney’s argument at this place is perplexing. He tells us at length that
identity cannot be just read from polls, culture or some other form of history of the
community, it ultimately involves a choice. This is exactly the view we presented.
After our review of the literature on nationalism in IMNSAE (ch. 2), we conclude
(like most others in the field) that there can be various objective markers at play—
language, history, culture, race, political borders—but that ultimately national iden-
tity cannot be defined in terms of any of these, only as the choice of identification
made by individuals. All these conditions might strongly influence their choice, but
none determines it. Because of McSweeney’s either/or move quoted above, he has
constructed a Wæver et al. that say with the nationalists that identity is objective,
given and necessary, it is what we are and have to be because of history. He then
succeeds in refuting this fictitious position.
McSweeney’s task in this section, however, was to get to a way to ‘correct’
identities—against our ‘relativism’—so just pointing to the element of choice does
not help him much. McSweeney ends up with a strong call (p. 89) for a referee to
settle identity questions authoritatively, but at this crucial point of his analysis

11
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York, 1984 [1893], preface to 1st edn,
p. xxvi.
248 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver

(pp. 88–90) he becomes frustratingly unclear. His worst case seems to be that identity
remains unsettled and vulnerable to political manipulation; his best that it is
somehow negotiated amongst the citizenry. He is not clear about what role security
analysts are supposed to play in this process, and if they are to participate how they
should separate the role of analysts from that of participant in the securitization/
desecuritization process. Although he wavers on the question, the state lurks in the
background as the authoritative imposer of ‘arbitration’ should negotiation fail and
anarchy threaten. In this discussion McSweeney first slips into reifying society as
that which is contained by the state, and then into the assumption that this ‘society’
must somehow find, or have imposed on it, a collective image of itself. Our starting-
point was that we found this essentially Hobbesian position deeply unsatisfactory.
We wanted to leave room for a concept of society detached from the state, and for
circumstances in which identity politics was about maintaining difference rather
than finding a collective image. In those circumstances the question is not
McSweeney’s one of who arbitrates, but whether there should be an arbitrator, and
how definitions of difference can be constructed in ways that exacerbate or mute
insecurity.
Our unease with the state is supported by a very long list of profoundly
problematic state interventions on identity issues. To take just one: the Kurds in
Turkey. Should the Turkish state really be the final judge on Kurdish identity and
security? As we explained in IMNSAE (pp. 24–5), this was a major reason for our
revision of PSF concepts: when societal security was conceived of as one more form
of state security—‘the way states could be undermined or destabilized by ‘‘their’’
societies becoming threatened or weakened in terms of social cohesion and
identity’—it had the perverse effect that a state would feel most secure if some
minority could just be put down. If one wants to take this minority seriously and
say societal security is about their security, one has to open up to a more complex
landscape of multiple referent points for security.
In sum, McSweeney seeks to cast our position much more narrowly than is in fact
the case. Ironically, his attempt to formulate a critical position pushes him towards
an objectivism that he otherwise wants to reject, whose problems he has not
resolved, and from which our constructivist approach offers at least a partial escape.

3. Buzan and the Copenhagen school

McSweeney mounts a vigorous attack on Buzan, arguing that the work of the
Copenhagen school, particularly IMNSAE, does not remedy the shortcomings of
his previous work, but rather guts the general state-centric assumption that
underpinned many of its most useful ideas (pp. 82, 91–3). McSweeney puts himself
in a difficult position. He seems to defend PSF ‘as the canon and indispensable
reference point for students of security’ (p. 81), while wanting to attack IMNSAE.
Yet PSF should be the more objectionable to him for both its greater objectivism
and its state-centricity, while IMNSAE actually moves towards his preferences in
terms of both its subject focus and its constructivist method.
Fortunately, McSweeney’s argument that by signing on to IMNSAE Buzan has
collaborated ‘in the abandonment of state primacy’ (pp. 82, 92) is so overstated that
 Discussion: the Copenhagen school replies 249

most of the points he tries to hang on it fail by default. We argue that what is or is
not prime in international security, including the state, depends on historical
conditions. The particular case of 1990s European security is difficult to grasp if
seen simply as a constellation of nation-states. Much more of the dynamics can be
brought out by a constellation made up of at least three kinds of (non-like) units:
states, nations and the EU. We do not, as McSweeney would have it, argue that
societal identity has now become the core value in security (p. 82), only that it can
become a referent object for security action. While McSweeney is right to point out
that IMNSAE does raise questions about Buzan’s formulation of weak and strong
states, and security complexes, he is wrong to think that Buzan has therefore ‘to
reformulate his entire theoretical framework’ (p. 92).
In one sense, the arguments in IMNSAE are simply an elaboration on the whole
problematique of weak states. Giving societal security the status of a referent object
does not prevent the existence of strong states. Nothing in the idea says that
collective identity has to be in opposition to the state, or even that societal issues
have to become securitized. But it does enable one to look more deeply into the
problems of weak states, where societal insecurity is often a central issue.
McSweeney worries unnecessarily about the impact of all this on the link between
strong states and mature anarchy. Although an important logical and idealist
component in PSF, that link was always highly qualified: strong states were a
necessary but not a sufficient condition for mature anarchy. PSF had little useful to
say on how to solve the problem of weak states. IMNSAE does not solve the
problem either, but it does offer better analytical tools for examining it. In this
context, the idea that the international system is not in any way allowed ‘to
determine shifts in the security position of the state’ (p. 92) has never been part of
Buzan’s position and is a contradiction of the central tenets of all forms of
structural realism.
McSweeney is right to hint (pp. 91–2) that IMNSAE creates difficulties for
security complex theory. Why was the concept of security complex not used more in
IMNSAE? Why not either construct a ‘societal security complex’, or integrate the
new concept of societal security directly into classical security complex theory as
presented in PSF, which was constructed from the political and military sectors and
was purely state-based? It is not obvious that security complex theory with its basic
claim about a regional focus for security dynamics also holds for the new sectors of
security, the environment, economic and societal security. To insert the security of
societies into regional formations defined by the states, as we did in IMNSAE, was
not an ideal solution, and it demands serious reflection whether security complex
theory can be rearticulated for a post-sovereign system where actors other than
states are also players. This problem of how to reconcile the new sectors of security
studies with security complex theory is a core theme of our next book.

4. Conclusion

If space allowed, there are other points we could take issue with in McSweeney’s
piece. But it is more pertinent to raise some general questions that stem from the
nature of his review. Most worrying is McSweeney’s implicit argument that there is
only one correct way to study security. We believe that there are many ways to
250 Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver

understand security, and that each will have its merits and its drawbacks. Focusing
on any one element will always make some things clearer at the cost of obscuring or
distorting others. That is the nature of social theory, and there is no escape from it.
We also found it odd that he (kindly) designates us as ‘the Copenhagen school’,
and then ignores what this might mean. There are enough institutional barriers
against collective writing, without the academic critique and debate also being
unable to acknowledge collective works as collective. By focusing on Buzan,
McSweeney virtually ignores Wæver, who made the main theoretical contribution to
IMNSAE.12 This blindness seems to explain how McSweeney missed the strong
constructivist approach to societal security. He also missed the opportunity to con-
sider all four of the works he lists, and thus to get some handles on the nature of the
school. How is it that the reactionary objectivist Buzan, and the postmodern Realist
Waever have been able to work together—with each other, as well as with liberals
like Pierre Lemaitre, Morten Kelstrup and Jaap de Wilde—and what kind of syn-
thesis have they created? There is also a certain implication that having written one
classic position piece, Buzan should either shut up or go on repeating it endlessly.
Even though we dispute much of McSweeney’s accusations of inconsistency, the fact
that he makes it suggests that authors are not allowed to develop or change their
positions. PSF was valuable because it helped to start a debate about the concept of
security. It was never intended to be the last word on the subject, and it has served as
a springboard to help others, including its author, to formulate alternative positions.
The field will develop as those positions (including the methodological individualist,
critical one favoured by McSweeney and others) articulate themselves and compete
to see how well they help us to understand and act upon the security problems of
the day.

12
Ole Wæver, ‘Security, the Speech Act’ Working Paper, 1989/19, (Centre for Peace and Conflict
Research, Copenhagen); ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’; ‘European Security Identities’,
Journal of Common Market Studies, 34 (1996), pp. 103–32; ‘What is Security? The Securityness of
Security’, in Birthe Hansen (ed.), European Security—2000 (Copenhagen, 1995), pp. 222–49;
‘Sikkerhedspolitik—nationalsstatens monopol?’ (The Concept of Security—A Monopoly of the
Nation State?), Grus, 46 (1995), pp. 43–70; ‘Insecurity and Identity’; ‘Societal Security—A Concept
and its Consequences’, in Cooperation and Conflict (forthcoming).