Identity and the Politics of Security

The theme of identity has become one of the most important and yet contested elements in contemporary debates over the nature of security and the future of security studies. A key source of this contestation lies in the way that largely unacknowledged claims about knowledge and identity are historically related in one of the most powerful and pervasive conceptions of the relationship between politics and security, which I term the `liberal sensibility'. This foundation, however, has rarely been acknowledged by those who seek to integrate identity concerns into reformulated understandings of security. Contrary to commonly held views, a conception of identity has not been missing from prevailing theories of International Relations. On the contrary, it has been constitutive of them. Grasping the apparent absence of identity concerns as being in fact the outcome of a negative identity practice — a desire to exclude identity concerns from the realms of politics and security — provides a clearer understanding of the structure of the emerging debates between neorealist and critical theories in security studies. It also illustrates how these debates are frequently structured in quite misleading terms, terms that obscure rather than illuminate the fundamental questions raised by the relationship between identity and security.