My name is Barry Buzan. I'm professor of international relations at the LSE. I took my first degree at the University of British Columbia. I did my PhD here at the LSE, what now seems very long time ago. I taught at UBC briefly.
I had a postdoc there and I was at Warwick for a long time and now I've... My work has mostly been on the theoretical side of security, so I've been working with the concept of security for a long time. I think I can reasonably claim to have written the first book that was about the concept of security.
because it was an odd hole in the literature in a sense. If you wanted to study justice or love or any other kind of social concept, you'd probably find a whole shelf load of books that discuss the concept. there wasn't such a book.
So my interest has been in the concept itself, both what it covers, in other words what the terrain of it is, and also more recently in conjunction with colleagues in Copenhagen to look at the process by which something gets designated in security language, so a more constructivist take on it. In other words, here the perspective is not that threats are necessarily the best. necessarily objective things, that if there are 50 tanks on your borders, that's necessarily a threat because they're tanks.
But how it is that a society or any group of people comes to designate or not designate something as a threat. So it offers you a range between paranoia on the one hand, like individuals, societies can see threats where there are none in an objective sense, or complacency on the other end, where societies don't define something of a threat. when it actually is.
So it offers two ways of looking at security. There's the more traditional objective threat analysis, which can be military but it can also be environmental and societal, depending on what you want to designate as a threat and what you're concerned about the security of. And then there's the social side of it, how, what's the process by which threats get constructed, who speaks it, who listens to it. how does something get put together and accepted as a threat. And you can see that process, I mean, with the ending of the Cold War, it was a very interesting example of how something which had been very successfully constructed as a threat, and I think in most people's eyes, not everyone, but in most people's eyes in the West and probably in the East, was accepted as a real threat, and probably was, but all of that disappeared in four or five years.
The rhetoric changed and a different sort of discourse discourse began to emerge and within four or five years it was all gone, as indeed was the Soviet Union. So that's a very interesting example of what I'd call a de-securitizing process, where something which is established as a threat gets undone and wound down and accepted as no longer being a threat. So it's a process that works in both directions.