People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era

Security is one of those concepts everyone uses and almost no one can fully define, and that gap turns out to matter enormously for how nations behave.

The Concept That Slips Through Every Net

Most political concepts invite debate at their edges but stay firm at their core. Security is different: its core is contested too, leaving scholars and policymakers arguing over what they are even trying to protect.

That ambiguity is not a flaw to be corrected. It reflects the genuine complexity of what is at stake whenever a society asks whether it is safe.

When Vagueness Has Consequences

Consider a government deciding whether a refugee influx, an economic downturn, or a rival state's military buildup counts as a security threat. Each framing unlocks different tools, budgets, and legal powers.

The word does real work in the world. Labeling a situation a security matter shifts who decides, how fast, and with how much force. That is why control over the definition is itself a form of power.

Referent Objects and the Question of Whose Security

One reason definition is hard is that security is always security for someone. Buzan highlights that the referent object, the thing being secured, can be an individual, a state, a society, or even a species.

Security for whom changes everything.

A policy that secures the state may threaten its citizens. A policy that protects one society may endanger a neighboring one. Choosing the referent object is a political act disguised as a technical choice.

The Most Common Trap

Analysts and leaders alike routinely equate the security of the government with the security of the people it governs. Keeping those two separate is the first discipline the concept demands.

Underdeveloped as a Field, Overdetermined as a Word

Security studies spent much of its early life focused narrowly on military threats between states. That focus gave the field analytical sharpness but left it unable to theorize the full range of dangers that populations actually face.

Referent object

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The entity whose security is under consideration, whether individual, state, society, or civilization.

Securitization

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The political process by which an issue is framed as an existential threat requiring emergency measures beyond normal politics.

Widening

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Extending security analysis beyond the military sector to political, economic, societal, and environmental dimensions.

Buzan's argument is that the field needs widening without losing analytical discipline. Widening the concept risks making it so broad that almost any social problem becomes a security issue, draining the term of useful meaning.

Five Sectors, One Analytical Frame

Rather than a single unified definition, Buzan proposes mapping security across distinct sectors. Each sector has its own logic, its own referent objects, and its own threshold for what counts as a threat.

This sectoral map does not mean every problem in each sector is automatically a security problem. The sectors show where threats can arise; judgment is still needed to decide when they rise to the level of genuine security concern.

Where the Idea Holds and Where It Strains

The multi-sector framework works best when a single threat cuts across several sectors at once, making its security character unmistakable.

It becomes harder to apply when a slow, diffuse process, like gradual cultural change or long-run environmental degradation, never reaches an obvious crisis point but still erodes the conditions for a community's survival.

Essentially Contested and Purposefully So

Philosophers of language distinguish between concepts whose vagueness is accidental and those whose contestedness is built into their very purpose. Security belongs to the second category.

Reasonable people can share the same facts and still disagree about whether a situation is a security matter, because their underlying values differ about what deserves protection and at what cost.

Essentially contested concept

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A concept whose proper application is permanently disputed because its criteria are tied to rival value commitments, not just to missing information.

Objective vs. subjective security

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The gap between measurable external conditions and the felt sense of safety, which do not always move together.

This is not a counsel of despair. Recognizing a concept as essentially contested clarifies the debate: disagreements about security are often really disagreements about values, not about facts, and should be argued that way.

The Objective-Subjective Gap and Its Second-Order Effects

A state can be objectively well-defended and still feel deeply insecure, or objectively vulnerable and feel calm. That gap between objective conditions and subjective perception generates its own political dynamics, driving arms races, threat inflation, and unnecessary conflict.

Objections Worth Taking Seriously

Critics of widening argue that broadening security to cover economics, environment, and society makes the concept analytically useless: if everything is a security problem, the word signals nothing and justifies anything.

• Widening objection: too broad a concept becomes a blank check for state power over any social domain.
• Narrowing reply: sectors provide structure; widening without discipline is careless, but disciplined widening is necessary.
• Securitization objection: framing problems as security issues militarizes them and crowds out political solutions.
• Buzan's implicit reply: the risk is real, which is why identifying the referent object and the threshold of threat remains essential, not optional.
• State-centrism objection: focusing on state security systematically ignores threats that states themselves pose to individuals.
• Multi-level reply: holding state and individual security as distinct analytical categories, not synonyms, addresses this directly.

None of these objections defeats the project of analyzing security across levels and sectors. They do, however, demand that any analyst working with the concept be explicit about referent objects, threat thresholds, and the values embedded in every definitional choice.