The definitive introduction to security studies, focusing on key theoretical approaches and the critical issues shaping today's global security landscape. Contemporary Security Studies offers a uniquely engaging introduction to Security Studies, addressing key theories and contemporary issues in the field. A team of expert scholars strikes a careful balance between depth and clarity, making it an essential companion for students exploring the modern security agenda.
Key features:
- Offers broad, easy-to-digest coverage of the key theories and concepts in Security Studies
- Brings together carefully edited contributions from international experts in the field, giving students insights from a range of leading scholars
- 'Think point' boxes challenge students to question their own assumptions, and help to develop critical thinking skills
- Case study boxes encourage students to connect theory and practice by demonstrating the real-world manifestations of political issues
- Includes coverage of critical Security Studies perspectives, including poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and post-human.
- Considers a broad range of traditional and non-traditional security issues, from inter-state armed conflict and nuclear weapons to security issues centring on the environment, crime and cyber-attacks
- Also available as an e-book with functionality, navigation features, and links that offer extra learning support
New to this edition:
- Chapter 3 provides a new look on how liberal ideas underpin liberal internationalism and how these ideas have a long history of ordering international politics, but constantly find themselves contested, challenged, and in crisis.
- A new Chapter 13 on nonhuman security studies introduces students to this innovative approach to Security Studies, explaining the insecurities that arise for some humans, other species and non-sentient beings (rivers, mountains, etc) during the Anthropocene, an era in which human activity is having a fundamental impact on the planet's biosphere.
- A revised Chapter 15 on military security, tracing the use of force in achieving security, and the management of force, via alliances and arms control, in statecraft.
- Chapter 22 on terrorism has been reworked to provide in-depth explanation of the challenges of defining terrorism, the complications with counter-terrorism in preventing acts of terrorism from occurring before they happen, and the insights that Critical Terrorism Studies, feminism, and postcolonialism offer.
- A revised Chapter 24 on energy security, which traces the evolving concept of energy security, revealing the shifting nature of it as a geopolitical concern, and concluding by examining it from an individual rather than state perspective.
Digital Formats & Resources:
The 7th edition is available for students and institutions to purchase in a variety of formats: the e-book and Politics Trove offer a mobile experiences and convenient access along with multiple choice questions, lecturer power point slides and lectured test bank, functionality tools, navigation features and links that offer extra learning support.
For more information about e-books, please visit www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/ebooks
Alan Collins, Professor, Depratment of Politics, Philosophy, and International Relations, Swansea University
Alan Collins is Professor of International Relations in the School of Social Sciences at Swansea University, UK. He is the author of Security and Southeast Asia: Domestic, Regional and Global Issues (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2003), Building a People-Oriented Security Community the ASEAN Way (London: Routledge, 2013), and co-editor of Unpacking the Death Penalty in ASEAN (Singapore: Springer, 2023).
