Introduction

The expression ‘security’ is surrounded by a conservative atmosphere. Concerns about stability, security and order have been largely raised by those who intended to preserve things from change. National security, in particular, is still a restricted subject, prone to unaccountable state decisions, policies and regimes. The close links between security studies, national security and military expertise kept the field apart from cross-cutting political controversies over the desirable aims and standards for a political community (Waever, 2015). In this context, the meanings of (in)security unavoidably restated an attachment to stasis and equilibrium, or to the absence of credible threats.

In its classical sense, security is understood in Hobbesian terms as the neutralization of threats assured by a well-functioning sovereign state (Morgenthau, 1948; Waltz, 1979; see also Muhammad and Riyanto, 2021). Insecurity, hence, is an unstable and unpredictable condition of absence of state authority, that is, civil war. What defines modern states is the provision of protection within their borders, which means controlling physical violence inside and threats from outside. What follows from that is the differentiation and inner specialization of the personnel responsible for security as a public policy. There is a nationally bounded circuit that shapes security as ostensive protection in the interaction between rulers and ruled.

More recently, critical perspectives emerged around two overlapping issues. First, who defines what security means in practice? That leads us to underscore how power relations shape decision-making and how ‘security concerns’ remain an open path for exceptional measures of government. In other terms, specialized security establishments do not simply deal with a given set of risks, rather, they control the means to define what is a threat, whether it shall be a foreign state, the labour movement, the immigrants or undercover terrorism. The analysis of political boundary setting and the discursive constitution of threats and risks are fundamental for a critical appraisal on security studies. The second issue that paved the way for this critical renewal could be phrased as such: what should security be able to encompass?