What does it mean to be secure? One might be forgiven for thinking that security ought to be relatively easy to define, even if there's less agreement about how best to actually achieve it. One of the problems is deciding quite what the ‘referent object’ might be when deciding whether someone, or more commonly something, is secure or not. At the outset, therefore, it is important to recognize that not only are some of the issues to be discussed often theoretically contested and reflective of the normative preferences of the observer, but they are also inherently political and anything but objective. At one level, this is a manifestation of the nature of material reality and our interaction with it, especially at the most infinitesimally small scale. At another comparatively mundane and familiar level, what we consider to be causally significant is – in part, at least – a judgement about what matters, in every sense of the word. As Colin Wight puts it, ‘politics is the terrain of competing ontologies’. Despite the not unreasonable expectation that theory is supposed to help us understand something, in the academy theory frequently contributes to the confusion, not least because different people think that security should be defined in relation to different things.

While this may sound like an unpromising prelude to the sort of arcane discussion academics are often accused of indulging in, the debate is important and surprisingly interesting. It even has major consequences in the much-invoked ‘real world’. The scare quotes – of which there are a lot in what follows, I’m afraid – are merited in this case because some observers think there is no such thing. Or, to put it slightly less provocatively, perhaps, it is increasingly common to suggest that the way we individually and collectively think about the world has consequences for the way that we act in the world. If you think the world is still a Darwinian struggle for survival, for example, in which no one can be trusted and everyone else is as mean spirited, conniving and untrustworthy as you are, then that might reasonably be expected to influence the way you behave. Whether such a response is reasonable, ‘realistic’ or likely to add to your sense of security is another matter.