It is twenty years since Nye and Lynn-Jones (1988: 8) described ISS as a young field whose ‘progress has been halting’ and with a ‘definitive intellectual history’ yet to be written. The sheer quantitative magnitude of ISS is perhaps a good explanation of why nobody has picked up the Nye and Lynn-Jones challenge. Since 1988, the ISS archive has expanded even further with the rapid growth of widening perspectives in the 1990s and the vast body of literature dealing with 9/11 and the GWoT. Leaving the intellectual merits of ISS aside, in the past twenty years, the field has been productive, generating an extraordinary number and range of books, reports, journals, students, conferences, think-tanks and policy advocates. Crucially, in terms of Nye and Lynn-Jones's late-1980s diagnosis of ISS as a theoretically underdeveloped enterprise, there has been a rapid growth in conceptual and analytical work examining, adopting or rejecting new conceptualisations of security.

There may be good reasons other than the daunting scale of the ISS archive for why a historical sociology of ISS has not yet been written. Both Political Science and other sub-fields like International Relations and Political Theory have, as laid out in chapter 3, generated at least some disciplinary sociologies, but ISS has not. One explanation might be that security scholars are in the business of the contemporary: if security is about the urgent, then why spend years digging up the past?