This book reconnects critical security studies approaches with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations, contributing an original understanding of the interplay between security politics and foreign affairs.

Whether the object of concern is migrants, climate change, or the financial system, it has become popular practice in Europe to sketch a complete range of policy themes in terms of security. By the same token, many such novel security associations have also been used to describe a world composed of transnational dangers. In many places, it is often claimed that migration, climate change, financial instability, and other contemporary insecurities represent collective global - or at least regional European - policy challenges. Critical approaches to security in particular have played a vanguard role in analysing the association of policy themes with security logics, as well as the attendant effects of such conceptual linking.

It is surprising, then, that these same critical approaches have not addressed the interplay between the formulation of security discourses and foreign affairs in more detail. While European policymakers are in strong agreement when it comes to the association of new dangers with collective insecurity, which supposedly calls for collaborative security strategies across borders, critical approaches to security tend to focus ever more closely on domestic aspects of the politics of security, be they distinct security assemblages such as body-scanners or the more general effects of securitization on political decision-making or public-private relations. Irrespective of critical scholarship s pioneering work on the politics of security discourses, it fails to provide conceptual tools to analyse the bearing that security politics has on the international. This book addresses this gap and formulates a distinct analytical framework focusing on the linkages and associations at play between the politics of security on the one hand and foreign affairs on the other. Essentially, this framework rests on the argument that when political communities recognise security concerns, they effectively endanger, order, and condition international relations. It is argued that in defining who threatens whom and how, notions of insecurity codify authoritative systematisations of the world in and for a political community, and that in doing so, they condition foreign politics. By developing security into a relational world-ordering concept, the book hence proposes a novel perspective on the politics of security, a critical perspective that squarely addresses the local making of the international.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, European politics, foreign policy and IR, in general."

This book provides a framework for analysing the interplay between securitisation and foreign affairs, reconnecting critical security studies with traditional IR concerns about interstate relations. What happens to foreign policymaking when actors, things or processes are presented as threats? This book explains state behaviour on the basis of a reflexive framework of insecurity politics, and argues that governments act on the knowledge of international danger available in their societies, but that such knowledge is organised by markedly varying ideas of who threatens whom and how. The book develops this argument and illustrates it by means of various European case studies. Moving across European history and space, these case studies show how securitisation has projected evolving and often contested local ideas of the organisation of international insecurity, and how such knowledges of world politics have then conditioned foreign policymaking on their own terms. With its focus on insecurity politics, the book provides new perspectives for the study of international security. Moving the discipline from systemic theorising to a theory of international systematisation, it shows how world politics is, in practice, often conceived in a different way than that assumed by IR theory. By the same token, by depicting national insecurity as a matter of political construction, the book also raises the challenging question of whether certain projections of insecurity may be considered more warranted than others. This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, European politics, foreign policy and IR, in general.