Subjects in Security - An Interdisciplinary History of a Contested Concept

My research examines the historically contingent understandings of security and insecurity in European political thought over the longue durée. I draw on a range of information from published texts to archival sources to trace the historical shifts that have characterised discourse on security from Classical Greece and Rome to the present day. A particular focus of my research concerns the relationships between security and warfare exemplified in European Enlightenment thought (c. 1600-1800), and in histories of European colonisation across the globe. A key feature of my research is the interdisciplinary ambition to integrate the analysis of conceptual history with the insights of colonial history and emerging scholarship on the histories of the senses, and the history of science to contribute new understandings of the role of security and insecurity in our language of global politics.

My research program has been funded by a series of competitively awarded national and international research grants including:

  • An Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2010-14): ‘A Colonial and Conceptual History of Asymmetric Warfare and Security’.
  • An Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (2013-15): ‘Policing Noise: Listening to Civility in British Discourse 1700-1850’; and
  • A Riksbankens Jubileumsfond grant (Sweden) with Dr L. Andersson Burnett (Linnaeus University) (2016-19): ‘The Borders of Humanity: Linnaean Natural Historians and the Colonial Implications of Enlightenment Thought’.

Project Leader

Bruce Buchan

Project Team

Linda Andersson Burnett (Linnaeus University, Sweden)

Project Value

$600,000

Type of Funding

Riksbankens Jubileumsfond grant (Sweden)

Dates

2016-2019

Theme/s

Policing and Security

Aims

  • To understand the conceptual and historical relationships between security, insecurity, and war in Western thought and culture;
  • To explain the origins and development of security in Western political thought;
  • To provide a critical evaluation of the pervasive influence of security in contemporary political discourse;
  • To create new opportunities to integrate a variety of sources: from colonial history to the history of the senses, from the history of science to the history of political thought, in analysing security and insecurity in the modern world.