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The field of critical security studies (CSS) emerged in the late 1980s as a self-declared emancipatory project in opposition to mainstream realism. The fall of the Berlin Wall ushered in a period of seeming glasnost among security scholars who long had felt sidelined by overly militarized, strategic and state-centric approaches. During the past few decades a number of diverse strands of CSS have developed. Indeed, the field has become so varied that arguably its unity is based only by self-proclaimed criticism of “traditional” approaches to security.

However, if there is a shared sense that the general CSS approach has facilitated a deeper engagement with the concept of security that had become progressively more narrow and restrictive during the Cold War it is nevertheless the case that attempts to demarcate the porous borders of the concept of security have now become the main intellectual battleground among the various “non-traditional” approaches. “Security” has always been a contested concept. The debates on the “deepening and widening” of the concept of security have failed to produce anything resembling a systematic and convincing account of the core meaning of the concept or its relationship to other concepts seen crucial for its articulation.

The focus on identity has been among one of the sharpest lines by which CSS has delineated its break with a “traditional” notion of security. Constructivist scholars in particular have highlighted the role that discourse and representations of identity play in security policies, drawing attention to its fluid and contested nature. Feminist scholars have also variously called attention to how gender identities construct and reinforce the global order and domestic systems of oppression and marginalization. But, here too, concrete achievements have been limited. The pre-occupation with discourses of identity, the politics of belonging, or the gendered nature of world politics belies the absence of deeper theorizing. Although a great deal of work has been devoted to understanding the link between identity and security, the link remains ambiguous and nothing resembling a theory has emerged. Indeed, the very emphasis on the fluid nature of identity can lead to a sense of ontological insecurity as a person’s stable sense of self is eroded. This in turn can lead to a retreat into a more rigid identity.

This chapter seeks to transcend the bifurcation of the security debate between “traditional” realist approaches and “non-traditional” approaches. I call attention to the limited critical and emancipatory potential of the early CSS agenda as it was encapsulated in broadly individualist (human security/rights) and cosmopolitan (responsibility to protect) orientation to global realities. The main target of my critique is the merging of CSS with a dominant liberal approach to post-Cold War security dilemmas. The core of the critique is framed around the challenge still left unanswered by the bulk of CSS literature: the under-theorized relationship between security and identity. I argue that this merger did much to obfuscate the nature of the relationship and did so exactly at the time when the increasing spread of market economy and retreating welfare state were putting pressures on the ties between security and identity. I trace the problem to two specific weaknesses inherent in liberal thought itself: the presumed universal character of liberal values and the limited notion of power. Both raise serious doubts about the critical potential of the dominant liberal approaches and, hence, large parts of the CSS intellectual and policy agenda. I show that a deeper and more comprehensive critique of the concept of security requires a critical political economy (CPE) perspective. Such a perspective allows for a direct engagement with the structural forces that affect one’s sense of security and hence mediate individual and group identity relations. By focusing, among other things, on repeating economic crises, the CPE approach lends itself to a mid-level theory-building that can explain the causal links between the rising economic insecurity and the growing phenomenon of narrow identity politics.

I begin with a brief overview of the emergence of CSS as a crucial part of post-Cold War security studies. Despite its heterodox nature and relatively recent appearance, the CSS approach has become among the dominant perspectives in the growing literature on the meaning of security as one of the organizing concepts of modernity. In the section “Power and Identity” I examine the alignment between the early CSS agenda and traditional liberal approaches to international security and conflict resolution. I draw attention to the fact that the shared emphasis on the individual as the main referent of security practices has undermined the critical and emancipatory aspects of CSS. This shortcoming is evident in the limited theorizing on the nature of the relationship between security and identity, despite the growing emphasis on identity in CSS’s literature.

Finally, in the section “Critical Political Economy Approach to Security-Identity Nexus” I analyse the connection between security and identity from the CPE perspective and conclude that CPE offers a more critical contribution to security studies and a greater opportunity for theory-building.

Critical Security Studies

Emma Rothschild observes that the reconceptualization of security is a crucial task undertaken after the end of all great international wars when momentous changes in the international political configuration force a rethinking of the institutions that were the mainstay of the old order (1995: 53). What emerges from this active search for fresh foundations is a notion of security infused with a new set of self-conscious principles to guide the dawning era. The end of the Cold War marked the consolidation of the “critical turn” in security studies as scholars across disciplines seized the opportunity presented by the transformation of the external world. Various “dissident” approaches (Terriff et al. 1999: 112) were contesting the “traditional” strategic studies perspective of security that had dominated academic inquiry and international politics since the late 1940s.

Of course, security has always been a contested concept. To date the rise of critical perspectives on security from the late 1980s is somewhat misleading. The critique of realism and its state-centric vision of reality had its nascent beginnings in social movements of the 1970s, opposition to the Vietnam war, and in more general critiques of NATO’s nuclear weapons policies (Rothschild 1995: 58). Peace studies scholars contested the possibility of meaningful security for individuals under the conditions that posited war as a natural condition (Baldwin 1996: 124). From these early beginnings, the main axis of opposition to “traditional” approaches to security was marked by a principled commitment to individual well-being as the primary concern of all scholarship and human endeavours.

Despite these earlier precursors, it is now common to see Robert Cox’s 1981 essay as the crucial breaking point in the international relations (IR) discipline and as an inspirational moment for the CSS scholars who came into their own a decade later. His argument drew a sharp line under the dominance of empiricism of the preceding decades. Borrowing from the critical theory position of the early Frankfurt School, Cox outlined the difference between the positivist theories that approached reality as if it possessed concrete material attributes that could be observed and explained and the theories that are informed by a reflexive stance towards their “position in time and space, specifically social and political time and space” (Cox 1991: 128). This distinction between the “problem-solving” approaches and the “critical approaches” set up the dichotomy in security studies that largely persists today. CSS presented itself as a “critical” alternative to “traditional” security studies that had elevated a static, militarized and state-centric notion of security to the level of “hard” science subject to immutable logic of an anarchic international system and narrowly defined rationality of national security interests.

In contrast, CSS was openly normative and advocated for alternative organization of social reality, and hence, security relations. The early CSS scholars, most notably those associated with the “Welsh School”, embraced the idea of critical social science in service of the normative goals of human betterment (Jones 1999). Many observed that the Cold War template for security, the pre-occupation with external threats, and the defence of state borders did not address the actual lived experiences of most people who suffered from lack of minority rights, environmental protection, socio-economic underdevelopment, and health epidemics among many other more personal and immediate concerns.

In 1990, Ken Booth declared emancipation to be the spirit of the 21st century (321). In his plenary address to the British International Studies Association, Booth argued that, along with its normative stance, emancipation becomes the way to “loosen the grip of the neo-realist tradition” on the thinking and practice of security (321). For Wyn Jones, the critical approaches stand or fall by their ability to reveal the potential for “emancipatory transformation”: “… it is critical theory’s commitment to emancipation—understood as development of possibilities for a better life already immanent within the present—that provides the point of critique of the prevailing order” (1999: 28). At the centre of this emancipatory project was a return to the classical liberal notion of the individual as the measure of all value systems and practical undertakings. However, the liberalism that came to define the new world order in the 1990s has shed the national self-determination to which it was bound in the 19th century (Rothschild, 54). The adoption of this leaner version of liberalism removed the national political community (the state) from its role as the emancipatory agent and exposed a crucial weakness within a critical agenda of CSS.

As the opening quote suggests, this role was taken up by the dominant powers. In parallel with the debates in academic circles, the sovereignty of individual was advocated by policymakers at the national and international level who were engaging in their own redefinition of the parameters of security. “Liberal internationalism” became the animating spirit of new global institutions and their security agendas (Rothschild 1995: 54.). In 1994 the United Nations Development Program introduced the concept of human security in its annual report. A year later, the Commission on Global Governance issued a far more ambitious report on the state of global politics. Invoking a shared “global civic ethic”, it argued that global challenges require a radical restructuring of international organization if they are to be effectively addressed (The Commission on Global Governance 1995).

Several heads of states and high-ranking dignitaries were seizing the moment to locate themselves at the head of the changing security scenario and set the agenda for a new principled foreign policy. Tony Blair in the UK and US President Clinton both made appeals to the new humanitarian century and to human security in their public statements (Rothschild 1995: 55). Norway and Canada restyled their entire approach to foreign policy to present themselves as global advocates of the human security agenda. UN Secretary General joined the chorus of voices calling for a refocus from “armed territorial security” towards a more inclusive and human-based perspective (Rothschild 1995: 56).

Yet the overlap between academia and the policy world went beyond mere coincidence in perspectives on the post-Cold War international order. Several scholars were playing a direct role in policymaking. The collaboration gave critical scholars access to policy formulation but it also declawed much of the critical agenda. The anti-statism of CSS and the belief that policymakers in Western capitals and in the UN or the EU corridors represented the emancipatory forces could only be maintained by turning a blind eye to the great power inequalities in the international system (McCormack 2009).

Power and Identity

The separation of the field of security studies into “traditional” and “non-traditional” approaches is a misleading simplification. As many have noted, the appropriation of the adjective “non-traditional” sets up “traditional” approaches as a straw man of unreflexive and uncritical perspectives on security (Hynek and Chandler 2013). E.H. Carr’s critical version of realism is never mentioned, nor is his devastating critique of 19th century liberalism as a glossy veneer for blunt pursuit of self-interests by the stronger members of the international system (Carr 1964). In a dazzling move of uncritical thinking, liberalism, which is equally unreflexive about its own assumptions and social conditions it takes as given, was excluded from the “traditional” camp and hence from the critique. Instead, imported almost wholesale liberal/cosmopolitan values are presented as emancipatory.

Anti-statism and an uncritical adoption of liberalism as a global ethic betray a very limited notion of power—a direct coercive power of states. Liberalism obscures the power dynamics inherent in the global economic structures and hence makes invisible the relationship between economic pressures emanating from the international market onto states and via states onto individuals. The link between the power inequalities among states and the economic well-being of the individuals inside the state receives little analysis. Attention is focused on the inside of the state as the main source of individual insecurity. The “widening” of security concept to include political, economic, social, environmental, and cultural threats further extends the areas of domestic sphere that fall under potential scrutiny. Yet, as Catherine Schmittecatte shows, the new framing of security is guided by priorities of the more powerful. Emphasis is placed on freedom from fear (R2P, or Responsibility to Protect) but not freedom from want (Chandler 2011: 120). This makes the exclusion of liberalism from the early critiques more puzzling. Initially many CSS scholars were interested in deepening and widening the concept of security because they believed that the “traditional” approaches did not address the problems of real people suffering from various conditions of insecurity, neglect, marginalization, abuse, and social stigma. In his call for rethinking of security concept Booth argued that the definition of “emancipation implies an egalitarian concept of liberty”. And, that “liberty without economic status is propaganda” (1991: 322). Liberalism is too complicit in structures of oppression to be left unchallenged.

Because the state is an artefact of power and domination it is stripped of its emancipatory role. Booth’s observation captures the sentiment of the age, “Realist ethics are narrow and selfish, based on the power politics of place”. He declares that “[t]his is contrary to human interests” (McCormack 2010: 7). Emancipation resides in the global liberal ethic and, for Booth, in “global community building” (1991: 324). A particularly significant role in this new “global neighbourhood” is accorded to global civil society actors who are seen as fostering and maintaining the global civic ethic (Our Global Neighborhood 1995). Seemingly, without any self-awareness global civil society is invested with only positive attributes. Though it is not stated explicitly, the assumption betrays the classical liberal view that civil society is a natural expression of individual needs and interests, a voluntary association of freely choosing individuals. It does not possess any coercive power other than the power of ideas. Along with the other post-sovereign forms of organization, it merely reflects naturally overlapping interests and values already shared by everyone. This depoliticizes the role of civil society and obscures the ways in which it makes the global neoliberal order governable (Amoore and Langley 2004).

This cavalier attitude is indicative of the confusion in CSS regarding identity. Focus on the “politics of belonging” marked an important expansion of security field, but the heterogeneity of approaches that cluster under the critical umbrella has prevented sustained engagement. In constructivist works, like Campbell’s (1992) grand analysis of how the US identity was produced via writing of Cold War foreign policy, the focus has been on the bureaucratic process of categorization and othering (CASE Collective 2006: 453). Securitization literature introduced the concept of “societal security” (Waever 1993) but it is linked to existential threats and maintains the focus on state elites as the main actors in security-identity nexus. The turn away from realism requires renunciation of ethnocentrism encapsulated in national security agenda. A serious treatment of identity and nationalism and cultural conflicts is therefore non-existent (Farrands 2002: 24). Finally, the reliance on liberalism introduces a level of schizophrenia into the CSS treatment of identity. On one hand, many are convulsed by the “barbaric manifestation of identity politics” in the conflicts of the day (Jones 1999: 67). Liberal assumptions about harmony of interests see violent conflicts as an “aberration in social political life” (Thornton 2007: 10). Parochial attachments are an anathema to the emerging global public sphere. Anyone harbouring such perspectives is thereby categorized as outside the community of reasonable individuals (Our Global Neighborhood 1995). On the other hand, many CSS writers concede that local identities grant the newly individualized humans a sense of meaning, authenticity, and emancipation in an uncertain world (Booth 1991: 314–315).

The confusion takes on a new meaning when we consider that the many liberal instruments put in place to address global crises that stem from identity-based conflicts, such as Rwanda and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, entirely ignore the issue of identity. The R2P, for example, does not engage with the basic component of the crimes that it seeks to redress. It instructs the global community to take the responsibility of preventing genocides and mass atrocity crimes but says nothing about what defines the crucial identity groups, under what conditions identity markers become such deadly attributes, or how to rebuild societies that have gone through an ethnic conflict. Finally, while the R2P and other international instruments are seen as adding positive elements to the growing mutually reinforcing web of international law they introduce a crucial contradiction. Most international human rights conventions have an individual as their referent object. The Genocide Convention, the R2P and the mandate for the International Criminal Court ICC, on the other hand, are addressing groups and not individuals. This sets up a potentially contradictory normative ordering of the main referent objects of security. Without a proper engagement with the nature of identity, liberal human rights instruments cannot hope to settle the contradiction between these fundamental principles of political life.

The commitment to humans as ultimate referents leaves any group identity merely a residual category. In the words of Hedley Bull, human beings are the only registers of moral concern, “… permanent and indestructible in a sense in which groupings of them of this and that sort are not” (Booth 1991: 319). To me Rothschild’s tour through the history of ideas offers a more nuanced view on the relationship. Security is an individual condition but “one that can only be realized in some sort of collective enterprise” (1995: 63). The CSS attitude towards identity is potentially very damaging to our understanding of security and the social scaffolding that supports it.

Critical Political Economy Approach to Security-Identity Nexus

The CPE approach shares many attributes with CSS. Since the 1980s both have responded to Robert Cox’s call to replace the traditional problem-solving approaches to international affairs with critical approaches. However, CPE holds several advantages over CSS. First, it embraces a much more complex notion of power and, as a result, does not exclude liberal approaches from its critique. It recognizes that while states are dominant actors on the international scene and play a crucial role in determining individual security, our understanding of power and its effects on everyday life is not exhausted by simply looking at behaviour of state decision makers or by deconstructing the normalizing effects of statehood. CPE goes beyond the focus on the state to include other structures and actors in its critique and analysis.

At the same time, CPE is sensitive to the fact that all the rethinking and reorientation away from a state-centric approach to IR has not done away with dominant hierarchies in the international sphere. Power inequalities among the states remain an important driver of insecurity for the individuals living inside them.

By elevating the individual above all other referent objects of security, CSS has narrowed its critical potential. This move is based on a normative ordering that sees the individual as the only moral unit and conceives social groups, including identity-based groups, as purely derivative possessing no independent intrinsic value apart from serving the individual needs and interests. State is conceived as just such an artificial social unit endowed with a large amount of coercive power to discipline its subjects but no independent moral claims. As Jean L. Cohen observes, it is stripped of any normative significance or intrinsic value (2009: 349). Thus, in the emerging world order “sovereign equality” is to be excised from the protection of the international law. Such “moral reductionism”, as Cohen (2009: 348) calls it, is unfortunate and dangerous. It wrongly cleaves the individual out of the very context, domestic political community, in which her political agency is possible (2009: 350). Because, at least in democracies, “the citizen is the referent of public power and of the constitutional principles (public law) regulating the exercise of sovereign power. … [i]nternal and external sovereignty entail each other” (Cohen 2009: 355). The individualization of international order upon the values of liberal cosmopolitanism renders already unequal state relations even more unequal by opening the domestic sphere of the weaker states to external scrutiny and interference. It also, in the process, undermines the moral worth of the democratically constituted subject. Far from empowering the individual person, CSS and liberal approaches contribute to the growing disenfranchisement of the marginalized and under-represented segments of global society and empty domestic democratic politics of substance without constituting an alternative model for the democratic legitimation. CPE offers critiques of a state-centric system but does not abolish the value of states altogether. By adopting a much more complex notion of power, it highlights the fact that power, including the power of the state, can be both enabling and disabling of individual and group aspirations. And by drawing attention to the structural elements of international liberal order, it reminds us that power inequalities among states have direct constitutive effect on autonomy and well-being of individuals.

But, perhaps, the most important advantages of the CPE approach is that it allows us to link macro and micro levels, in this case the global economic structures to the everyday experiences of individuals. The macro level analysis adds a crucial element to understanding the relationship between security and identity that is often missing from CSS. By studying the structural changes taking place in global economy CPE illuminates system level attributes that impact lives of everyone and alter the everyday choices of governments and individuals. Timothy Sinclair refers to this as the International Political Economy of the Commonplace (1999). It is in the everyday experiences that the contradictions and crises inherent in global liberal economic order most directly reveal themselves (Sinclair 1999: 158). The individual has no control over these crises. Ethnonationalist projects offer a way to reconcile personal sense of vulnerability and hence manage the contradictions that manifest in everyday life. Theorized in these terms, the CPE approach allows us to travel along the link between the daily experiences of individuals and the system level factors in both directions. “The only reason to understand the latter is to illuminate the former, but the former also reveals much about broad change” (Sinclair 1999: 165). For me, the focus on the interplay between the general and the particular gives us more than just an insight into the changes taking places in the global economic structures. It allows us to comment on the totality of economic and social relations; to chart global trends.

Though CPE offers an important insight into the link between insecurity driven by economic forces and the rise of sectarian conflicts, identity cannot be reduced to economic explanations. It is a far more dynamic and complex phenomenon. The argument sketched here is a general interpretation of a pattern. I do not aim to offer a covering law. But, I believe that even on these more humble expectations the CPE approach reveals more about the linkages between insecurity and identity than many competing explanations.

The Rise of Identity Politics

When we inquire into the relationship between identity and security, CPE grants us a perspective on the evolving historic conditions that have become characteristic of the modern neoliberal economic model. The Growing economic insecurity, or at least the fear of relentless competition, has been shadowed by an increasing appeal of identity politics in many countries. Since the late 1970s, the global capitalist structures have been undergoing major transformation, expanding geographically, commodifying every part of the daily life, and hollowing out states as sites of social control (Fox Piven 1995: 108). In Western democracies the liberalization of economies has undone the post-war compromise between the leading social forces. The economic security it had brought to the individual dimmed the importance of ethnonational identities of pre-war years. The demise of this system that underwrote the post-World War II political order both at the global and national levels has contributed to the return of right-wing politics in Europe, the US and the rest of the developed world. The Unceasing competition for jobs, the increased downwards pressure on wages of lower-skilled segments of society (for those who remain employed) and the shrinking of the welfare state combine to produce a state of constant and gnawing sense of insecurity. The persistent claim that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal economic policies and the shift in global discourses, which present them as merely technical responses to stagnation of the late 1970s, has done much to heighten the sense of a perpetual economic insecurity. There are the daily reminders of the need to constantly reinvent and re-educate oneself to be ready for whatever passing skills the competitive global market might need. There is a feeling that “anyone who does not actively change on his own will become a passive victim of changes draconically imposed by those who dominate the market” (Berman 1982: 94). Sinclair believes that this relentless “hypercompetitiveness reduces the propensity of individuals mentally to place themselves in the position of others” (1999: 161). The resulting individualization has not undermined all forms of collectivization, as he worries. As we can see from the right-wing party success in several European elections since the 2008 economic crash, the rising suspicion of minorities and renewed attack on immigration policies, group identities thought to have been weakened by the decades of peace and prosperity have come back to claim their relevance in the political sphere. Liberal commentators find the likes of Golden Dawn in Greece, UKIP in the UK and the Tea Party Movement in the US inexplicable and an embarrassing throwback to a bygone era. But, the growing inequality across Western democracies means that for many who feel uncertain about their future and who experience a real decline in the quality of life, identity politics remains a comfort (Fox Piven 1995: 111).

In Eastern and Central Europe identity issues have remained the part of daily politics since the fall of the USSR. Anthony D. Smith has ascribed this to the “ethnic” model of a nation that, he believes, exists in Eastern Europe and Asia (1991: 9). A refrain to ancient hatreds to explain the violent disintegration of former Yugoslavia was common among the CSS scholars also.

CPE offers a more complex explanation of why nationalism remains a popular ideology among many in the east of Europe. First, a longer historic view reminds one that, though relatively bloodless, the transition from state socialism to market economies was a traumatic process that generated a lot of anxiety for the people of the former Soviet bloc. Sudden disappearance of state mechanisms, wage and pension systems, housing and healthcare guarantees, and other prudential goods, left everyone uncertain about the future. “Shock therapy” the favoured policy used to characterize a set of massive economic reforms imposed by external actors on most Eastern European states resulted in enormous economic pain for almost everyone. To exacerbate the matters, Eastern Europeans joined global structures at the height of neoliberal transformation of the global capitalism. “Shock therapy” itself was a product par excellence of the new neoliberal agenda. Added pressures came also from the pre-accession agreements with the EU. Asymmetric power relations between the two sides in the negotiation process led to agreements that saw Eastern European markets opened for Western investments while the EU’s agricultural sector, perhaps one area in which Eastern Europe could be competitive, was closed to Eastern products. In many places industrial base was bought up by foreign investors and gutted to ensure that local brands would not compete with international merchandise. When the Eastern states were finally allowed to join the EU, almost all Western European countries imposed bans on the free movement of peoples to prevent the expected masses of cheap Eastern workers from “flooding” across the borders.

Second, the competition for scarce resources fanned the ethnic grievances that lingered from socialist times. Ethnic groups looked upon the state as the mechanism to secure their economic well-being. Through tightly drawn property laws, narrow definitions of citizenship, and language barriers to employment, the new states could control the access to scarce resources and boost their own legitimacy at a time when they lacked capacity to play any meaningful socio-economic function. Everywhere a nation-state of one’s own was perceived as the emancipatory agent. At the very moment when CSS scholars in the West were adopting an anti-statist model of security people in Eastern Europe were looking to the state to guarantee equality in international sphere. Even in Yugoslavia, the “new wars” were about: “the control of the state apparatus and its territory.…” and “testif[ied] not to the disappearance of the state, but to its continuing importance” (Knudsen 2001: 362–363).

Finally, the financial crisis of 2008 left many Eastern European economies in shambles and exposed the massive contradictions at the heart of the “shock therapy” and the neoliberal economic policies. While foreign banks demanded their money back, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank recommended drastic austerity measures. In a desperate move, Latvia, by far the worst affected of all the EU states and facing bankruptcy, aimed to cut pensions by as much as 70%.Footnote 1 It was prevented from doing so by the national court. Austerity policies were eventually implemented in all states resulting in severe cuts to social provisioning and safety nets and massive lay-offs of workers. In 2014 growth figures were up again and many have declared that Eastern Europeans have put the crisis behind them. Yet, in 2013 and 2014, only Czech Republic had poverty levels lower than 20%. Bulgaria’s stood at almost 50%.Footnote 2 In 2014 Eurostat reported that over 40% of Bulgarians, around 27% of Romanians, 26% of Hungarians and 24% of Latvians experienced severe deprivation. By comparison, Greece, now the focus of concern, ranked 5th with 20%.Footnote 3 It is of little surprise that many in Eastern Europe find no solidarity with Greece. The feeling of common Europeanness has a hard time flowering in such an austere climate.

Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) has come close to disintegration and chaos several times since the end of the Yugoslav wars. The war of 1991–1995 left BiH in a far more precarious situation than any other of the former Yugoslav member states. The Ferocity of fighting destroyed its social fabric, and left the physical and economic infrastructure in ruins. The Dayton Peace Agreement sanctioned an unnecessarily complex, some would say, unworkable, political system. Ethnic cleavages have been cemented in a federal structure split between a Bosnian Muslim/Croat alliance and Serb entity of Republika Srpska. Achieving re-engagement among the Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs under these conditions was always going to be a difficult task.

The CPE approach adds the necessary links between the lingering power of identity politics and the persistent economic insecurity in BiH and raises questions about the liberal models of state-building. A quick review of the recent history reveals an economic picture that has almost no silver lining. From the signing of the Dayton Agreement BiH seems doomed to malignancy. Like other former socialist states, BiH enters the international arena as an independent state at the height of the transformation of global capitalism. Under the Office of High Representative for BiH, Bosnia is effectively run by a cartel of international actors who use economic intervention to reconstruct the state. In line with the neoliberal policies of the day, the emphasize is on economic growth and budget rather than everyday economic issues like wages and employment. The nascent state has little active role in economic planning; much of the economic activity was invested in sub-state entities and private actors (de Guevara 2008). In the first ten years the tax collection is negligible. In 2005 the Indirect Tax Agency (ITA) finally gave the state some degree of control over revenue, though as de Guevara notes, most of it goes to repaying international loans and to central state agencies (2008: 377). As a result, the new state has a limited redistributive capacity and the bonds between the state and its citizens remain atrophied. The Informal economic networks built on familial/ethnic ties that can guarantee reciprocity stay unchallenged.

Following the 2008 global economic crisis Bosnia suffered through a double-dip recession. While the macroeconomic indicators have improved somewhat there is little change in general well-being. About 18–20% of the population is severely impoverished, and another 30% are estimated to be in danger of falling under the poverty line.Footnote 4 Unemployment is persistently high. After dropping to its lowest 39.03% in May of 2008, it rose steadily to 46.10% in February of 2013. In 2015 the unemployment averaged 43%.Footnote 5 Of particular worry is chronic youth unemployment, which has remained in high 50% and low 60% since 2010.Footnote 6 According to an international survey carried out by GlobalPost, in 2014 BiH had the highest youth unemployment rate in the world.Footnote 7 Youths are generally well-educated but the job market is feeble. Hence, the job opportunities are still strongly linked to family networks or emigration. Emigration, through remittances that are sent back home, however, reinforces the familial and ethnic economic ties. Recent accession negotiations with the EU offer hope to some that Bosnian economy and political institutions will improve (Babuna 2014; de Guevara 2008). But, the experience of other former socialist states should make us more circumspect. The accession to the EU will mean adoption of its neoliberal economic principles, which will entail the restructuring of the economy along a set of stringent “technical” requirements; the process is more likely to contribute to economic insecurity not ease it.

Under these conditions, the ethnic cleavages cannot be ameliorated. Ethnic ties and informal networks provide some well-being for individuals. For Bosnians, as for many in Eastern Europe, memories of economic security and stability of the socialist era exacerbate the sense of anxiety and isolation. Persistent economic insecurity has resulted in real social and political exclusion. Group identity, on the other hand, offers immediate inclusion into a shared narrative that is not premised on economic capital. This common narrative sustains an emotional link to a lost past, familiar social and physical landscapes (many now part of another country) in an otherwise uncertain world.

Finally, nothing obscures the narrative of identity as the pathologization of genocidal violence. In the context of Africa especially, irrational behaviour is portrayed among a long list of afflictions that torment the underdeveloped continent. Reflecting on why the Rwanda genocide went unnoticed in the Western press until the killings were almost finished, journalist Philip Gourevitch comments, “… what do Africans do in the American press? They die of miserable things” (Dawes 2007: 23). But, far from being a product of some particular local conditions, the Rwanda genocide was made possible by a long historic interference by external forces. The role of the colonial past has by now been well covered (Mamdani 2001). Here I want to briefly draw attention to a much more immediate set of constellations that prepared the ground for the violence.

Though land is scarce the soil is rich and since the colonial days Rwanda has based its economy on crop exports. By 1994, coffee had become the mainstay of Rwandan export-oriented economy. Isaac Kamola provides a detailed account of political economy of Rwandan coffee production (2007). It is a tale of the rise and fall of the International Coffee Agreement (ICA). Signed in 1962 the ICA was designed to concentrate control over coffee production in the hands of the US, Europe and larger coffee producing nations by keeping down the competition from cheaper African coffee growers through price control (Kamola 2007: 580). As land in Rwanda became scarcer due to the liberalization policies introduced in the 1970s and as coffee prices climbed to new heights, many Rwandan farmers turned large percentages of their farmland over to coffee production. Government policies were favourable to coffee growing and corruption sustained a vast patronage system. By the late 1980s when global coffee prices were high a large part of government budget came from the sale of coffee. Much of it was spent recklessly but it also allowed the government to exert a pacifying effect on rural famers by paying high prices for the coffee and keeping social unrest at bay (Kamola 2007: 582). In the early 1990s three crises undermined the delicate balance in Rwanda’s economic relations. First, in 1989, under attack from international coffee importers and exporters and the new Washington consensus, the ICA was abolished. Coffee prices dropped by two-thirds in less than two months (Kamola 2007: 584). Second, in 1988 already struggling Rwandan economy came under the IMF and the World Bank’s structural adjustment programs. Drastic devaluation took place in September 1990 and the second devaluation followed in 1992 (Omaar 1995: 20). Finally, the war with the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) added another burden to a struggling economy by displacing nearly one million people, one-seventh of the population. The RPF occupied some of the largest tea plantations in the north, cutting supplies of the second highest export after coffee (Omaar 1995: 21). “Currency devaluation, collapsed coffee prices and the government’s continued subsidization of the coffee sector resulted in Rwanda accruing US$1 billion in foreign debt by 1994” (Kamola 2007: 584). Crucial public services stopped functioning and patronage broke down. The Hutu were the hardest hit since they had been the main recipients of government jobs. As the economy imploded and pressures for democratization grew, political tensions that had been kept suppressed by economic manipulations could not be contained. As the deeply intertwined patronage system unravelled, there was little left to lose for the privileged groups in the state apparatus. The government proceeded to militarize the country and purposefully exacerbated ethnic tensions.

Conclusion

The end of the Cold War marked a shift in the organization of the international system. The fortuitous timing allowed scholars to subject the concept of security to “unprecedented scrutiny” (Jones 1999: 1). Critical perspectives now constitute part of the living canon of social science approaches to security studies. Beate Jahn worries that due to this success critical thought has become a form of orthodoxy (Farrands 2002: 14).

The argument in this chapter is that by adopting an individual as a referent object of security CSS becomes almost indistinguishable from liberalism. The Early CSS scholars focused all their critique on realism and strategic security studies. Liberalism was typically excluded from their critical analysis. As such, they foreclosed lines of critique that explore the dynamics between the economic and social worlds, interests and identity. The complex relationship between identity and security requires an approach that goes beyond the individualism of human security agenda. It requires a more structural account of the rise of economic insecurity as a crucial driver for the appeal of identity ties.

The CPE approach allows us to integrate the study of particular with the considerations of the general. It is this link that is particularly crucial for understanding how the shifts in an individual’s economic security allow for the politicization of group identities in a given society. By tracing the changes in global economic architecture and by linking them to local economic trends, CPE reveals the cumulative long-term effect of increased socio-economic uncertainty and the attendant feeling of insecurity. By taking this historic perspective, it highlights the fact that contradictions and crises are inherent to the global economic system, the producing contradictions and crises in everyday experiences of individuals (Sinclair 1999: 158). In an increasingly volatile and challenging environment group identity is often the only narrative that offers individuals some sense of stability and permanency. Without its comfort how is “the self to move and live in the whirlwind?” (Berman 1982: 17).