Security, Identity and Interests

The study of security has been dominated for four decades by a scientific perspective that has been under attack since the end of the Cold War. In this book, Bill McSweeney discusses the inadequacy of this approach and criticizes the most recent attempts to surmount it. Drawing on contemporary trends in sociology, he develops a theory of the international order within which the idea of security takes on a broader range of meaning, inviting a more interpretive approach to understanding the concept and formulating security policy.