Review of Critical Reflections on Security and Change

The field of international security came of age during the Cold War. Its growth was galvanized by the Soviet-American rivalry that emerged after World War II. The central preoccupation of security studies was the military dimension of that rivalry and above all the nuclear arms race at the heart of the competition. Although the field grew increasingly diverse over time, its core concerns (especially for so-called "mainstream" or "traditional" security studies) remained focused on the superpowers, their allies, their militaries, and their global competition. Indeed, to critics of traditional security studies, the field itself seems like an artifact of the Cold War.

What are we to make of the field now that the world has changed so suddenly and so stunningly? What does the end of the Cold War mean for a field that wassoheavily shaped by Cold War concerns? These are the broad questions that undergird this volume, a collection of diverse essays loosely linked by the theme of change.

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