Strategic Studies Quarterly

Abstract Conceptual overlapping among security, politics and strategy was ever caused to meaning uncertainty of security studies and its dependency to political, strategic and international relations studies, too. Here, for transparency and solving of this conceptual overlapping, author is trying to be taking under questioning the presuppositions of strategic, political and international relations studies such as likeness of concept of security and security studies, coming in to existence of security after politics, strategy and international relations, and to be more limited scope of security studies. Besides the reviewing these presuppositions, this article, by genealogy perspective, is trying to evidence the boundaries of the security studies related to political, strategic and international relations realm, and representing the evolution of it.

Abstract The relationship between security, politics and strategy has frequently been subject to academic debates and the demarcation of boundaries among these concepts and the contours of their study areas are the result of such academic debates and contentions. In this article, the author examines the historical grounds of change in the aforementioned concepts and analyzes their mutual relationship according to four traditional, meta-traditional, modern and postmodern discourses in order to explain part of ambiguities and complexities of the concept of security. Indeed, dependence of the security concept on concepts of politics and strategy and the overlapping of security studies area with areas of political and strategic studies – as the fundamental assumption in the existing literature of security studies – is challenged in the writing. In answering the question of what relationship exists between the concept of security and concepts of politics and strategy in terms of time sequence, the author tests the hypothesis that there is no time sequence between the concepts of security, politics and strategy and that historical-discursive change in such concepts indicates their coincidence.