Critical Security Studies is an academic discipline within security studies which rejects mainstream approaches such as realism and neorealism.

In May 1994, a small conference was held at York University in Toronto entitled Strategies and Conflict: Critical Approaches to Security Studies. It brought together from around the world a variety of scholars with interests in security and with concern about new security studies in the early post-Cold War era. This conference title was used as the title of the book, edited by Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams. In their 1997 book, Critical Security Studies: Concept and Cases, Krause and Williams suggested a broad definition of critical security studies which covered all “new approaches” from Constructivism through Feminism and “Copenhagen School” to Poststructuralism. 

Krause and Williams helped shape critical security studies as a pluralistic field. In addition, they pose such questions to open a broad and complex agenda for security studies. Questioning the referent object of security, ‘who or what is to be secured’, Krause and Williams challenged the traditional state-centric understanding of security and instead put forward the individual as the object of security.

The term Critical Security Studies is also used to refer to the coherent theoretical school created mostly by the endeavor of Professors Ken Booth and Richard Wyn Jones, Andrew Linklater and their colleagues from the Aberystwyth University. Booth and Wyn Jones developed a brand of ‘Critical Security Studies’ that challenged the definition of security in terms of military threats to the state, and instead linked the study of security to human emancipation.

Critical Security Studies contributes to security studies by broadening and deepening the concept of security. T