Measured in terms of growth since 1945, the study of security is probably the most prestigious sub-field of international relations. As many have noted, its growth and status were enhanced by the injection of money into the expansion of academic posts and publishing opportunities to sustain them. The main pressure behind this lever of opportunity was undoubtedly the relevance to US foreign policy of the realist approach to the subject during what Stephen Walt calls its ‘golden age’, until the mid 1960s, and its ‘renaissance’ from the mid 1970s.

But to describe the most productive era of strategic studies, focused narrowly on military power and nuclear deterrence, as the golden age of security studies in the manner of Walt is to equate the study of security in the international arena with a particular agenda for its achievement. Its focus, philosophy, theory and method were set by the demands of the American policy-making establishment and the interlocking needs of academics. Until the mid 1980s, an apparently closed community of scholars found enough support in Cold War fears and policy incentives, and in the near-monopoly of realism in the wider arena of international relations, to ignore the fundamental problems raised by other disciplines in relation to security. Even more than other siblings of the international relations field, security studies was, until recently, a peculiarly American enterprise, fuelled by policy needs of the Western superpower after World War II.