This chapter introduces the notion of critique. At its simplest, to apply ‘critique’ means to question and ask questions about our world(s). This is because how we perceive our world(s) shapes what we identify as problems and why. This is what is also termed, problem framings. The chapter begins by outlining the main elements of critique: contingency, historicity, sociology, and a concern with transformation. It then presents the benefits of adopting a perspective that is critical of security. To understand the impacts of security within worlds and across them, it is important to look at security in relation to class, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ideology and culture, religion, political belonging, and disability and/or their intersections. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the decision to mobilize security is always a political choice.
Chapter
1. What is critique?
Chapter
Prosopography
Jacob A. Hasselbalch and Leonard Seabrooke
This chapter discusses prosopography, which is defined as the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives. The etymology of the word suggests that prosopography is about describing or recording a person’s appearance or life, but prosopography differs from biography in that it analyses structured biographical data of groups of individuals that have something in common. Prosopography emerged primarily as a method for historical research. Outside of historical research, it is more commonly known as ‘group biography’ or ‘career-path analysis’. Prosopography has also been a key element of ‘field-based’ research on social groups and the sociology of professions, and is more of an approach than a method sui generis: it implies the systematic organization of data in such a way that connections and patterns that influence historical processes are revealed. The chapter then details the five stages of prosopography.
Chapter
6. Sociological and Anthropological Approaches
Damien Short
This chapter explores sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of human rights. Anthropologists and sociologists have typically been either positivists or relativists. Consequently they have been slow to develop an analysis of justice and rights, thus lagging behind other disciplines in analysing the growth of universal human rights. This chapter shows how sociology and anthropology finally engaged with the concept of universal human rights after a long disciplinary focus on cultural relativism and legal positivism. It considers how sociology expanded its analysis of citizenship rights to that of human rights and how anthropology turned its ethnographic methodology towards an examination of the ‘social life of rights’. It also describes ‘social constructionism’ as a common bond between sociology and anthropology, laying emphasis on the importance of sociological and anthropological perspectives to the study of human rights.
Chapter
The Social Life of Human Rights
Damien Short
This chapter looks
into the development of sociological approaches to the study of human rights. It
explains how sociology covered the ride of human rights through shared human
vulnerability and collective sympathy, institutional threats, and assertion of
powerful class interests, while anthropology deepened the understanding of
socially constructed rights. Sociologists tend to view rights as inventions or
products of human social interaction and power relations. The chapter then
expounds on the concept of social constructionism in relation to power and
social structure. It also explains that an ethnographic approach to human rights
showcases how human rights function and their meaning to different social actors
in varying social contexts.
Chapter
Ethnography
Chowra Makaremi
This chapter highlights ethnography, which is a method developed in the practice of ethnology, a subdiscipline of anthropology dedicated to the study of peoples using a micro-analytical and comparative perspective. Ethnographic methods such as immersion and micro-analysis have influenced qualitative research in sociology since the rise of the Chicago school of sociology. However, it is only since the 1970s that anthropologists have started to apply their research methods to their own societies. A founding principle of ethnographic knowledge lies in the notion of alterity and the idea that being an outsider to a culture may bring specific insights and questions about dimensions of social life that are interiorized as ‘natural’ and obvious by those native to that culture. What opened the path to ethnographizing one’s own society was the understanding that this productive and scientific use of alterity was not related to some intrinsic qualities of the researchers or the people they study, but to the ability to develop an estranged gaze, even on one’s own social world.
