This Handbook gathers together state-of-the-art theoretical reflection and empirical research by a group of leading international scholars relating to recent transformations in the field of security studies.

In today’s globalized setting, the challenge of maintaining security is no longer limited to the traditional foreign-policy and military tools of the nation-state, and we face a wide range of security threats. Since the late 1980s, a flurry of research and scholarship has brought forth a new range of theoretical positions and methodologies for studying security, focusing on issues such as information technology, biological and chemical warfare, resource conflicts, pandemics, mass migrations, transnational terrorism, and environmental dangers. This Handbook represents a critical stock-taking of the evolution of security studies, a reflection on the new security thinking, and a critical review of its premises and ambitions, its politics, and its continuities and discontinuities with what remains of the Cold War security studies tradition.

The contributors discuss and evaluate the critical shifts in security studies along four key axes:

• Part I: New Security Concepts

• Part II: New Security Subjects

• Part III: New Security Objects

• Part IV: New Security Practices

Offering a comprehensive theoretical and empirical overview of this evolving field, this book is now available in paperback and will be essential reading for all students of critical security studies, human security, international/global security, political theory and IR in general

J. Peter Burgess is Research Professor at PRIO, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, where he leads the Security Programme and edits the interdisciplinary journal Security Dialogue. In addition, he is Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian　University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (NTNU), and Research Fellow at the Institute for European Studies, Brussels.