ResearchPod Summary
Didier Bigo and Emma McCluskey propose the PARIS approach—Political Anthropological Research for International Sociology—as a critical alternative to traditional security studies. The authors argue that the common practice of categorizing critical security research into rival 'schools' (such as Aberystwyth, Copenhagen, and Paris) is an essentialist mistake that obscures the actual intellectual convergence and dialogue occurring among scholars. Instead of treating these as competing geographic entities, the authors define PARIS as a research program that integrates political anthropology, sociology, and international relations to examine how security is constructed in practice.
The core of the PARIS approach is the rejection of the idea that 'security' is a stable, objective concept or a fixed object of study. Instead, the authors argue that security is a label used by various actors—practitioners, think-tanks, and academics—to justify specific political actions, often involving coercion or surveillance. By analyzing the 'social life' of these labels, the PARIS approach seeks to uncover the symbolic violence inherent in how boundaries are drawn between security and insecurity, or between freedom and threat.
Perhaps the most significant conceptual contribution is the metaphor of the Mobius strip. The authors argue that security and insecurity are not two separate, opposing sides of a coin. Rather, they form a single, continuous surface where the distinction between the two is constantly contested and shifting. Because there is no objective 'inside' or 'outside' to this strip, the researchers emphasize that any attempt to define security is inherently a political act of power.
This approach is vital for researchers because it demands a shift in focus: from asking 'what is security?' to 'what does security do?' By studying the everyday practices of actors across different fields—from policing and border control to digital surveillance—the PARIS approach reveals how security discourses can diminish democratic debate and silence discussions on freedom and equality. It encourages scholars to move away from the 'publish or perish' culture of simplifying complex social phenomena, urging them instead to embrace the messy, transdisciplinary reality of how power is exercised in the name of security.
[[RP_SECTION:the-paris-approach|The PARIS approach]]
Alex: [measured, professional] A security agency, on this view, is not standing outside a problem and responding to it. It helps draw the line between what counts as secure and what counts as a risk. That is the position of the PARIS approach, as Didier Bigo and Emma McCluskey set it out in their conceptual account.
Sam: [curious, analytical] That sounds like a strong causal thesis. Does labeling something a threat inherently generate the insecurity it claims to address? Or is it weaker, that the label is part of how the line between secure and insecure gets drawn?
Alex: [precise] The weaker reading is the safer one. The anchor is an image: security and insecurity sit on a single continuous surface, like a Möbius strip. You can't follow it from one side to the other and find a clean edge. PARIS stands for Political Anthropological Research for International Sociology, and its point is about that boundary-making. Agencies help construct the boundaries, they don't just react to external danger.
Sam: [leaning in, probing] So the agency is an active participant in defining the reality it manages. Where does that leave the usual map of the field? Security studies is often taught as three schools: Aberystwyth, Copenhagen, and Paris. [[RP_SECTION:critique-of-security-schools|Critique of security schools]]
Alex: [steady, grounded] The authors push against the essentialism of that three-schools model. The city labels work as shorthand, but they obscure the fact that these scholars have been in a productive, evolving dialogue for decades. Treating them as fixed, rival camps misdescribes how the work developed.
Sam: [thoughtful, processing] As a sociologist of knowledge would put it, the taxonomy is itself a construction. The labels are products of practice, and the field is doing to itself what it says security agencies do to threats.
Alex: [deliberate, clarifying] That's a fair extension, and it fits the method. If you stop treating the schools as natural kinds, you look at the everyday practices that produce the labels. The same move applies to security itself. The approach rejects the functionalist view in which security is just a response to danger. Instead it analyzes the habitus of professionals of politics and of security agencies: the dispositions and routines that shape how they see and act.
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Sam: [skeptical, pushing back] Here's where I'd expect a referee to push. If you focus on mundane practices, you risk losing the broader political stakes. How do you connect a micro-level analysis of routines to macro-level questions about state power and civil liberties? [[RP_SECTION:micro-level-security-practices|Micro-level security practices]]
Alex: [slower, for clarity] The authors treat that as the central challenge, and their answer is political anthropology. Security is treated as a practice, not a concept. Technical, bureaucratic decisions look minor when viewed one at a time, but they carry profound political consequences. So the analysis starts in the routine and follows it outward.
Sam: [analytical] That's a claim about where to start looking, though, not a demonstration that the bridge holds. Whether it does depends on the case material, and this discussion stays at the conceptual level.
Alex: [direct, acknowledging] Yes, and that's a fair limit on what we can say here. The approach is an orientation for research rather than a tested hypothesis. Its strength is the set of questions it lets you ask. [[RP_SECTION:veridiction-and-doxa|Veridiction and doxa]]
Sam: [nodding, connecting the dots] Two terms seem to do much of that work. One is veridiction, how truth claims get validated within a field. The other is doxa. How do they fit together?
Alex: [measured] Veridiction is about who gets to say what counts as true, and by what procedures. Doxa is the taken-for-granted assumption that sits beneath those procedures. Together they explain how security labels come to feel like common sense. Once a label feels self-evident, surveillance or emergency measures can become the default response to complex social problems, and nobody has to argue for them. Deconstructing the doxa means making that default visible again as a product of practice.
Sam: [reflective] So the Möbius image carries the whole program. If security and insecurity are made in the same practices, then analyzing those practices is how you get at the politics.
Alex: [direct] That's the core of it. The approach asks you to treat security as something produced in routine, professional, contestable work, rather than as a neutral answer to an external danger.
Alex: [measured, closing] If you want the detailed arguments and the material we skipped, you can generate a deep dive of this paper. The paper has the rest either way.
Sam: [light, closing] Thanks for listening.