Thread by @drfarls

Now that I'm here at the #ISA2022 I'm in the mood to have a brief thread on what it was like to do security studies in political science in the 1990s...

It is difficult to believe now but it really was the case in the 1990s that the subdiscipline of International Relations in Political Science determined that security studies were no longer a thing, basically because there weren't going to be any wars anymore.

This is what graduate students at my undergraduate institution told me. This is what faculty at my undergraduate institution told me. "Nobody cares about that anymore" is a quote that I have held dear for a great many years.

Security related work had to be framed either around paradigm wars or fitted into some other area of study; international organization, for example.

When I got to graduate school I was more or less the only security studies student; one guy from a previous cohort had studied security but he dropped out to become a tech mogul (didn't work out).

Fortunately my program did have a faculty member who was a kind of security specialist, although not really in what we might term "hard" security studies. And we later added another faculty member who very much did specialize in security, so things were more or less okay.

But the graduate students were absolutely not interested in security work. Some formulation of "nobody cares because there are no more wars" was spoken dozens of times. This despite the fact that the US literally fought a war in 1999.

This wasn't *just* a case of something new taking over from something old; there was the distinct feel (rarely voiced but definitely there) that security studies were somehow "dirty."

Folks didn't quite say it out loud but everyone knew that the people who studied war were the ones who actually liked war and thought war was cool. And those people were bad.

There was also some bitterness about the way in which funding was distributed during the Cold War, where security topics enjoyed an advantage over other fields of study. War as a phenomenon ended and now was the time to take sweet, sweet mental revenge.

Anyway this moment didn't actually last all that long. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests had an effect, as did Kosovo. And of course 9/11 Changed Everything and it was once again ok to study war.

Still... it's an interesting moment in the history of the academy. In the end it didn't really affect my career very much, but I suppose if the world hadn't started going to shit before I graduated it might have been hard to find a job.

So when anyone tries to tell you that academia isn't "trendy" (and a few people still try to pretend), best not to pay much attention.