Network analysis

Book synopsis: Focusing on critical approaches to security, this new textbook offers readers both an overview of the key theoretical perspectives and a variety of methodological techniques. With a careful explication of core concepts in each chapter and an introduction that traces the development of critical approaches to security, this textbook will encourage all those who engage with it to develop a curiosity about the study and practices of security politics. Challenging the assumptions of conventional theories and approaches, unsettling that which was previously taken for granted – these are among the ways in which such a curiosity works. Through its attention to the fact that, and the ways in which, security matters in global politics, this work will both pioneer new ways of studying security and acknowledge the noteworthy scholarship without which it could not have been thought. This textbook will be essential reading to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of critical security studies, and highly recommended to students of traditional security studies, International Relations and Politics. Chapter Abstract: Social thinkers today are taking important steps from conceiving the social world in terms of substances and ‘things’ toward conceiving it in terms of processes and unfolding relations. Network approaches are at the core of this movement toward relational thinking. The chapter discusses social network analysis as more than a mere ‘method,’ and argues that it belongs to a family of analytical strategies for the study of how resources, goods, events, or positions flow through a particular configuration of social ties. We show how the critical potential of network analysis grows from: (1) (re)-materialisations; (2) interstitial thinking; (3) thinking across scales and strata of reality. In International Relations, the potential of network thinking rests in its creative disturbance of to state-centric visions