Rejoinder

Anatomy of a Footnote

CHRISTINE SYLVESTER*
Department of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster
University, UK

W
HAT IS A FOOTNOTE? what does it mean in the larger scheme of
a text?

A footnote is several different and even contradictory things, really. A

footnote can add information to a discussion without requiring the reader to
consider that information if s/he is not of a mind to. In such cases, the
information is clearly meant to be less important and less central to the dis-
cussion than the ‘real’ text above the note. A footnote can also acknowledge
another’s ideas or a body of work that the writer finds inspirational – as in
good, preferred, approved. Equally, in absenting some people and works
and including others, a footnote signals to the reader who and what the
writer finds uninspiring and unimportant, or perhaps threateningly impor-
tant. That is, a footnote can give credit where credit is thought to be due and
it can snub ideas, withhold credit and recognition, or only partially acknow-
ledge these (as when names are provided but no reference to specific works
is offered). A footnote also stakes out personal space in what can be an imper-
sonal narrative: one’s foot is forward, and the footprint is a clue to where
writer has been and goes and who is taken along for the ride or not. It is an
eccentric space, the place to shoehorn in details that tickle a writer’s fancy
and that reveal his or her life just a little bit and his or her values much more.
Whether presenting something to the reader or making details that should be
presented go missing, footnoting is the ghost that stalks all formal academic
texts and writers: it is an inclusion that is simultaneously an exclusion. A
footnote, thereby, is one of the lodestars of the political in academia. Who and
what is in and who and what is out: it’s all in the footnotes.
Here is a footnote. It appears early in ‘Critical Approaches to Security in
Europe: A Networked Manifesto’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006) as footnote num-
ber 3, on page 444:
Wæver (2004a) lists ‘hard-core postmodernists’ and ‘feminists’ under ‘other partici-
pants’. Because we begin from the suggestive classification that informs Wæver’s
analysis, this article necessarily works within, but also seeks to problematize, both

© 2007 PRIO, www.prio.no

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Vol. 38(4): 547–558, DOI: 10.1177/0967010607085001
548 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 4, December 2007

geographical and theoretical limits. Although very interesting work drawing on Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Jacques Rancière (such as that of Benjamin Muller, Peter
Nyers, Patricia Molloy, Lene Hansen and Roxanne Doty) is not directly discussed, such
work needs to be considered within a conversation that is now rapidly expanding.

What is this footnote’s anatomical structure, its academic footprint?

A Skinny Skeleton

This footnote establishes the key parameters of the entire piece. It tells us that
the writers are taking one work of scholarship as the basic organizing frame-
work for their article, and it is a paper that Ole Wæver of the University of
Copenhagen presented at the International Studies Association meetings in
Montreal in 2004: ‘Aberystwyth, Paris, Copenhagen: New “Schools” in
Security Theory and Their Origins Between Core and Periphery’ (Wæver,
2004). Readers of the c.a.s.e. article will probably not know that particular
piece, for the elementary reason that it has not been published. Those who
know the cited paper know it, and those who do not must try to scare it up
somewhere or take the writers’ word that the paper cited exists, that it is
good, and that it deserves to be the skeleton holding up the arguments to
come. Taking it on faith that the framework is worthy is easier than trying to
find and assess it oneself; but, in either case, the reader is put on the back foot
and can be forgiven for thinking s/he is encountering a members-only club.
Unpublished work is not necessarily weak. It simply has not yet been
vetted by the scholarly community acting as blind judge. It is therefore
untested work. In this case, it is an untested work embraced nonetheless by a
like-minded group. Its skeleton is to hold a bulky weight for one untried:
most of the critical approaches the writers plan to include and manifest
will be pinned on its brittle bones. It will also be made to bear approaches to
security studies that are in the shadows of presence and in the tombs lying
about. Is it up to these tasks?
The main text of the c.a.s.e. article informs us that the collective is adopting
Wæver’s place-based schema of security studies in Europe. The nerve centers
are the large city of light on the continent, a small Nordic city of seasonal light
and dark, and a remote town on the western shore of Wales. That is to say,
critical security studies in Europe has something to do with academic Paris,
Copenhagen, and Aberystwyth. Both the text and the footnote tell the reader
that the collective is using the Wæverian framework with certain provisos,
bits ‘problematized’ and rendered ‘suggestive’ in order to avoid ‘misleading’
the reader. One proviso has to do with geography. Wæver’s schools, say the
writers, are more decentralized than the place assignments he gives them; in
fact, the collective proposes to think of ‘dispersed locations associated with
Christine Sylvester Anatomy of a Footnote 549

specific individuals and debates much more than unitary schools of thought’
(c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 444). People, not places, are to count. Debates are
key. Beyond showcasing the work of variously placed security specialists, the
collective wants to ‘show how the dialogue between different scholars has
shaped the conceptual discussion through a set of encounters, producing the
appearance of “schools” talking to each other’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 444).
Perhaps this is an allusion to the second proviso mentioned in the footnote:
‘theoretical limits’. Dialogue has produced ‘clusters of innovations associated
with the three “schools”’ and ‘cross-fertilization’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006:
444–445). Vague dilemmas remain, however, and these require the consider-
ation of ‘new paths . . . for critical approaches to security in Europe’ (c.a.s.e.
collective, 2006: 445). c.a.s.e. is on the case.

Missing Heads

But, a few body parts are missing. Notice that the footnote frames the men-
tion of worrying geographical and theoretical limits with two sentences, one
on each side. The sentence that leads off the footnote mentions categories of
critical security scholarship in Europe that are in some way ‘other’ according
to Wæver: ‘hard-core postmodernists’ and ‘feminists’. The third sentence
presents a list of names, some on their own and some in parenthesis. It is
initially difficult to figure out exactly what the connection is meant to be
between sentence two of the footnote, which mentions the limitations in the
Wæverian framework, sentence one that signals the existence of ‘other
participants’, and sentence three that gives names, starting with ‘Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida’ and continuing on (to a few International
Relations [IR] analysts). Are all those named the ‘other participants’? It is
difficult to know at first. We are told at the end of the footnote that work by
those on the list is ‘interesting’ but ‘not directly discussed’.
Is the collective trying to signal its objection to Wæver’s designation of
some as others, or its sense that this designation is not a troubling theoretical
limitation in the framework? In fact, c.a.s.e. is hedging its bets. Those ‘not
directly discussed’ will appear in some ‘conversation that is now rapidly
expanding’. Where that conversation is in time and place is not indicated.
Why that conversation cannot be held here and now, in the article, is unsatis-
factorily resolved: it cannot be now and here, apparently, just because Wæver
excludes some participants then and there. Hardly an impressive display of
critical thinking. The reader can see that Wæver’s labels stuck onto some
heads in security studies are being accepted, with a bit of angst but no
interrogation. The issue in question must be someone else’s discussion to
have. The critical security stomach of Europe must be full.
550 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 4, December 2007

Who, then, are these undead ‘other participants’ (placed) outside the dis-
persed locations and debates that have seemingly broadened the inside? In
the fuzzy logic of the footnote, we realize that the scary ones clearly do not
include Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, or Jacques Rancière. These are the
lions of critical thinking, men with such unquestionable status that everyone
(surely) knows what they have written and how they are relevant to critical
security studies: no specific citation necessary. If ‘other participants’ have
drawn on these men’s ideas, they may be mentioned by name: Muller, Nyers,
Molloy, Hansen, Doty. As ‘other participants’, despite their fealties, however,
the collective tucks these into a parenthetical space within the footnote. It is a
little entombing box from which they cannot leak, seep, or ooze contami-
nants. Foucault and Derrida take language and grammar very seriously, and
so, one presumes, must the collective that honors them: the box is hardly a
misstep or mistake in the analysis. Neither is this: Wæver’s unpublished
paper gets the only proper citation in the entire footnote. He is ‘Wæver
(2004a)’, which makes him Lord of the Foot. The reader cannot turn to the
bibliography at the end to determine whether work by ‘hard-core postmod-
ernists’ and ‘feminists’ actually deserves the lower status it is given here, the
relegation. Their writing is missing in this footnote. Off with their heads and
off-page they go.
Uneasy with some geographical and theoretical limitations of its chosen
framework, a group of critical scholars turns around and accepts without
comment that framework’s other odd limitations – its unjustified exclusions
and overwrought labels. If so-called mainstream security scholars pulled a
similar move, if they hinted that critical security studies scholarship was less
relevant or should be discussed somewhere else, we can imagine the
responses. So, why does c.a.s.e. cut out some of its own body parts? Can
the collective really say there is a significant difference between the people
gathered and cited within the article and those surgically removed as ‘other’?
Is there significant difference between a non-critical mainstream making
excisions and a collective doing likewise? I have no insider knowledge of
what c.a.s.e.’s rejection/deflection/excision thing is all about. What I can
surmise from the footnote, though, is this: a critical group, with a radical-
sounding document, is looking down its nose at some critical security
individuals while lauding others. And, in that context, it is hardly inconse-
quential that the group writes of ‘feminists’ and ‘postmodernists’ and not of
feminism or postmodernism as bodies of scholarship. People count –and yet
the promised dialogue between different scholars of critical security will be
restricted. And compromised as a result.
Christine Sylvester Anatomy of a Footnote 551

Escaping Morbidity

Let us bring out of entombment one ‘other participant’ and judge her relega-
tion to a footnote – and to the parenthesis within it, to boot – rather than her
inclusion in a dialogue. Let us consider Lene Hansen. Hansen is an Associate
Professor at the University of Copenhagen. Her work is explicitly in the field
of critical security studies (e.g. Hansen, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2006). That she
works in Copenhagen could make her part of the Copenhagen School; but,
given that the collective takes pains to avoid drawing too literal a line under
place-names, it might just be that she does critical security studies but not in
approved School ways. She has co-edited with Wæver (Hansen & Wæver,
2002), yet she is also critical of the Copenhagen School for its gender over-
sights. If she is part of C School, presumably c.a.s.e. would discuss her work
in relation to its approach (particularly on pp. 452–457). But c.a.s.e. does not
do this. Perhaps the collective puts her with the ‘other participants’ because
she is a ‘feminist’ and participants in the C School are not feminists. Maybe
she is a ‘hard-core postmodernist’. What if one is both of these obviously
unfortunate things? Is it the chainsaw for double ‘other participants’?
Look at her major piece about a mermaid with a security problem (Hansen,
2000). Without doubt, it is an important critique of the way gender and
feminist writings have been handled, or not handled, in the work of the
Copenhagen School. Hansen is concerned with ‘important security problem-
atics excluded’ from its gaze (Hansen, 2000: 286). She points out that there
was a ‘striking absence of gender’ in security discussions at the Copenhagen
School (Hansen, 2000: 286) and works to correct that absence in her mermaid
piece and in portions of her recent book, Security as Practice: Discourse
Analysis and the Bosnian War (Hansen, 2006: chapters 8 and 9). The main C
School text in the late 1990s accorded gender analysis one brief mention in
the main narrative, concerning trends in the USA, and one in – wait – a foot-
note on how feminists politicize the private (Buzan, Waever & de Wilde,
1998: 46, 130).
Hansen pinpoints two blank spots, as she puts it, in the C School’s speech-
act framework that have acted as gender censors: security as silence and sub-
suming security. She says that ‘security as silence occurs when insecurity
cannot be voiced, when raising something as a security problem is impossi-
ble or might even aggravate the threat being faced’ (Hansen, 2000: 287).
Seven years later, we ponder that thought as we consider the difficulties of
speaking from a parenthesis in a footnote. That grammatical structure saves
participants in the real discussion from having to hear too many ‘other par-
ticipants’. It also oversecures those in the box – or should we say it securitizes
them? In ‘The Little Mermaid’s Silent Security Dilemma and the Absence of
Gender in the Copenhagen School’, Hansen (2000: 294) points out that secu-
552 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 4, December 2007

rity as silence comes about when ‘the potential subject of security has no, or
limited, possibility of speaking its security problem’. Her case in point is the
situation faced by many Pakistani women who are raped. Their security
strategies are ‘silence, denial, or if the incident has become known, flight’
(Hansen, 2000: 295). They can find it nearly impossible to engage in speech
acts about the rape, because to do so puts them in harm’s way of zina, the law
against sexual intercourse outside bona fide marriage.
Silencing ‘other participants’ in the context of critical security studies in
Europe is certainly not of the same magnitude, but it does fit the general
argument Hansen is making about the absence of gender in the Copenhagen
School. The problem of silence concerns all those subjects endangered by
any attempt to speak, and the referent-object problem concerns all forms of
identity that are not ‘self-contained’. If those subjected to a securitizing move,
such as being designated ‘other participants’, attempt to speak up, they find
themselves walled off from the communication options necessary to appeal
their relegation. Their written words are blocked, as in not cited. Yet ‘the
Copenhagen School defines security according to what is successfully put
into language’ (Hansen, 2000: 300). All of this is like the dilemma faced by a
mermaid in Copenhagen harbor, whose silent hope of liberation and love
‘prevents her from ever fully materialising as an embodied subject’ (Hansen,
2000: 285). She is the mermaid from the famous fairy tale, who exchanges
her voice for legs to meet the prince, and then sacrifices her ability to return
to her family – and life – because the prince does not see her as a proper
subject. The moral of that tale starts in Copenhagen but travels far to the
‘other participants’ in the c.a.s.e. approach and to the world beyond
European critical security concerns.
Hansen describes subsuming security, the second blind spot, as the unap-
preciated complexity of gender. Being a woman or being a man is rarely
one’s only identity. It intermingles with identities that the Copenhagen
School finds salient to security, such as nationality and race. What this means
is that gender cannot be ’the kind of collective, self-contained referent object
required by the Copenhagen School’ (Hansen, 2000: 287). That is to say, it
cannot be existentially threatened in the same way that one’s national,
religious, or racial identity supposedly can be. Gender insecurities have
accordingly been relegated to an individual problem that is lower in the
greater hierarchy of security concerns, like a footnote to the main text. Again,
though, the ‘crime’ of being raped shows the shortcomings of subsuming
security. To many a feminist analyst, it is unstartling that ‘the targeting of
individual Pakistani women is deeply connected to their inscription within an
inferior gendered collectivity’ (Hansen, 2000: 291; emphasis in original). Such
is a basic tenet of feminist thinking: individual people called women are
treated in certain ways often because they are members of a subordinated
group, not because they may be ‘bad’ women or because they are members of
Christine Sylvester Anatomy of a Footnote 553

the ‘wrong’ national identity group; it is not unusual for the existential threat
to be delivered by people from one’s own group, not by outsiders alone. At
the same time, as Judith Butler (1990: 3) points out and Hansen (2000: 299)
cites, it is not enough to call women a large group, because ‘gender is not
always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts,
and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional
modalities of discursively constituted identities’. Gender is a complex
security question.
At the end of a chain of logic and argumentation around these points,
Hansen (2000: 299–300) comes to her key contribution: ‘the focus on speech
produces problems in situations where the possibilities of speaking security
are constrained, and the conditions for becoming a referent object are such
that gender security is almost excluded from qualifying’. Following Butler,
she recommends including the body as a vehicle or performance of commu-
nication, and also examining the strategies used to keep certain security
problems from being seen at the collective level. These shifts would imply
that security is not necessarily a speech act between the state and its subjects,
but ‘a practice which constitutes subjects at both “ends” of the speech act (the
speaker and those spoken to)’ (Hansen, 2000: 303). We could thereby ‘arrive
at a theory that seeks to understand security as a practice which through dis-
cursive and bodily acts inscribe particular subjects as threats or as being
threatened’ (Hansen, 2000: 304). And, again, that theory of practice would
take us far beyond Copenhagen and its School, into far larger spaces of
silence, subjecthood unrealized, and bodies of security and insecurity.
By contrast, one senses that c.a.s.e. members are looking at themselves and
their mentors more than they are locating, engaging, or embracing anyone
else. And yet, security as practice rather than as concept is something the
c.a.s.e. piece advocates – security as the realm of politics and not something
allowed to be depoliticized: ‘We contest a vision of research as detached from
political contingency and action’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 445). Hansen
helped us to see political strategies that can turn security dilemmas into indi-
vidual and internalized – and unspeakable – non-problematics. We lament
her lost voice in an article that notes ‘persistent interrogations’ of critical
security studies coming only from ‘constructivist/reflexive approaches’
(c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 445). And, more than that, once security becomes
practice and not concept, we have to wonder whether there is a practice afoot
in the footnote strategy that silences and subsumes security by mentioning
individuals, pigeonholing their identities, and not providing a guide to work
that might undermine the identity assignments. In the case of feminist schol-
ars, it can seem that trying to put gender into the picture is the very thing that
gets one entombed: it really is a man-i-fest(ival) out there. Individuals,
schools, ideas taken on relative to others that are silenced, ignored, deflected,
or deferred: that might be the unspoken security issue for the collective.
554 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 4, December 2007

Hansen’s critique reveals theoretical limitations that seem considerably

more important than whether geographical place of work is too rigidly
framed or not. Her concerns should have broadened the security discussion
of the day and situated her as a theorist of critical security studies in Europe.
Yet, some individuals are read and engaged and others are not. So, let us
enter her work as ‘a new path to explore’, a crucial text in ‘a wider debate
over the status of producers of knowledge, the role of “security” intellectuals,
and modes of intervention in international politics’. That her piece was
published in 2000 gives us good cause to include it in the ‘call for the return
of a certain number of issues to the realm of politics’ . . . and ‘as an argument
against research without politics’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 445). Or, to pick up
on the c.a.s.e. discussion of the Aberystwyth School, perhaps the time has
truly come for ‘all those who have been left out of the traditional remit
of security . . . to become its subjects’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 456), even
‘feminists’ and ‘hard-core postmodernists’.

Ressentiment/Amour

Having worked a player out of an entombing box, there are still some issues
– ticklish ones – remaining in the anatomy of a footnote. Here’s one: To what
extent do slights and relegations by critical security studies complicate the
goal of bringing security to the realm of sound politics? Just taking matters
of feminism as an example, is that relegation part of a larger tendency to
dismiss feminist scholarship as not critical, or not critical in the right ways, or
threatening to the critical traditions some are endeavoring to establish, or too
political in the wrong ways? Clearly, there is some disconnecting with femi-
nism going on – in the piece, in responses to it, and in all likelihood in larger
critical circles too. Yet, it would be difficult to dispute the fact that feminism
is a well-established field of critical thought and arena of critical practice. In
many ways, it is an exemplary realm that resists its own depoliticization.
More, feminist analysis comes in all the forms identifiable to any range of
critical thinkers doing security studies, from the Frankfurt School to the Paris
School, the Copenhagen School, the Aberystwyth School, post-structuralism,
biopolitics, and beyond. Feminist IR, in particular, has tackled issues of secu-
rity since the 1980s and is indisputably a ‘parallel emergence as a collective
phenomenon’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 450) with various schools of critical
security studies. Yet, I sense that appreciation for or interest in feminist con-
tributions to critical thinking is waning rather than waxing in critical Europe.
Certainly this is the case in the c.a.s.e. article. There are many openings in
that document to credit feminist scholarship with a history of critical security
contributions. One obvious place is on page 447, where dissident modes of
Christine Sylvester Anatomy of a Footnote 555

thought ‘that emerged in the mid-1980s through a set of encounters between

mostly North American scholars’ are cited. Not a single feminist name, let
alone a woman’s name, appears in a lineup of nine. The collective either sees
no value in or has not read the security-related work of Cynthia Enloe (1989),
Jean Elshtain (1987), Judith Stiehm (1984), Ann Tickner (1992) or Carol Cohn
(1987) – to mention only a few whose dissidence in IR arose at the same time
the c.a.s.e.-favored dissidents were writing. It similarly does not see the
creative and ironic security/gender/IR dissidence coming from feminists
who study war, a topic that European critical security studies oddly bypasses
(e.g. Butler, 2004; Elshtain, 1987; Jabri, 1996; Sjoberg, 2006). It would be one
thing if the c.a.s.e. article had been penned by one or two people, who cut a
few corners on the way to press. That 25 people manage to not notice that all
the dissidents and lions of critical security studies are men is remarkable. Not
only does c.a.s.e. fail to engage the leading European feminist doing critical
security studies (Hansen), it cannot see any other feminists working in related
areas anywhere in the world! Many eyes pore over a networked manuscript,
and many versions of it are produced and revised and responded to. And,
after all that, no footage of feminists.
This is not an isolated case of intellectual amnesia, stonewalling, or spleen.
Panel after panel, workshop after workshop, it is like this these days. When I
occasionally raise the inevitable question about the absence of gender from
the body of work just presented, there is a tsk-tsk of resentment, or suddenly
an urgent need arises to study one’s notes or tie one’s shoelaces. Sometimes,
a panelist gives a little lecture on how irrelevant gender distinctions are
today or how feminist frameworks distract ‘us’ from security frameworks.
Occasionally, it is said that a group tried to find a feminist to be on the panel,
join the workshop, or write for the c.a.s.e. article but none turned up (so, of
course, no one else could possibly…). Why were the feminists unenthusiastic
about joining? That is the question to ask.
It was not always so. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, IR scholars of various
persuasions met to discuss new (and annoying) thinking in the field. I was at
several pace-setting events of the time, including the conference on feminism
and the state held at the University of Southern California in 1989, Wellesley
College’s 1990 conference on gender and IR, and the grand birthday party for
Aberystwyth’s department of IR in 1994, which reviewed all leading IR
literatures, including feminism and postmodernism. In these and in other
venues, like the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1988,
the then feminists writing in IR were joined by a mind-boggling array of
prominent scholars from across the field: among them Hayward Alker, Rick
Ashley, Ken Booth, Barry Buzan, Fred Halliday, Bob Keohane, Steve Krasner,
Andrew Linklater, Richard Little, Michael Mann, Craig Murphy, James
Rosenau, John Ruggie, Theda Skocpol, Steve Smith, Ole Wæver, Rob Walker,
and Immanuel Wallerstein. All of us talked together about new contributions
556 Security Dialogue vol. 38, no. 4, December 2007

to IR. In the case of conferences put on by USC, and Wellesley, the express
purpose of the gatherings was to consider papers on gender and inter-
national relations. Everyone invited and present had written on some facet of
that topic, and everyone gave a paper to the assembled, not just the feminists.
This unprecedented moment within third-debate IR passed relatively
quickly. By the later 1990s we were beginning to draw lines in the sand again,
this time by proliferating new groups or sections that gradually turned into
camps. IR today exists as fragments, zones, and camp-ish camps, all taking
some exception to the many ‘other participants’ in IR. We rally around our
texts, our ‘specific individuals’, our debates, our workshops. Quite possibly,
we do not even know the important texts from a neighboring camp in the
field – or really care to engage them (Sylvester, 2007). We can be in love with
our favorite thinkers, displaying all the usual blindness to a beloved’s
personal and intellectual shortcomings. He becomes a font of genius: his
writings are poured over, endlessly discussed, endlessly revisited. He
becomes a sacred object to remember, quote, defend, and preserve. The criti-
cal European analysts of IR often seem in love with Foucault, some with
Schmitt and Agamben. For their part, Americans just love Waltz, Wendt, and
Morgenthau. Feminist IR does not find any of these guys quite as fabulous. Is
this the problem? We do not have the same saints’ bones in our reliquaries?
I don’t know. But there are consequences of leaving us and so many in the
world out and other. When critical people of all persuasions and locations
forget to recognize that critical comes in many forms, when they designate
some critical analysts as ‘other participants’, fall into the habit encouraged by
camp IR to focus narrowly and rally around a few thinkers, when they forget
that feminists are dissidents too and that women are in security peril the
world round, when they forget their grammars and citations and build little
tombs to hold some of their own body parts, they are in trouble in a troubled
world. And, more, when these faults repeat across venues, then criticals
become a bit like those they decry as hegemonists or non-critical thinkers.
And, lest a footnote be regarded as a mere piece of marginalia at the
margins of a field, it is crucial to recognize that critical scholarship is no longer
on the margins of IR. It, too, has its bona fide camps (e.g. critical terrorist
studies, a post-structuralism working group, feminist theory and gender
studies, international political sociology) and its own journals (e.g. Alter-
natives, International Feminist Journal of Politics, International Political Sociology,
Critical Studies on Terrorism). ‘It’ may not run IR, but then no camp in the field
is strong enough to do so today. If critical security studies could command
ideas in IR, I wager it would not look favorably on feminist thinkers and
thinking. More likely, ‘it’ would hug a postmodernist, Wæver’s blocking
moves notwithstanding. After all, he or she would be an intellectual descend-
ant of one of the continental lions, saints, and geniuses against whom even a
Judith Butler does not fully rate, let alone a mermaid with a security problem.
Christine Sylvester Anatomy of a Footnote 557

So, what is this footnote? It is a site of politics within a security studies

group that denounces ‘depoliticization, both in the social realm and in the
realm of academia’ (c.a.s.e. collective, 2006: 445), but itself depoliticizes some
contributions and politicizes others. The contradictions, silencings, and
subsumings should be reconsidered, for these cannot be rectified just by
adding a few feminists or wild-eyed ‘hard’ postmodernists to the collective
or a few more citations to the next listing. The skeleton needs some flesh. The
sawn-off heads need putting back in place. Very importantly, the collective
needs to rein in its manifesting and think harder about basic principles.
Footnotes flirt in the footlights, and one hopes that this one is a metatarsus,
an intermezzo: only feet and heads away from where it could be.

* Christine Sylvester is Professor of International Relations and Development at the

Department of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University. This response
has benefited from the many conversations the author has had in recent months with
feminists who explore aspects of security and conflict, including Lene Hansen, Vivienne
Jabri, Swati Parashar, Elina Penttinen, Laura Sjoberg, and Tarja Vayrynen.

References
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Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.
c.a.s.e. collective, 2006. ‘Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked
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