Ken Booth has tasked himself and his contributors (particularly chapters by S. Smith, A. Linklater, H. Alker, and R. Wyn Jones) with sorting out the menagerie of theoretical criticisms often identified as either critical or in some way as alternatives to realism, including not only those that directly engage questions of security—“securitization” theorists and constructivists—but also the various “post” (modern, structural, positivist, colonial) theoretical critiques. Though on the whole the book rejects both realism and poststructuralism, the contributors do find some common ground with and among “critical,” “post,” and “alternative” writers on the question of improving the human condition (as an implicit goal of criticism), and applauds those who engage ethical issues to the extent that criticism is undertaken in order to reveal and confront, if not overcome, oppression.

But this volume is more than a parsing of various strands of critical theoretical and philosophical writing in political, social, and international relations theory. Instead, by means of a careful analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, contributions, and relationships among writings in the critical theory tradition and radical IR theory, Booth (with much support from his contributors) constructs a platform on which to propose “the” (not “a”) critical theory of security in the final chapter. The work thus acknowledges intellectual debts, while out of them developing a complex theory that also serves as an organizing theme of the text.

Beginning with Cox's insight that theory is always “for some one or for some purpose,” and is therefore a political practice, and taking his distinction between “problem-solving” and “critical” theory as a point of departure (p. 4), the authors develop their arguments around the notion that as a practice creating the social world of “facts by agreement,” realism serves to replicate the world as it is, with existing power relations intact. Doing so not only fails to provide security for the majority of people but is also making the world as a whole less secure. Of all the reasons to reject realism (nine good ones are listed in Booth's introductory chapter), this, they argue, is the most compelling. In contrast, critical theory and practice aim to reform the world by restructuring power relations according to the imperative of emancipation in the spirit of the Frankfurt School.

This theme is taken up by each contributor in ways that both enlighten and provoke our thinking about how it bears on questions of human security. Whereas conventional security theorizing protects the material privileges of elites in elite states at the expense of security for ordinary people, the referent for critical security studies (CSS) is, at the same time, the human as an individual and humanity as a whole. “The only transhistorical and permanent fixture in human society is the individual physical being,” says Booth (p. 264), and security as if people mattered, or as we are told, for “real people in real places” (p. 272). These real people include Shidane Arone, a Somali teenager brutally tortured and killed by Canadian “peacekeepers” in 1993, the subject of Sandra Whitworth's contribution on the consequences of “militarized masculinities” (p. 89). They are “Australians” in Petman's chapter, whose racialized identities have been constituted predominantly by white settlers manipulating cleavages between themselves and indigenous Australians, and themselves and their Asian neighbors. The real people in J. Ruane and J. Todd's study are the Protestant-Scottish-English-British settlers and the indigenous-Catholic-Gaelic Irish, and their descendants in Northern Ireland whose best hope for lasting peace/security may lie in the reconfiguration of their relationship in ways that take into account their interlocking oppressions and shared prospects for emancipation. CSS is for all of humanity, and for the purpose of human emancipation. Both the orthodoxy serving elite, state-centric conceptions of security and poststructural approaches that “celebrate insecurity” fail to engage the ethical responsibility created by an emerging self-consciousness of our common humanity.

Perhaps Roger Tooze and Graeme Cheeseman tackle the most difficult subjects, from the perspective of critical security. Tooze takes on the globalization of capitalism and its neoliberal ideology, in search of a critical international political economy that addresses and resists the structural economic violence that follows from the practice of economics masquerading as (a physical/natural) science. No theory of security as emancipation is credible without wrestling with the oppressions and insecurities that are a direct consequence of the practice of neoliberalism. Tooze knows this, and takes it on. Cheeseman attempts to reconcile elements of an “alternative security agenda” that emerged during the Cold War with the necessity of rethinking the role of the military in light of both new sources of insecurity and the changing situation of the state. He looks for ways to move toward an “enlightened and humane” global governance or “transgovernmentalism” (p. 78), but laments a retreat from “alternative and critical thinking about security” since the Bush administration (and its British ally) initiated a global war on terrorism.

I did have two concerns, though addressing them may have required additional chapters, and readers inspired after reading this work may yet pursue them. The first is that this project does not directly address the most difficult question of whether violence might ever be justified as an act against oppression, against an ongoing humanitarian crisis, in order to stop an ongoing injury. I have in mind not only the unparalleled case of the Holocaust but also “real people in real places” more recently in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur. The other is that the referent for CSS is said here to be twofold—the individual and the whole of humanity. But particularly in light of Tooze's search for a critical international political economy, there are instances of violence committed against a group by depriving it of its material/economic base simply because the group wishes to control whether, and if so, how, it interfaces with global capitalism. This is the case of indigenous peoples today in an increasingly energy-desperate capitalist system, from Ecuador to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (and historically the whole of Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and all of Central and South America). It is my hope that CSS will open spaces for a kind of rethinking and restructuring of power relations that will not only facilitate the emancipation of these people and places but also prevent future humanitarian crises.

This book is an extraordinarily important contribution to the field of critical security studies, as well as international relations and social theory. In addition to adopting Cox's definition of critical theory and Jürgen Habermas's commitment to emancipation, the contributors also share a concern with theorizing CSS in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. This, along with the excellent organization of the book into three parts corresponding to the conceptual foundations of Booth's critical security theory—security, community, and emancipation—give it a coherence uncommon in edited volumes. Critical Security Studies and World Politics should be read widely among students of politics (Booth even argues that political science ought to be a subfield of international relations) regardless of specialization.