Michael Desch argues that the increasing sophistication of quantitative methodology deployed by those who study war and conflict in global politics (“security studies”) undermines the relevance of work in the subfield to the “real world” (the Washington Beltway) in ways that are normatively and substantively problematic. I generally agree with Desch that security studies has a relevance problem attributable to its current epistemological and methodological framings. However, I think Desch specifies both the target of relevance and the scope of security studies’ methodological issues in ways that obscure the degree to which his own analytical framework is actually part of the problem rather than an effective critique of it.

First, Desch’s interpretation of “relevance” is overly narrow, and this causes him to misdiagnose security studies’ relevance problem. His argument homologizes “relevance” of security studies and its ability to gain an audience in the Washington Beltway in the United States as it considers U.S. national security. Accordingly, Desch longs for a time when security studies had the ear of the Washington elite. Yet attention from the Beltway is at best orthogonal to and quite possibly negatively correlated with the sort of relevance I find important, intellectually and normatively. Security studies, both before and after the quantitative turn that Desch identifies, has generally been focused on interstate interaction (with a skew towards great power politics). It makes sense from that perspective, then, that its proponents would associate relevance with heed from a great power government.

Yet even early research from a feminist perspective suggested that secure states produce (gendered) insecure people at their margins, because the provision of national security operates on hierarchies of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and national identity. ^{Footnote 1} Accordingly, feminist (and other critical) work that intervenes in the field of security studies takes a normative interest in the lives of those people at the margins of the international system, rejecting the assumption that great power dominance is normatively good. ^{Footnote 2} This research asks what makes people secure, and what makes people insecure—the referent of “security” is the individual, the family, the community, and the local social network rather than the (great) state. ^{Footnote 3} Often, empirical studies of peoples’ (in)securities suggest that “the Beltway” is a security threat both to many Americans, and to many more people around the world—rather than the entity to which security studies should be making suggestions about increasing its own security. ^{Footnote 4} In this view, “security” is as much about the availability of nutrition and clean water than about troop logistics; as much about freedom from domestic violence than about air maneuvers; and as much about the provision of medical care than nuclear deterrence.

This suggests that the Beltway’s military-focused strategic and tactical concerns are the wrong subject of security, and elite American policy-makers are the wrong audience for relevance. In an interpretation of security studies that pays attention to the margins of global politics, relevance should be pinned to a number of other factors, including but not limited to accessibility and/or benefit to people at the margins of global politics, provision of locally sustainable security solutions, critiques of gendered and raced hierarchies in global social and political life, or transgressions against cycles of interstate violence and intrastate repression. On this interpretation of relevance, there was not a time gone by when security studies used to be appropriately relevant; it has never been relevant to these concerns, at least not in a way that provides significant practical or normative benefit to people at the margins of global politics.

Still, even in this interpretation of relevance, Desch’s suggestion that there is a trade-off between relevance and the use of increasingly sophisticated quantitative methods to study security has some merit. While there are many knowledge-producing benefits to quantification, ^{Footnote 5} and more benefits to quantification that does a better job of capturing the complexities of the lived realities of (in)security in global politics, there are also many limits—not only in accessibility, but also in the ability to capture a number of different phenomena relevant to that (in)security, such as structures of signification; ^{Footnote 6} liminality, marginality, and invisibility, ^{Footnote 7} and co-constitutive relationships. ^{Footnote 8} These limits may well net a decrease in relevance coming from the increased use of quantitative methods in security studies.

However, I believe that the real relevance problem facing security studies is due less to the increased emphasis on quantitative methods than to a more general neo-positivist conception of social science that plagues much qualitative research as well. Desch takes the appropriateness of this conception for granted, and talks about what sort of social science methods to use and how to frame social scientific research usefully to policy-makers. Yet feminist work has suggested that the sort of “objectivity” sought by Desch as much as by those he criticizes in fact represents the universalization of the experiential knowledge of the elite, with the effect of silencing other voices. ^{Footnote 9} The notion that the experiential knowledge of the elite is objective licenses the privileged to think (and speak) for everyone so long as they do so in a way that is understood to meet the standards of “science.” ^{Footnote 10} This position is problematic because it ignores relationships between knowers and the knowledge that they have, framing knowledge as universal, when it is actually contingent, interested, and political. ^{Footnote 11} Obscuring the politics of elitism in the scientific method makes its work not only inaccurate and exclusive, but substantively problematic for those at the margins in global politics, while at the same time enforced on them. In this view, the “scientific method” approach to security studies research, quantitative or qualitative, could be seen as another axis of hierarchy and exclusion in the field. While I will not be able to do that argument justice in the short space that I have, I think it is important to point out the ways in which observability and objectivity, as much as quantification and regression, can be seen to narrow what is analyzed and understood as important in security studies.

This suggests that while Desch is correct that security studies has a relevance problem rooted in disciplinary methodology, his problematically narrow interpretation of relevance and his complicity in the discipline’s current neo-positivist epistemologies—and the violence of these epistemologies—obscure the real nature of the problem. In order for security studies to contribute meaningfully to substantive threats to people’s security, it will need to abandon its (gendered) state-centrism and its nostalgia for closer ties to status quo political power, and embrace a more critical perspective on the sources of human vulnerability and suffering and the audiences to whom that analysis would be most relevant.