Who Produces the Critique of Security? Western Epistemic Centrality and the Place of Arab Scholarship in Critical Security Studies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61353/ma.0250431Keywords:
Critical Security Studies, Epistemic Centrality, Arab Scholarship, Beirut School of Critical Security Studies, Academic Institutionalization in Doha, Theoretical TravelAbstract
This article examines the place of Arab scholarship within Critical Security Studies through a multilingual thematic critical review of literature between 1986 and 2026, tracing the relations linking concepts to institutions, language, publishing, indexing, and teaching. The review shows that epistemic centrality rests on academic capacities that carry theoretical innovation through interconnected circuits of circulation, accumulation, and recognition. Arab contributions appear across localization, derivation, conceptual generation, institutionalization, and theoretical travel, with conceptual density in Palestinian scholarship and the Beirut project, alongside institutional capacity in Doha. Arab scholarship has also reformulated securitization, protection, and lived violence through regionally grounded experience. The central gap lies in connecting conceptual innovation to sustained cycles of independent use, critique, translation, citation, and teaching, thereby extending concepts beyond their authors and cases and redistributing authority in the production of security critique.
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