Thesis title: Il simbolo ambiguo della "sicurezza": nascita ed evoluzione dei Critical Security Studies
The present work aims to investigate the category of "security" in order to highlight some of the characteristics that make it an "ambiguous symbol". To do this, it employs the theoretical lenses of Critical Security Studies, understood here as the collective of the Copenhagen, Aberystwyth, and Paris schools. Through the analysis of the different conceptions of "security" developed by these schools, some of the main theoretical knots inherent to the entire internationalist thought will be observed, such as the notions of "international anarchy", "identity", and organizational dyads like Inside/Outside, Us/Them, and Political Theory/International Relations. The three schools will be analyzed individually to illustrate both their genesis and their evolution in a thorough manner. The entire work is underpinned by questions concerning the category of security and its use as an instrument of power, on one hand, and as the ultimate condition to which political communities aspire, on the other. Investigating the concept of "security" without limiting the inquiry to the mere forms it assumes in different circumstances becomes even more relevant in light of its almost total ubiquity in contemporary debate. In line with the "critical" notion of the three schools, this work, in addition to reconstructing a central debate for the discipline of International Relations, aims to investigate the ordering rationality inherent to the category of "security", emphasizing how the latter is always "for someone, for some purpose."