Comparisons in global security politics : representing and ordering the World / Thomas Müller, Mathias Albert, and Kerrin Langer

Front cover -- Comparisons in Global Security Politics: Representing and Ordering the World -- Copyright information -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction: Practices All the Way Down? Comparisons in Global Security Politics -- Two approaches to the study of comparisons -- Comparative practices -- A framework -- How is comparative knowledge produced? -- How does comparative knowledge become politically relevant? -- How do comparative practices shape security politics? -- The structure of the book -- References

Part I Teasing Out Comparative Practices -- 2 The Construction of Status in Security Politics: Rules, Comparisons and Second-Guessing Collective Beliefs -- From motivations and mapping to rules and ordering -- Who sets the rules of the game? -- Studying the rules of status competitions -- The US's SALT strategy: how status became security -- Conclusion -- References -- 3 Defence Analysis and Military Data at the IISS: How to Count and When is a Tank Modern? -- Defence and military data and the IISS -- Show me the money: defence spending

Classifying and categorizing equipment, and moving to qualitative judgements -- Factors driving change in military data and defence assessments -- References -- 4 Seeing Deterrence and Defence: Visual Representations of Military Force Comparisons between NATO and the Warsaw Pact in the 1980s -- Seeing force comparisons: world-making and security governance -- Discourse analysis revisited -- The textual, visual and sensible site of discourses -- A visual methodology for comparing military force -- The aesthetics of force comparison -- Contextualization: disputes over military balance in the 1980s

Technical images of force comparison: exploring five vignettes -- Seeing deterrence and defence, modernizing forces? -- References -- 5 What Drives Status Comparisons? An Experimental Study of Status Attribution in the Field of Space Exploration -- Status, fields and capital -- An experimental approach to status and fields in world politics -- Results -- Conclusion -- References -- Part II How Comparisons Constitute Governance Objects -- 6 Not Yet Comparable? Maritime Security Knowledge and the Messiness of Epistemic Infrastructures -- Introduction

Security knowledge and epistemic infrastructures -- Epistemic infrastructures and oceanic insecurity -- The epistemic infrastructures of maritime crime -- Quantifying piracy -- Maritime domain awareness -- Conclusion -- References -- 7 Framing (State) Fragility: The Construction of Imaginary Global Spaces -- Constructing the obscure object of a 'fragile state' -- Creating the object -- Failed/Fragile States Index -- 'Banking on fragility': the World Bank's adoption of fragility language -- OECD states of fragility -- The G7+ International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding

Comparison is a central feature of the practice of interstate relations, yet it is rarely studied. This book demonstrates the significance of comparison in world politics and reveals how comparative knowledge is produced, how it becomes politically relevant and how its practices shape security politics