Description
The concept of the security dilemma is often constructed around a dichotomy between so-called “malign” and “benign” actors. The security dilemma is said to explain the emergence of conflict between two benign actors who mistakenly view each other as malign. If one of these actors is “genuinely” malign, however, the conflict is no longer deemed attributable to the security dilemma. In this article we seek to problematise the malign-benign dichotomy in several ways and argue that adherence to it by security dilemma theorists has limited the potential and reach of the concept. We do this by first highlighting the litany of epistemological and ontological issues that the malign-benign dichotomy faces and has provided no solutions to; and second, by arguing that security dilemma theorising should reorientate itself away from attempting to identify malign-benign actor “types” as rigid categorisations. Instead, we argue that security dilemma theorising should embrace a relational view of actor type, where these identities are neither static nor wholly dispositional, but instead emerge from relations and interactions in often contradictory and in-flux ways. Re-thinking the security dilemma along these lines drastically broadens the scope and potential contribution of the concept, while still accounting for its original, tragic dimension.
