Barry Buzan ’s contribution moves forward the debate on security in the early
post-Cold War period by acknowledging that, while security is an essentially con-tested concept, it should be possible to offer categorisations and greater analytical coherence to the evolving security agenda. Buzan innovates by presenting a systematic list of sectors: military, political, economic, environmental and societal security. He further points out the importance of thinking of how these sectors apply to a range of different referent objects of security, and how the security of one sector or referent cannot be thought of in isolation from the others, thus laying the ground for thinking of security in holistic terms.