The debate on energy security in international relations: The reinventionof a multifunctional concept

Abstract

Energy security has become one of the priorities of the national and international political agenda, however, its understanding has led to the development of a multiplicity of terms that rather than converging in a definition, have caused the concept to become “slippery”, making it difficult to approach it as a specific descriptive axis of the national and international context of the energy sector and its governance.

Therefore, in this article an exhaustive review of the state of the art is made, in terms of its approach and interpretation from the approach of the discipline of International Relations. The objective pursued is to clarify the logic and contribution of the different theoretical aspects to deepen the understanding of the approaches that define it, as a result of the multidimensional and multifunctional nature of the term.

For this, the article is structured as follows. In the first part, the definitions of energy security are addressed: dimensions, structural patterns and a classification is established based on the implicit risks in each case. In the second, the analysis categories of the term are analyzed, including the efforts to define the phenomenon from the perspective of the energy economy. In the third part, total safety is reviewed as an effort towards the possible formation of a transversal concept. Finally, in the conclusions, the main findings of the work are described.