Securitization Revisited

Contemporary Applications and Insights

Michael J. Butler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367785239
• eBook ISBN: 9780429620126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book seeks to interrogate how contemporary policy issues become 'securitized' and, furthermore, what the implications of this process are. A generation after the introduction of the concept of securitization to the security studies field, this book engages with how securitization and desecuritization 'works' within and across a wide range of security domains including terrorism and counter-terrorism, climate change, sexual and gender-based violence, inter-state and intra-state conflict, identity, and memory in various geographic and social contexts. Blending theory and application, the contributors to this volume – drawn from different disciplinary, ontological, and geographic 'spaces' – orient their investigations around three common analytical objectives: revealing deficiencies in and through application(s) of securitization; considering securitization through speech-acts and discourse as well as other mechanisms; and exposing latent orthodoxies embedded in securitization research. The volume demonstrates the dynamic and elastic quality of securitization and desecuritization as concepts that bear explanatory fruit when applied across a wide range of security issues, actors, and audiences. It also reveals the deficiencies in restricting securitization research to an overly narrow set of issues, actors, and mechanisms.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars of critical security studies, international security, and International Relations.

Chapter 6 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I
Theoretical insights

Introduction

Revisiting securitization and the ‘constructivist turn’ in security studies

Michael J. Butler and Zena Wolf

Over a generation after Richard Ullman (1983) issued a clarion call for the redefinition of security, scholars and practitioners alike continue to seek a deeper understanding of the contingent processes that lead to specific constructions and interpretations of security and insecurity by agents engaged in the process of socialization and meaning-making – a process Ole Wæver (1995) labeled “securitization.” This introductory chapter sets the stage for the range of applications and assessments of securitization contained in this book. It does so primarily by chronicling the larger shift in the security studies field toward critical approaches which, in turn, paved the way for the aforementioned ‘constructivist turn’ and in particular the development of securitization as a concept (C.A.S.E. Collective, 2006).¹

This chapter situates the so-called ‘constructivist turn’ in relation to the emergence of critical security studies – a broader ontological shift itself explained by a convergence of social forces and intellectual factors detailed below. Following this origin story, we turn to a synthetic review of the scholarship concerning the ‘constructivist turn’ in security studies, and in particular what we consider to be its signal contribution: namely, the concept of securitization. This effort at providing a brief and synthetic intellectual history of securitization helps set the stage for the articulation of three common overarching concerns around which the inquiries and investigations advanced in this volume are oriented.

Both individually and collectively, those inquiries and investigations seek to contribute to a more robust understanding of securitization theory and practice. To that end, the contributions to this volume are motivated by two distinct but inter-related analytical objectives: namely, to examine how securitization works as a process, as well as to assess its explanatory strengths and weaknesses as a concept. These analytical objectives are not only related, but also mutually reinforcing. Indeed, when taking into account various security issues and actors, the contingent and specific dimensions of the securitization process have significant implications not only for political and policy outcomes, but for our very understanding of security (Williams, 2003).

Confronting a ‘new’ security environment

Theoretical insights in the social sciences are undoubtedly a by-product of prevailing intellectual and social-historical contexts, and the interplay between them (C.A.S.E. Collective, 2006). To this end, the end of the Cold War radically recast prevailing notions of the structure of the international system (Booth, 1997). Indeed, the dust from the Cold War had hardly settled before these and other emergent challenges led to proclamations of a post-Cold War “new security environment” (Kaplan, 1994; Buzan, 1991a). This structural transformation in turn left scholars and policymakers alike without a singular, fixed account of the international security environment around which to base their analyses and actions. The resulting intellectual and policy vacuum stimulated greater recognition of the possibility of a ‘new’ security environment in which security actors, threats, and responses alike are subject to an ongoing social and political process of definition, redefinition, and contestation.

New actors, new threats

In reality, the emergence of a ‘new’ security environment was a gradual process stemming back decades. The point of origin of the concept itself remains the subject of continuing debate, but from our standpoint, the more meaningful conversation is one that engages with extant structural dynamics producing, or perhaps revealing, a dizzying array of security challenges and unleashing a contested and politicized process to define and prioritize them. The extent to which these dynamics have led to a redefinition of the security landscape, elevating non-state actors and non-traditional ‘threats’ such as transnational terrorism, ethnic conflict, state failure, natural resource wars, ecological disasters, cyberattacks, abject poverty, and systematic discrimination and oppression on the contemporary security agenda, is an important consideration underlying this volume (Krahmann, 2005; Matthews, 1989).

A particular target of most efforts to re-orient security studies to confront a ‘new’ security environment is the singular emphasis of realist theory on militarized interactions between competing states striving to advance national interests. This emphasis is itself a by-product of realism’s essential precept that the state is the central actor in international politics (Baldwin, 1997). The statist orientation of realism and its deliberate emphasis on power, order, and competing interests rendered the theory highly useful for describing security threats and proscribing security responses in a Cold War world in which these factors were predominant. However, given the elevation of social inequality, gender inequity, poverty and relative deprivation, resource scarcity and environmental degradation, crime, health, external and internal migration, and the like within the ‘new security environment,’ the utility of a cognitive lens that places a premium on states, material interests, and military capabilities seems limited at best.

The degree to which non-state actors (NSAs) including multinational corporations (MNCs), non-governmental organizations (NGOs), transnational terrorist networks, paramilitaries, private military contractors (PMCs), policy thinktanks, peace advocates, and the like have altered and eroded the power and influence traditionally enjoyed by nation-states is instructive in this regard. Consider, for instance, the emergence and significance of ISIS, and before that al-Qaeda, on the security agendas and policies of much of the international community; the role of NGOs such as the Coalition for an International Criminal Court in shaping international law and institutions; or the impacts of remittances from migratory workers to the economies of many developing countries. These and other similar examples point to two related components of structural change with great import for contemporary security thinking and practice: one, the rise to the fore of non-state actors as security actors; and two, the potential for that emergence of non-state actors to undermine state capacity in the security realm.

The ‘dark side’ of interdependence

Suppositions of a ‘new security environment’ are dependent not only on the emergence of new actors, but also on a recognition of new (or previously overlooked) sources of insecurity. From an empirical and policy standpoint, the emergence of ‘new world disorder’ (Zartman, 2008) in the Cold War’s wake spawned a plethora of new (or previously overlooked) security threats and challenges. Included among these were the increasing frequency of intra-state conflicts, the rampant spread of small arms and light weapons (SALW), the simultaneous increase in both failing and predatory states, environmental degradation and population displacement, and the blossoming of transnational terrorism and crime.

At an abstract level, these sources of insecurity can be understood as unintended outcomes or ‘negative externalities’ produced by the complex interdependence animating the past several decades of globalization. The presumed or supposed benefits of such interdependence are oft-celebrated (Keohane & Nye, 2001; Friedman, 2007). Yet the depth and expanse of networked interactions between and among societies and individuals is not without its hazards. Most notable among these is the increased sensitivity and vulnerability of an ever-greater number of actors to a wide range of security threats (Baldwin, 1980). Indeed, to a very real extent, ‘globalization’ can be said to be the main impetus driving the emergence of a range of new or newly salient security threats and challenges.

Certainly, the political, social, economic, cultural, and ideational processes of globalization, as well as the backlash against these processes, pose a very real security challenge, in the form of a boiling over of frustrations about the transformations wrought by these processes into violence. Yet it is not just a turn to violence within, between, or across societies by globalization’s ‘discontents’ that is important here. The increasing intensity and extensity of global interdependence has also created a degree of densely networked and weakly governed interconnectedness in commerce, transport, energy and natural resources, migration, and information technology that has raised both the profile and stakes of activities within these issue areas, wiping away the ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics dichotomy commonplace in a previous generation. At the core of the issue is the degree to which economic, social, and ecological processes are linked to political instability and volatility and, in turn, violence (Homer-Dixon, 1999).

The degree to which these mutually constitutive and reinforcing dynamics are gaining traction in the field of security studies is in turn fostering challenges to what were not so long ago considered to be discrete and mutually exclusive phenomena associated either with a ‘security’ or ‘development’ agenda, as opposed to the intersection or combination of the two (Collier, 2003). The evident and undeniable emergence of new security actors, threats, and challenges as briefly introduced here has had significant impact on the activities and agendas of security practitioners at the local, state, regional, and global level. Indeed, the story of the ‘new security environment’ is one in which, nearly three decades on from the end of the Cold War, security planning and postures remain in a seemingly perpetual state of flux.

The emergence of critical security studies

From an intellectual standpoint, the extant changes in the security arena described above inspired profound challenges to the conventional wisdom concerning the nature of security and how to provide it. As the impact and implications of actors and threats which were traditionally overlooked or marginalized became ever more real and profound, fundamental challenges to the prevailing ontology of security itself emerged. From their earliest origins, critical approaches to security studies have exhibited a shared concern with exposing the ‘intellectual hegemony’ of realism and challenging its attendant assumptions (Booth, 1991, p. 318). Indeed, in these anti- or counter-hegemonic aspirations, we can most readily discern the overt influence of critical theory more generally on security studies beginning in the 1980s, albeit with deeper roots (C.A.S.E. Collective, 2006).

In the quest to redefine security, the intellectual position articulated by Critical Security Studies (CSS) met significant resistance. This resistance was predicated on the presumption that increased elasticity in the definition of security portended a potentially dangerous loss of meaning (Deudney, 1990; Ayoob, 1997). Much of this opposition came from neo-realist scholars who sought to preserve a narrow, traditional reading of security in order to maintain the ‘intellectual coherence’ ostensibly provided by prevailing orthodoxies in the security studies field (Buzan, Wæver, & de Wilde, 1998).

The ‘traditional’ approach²

The introduction of the term ‘new security environment’ signaled an effort to refine, if not supplant, the traditional approach to security and its emphasis on nation-states, material interests, and coercive power (Krause and Williams, 1996; Wyn Jones, 1996). An accepted point of reference for over a generation in institutional contexts ranging from NATO (Vershbow, 2016) to the UNDP (UNDP, 1994), this term had the unintended effect of underscoring realism’s role as the paradigmatic progenitor of the security studies field (Crawford, 1991).

Steeped in a Machiavellian appreciation for power, a Hobbesian pessimism regarding human nature, and a Clausewitzian belief in the notion of war as the paramount policy instrument, from its earliest discernible origins in the aftermath of World War II, the security studies field has long rested on a set of key propositions derived from realist thought. Indeed, under the guise of celebrating a ‘renaissance’ of the security studies field, Walt (1991) equated security studies with the study of

[…] the conditions that make the use of force more likely, the ways that the use of force affects individuals, states, and societies, and the specific policies that states adopt in order to prepare for, prevent, or engage in war.

(Walt, 1991, p. 212)

In doing so, the field was reduced to a single fundamental concern with “the threat, use, and control of military force” (Walt, 1991, p. 212; emphasis in original).

Following from this a priori proposition, the orthodox approach to security studies produced and reinforced several fundamental (and inter-related) bedrock concepts in the field – concepts that later became central objects for interrogation by those critical of prevailing orthodoxies in the security studies field. One such concept is that of self-help anarchy, and its proposition that the absence of a central governing authority necessarily produces an environment in which states exist in a self-help relationship with one another (Herz, 1950). From a security studies perspective, the chief implication of this assumption regarding the structure and animus of the international system is that anarchy provides the ‘permissive conditions’ for war; absent any global Leviathan, states can and will do ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Theoretical insights
• Part II Securitization in application
• Part III Mechanisms of desecuritization
• Conclusion: securitization, revisited: revealed insights, future directions
• Index