Security in Translation

Securitization Theory and the Localization of Threat

H. Stritzel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137307569
• eBook ISBN: 9781137307576
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Security in Translation proposes an innovative way to capture the evolution, spread and local transformation of threat images in world affairs. Reworking traditional securitization theory, this book develops a coherent new framework for analysis that makes securitization theory applicable to empirical studies.

Part I

Theory

1

Securitization Theory and the Copenhagen School

Securitization was developed by the Copenhagen School of Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, Jaap de Wilde and others, so called because most writings emerged at the Conflict and Peace Research Institute (COPRI) in Copenhagen in the 1990s. The concept of securitization is currently still most fully developed in Security: A New Framework for Analysis (1998), which, however, draws upon earlier reflections by Wæver in Securitization and Desecuritization (1995), Concepts of Security (1997) and a number of unpublished manuscripts including Security, the Speech Act (1989a) (see also Wæver, 2003). In the meantime, the concept has also been explicated and transformed by various critics of a ‘second generation’ of securitization scholarship (see in particular Balzacq, 2011; Vuori, 2008; Stritzel, 2007; 2012; Floyd, 2010) and applied to numerous specific perceived security problems ranging from migration and the environment to cyberthreats. Theoretical discussions have so far largely been focused on several single aspects of the idea/theory, including the role of identity/identification (McSweeney, 1996; 1998; 1999), bureaucratic routines (Huysmans, 2006; Bigo, 1996; 2000; 2002), ethics (Aradau, 2004; Floyd, 2007), agency and discourse (Stritzel, 2007; 2012), non-articulations/silence (Hansen, 2000), illocution versus perlocution (Balzacq, 2005; Vuori, 2008), audience (Balzacq, 2005; Léonard and Kaunert, 2011), securitizations in non-democratic environments (Vuori, 2008), and images and visual language (Williams, 2003; McDonald, 2008; Hansen, 2011; Vuori, 2010b). But, despite its popularity, these debates have still only just begun to transform the new idea into a more comprehensive security theory, and the Copenhagen School has so far provided only a few hints on how to study securitization. This has led to very diverse applications, interpretations, misrepresentations, modifications and critique in recent years, and Wæver himself is honest enough to admit that his own reflections on securitization are marked by several tensions, anomalies and contradictions (see Wæver, 2003).

While the idea of securitization thus currently seems to be under-determined in meaning and overdetermined in figuration, the many contributions to it give a clearer picture of the many deficits and limits of the initial conceptualization of securitization, and they underline the need for further elaboration and modification. Some scholars have made attempts to be ‘faithful’ to the original thoughts by Wæver, although these may not be fully reconstructable (at least not consistently) (see e.g. Floyd, 2010; Vuori, 2008; 2010a), while others have decided to move beyond the Copenhagen School and construct what is arguably currently evolving as a viable alternative second-generation securitization theory post-Copenhagen (see in particular Balzacq, 2011; Salter, 2008; Stritzel, 2007; 2012).

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the initial conceptualization of securitization by Wæver and the Copenhagen School. It argues that the way the idea of securitization has been articulated by Wæver and the Copenhagen School is too undertheorized and contradictory to provide clear guidance for detailed empirical analyses. Specifically, the Copenhagen School approach to securitization suffers from three sets of problems: (1) construction problems of the theory itself; (2) an insufficient explication of the theoretical background of the theory; and (3) an insufficient reflection on problems of empirical application. Yet, in challenging the articulation of securitization by Wæver and the Copenhagen School, the aim of this chapter is not to destroy the concept of securitization as such, but to clarify (and modify) how it can be understood. Despite its many tensions and contradictions, the theoretical space opened by the idea of securitization can provide a useful intellectual starting point and basic framework for reflections on the evolution of threats and processes of discursive transformation.

The first part of this chapter will examine the speech-act approach to securitization by Wæver and relate his interpretation to relevant debates in philosophy, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology which are currently insufficiently elaborated by Wæver himself. The second part will examine the attempts by the Copenhagen School to transform Wæver’s initial conceptual idea into a broader theory to study securitization. In a final step, central problems of applying the theory to the empirical analysis will be discussed.

The Copenhagen School approach to securitization

The Copenhagen School approach to security studies is marked by three main conceptual pillars: securitization, sectors and (regional) security complexes (see Buzan et al., 1998). The latter two elements, which refer to different spheres of security and to a scheme for analysing regional security configurations (see Buzan, 1991; Buzan and Wæver, 2003), are the result of the conceptual work of Barry Buzan, who is also known for ideas within the paradigm of (European) realism (see e.g. Buzan et al., 1993). The idea of securitization goes back to Ole Wæver (1989a; 1995; 1997), who is much more strongly influenced by poststructuralist ideas than Buzan and de Wilde and who tries to combine a diverse range of intellectual ideas drawn from continental social theory and philosophy, mainly Derrida, Arendt and, to a lesser extent, also Bourdieu and Butler, as well as philosophy of language, including speech-act theory, in the tradition of John L. Austin. In what follows, the analysis will focus entirely on the idea of securitization and neglect how this concept may fit into the larger theoretical context of the Copenhagen School approach to security more generally.

In essence, in the reading of the Copenhagen School, securitization combines the radicalization of a realist conceptualization of ‘security’ understood as ragione di stato with the claim that security is a ‘speech act’. While the latter claim appeared in early publications by Wæver as a distinctly speech act-theoretical approach to security (which Wæver hoped to combine with poststructuralist ideas), in the collaborative works of the Copenhagen School a much stronger emphasis can be found on an intersubjective conceptualization of producing security, in which a speaker and an audience ‘negotiate’ the implementation of ‘security’ measures (see Buzan et al., 1998).

Much of this resembles the reflections by moderate realist Arnold Wolfers in National Security as an Ambiguous Symbol (see Wolfers, 1952). Wolfers argued in this article that any level of security which a nation practises results from a process of negotiation between a leader/the decision makers and the people. The decision makers are thereby in a position to choose the values which deserve protection, the level of security that is thought to be needed, and the means and the sacrifices which the choice of means implies (see Wolfers, 1952: 502). The people, in turn, give their consent to any additional efforts for security, which they necessarily experience as a substantial burden because of cost in taxes, reduction in social benefits or ‘sheer discomfort’ (Wolfers, 1952: 487–488). However, in contrast to the Copenhagen School, Wolfers at the same time clearly rejects a radical ragione di stato reading of security practices, including the claim that nations completely subordinate all other values to the maximization of their security (see Wolfers, 1952: 487) or that they are always concerned with their survival (see Wolfers, 1952: 488–489). For him, ‘a glance at history’ (Wolfers, 1952: 499) would suffice to show that such a practice only rarely reflects the reality of actual security practices:

From one extreme point of view it is argued that every sacrifice, especially if imposed on other nations, is justified provided it contributes in any way to national security. Clearly this implies a position that places national security at the apex of the value pyramid and assumes it to constitute an absolute good to which all other values must be subordinated. Few will be found to take this position because if they subscribed to a nationalistic ethics of this extreme type they would probably go beyond security – the mere preservation of values – and insist that the nation is justified in conquering whatever it can use as Lebensraum or otherwise.

(Wolfers, 1952: 500; emphasis added)

In Security: A New Framework for Analysis and Securitization: Taking Stock of a Research Program in Security Studies, Wæver and the Copenhagen School frame the disciplinary context for the evolution of their ideas to be the dominant debate on the concept of security in the 1980s, in which securitization would have emerged as a ‘third way’ (Wæver, 2003: 8) in the struggle between proponents of a broad versus a narrow concept of security.¹ Put simply, the wideners proposed broadening the security agenda to include concepts such as environmental or economic security, and ‘deepening’ security to include new referent objects beyond the traditional state-centrism of international relations (IR). Proponents of a narrow concept claimed that, if the idea of security was broadened too much, security studies would lose its focus and intellectual coherence. The Copenhagen School here deviated from both wideners and traditionalists insofar as they claimed to analyse, in their view, ‘the real functions of security’ and ‘what practitioners actually do in talking security’ (Wæver, 2003: 8–9). However, early realist Wolfers, whom the Copenhagen School explicitly and implicitly draw upon (see in particular Buzan, 1991; see also Buzan and Hansen, 2009), would actually disagree.

Meanings of security

Apart from this, the interesting question is, of course, whether there is indeed a universal logic of security, what such a logic actually entails, and, finally, how one can identify such a logic. For the Copenhagen School, security needs to be read in the context of a ‘state of exception’, which leads them to the claim that security threats are always existential for the survival of a particular referent object, which can be the state/populace/territory but also identity/culture, organizational stability/social order, natural environment/biosphere or markets/financial system (see Buzan et al., 1998: 7; Peoples and Vaughan-Williams, 2010: 80). Likewise, security is characterized in terms of a distinct modality marked by utmost urgency, priority of action and the breaking free of ‘normal rules’ of politics: with the process of securitization, an issue is dramatized as an issue of supreme priority, so that an agent can legitimately claim a need to raise the issue above the constraints of regular political rules and procedure and open debate to treat it by ‘extraordinary measures’ (see Buzan et al., 1998: 24–29).

In Securitization and Desecuritization, Wæver (1995: 47) justifies his concession to (a radicalization of) traditionalism by arguing that security ‘carries with it a history and a set of connotations that we cannot escape’, which he then goes on to specify by drawing on the theoretical literature of strategic studies (see Wæver, 1995: 51, 54–57). In Security: A New Framework for Analysis, this aspect even gets a prescriptive connotation: ‘The main purpose of this book is to present a framework based on the wider agenda that will incorporate the traditionalist position [ . . . ] [because members of the Copenhagen School] take seriously the traditionalists’ complaint about intellectual incoherence [of the (traditional) field of security studies]’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 4; emphasis added). Consequently, they argue that if security issues are ‘to count as security issues’ they need to meet ‘strictly defined criteria’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 5) (rather than the various ambivalences of multiple local usages in the actual sociopolitical ‘field(s) of security’). Their reference to traditionalism is thereby equated with ‘exploring the logic of security itself’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 4) (as though there existed a universal, transhistorical ‘logic’).

Apart from the fact that the Copenhagen School arguably go even beyond traditionalism in their reading of security strictly in the context of a state of exception, they seem to also overlook the complexity and historical contingency of the concept of security. As scholars such as Rothschild (1995) or Arends (2008) – as well as Wæver (2008) himself, curiously enough – have shown (see also Stritzel and Vuori, forthcoming), understandings of security have changed quite significantly throughout history depending on the sociopolitical context and the constellations of actors promoting or resisting a particular understanding. Security is thus always ‘a political construction in specific contexts’ (Dalby, 2002: xxii).

From a historical perspective, as Yergin (1977) showed for the US context, the meaning of security as ‘national’, ‘military’ and ‘state security’ was a deliberate political intervention of US officials in the evolving Cold War context, where it replaced ‘defence’ as the previously preferred term of the military (see Yergin, 1977: 193–194). The war effort required the combination of civilian and military activities, which led to a shift in terminology because security blurred the distinction between military and civil issues, and between domestic and international. This made the war effort more palatable. Defence was usually understood as following geopolitical lines, while security was freed from this constraint, as it could be defined according to the needs of ‘national interests’. ‘National interests’, or ‘legitimate interests’, were a defining referent for security in the 1940s (see e.g. Lippman, 1943), while by the 1950s the emphasis had shifted towards what Wolfers coined as ‘core values’ (see Wolfers, 1952: 484). Specifically, after the war the notion of security was useful to curtail the traditional mistrust of standing armies in the US. According to Yergin, it was first Secretary of Defense Forrestal who used national security to legitimate a strong military establishment to fight a ‘future enemy’, which was then also reflected in the National Security Act of 1947 (see Yergin, 1977: 209–210, 339–340). National security thus arguably worked as a ‘package legitimizer’ in the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union and the ‘Communist threat’ (see also Stritzel and Vuori, forthcoming). In this specific historical context, the evolving concept of national security can be interpreted as, indeed, retaining a form of radical ragione di stato policies of absolute state authority in the US context in an era when democratic ethics seemed to be making such a way of thinking increasingly unacceptable (see also Stritzel and Vuori, forthcoming). From this perspective, the national interest, and now national security, were ways to address the ‘democrat’s dilemma’ in the US context of how to combine democratic values in domestic politics with a perceived amoral and anarchic international system and to justify drastic measures including military intervention, political assassinations and war during the Cold War.

Yet, as Fierke (2007: 43) has argued, even during the Cold War, security was also profoundly situated within several different clusters of concepts in different regions of the world. One such powerful alternative concept within this broader cluster of security has traditionally been the notion of peace, which reaches back at least to the establishment of the early peace societies after the end of the Napoleonic Wars (see Dean, 2008).² During the Cold War this competition manifested itself in a stark dichotomy of peace studies (peace) versus strategic studies (security). In contrast to military means, peace scholars claimed to focus on non-violent means; in contrast to national security, they claimed to analyse ‘world problems’ from ‘a world perspective’; and, in contrast to the traditional focus on the state, they were deliberately human-centred and normative by identifying human needs and the causes of human insecurities, of which the state can be a crucial part (see e.g. Lawler, 2008). Depending on the discursive locale, the specific configuration of such a broader security cluster can thus play out very differently, and it was arguably only in (parts of) the specific locale of the US that security was strictly understood and practised as national security in the way defined above and understood by the Copenhagen School.

Furthermore, to the extent that dominant perceptions and practices in international security affairs changed towards the end of the Cold War, so did definitions of security (again), and the notion of security became again more malleable. Starting in the 1980s, an increasing number of security scholars outside peace research started to question the military and exclusively interstate focus of traditional security studies, and an agenda of ‘new security challenges’ evolved which eventually dominated the security debates of the 1990s. These new security chal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Theory
• Part II: Case Studies
• Part III: Implication
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index