As we enter a new year, the baton is passed on once more to a new cohort of young and energetic hopefuls who will take over this third year of the Security Distillery. We are full of excitement around this handover as we plan out new posts and additional forms of media content, whilst continuing with the hard work put in by past cohorts. However, it is also a time of great uncertainty in global politics and we have much to follow: the Iran crisis, US President Trump’s impeachment trial, intensifying terrorist violence in West Africa and climate change, to name a few. It may be redundant to say at this point but, globalisation, and all things that go under this umbrella term, is making international security analysis increasingly complex and nebulous.
In order to have as much clarity as one can with security issues, it is important to take a step back and ask oneself the basic questions, as with every subject matter. For the Distillery, these questions are: security of what, from what, for whom and by what means? Why has President Trump proposed to spend a further $7.2 billion on building the wall with Mexico? [1], or why did the European Union spend €98.7 million more to counter terrorism rather than tobacco addiction when in 2016 alone 700,000 Europeans died from tobacco consumption whilst 142 were killed in terrorist attacks [2, 3, 4, 5,]?
By Maria Patricia Bejarano
Securitisation theory
We have chosen to organize our articles by theme, in order to add some continuity to the reader’s experience. Our first theme of the Security Distillery this year is to be case studies of securitisation, as this theory aims to answer the core questions by subverting traditional security studies assumptions, and arguing that security issues are socially constructed and not universally given. This entry will be a short introduction to the theory, and case studies in the next month will delve in to applications of the theory, looking at the securitisation of sex work, refugees, immigration and the case of Brazil.
Securitisation is a theory which focuses on the process of making something a security issue, unlike traditional security theories which focus on the subjects of security themselves (ie. Realists would say that the subject of security is the nation-state and its territorial integrity, while Liberalists would argue for human security). Securitisation, which is closely associated to the Copenhagen School of thought (See: Ole Wæver, Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde), was developed in the 1990s and is seen as a constructivist approach to security. Unlike previously mentioned traditional theories, securitisation argues that anything can be a security issue as long as it passes through a specific process whereby a subject is securitised.
The process of securitisation is as follows: a securitising actor identifies an issue they believe is a threat to a referent object, and conveys this as a spoken message to an audience through a speech act, which advocates that extraordinary measures must be taken in order to protect the referent object from this existential threat. In other words, a security issue becomes a security issue because somebody says so. Oft cited examples of securitisation are terrorism and migration, as mentioned above. These phenomena, although statistically-speaking pose much less of a threat than automobile incidents, for example, are considered issues of high security importance and prioritisation. Authors within the Copenhagen School argue that it is precisely because terrorism and migration have become securitised that they are considered more important and more threatening than other potential security issues. From this idea stems the notion of (de)securitisation, which looks at the process of returning a securitised issue back to its normal non-urgent state. There are, of course, criticisms and shortcomings to the theory of securitisation (See: Bill McSweeney). The dependency of speech acts on the securitisation process does not consider other forms of communication, the static nature of the securitisation process does not take into account the fact that language and communication are fluid and constantly evolving processes, and furthermore, the need for a securitising actor to have legitimacy in order to convey their speech act implies that those outside of the elite cannot securitise an issue. However, in spite of these criticisms, it is still important to consider the real-world examples of securitised issues as they have far-reaching consequences in politics, economy and security worldwide. Over the next four weeks we will see examples of these consequences as we publish one case study of securitisation every week. We hope that you find them as compelling as we did and look forward to publishing more series like this one over the coming year at the Security Distillery.
SOURCES
1. The Washington Post, (2020). Lawmakers from both parties criticize White House plan to take $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding for Trump’s border wall. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/lawmakers-from-both-parties-criticize-white-house-plan-to-take-72-billion-in-pentagon-funding-for-trumps-border-wall/2020/01/14/675838d4-36ed-11ea-bf30-ad313e4ec754_story.html [Accessed 14 January. 2020].
2. European Parliamentary Research Service, Europol, (2016). Terrorism. How Parliament is addressing the threat. Available at: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/infographic/europe-and-terrorism/index_en.html [Accessed 9 January. 2020].
3. European Parliament, (2017). EU budget 2018 approved: support for youth, growth, security. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20171127IPR88936/eu-budget-2018-approved-support-for-youth-growth-security [Accessed 9 January. 2020].
4. European Commission, (2004). "Feel free to say no" anti-smoking campaign hits the road again. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_04_323 [Accessed 9 January. 2020].
5. European Parliament, (2016). 700,000 deaths a year: tackling smoking in the EU. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20160518STO27901/700-000-deaths-a-year-tackling-smoking-in-the-eu [Accessed 9 January. 2020].