Why is there no securitisation theory in the Korean nuclear crisis?

Abstract

Despite the fact that the Korean nuclear crisis is one of the most protracted security issues in the world, the research analysing the crisis from the perspective of securitisation theory is curiously absent. This article attempts to pin down some distinguishing features of South Korea’s securitisation of the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, thereby investigating why one rarely sees the implications of securitisation theory in the way that the Copenhagen School theorists would suggest. Borrowing the key components of securitisation theory—existential threats, referent objects and extraordinary measures—this article suggests three elusive characteristics of the South Korean actors’ speech acts as sources highlighting the dilemma. To make the article’s arguments clearer, I hold Floyd’s classification of securitisation theory, which separated the securitisation process into two different stages: securitising move and security practice. While acknowledging the importance of the differences between illocution and perlocution in a securitisation process, this article takes this logic one step further by suggesting the limits of the perlocutionary effect in making the securitisation process complete.

Keywords:

• Securitisation theory
• securitisation dilemma
• South Korea
• North Korea
• North Korea’s nuclear threat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The previous studies regarding this are too many to be included here. For this, Balzacq, Léonard, and Ruzicka (2016) concisely recapitulated the ramifications of securitisation theory.

2 Smith (2000) used the term securitisation as a broader perspective portraying North Korea as a bad or mad state, rather than seeing it as the term coined by the Copenhagen School.

3 The Copenhagen School categorised public issues into three main types. In the non-politicised state, the issue is not under the spotlight because policymakers do not manage it. However, government decisions and political resource allocations are needed if the issue is politicised. In the securitised stage, the issue requires emergency measures and justifies governmental actions that are not possible within the normal purview of the political procedure (see Buzan et al., 1998). Later, Corry (2012) further clarified the classification by adding the concept of ‘riskification’. According to him, the grammar of securitisation is based on direct harm to a referent object, while riskification is based on conditions of possibility of harm that can put a governance-object at risk.

4 The term ‘securitisation dilemma’ is also seen in Austin and Beaulieu-Brossard’s recent article, where they offered a situation in which desecuritising moves and securitising moves are simultaneously enacted (see Austin & Beaulieu-Brossard, 2018). Judge and Maltby (2017) also pointed out a grey area somewhere between securitisation and riskification regarding the European Union energy policy, albeit not using those exact words. Although my definition is not the same as these studies, all of which are broadly in line with one another in that they call for more clarified contextual conditions in which securitisation processes can be better understood.

5 The long-pending GSOMNIA was finally signed on 23 November 2016 when former President Park Geun-hye had already become a lame duck president, caused by a political scandal that led her to be impeached and later imprisoned.

6 In 1993, the Pentagon warned that ‘a War in Korea could cost as many as 500,000 military casualties within the first 90 days, more lives than were lost throughout the 1950–1953 war’ (see Sigal, 1999, p. 211). It goes without saying that the number of casualties would be far higher if a full-scale war occurred now (see Cohen, 2017).

7 The term CVID stemmed from the George W. Bush administration in the wake of the second North Korean nuclear crisis. Since then, Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have used this term as a main principle in terms of dealing with the North Korean nuclear threat. Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State under the Donald J. Trump administration, used a new term ‘permanent, verifiable, irreversible dismantling’ (PVID) (see Pompeo, 2018), as an upgraded version of CVID. The term CVIG is also relatively new but gaining increasing importance as a critical part of the denuclearisation process (see Lee, 2017).

8 North Korea sank a South Korean corvette, Cheonan, which led to 47 people being killed in March 2010; 2 South Korean soldiers were killed and 13 others injured after North Korea fired dozens of artillery attacks on the South Korean Yeonpyeong Island in November of the same year. It was the North’s first artillery attack on the South’s territory since the 1950–1953 Korean War. After the Cheonan incident, Lee Myung-bak initiated the May 24 measures to suspend assistance programmes to North Korea.

9 The full data are available at: http://www.kinu.or.kr/www/jsp/prg/stats/PollList.jsp and http://tongil.snu.ac.kr/, both of which are written in Korean.

10 There are different opinions about Seoul’s and Washington’s abilities to understand the North Korean nuclear weapons capabilities. While some have questioned the US’s ability to detect Pyongyang’s nuclear activities (see Sanger & Broad, 2018), many South Korean leading scholars have expressed their concerns that Seoul knows very little about Pyongyang’s nuclear strategy, nor do they have a centralised human information analysis system regarding North Korea’s military information (see Hwang et al., 2011; Jeon, 2016).

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Seongwon Yoon

Seongwon Yoon is a teaching associate in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He received his PhD from the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford and previously worked as a journalist.