Extraordinary or ordinary emergency measures: what, and who, defines the ‘success’ of securitization?

Abstract

This paper is concerned with two interrelated problems in the Copenhagen School’s (CS’s) securitization theory. The first is the challenge that non-exceptional security polices pose to the theory, which starts from the assumption that securitization is ‘successful’ only when extraordinary emergency measures are adopted. The second arises not from what factors define securitization’s ‘success’, but rather from who does so. Securitization theory suffers from a constructivist deficit because the criterion for the ‘success’ of securitization is set by scholars, whereas a more ‘radically constructivist [theory] regarding security’ would require practitioners to be in charge of defining the ‘success’ of securitization. The paper offers a solution to both of these problems by suggesting that securitization is ‘successful’ only when (1) the identification of a threat that justifies a response (securitizing move) is followed by (2) a change of behaviour (action) by a relevant agent (that is, the securitizing actor or someone instructed by the same), and also (3) the action taken is justified by the securitizing actor with reference to the threat they identified and declared in the securitizing move. It goes on to reject the ideas of a sanctioning audience and of the insistence on existential threats as also set by the CS.

Acknowledgements

This paper has been a long time in the making and I would like to thank the countless people who have shaped my thinking along the way. In particular I am grateful to the reviewers and editors of this journal as well as to Juha Vuori, Andrew Neal, Jonathan Floyd, Philippe Bourbeau and Jonathan Herington.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The terms ‘extraordinary emergency measures’ and ‘exceptional security policy’ are used interchangeably in this article. The same applies to ‘ordinary emergency measures’ and ‘non-exceptional security policy’.

² To be sure, he does recognize that if some securitizing acts do not take this form then this poses a challenge to securitization theory and needs to be studied.

³ At this point Ciută and I part company. It is not Ciută’s intention to offer a revision of securitization theory. He merely suggests that securitization theory ‘must have a thicker and more consistent understanding of its key argument that ‘security is constructed …. to argue that security is constructed is to argue for the importance of context’ (Ciută 2009, 317). This would require scholars to empirically examine the construction of threats, referent objects, securitization actors, security measures and the meaning of security specifically, ‘the categories of meaning that circumscribe the actor’s interactions’ (Ciută 2009, 317). In short, Ciută’s aim is not to make securitization theory more constructivist; rather that theory’s inherent constructivist deficit enables him to develop a new meaning of security as context dependent.

⁴ ‘Security practitioners’ here refers to anyone involved in making and delivering security policy (including non-state actors) and is not restricted to security professionals.

⁵ Securitizing actors may consider the action taken exceptional/extraordinary because they have not acted in this way before (that is, the action taken is extraordinary for them), while we as scholars may consider that same action ordinary/non-exceptional because it remains within an existing legal framework or perhaps even because it is standard procedure for other actors. Moreover, views of what is exceptional/non-exceptional can also change over time within the same social setting. Whilst these are important considerations, they do not concern us here, because the whole point of the revision is that security policy does not have to be extraordinary to count towards ‘successful’ securitization. What matters in short is that there is an action or observable change of behaviour connected to the securitizing move.

⁶ According to Adler and Pouliot (2011, 6), ‘Action is behaviour imbued with meaning. Running in the streets aimlessly is mere behaviour, running after a thief is an action endowed with meaning.’

⁷ I use the word ‘aggressor’ to designate any actor at the source of agent-intended threats, including terrorists etc.

⁸ This category includes ‘agent-lacking’ and ‘agent-caused’ threats, in which the former refers to threats lacking human involvement (for example, truly natural disasters) while the latter refers to threats caused by humans but not intended by them (such as climate change, for example).

⁹ I include ‘would-be’ here because according to my own formulation an actor achieves the status of securitizing actor technically only when securitization succeeds; in cases where securitization fails, for whatever reason, they remain prospective or would-be securitizing actors.

¹⁰ This is not to suggest that utterers of securitizing requests are not relevant, only that they are not necessarily relevant for the success of securitization.

¹¹ One audience for securitizing moves of intent-lacking threats, two audiences for securitizing moves of agent-intended threats.

¹² It is to be expected that this kind of a securitization is largely hypothetical. This is so because most non-human entities are (by humans) valued in instrumental terms. The natural environment, for example, is generally valued instrumentally, that is, for the ecosystem services it offers human beings. In other words, a securitization that seemingly seeks to preserve the biosphere does so for the benefits it has for human beings not for the biosphere itself. In other words, there is a human referent object at the heart of most such securitizations. Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, we need to list this possibility here.