International Relations

International Relations http://ire.sagepub.com/ Forum: What kind of theory − if any − is securitization?

Thierry Balzacq, Stefano Guzzini, Michael C Williams, Ole Wæver and Heikki Patomäki International Relations published online 21 October 2014 DOI: 10.1177/0047117814526606 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ire.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/10/20/0047117814526606

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Forum

Forum: What kind of theory – if any – is securitization?

International Relations 1–41 © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0047117814526606 ire.sagepub.com

Thierry Balzacq, Stefano Guzzini, Michael C Williams, Ole Wæver and Heikki Patomäki

Abstract One of the great appeals of securitization theory, and a major reason for its success, has been its usefulness as a tool for empirical research: an analytic framework capable of practical application. However, the development of securitization has raised several criticisms, the most important of which concern the nature of securitization theory. In fact, the appropriate methods, the research puzzles and type of evidence accepted all derive to a great extent from the kind of theory scholars bequeath their faith to. This Forum addresses the following questions: What type of theory (if any) is securitization? How many kinds of theories of securitization do we have? How can the differences between theories of securitization be drawn? What is the status of exceptionalism within securitization theories, and what difference does it make to their understandings of the relationship between security and politics? Finally, if securitization commands that leaders act now before it is too late, what status has temporality therein? Is temporality enabling securitization to absorb risk analysis or does it expose its inherent theoretical limits?

Keywords audience, critical security studies, epistemology, ethics, extraordinary politics, ideal type, ontology, politics, risk, securitization, security studies, social mechanism, speech act theory, temporality, theory building

Corresponding author: Thierry Balzacq, The Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM), 1 Place Joffre, Case 46, 75700 Paris SP 07 France. Email: [email protected]


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International Relations

Introduction: ‘What Kind of Theory – If Any– Is Securitization?’ Thierry Balzacq

The Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM), Paris

Stefano Guzzini

Danish Institute for International Studies, Copenhagen; Uppsala University; IRI/PUC-Rio de Janeiro

I It all started with ‘de-securitisation’.1 When international affairs seemed stuck in a state of (cold) war, how could politics regain its place? How could diplomacy get back to center stage, when it was asked to establish a common language for assessing (if disagreeing about) events and finding compromises, while being, paradoxically, only able to function if such shared understandings already existed? As it happens, political practice gave some hints. German Ostpolitik was to become an inspiration for peace research by concentrating on the pragmatic process which replaced the Cold War logic of ‘Clausewitz reversed’,2 where all politics had just become the prolongation of war with other means. Quite logically, as Ole Wæver insists in his contribution to Forum, his theorizing is driven by this focus on politics as action. Indeed, to relate to Michael Williams’ contribution to this Forum, Ostpolitik was a form of ‘extraordinary’ politics which called for being identified and named, and thus prompted de-securitization and its theorization. This Forum observes, however, that the development of securitization has been taken in two main directions. On the one hand, those who follow the Copenhagen School (CS) hold that securitization should emphasize the illocutionary act which underpins the emergence of security problems. On the other hand, despite their diverse emphases, critics have challenged the CS, asking, (1) What does it mean that securitization is intersubjective? (2) How significant it is to claim that context matters? and (3) How can we make sense of the relationship between politics and securitization? In many ways, this opposition premises on the nature of securitization theory. But then, as the very title of the Forum implies, it is not altogether clear what kind of theorization we talk about. Actually, ‘theorising’ might have a greater pragmatic bite than ‘theory’, since, in our view, there are four different activities we can engage in, when we ‘do’ theory.3 Checks about the logical constitution, assumptions and internal coherence of theories are done in metatheorizing. And then, there are two forms of theorizing which used to be the core of political science, combined in the past, but often divided today. One would be philosophical theorizing, which has increasingly become a form of normative theory or moral


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philosophy, an activity following a strict logical canon. The other form is what one could call constitutive or ontological theorizing (or ‘political theory’ proper), since it is about the identifying and understanding of central phenomena in the social and political world, like ‘the state’, ‘democracy’, ‘power’ or, indeed, ‘security’. Also, this type of theorizing is empirical, but in a different way. The observer is more active in this (hermeneutic) encounter of empirics and pre-conceived concepts. For these concepts are part of, and their theorizing feeds back into, a more comprehensive whole – witness how Max Weber’s Fundamental Sociological Concepts at the start of Economy and Society are both the result of empirical studies, and the condition for their very possibility.4 Finally, there is empirical theorizing. In the more naturalist tradition, this may either come in the form of the generalization of empirical generalizations, like in correlational studies or in causal analysis. In the interpretivist tradition, empirical theorizing usually appears as configurational analysis, but also in causal analysis if redefined in a non-Humean way.5 The analytical framework of ‘securitization’, because of its beginning from this latter type of political theory, inevitably ended up straddling across all forms of theorizing. Various categories, sometimes overlapping and sometimes clearly set apart, have been proposed to capture the growing differentiation of theories of securitization: for example, linguistic/discursive versus practice-oriented approaches to securitization, sociological versus philosophical views,6 explanatory versus constitutive (or normative) approaches.7 This diversification raises many questions, some of which have to do with the challenges brought up by the attempts to translate results from one logic of theorizing into another. This bears directly on one of the key obstacles that securitization scholars have to tame or clarify, that is, the possibility of various theories or forms of theorizing.

II The aim of this Forum is to explore the theoretical natures of securitization, with an eye toward drawing out the characteristic features of some of the available ways of theorizing securitization. Although they diverge on the responses, contributors share the view that the debate on the theoretical natures of securitization is important because the appropriate methods, the research puzzles and type of evidence accepted all derive, to a great extent, from the kind of theory scholars bequeath their faith to. For instance, the fact that Andrew Neal and Christina Boswell reached two opposite conclusions on whether migration was securitized within the European Union after 9/11 would be difficult to understand if one neglects the kind of approach to securitization that they utilized and/or criticized. As a matter of fact, Neal privileged practices, which led him to answer positively, while Boswell emphasized language, which brought her to argue negatively.8 But, then again, is the fact that one approach uses language and another insists on practices a decisive criterion for treating these views as two separate kinds of theories? Put otherwise, are language and practices primarily expressions of theoretical commitments or are they core elements of a given theoretical project on securitization? Let us backtrack a little. Securitization is rooted in the basic idea that the existence and management of certain issues as security problems does not necessarily depend upon objective, or purely material conditions. Another way to cash in on the same formula is to say that something acquires a security status as a result of an intersubjective process


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involving a securitizing actor and an audience. In this sense, ‘security has a particular discursive and political force and is a concept that does something – securitize – rather than an objective (or subjective) condition’.9 One of the central implications of this idea is that once established, securitization enables policy makers to immediately adopt whatever means they deem appropriate to curb the threat. This is a fairly standard account, but it is amenable to various understandings, many of which draw on different intellectual traditions, and some of which conduct securitization in different epistemological and ontological terrains. For instance, some critics have observed that the commitment of securitization to the intersubjective nature of security problems is not always consistent. This problem has to do, to a great extent, with the precise status of audience in securitization theory.10 On the other hand, there are arguments pitched at the level of the scope of securitization theory, that is, whether securitization can be brought to bear to the diverse ways in which security issues are constructed by various communities, at different times in history.11 These arguments directly conjure up difficult debates about the appropriate treatment of contextual factors in securitization theory. Paraphrasing Wæver, Rita Floyd connects the problem of context to the nature of securitization theory. ‘The inclusion of context’, so the argument goes, ‘would change the theory beyond recognition, moving the focus away from the act that is securitization, toward a causal theory of securitization instead’.12 Buzan and Hansen confirm this initial interpretation by stressing that securitization is a ‘constitutive, non-causal theory’.13 In a recent move, however, Wæver has accepted Guzzini’s proposal to knit securitization with causal mechanism (although insisting at the same time that the constitutive, non-causal moment is essential and should be kept separate from the causal analysis of ‘what securitization does’).14 Thus, we have almost come full circle; from what securitization expresses to what type of theory it is and could be depending on critics’ argument, emphasis and revisions.

III The task, therefore, is to start thinking about what characterizes different theorizations of securitization, and to assess the permeability of their respective boundaries. In this Forum, each contributor presents and discusses one version of theorizing, but on occasions, draws on others. Thierry Balzacq develops an ideal type of securitization which he then wishes to see connected to an explanatory theory with a more sociological focus. By implication, there is not only one theory of securitization but potentially many, with distinctive center of gravity. He disagrees with Ole Wæver on the centrality of illocutionary act in theorizing securitization and suggests instead that perlocutionary act is central as it is from perlocution that the ‘powers’ created by securitization originate. In addition, while Wæver amplifies Waltzian type of theorizing, Balzacq calls for a Weberian ‘explanatory understanding’. However, both authors agree on the necessity of investigating the causal mechanisms that underlie securitizing processes. This convergence is intriguing as it raises the question as to whether two opposite uses of speech act philosophy can rely on a similar explanatory mechanism. Michael Williams does not go down the route of explanation, nor does he develop a causal account. He proposes, instead, to interpret securitization as a political theory,


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which makes him develop a type of constitutive-ontological theorizing which, in some instances, provides the more normative approaches with a different philosophical grounding. This summarizes and rekindles his previous engagements with the normative features of securitization.15 But it also opens new avenues for research. In particular, he insists that the empirical and philosophical cannot be divorced. He sees the political core of securitization not in Schmittian decisionism with its strict division of the normal and exceptional, but in terms of ‘extraordinary’ politics, which allows for a conceptualization where security and normal politics are combined. Balzacq subscribes to the existence of an inherent link between security and politics, but he is unsure as to whether this leads to a common ground between exceptionalism and the politics of the extraordinary. Indeed, he sees the politics of the extraordinary and exceptionalism as obeying to two distinct logics: the former is inclusive, and the latter is exclusive. Balzacq attaches his sociological theory to the politics of the extraordinary, which, he argues, further differentiates his approach from Wæver’s. Ole Wæver, like Balzacq, develops a particular type of empirical generalization. However, he challenges Balzacq’s sociological theory on the precise ground that it is set on a wrong premise (perlocutionary), and thereby displaces the political moment, which Wæver wants to place at the center, not unlike Williams. Because his view has been taken in various directions by various exegeses, Wæver further develops his underlying political theory as being inspired by Hannah ‘Arendt and implemented through speech act theory’, specified in terms of collective illocutionary acts. This core then, he argues, should reach out to causal (explanatory) and philosophical, concept and discourse analysis. He objects to Balzacq’s usage of ‘ideal type’ across theories, and pleads for a different reading of Weber-inspired construction of ideal types from a specific theoretical angle. Finally, unlike the three previous contributors, Heikki Patomäki is skeptical about the theoretical nature of securitization. He finds resources for making his argument in a new wave of scholarship, which created a dialogue between risk studies and securitization analysis. At the heart of such works lie anticipatory rationality and the impacts of probability on security perception, foresight and policy.16 Patomäki argues that this turn raises fundamental problems for any so-called theory of securitization. For instance, it reveals that securitization is primarily a manifestation of a very limited social mechanism, of sorts. To substantiate this argument, he develops the initial inspiration of security as a speech act in two directions, both of which are connected to time and to a more comprehensive theoretical embedding. First, as for any understanding of a performative (security as a speech act), it is important to understand the history that has made that particular speech act possible (how has the speech act of security come to do what it does?). And second, by looking about security in terms of future risk, he asks for assessing the role of the social mechanism of securitization within open global political economic processes. This discussion on what securitization can and cannot do, due to its internal theoretical structure, relates Patomäki’s work to a kind of meta-theorizing. Thus, the Forum shows that taking into account the voice of a skeptic, whose research falls within what few scholars consider as the new source of inspiration for securitization (i.e. risk), proves to be a useful reminder of the fact that what a theory is or pretends to be cannot be divorced


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from how it is perceived by scholars working in cognate subjects, within the broader domain of International Relations. As it appears, then, the contributors to this Forum come to securitization from distinctive... to grips with the question from distinctive angles, but they converge toward a common concern: unpacking the difference it makes to embark on one specific type of theorizing securitization. In other words, they present what they think securitization theory is, and what it does. This degree of subjectivity means that most of the interventions gathered here are only one manifestation of the kind of theorization they align securitization with. For instance, Williams’ political theory speaks to the broader discussion on the relationship between securitization and normativity.17 But the premises and the objectives of his political theory are different in that they do not establish, for instance, the conditions under which securitization is desirable or not. Yet, in some ways, they make that discussion possible.18 Moreover, the Forum is part of increasing demands to evaluate where securitization stands today, how it should develop and whether this would affect the way securitization scholarship engages both traditional and critical theories of security.19 Of course, such a Forum is not meant to bring any argument to a closure. Thus, while most issues launched are examined in some detail, others remain open. For instance, it would be interesting to assess whether the differences among theories of securitization play out in case studies and what it means for the evolution of specific kinds of securitization theory.In other words, it is the aim of the Forum to provide the broader field with the opportunity to extend the discussion, either in terms of responses to this Forum or in any other outlet. Notes 1. Ole Wæver, ‘Security, the Speech Act: Analyzing the Politics of a Word’, Working Paper No. 19 (Copenhagen: Centre for Peace and Conflict Research, 1989); Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie Lipschutz (ed.) On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–86. 2. This is the main criticism of the Cold War logic (and US foreign policy) in Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz. II: L’âge planétaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 3. Stefano Guzzini, ‘The ends of International Relations Theory: stages of reflexivity and modes of theorising’, European Journal of International Relations, 19(3), September 2013, pp. 521–541. 4. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1980 [1921–1922]), pp. 1–30. 5. For an application of these different forms of theorizing to the Copenhagen School – and for a plea to see its empirical theory in terms of a causal mechanism redefined – see Stefano Guzzini, ‘Securitization as a Causal Mechanism’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August– October 2011, pp. 329–41. 6. On these different characterizations, see Thierry Balzacq, ‘A Theory of Securitization: Origins, Core Assumptions, and Variants’, in Thierry Balzacq (ed.) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–30. 7. In this issue, the explanatory theory is defended by Wæver and Balzacq, although they nudge it into different directions. The constitutive approach is presented by Williams. 8. See Andrew W. Neal, ‘Securitizing and Risk at the EU Border: The Origins of FRONTEX’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 47(2), March 2009, pp. 333–56; Christina Boswell,


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9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

‘Migration Control in Europe after 9/11: Explaining the Absence of Securitization’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 45(3), September 2006, pp. 589–610. Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 214. See Jonathan Bright, ‘Securitization, Terror, and Control: Towards a Theory of the Breaking Point’, Review of International Studies, 38(4), 2012, p. 864. The discussion on audience and performativity has received extensive treatments by, inter alia, Thierry Balzacq, ‘The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context’, European Journal of International Relations, 11(2), June 2005, pp. 171–201; Holger Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(3), September 2007, pp. 357–83; Matt McDonald, ‘Securitization and the Construction of Security’, European Journal of International Relations, 14(4), December 2008, pp. 563–87; Mark B. Salter, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization: A Dramaturgical Analysis of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 11(4), December 2008, pp. 321–49. Felix Ciută, ‘Security and the Problem of Context: A Hermeneutical Critique of Securitization Theory’, Review of International Studies, 35(2), April 2009, pp. 301–26. Rita Floyd, Security and the Environment: Securitisation Theory and US Environmental Security Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 21. Buzan and Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies, p. 215. Guzzini, ‘Securitization as a Causal Mechanism’. For an initial view on this topic, see Michael C. Williams, ‘The Continuing Evolution of Securitization Theory’, in Balzacq (ed.) Securitization Theory, pp. 212–22. Ole Wæver, for instance, posits that ‘securitization is securitization, and risk is risk’. See Wæver, ‘Politics, Security, Theory’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August–October 2011, p. 474. A different take a offered by Olaf Cory, ‘Securitisation and “Riskification”: Secondorder Security and the Politics of Climate Change’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(2), January 2012, pp. 235–58; Karen Lund Petersen, ‘Risk Analysis: A Field within Security Studies’, European Journal of International Relations, 18(4), December 2012, pp. 693–717; Stefan Elbe, ‘Haggling over Viruses: The Downside Risks of Securitizing Infectious Diseases’, Health Policy and Planning, 25(6), November 2010, pp. 476–85; Elisabeth Wishnick, ‘Dilemmas of Securitization and Health Risk Management in the People’s Republic of China: The Cases of SARS and Avian Influenza’, Health Policy and Planning, 25(6), November 2010, pp. 454–66. See, for instance, Christopher S. Browning and Matt MacDonald, ‘The Future of Critical Security Studies: Ethics and the Politics of Security’, European Journal of International Relations, 19(2), 2013, pp. 235–55. For a normative approach to securitization that might be tied to such a political theory but with a specific ramification toward de-securitization, see Floyd, Security and the Environment, chapters 2 and 6. This approach has raised criticisms, some of which are perhaps exaggerated. See Jaap de Wilde, H., ‘Review of Rita Floyd: Security and the Environment’, Perspectives on Politics, 10(2), June 2012, p. 214; Wæver, ‘Politics, Security, Theory’, pp. 472–3. Two recent attempts at discussing the achievements of securitization theory are ‘The Politics of Securitization’, Special Issue of Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August–October 2011; Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory.


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The ‘Essence’ of securitization: Theory, ideal type, and a sociological science of security Thierry Balzacq

University of Edinburgh, The Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM), Paris

Introduction Ordinarily, scholars refer to securitization theory in singular, assuming that we can ferret out a unique theory that the concept of ‘securitization’ really corresponds to.1 In the literature, however, there coexist various theories of securitization, each of which is committed to distinctive ontologies and epistemologies, as well as to ‘different orientations toward empirical material’2 (methodology); yet, the adherents to these different theories all subscribe to the same concept: ‘securitization’. In this light, I submit, securitization (not securitization theories) is an ideal type, that is, a set of essential qualitative features which, when combined, constitute a logical whole.3 The ideal-typical construct spurs various theories of securitization (linguistic or philosophical, sociological, etc.). These theories derive their identity from the degree to which they come close to, or deviate from, the ideal type of securitization. This essay delineates the characteristics of a sociological theory of securitization, whose nature and functioning are indebted to Weber’s ‘ideal type’. I discern three main advantages in recasting securitization as an ideal type. The first is that it improves understanding of the internal coherence of securitization, without which the concept might be indefinitely stretched out. Second, it enables researchers to gauge the extent to which alternative readings and uses of securitization are commensurable or not. Third, following Max Weber’s account,4 capturing securitization through the lens of ideal type makes it possible to blend interpretative understanding and causal explanation. I proceed in three sections, the first of which discusses the conceptual apparatus of Weber’s ideal type in order to bring its structuring and differentiating logics to the foreground. This analysis sets the stage for spelling out the implications of the ideal typical construct on the concept of securitization. To this purpose, section ‘Essentials of securitization’ suggests the logical characteristics (i.e. essentials) of securitization.5 The concept of securitization stands for the structural-significant components of various empirical phenomena. In this sense, securitization – once again, not particular theories – accounts for threat construction in a way that is not situation bound. In other words, the logical structure of securitization is non-contingent, even if the meaning of security is often contextual.6 I argue that when the essentials of securitization are established, different theories of securitization can engage in fruitful discussions, by emphasizing both how


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each relates to the ideal type and how its specific component parts give prominence to some factors and not others. However, the decision to include an element into a particular theory of securitization is not case-specific, but entirely constrained by the essentials of the ideal typical construct. In section ‘Desiderata of a sociological theory of securitization’, I connect the proposed ideal type to a sociological theory of securitization. The bulk of the section compares a sociological theory of securitization to other approaches. I contrast, in a systematic fashion, my approach to securitization with alternative views, using three cases, from one of the most debated to the neglected theme: audience, the relation between politics and security, and the status of responsibility in securitization. I specify the type of ontology and epistemology which underwrite a sociological theory of securitization.

The functional status of ideal types According to Giovanni Sartori, the primary goal of social science is conceptual design.7 Concepts provide ideal typical accounts of social phenomena by structuring ‘empirical observations into systematic facts’.8 Thus, an ideal type is a useful instrument in producing analytical statements about our experience of the world. The nature and contents of the ideal type are co-dependent with its function in social research. In other words, an ideal type denies priority to either epistemological or ontological commitments. The ideal type is a mental construct, which aims to sort out the logical status of concepts. The construction of an ideal type is carried out inductively from the ‘extensive study of relevant materials’9 out of which the researcher selects certain segments of the empirical reality. Specifically, as Weber puts it: an ideal type is formed by the one-sided exaggeration … of one or several points of view and by the synthesis of great many diffusely and discretely existing component phenomena … which are sometimes more and sometimes less present and occasionally absent, which are in accordance with those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints, and which are arranged into an internally consistent … thought-image.10

As this citation makes clear, the construction of an ideal type aims to put in relief the unique traits that certain phenomena have in common, which are brought together, in an idealized fashion, under the same concept. Ideal type comprises ‘typical’ elements, characteristic features that are shared by a set of phenomena. The form of an ideal type is general in that its component parts are not equally present in all things it designates. The reason for this differentiated realization of an ideal type is that, empirically, social phenomena exhibit recurrent constellations of characters, but in different degrees. The ideal type’s description is hypothetical in that it does not apply to what is unavoidable, but refers to what is empirically possible. It does not predict, but conditions the realization of a specific outcome to the fulfillment of certain sequences of actions, in specific kind of instances. The different elements and situations are structurally significant, as they underline various social phenomena to which the type refers. The task of the ideal type is therefore to offer explanations whose scope and relevance supersede a particular situation or instance. As key elements are found within many instances, they


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denote ‘essential tendencies’11 of the phenomenon. This suggests that a crucial attribute of an ideal type is its internal coherence, which is to say that the features that an ideal type encompasses are logically connected. In short, contradictions are fatal to ideal types. Hence, an ideal type will not try to cast its net too widely, but will instead resort to an intensional abstraction that will help it keep all the subsidiary parameters out of its realm. It would be a mistake, then, to construe the ideal type as a one-to-one correspondence between pure elements of the type and the empirical reality. In fact, following Carl Hempel, ideal types are not copies of empirical instances.12 Rather, he argues, the latter are approximations of the former. That which singles out deviations from the ideal type is determined by the theory which embodies the ideal type.13

Essentials of securitization Having delineated the content and scope of ideal types, the question is begged: to what extent is securitization an ideal type? How does an ideal typical view change our understanding of the meaning, content, and use of securitization? The move from the former to the latter poses problems of its own, the consideration of which will be investigated in section ‘Desiderata of a sociological theory of securitization’ wherein the case for a sociological science of securitization will be made.

Methodology In order to devise an ideal type, Weber advises that we conduct extensive work on a variety of instances, from which core features of the type are abstracted, accentuated, and generalized. To that effect, I have resorted to content analysis. Although space constraints forbid an extensive description of my coding manual, it is important to be transparent about how I proceeded in order to sort out the ‘essence’ of securitization. In very broad terms, I examined the articles compiled in the recent Special Issue of Security Dialogue on ‘The Politics of Securitization’. Furthermore, I have done the same with the chapters included in my 2011 edited volume on Securitization Theory.14 In total, 23 documents were analyzed individually.15 In addition to including all the main trends of securitization scholarship, these two sources brought extensive and up-to-date reviews of the literature, across a broad range of issues. My objective was to uncover the ‘semantic universe’ of securitization, that is, the constellation of concepts associated with securitization. After reading these documents, I conducted a deductive content analysis. Behind this investigation, there was the idea that the meaning of securitization varied from one paper to another, but authors seemed to use similar concepts in relation to securitization (referent object, existence, audience, securitizing moves, context, exceptional measures, etc.). The hypothesis I tried to probe was that the difference in the meaning came from the distinctive ways in which scholars arranged the concepts generally associated with securitization. To create my categories, I submitted the documents to the following question: what did they mean by ‘securitization’? For documents containing a case study, an additional filter was inserted: what evidence did the documents use to decide that this was an instance of securitization or not? An associated word search in sentences was conducted running the Adelaide Text Analysis Tool (AdTAT). The AdTAT is primarily a


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concordance software, which is useful in finding co-occurrences of words or sentences.16 In the corpus, I excavated co-occurrences of ‘securitization’ with any other words that are often linked to it (e.g. existential threat, audience, power, securitizing move, etc.).

Results In the following table, the words in bold are those that were associated with securitization. I deleted any non-relevant co-occurrence (e.g. articles, prepositions, pronouns, or specific places such as the ‘EU’ or ‘China’). Of course, presenting the ideal type as a system of statements is not immune from subjectivity, however. Elo and Kyngäs argue that a distinctive feature of content analysis is that ‘each researcher interprets the data according to their subjective perspective’.17 Mine is expressed in the way in which the words in bolds are embedded in sentences (see Table 1). As with any ideal type, therefore, this one will have to be checked against its ability to capture securitization in practice. I should emphasize that exceptions can be found in each of the characteristics identified above. Evidently, there are other features that can be culled from the literature, but they are usually of an idiosyncratic import. These features can be case-specific or profoundly tied to one particular theory of securitization, and as a result can be correlatively ignored, if not contested, by others. This is normal. For the ideal type of securitization is not meant to integrate all the factors that turn a phenomenon into a threat. Precisely, because its scope is so focused, the proposed ideal type does not stipulate whether securitization is a speech act event or a perlocutionary act, nor does it make any indication as to whether context is primarily a causal or a constitutive factor.19 By the same token, the ideal type does not privilege any view on the audience design (form and constitution), for instance, whether it predates the securitizing move or co-emerges in the process. Finally, the ideal type of securitization does not state the conditions under which an audience will accept a securitizing move, of which one might think of plenty of variations. Three things emerge from this. First, adherents to different theories of securitization accentuate elements that are compatible with their ontological and epistemological claims.20 Second, the ways in which the features of the ideal type can be articulated Table 1. An ideal type of securitization. • Threats are social facts whose status depends on an intersubjective commitment between an audience and a securitizing actor • Securitizing moves and context are co-dependent • The drivers of securitizing moves are knowledge claims about an existential threat to a referent object • Power relations among stakeholders structure both the processes and outcomes of securitizing moves • Securitizing moves are engraved in social mechanisms (persuasion, propaganda, learning, socialization, practices, etc.) • Securitization instantiates policy changes – for example, ‘deontic powers’ (rights, obligations, derogations exceptional or otherwise, etc.)18 • Securitization ascribes responsibility


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depend on the assumptions and hypotheses generated by the specific theory. Third, following from this, an ideal type is not exhaustive, nor is it set in stone. It is a provisional mental construction.21 The significance of any given theory of securitization rests, most of all, on the extent to which it ‘exploits’ the core characteristics of the ideal type of securitization. Indeed, theories differ from the ideal type by degrees. Each theory exhibits peculiar features of the social phenomenon that are not included in the ideal type. These claims owe something to the fact that individual theories account for exceptions that separate it from the component parts of the ideal type. Obviously, then, it can be said that a specific theory of securitization can expose elements that are not integral to the ideal typical construct. Even so, elements that distinguish one theory of securitization from the others should not contradict any of the component parts of the ideal type. In the next section, I use the concept of securitization to ascertain what a sociological theory might tell us about the design and emergence of threats that other views would probably find difficult to analyze. The argument is, if anything, a brief one.

Desiderata of a sociological theory of securitization In this section, I connect the ideal type to the basic theoretical resources of a sociological view of securitization. In order to ensure a direct continuity with the sections above, I start by setting out the peculiarities of a sociological theory in comparison to some of the available alternative theories of securitization, in particular Wæver’s. I do so along three lines: audience, politics, and responsibility. Second, I delineate the ontological prescription yielded by a sociological theory. Third, I translate the epistemological rationale of the ideal typical construct into the theoretical nature of the sociological theory sketched here. Finally, it is worth noting that while I call my approach ‘sociological’, it is possible to encounter other sociological views in the literature, which would not be necessarily committed to the theoretical premises developed below. For instance, while Huysmans would come close to the treatment of audience proposed in the sociological theory, he might not be entirely at ease with the ontological content that I associate with a sociological theory of securitization.22

Appropriation of the ideal type by a sociology theory of securitization The distinctive features of a sociological approach to securitization are discussed in detail elsewhere.23 Here, I want to use three cases, to indicate how a sociological theory of securitization nudges certain essentials of the ideal type of securitization into a specific direction. The first case relates to the thorny issue of audience. Scholars are wont to claim that audience is a crucial element in sanctioning the intersubjective nature of securitization. On the one hand, the philosophical (called also linguistic) view of securitization posits that audience ‘decides’ a ‘successful securitization’.24 However, the literature seldom provides clear examples of cases that meet the overriding assumption that an (observable) audience has agreed with the securitizing claims.25 In ‘A Theory of Securitization’, I have argued that there are indeed two main obstacles.26 First, threat images that become


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prevalent in a society, without explicit audience assent, cannot be captured in terms of the linguistic theory, nor participate in the development of its conceptual apparatuses. Second, as a consequence, other approaches to understanding the emergence of security issues are treated either as subordinate of, or as substitute for, that approach. This is unwarranted. In fact, keeping the assumption of audience assent in securitization theory bears difficult inference obstacles. But, at the same time, dropping it would be fatal to the ideal type view of securitization as an intersubjective process. A very different style of concern informs a sociological theory of securitization. It proposes, on the basis of several empirical case studies, to restrict (not to repudiate) this premise in order to integrate the ideas of alternative views of the formation of security problems, and bring to light results that were previously untapped. In this perspective, audience is but one element of a larger theoretical pattern in securitization studies, one which draws its importance in relation to others (e.g. practices, bureaucratic routines, policy instruments such as technologies, etc.).27 A second case concerns one of the most contentious elements of the ideal type, namely, the view that securitization creates ‘deontic powers’. At root, this issue refers to the relation among security, policy, and politics. The Copenhagen School is famous for arguing that ‘when a securitizing actor … takes an issue out of what under those conditions is “normal politics,” we have a case of securitization’.28 For a sociological approach to securitization, by contrast, ‘exceptionalism’ is but an extreme possibility inherent to ‘deontic powers’. The enactment of deontic powers discloses one of the most intriguing liberal features of securitization that seems, surprisingly, never to have been pointed out: that the intersubjective character of securitization establishes a social contract of sorts. More importantly, a sociological theory departs from the philosophical theory’s claim that these ‘deontic powers’ presuppose a separation between ‘normal’ and ‘exceptional’ politics,29 as it rejects the disconnection between security and politics. Michael Williams makes this claim quite explicit. He uses Andreas Kalyvas in a useful attempt to bridge my position and Wæver’s. But I read Kalyvas in a more radical way, meaning that his work does not sit well within the framework developed by Wæver, wherein securitization is separate from politics.30 For the sociological theory, it is difficult, if not impossible, to have a security discussion, devoid of any political games and/or implications as it is impossible to have a security debate without normative features. At least, this is a lesson we can derive from critical theory. That is, the sociological theory of securitization I propose examines the relationship between security and politics in terms of degrees, not in absolute terms. In other words, rather than trying to isolate a putative political ‘moment’, I suggest that we emphasize how security and politics (re)define, and constantly enter into each other’s orbits. Politics does not evaporate at the doorsteps of securitization. That is, security is neither above nor beneath or beyond politics. This has always been the position of many scholars using a sociological approach to securitization (e.g. Bigo, Salter, Bourbeau, etc.). In contrast, Wæver’s treatment of the relationship between politics and security has often varied from one paper to another, sometimes even within the same work, as it becomes conspicuous in this Forum. Overall, if Wæver now agrees that security and ‘normal politics’ do not operate under radically opposite logics, is not that a sea change of his theory’s center of gravity? Would focusing on Hannah Arendt’s reading of politics solve the problem? Probably not. In the Promise of Politics, Arendt argues that politics,


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whose essence is freedom, should be set apart from the necessity of life, violence, or war.31 In short, Arendt promotes a ‘purified’ version of politics. While intellectually stimulating, detaching security from politics is of little, if any, practical use. The third and final case I want to address is the status of responsibility within securitization theories. In this Forum, I share with Wæver the position that securitization establishes a form of responsibility (and the underlying idea of ‘deontic powers’). But our premises are different and the implications of our arguments diverge. He draws on Marina Sbisà, while I follow John Searle, who was among the first to investigate, rather extensively, the question of deontic powers within speech act theory. However, would it help the reader to claim that our positions part ways just because we dwell on different authors? I am not sure. To put it simply, Sbisà and Wæver conflate the deontologies inherent in language, which make communication possible and enable illocution to produce their (conventional) effects, and the deontologies which result from the speaker’s ability to ‘get people to accept the facts that (s/he) is creating’.32 Commenting on speech acts, Sbisà argues that ‘different effects pick out different actions’.33 For Searle, ‘if people who make the claims can get others to accept the claims, then they have created a kind of deontology that goes beyond the deontology of the speech act’.34 Questions: if Searle is right that deontic powers deduced from the acceptance by A (say, the audience) of the claims made by B (say, the securitizing actor) supersede speech act, what kind of deontic powers is Wæver’s theory calling for? Could it be that illocution is at the heart of the securitizing move, while perlocution constitutes the center of securitization? Wouldn’t that allow us to understand why Searle argues that the deontology intersubjectively created goes beyond that of the speech act? Isn’t this a possibility we should explore further? The implications of our understanding of responsibility might also differ. In Austin’s philosophy, according to Sbisà, responsibility ‘is meant to apply to actions independently of their being blameworthy or blameless’.35 While I understand this argument, it fails to capture what is at stake in securitization. Responsibility is not only about ascribing a certain effect to an agent. Rather, in the context of securitization, responsibility is always already ethically loaded; securitization establishes a type of shared agency. If things go wrong, both the speaker and the audience are held accountable for the effects.

Ontology How can we wring out the ontological gist of a sociological theory of securitization? Cut to the bone, a sociological approach to securitization is a theory of processes and structures. It holds that an intersubjective representation of reality (constructivism about facts) need not be necessarily incompatible with the possibility that some features of the world, independent of actors and their beliefs about them, are capable of explaining why a community holds that something is a threat (objectivism about rational explanation).36 This is different from arguing that the meaning of such features is independent from actors. The trade-off between constructivism about facts and objectivism about rational explanation allows a sociological theory of securitization to relate language and mind to the impact of the external world in regulating the content of the previous two. In this way, the ontology of a sociological theory parts way with that of a post-structuralist treatment of securitization.37


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Epistemology The function of an ideal type in epistemology comes in direct relation to its ontological aspects. Conceiving securitization as an ideal type reinforces the sociological attempt to explain the construction of threats by revealing the social actions and structures that underline them. Here, however, explanation cannot be put only in terms of a ‘deductive– nomological’ procedure. Rather, it requires an abstraction of characteristic features of a social phenomenon in order to ascertain whether these elements are instances of typical traits of the ideal type. In his sophisticated study of Weber’s theoretical proposals, Dieter Henrich notes, ‘ideal types are explanations – accomplished in the form of concept – of … events by reference to the circumstances which made their existence possible’.38 A theory of securitization of this sort brings out relevant factors or conditions, which tell scholars what brought about a phenomenon or why is that a securitizing move succeeded. In ‘The Meaning of “Theory”’, Gabriel Abend calls this ‘theory2’.39 Indeed, as the events or phenomena are social, it is worth emphasizing that their existence depends, to a great extent (but not exclusively), on the meaningful cause through which they are designed. The task of a sociological theory of securitization is not just to grasp what it means to say that a phenomenon is a threat, however; it wants to decipher the sequences of cause-and-effect in securitization (in the sense that the definition of a threat leads to similar consequences: the creation of deontic powers). So far as it goes, this enterprise would establish the investigation of social mechanisms at the center of its explanatory architecture.40 I assume that Wæver’s endorsement of social mechanisms makes our positions a bit closer. But Wæver argues that he does ‘not apply causal mechanisms to what brought securitization into being. Only to the effects of securitization’.41 But then, what is left of the idea of causal mechanisms, if we only examine effects, not the causal processes that produce a given outcome?42 Not that causal processes are the only forces that matter in securitization; instead, the problem lies with some lack of consistency. To agree that causal mechanisms are important conveys its own set of epistemological commitments. It is not à la carte type of preferences.

Conclusion Drawing upon Weber’s ideal type, this essay has attempted to map – if in broad strokes – the features and content of a theory of securitization with a sociological complexion. Its main characteristics where discussed using three cases: the role of audience, the relationship between politics and security, and the status of responsibility in securitization processes. This was then steeped into a distinctive ontology and epistemology. Furthermore, I have argued that the evolution of securitization studies, and the provocative results generated by the available alternatives, demonstrate that the concept of securitization has given rise to a rich cluster of theories, each of which sets the center of gravity – that is, the component parts of the concept – into an original track. Put differently, theories of securitization intersect through the ideal typical construct, but diverge on the extent to which they conform to, accentuate, or downplay some elements of the ideal type. Moreover, they can (and often do) reveal distinctive features that are case-specific.


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In this light, I suggest, each theory should be judged in its own terms.43 For ‘whether or not (assumptions of a theory) are acceptable depend on the merit of the scientific structure of which they are part’.44 To be sure, there is always an evaluative component to securitization studies, not only in a fashion of ‘just/unjust’ or ‘good/bad’ securitization theory (which is different from claiming that anything goes) but also in the sense that each analysis establishes whether or not the theory under consideration is beneficial, useful, or fruitful in understanding the action of the agents involved in particular processes of securitization. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this article was presented to the faculty and graduate students at King’s College London, in 2012. I am grateful to Didier Bigo for giving me the opportunity for rewarding intellectual exchanges. I thank Stéphane Baele, Philippe Bourbeau, and Ole Wæver for their comments and suggestions. Several anonymous reviewers also helped clarify the argument.

Notes 1. For a review of securitization and the main issues it raises, see Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998); Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Routledge, 2011). 2. Robert K. Merton, ‘Sociological Theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 50(6), May 1945, p. 464. 3. See in particular Thomas Burger, Max Weber’s Theory of Concept Formation: History, Laws, and Ideal Type (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1976), pp. 154–79; Susan J. Hekman, ‘Weber’s Ideal Type: A Contemporary Reassessment’, Polity, 16(1), November 1983, pp. 119–37. 4. See Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, edited and translated by E. Shils and H. Finch (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949). 5. Aronovitch points this out as a very important objective of an ideal type: ‘what Weber seeks to capture is the essence or underlying tendency of certain … practices, elements that may not be visible or prominent in the majority of cases’. Emphasis added. Hilliard Aronovitch, ‘Interpreting Weber’s Ideal-Type’, Philosophy of the Social Science, XX(X), September 2012, p. 5. 6. A tight argument for the contextual understanding of security can be found in Felix Ciută, ‘Security and the Problem of Context: A Hermeneutical Critique of Securitization Theory’, Review of International Studies, 35(2), April 2009, pp. 301–26. 7. See Giovanni Sartori, ‘Concept Misformation in Comparative Analysis’, American Political Science Review, 64(4), December 1970, pp. 1033–53. 8. Patrick T. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Social Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 151. 9. Nicholas Timasheff, Sociological Theory: Its Nature and Growth (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 178. 10. Weber, The Methodology, p. 90. 11. Ben Nefzger, ‘The Ideal-Type: Some Conceptions and Misconceptions’, The Sociological Quarterly, 6(2), March 1965, p. 170. 12. Carl G. Hempel, ‘Typological Methods in the Natural and Social Sciences’, in Carl G. Hempel (ed.) Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: The Free Press, 1965), pp. 155–71.


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13. Giovanni Camardi, ‘Ideal Types and Scientific Theories’, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences and the Humanity, 82, 2004, p. 280. 14. Cf. ‘The Politics of Securitization’, Special Issue of Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August– October 2011; Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory. 15. In total, 152,632 words were examined. This is more than what is required by the software I used (AdTaT). It holds that ‘100,000 words, made a suitable corpus for examining the terms and language features used in writing in particular disciplines of science’. See below. 16. I thank Stéphane Baele for his assistance in this regard. 17. Satu Elo and Helvi Kyngäs, ‘The Qualitative Content Analysis Process’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 62(1), April 2008, p. 113. 18. John R. Searle, ‘Language and Social Ontology’, in C. Mantzavinos (ed.) Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Philosophical Theory and Scientific Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 19. 19. Of course, some might claim that inserting context here is not fair, and tilts the ideal type toward a contextual reading of securitization. As I explain below, elements included can be taken in different directions by different theories of securitization. In this respect, Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde’s 1998 book has a distinctive understanding of context (p. 32). Other features of this discussion can be found in Thierry Balzacq, ‘The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context’, European Journal of International Relations, 11(2), June 2005, pp. 180–84; Philippe Bourbeau, The Securitization of Migration: A Study of Movement and Order (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 98–124; Nils Bubandt, ‘Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global, National and Local Worlds’, Security Dialogue, 36(3), September 2005, pp. 275–96. 20. See Ringer R., Max Weber’s Methodology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 21. See William Caspary, Dewey on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 22. Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU (London: Routledge, 2006). 23. For a start, see Thierry Balzacq, ‘A Theory of Securitization: Origins, Core Assumptions, and Variants’, in Balzacq (ed.) Securitization Theory. 24. Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security, p. 31. 25. See Holger Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(3), September 2007, pp. 357–83; Mark B. Salter, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization: A Dramaturgical Analysis of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 11(4), December 2008, pp. 321–49; Matt MacDonald, ‘Securitization and the Construction of Security’, European Journal of International Relations, 14(4), December 2008, pp. 563–87. 26. Balzacq, ‘A Theory of Securitization’, p. 8. This paragraph and the following are taken from there. 27. See also Didier Bigo, ‘Security and Immigration: Toward a Critique of the Governmentality of Unease’, Alternatives, 27(4), February 2002, pp. 63–92; Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity; Sarah Léonard, ‘EU Border Security and Migration into the European Union: FRONTEX and Securitization through Practices’, European Security, 19(2), January 2010, pp. 231–54. 28. Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security, pp. 24–5; emphasis added. 29. For one of the most solids discussion of this point, see Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, Images Enemies: Securitization and International Politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47(4), December 2003, pp. 511–31. 30. See Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 6–7.


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31. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, edited by J. Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005); For an astute Reading, see Danna Villa (ed.), The Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 32. Searle, ‘Language and Social Ontology’, pp. 18, 19. 33. Marina Sbisà, ‘How to Read Austin’, Pragmatics, 17(3), 2007, p. 467. 34. Emphases added. Searle, ‘Language and Social Ontology’, p. 17. 35. Sbisà, ‘How to Read Austin’, p. 467, footnote 6. 36. Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 22–31. 37. On a post-structuralist reading of securitization, see Lene Hansen, ‘The Politics of Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis: A Post-Structuralist Perspective’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August–October 2012, pp. 357–69. 38. Dieter Henrich, Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehere Max Weber (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1952), p. 88. Cited in and translated by Burger, Max Weber’s Theory, p. 127. 39. Gabriel Abend, ‘The Meaning of “Theory”’, Sociological Theory, 26(2), June 2008, p. 178. 40. For the discussion of social mechanisms in the context of securitization, see Thierry Balzacq, ‘Enquiries into Methods: A New Framework for Securitization Analysis’, in Balzacq (ed.) Securitization Theory, pp. 46–50; Stefano Guzzini, ‘Securitization as a Causal Mechanism’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August–October 2011, pp. 329–41; Wæver, ‘Politics’, pp. 469, 477. 41. Correspondence, August 13, 2013. 42. See, for instance, Peter Hedström and Richard Swedberg (eds), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach to Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 43. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry, pp. 207–12. 44. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 10.


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Securitization as political theory: The politics of the extraordinary Michael C Williams University of Ottawa

I Is securitization a theory? A method? A concept? A philosophy? Or all of these? Much in the ongoing debates over the strengths and weaknesses of the Copenhagen School and the diverse literatures it has given rise to depend on how one answers these questions. At one level, these debates can only be to the good: greater precision on what different analysts or approaches mean by securitization, and how they seek to apply it, provides important correctives to existing research as well as opening new avenues of inquiry. As the Introduction to this Forum shows, and Thierry Balzacq’s contribution argues in more detail, enhanced methodological rigor, elaboration of analytic techniques, and greater clarity about questions of context and fields of practice are positive developments in the further development of this vibrant area of research.1 In this brief contribution, however, I would like to suggest that valuable as this process is, greater empirical breadth, sociological depth, and methodological precision confront crucial limitations because at its core (in its ‘essence’, if one likes) securitization is incapable of being fully captured by empirical social science. This is part of securitization theory’s sometimes frustrating ambiguity, but it is also a crucial part of its fertility and insight. As a perspective that is philosophical and in a very flexible sense sociological, securitization is above all political. It points to the protean potential that is a defining characteristic of politics in itself. This aspect is not a ‘philosophical’ perspective entirely divorced from sociological concerns. On the contrary, it provides a specific vision of the importance of the sociology of securitization which transcends questions of method alone and accentuates the place of securitization as an aspect of political theory as much as a contribution to social science. In part, these questions can be explored by returning to themes developed around the oft-cited and controversial question of whether securitization is defined by a politics of emergency and exception.2 These debates have tended to focus rather one-sidedly on the relationship between securitization theory and Carl Schmitt’s famous definition of the concept of the political as an exceptional decision defined within the friend–enemy distinction, and with the question of whether and to what extent the Copenhagen School’s definition of security is derived from, or identical to, Schmitt’s concept of the political.3 Yet, the issues raised by these questions can move beyond the friend–enemy distinction. Cast more widely – and perhaps more creatively – they alert us to the relationship between securitization and what Andreas Kalyvas has called ‘the politics of the extraordinary’.4


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If securitization is viewed within the wider lens of the politics of the extraordinary, instead of the narrower view of enmity, emergency, or exceptionality that has tended to dominate, it opens up a range of key issues that cross the philosophical/sociological divide. While debates over the connection between securitization and the politics of exception have (understandably) consistently been cast in a negative light, a focus on the politics of the extraordinary highlights the creative nature of securitization, as well as its strength in linking philosophical and sociological concerns within security politics.

II What is the politics of the extraordinary? From one side, it is familiar within securitization theory as the declaration of existential threat and (if successful) the generation of the capacity to break free of the rules of ‘normal’ politics. In the debates over securitization theory, this has often become identified (usually negatively) with ‘Schmittian’ exeptionalism, decisionism, and the declaration of a divide between friend and enemy. Yet, as the controversies over whether securitization can also be positive show, a purely negative view of securitization cannot capture the range of issues involved.5 Focusing instead on the possibility of positive securitization brings into view a second type of extraordinary politics, that which see it as calling into action what Sieyès famously called the ‘constituent power’ of a political order.6 Placing the question of the constituent power at the center of concern shifts the gravity of securitization theory. While exceptional politics within a friend/enemy logic produces or reproduces an exclusionary order, extraordinary politics stresses also the possibility of securitization as a process of openness and self-determination with democratic potential. In Kalyvas’ evocative formulation, within a democratic vision of extraordinary politics ‘there is an intensification of popular mobilization, an extensive consensus’ which ‘describes the extraordinary reactivation of the constituent power of the people and the self-assertion of a democratic sovereign’.7 The positive potential of securitization theory is thus the corollary of its potential for closure, allowing for not only a normative reaction of expansion of concern in the name of more ‘positive’ forms of security but also a more foundational – if always fraught – reevaluation of the political order itself in ways that can be inclusive and reformative as well as violently exclusionary. This potential of securitization theory has been noted on a number of occasions8 in connection with ‘acts of founding’, such as revolutionary moments, which are foundational in the sense of ‘higher’ law-making: they express the ‘constituent power’, the will of the people in the broadest sense.9 Mobilized in the construction of a new political order, this constituent power becomes latent in ‘normal’ politics: it retreats – and must necessarily do so – in order for stability to be secured, and normality to prevail over the vicissitudes of permanent revolution. Ordinary politics thus becomes dominated by the more narrow and mundane competition of diverse interests and elite political management. As Kalyvas nicely puts it (linking the arguments of Bruce Ackerman10 with Schmitt), ordinary politics is: characterized by widespread pluralism and political fragmentation, devoid of any collective project that could unify the popular sovereign around some concrete fundamental issues. This fragmentation explains and justifies the predominance of relations of bargaining, negotiation, and compromise among organized interests, driven by their narrow, particular interests.11


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Yet, in this vision, the constituent power remains capable of mobilization. At such junctures, ‘the people’ – the constituent power of the political order – can emerge from repose. The politics of the extraordinary, and a democratic politics of the extraordinary in particular, are thus marked by times when the: formal procedural rules that regulate normal institutionalized politics are supplemented by or subordinated to informal, extraconstitutional forms of participation that strive to narrow the distance between rulers and ruled, active and passive citizens, representatives and represented. Extraordinary politics aims either at core constitutional matters or at central social imaginary significations, cultural meanings, and economic issues, with the goal of transforming the basic structures of society and resignifying social reality. To put it in more general terms, the democratic politics of the extraordinary refers to those infrequent and unusual moments when the citizenry, overflowing the formal borders of institutionalized politics, reflectively aims at the modification of the central political, symbolic, and constitutional principles and at the redefinition of the content and ends of a community.12

The resemblances between securitization theory and the politics of the extraordinary seem clear. Securitization theory, too, stresses how securitization can mobilize audiences outside formal political structures, no matter how restrictive these possibilities may appear – and often are. The Copenhagen School also draws attention to the protean nature of securitization, for, however, fixed or sedimented structures may be, one of the most striking aspects of security is its ability to challenge these structures and practices, as well as to reinforce them. While recognizing that not all securitizing acts are equally powerful in a given context (and certainly far from inimical to a wide range of sociological means of grasping them), securitization theory nonetheless holds fast to the idea that security can in principle be enunciated from anywhere and can potentially bring into existence a group that comes to see itself as a group through this process of representation – what, in a different context, Pierre Bourdieu called a process of ‘social magic’ or the ‘Mystery of the Ministry’. The state or other dominant social actors are doubtless usually more capable of successfully undertaking this project, and we can often identify sociologically the structural and discursive conditions that make certain securitizing acts more likely to succeed than others. Yet, there remains an indeterminacy and unpredictability at the core of this process that renders any attempt to reduce securitization to prevailing processes inevitably partial. Here, we confront a key dilemma for the sociology of securitization. It is simply impossible – not only sociologically, but existentially – to grasp definitively its myriad potentialities. The constituent power is not a fixed entity – ethically, spatially, or temporally. Nor is there any fixed or exclusive position, discourse, or procedure through which it can be evoked and mobilized. As revolutionary movements demonstrate perhaps most clearly, the politics of the extraordinary can emerge from unexpected sources and through surprising processes that overturn, disrupt, or challenge prevailing structures and practices. One of the merits of the Copenhagen School is that it alerts us to the negative as well as the positive aspects of this potential. Securitization often (perhaps even usually) expands the gap between rulers and ruled in a democratic sense by concentrating decision and action in the hands of state executives, even if it may narrow it via an intensified emotional identification between the people and the polity. Here, security becomes in


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many ways the antithesis of politics in the sense of contestation that, in this Forum and elsewhere, Wæver has associated with Arendt. These issues are at the heart of an intrinsic ambivalence about whether to securitize an issue or not – a decision which the Copenhagen School, and Wæver in particular, has generally responded to by counseling caution. But caution is not exclusion: securitization theory is an overtly political theory precisely in its admonition that actors should weigh consciously the possible consequences of ‘security’ actions, and that taking and ascribing responsibility for these decisions and actions is crucial. A clear sense of complex social causality is vital in these judgments, but it is alone insufficient to address challenges that are political in this much deeper sense. It is also possible to glimpse further dimensions of the nature of the constituent power and the politics of the extraordinary beneath debates over method. Although the issues are too wide-ranging to be covered in any detail here, they can usefully be opened up by turning to an issue which has preoccupied much recent sociological research in securitization, and which often held to directly challenge or even undermine its more ‘classical’ formulations. This concerns the strict divide that the Copenhagen School proposes between ‘normal politics’ and ‘security’ practices. As numerous analyses (including Patomäki’s in this Forum) have demonstrated, such a clear divide cannot seem to capture the social reality of security practices concerned with the politics of ‘unease’ or the increasing salience of risk technologies, which rarely conform to so stark a logic and so categorical a divide. But while these insights challenge views of securitization that place it within a political philosophy of the norm and the exception, they also raise questions which go well beyond the confines of empirical sociology and method per se, and in fact cut to the core of some of the most difficult political issues involved in the sociology of securitization. Simply put, the question is how to think through the implications of whether (or not) there is a connection between the realm of normal politics and that of security, and of the position and role of the constituent power in relation to both. If, as early forms of securitization theory seem to imply, security and normal politics are completely distinct realms, then securitization theory seems fated to reproduce those understandings of the constituent power that view it as completely outside normal politics – as, for instance, either substantialist (as a given, such as Sieyes ‘nation’ or some iterations of Schmitt’s Volk), or as purely empty and unconstrained (a protean space of possibility sometimes linked to formulations of Derrida, a norm-less exception again often tied to still other versions of Schmitt, and sometimes to various formulations of ‘agonistic’ democracy).13 Philosophically and politically, neither of these positions stands up to scrutiny. Each ultimately succumbs to logics of authoritarianism or arbitrariness, or to a retreat into evasiveness that undermines their political insight as much as it reflects their conceptual inadequacies. Sociologically, however, the interesting question involves the processes through which these concepts and visions of security (or ‘the political’) gain social purchase and render the politics of the extraordinary into one-sided and often violent practices. To be critically informed, such an enquiry must be both philosophical and sociological, falling prey neither to claims about the ‘philosophically’ necessary or essential nature of security as a founding moment inescapably tied to exception as enmity, nor to claims about the sociological inevitability of exclusionary and violent social and political practices


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that actually reflect their spurious conceptual foundations more than any social or political ‘necessity’. Here, a sociology of securitization has intriguing predecessors and inspirations in figures such as Otto Kirchheimer, and particularly Franz Neumann, who sought to explain the social conditions and political strategies under which logics of extremity and exception, or of neutralized domination via de-formalized law and administration which were their dialectical counterparts, came to prevail and how, by being recognized, they might be countered.14 From another direction, there are those philosophic traditions which stress the importance of not separating normal and extraordinary politics, and which seek to provide conceptual and sociological insights for understanding how the extraordinary can be connected to normal politics without either falling prey to unconstrained understandings of each (the decisionistic exceptionalism or de-politicized neutralization of ‘normal’ politics, for instance). This takes current debates in securitization in interesting and potentially important directions. In a recent contribution, for example, Ole Wæver has clarified his position by arguing that for him, securitization theory involves a ‘Schmittian’ understanding of security as exceptionality and emergency with an ‘Arendtian’ understanding of politics.15 This is a typically insightful formulation; yet, it can be pushed even further by noting that one of Arendt’s key concerns was to attempt to demonstrate how exceptional and normal politics could be brought into relation with each other – and that for her it was vital to understand how extraordinary politics could function positively within democratic politics without falling into violent exceptionalism.16 The lineages represented by Neumann, Arendt, and others attune us to the fact that by following sociologically a ‘philosophically’ derived view of securitization that defines it as emergency/exception/enmity, and as the antithesis of normal politics, we may be blinding ourselves not only to crucial issues of judgment concerning the question of the constitutive power in political life but also to the sociological structures and political practices that seek both to activate and limit the creative potentiality of security. For example, much has been written, with great insight and well-taken concern, about the contemporary imbrication of security logics into normal politics, and important sociological work has drawn attention to the processes through which this can take place. But revealingly little attention has been focused upon the opposite possibility – on the ways that ‘political’ logics can operate positively within ‘security’, and vice versa. This is not a simple oversight. It emerges from the ways in which sociology of securitization has been constructed upon a specific philosophic view of securitization as enmity/exception that limits our vision of the politics of the extraordinary. As I have argued elsewhere, this has also been connected to too easy an acceptance of a Schmittian critique of liberal democracy and has too often led to a failure to undertake a serious-enough engagement with liberal–democratic politics.17 Sociological and philosophical approaches to security have much to learn from each other. I do not mean this in the obvious sense that one develops meta-theory and the other empirical theory. Instead, the connections between the philosophic and the sociological are essential in allowing securitization theory to explore and confront some of the most important and difficult issues opened up by its agenda. The politics of the extraordinary provides one potentially fertile direction for philosophical and sociological research beyond unnecessary divides between ‘internalist’ and ‘contextualist’ theories of


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securitization. Perhaps most importantly, it may supply inspiration for thinking about the politics of securitization and about the politics of the sociology of securitization. As the examples of Neumann and Arendt show, the sociology of securitization need not – and, perhaps, ethically cannot – be neutral. The philosophic and the sociological are in this vision connected, and sociological concerns are at least partially reconfigured in a fuller political theory of securitization. Notes 1. See, for instance, the contributions to Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory (London: Routledge, 2010), and those to the Special Issue on ‘The Politics of Securitization’, Security Dialogue, August–October 2011. 2. See particularly Jef Huysmans, The Politics of Insecurity (London: Routledge, 2006). 3. My own contribution to this discussion (and to its one-sidedness) can be found in Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization in International Politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47(4), December 2003, pp. 511–31. 4. Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5. For diverse discussions in a very wide literature, see Claudia Aradau, ‘Security and the Democratic Scene: Desecuritization and Emancipation’, Journal of International Relations and Development 7(4), December 2004, pp. 388–413, and Rita Floyd, Security and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 43–60, 174–87. 6. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, ‘What is the Third Estate?’, in Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Political Writings, edited and translated by Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishers, 2003), pp. 92–161. 7. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, pp. 164–65. 8. See, for instance, Aradau, ‘Security and the Democratic Scene’; CASE Collective, ‘Europe, Knowledge, Politics – Engaging with the Limits: The c.a.s.e. Collective Responds’, Security Dialogue, 38(4), November 2007, pp. 559–76; Holger Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(3), September 2007, pp. 367–70. 9. For instance, Bonnie Honig, ‘Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic’, American Political Science Review, March 1991, pp. 97– 114. As in most of international relations (IR), interest in these trajectories has often been confined to ‘post-structural’ readings of securitization, drawing largely on Derrida; but as intimated below, the lineages are much wider and – arguably – much more intriguing than this relatively constrained reading allows. 10. See Bruce Ackerman, We The People: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) and We The People, Volume 2: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The linkages between these issues and IR theory is developed further in Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Michael C. Williams, ‘Reviving the Rhetoric of Realism’, in Security Studies (forthcoming). Interestingly, a rare mention in IR is in the liberal theory proposed by John Ikenberry, although he does not pursue them; see his Liberal Leviathan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 13–4. 11. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, p. 164. 12. Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, p. 7. Kalyvas argues, not uncontroversially, that such an understanding can also be found in Schmitt’s thinking. 13. On the first of these options, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, in D. Carlson, D. Cornell and M. Rosenfeld (eds) Deconstruction and the


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14.

15. 16.

17.

Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3–67; as Stefano Guzzini notes, Derrida’s thinking played a role in very early formulations of securitization theory, and this is a legacy that remains to be resolved; see Guzzini, ‘Securitization as a Causal Mechanism’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August–November 2011, pp. 329–41. On agonistic democratic versions, different examples include Sheldon Wolin, ‘Fugitive Democracy’, in Seyla Benhabib (ed.) Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 31–45; and Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Some of the key texts here have been collected as The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays of Franz L. Neumann and Otto Kirchheimer, edited by William Scheuerman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). Perhaps the most sustained sociology is Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942); an excellent discussion is William E. Scheuerman, Between the Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). For a somewhat different view on their significance for securitization theory, see Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization’, pp. 357–83. Both Kirchheimer and Neumann are, of course, generally associated with the Frankfurt School, which is in turn often connected to forms of Critical Security Studies that are usually seen as standing in opposition to securitization theory. Pursuing these paths demonstrates yet again the missed opportunities for engagement that might be retrieved from beneath these often misconstrued and by now sterile oppositions. Ole Wæver, ‘Politics, Security, Theory’, Security Dialogue 42, 2011, pp. 465–80. For an exploration, see Ferenc Feher, ‘Freedom and the “Social Question”’ (Hannah Arendt’s Theory of the French Revolution), Philosophy and Social Criticism, 12(1), April 1987, pp. 1–30. Although she does not explicitly place it in this context, this seems to me one of the key themes at work in Vibeke Schou Tjalve, ‘Designing (De)security: European Exceptionalism, Atlantic Republicanism and the “Public Sphere”’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August– October 2011, pp. 441–52. Michael C. Williams, ‘Securitization and the Liberalism of Fear’, Security Dialogue 42(4– 5), August–October 2011, pp. 453–63; see also Nomi Claire Lazar, States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For an important treatment, see Jef Huysmans, ‘Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy’, Contemporary Political Theory, 3(3), December 2004, pp. 321–41.


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The Theory Act: Responsibility and exactitude as seen from securitization Ole Wæver

University of Copenhagen

[Speech act theorist J.L.] Austin gives us insights into the capacity of mankind for creating shared environments through language, not as a matter of transmitting anything from one head to the other or of causally influencing each other’s mental states, but as a matter of establishing situations and roles and attributing local statuses to participants. Herein lies the power of human civilization as opposed to ‘state of nature’; the power which alone makes it possible, on occasion, for someone weak and without weapons to be listened to and even obeyed, the power which makes it possible to conceive and pursue things such as social equality or solidarity and equal opportunities for genders, all of which would not be conceivable in a ‘state of nature’ ethology. To acknowledge in theory and investigate such power is at the same time to foster it and defend it against the risk of regression into forms of social life based on brute force and coercion.1

That seems to be a relatively simple question: ‘What kind of theory (if any) is securitisation?’. Yet, answering it soon turns out to demand answers to questions like what is politics, theory, sociology and philosophy?, not to mention specifying the criteria for quality social science – academically (truth? explanatory power?) and in society at large (emancipation? policy guidance?) – and settling how as a discipline we should conduct productive research programs and debates between these. I am not complaining. This is exactly how it should be. All these questions are important ones, and they are best discussed in relation to specific research. Too often it is assumed that specialists in philosophy, metatheory, and methodology should handle all those grand questions, and we lowly (security) theorists should adjust our work to their conclusions. No, the organizing center should be (security) research as such (theoretical and empirical work), and questions about responsibility, accuracy, and so on should be handled in relation here to. The discussion around theory building for securitization studies has two center of attention, and this piece will address each in turn: First, what kind of theories can do justice to the political nature of both the analytical object and the social role of security studies; second, what is the role of theory in research (vis-a-vis paradigms and metatheory and vis-a-vis empirical analysis). Roughly, this corresponds to the two distinctions that the word theory is usually built through: theory in relation to practice/action (cf. ‘theoretical’ heard as ‘not practical’) and theory in relation to empirical research (cf. ‘theoretical’ used as ‘not empirical’). After these two sections, the conclusion finds that securitization theory is a worthwhile effort.


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What kind of theorizing of politics? The tragic irony of political science is that exactly scholars of politics tend to erase politics. Two versions exist. The dominant one explains away politics by causally making it derivative of other factors. A second destructive move dissolves political action into political theory, which in this context means philosophy. Neither causal social science nor political philosophy is as such misplaced in relation to understanding politics, but in their heavy handed versions, they fail to respect the centrality of politics as action. Causal explanation from non-political factors is probably the more obvious case, but political theory can have the same effect when politics is placed as a philosophical question to be solved intellectually, implying that this provides a secure guide for taking the correct approach to politics. Then, action is transposed into contemplation and human interaction becomes inner thought. Hannah Arendt has, in my view, compellingly argued that at least one crucial dimension of politics is action that goes on between men, corresponding to the human condition of plurality. Because politics takes place among people, in-between us, because power only emerges when people act together, it basically consists of action directed to and dependent on the reaction of others, not doing things directly. History is not ‘made’ in the sense that one actor has a plan and then carries it out. Politics is always more uncontrolled – action leads to other acting and so forth in chain reactions. Theories should never explain away that irreducible, open element that is the in-betweenness of politics.2 It is not enough to work out safe, progressive meta-positions – politics demands the wager of action with sometimes unpredictable effects, and whether one’s action was good or not will be established only later by the storyteller.3 Theory should be viewed as action similarly – both by those who invent/design one and by every user who performs the act of adding this theory to a study.4 Given that a theorist cannot know every specific case in advance, the main responsibility of the theorist is to design the theory structurally so that a truly political understanding becomes unavoidable. However, it is not evident how an empirical research agenda on securitization could be constructed directly on this basically philosophical premise. Enter, speech act theory. Securitization theory was built from the start on speech act theory, because it is an operational method that can be designed to protect politics in Arendt’s sense.5 Put in short form, the political conception of securitization theory is inspired by Arendt, implemented through speech act theory. Securitization theory can both deliver explanatory social science and respect politics as open space by partaking in development of a general, emerging approach that might be called ‘the collective theory of political speech acts’ – with potential relevance far beyond security studies. Within speech act theory, it has been articulated by Marina Sbisà, and I have attempted a similar argument especially in various ‘replies to critics’ on securitization’s meta-theory. Sbisà has argued that Austin’s theory of speech acts entails that the illocutionary effect (‘done in saying’) is co-produced by the audience in a more extensive sense than pure uptake, and the status transformation entailed in, for example, securitization is a redefinition of the rights and responsibilities of actors, not just a form of communication (as has become ‘the received view’ of speech act theory, through especially Searle).6 Similarly, I have insisted on analyzing securitization as an illocutionary


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and not a perlocutionary act in order to organize the theory around the constitutive, transformative event of actors reconfiguring the relationship of rights and duties rather than seeing an external cause–effect relationship between speech and effects.7 Marina Sbisà has demonstrated why ‘deontic modal competences’ should be tied to the illocutionary act, and why Searle waters out Austin’s speech act theory when he (as most other mainstream philosophers and linguists) re-creates a divide within speech act theory between language and action. The radical potential of Austin’s theory is lost when these traditionalists separate everything social from the illocutionary, and de facto reduces the illocutionary act to communication, and thus – against Austin’s original intent – removes the possibility that speech can be really action. We witness surprisingly, ‘the contrast between saying and doing, reborn within the very context of speech-act theory’.8 In the co-produced political illocutionary event, a social situation goes through a ‘phase transformation’ to become defined and regulated by security (or in other cases, for instance risk). This has taken securitization theory beyond a focus on discourses and rhetoric (which it originally shared with a general trend toward ‘constructivism’ and ‘language’ within the new security studies) to a theory of political co-production between multiple actors of social states – ‘the mutual shaping of the agents of the interactional event’.9 Such changes in the participants’ ‘deontic modal competences’ has the character of ‘event’ in the sense explored by Jacques Derrida,10 where something happens that is irreducible, and therefore also irreducible to the tempting interpretation in terms of ‘performativity’. With this theory, political events can be studied empirically as social phenomena. The event of such changes between ‘political states’ has to be investigated as political coproduction in the relationships among actors, neither in or by single actors nor as socially determined and thereby unpolitical.11 The effects of these changes of the political situation can, however, be studied in more classical, causal language as effects on society, process, and polity. Conditions for these events include material as well as discursive and institutional matters to be studied. With this distinct version of speech act theory at the center, it becomes possible to integrate three distinct stages of analysis where different methodologies are appropriate for each. In the first stage, the aspirations of multiple actors are related to societal conditions. In the second stage, speech act theory allows for analysis of complex arrangements in terms of the political codification that constitutes them as particular relationships. Third, effects of a specific form of organization (in casu securitization) have been suggested in various literatures and expected effects on political, legal and socio-psychological life could be tested in case studies. Political theory plays a key role in interrogating the deontic modal constellations politically and ethically. Interestingly, (as demonstrated also by this forum) the different strands of securitization theory convergence on combining multiple methods and forms of analysis. A crucial task will now be to investigate what combinations are internally consistent. My ‘illocution focused’ version of securitization theory claims it can integrate causal explanations, social mechanisms, hypothesis testing and political theory, by systematically organizing the different parts around securitization as specific kind of political event. The consistency and consequences of this set-up should be probed, and similarly for the other strands.


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Insistence on illocutionary force as the center of securitization studies is exactly motivated by the resulting kind of theory, not least in terms of how it handles politics. Therefore, the so-called sociological version of securitization theory12 is problematic. It defines securitization as ‘practices’ and ‘processes’, and its general explanatory ideal is to capture all the interactions whereby people influence each other – ultimately drifting toward a reconstruction of individual dispositions and reactions, a sender–receiver view of communication, a mentalist conception of meaning and a cause–effect understanding of social relationships, including politics. As social science, this is unproductive because it leads to 1:1 mapping rather than theory and explanation, and politically, it replaces responsibility with causality.13 This is not a politically neutral choice between theories, not purely analytical – but partly a political choice, partly about the kind of knowledge one aims at. For instance, the concept of ‘audience’ becomes, in the sociological version, an empirical question, but that is only possible if securitization has been defined in a way where it can happen without an audience, whereas the ‘political’ (illocutionary) version of the theory studies securitization as a relationship, and therefore the question becomes how speaker and audience jointly reconfigure their relationship. Consequently, if the audience is found (cf. Balzacq, this forum) to participate less explicitly than originally expected, this has to be re-theorized as a form of political interaction. When the sociological version of securitization theory allows for ‘securitization’ to occur without political co-production between securitizing actor and audience, this implies that securitization no longer means the same thing, and the whole ideal-type procedure collapses. So, what kind of theory is securitization? It is a theory of something political – security – that is structured around a core concept designed to preserve a truly open, political, constitutive space of human inter-/co-action (specifically handled through a specific version of speech act theory of collective illocutionary acts) with other forms of research ordered into designated roles around this center: causal and philosophical analysis as well as discourse and conceptual analysis.

The role of theory Theory has knotty relations both ‘upwards’ (to meta-theory and paradigms) and ‘downwards’ to empirical analysis. On the first front, we should center debate on theory, not paradigms (international relations (IR)) or meta-theory. Debates keep bringing up the weird argument that securitization theory is inconsistent because it combines elements from, for example, realism and post-structuralism, or causal and constitutive logic. This criticism presupposes that these larger groups are internally consistent and mutually isolated. On the contrary, we all know numerous examples of internally consistent theories that draw on several traditions – and many more examples of theories that stay within their ‘box’ and yet are horribly inconsistent. Therefore, investigations of the internal consistency and productivity of research traditions should focus on distinct theories, not loose collections hereof. IR paradigms are most important for the sociology and history of the discipline, less for actual analysis. Meta-theory is important, but it should support, not replace theory of – in this case – security. Patrick Jackson’s powerful plea for philosophy of science actually


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points in this direction too.14 It does not point to one form of theorizing, but argues that with a higher level of training in philosophy of science, we could discuss our theories more competently. More recently, I have attempted to clarify with philosophy of science from Robert Giere, Nancy Cartwright, Kenneth Waltz and others,15 especially the relationship between theory, research design and empirical analysis. A theory is here a model that does not in itself explain, but it forms a coherent system in relation to which it is possible to both compare instances and formulate specific hypotheses. Therefore, an ‘empirical’ case study always involves much theoretical work to specify and ‘attach’ the theory to a specific interest. A theory on its own never predicts or explains; a set-up for a specific purpose, often involving several theories, might be able to do so. Reporting from empirical analyses should therefore include much more attention to how theories were posited and utilized in order to carefully draw more general lessons, where too often empirical findings are directly taken to prove what is ‘missing’ or ‘wrong’ in the theory. Empirical exactitude is an ideal for the analysis, and the question to the theory is how it helped to produce that analysis. In this forum, Balzacq has helpfully brought Weber’s ideal types in play.16 The difference between ‘model’ in philosophy of science and ideal type is too big a question for now, but two problems with the way Balzacq uses ideal type can be briefly mentioned. First, it is not possible to construct an ideal type outside of perspective. According to Weber, one necessarily abstracts with the intent to ‘exaggerate’ a particular dimension or dynamic and thus, from a theoretical angle, optimize intellectual coherence. An ideal type is constructed from ‘a theoretical and hence “onesided” viewpoint’.17 Several different ideal types can be constructed for the same concept. Balzacq draws up a more disjointed list of features that unify cases of securitization. This comes close to what Weber strongly warns against: mixing up ideal types with classificatory concepts. Second, by attaching ‘model thinking’ (in the shape of ideal types) to the concept of securitization, but not the theory/ies, Balzacq leaves it open what kind of theory his version of securitization theory is. This allows the sociological ‘theory’ to become an unstructured mapping of actors’ perceptions/predispositions and their exchanges of communication – with no theoretical focal idea, in particular no organizing theoretical tool at the collective, political level. This is why the classical Copenhagen School version of securitization has a theory that takes the form of a model. This raises the question about sociology, philosophy and political science, which also Williams point to in his important contribution. Recent debates on securitisation18 contrasts ‘sociology of securitisation’ to (classical Copenhagen style) ‘theory of securitisation’. There is some truth to this, if the former means pragmatism and micro-sociology and the latter means illocutionary logic. Then, it is an important choice because this kind of ‘sociology of securitization’ dissipates into unending chains of cause–effect, where everything has to be taken into account at each stage to understand how each unique actor interprets and reacts to each input.19 But more broadly, sociology could and should mean more than this. The expression ‘sociology of’ has generally become a popular move these days (replacing ‘the social construction of …’?). It makes a play on something being more empirical and attentive to local variations, while simultaneously anchored in a social science. Probably, it would be more productive to think of


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‘sociology of’ and ‘politics of’ as different kinds of theory. Political theory similarly has achieved a confusing status in these debates, often as an ethical reflection external to the theoretical concepts, where it would play a stronger role as the political theory of those operations represented by the key concepts in the social theory. Securitizsation is that kind of theory, organized around a theoretical conception of a distinct political move, allowing for causal analysis of its consequences, sociological analysis of social patterns that condition political possibilities and political theory exploring human life under different arrangements.

Conclusion … if any Has the research program been cumulative? Do we need the theory for the coming voyages? On most conventional measures, ‘securitization’ is an academic success story. However, some might speculate whether it is the (classical) theory or just the concept that has been catchy? Many references are to the ‘idea’ or the ‘slogan’. However, numerous dissertations and other studies have been made with this ‘framework for analysis’, so it seems that more than the concept has proven useful. The specific meta-theoretical explications were not available at the time, but probably present implicitly. Whether they (i.e. ‘the kind of theory’) made the usage more or less productive would be an interesting second-order research question. Despite the Forum’s ‘if any’ question, it seems that the classical Copenhagen version of the theory has certainly been a theory and of a very specific kind. The critical question is rather whether it has been too much of a theory – whether it is necessary and/or helpful to play the theory card that hard or more is gained by a ‘less theoretical’ approach such as, for example, the so-called ‘sociological’ version. To assess this, the discipline needs to cultivate a more elaborate terminology and publication format for assessing how a theory participates in specific studies – what exactly does it do. Notes 1. Marina Sbisà, ‘How to Read Austin’, Pragmatics, 17(3), September 2007, pp. 461–73; quoting p. 471. 2. It is therefore problematic when the so-called sociological version of securitization theory (exemplified by Balzacq’s article in this forum) suggests that ‘securitization’ can be the causal effect of ‘processes and practices’ of various kinds and come into being without passing through any political relationship among actors. 3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958). 4. Ole Wæver, ‘The Speech Act of Realism: The Move That Made IR’, in Nicolas Guilhot (ed.) The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 97–127; Ole Wæver, ‘Politics, Security, Theory’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), August–October 2011, pp. 465–80. 5. Ole Wæver, ‘Security, the Speech Act: Analyzing the Politics of a Word’, Working Paper No. 19 (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, 1989); Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.) On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–86; Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).


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6. The speech act effect is social. The classical examples from speech act theory of obliging, committing, and so on are not about communication of intention (as speech act theory was gradually reduced to), but social effects of an illocutionary character. This focus allows for a theoretically stronger version of the theory. Whereas the mainstream version tends toward general pragmatics (a micro-sociology of an infinity of actors with each their individual perception – ultimately a 1:1 map of social complexity), Sbisà’s ‘neo-Austinian’ version is more of a theory with its focus on illocutionary force linked to specific operations. 7. Wæver, ‘Politics, Security, Theory’. 8. Marina Sbisà, ‘Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution’, Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 5(1), 2009, pp. 33–52; quote from p. 42. Long ago, Marina Sbisà and Paolo Fabbri suggested that the ‘one place model’ of speech acts without a major role for audience corresponds to structural-functionalist sociology, whereas the ‘two place model’ with the audience in a key role (as the philosophical version of securitization theory) creates a focus on interaction through which the parties mould themselves; ‘Models (?) for a Pragmatic Analysis’, Journal of Pragmatics, 4, 1980, pp. 301–19. 9. Marina Sbisà, ‘Communicating Citizenship in Verbal Interaction: Principles of a Speech Act Oriented Discourse Analysis’, in Hausendorf H. and Bora A. (eds) Analyzing Citizenship Talk: Social Positioning in Political and Legal Decision-Making Processes (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2006), pp. 151–80, p. 155. See also Sbisà, ‘Illocutionary Force and Degrees of Strength in Language Use’, Journal of Pragmatics, 33(12), December 2001, pp. 1791–814. 10. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 11. It is exactly not – as claimed by Patomäki in this forum – an ‘if-then’ phenomenon. 12. Thierry Balzacq (ed.), Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Routledge, 2011). 13. For trenchant critiques of this 1:1 ambition of mapping, see Sbisà, ‘How to Read Austin’; Max Weber, ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy’ (original 1904), in Max Weber (ed.) The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1949), pp. 49–112, see especially p. 72 and p. 78; Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’, in Jorge Luis Borges (ed.) Collected Fictions (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 352–26. Sbisà and Weber criticize also the psychological/cognitive reductionism and theoretical disintegration that the sociological theory of securitization suffers from. 14. Patrick T. Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (London: Routledge, 2010). 15. Ole Wæver, ‘Waltz’s Theory of Theory: The Pictorial Challenge to Mainstream IR’, in Ken Booth (ed.) Realism in World Politics (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 67–88 (shortened and clarified version of an article from International Relations, 23(2), 2009, pp. 201–22. 16. Weber, ‘Objectivity’; Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie, 5th ed. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1985 [1922]). 17. Weber, ‘Objectivity’, p. 105. 18. Thierry Balzacq, ‘The Three Faces of Securitization: Political Agency, Audience and Context’, European Journal of International Relations, 11(2), June 2005, pp. 171–201; Holger Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(3), September 2007, pp. 357–83. 19. While the alternative version (that some call ‘philosophical’ or ‘linguistic’, but probably would respond better to names like ‘political’ or ‘illocutionary’) invests more in a specific theoretical move.


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Absenting the absence of future dangers and structural transformations in securitization theory Heikki Patomäki University of Helsinki

Introduction The basic idea of securitization theory (ST) is that actors can bring about securitization by presenting something as an existential threat and by dramatizing an issue as having absolute or very strong priority.1 There are two main readings of ST. To some extent, they stem from two opposing views of what a theory (of securitization) can and should do, but they also reflect meta-theoretical differences, being united only in their ambivalence about the possibility of anticipating the future in a meaningful and rational way.2 The first, usually associated with post-structuralism, focuses on language and more specifically on the speech act of securitization and its constitutive effects.3 The dramatic effect of the post-structuralist ST lies in the implicit denial of the reality of threats. The second, more conventionally sociological approach analyses the social process of securitization in terms of facilitating conditions, authority of the speaker and the complex social field within which securitization occurs. This approach does not deny that threats and dangers can be real, but its critical intent focuses on showing the impact of social conditions and relations that may distort, or even generate ex nihilo, representations of external dangers and threats.4 In this article, I try to go beyond these approaches by absenting the absences in ST, namely, (1) the future as something that is real but not yet (fully) determined and (2) the possibility of structural transformations. True, there is a sense in which the future and future threats are present in the post-structuralist version of the theory. Future dangers understood through the modern probability calculus are seen as constitutive of security talk. Reality is socially constructed. While probability and claims about the future may, in this way, be seen as real in constituting present practices, key works such as Barry Buzan’s, Ole Wæver’s and Jaap de Wilde’s Security: A New Framework for Analysis are open to different readings on the question whether future dangers, threats and risks can themselves be real.5 The main argument in favor of relativism about security claims is that future security problems can only be meaningfully discussed if precise scientific predictions are possible. Predictions presuppose a closed, mechanical and deterministic system. There are passages in Security: A New Framework and other works, however, that seem closer to traditional forms of materialist political realism, implying that threats and future


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possibilities can be real and foreseeable.6 But because of this ambivalence, only little work has been done in thematizing future dangers as something real in themselves, not to speak of assessing their likelihood. Similarly, structural transformations do play a limited role in ST. Especially, the sociological perspective can illuminate the possible effects of institutional changes, but it tends to direct attention to domestic structures only. Whenever ST takes into account and thematizes the interactions of securitizing states, it resembles the ‘crude realist thinking about the balance of power, where the national security concerns of states A, B, C, D, etc. interact with each other on the basis of materialist calculations of threat’.7 ST tends to assume a given structural setting and is interested only in the dynamics of interactions within this setting. In some formulations, it allows for regional integration processes to make a difference by creating conditions for a pluralist security community, but mostly, ST focuses on interactions among states in a states-system, understood in terms of political realism and British institutionalism. In contrast, in this article, I argue that real future dangers can be absented by transforming structures, including global political economy structures. This presupposes that we can plausibly analyze possible and likely futures also in opensystemic, non-mechanical and non-deterministic contexts.

Modern probability calculus as constitutive of the concept of security As a social mechanism, securitization is characterized by a fairly mechanical pattern between security talk and particular kinds of responses to it. One can express this basic pattern of securitization by means of a simple if-then sentence: if {a, b, c}, then securitization happens, and with it the defined effects {x, y, z}, typically involving some exceptional measures.8 In other words, security talk is triggered by something, and once triggered by this something, it brings about certain de-democratizing or militarizing effects in a rather mechanical fashion. The sociological approach insists that securitization requires a complex setting of social relations to work. However, also the sociological approach must assume that the use of the word ‘security’ has potential to generate the defined effects, even though mere speech act by someone somewhere is not sufficient for securitization to occur. Where does the power of security talk come from? A conception of security as oriented toward future dangers emerged with the European modernity.9 While collective violence has been a problem across the world, and while questions about military dangers and opportunities have been pondered and debated at least since the first millennium BC, security could not have been defined in terms of risks of future contingencies before the emergence of the concept of mathematical probability.10 Gradually, the concept of security became prominent in three apparently disconnected fields. The first is that of ‘social security’. All people have faced the uncertainties brought on by illness, disability, maternity, death and old age, as well as by other eventualities such as bad weather. Since the late nineteenth century, pushed by the rise of the labor movement and its demands, states have developed policies against these and more modern uncertainties such as unemployment, typically in terms of social insurances (by this time, private insurances were already a large-scale industry). Second, in the US


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Securities Exchange Act of 1934, ‘securities’ were defined as any transaction that involves an investment of money in an enterprise, directly or indirectly, with an expectation of future profits – implying, however, a risk of loss – to be earned through the efforts of someone other than the investor. Third, the concept of ‘national security’ emerged as the official guiding principle of foreign policy in the United States when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act on 26 July 1947. ST presupposes these twentieth-century meanings connected with the word ‘security’, constituted by the modern probability calculus and concept of risk that can be traced back to the seventeenth century. According to Ian Hacking, the modern concept of probability that emerged in the 1660s had a dual meaning: it had to do with both a degree of belief and stable frequencies.11 The former comes close to meaning ‘approvable as a basis for action’, whereas the latter entails theories about calculating likelihoods, as well as testing hypotheses, in terms of infinite sequences of occurrences of something. The latter presupposes stable frequencies, in turn closely associated with the Humean regularity view of causation. Risk can be defined in terms of probability (P) and the value of loss (VL): risk R = P × VL. Modern security is about avoiding risks, concerning explicitly the future. A future loss can be imagined and then a probability attached to it. Given the twentiethcentury practices of insurance, securities exchange and national security, a claim about potential future loss, misfortune or catastrophe is framed as a risk, which in the context of national (state, homeland) security has regularly generated de-democratizing or militarizing responses. Logically, however, an attempt at securitization must be based on two claims, concerning (1) a danger that lies in the future and which may materialize with probability p and (2) the best way to respond to that danger. But how do we know whether claim (1) is true? Moreover, from a normative point of view, there is no automatic link from (1) to any particular (2). Ontologically, the future is real but not yet (fully) determined. Future is an increasingly shaped and structured possibility of becoming mediated by the presence of the past. As Roy Bhaskar maintains, ‘the future is paradigmatically shaped possibility of becoming’ that, as a possibility, ‘may be closer or more distant from us, more or less about, and more or less likely to be actualized’.12 The question for critical security studies is as follows: how can we assess claims about the future, which, reflexively, involve also likely consequences of one’s own actions? Action is always future oriented and requires some knowledge about likely consequences. The concept of probability is thus indispensable for comparing anticipations in terms of whether they can provide an approvable as a basis for action. It is, however, possible to redefine probability in a way that detaches it from those modern cognitive and social forms, which have been intertwined with particular forms of mathematics (system of numbers, arithmetic, algebra and probability calculus) and practices and institutions of capitalist market society. Importantly, John Maynard Keynes in his Treatise on Probability revived the older, practical meaning of the term probability.13 Keynes’ theory was a synthesis between the belief and frequencies approaches, stemming from an attempt to find a basis for ethical actions. For Keynes, relative frequencies are only a type of relevant evidence and in many situations; they are not available. Probabilities are not necessarily numerical and sometimes cannot even be compared. Probability concerns an inference from evidence/


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reasons to our probability judgments. The weight of evidence does not necessarily change our probability estimate but may alter our confidence in it. Learning more about the situation can mean that our ignorance increases, implying that the weight of evidence and confidence may in fact decrease.14 Probability judgments are thus necessarily complex and multi-layered. To this Keynesian theory may be added a dialogical understanding about assessing probability judgments. Different actors, although all perfectly reasonable and having the same evidence e, may yet have different degrees of belief in p.15 The disagreement is not the end of the story, however. The problem of assigning different degrees of belief in, or having different probability estimates of, p can become a topic in a rational cognitive controversy that follows the dialectical logic of formal disputations.16 Each dialectical step may also involve further research into the matter, accommodating new pieces of evidence and new geo-historical experiences. Furthermore, although the majority of relevant probabilities in historical social sciences may be non-numerical, we can nonetheless use the basic Bayesian theorem as a heuristic tool to assess the reasonable impact of an occurrence of new evidence or historical turns, that is, to analyze how we should change estimates and beliefs.17 The point is that the likelihood of different possible futures can be assessed rationally. Therefore, it may be quite sensible to present something as an existential threat or even dramatize an issue as having a strong priority. And yet, often these kinds of claims are exaggerated, unfounded or misleading. The scenarios may not be plausible or there is overconfidence in one’s probability judgment, given the openness of social systems, nature of available evidence and our degree of ignorance. Since world history unfolds in relatively open systems and is often sensitive to small changes in some conditions, anticipations of possible futures are contingent on a number of uncertain things: multifarious geo-historical processes and mechanisms (including homeostatic causal loops), and the modes of responsiveness of actors, which are linked to layered systems of collective learning and self-regulation.18 Through modes of responsiveness and mechanisms of learning, actors’ expectations and anticipations are in fact an essential part of geohistorical processes. Scenarios may, and often do, lack critical self-reflexivity, even though prophecies can be self-fulfilling or self-denying – sometimes on purpose.19 Reflecting upon these uncertainties, feedback loops and relative openness of the future, the construction of scenarios about possible futures has also a moral aspect. Furthermore, even when a particular future danger is not only real but also likely, it is not evident what the best way to respond to that danger is. The choice of adequate response is an ethico-political question par excellence. Hence, instead of merely describing a quasi-mechanical pattern between modern security talk and typical responses to it,20 the main purpose of critical security studies should be to cultivate better ways of discussing the future and dangers that may lie in the future.

Avoiding future dangers in terms of structural transformations The modern probability calculus and related forms of insurance and security are constitutive of the prevailing geo-historical modes of responsiveness. A causally efficacious


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intervention shaping those background meanings and related modes of responsiveness may undo, and thus absent, the social mechanism of securitization. It should be stressed, however, that modern security talk is not the only possible path toward de-democratization, militarization or potentially violent conflicts.21 Critical security studies can do more than avoid reification and provide a dialectical comment on the geo-historical constitution of securitization.22 The reproduction or transformation of the conditions of social action presupposes manifold and layered social structures and implies power as transformative capacity. The term ‘social structure’ refers to internal and external relations of a positioned practice. As social scientists, we are interested in not only internal but also external social relations, not only in constitution but also in causation. Thus what matters – apart from the framings and narratives available to an organization given the formative context – are the concrete mechanisms of choice, which select and frame issues and amalgamate stories about possible and likely futures. This is what the sociological approach to ST is good at. It can shed light on how securitization is shaped by the speaker’s authority and his or her causally relevant audiences, on how particular contextual circumstances can trigger or reinforce securitization and render the relevant audience more sensitive to its vulnerability and how securitization can occur in various fields of struggles.23 What is lacking in all forms of ST, however, is an account how the relevant contextual circumstances and structural relations of power stem from the dynamics of global political economy. Characteristically, the contextual circumstances that may trigger or reinforce securitization and render relevant audiences more sensitive to their vulnerability have to do with economic growth, levels and terms of (un)employment, socio-economic uncertainty, distribution of income and effects of commodification. The lack of adequate politico-economic responses may even result in a spiral of downward developments involving escalation of conflicts and, potentially, war. Asymmetrical relations of power can shape and generate securitization. For instance, actors positioned in the practices of corporations, political parties and states may be intra- or trans-related, for instance, through simultaneous or successive positioning of individual actors, interrelated through relations of financial (inter)dependency or both, also through systems of industrial and technological planning. These kinds of power relations condition the selection and framing of issues on the agenda, possibly involving securitization. Another example is the possibility that international financial institutes or the structural power of transnational capital constrains states’ economic policies in counterproductive ways, thereby making large segments of relevant audiences in many countries more sensitive to their vulnerability. Moreover, under circumstances characterized by a continuing and possibly deepening downward trend in the world economy, unfavorable terms of trade, financial crises, as well as population growth and environmental problems, several states may ‘fail’ or collapse. Thus, because of global political economy developments, wars fought in the global south may expand and/or become more frequent. These kinds of insights have long been known to various Liberal, Keynesian and Marxian political economists. Many of them have advocated structural and institutional changes in line with their theoretical understandings, such as more democratic state


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structures and open world economy; more capable, fair and democratic regimes of cooperation and systems of global governance; and institutional arrangements that would enable going beyond the possibilities and constraints set by contemporary liberal– capitalist world economy.24

Conclusion The theory of securitization has only limited explanatory power, even assuming continuity of the formative background. It can be helpful in analyzing some aspects of processes that are relevant to understanding the social conditions of peace, conflict and security, but it has little to say about wider geo-historical processes. In other words, ST is no more than an ideal-typical model of a particular and limited-scale social mechanism. It can do significant explanatory work only in the context of wider geo-historical theories and explanations. From an Alkerian perspective,25 ST can usefully be read as an attempt to uncover the practical grammars and deeper conceptual logic of action making particular outcomes possible.26 These logics – constituted by modern concepts of probability and risk – can be changed. They are debatable and re-negotiable. By revising the concept of probability and by introducing critical reflexivity to scenario-building, it is possible to provide better means for discussing future dangers. In other words, ST encourages one to be critically reflexive about one’s anticipations about the future and how they are used in actions and practices. While future dangers and their likelihood can be assessed rationally by intersubjective means, they may also be cogenerated by grammars and meanings intrinsic to modern security practices. In particular, modern probability theory tends to be a rather misleading basis for reasonable probability estimates about future possibilities. There are no non-contextual and stable frequencies, which could provide the basis for an ‘objective’ probability. The more unique the relevant historical trajectories are, the more uncertainty tends to prevail. Under uncertainty, learning more about the overall complex situation and about the relevant factors can mean that the weight of evidence and our confidence in the original probability estimate in fact decreases. The crux of this line of ethico-political argumentation can be summarized as a rule of action: the more ignorant we are about the likely consequences of our own actions, the more we should stress the role of generalizable virtues and norms and avoid undue securitization, because securitization tends to imply secrecy, violation of legitimate norms and procedures and thus de-democratization. A process of interacting securitizations can also create enemies and make war conceivable. It is possible to shape the circumstances and structural conditions of action, including those structural conditions and asymmetric relations of power that can make undue securitization easier. In this article, I have especially emphasized the importance of global political economy processes in co-determining the potential for securitization as well as for opening other possible paths toward de-democratization, militarization or potentially violent conflicts. Unwanted sources of causal determination can be absented through structural and institutional changes, even though transformations tend to have unintended consequence too. That is, also changes toward more functional and legitimate systems of governance or government require rational knowledge about possible and likely futures.


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Balzacq et al. Notes

1. Ole Wæver, ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie D. Lipschutz (ed.) On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 46–86; Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998). 2. Thierry Balzacq calls these two variants as philosophical and sociological in ‘A Theory of Securitization: Origins, Core Assumptions, and Variants’, in Thierry Balzacq (ed.) Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–30; see also Holger Stritzel, ‘Towards a Theory of Securitization: Copenhagen School and Beyond’, European Journal of International Relations, 13(3), 2007, pp. 357–83. 3. This was the original starting point of Ole Wæver, ‘Security, the Speech Act: Analyzing the Politics of a Word’, Working Paper 19 (Copenhagen: Centre for Peace and Conflict Research, 1989). Post-structuralist securitization theory (ST) continues to be practiced and extended to new directions by many, for example, Jef Huysmans, ‘What’s in an Act? On Security Speech Acts and Little Security Nothings’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), 2011, pp. 371–83. 4. For instance, Thierry Balzacq, ‘The “Essence” of Securitization: Theory, Ideal Type, and a Sociological Science of Security’, International Relations, IN PRESS. 5. For instance, Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde, Security, on p. 19, the authors merely talk about making the ‘constructivist deviation from objectivist, material realism […] more sophisticated’, but on p. 24, it is claimed that ‘“security”’ is a self-referential practice’ and on p. 26 that ‘the task is not to assess some objective threats that “really” endanger some object to be defended or secured’. 6. There are passages, however, that seem closer to traditional forms of materialist political realism. For instance, on p. 51, their claim is merely that ‘there is no absolute correlation between the existence of external military capability and its securitization’, implying (1) that there is at least some correlation between the two and (2) that external military capabilities are real. The authors express similar ambivalence, for instance, about global environmental problems and whether they are merely referent objects of securitization or also real and a cause of concern in their own right (e.g. pp. 76, 83). What is more, on pp. 189–90, they seem to suggest that securitization theory (ST) itself can help in ‘finding the turning points that might decide the ways in which the future will unfold’. 7. Barry Buzan and Ole Wæver, ‘Macrosecuritization and Security Constellations: Reconsidering Scale in Securitization Theory’, Review of International Studies 35(2), 2009, p. 256. 8. I owe this formulation to a draft of Stefano Guzzini’s, ‘Securitization as a Causal Mechanism’, Security Dialogue, 42(4–5), 2011, pp. 329–41; this formulation was deleted from the final version. 9. Ole Wæver, ‘Peace and Security. Two Concepts and Their Relationship’, in Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung (eds) Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 55. 10. The concept of mathematical probability emerged in the 1660s, and in the first decades, its practical use was confined to certain areas of state annuities and private finance. The term ‘security’ seems to have become increasingly associated with the field of inter-state relations and external policies of the states in the 18th and particularly in the nineteenth century, although its use remained relatively sporadic until the First World War. 11. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 12. Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 142–44. 13. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (London: Rough Draft Printing/Macmillan, 2008/1920).


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14. This aspect of the Keynesian theory is nicely spelled out in Marco Crocco, ‘The Concept of Degrees of Uncertainty in Keynes, Shackle and Davidson’, Nova Economia Bela Horizonte, 12(2), 2002, pp. 11–27. 15. Donald Gillies, ‘Probability and Uncertainty in Keynes’s The General Theory’, in Jochen Runde and Sohei Mizuhara (eds) The Philosophy of Keynes’s Economics (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 111–29. 16. See Nicholas Rescher, Dialectics: A Controversy-Oriented Approach to the Theory of Knowledge (New York: State University of New York Press, 1977). 17. Heikki Patomäki, ‘Exploring Possible, Likely and Desirable Global Futures: Beyond the Closed vs. Open Systems Dichotomy’, in J. Joseph and C. Wight (eds) Scientific Realism and International Relations (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 147–66. 18. See Heikki Patomäki, ‘Chapter 2: Learning from Possible Futures’, in Heikki Patomäki (ed.) The Political Economy of Global Security: Wars, Future Crises and Changes in Global Governance (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 17–35. 19. David Patrick Houghton, ‘The Role of Self-Fulfilling and Self-Negating Prophecies in International Relations’, International Studies Review, 11(3), 2009, pp. 552–84. 20. In fact, militarized national security response is only a standard possibility. Any future risk, including war and climate change, can be insured against, and these insurances can then be reinsured and (depending on financial market regulations) securitized in financial markets. On the other hand, insurances can also be made social or collective and thus obligatory, excluding private reinsurance and financial securitization. 21. An open question is whether the real power and dramatic effects of securitization stem from the underlying moral narratives more than from a mere technical risk-analysis. For an analysis of how US foreign policy is in important part constituted by Manichean myths and rituals of enemy-construction, see Heikki Patomäki, ‘Kosovo and the End of the UN?’, in Peter Van Ham and Sergei Medvedev (eds) Mapping European Security after Kosovo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 82–106. 22. Reification means that effects of social processes are represented as being outside the reach of human influence, which is a key point of ST criticism against positivist security studies. The dialectical comment made by ST has involved revealing the inner logic of modern securitytalk and problematizing it, thus suggesting a dialectical movement forward without, however, transcending it by providing alternatives. 23. Balzacq, ‘A Theory of Securitization’, pp. 11–15. 24. Since Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, the idea of harmony of interests in free markets – free trade – has been taken as providing a generator, guarantee and strategy of peace. However, Keynesian and Marxian theorists have argued that in the liberal–capitalist world economy, there are various mechanisms that generate, through unintended consequences of manifold actions, economic problems and crises that may lead to counterproductive or even aggressive international responses. For an overview of different theories, see Heikki Patomäki, ‘Political Economy of International Security’, in Pinar Bilgin and Paul D. Williams (eds) Global Security and International Political Economy, Volume 1: Global Security (Paris and Isle of Man: UNESCO, with EOLSS Publishers, 2010), pp. 306–38, and for an excellent account of Keynes’ understanding of the conditions of war and peace, Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 25. For instance, Renee Marlin-Bennett (ed.), Alker and IR: Global Studies in an Interconnected World (London: Routledge, 2011). 26. See Hayward Alker, Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially chapters 5 and 10.


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Balzacq et al. Author biographies

Thierry Balzacq is the Scientific Director of the Institute for Strategic Research (IRSEM) at the French Ministry of Defense, Paris. He is also Tocqueville Professor of International Relations at the University of Namur and Honorary Professorial Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include, security studies, IR theory, and EU politics. He has published over 10 books in English and French, including : Securitization Theory: How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve (Routledge, 2011), Traité de Relations internationales, co-edited with Frédéric Ramel (Presses de Sciences Po, 2013), 1,232 pages ; Contesting Security : Strategies and Logics (Routledge, December 2014); Théories de la sécurité (Presses de Sciences Po, December 2014). Stefano Guzzini is Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies, Professor of Government at Uppsala University and Distinguished International Professor at PUC-Rio de Janeiro. His most recent publications include: The Diffusion of Power in Global Governance: International Political Economy meets Foucault (Palgrave, 2012, co-edited with Iver Neumann), The return of geopolitics in Europe? Social mechanisms and foreign policy identity crises (Cambridge UP, 2012), Rethinking Foreign Policy (Routledge, 2013, co-edited with Fredrik Bynander) and Power, realism and constructivism (Routledge, 2013). Heikki Patomäki is Professor of World Politics at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests include philosophy and methodology of social sciences, peace research, futures studies, economic theory, global political economy, and global political theory. Patomäki’s most recent books in English are The Great Eurozone Disaster. From Crisis to Global New Deal (Zed Books, 2013) and The Political Economy of Global Security. War, Future Crises and Changes in Global Governance (Routledge, 2008). Ole Wæver is Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Director of CAST, Centre for Advanced Security Theory, and of CRIC, Centre for Resolution of International Conflicts. Internationally he is mostly known for coining within security theory the concept of ‘securitization’ and as one of the main figures in developing what is often referred to as the ‘Copenhagen School’ in security studies. Among his main books are Security: A New Framework for Analysis (with Barry Buzan and Jaap de Wilde 1988, Chinese 2002, Czech 2006); Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security (with Barry Buzan, 2003; Chinese and Iranian translations 2009); International Relations Scholarship Around the World (ed with Arlene B. Tickner, 2009); Climate change: Global Risks, Challenges & Decisions (with Katherine Richardson et al 2011). Ole Wæver was elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2007. Michael C. Williams is Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His research interests are in International Relations theory, security studies, and political thought. His most recent book (with Rita Abrahamsen) is Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2011). His previous publications include The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (Routledge, 2007) and the editor of several books, including most recently, Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J. Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2007).
