Content area
Full text
Introduction
The concept of securitisation, introduced in the security study lexicon by theorists of the so-called Copenhagen School,1seeks to capture the function of the label 'security' as employed in political discourse practices. Trying to understand what 'practitioners do in talking security',2the Copenhagen School relies on speech act theory and poststructuralist discourse theory to rethink security within a social constructivist framework. From this perspective, the constitution of security problems - that is, securitisation - is based on three key assumptions: first, security results from a meaning-making process that presents an issue as an existential threat to a particular referent object, and because of this constructed sense of danger, justifies emergency and extraordinary measures to protect the threatened object; second, this process is revealed and exhausted in the realm of discourse itself, without assuming any necessary connection with some external referent in the 'real' or 'material' world; and, third, this discursive process has performative implications, that is, 'by saying the words, something is done'.3Put simply, by saying 'security', an emergency condition is established, thus paving the way for exceptional measures (usually, but not exclusively, the use of force) to protect the object under threat (usually, but not exclusively, the nation/state).
The discursive foundations of these key assumptions - basically derived from John Austin's and John Searle's speech act theory and the poststructuralist discourse theory's premise that the relationship between linguistic signs and their supposed referents in the world is purely arbitrary - makes security discourse's actual connections with an extra-discursive referent in the world a pointless or misplaced preoccupation. From this perspective, nothing is security in itself.4Rather, security is a quality of politics that emerges through intersubjective discourse practices involving political actors and their relevant audiences. For Copenhagen School theorists, therefore, it is politically or analytically unhelpful to approach security objectively, trying to establish a substantive correspondence between discourse and the reality of threats: security 'is a social quality, a part of a discursive, socially constituted, intersubjective realm'.5
This makes securitisation, according to the Copenhagen School, a non-causal constitutive theory by definition. More precisely, when faced with the question of causality, Ole Wæver argues that securitisation theory should be divided into two parts. The first, representing the core...