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Introduction
This article will lay out the original logic of the Copenhagen School (CS) regarding the processes of securitization and desecuritization. The recent supplements to this theory by Balzacq and Stritzel will then be summarized. This literature review demonstrates that there is common reduction of the speech act-audience relationship in securitization theory that must be theorized further. Dramaturgical analysis adds to this model a more nuanced understanding of audience-speaker co-constitution of authority and knowledge, the weight of social context, and the degree of success of (de)securitization. This dramaturgical analysis, then, does not abstract the speech act from its socio-political or organizational context, but rather situates the securitizing move in a particular local 'regime of truth', in a particular setting and in time (Foucault 1980). Four different settings explain variations in the form, content, and success of speech acts: the popular, the elite, the technocratic, and the scientific. In each of these different settings, the core rules for authority/knowledge (who can speak), the social context (what can be spoken), and the degree of success (what is heard) vary. This goes far beyond linguistic rules towards norms and conventions of discourse, as well as bureaucratic politics, group identity, collective memory, and self-defined interest. The second half of the article plots these concepts and relationships within a 2-year period when the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), responsible for key elements of Canada's aviation security system, underwent a series of formal reviews.
Though guided by Jackson and Nexon's (1999) admonition for a processual/relational international relations method, this paper differs from other critiques of securitization theory. Rather than engage on an internal critique of the specifics of speech-act theory, from which the CS drew the theoretical base of securitization theory, this article examines the political nature of (de)securitizing moves. Interviews with security experts, government officials, and other scholars conducted by the author demonstrated radically different understandings of the exact same processes of securitization: experts were eager to 'cash in' on newly available security budgets, government bureaucracies were concerned with the measurement of security, while scholars attempted to desecuritize the issues of risk management and profiling. As such, it was clear that there was not a single securitizing move that was accepted or rejected, but a much more complex...