Securitization Theory

How Security Problems Emerge and Dissolve

Thierry Balzacq, Thierry Balzacq

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135246136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This volume aims to provide a new framework for the analysis of securitization processes, increasing our understanding of how security issues emerge, evolve and dissolve.

Securitisation theory has become one of the key components of security studies and IR courses in recent years, and this book represents the first attempt to provide an integrated and rigorous overview of securitization practices within a coherent framework. To do so, it organizes securitization around three core assumptions which make the theory applicable to empirical studies: the centrality of audience, the co-dependency of agency and context and the structuring force of the dispositif. These assumptions are then investigated through discourse analysis, process-tracing, ethnographic research, and content analysis and discussed in relation to extensive case studies.

This innovative new book will be of much interest to students of securitisation and critical security studies, as well as IR theory and sociology.

Thierry Balzacq is holder of the Tocqueville Chair on Security Policies and Professor at the University of Namur. He is Research Director at the University of Louvain and Associate Researcher at the Centre for European Studies at Sciences Po Paris.

1
A theory of securitization

Origins, core assumptions, and variants

Thierry Balzacq

This chapter reformulates the assumptions of securitization in a form appropriate to empirical studies and to the development of a comprehensive theory. Drawing on a variety of IR theories—constructivism, poststructuralism, critical theory—students of securitization aim to explicate the structures and processes that constitute security problems.¹ Securitization theory elaborates the insight that no issue is essentially a menace. Something becomes a security problem through discursive politics.² However, within securitization theory there are various ways to characterize this insight. On one side, those working in a poststructuralist tradition believe in a “social magic” power of language, a magic in which the conditions of possibility of threats are internal to the act of saying “security.” ‘The word “security”,’ argues Wæver (1995: 55), a pioneer of securitization studies, ‘is the act … by saying it something is done.’ In short, ‘security is a speech act’ (Ibid.).³ In essence, the basic idea of the speech act theory is, simply expressed: certain statements, according to Austin, do more than merely describe a given reality and, as such, cannot be judged as false or true. Instead these utterances realize a specific action; they “do” things: they are “performatives” as opposed to “constatives” that simply report states of affairs and are thus subject to truth and falsity tests. This view, which is part of the philosophy of language fold, provides foundations for the Copenhagen School (CS) approach to securitization. Thus, I call it “philosophical.”⁴

Others, including those with a social theory influence, talk about securitization primarily in terms of practices, context, and power relations that characterize the construction of threat images. The argument is that while discursive practices are important in explaining how some security problems originate, many develop with little if any discursive design. This variant is termed “sociological.” It inspires most of the contributions of this volume.

There are three key differences between the philosophical and the sociological view of securitization. First is that the philosophical variant ultimately reduces security to a conventional procedure such as marriage or betting in which the “felicity circumstances” (conditions of success of speech act) must fully prevail for the act to go through. The sociological view argues, on the contrary, that securitization is better understood as a strategic (pragmatic) process that occurs within, and as part of, a configuration of circumstances, including the context, the psycho-cultural disposition of the audience, and the power that both speaker and listener bring to the interaction. In other words, if the strategic action of discourse operates at the level of persuasion and uses various artefacts (metaphors, emotions, stereotypes, gestures, silence, and even lies) to reach its goals, the speech act seeks to establish universal principles of communication, the value of which is to be functional whatever the context, culture, and whatever the relative power of the actors. In fact, this contrast between the strategic and speech act view of security parallels the difference between “pragmatics” and “universal pragmatics.”⁵ While the first deals with language usage, including a colourful use of language to attain a goal, universal pragmatics is primarily concerned with fundamental principles (or rules) underlying communicative action.⁶

Second is that, for the sociological variant, performatives are situated actions mediated by agents’ habitus; that is, a set of dispositions that informs their perceptions and behaviors (Bourdieu 1990, 1991). Performatives are thus analyzed as nodal loci of practices, results of power games within the social field or context on the one hand, and between the latter and the habitus on the other. In this instance, the discourse of securitization manifests a distinct kind of agency, i.e., a ‘temporally constructed engagement by actors of different structural environment—the temporal relational contexts of action—which, through the interplay of habit, imagination, and judgment, both reproduces and transforms those structures in interactive response to the problems posed by changing historical situation’ (Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 970).

Third is that audience is important for both philosophical and sociological approaches to securitization, but it is conceived in different terms by each. For the philosophical view, the audience is a formal—given—category, which is often poised in a receptive mode. The sociological view emphasizes, by contrast, the mutual constitution of securitizing actors and audiences. In this respect, audience is not necessarily a fully constituted entity, across the board, as the speech act tends to assumes, but an emergent category that must be adjudicated empirically, before being set as a level of analysis. This does not mean that the sociological model subscribes to the argument that speech act “creates” the audience, because this would transform audience into a pure byproduct of a speech act event.

Taken together, these three differences open a new avenue not available to the philosophical view. Securitization can be discursive and non-discursive; intentional and non-intentional; performative but not ‘an act in itself’. In short, security problems can be designed or they can emerge out of different practices, whose initial aim (if they ever had) was not in fact to create a security problem. As Pouliot (2008: 261) puts it, following Bourdieu, ‘social action is not necessarily preceded by a premeditated design. A practice can be oriented toward a goal without being consciously informed by it.’ In this light, securitization consists of practices which instantiate intersubjective understandings through the habitus inherited from different, often competing social fields (Balzacq et al. 2010). The dispositif weaves these practices. Thus, in addition to discourse analysis, the sociological view argues that the study of securitization is compatible with other methods currently available in social sciences (see Chapter 2).

On the surface, the difference between the two variants seems rather stark. On closer inspection, however, the two variants are primarily ideal types, meaning that studies of securitization do not necessarily fall neatly within a particular category. In other words, examining the development of threats combines philosophical and sociological insights, with the proviso that statements about the “magical power” of speech acts are moderated. This is what Bourdieu attempted, if in a different domain, by insisting on the symbolic power of words, that is

the power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming and transforming the vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world and the world itself, an almost magical power which enables one to obtain the equivalent of what is attained through (material) force …, by virtue of the specific effect of mobilization.⁷

In this citation, the qualification “almost” (in French: presque or quasiment) has been dropped by many commentators, but it is probably more important than often thought. In fact, for Bourdieu, the symbolic power does not pertain to the illocutionary force (in which case it will be absolute magic), but is, on the contrary, associated with the ‘belief in the legitimacy of words and those who utter them.’⁸ It is, therefore, mainly at the intersection of the legitimacy of agents involved and words used, that the symbolic power of security lies.

Securitization is not a self-referential practice but an intersubjective process.⁹ Recall the definition proposed in the preface, whereby securitization was understood as a set of interrelated practices, and the processes of their production, diffusion, and reception/translation that bring threats into being. The strength of this definition is its parsimony. It has two main weaknesses, however. One, this definition is not so different from other conceptualizations of the construction of security problems. Two, it overlooks one of the fundamental constituents of securitization, namely time constraint or the sense of criticality (i.e., the time left before something purportedly irremediable, happens). I propose, in this light, to consolidate it.

I define securitization as an articulated assemblage of practices whereby heuristic artefacts (metaphors, policy tools, image repertoires, analogies, stereotypes, emotions, etc.) are contextually mobilized by a securitizing actor, who works to prompt an audience to build a coherent network of implications (feelings, sensations, thoughts, and intuitions), about the critical vulnerability of a referent object, that concurs with the securitizing actor’s reasons for choices and actions, by investing the referent subject with such an aura of unprecedented threatening complexion that a customized policy must be undertaken immediately to block its development. Beginning with a critical investigation of its lineages (section I), this chapter codifies securitization theory in terms of three core assumptions from which the structure of the volume will be constructed: 1) the centrality of audience; 2) the co-dependency of agency and context; 3) the structuring force of the dispositif, that is, a constellation of practices and tools. This is the subject of section II. Facing the difficulty of mapping out different variants of securitization theory, section III reframes the distinction between the philosophical and the sociological variants of securitization in relation to their commitment to our three assumptions. In particular, it outlines how the association of the speech act (philosophical) view with “poststructuralism” leads to methodological impasses. The purpose of the chapter is to contribute to the development of a comprehensive theory of securitization, stripped of some of its original tensions, so that it can be easily deployed to explicate the development of specific security problems.¹⁰

Speech act protocols and the evolution of securitization

It is widely recognized that the commitment of securitization theory to speech act is inspired by Austin and Searle, probably the most prominent figures in developing the performativity of language in philosophy.¹¹ Thus, any attempt at revising, regrounding, and expanding the theoretical procedure of securitization requires a clarification of the central premises of the philosophy of speech acts. Such an undertaking risks disparagement, however: ‘It is rather to insist,’ warns Quentin Skinner (2002: 106), ‘that we shall miss the relevance of speech act analysis if we think of it as just another piece of philosophical jargon that we can brush aside if we happen not to like the sound of it.’ Therefore, heading this caveat, this section provides the reader with the conceptual instruments needed to proceed, I hope, smoothly through the remainder of the article. Basically, it seeks to shed light on how I reevaluate the CS study of security, the manner in which I try to remedy its weaknesses, and how, in practical terms, the position adopted here leads us to a concept of security as a pragmatic act.

Locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary¹²

The enterprise of speech act philosophy can be interpreted as a movement away from descriptive grammar and generative transformational thinking. The first claims that language is a question of “sound and meaning,” whereas the second reduces language to truth conditional criteria of meaning. The latter position clearly lines up with logical positivism, with its belief that the meaning of sentences lies in the verifiability principle—whether a sentence can be classified as true or false.¹³ Both assume, however, that linguistic communication is concerned with words, sentences and symbols per se. Taken together, these commitments pitch descriptive grammars and logical positivism against the speech act theory. In particular, the speech act theory puts emphasis on the function of language—doing things—and thus moves the unit of linguistic communication from symbols, words and sentences so as to locate it in the composition of these elements in ‘the performance of … speech act(s)’ (Searle 1969: 16). Thus, in contrast to logical positivism, that which constitute the primary units of linguistic communication are speech acts, where utterances are able to ‘perform’ an activity that can transform the way the world currently is.

From Austin’s perspective, each sentence can convey three types of acts, the combination of which constitutes the total speech act situation: (i) locutionary—the utterance of an expression that contains a given sense and reference (Austin 1962: 95, 107); (ii) illocutionary—the act performed in articulating a locution. In a way, this category captures the explicit performative class of utterances, and as a matter of fact, the concept “speech act” is literally predicated on that sort of agency;¹⁴ and (iii) perlocutionary, which is the “consequential effects” or “sequels” that are aimed to evoke the feelings, beliefs, thoughts or actions of the target audience. This triadic characterization of kind of acts is summed up by Jürgen Habermas (1984: 289) in the following: ‘to say something, to act in saying something, to bring about something through acting in saying something.’¹⁵

It is important to note that illocutionary and perlocutionary acts diverge in the direction and the nature of consequences they initiate. The first, by convention, is bound up with effects that occur if and only if all four of the “felicity conditions” are met: (i) a preparatory condition determined by the existence of a ‘conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances’; (ii) an executive condition to determine whether the procedure has been fully executed by all participants; (iii) a sincerity condition that posits that participants in this ‘conventional procedure’ must have certain thoughts or feelings, and ‘must intend so to conduct themselves’; (iv) a fulfillment condition determined by whether participants ‘actually so conduct themselves subsequently’ (Austin 1962: 14–15).

The second, perlocution, is ‘specific to the circumstances of issuance, and is therefore not conventionally achieved just by uttering particular utterances, and includes all those effects, intended or unintended, often indeterminate, that some particular utterances in a particular situation may cause’ (Ibid.).¹⁶ The source of this unfortunate mistake rests on the false assumption that the speech act encompasses both the illocutionary and the perlocutionary act. This might be grounded in a more profound confusion between the term “speech act” that is the illocutionary act...

Table of contents

• Series: PRIO New Security Studies
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 A theory of securitization
• 2 Enquiries into methods
• Part I The rules of securitization
• Part II Securitization and de-securitization in practice
• References
• Index